NTFS is a pretty damned slick filesystem too. Not that anybody here on Slashdot, yourself excepted, would ever admit anything coming from Microsoft to be any good at all.
Ok, I post this every time it comes up, and it still comes up so I'm going to post it again.
Why should we, as consumers, give half a crap whether the Xbox/Gamecube/Wii/toaster over is "profitable" for the company making it? Does that seriously enter into your purchasing decision? Seriously?
Ah, but if they did, your hipster-ism and built-in hatred of anything popular would then force you to hate that game! Then in a few years (once Halo became 'retro' enough to be cool again), you'd decry "too bad the masses latch on to MegaKill and not something so overrated, like Halo." Then you could adjust your tinted glasses and ironic t-shirt and move on to hating popular movies instead.
Anybody who is still with Comcast is so brow-beaten that they'll be with Comcast until the end of time. If they gave half a whit about "quality" or "service," they'd have run fleeing to another ISP years ago.
You don't have to watch I, Robot, just to engage your brain.
Asimov's "US Robotics" company leased robots to various companies to perform various tasks. All the robots were "hard-wired" with the three laws. Let's say you're a mining company and you're about to dump a bunch of gold on the market. Let's say I own a competing mining company at least a month away from being able to compete... I can walk to your facility and tell the robots to sabotage their equipment and themselves, and that's not against any of the three laws." Or, more directly, I could just tell the robots that I own them now, and they'd follow me home, and that's also allowed by the three laws.
The Three Laws are just a plot device to write somewhat interesting mystery stories involving robots. (Mysteries like, "how could a human get a robot to kill someone despite the laws?) If you read Asimov's stories, you'll find that in nearly EVERY ONE, the mystery is solved because the robot has an "inbalance" in the laws, or that the third law was left out, or something else that directly contradicts the notion that the three laws are hard-coded.
That's not to say the stories aren't good, just that the premise is pretty weak. At least a couple of them were excellent (like the one where the robot could read minds), although most were more than a little silly (like the one where the robot 'twiddles its thumbs'.)
Not necessarily. But when we read about numerous Vista show-stoppers, it's hard to believe that some people are having a good experience with the OS. We might conclude that these folks don't push the OS very hard, so the flaws are not exposed. Other conclusions are possible -- maybe it really DOES work for some people.
Or maybe the "show-stoppers" you're hearing about are nothing but pure weapons-grade bullshit in the first place.
Underneath it all, many people are waiting for MS to release "a better Unix than Unix". Until they do, people will be quick to side with Linux as the better choice. Apple made the big jump with OSX; time for MS to do the same.
They already have! Windows Vista has a better permissions system than Unix, it's equally stable, it's got a great new CLI environment with Monad (or whatever they're calling it these days), it's capable of running a variety of apps no Unix system ever dreamed of. It works with hardware that no Unix system ever dreamed of, until Windows came along and said "hey, let's do this." (Do you think a purely Unix world would ever have tablet PCs or webcams?)
I think you have the challenge reversed. The challenge is for Linux/Unix developers to create a product that does everything Windows NT-based OSes do, but better. But the actual goal of Linux/Unix seems to be to do the bare minimum to keep up GUI-wise, but only as long as your 1974 CLI scripts still run. All the major open source apps, except Firefox and Apache (and perhaps a few others) are at least 5 years behind the competition, even the competition that's not even 5 years old, like Apple's iWork suite.
I'd like to add to that that most of the people here on Slashdot who constantly whine about how terrible Vista is have never used it, or if they have, didn't give it a fair shake. Most of the "hard-core" Slashdotters haven't used a version of Windows since 98 or 2000... despite that they'll happily point out problems that "Windows" has, even if they've been fixed for years.
A few days ago there was a story about OpenOffice wanting to compete with Outlook, and there were tons of responses talking about how insecure Outlook is-- ignoring that Outlook has been secured now for, what, 3-4 years? Another common gripe is the "blue screen of death" which means one, and only one, thing in modern Windows versions: You have a hardware fault. Or take the abuse Office 2007 gets for having a 'different' interface, written by people who have obviously never used it or who are so set in their ways that any deviation from Office 97 is equivalent to blasphemy.
