The wrong text is linked. That text is the title of the Gartner article that the zdnet.uk article is written about. The Gartner article itself isn't available for public consumption, as far as I can tell.
To be fair to Sony, and to note that I'm all for fixing bugs, it's worthwhile to remember that no matter how "balanced" a game is, there's always a vocal minority that decrees that it's unbalanced and won't be swayed no matter what changes are made. I've admined a MUD for years, and learned that lesson: You can't ever convince everybody that the game is balanced, no matter what you've done to balance it.
I can give them 10 out of 10 with fewer bugs and a more socially responsible business model. Who should be receiving the benefit of massive government contracts? Me, or MS?
You can? What is your OS called? How did you get all those hardware makers to write so many drivers for your OS? How is your business model more socially responsible?
Frankly, if you actually *did* have a product that does what you describe, you'd already have government contracts.
If I goddamned KNEW HOW TO FIX IT I'd probably have a working copy of tvtime right now. What the hell is wrong with you?
Look, I can spend the next 6 months of my life "fixing it" or the guy who created the software in the first place can spend an hour checking to see if his instructions can be followed. Which one strikes you as more efficient? Again freedom doesn't play into this at all. The guy who created ivtv obviously doesn't want anybody to be able to install it, probably because he has some elitist bullshit attitude, and he didn't spend the miniscule amount of time it would take to actually make it easy to install. So I guess there's freedom to be an asshole... but people who sell their software usually try to actually help people use it.
I don't want to learn how to write Linux drivers so I can "fix" ivtv, ok? I don't give a crap about your "freedom." I just want to use my goddamned video capture card. Figure it out. That "big black box?" It works. This little transparent one doesn't.
Freedom isn't making my life hard; the kernel programmers are making my life hard. The guy who put together the ivtv driver and didn't provide an installer is making my life hard. The guy who wrote the documentation for tvtime and ivtv but didn't finish or check their work, he's making my life hard.
What does freedom have anything to do with any of that? There are a lot of free programs (uppercase or lowercase F) that are easy to install and use; why isn't ivtv?
I'm not a 1337 Linux0rz hax0r, but I say put in ANYTHING that makes drivers easier to install. Have you tried to install ivtv for Hauppauge video capture cards recently? Holy crap! The documentation that's there is self-contradictory, incomplete, and doesn't cover every distro. It can't be done without at least a half-dozen lines in the terminal. It assumes a level of computer knowledge that 99% of people won't have. (For instance, assuming that people *know* what commands they need to use SUDO with and what commands they don't. I just gave up halfway through as command after command failed, and did SUDO for everything which I'm sure is wrong, but eh.)
Then when you finally have the process finished, and it looks like it's all working... you install tvtime (which was easy) and the whole thing doesn't work! All you get is static. There's no troubleshooting documentation with tvtime (whose documentation, BTW, is also incomplete) and there's no troubleshooting documentation with ivtv, and there's no way to search for useful information if you're not up to your neck in Linux terminology.
The word "bug" did exist. They wrote that there as a *JOKE*.
I don't think anybody's claimed that the word "bug" didn't exist before computers. People have been "working the bugs out" for probably a hundred years or more. You could reasonably claim that was the first use of the term "computer bug" possibly, but adding the word "computer" doesn't change the word "bug."
A persistent error in software or hardware. If the bug is in software, it can be corrected by changing the program. If the bug is in hardware, new circuits have to be designed.
Although the derivation of bug is generally attributed to the moth that was found squashed between the points of an electromechanical relay in a computer in the 1940s, the term goes back to the 1800s to refer to flaws in mechanical systems. See buggy, bug fix, software bug, broken and Web bug. Contrast with glitch.
A Note from the Author On October 19, 1992, I found my first "real bug." When I fired up my laser printer, it printed blotchy pages. Upon inspection, I found a bug lying belly up in the trough below the corona wire. The printer worked fine after removing it!
Re:Code books in general?
on
Java Puzzlers
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· Score: 1
This post is like "free karma." It shows up for every damned book review, and some moderator bumps it up every time. Like clockwork.
Yes. Look at the set of knowledge you need for the Linux way:
1) You need to know that the terminal exists. 2) You need to know how to get to the terminal. 3) You need to know that the urpmi command exists. 4) You need to know what the syntax of the urpmi command is, at least basically. 5) You need to know what name the people who organize the repository gave Open Office. For instance, I wouldn't assume the ".org" would be at the end of it. 6) You need to know how to run the program after its installed. Some Linux repositories add an icon to a handy menu, some do not.
Compare that to the knowledge required to install from the Office CD:
Also BeOS was developed in the early 90s, but they might have started in the late 80s. I'm pretty sure I recall seeing interviews in which the creators said that it was written from scratch.
MacOS has had full support for drag&drop since version 7.0. MacOS 7 is roughly equilivant to Windows 95. (And that's more-or-less the same time Windows got drag&drop support, or at least Office did.) It's not just an OS X thing. It also has had clipping support that long... if you select some text and drag it to the desktop, it creates a "text clipping" file, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Unfortunately, the OS X Finder handles clipping files in an intensely stupid way, but at least MacOS can still create them.
And I think the feature is very useful. The easiest way to save an image from a webpage (a task I do a lot) in MacOS is to grab that image and drag it to the desktop, or a folder, or where ever you want it. And creating clippings is handy as hell... I have something like 5 years of interesting dialog and quotes from a MUD I play all stored as clippings in a folder. If I see something interesting, I select the text and drag it in there... DONE! No copy, open SimpleText/TextEdit, paste, save, choose path, quit SimpleText/TextEdit.
