So Linux is a person with the mind of a 12-year-old stuck in a plain, undecorated room, too socially-awkward to even speak to guests but filled with tons of pointless trivia?
Can the router stats. People don't give a shit what runs routers, and in the majority of cases it'd be IOS anyway. Stick with what people actually care about.
Newspapers were considered so important to the country that the first amendment to the Constitution preserved the freedom of the press.
The Press is a pretty generic term. They might have been thinking of newspaper, or they might have been thinking of politically divisive books (for example, this one: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1596985275/bookstorenow600-20 which the Canadian government has been spazzing out over.)
In any case, even if newspapers do go away, "The Press" will still enjoy the same protections of the First Amendment.
I have a friend who's just finished a Chiropractic program, and he's fully trained and licensed (in the State of California at least) as a family practice doctor. That's right, the program he's in requires him to be a conventional medical doctor before he receives his Chiropractic certifications. So even if you doubt the effectiveness of the field, seeing him for a medical problem you have would be absolutely no worse than seeing your local family practice doctor.
In addition to that, his main tool in his work is the x-ray machine, and they're spoken to at length about the importance of referring cases that can't be treated through Chiropracty to other specialists.
That all said, there are quack Chiropractors out there, which is a real shame. But not all of them are quacks... make sure you do your research when you pick a medical practitioner of *any* type, that's the best advice you could follow.
(If you really want to get upset, you can claim acupuncture as a "medically necessary procedure" on your insurance in Washington State. Now that's quackery!)
My Wind did an OK job of it with 1 GB. Definitely usable, not perky by any stretch of the imagination. All I can say is, try it before you knock it. (The RAM is the big difference, though. XP can run fine on 400 mhz machines as long as it has enough RAM; I assume Vista is similar.)
More to the point (for me at least), you can't improve a UI without changing it! I feel like many slashdotters would prefer using the same crappy interface for their entire lives. I like that MS changes their UIs! It means they're really trying to make a better product. That's more than most companies do. (and yes MS may fail at imrpoving, just trying in this industry is notable.
Seems kind of dumb anyway, since the majority of netbooks are running Intel Atom chips, which not only can run Windows, but at 1.6 ghz (with 1.5+ GB RAM) can actually do a pretty damned good job of running Vista.
I'm sure there's some netbook somewhere using Arm chips... who makes it and where do you buy it? My Wind has a Intel Atom. My buddy's Eee PC has an Atom. Dell's Mini 9? Atom. HP Mini? Atom.
Funny how Unions are also the reason that we have safe working conditions and a reasonable minimum wage in the UK.
Your tense is wrong for the US. In the US, they *were* the reason we have safe working conditions, reasonable wages, health insurance, etc. That's not longer the case, and hasn't been in... well, ages. Half the benefits promoted by unions originally are now part of US law, and the rest (like health insurance) are taken as "givens" for all employers.
I also find it odd that so many americans find the very idea (of workers gathering together to form a stronger position for bargaining with employers) somehow offensive.
Whoa, slow down buddy. This is "Slashdot." Slashdot doesn't represent America, not even close-- heck, there are huge swathes of people in the US who are the "union-or-die" type, have the bumper sticker, etc. In my state, Washington, I'm guessing the union supporters who work for Boeing far outnumber the "anti-union" tech workers, and we have one of the biggest tech sectors in the country. But, see, Boeing employees? Generally they don't post here.
It seems in the US that the party with more power (the employer) should be allowed to tread all over the weaker individuals in society (employees) because every last one of you is going to be that guy next.
Wow, now you're way into the propaganda.
Ok, look, this is the problem: union thinking requires employees to hate their employers.
You're phrasing it as an "us-vs-them" situation, which is exactly the problem I have with unions. I like my bosses, I like my company, and I want to help my company make money because I know that I benefit myself by doing so.
If you're really obsessed with "power", I have a ton of power over my employer. If I quit, retraining a replacement could take literally years. I wouldn't do that, though, because my boss isn't my enemy; if/when I decide to leave, I'll engage him like a mature human being and discuss a transition.
You also have to take into consideration the American Dream. One of the most popular tenants of which is that, by hard work and the sweat of your brow, you can pull yourself up the social ladder and become the boss. The union attitude, however, basically removes that-- the lazy are promoted and given raises at the same rate as the good workers.
I think for a lot of us, our parents were in unions (both my mom and dad were schoolteachers, so they had no choice but to be in the union), and we saw first-hand how crappy union shops are. Both of my parents specifically told me not to get into teaching, BTW, specifically because of that.
