Except that Linux advocates are always trying to get people to install Linux on their existing hardware, which likely does have non-Linux-compatible components simply because it wasn't purchased with the intent of installing Linux on it. (Otherwise, it would probably already have Linux on it, eh?)
She found a pretty, $5000 software product that is the core of her business, but didn't listen when I pointed out the (many) design flaws in the program. For example, who uses DHCP to assign an address to a standalone host when the client software that talks to that host has to have the IP address (not FQDN of the host, the IP address!) statically set in the configuration file?!?!
To be fair, you can use DHCP to set a static IP address, you just plug in the machine's MAC address. However, that's still a bad design for a program, that it can't look up its server by name.
An oil company with this technology (and owning the patent so nobody else could have it) would have a HUGE competitive advantage. You're saying that they'd give up that competitive advantage for... what purpose? Just because they like drills? That makes no damned sense.
Incidentally, neither does the "car engine with 500 MPG buried in the desert by Ford" bullcrap. If Ford had such an engine, it would give them a huge competitive advantage, and they'd be retards to not use it.
It's one thing if Verizon had said that the costs of maintaining Usenet versus the number of subscribers actually using it made it an undesirable business, and were cutting it entirely.
I could understand that. That would be a pure business decision. As a subscriber, I may or may not complain, but it's just business.
So you're ok with the decision, you're just not ok with their (announced, possibly not actual) reason for making the decision?
But some of us don't understand why we need to "move on" from a superior technology.
If it was superior, then it'd be more popular, wouldn't it? The fact that virtually nobody has even *heard* of Usenet, despite it being available for long than the web, indicates to me that it is not, in fact, superior to the web.
I'm a pretty tech-y person, and I haven't touched Usenet since 2001 or so. I don't miss it. Might as well criticize Verizon for not keeping their Gopher site in order, or offering Telnet access to email... let's move on already.
Rather than selling the idea to me though, it really put me off. The gist of the talk was that Codemasters weren't interested in producing good games, only games that sold well.
When you're in business trying to make a buck, the definition of "good games" and the definition of "games that sell well" intersect almost entirely. Every so often, you hit a game that does both; Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, or Portal, for example. But most of the time it's one or the other. Beyond Good and Evil, for example, is cited as a good game by a lot of critics, but it sold terribly. (I have a copy and I was never able to get into it.) Or Otogi, or Psychonauts, etc.
I dunno, considering some of the crap Tesla was peddling, I bet he'd be pretty proud of the whole thing.
Remember, Telsa firmly believed that a single power station could power every electric device on the entire planet wirelessly, and that the only reason his station didn't work is that it wasn't huge enough. I think he electrocuted a few cows trying this one out.
We already knew of the theory behind why demagnetizing CDs nets audible results. The aluminum used for the reflective CD layer is contaminated with ferrous impurities and thus susceptible to magnetizing. Ditto for the ink used for printing the label. When the CD spins at up to 500 RPM, these ferrous particles begin to act as magnets as they are moving in a -- however small -- magnetic field. Let's assume that after an hour's play, all magnetizable particles have activated. We'll thus have a fair amount of magnets rotating inside a magnetic field. Little imagination is required to appreciate that such magnets could have a detrimental effect on all electronic circuits in the vicinity. As we have reported in our article on copying CDs to improve their sound quality, a great deal of the CD system is analog in nature and thus very much prone to external influences such as moving magnetic fields.
The most frightening thing is that these people seem to understand the difference between analog and digital, and STILL believe this bullshit. BTW, has anybody ever seen a negative review of audiophile crap?
I've never understood why Mac nuts simultaneously claim that Macintosh is better because you don't need to replace your computer as often and do completely and utterly hate everything related to backwards-compatibility. It seems hypocritical.
My G5 is now a media server, not a desktop computer, and I expect to use it as a media server for a very long time. The problem is that it's PPC (natch), and if Apple stops supporting PPC then Macintosh developers will also, and it'll some become impossible to get any software to run on it. (Right now, it's running 10.4 and I don't plan to ever upgrade it.) Mac developers *hate* backwards compatibility, it's already super-easy to find software that doesn't even support 10.3.