Apple hasn't had anything in that range for ages. The cheapest tower Mac, back when they used G5 CPUs, was $1600. Now you have to spend twice that to get a tower, it's ridiculous. That's the main reason I moved to Dell for my next computer, I couldn't justify spending a full $1500 dollars more for (virtually) the same hardware Dell would sell me. Sure, my Dell doesn't have 76 Xeon CPUs, or whatever makes the Mac Pro so expensive, but that's waaay over kill for my use anyway.
It would look even cooler if Microsoft hadn't beat them to it by months with Vista. (Then again, Vista only has it on the Business and Ultimate versions, but still.)
Skipping the first point, because I guess it's more an opinion than anything.
See, this is where you move from "okay, he has different tastes from mine" to "bat-shit insane." The PS2 has nothing that can compete with stuff like Resident Evil 4. I mean, PS2 is plainly situated in jaggie-land. There's really no comparison between the PS2 and the Cube.
Yes, the hardware of the Cube (except the optical drive) was more or less twice as powerful as the PS2. The problem is that it came out at the same time as the Xbox, and it was a complete wimp when compared to that system. It had a year's development time on the PS2, so you'd expect the hardware there to be better, but it was nowhere near the (more relevant) competition.
but it did online just fine. Unfortunately, hardly any games made use of it.
The Gamecube didn't even have a network card, how were you supposed to put it online? Magic beans?
Sure, maybe some super-obscure Japanese-only import that cost a geeky Nintendo nerd somewhere $600 just happened to work with one game in the US because Nintendo never bothered to screen by nationality, but that's hardly the same as "it did online just fine."
Because the wacky disk they used instead of DVDs could only hold 1.5 GB, so cross-platform ports had to be trimmed down for Gamecube?
Okay, which games are you talking about?
I've seen it in developer interviews/post mortems before, but now I can't find any references, so I guess I withdraw that point unless someone else wants to dig up a list. (For the record, it wasn't "trimmed down" meaning less content, but things like reducing the texture size or the video quality.)
Yeah, unlike the PS2, or the Xbox, or the 360, or the PS3, or any other damn console in the history of consoles. I do not own a single console which fits into my entertainment center (by which I assume you mean it I can stack it). Actually, the Cube has the advantage of being small, so it's easy to place it, but the Xbox? Or the original PS2? Not so damn much.
You have a very strange entertainment center. My Xbox was the exact same size as my Dish Network decoder box, and not as tall as my surround receiver. It fit perfectly on a shelf. If a Xbox 360 doesn't fit in your entertainment center, how do you get your cable box in it? Or surround receiver? Seriously, the Xbox 360 is half the size of either of those.
The Gamecube didn't fit because it was too tall, not because it was too big in general. Making what is essentially a A/V component cube-shaped was a dumb idea.
There is a finite amount of oil below the ground. We are pumping it at a faster and faster rate. One day it will vanish entirely.
Yes, there is. And it's enough to power our society at its current level for thousands of years. It gets marginally more expensive to drill over time, then again, technology to find and drill oil also gets cheaper over time, so the end result is that we have far more reserves (oil we know is in the ground but haven't bothered to tap yet) than we've ever had before.
The fact that people have been predicting the "end of oil" for literally a hundred years, and it's never come to pass, also weakens this point of debate quite a bit.
There is a finite amount of topsoil, and every annual we grow on it leads to some erosion.
Yes, but there are also processes in place that reverse erosion. If erosion was the only mechanism at work on topsoil, the entire Earth would have been nothing but rock long before humans came along. In any case, there are fields in New Guinea and China that have been farmed for thousands of years, and are still farmable and productive.
Today our world has 6 billion people. If only 1% of them are starving that is still 60 million people.