Standards compliance is a non-feature. Give end-users a list of browser features, ask them to rank them, and I can guarantee standards compliance will come in last. The ONLY people who care are web developers, because it makes their job slightly easier. Cry me a river. (And web developers have to QA their page anyway.) Microsoft's time is much better spent on features users actually care about.
Demanding that browser makers drop everything and work only on standards compliance is like telling Toyota they should immediately stop production of all their cars so they can make it easier for mechanics to operate on. It's ridiculous, it doesn't help any end-users (you know, the people we're here to serve), and it's a huge waste of time for Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, and everybody else who makes a browser.
Here's a challenge for Slashdot: explain to me how standards compliance benefits the end-user of the browser.
Changing the look (I won't say "improving") without improving the usability is polishing a turd. It's still impossible to search for bugs, it's a pain in the ass to upload images (and the limitations on image size are: 1) inscrutable, 2) date from about 1996 when storage was expensive), logging-in forgets which page you were on before you log in, etc etc etc. It's just a terrible site.
Any product/project that uses SourceForge for bug tracking? You can guarantee they don't give half-a-shit about usability, if they can tolerate that horrible site.
Every day you look at three and fix them - thoroughly, concisely, permanently. Every day, thirty more bug reports come in.
Ok...
Are you still looking at bugreps, or people just bitching?
I dunno; your product very well could just have thousands of bugs in it. (There was a well-publicized article a few years ago about how Windows 2000 had over 60,000 bugs left in its bugtracker when it was released IIRC. Yet it wasn't actually a bad release.)
I get the sense you're trying to make some kind of poignant point, but I don't get what it is.
Of course, part of the problem with the open source development method is that since you don't do organized beta tests, you don't (normally) catch the most common bugs before general release. What that means is that, of those 1000 backlogged and 30 new bug reports per day, probably 95% of them are duplicates. Does that count as "bitching?" Is that the point you're trying to make?
You also have to consider that SourceForge sucks. Searching for existing bugs is extremely difficult, hell, even logging in to the site is ten times more difficult than it needs to be. You can't blame people for putting in duplicate reports.
Anyway, my major gripe is projects, open source or not, mature or immature, big or small, that ask users to file bug reports, and then utterly ignore them.
Doesn't the fact that it hasn't taken off indicate that it's not needed, though?
More to the point, what's the benefit to, say, Amazon.com? Or Google? Or any of the big companies that would have to spearhead this on the web before the general population got involved?
I have nothing against "AJAX", I just have this thing against "ugly."
Slashdot had a huge competition to design a new look only a couple of years ago, and it actually looked pretty good for a long time. Then, relatively recently, they've decided they wanted to add dynamic features, and the look has gone into the crapper. The only recourse is to keep Slashdot set to "Classic" appearance, which is less vomit-inducing, but the "version 2" appearance keeps leaking in.
and probably a dozen others I've noticed but not bothered to submit. (BTW, if anybody at Slashdot tells you to submit your issue as a bug report to get it looked at, they're lying. They never look at bug reports.)
A changelog would imply they're following some kind of "design" or "plan" when they're clearly not. They make changes to people using the "version 1 discussion system" obviously intended for users of the "version 2 discussion system", like the Users page. They randomly break things, then half-repair them. i.e. listing the wrong content (submitted articles), then 'fixing' it by showing the intended content (recently posted comments) wrongly (incorrect scores).
IE has tons of backwards-compatibility cruft. They can't just yank it; there'd be thousands of apps that literally couldn't run because they depended on some obscure IE feature.
That said, Microsoft *does* have an excellent (if slow) rendering engine named Orcas. As opposed to IE's engine, named Trident. It's used for their also-excellent Expression Web product. And, I think, Visual Studio, but I don't have that installed so don't quote me on that.
I still don't get the case for semantic-web, -desktop, -anything.
I think one of the reasons people are slow to adopt it is because people don't know what the heck it is, or can't imagine how it could benefit them in any way.
Anything that uses the system registry. Microsoft 'helpfully' redirect it. Ditto Program Files.
Not if they're coded correctly.
Applications that *wrongly* try to write into nodes of the registry they shouldn't have access to will have their registry entries redirected. Applications that attempt to write into the Program Files folder (also *wrongly*) will get a "spoofed" Program Files made for them elsewhere.
These applications were broken in Windows XP; they were broken in Windows 2000 Pro; they were broken in Windows NT4. They've been broken for decades, the only difference is that Microsoft is now having the OS enforce its own multiuser rules.