Now, given, as a media server I don't really *need* to install new software on it, but it would sure be nice if I had the option.
They should have spent 30 seconds Googling the potential name before renaming it, therefore picking a name originally that didn't conflict with any other software projects. Instead of just fumbling around and renaming it twice in a few months.
Bravo, good post. I think the grandparent has just watched Fight Club way too many times.
Re:How long is your bug reporting experience?
on
The State of X.Org
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· Score: 1
That's probably a difference in the project more than anything.
The Inkscape bug I posted was a blatantly obvious one. The Inkscape developer passed-the-buck to some UI library he was using, but that project has done nothing with it, so the bug remains in both products. (And potentially every other project using that UI library.) So that was the case of a project that was actively responding to bugs forwarding the bug on to one that isn't. (Of course, the Inkscape developer later deleted the unresolved bug! So there's a point against.)
The Slashdot bugs on that page I mostly entered out of spite, after seeing how hideously ugly and non-functional the new Slashdot template is. (None have been fixed, natch.) I really shouldn't count them.
I don't even know what/frenchspacing is, or what program has that option, or whether that program (assuming I even use it, which seems unlikely) has it turned on by default.
I'm sure Dr.\ Blarg appreciates your spelling of his name, though.
Blizzard alternates between pleasing casual players, then making things hard on casual players. It's so weird.
They introduce the Battlegrounds system, which is great for casual players who can now get nice equipment without having to spend half their waking time raiding. Then they patch the original system so that it 'grades on a curve', making it impossible to get the really good equipment unless you now spend half your waking time playing Battlegrounds. Now they've patched it to be back the way it was originally!
Same applied to Arena; when they introduced it, it was a great way to earn EQ with a relatively minimal time investment, and you were guaranteed a certain amount of points no matter how much your team sucked. Now they've patched it so that half the rewards can only be purchased by people with super-high team ratings, making them inaccessible to casual players.
I wish they'd make up their mind already. More specifically, I wish they'd just make the entire game accessible to casual players who don't want to raid, and leave it that way.
Heh, thanks. I get marked as troll all the time for posts like that.
I seriously and honestly would like someone to explain to me why web standards are such a big deal. I'd much rather Mozilla (or Microsoft, or Apple, or anybody who makes browsers) work on features that actually improve the user experience then work on implementing web standards that are likely to bloat rendering code and break old websites.
Licensing comparisons are stupid; obviously the open source "license" is always going to be better (cheaper, at least) than the commercial one.
As for technical comparisons, well, Terminal Server is capable of sending audio as well as video down the pipe, it can handle multiple-monitors on the client in a reasonably intelligent fashion, and it's much faster than X11.
Microsoft's system is also smarter on a single computer. For instance, monitor configuration: * auto-detects when I'm plugging in a new monitor, even when the computer's running * auto-sets the monitor to its maximum safe settings without the user needing to do anything * allows you to easily change the default monitor, the monitor with the taskbar (which isn't necessarily the default one), to incorporate multiple monitors of different sizes/resolutions into a single desktop, etc. The only thing it doesn't do is let you set a different wallpaper-per-monitor. OS X does. (Ironically, Windows used to also allow that using Active Desktop, but Vista removed it for some reason.)
I've tried using Linux on a multi-monitor computer, and it wasn't a pleasant experience. I can't imagine that, say, docking a laptop and then extending the monitor to the dock one works well, but I've never personally tried that. I do know that Tablet support in Linux is crap compared to Windows or OS X-- and Apple doesn't even MAKE a Tablet PC!
How about running multiple display managers, so that I can have more then one person using the machine with seperate monitors and input... no. Thought not.
I've never had the need to do that, nor can I think of a situation in which that would be useful. So while X11 may be able to do that, and Terminal Server may not be, I don't think there's any demand for it. (The fact that Terminal Server doesn't do that actually confirms it; if there was demand in it, there'd be money in it, and Microsoft would code it.)
Don't even get me started on Windows Remote Desktop vs. VNC/X11, because Microsoft's solution completely blows VNC out of the water.
How many bug reports have you even bothered to file with X.org? That's what makes a user part of the community. Not just using the software for free, which just makes you a user.