Yes it is. I'm not saying that it's a good thing that anybody starves, but the simple fact is that fewer people are starving now than ever before in recorded history. And every year, fewer still people starve, as food production is going up far faster than population growth. There's no reason for alarmism here, because things *are getting better*.
We have enough food to feed everyone, but we don't.
The areas that do not have enough food suffer from repressive governments that do not allow farmers to farm productively and waste food aid from other nations. The problem here is not a lack of food, it's a lack of stable government. You say "but we don't" as if we aren't trying!
We could give everyone in the world clean water and sewers, but we let 1 billion people worldwide suffer the effects of bad sanitation.
Same point as above.
Never before has so much belonged to so few.
Are you serious? Have you ever heard of "kings" and "serfs?" Did you know the entire world used to be ruled by tyrannical dictators who took everything while the common man got nothing? You have got to be kidding me if you think our current society is more stratified than historical ones! Seriously, let's engage some brain cells here and think before typing.
But I don't want weak knee arguments of how killing a completely sentient alien is at all different than killing a human being.
For those following along at home, the "arguments" are this: completely sentient aliens do not exist. Human beings do. I don't know why you'd need more than that.
Don't they have a Saturday morning cartoon which is basically nothing but advertising for the game? Not that I watch Saturday morning cartoons, for all I know it was canceled after one episode...
Also, is Viva Pinata doing poorly? I was under the impression that, while Rare had a few bombs after Microsoft acquired them, Kameo was pretty good and Viva Pinata is pretty excellent.
Seriously, though. There's a big difference between a game where you fight and kill other human beings to engage in criminal activities, and a game where you only fight aliens to save humanity. I'm pretty sure Halo 2 and Halo 3 are actually designed so that at no point are you fighting other humans-- even when playing as the Arbiter. Frankly, I don't necessarily agree that Halo deserves the same rating as games like the GTA series, or Rainbow Six Vegas, or other much more graphic games.
Well, tell you what, why don't you schedule a demo with Xerox so you can tell them how crappy their product is in person? I don't know where your negativity comes from, but why not give them the benefit of the doubt instead of saying they're all idiots, huh?
My idea is to allow laws in violation of the constitution but require a super-majority to enact them.
A) The constitution already contains a method to amend it as needed; it's been done quite a few times, you might recall from school. B) Determining what is, and what is not "in violation of the constitution" is not exactly clear-cut. The Supreme Court is basically responsible for this now, but they do it after-the-fact, as I'm sure reviewing every piece of legislation before any voting is conducted would be unfeasible.
On the contrary, I'm do computer engineering research for a living. And don't get me wrong - I think this is a perfectly valid area to research. But a redacting copier is 3 (or more) decades from being a viable product - the technology just isn't there yet. Wildly exaggerated claims leading to disappointment have plagued the AI field for decades, and putting out products like this only contributes to that.
Well, obviously Xerox thinks it works or they wouldn't have spent the millions it takes to productize the technology. Maybe Xerox just has smarter engineers than you assume they have?
It seems to me that this is just basically a combination of OCR + keyword searching. The OCR has to keep track of where the original characters were located, so that it can blank them out, but other than that it doesn't strike me as anything particularly non-doable. The OCR is going to have some false negatives, probably, but I'm guessing false positives will be really rare.
Re:Today is pregancy and infant loss awareness day
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Blog Action Day
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Is there anybody on earth who isn't aware that pregnancy happens?
If the world's natural resources - fossil fuels AND agriculturally viable land-area - continue to deplete, the wars you're seeing now will someday be remembered fondly for their relative civility and restraint.
Considering that available oil reserves and worldwide food production are much, much greater now than they ever have been in the past, that's a pretty big "if", isn't it? Oil hasn't depleted at all; we have more available now than ever before. Same with food, there are fewer people starving now than ever before in history and that's with increased population.
Slashdot Mirror
NTFS is a pretty damned slick filesystem too. Not that anybody here on Slashdot, yourself excepted, would ever admit anything coming from Microsoft to be any good at all.
Ok, I post this every time it comes up, and it still comes up so I'm going to post it again.