What's really sad is the developers who go WAAAY out of their way to do stupid shit to make their product work, when they could just change a couple folder entries in the first place. Blizzard is guilty of this; instead of just moving their WTF and UI folders to the correct location, they actually move *the entire application install* into the/Users folder. It's hard to even fathom how anybody who considers themselves a "Windows developer" can be that dense. http://blakeyrat.com/2008/11/02/world-of-warcraft-updates-and-the-definition-of-half-assed/
No matter what it uses the RAM for it is using it, loading it with programs that you might use at some point. If you don't use any of those cached programs then Vista is wasting RAM and cycles doing nothing that benefits the user.
That's ridiculous.
How long does it take the OS to load HUGE.DLL? Let's say (for argument's sake) it takes 5 seconds. How long does it take the OS to dump RAM? Virtually no time at all, it's so quick you can't even time it.
So if I'm loading a program that uses HUGE.DLL, I just saved 5 seconds of startup time. In the much, much more infrequent situation where I load a program that doesn't use HUGE.DLL, *and also* uses so much RAM that the OS needs to free something from cache, I've lost about 0.01 seconds.
There's no reason NOT to cache. Hate Vista if you like, but have *ACTUAL REASONS*, and not just bullshit you made up.
Slashdot Mirror
So Linux is a person with the mind of a 12-year-old stuck in a plain, undecorated room, too socially-awkward to even speak to guests but filled with tons of pointless trivia?
Sounds accurate.
Can the router stats. People don't give a shit what runs routers, and in the majority of cases it'd be IOS anyway. Stick with what people actually care about.
Newspapers were considered so important to the country that the first amendment to the Constitution preserved the freedom of the press.
The Press is a pretty generic term. They might have been thinking of newspaper, or they might have been thinking of politically divisive books (for example, this one: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1596985275/bookstorenow600-20 which the Canadian government has been spazzing out over.)
In any case, even if newspapers do go away, "The Press" will still enjoy the same protections of the First Amendment.
I have a friend who's just finished a Chiropractic program, and he's fully trained and licensed (in the State of California at least) as a family practice doctor. That's right, the program he's in requires him to be a conventional medical doctor before he receives his Chiropractic certifications. So even if you doubt the effectiveness of the field, seeing him for a medical problem you have would be absolutely no worse than seeing your local family practice doctor.
In addition to that, his main tool in his work is the x-ray machine, and they're spoken to at length about the importance of referring cases that can't be treated through Chiropracty to other specialists.
That all said, there are quack Chiropractors out there, which is a real shame. But not all of them are quacks... make sure you do your research when you pick a medical practitioner of *any* type, that's the best advice you could follow.
(If you really want to get upset, you can claim acupuncture as a "medically necessary procedure" on your insurance in Washington State. Now that's quackery!)
$330? That's crazy, you can get a Wind or EEE PC for $300.
Grandparent asked who USED it, not "who created pointless, idiotic demos of it".
If you bought a copy of Quake, would you get the Java one? No? Then nobody uses it.
Yes, when designing this standard, scientists and engineers are going to cherry-pick frequencies likely to give you cancer.
My Wind did an OK job of it with 1 GB. Definitely usable, not perky by any stretch of the imagination. All I can say is, try it before you knock it. (The RAM is the big difference, though. XP can run fine on 400 mhz machines as long as it has enough RAM; I assume Vista is similar.)
More to the point (for me at least), you can't improve a UI without changing it! I feel like many slashdotters would prefer using the same crappy interface for their entire lives. I like that MS changes their UIs! It means they're really trying to make a better product. That's more than most companies do. (and yes MS may fail at imrpoving, just trying in this industry is notable.
I don't know what "the pandora" is. I'm guessing that, since I don't know what it is, it's not outselling the Wind or Eee PC.
Seems kind of dumb anyway, since the majority of netbooks are running Intel Atom chips, which not only can run Windows, but at 1.6 ghz (with 1.5+ GB RAM) can actually do a pretty damned good job of running Vista.
I'm sure there's some netbook somewhere using Arm chips... who makes it and where do you buy it? My Wind has a Intel Atom. My buddy's Eee PC has an Atom. Dell's Mini 9? Atom. HP Mini? Atom.
Funny how Unions are also the reason that we have safe working conditions and a reasonable minimum wage in the UK.