This article is exactly about the large number of filed bugs that aren't being fixed. What good would filing more bugs do if they can't fix the bugs they have already?
Besides, I've learned from long experience that filing bugs against open source projects is a waste of time. They never get fixed, most of the time they never even get read: http://blakeyrat.com/bugs/ That's just a partial list of the bugs (maybe a third) I've filed over the last 2+ years, none of which have been fixed. And most of which haven't been read. (And most of which are extremely obvious bugs, like lists that aren't alphabetized, or menu bars that don't work right.)
(Oh, ignore the Slashdot.org bugs, it's not really an open source project, since the bugs are against Slashdot.org specifically and not Slashcode in general.)
I want to run X11 on my laptop, but it won't let my laptop go into sleep mode. How do I get this problem fixed in your perfect world? Does the only possible way to get this problem fixed involve me taking 9 months out of my life to learn everything about video cards and X11's program structure and code the fix myself?
Someone who works already on the X11 project might be able to do the fix in a couple weeks, but you're saying it would be impossible to offer them any incentive, and the alternative is for someone else spending months making the same fix? Does that strike you as an efficient use of resources?
Dude, he's Crazy Jim. Just be glad he's not lecturing you about how he invented every major video game genre ever made, or whining that he can't find a decent job.
The US never mass-murdered "Negroes". You can maybe make a case for a few hundred, but "lower millions" is simply ridiculous.
In any case, there's really no point in arguing if you believe that the US's humanitarian record is just as bad as Communism's. That's so ridiculous, there's no way to have a rational discussion about it.
That's what always bothered me about Ender's Game, which is so highly praised in sci-fi circles. "Oh look, he's so super smart that he's ahead of everyone even though he's like 5 years old. And he can beat up the bigger kids, too! And his brother and sister are so smart they influence global politics when they're like 7!"
Could be worse, though. Could be Heinlein. "The main character is a super-smart, super-rich lawyer who lives in a beautiful mansion and is constantly surrounded by beautiful women." Ugh.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that Linux advocates are always trying to get people to install Linux on their existing hardware, which likely does have non-Linux-compatible components simply because it wasn't purchased with the intent of installing Linux on it. (Otherwise, it would probably already have Linux on it, eh?)
But buck-passing is all Linux developers can do when confronted by hardware incompatibility! Quick, pass that buck, record speed this time!
She found a pretty, $5000 software product that is the core of her business, but didn't listen when I pointed out the (many) design flaws in the program. For example, who uses DHCP to assign an address to a standalone host when the client software that talks to that host has to have the IP address (not FQDN of the host, the IP address!) statically set in the configuration file?!?!
To be fair, you can use DHCP to set a static IP address, you just plug in the machine's MAC address. However, that's still a bad design for a program, that it can't look up its server by name.
That doesn't make any sense.
An oil company with this technology (and owning the patent so nobody else could have it) would have a HUGE competitive advantage. You're saying that they'd give up that competitive advantage for... what purpose? Just because they like drills? That makes no damned sense.
Incidentally, neither does the "car engine with 500 MPG buried in the desert by Ford" bullcrap. If Ford had such an engine, it would give them a huge competitive advantage, and they'd be retards to not use it.
It's one thing if Verizon had said that the costs of maintaining Usenet versus the number of subscribers actually using it made it an undesirable business, and were cutting it entirely.
I could understand that. That would be a pure business decision. As a subscriber, I may or may not complain, but it's just business.
So you're ok with the decision, you're just not ok with their (announced, possibly not actual) reason for making the decision?
That makes... sense?
But some of us don't understand why we need to "move on" from a superior technology.
If it was superior, then it'd be more popular, wouldn't it? The fact that virtually nobody has even *heard* of Usenet, despite it being available for long than the web, indicates to me that it is not, in fact, superior to the web.
I'm a pretty tech-y person, and I haven't touched Usenet since 2001 or so. I don't miss it. Might as well criticize Verizon for not keeping their Gopher site in order, or offering Telnet access to email... let's move on already.
Rather than selling the idea to me though, it really put me off. The gist of the talk was that Codemasters weren't interested in producing good games, only games that sold well.