Why should we, as consumers, give half a crap whether the Xbox/Gamecube/Wii/toaster over is "profitable" for the company making it? Does that seriously enter into your purchasing decision? Seriously?
Ah, but if they did, your hipster-ism and built-in hatred of anything popular would then force you to hate that game! Then in a few years (once Halo became 'retro' enough to be cool again), you'd decry "too bad the masses latch on to MegaKill and not something so overrated, like Halo." Then you could adjust your tinted glasses and ironic t-shirt and move on to hating popular movies instead.
Anybody who is still with Comcast is so brow-beaten that they'll be with Comcast until the end of time. If they gave half a whit about "quality" or "service," they'd have run fleeing to another ISP years ago.
Too bad their feature isn't configurable, and opens up too many connections which kills my (admittedly pre-BitTorrent) home router.
You don't have to watch I, Robot, just to engage your brain.
Asimov's "US Robotics" company leased robots to various companies to perform various tasks. All the robots were "hard-wired" with the three laws. Let's say you're a mining company and you're about to dump a bunch of gold on the market. Let's say I own a competing mining company at least a month away from being able to compete... I can walk to your facility and tell the robots to sabotage their equipment and themselves, and that's not against any of the three laws." Or, more directly, I could just tell the robots that I own them now, and they'd follow me home, and that's also allowed by the three laws.
The Three Laws are just a plot device to write somewhat interesting mystery stories involving robots. (Mysteries like, "how could a human get a robot to kill someone despite the laws?) If you read Asimov's stories, you'll find that in nearly EVERY ONE, the mystery is solved because the robot has an "inbalance" in the laws, or that the third law was left out, or something else that directly contradicts the notion that the three laws are hard-coded.
That's not to say the stories aren't good, just that the premise is pretty weak. At least a couple of them were excellent (like the one where the robot could read minds), although most were more than a little silly (like the one where the robot 'twiddles its thumbs'.)
Similar situation in Futurama!
Fry: Leela, is the person that parrot is mimicking telling the truth by proxy?
Not necessarily. But when we read about numerous Vista show-stoppers, it's hard to believe that some people are having a good experience with the OS. We might conclude that these folks don't push the OS very hard, so the flaws are not exposed. Other conclusions are possible -- maybe it really DOES work for some people.
Or maybe the "show-stoppers" you're hearing about are nothing but pure weapons-grade bullshit in the first place.
Underneath it all, many people are waiting for MS to release "a better Unix than Unix". Until they do, people will be quick to side with Linux as the better choice. Apple made the big jump with OSX; time for MS to do the same.
They already have! Windows Vista has a better permissions system than Unix, it's equally stable, it's got a great new CLI environment with Monad (or whatever they're calling it these days), it's capable of running a variety of apps no Unix system ever dreamed of. It works with hardware that no Unix system ever dreamed of, until Windows came along and said "hey, let's do this." (Do you think a purely Unix world would ever have tablet PCs or webcams?)
I think you have the challenge reversed. The challenge is for Linux/Unix developers to create a product that does everything Windows NT-based OSes do, but better. But the actual goal of Linux/Unix seems to be to do the bare minimum to keep up GUI-wise, but only as long as your 1974 CLI scripts still run. All the major open source apps, except Firefox and Apache (and perhaps a few others) are at least 5 years behind the competition, even the competition that's not even 5 years old, like Apple's iWork suite.
Amen!
I'd like to add to that that most of the people here on Slashdot who constantly whine about how terrible Vista is have never used it, or if they have, didn't give it a fair shake. Most of the "hard-core" Slashdotters haven't used a version of Windows since 98 or 2000... despite that they'll happily point out problems that "Windows" has, even if they've been fixed for years.
A few days ago there was a story about OpenOffice wanting to compete with Outlook, and there were tons of responses talking about how insecure Outlook is-- ignoring that Outlook has been secured now for, what, 3-4 years? Another common gripe is the "blue screen of death" which means one, and only one, thing in modern Windows versions: You have a hardware fault. Or take the abuse Office 2007 gets for having a 'different' interface, written by people who have obviously never used it or who are so set in their ways that any deviation from Office 97 is equivalent to blasphemy.