Your tense is wrong for the US. In the US, they *were* the reason we have safe working conditions, reasonable wages, health insurance, etc. That's not longer the case, and hasn't been in ... well, ages. Half the benefits promoted by unions originally are now part of US law, and the rest (like health insurance) are taken as "givens" for all employers.
I also find it odd that so many americans find the very idea (of workers gathering together to form a stronger position for bargaining with employers) somehow offensive.
Whoa, slow down buddy. This is "Slashdot." Slashdot doesn't represent America, not even close-- heck, there are huge swathes of people in the US who are the "union-or-die" type, have the bumper sticker, etc. In my state, Washington, I'm guessing the union supporters who work for Boeing far outnumber the "anti-union" tech workers, and we have one of the biggest tech sectors in the country. But, see, Boeing employees? Generally they don't post here.
It seems in the US that the party with more power (the employer) should be allowed to tread all over the weaker individuals in society (employees) because every last one of you is going to be that guy next.
Wow, now you're way into the propaganda.
Ok, look, this is the problem: union thinking requires employees to hate their employers.
You're phrasing it as an "us-vs-them" situation, which is exactly the problem I have with unions. I like my bosses, I like my company, and I want to help my company make money because I know that I benefit myself by doing so.
If you're really obsessed with "power", I have a ton of power over my employer. If I quit, retraining a replacement could take literally years. I wouldn't do that, though, because my boss isn't my enemy; if/when I decide to leave, I'll engage him like a mature human being and discuss a transition.
You also have to take into consideration the American Dream. One of the most popular tenants of which is that, by hard work and the sweat of your brow, you can pull yourself up the social ladder and become the boss. The union attitude, however, basically removes that-- the lazy are promoted and given raises at the same rate as the good workers.
I think for a lot of us, our parents were in unions (both my mom and dad were schoolteachers, so they had no choice but to be in the union), and we saw first-hand how crappy union shops are. Both of my parents specifically told me not to get into teaching, BTW, specifically because of that.
Good point. Just one, since that was the only bug report any of them ever responded to.
Mostly I'm judging them by the shameful development process of this site.
Standards compliance is a non-feature. Give end-users a list of browser features, ask them to rank them, and I can guarantee standards compliance will come in last. The ONLY people who care are web developers, because it makes their job slightly easier. Cry me a river. (And web developers have to QA their page anyway.) Microsoft's time is much better spent on features users actually care about.
Demanding that browser makers drop everything and work only on standards compliance is like telling Toyota they should immediately stop production of all their cars so they can make it easier for mechanics to operate on. It's ridiculous, it doesn't help any end-users (you know, the people we're here to serve), and it's a huge waste of time for Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, and everybody else who makes a browser.
Here's a challenge for Slashdot: explain to me how standards compliance benefits the end-user of the browser.
Changing the look (I won't say "improving") without improving the usability is polishing a turd. It's still impossible to search for bugs, it's a pain in the ass to upload images (and the limitations on image size are: 1) inscrutable, 2) date from about 1996 when storage was expensive), logging-in forgets which page you were on before you log in, etc etc etc. It's just a terrible site.
Any product/project that uses SourceForge for bug tracking? You can guarantee they don't give half-a-shit about usability, if they can tolerate that horrible site.
A bug queue you mean?
Every day you look at three and fix them - thoroughly, concisely, permanently. Every day, thirty more bug reports come in.
Ok...
Are you still looking at bugreps, or people just bitching?
I dunno; your product very well could just have thousands of bugs in it. (There was a well-publicized article a few years ago about how Windows 2000 had over 60,000 bugs left in its bugtracker when it was released IIRC. Yet it wasn't actually a bad release.)
I get the sense you're trying to make some kind of poignant point, but I don't get what it is.
Of course, part of the problem with the open source development method is that since you don't do organized beta tests, you don't (normally) catch the most common bugs before general release. What that means is that, of those 1000 backlogged and 30 new bug reports per day, probably 95% of them are duplicates. Does that count as "bitching?" Is that the point you're trying to make?
You also have to consider that SourceForge sucks. Searching for existing bugs is extremely difficult, hell, even logging in to the site is ten times more difficult than it needs to be. You can't blame people for putting in duplicate reports.
Anyway, my major gripe is projects, open source or not, mature or immature, big or small, that ask users to file bug reports, and then utterly ignore them.
Doesn't the fact that it hasn't taken off indicate that it's not needed, though?
More to the point, what's the benefit to, say, Amazon.com? Or Google? Or any of the big companies that would have to spearhead this on the web before the general population got involved?