When you're in business trying to make a buck, the definition of "good games" and the definition of "games that sell well" intersect almost entirely. Every so often, you hit a game that does both; Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, or Portal, for example. But most of the time it's one or the other. Beyond Good and Evil, for example, is cited as a good game by a lot of critics, but it sold terribly. (I have a copy and I was never able to get into it.) Or Otogi, or Psychonauts, etc.
I dunno, considering some of the crap Tesla was peddling, I bet he'd be pretty proud of the whole thing.
Remember, Telsa firmly believed that a single power station could power every electric device on the entire planet wirelessly, and that the only reason his station didn't work is that it wasn't huge enough. I think he electrocuted a few cows trying this one out.
From the "review":
We already knew of the theory behind why demagnetizing CDs nets audible results. The aluminum used for the reflective CD layer is contaminated with ferrous impurities and thus susceptible to magnetizing. Ditto for the ink used for printing the label. When the CD spins at up to 500 RPM, these ferrous particles begin to act as magnets as they are moving in a -- however small -- magnetic field. Let's assume that after an hour's play, all magnetizable particles have activated. We'll thus have a fair amount of magnets rotating inside a magnetic field. Little imagination is required to appreciate that such magnets could have a detrimental effect on all electronic circuits in the vicinity. As we have reported in our article on copying CDs to improve their sound quality, a great deal of the CD system is analog in nature and thus very much prone to external influences such as moving magnetic fields.
The most frightening thing is that these people seem to understand the difference between analog and digital, and STILL believe this bullshit. BTW, has anybody ever seen a negative review of audiophile crap?
My audio cables are temporally-shielded to prevent interference caused by the EM wake of time travelers. A steal at only $800. An inch.
I've never understood why Mac nuts simultaneously claim that Macintosh is better because you don't need to replace your computer as often and do completely and utterly hate everything related to backwards-compatibility. It seems hypocritical.
My G5 is now a media server, not a desktop computer, and I expect to use it as a media server for a very long time. The problem is that it's PPC (natch), and if Apple stops supporting PPC then Macintosh developers will also, and it'll some become impossible to get any software to run on it. (Right now, it's running 10.4 and I don't plan to ever upgrade it.) Mac developers *hate* backwards compatibility, it's already super-easy to find software that doesn't even support 10.3.
Now, given, as a media server I don't really *need* to install new software on it, but it would sure be nice if I had the option.
They should have spent 30 seconds Googling the potential name before renaming it, therefore picking a name originally that didn't conflict with any other software projects. Instead of just fumbling around and renaming it twice in a few months.
But water under the bridge.
Bravo, good post. I think the grandparent has just watched Fight Club way too many times.
That's probably a difference in the project more than anything.
The Inkscape bug I posted was a blatantly obvious one. The Inkscape developer passed-the-buck to some UI library he was using, but that project has done nothing with it, so the bug remains in both products. (And potentially every other project using that UI library.) So that was the case of a project that was actively responding to bugs forwarding the bug on to one that isn't. (Of course, the Inkscape developer later deleted the unresolved bug! So there's a point against.)
The Slashdot bugs on that page I mostly entered out of spite, after seeing how hideously ugly and non-functional the new Slashdot template is. (None have been fixed, natch.) I really shouldn't count them.
I don't even know what /frenchspacing is, or what program has that option, or whether that program (assuming I even use it, which seems unlikely) has it turned on by default.
I'm sure Dr.\ Blarg appreciates your spelling of his name, though.
Blizzard alternates between pleasing casual players, then making things hard on casual players. It's so weird.
They introduce the Battlegrounds system, which is great for casual players who can now get nice equipment without having to spend half their waking time raiding. Then they patch the original system so that it 'grades on a curve', making it impossible to get the really good equipment unless you now spend half your waking time playing Battlegrounds. Now they've patched it to be back the way it was originally!
Same applied to Arena; when they introduced it, it was a great way to earn EQ with a relatively minimal time investment, and you were guaranteed a certain amount of points no matter how much your team sucked. Now they've patched it so that half the rewards can only be purchased by people with super-high team ratings, making them inaccessible to casual players.
I wish they'd make up their mind already. More specifically, I wish they'd just make the entire game accessible to casual players who don't want to raid, and leave it that way.