That's such a timely joke, because those "Dude, you're getting a Dell!" ads are all over TV right now.
Apple hasn't had anything in that range for ages. The cheapest tower Mac, back when they used G5 CPUs, was $1600. Now you have to spend twice that to get a tower, it's ridiculous. That's the main reason I moved to Dell for my next computer, I couldn't justify spending a full $1500 dollars more for (virtually) the same hardware Dell would sell me. Sure, my Dell doesn't have 76 Xeon CPUs, or whatever makes the Mac Pro so expensive, but that's waaay over kill for my use anyway.
It would look even cooler if Microsoft hadn't beat them to it by months with Vista. (Then again, Vista only has it on the Business and Ultimate versions, but still.)
Skipping the first point, because I guess it's more an opinion than anything.
See, this is where you move from "okay, he has different tastes from mine" to "bat-shit insane." The PS2 has nothing that can compete with stuff like Resident Evil 4. I mean, PS2 is plainly situated in jaggie-land. There's really no comparison between the PS2 and the Cube.
Yes, the hardware of the Cube (except the optical drive) was more or less twice as powerful as the PS2. The problem is that it came out at the same time as the Xbox, and it was a complete wimp when compared to that system. It had a year's development time on the PS2, so you'd expect the hardware there to be better, but it was nowhere near the (more relevant) competition.
but it did online just fine. Unfortunately, hardly any games made use of it.
The Gamecube didn't even have a network card, how were you supposed to put it online? Magic beans?
Sure, maybe some super-obscure Japanese-only import that cost a geeky Nintendo nerd somewhere $600 just happened to work with one game in the US because Nintendo never bothered to screen by nationality, but that's hardly the same as "it did online just fine."
Because the wacky disk they used instead of DVDs could only hold 1.5 GB, so cross-platform ports had to be trimmed down for Gamecube?
Okay, which games are you talking about?
I've seen it in developer interviews/post mortems before, but now I can't find any references, so I guess I withdraw that point unless someone else wants to dig up a list. (For the record, it wasn't "trimmed down" meaning less content, but things like reducing the texture size or the video quality.)
Yeah, unlike the PS2, or the Xbox, or the 360, or the PS3, or any other damn console in the history of consoles. I do not own a single console which fits into my entertainment center (by which I assume you mean it I can stack it). Actually, the Cube has the advantage of being small, so it's easy to place it, but the Xbox? Or the original PS2? Not so damn much.
You have a very strange entertainment center. My Xbox was the exact same size as my Dish Network decoder box, and not as tall as my surround receiver. It fit perfectly on a shelf. If a Xbox 360 doesn't fit in your entertainment center, how do you get your cable box in it? Or surround receiver? Seriously, the Xbox 360 is half the size of either of those.
The Gamecube didn't fit because it was too tall, not because it was too big in general. Making what is essentially a A/V component cube-shaped was a dumb idea.
There is a finite amount of oil below the ground. We are pumping it at a faster and faster rate. One day it will vanish entirely.
Yes, there is. And it's enough to power our society at its current level for thousands of years. It gets marginally more expensive to drill over time, then again, technology to find and drill oil also gets cheaper over time, so the end result is that we have far more reserves (oil we know is in the ground but haven't bothered to tap yet) than we've ever had before.
The fact that people have been predicting the "end of oil" for literally a hundred years, and it's never come to pass, also weakens this point of debate quite a bit.
There is a finite amount of topsoil, and every annual we grow on it leads to some erosion.
Yes, but there are also processes in place that reverse erosion. If erosion was the only mechanism at work on topsoil, the entire Earth would have been nothing but rock long before humans came along. In any case, there are fields in New Guinea and China that have been farmed for thousands of years, and are still farmable and productive.
Today our world has 6 billion people. If only 1% of them are starving that is still 60 million people.