I have nothing against "AJAX", I just have this thing against "ugly."
Slashdot had a huge competition to design a new look only a couple of years ago, and it actually looked pretty good for a long time. Then, relatively recently, they've decided they wanted to add dynamic features, and the look has gone into the crapper. The only recourse is to keep Slashdot set to "Classic" appearance, which is less vomit-inducing, but the "version 2" appearance keeps leaking in.
See, for example, these bugs:
https://sourceforge.net/tracker2/?func=detail&aid=2144813&group_id=4421&atid=104421
https://sourceforge.net/tracker2/?func=detail&aid=2159787&group_id=4421&atid=104421
https://sourceforge.net/tracker2/?func=detail&aid=2348173&group_id=4421&atid=104421
https://sourceforge.net/tracker2/?func=detail&aid=1939546&group_id=4421&atid=104421
https://sourceforge.net/tracker2/?func=detail&aid=1939531&group_id=4421&atid=104421
and probably a dozen others I've noticed but not bothered to submit. (BTW, if anybody at Slashdot tells you to submit your issue as a bug report to get it looked at, they're lying. They never look at bug reports.)
A changelog would imply they're following some kind of "design" or "plan" when they're clearly not. They make changes to people using the "version 1 discussion system" obviously intended for users of the "version 2 discussion system", like the Users page. They randomly break things, then half-repair them. i.e. listing the wrong content (submitted articles), then 'fixing' it by showing the intended content (recently posted comments) wrongly (incorrect scores).
Oh, and they're owned by the company that runs SourceForge, the site that frequently looks like this: http://schend.net/images/screenshots/slashdot/sourceforge_blank_window.png or this: http://schend.net/images/screenshots/slashdot/sourceforge_wish_it_was_a_blank_window.png
Slashdot seems to be a classic DailyWTF-esque "Developmestuction" environment: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Developmestuction_Environment.aspx
There isn't anybody at the entire Sourceforge/Slashdot corporate entity I'd call a "web developer".
IE has tons of backwards-compatibility cruft. They can't just yank it; there'd be thousands of apps that literally couldn't run because they depended on some obscure IE feature.
That said, Microsoft *does* have an excellent (if slow) rendering engine named Orcas. As opposed to IE's engine, named Trident. It's used for their also-excellent Expression Web product. And, I think, Visual Studio, but I don't have that installed so don't quote me on that.
I still don't get the case for semantic-web, -desktop, -anything.
I think one of the reasons people are slow to adopt it is because people don't know what the heck it is, or can't imagine how it could benefit them in any way.
30% reported by whom? Actual press, MS-hating blogs, or random slashdot posters?
In any case, it's bullshit.
Anything that uses the system registry. Microsoft 'helpfully' redirect it. Ditto Program Files.
Not if they're coded correctly.
Applications that *wrongly* try to write into nodes of the registry they shouldn't have access to will have their registry entries redirected. Applications that attempt to write into the Program Files folder (also *wrongly*) will get a "spoofed" Program Files made for them elsewhere.
These applications were broken in Windows XP; they were broken in Windows 2000 Pro; they were broken in Windows NT4. They've been broken for decades, the only difference is that Microsoft is now having the OS enforce its own multiuser rules.
What's really sad is the developers who go WAAAY out of their way to do stupid shit to make their product work, when they could just change a couple folder entries in the first place. Blizzard is guilty of this; instead of just moving their WTF and UI folders to the correct location, they actually move *the entire application install* into the /Users folder. It's hard to even fathom how anybody who considers themselves a "Windows developer" can be that dense. http://blakeyrat.com/2008/11/02/world-of-warcraft-updates-and-the-definition-of-half-assed/
No matter what it uses the RAM for it is using it, loading it with programs that you might use at some point. If you don't use any of those cached programs then Vista is wasting RAM and cycles doing nothing that benefits the user.
That's ridiculous.
How long does it take the OS to load HUGE.DLL? Let's say (for argument's sake) it takes 5 seconds. How long does it take the OS to dump RAM? Virtually no time at all, it's so quick you can't even time it.
So if I'm loading a program that uses HUGE.DLL, I just saved 5 seconds of startup time. In the much, much more infrequent situation where I load a program that doesn't use HUGE.DLL, *and also* uses so much RAM that the OS needs to free something from cache, I've lost about 0.01 seconds.
There's no reason NOT to cache. Hate Vista if you like, but have *ACTUAL REASONS*, and not just bullshit you made up.