Heh, thanks. I get marked as troll all the time for posts like that.
I seriously and honestly would like someone to explain to me why web standards are such a big deal. I'd much rather Mozilla (or Microsoft, or Apple, or anybody who makes browsers) work on features that actually improve the user experience then work on implementing web standards that are likely to bloat rendering code and break old websites.
Licensing comparisons are stupid; obviously the open source "license" is always going to be better (cheaper, at least) than the commercial one.
As for technical comparisons, well, Terminal Server is capable of sending audio as well as video down the pipe, it can handle multiple-monitors on the client in a reasonably intelligent fashion, and it's much faster than X11.
Microsoft's system is also smarter on a single computer. For instance, monitor configuration:
* auto-detects when I'm plugging in a new monitor, even when the computer's running
* auto-sets the monitor to its maximum safe settings without the user needing to do anything
* allows you to easily change the default monitor, the monitor with the taskbar (which isn't necessarily the default one), to incorporate multiple monitors of different sizes/resolutions into a single desktop, etc. The only thing it doesn't do is let you set a different wallpaper-per-monitor. OS X does. (Ironically, Windows used to also allow that using Active Desktop, but Vista removed it for some reason.)
I've tried using Linux on a multi-monitor computer, and it wasn't a pleasant experience. I can't imagine that, say, docking a laptop and then extending the monitor to the dock one works well, but I've never personally tried that. I do know that Tablet support in Linux is crap compared to Windows or OS X-- and Apple doesn't even MAKE a Tablet PC!
How about running multiple display managers, so that I can have more then one person using the machine with seperate monitors and input... no. Thought not.
I've never had the need to do that, nor can I think of a situation in which that would be useful. So while X11 may be able to do that, and Terminal Server may not be, I don't think there's any demand for it. (The fact that Terminal Server doesn't do that actually confirms it; if there was demand in it, there'd be money in it, and Microsoft would code it.)
Don't even get me started on Windows Remote Desktop vs. VNC/X11, because Microsoft's solution completely blows VNC out of the water.
How many bug reports have you even bothered to file with X.org? That's what makes a user part of the community. Not just using the software for free, which just makes you a user.
This article is exactly about the large number of filed bugs that aren't being fixed. What good would filing more bugs do if they can't fix the bugs they have already?
Besides, I've learned from long experience that filing bugs against open source projects is a waste of time. They never get fixed, most of the time they never even get read: http://blakeyrat.com/bugs/ That's just a partial list of the bugs (maybe a third) I've filed over the last 2+ years, none of which have been fixed. And most of which haven't been read. (And most of which are extremely obvious bugs, like lists that aren't alphabetized, or menu bars that don't work right.)
(Oh, ignore the Slashdot.org bugs, it's not really an open source project, since the bugs are against Slashdot.org specifically and not Slashcode in general.)
So, wait, let's get back to the matter at hand...
I want to run X11 on my laptop, but it won't let my laptop go into sleep mode. How do I get this problem fixed in your perfect world? Does the only possible way to get this problem fixed involve me taking 9 months out of my life to learn everything about video cards and X11's program structure and code the fix myself?
Someone who works already on the X11 project might be able to do the fix in a couple weeks, but you're saying it would be impossible to offer them any incentive, and the alternative is for someone else spending months making the same fix? Does that strike you as an efficient use of resources?
Explain this to me, please.
Dude, he's Crazy Jim. Just be glad he's not lecturing you about how he invented every major video game genre ever made, or whining that he can't find a decent job.
The US never mass-murdered "Negroes". You can maybe make a case for a few hundred, but "lower millions" is simply ridiculous.
In any case, there's really no point in arguing if you believe that the US's humanitarian record is just as bad as Communism's. That's so ridiculous, there's no way to have a rational discussion about it.
That's what always bothered me about Ender's Game, which is so highly praised in sci-fi circles. "Oh look, he's so super smart that he's ahead of everyone even though he's like 5 years old. And he can beat up the bigger kids, too! And his brother and sister are so smart they influence global politics when they're like 7!"
Could be worse, though. Could be Heinlein. "The main character is a super-smart, super-rich lawyer who lives in a beautiful mansion and is constantly surrounded by beautiful women." Ugh.