Yes it is. I'm not saying that it's a good thing that anybody starves, but the simple fact is that fewer people are starving now than ever before in recorded history. And every year, fewer still people starve, as food production is going up far faster than population growth. There's no reason for alarmism here, because things *are getting better*.
We have enough food to feed everyone, but we don't.
The areas that do not have enough food suffer from repressive governments that do not allow farmers to farm productively and waste food aid from other nations. The problem here is not a lack of food, it's a lack of stable government. You say "but we don't" as if we aren't trying!
We could give everyone in the world clean water and sewers, but we let 1 billion people worldwide suffer the effects of bad sanitation.
Same point as above.
Never before has so much belonged to so few.
Are you serious? Have you ever heard of "kings" and "serfs?" Did you know the entire world used to be ruled by tyrannical dictators who took everything while the common man got nothing? You have got to be kidding me if you think our current society is more stratified than historical ones! Seriously, let's engage some brain cells here and think before typing.
1) I hate comics where the comic isn't on the damned homepage. No I don't want to click through to view your comic.
2) "Today's comic" is not funny. It's more like catching the last third of a movie and having no clue what's going on or who anybody is.
But I don't want weak knee arguments of how killing a completely sentient alien is at all different than killing a human being.
For those following along at home, the "arguments" are this: completely sentient aliens do not exist. Human beings do. I don't know why you'd need more than that.
Don't they have a Saturday morning cartoon which is basically nothing but advertising for the game? Not that I watch Saturday morning cartoons, for all I know it was canceled after one episode...
It also has a detailed biography of every character from Sonic the Hedgehog.
Also, is Viva Pinata doing poorly? I was under the impression that, while Rare had a few bombs after Microsoft acquired them, Kameo was pretty good and Viva Pinata is pretty excellent.
Seriously, though. There's a big difference between a game where you fight and kill other human beings to engage in criminal activities, and a game where you only fight aliens to save humanity. I'm pretty sure Halo 2 and Halo 3 are actually designed so that at no point are you fighting other humans-- even when playing as the Arbiter. Frankly, I don't necessarily agree that Halo deserves the same rating as games like the GTA series, or Rainbow Six Vegas, or other much more graphic games.
Well, tell you what, why don't you schedule a demo with Xerox so you can tell them how crappy their product is in person? I don't know where your negativity comes from, but why not give them the benefit of the doubt instead of saying they're all idiots, huh?
My idea is to allow laws in violation of the constitution but require a super-majority to enact them.
A) The constitution already contains a method to amend it as needed; it's been done quite a few times, you might recall from school.
B) Determining what is, and what is not "in violation of the constitution" is not exactly clear-cut. The Supreme Court is basically responsible for this now, but they do it after-the-fact, as I'm sure reviewing every piece of legislation before any voting is conducted would be unfeasible.
On the contrary, I'm do computer engineering research for a living. And don't get me wrong - I think this is a perfectly valid area to research. But a redacting copier is 3 (or more) decades from being a viable product - the technology just isn't there yet. Wildly exaggerated claims leading to disappointment have plagued the AI field for decades, and putting out products like this only contributes to that.
Well, obviously Xerox thinks it works or they wouldn't have spent the millions it takes to productize the technology. Maybe Xerox just has smarter engineers than you assume they have?
It seems to me that this is just basically a combination of OCR + keyword searching. The OCR has to keep track of where the original characters were located, so that it can blank them out, but other than that it doesn't strike me as anything particularly non-doable. The OCR is going to have some false negatives, probably, but I'm guessing false positives will be really rare.
Is there anybody on earth who isn't aware that pregnancy happens?
If the world's natural resources - fossil fuels AND agriculturally viable land-area - continue to deplete, the wars you're seeing now will someday be remembered fondly for their relative civility and restraint.
Considering that available oil reserves and worldwide food production are much, much greater now than they ever have been in the past, that's a pretty big "if", isn't it? Oil hasn't depleted at all; we have more available now than ever before. Same with food, there are fewer people starving now than ever before in history and that's with increased population.