Re:Epson scanner w/ optional transparency adapter
on
Film to X-rays?
·
· Score: 1
X-Rays are typically 11"x17". No way it'd fit in any Epson scanner I've ever seen.
At the hospital where we work we do have a Kodak scanner specifically designed for X-Rays, but of course it costs probably in the range of $10,000-$15,000.
Of course this entire question is moronic. Go to the Radiology department, ask for a copy of your X-Rays to keep, and they'll charge you like $15. $15 is about two orders of magnitude cheaper than ANY method you could do yourself, and three orders of magnitude of any method you could do yourself that has enough resolution for the doctor to actually read.
This reminds me of the Slashdot story a few years ago about the programmer who was self-treating an illness he had and he was in bad shape. Healthcare is *not* something you can apply the "open source" philosophy to. Everyone you meet in your typical hospital visit has 12 or more years of training and *no one doctor* has all that training... it's impossible for one person to learn everything in the medical field, and that's assuming they did nothing but going to school full-time. If you're doing it as a hobby, you have no chance whatsoever.
Give up. Go to the hospital, find the Radiology depart, ask for a copy of your X-Ray.
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter was an expansion pack to Serious Sam, not a sequel. It used the same engine, same weapons and (mostly) the same enemies as the first.
Hey, if you like The Prisoner, buy it. I want them to release a new print of the DVDs that don't have the quality problems of the existing prints, and the only way that's going to happen is if people pay for the merchandise. Besides, it is an excellent show, well worth the money spent. Even if you believe piracy is OK for modern movies and TV shows that "suck" (as is the common Slashdot thinking; it's ok to pirate bad, modern movies and shows), "The Prisoner definitely is worth the money you'd spend.
At the very laest, if you're going to pirate it, be more polite to the people who paid for it and don't add "thank jeebus for Bittorrent!" to your statement. At least attempt to feel some shame.
And *pay attention to them*. If you try to watch a (good) show while you're working on something else or distracted, which is very common and easy with television, and it'll be a lesser experience than if you're not. If I watch the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey on my TV with the lights dimmed and the ringer on my phone off, I'm in tears. If it's running in a window on my computer while I'm answering email and the ending comes, it's kind of 'eh.'
But yeah, anybody who says TV is worse now than it was before cable networks is saying more about themselves than the television. TV is targetted now; if you're interested in home improvement, you get 24/7 on the Home and Garden channel, not 2 hours a week on NBC if you're lucky. That's a *good thing*.
But they probably have better critical thinking skills than generations past, that's the point. Every generation memorizes tons of useless crap, I can guarantee it. I know the theme song to "Mr. Ed" from watching it every night on Nick and Night when I was a kid. (Back when it was the same network as Nickelodeon.) Knowing the theme song to "Mr. Ed" doesn't say anything about my IQ. You're kind of missing the point of the argument, I think.
The NPR listeners are almost as bad as the people who always have to mention they don't own a TV. Look, NPR is great, ok? I'm sure it stimulates your mind. But I don't care. I like listening to alternative rock, and I have a good station for that.
Slashdot Mirror
The wrong text is linked. That text is the title of the Gartner article that the zdnet.uk article is written about. The Gartner article itself isn't available for public consumption, as far as I can tell.
I do see Zonk's point - of course there is a place for 'the twitch', and Nintendo does quite well in that area.
What does this refer to?
To be fair to Sony, and to note that I'm all for fixing bugs, it's worthwhile to remember that no matter how "balanced" a game is, there's always a vocal minority that decrees that it's unbalanced and won't be swayed no matter what changes are made. I've admined a MUD for years, and learned that lesson: You can't ever convince everybody that the game is balanced, no matter what you've done to balance it.
Tho you can forgive that after his invention of ingenious new words.
I personally canceled three acounts
How many accounts did you have? Criminy.
LucasArts: "Oh no, after our combat upgrade, that guy who pays for 15 accounts cancelled and now only pays for 12!"
But could it possibly be worse than B.C. or Garfield? Everything is relative...
I can give them 10 out of 10 with fewer bugs and a more socially responsible business model. Who should be receiving the benefit of massive government contracts? Me, or MS?
You can? What is your OS called? How did you get all those hardware makers to write so many drivers for your OS? How is your business model more socially responsible?
Frankly, if you actually *did* have a product that does what you describe, you'd already have government contracts.
If I goddamned KNEW HOW TO FIX IT I'd probably have a working copy of tvtime right now. What the hell is wrong with you?
Look, I can spend the next 6 months of my life "fixing it" or the guy who created the software in the first place can spend an hour checking to see if his instructions can be followed. Which one strikes you as more efficient? Again freedom doesn't play into this at all. The guy who created ivtv obviously doesn't want anybody to be able to install it, probably because he has some elitist bullshit attitude, and he didn't spend the miniscule amount of time it would take to actually make it easy to install. So I guess there's freedom to be an asshole... but people who sell their software usually try to actually help people use it.
I don't want to learn how to write Linux drivers so I can "fix" ivtv, ok? I don't give a crap about your "freedom." I just want to use my goddamned video capture card. Figure it out. That "big black box?" It works. This little transparent one doesn't.
Freedom isn't making my life hard; the kernel programmers are making my life hard. The guy who put together the ivtv driver and didn't provide an installer is making my life hard. The guy who wrote the documentation for tvtime and ivtv but didn't finish or check their work, he's making my life hard.
What does freedom have anything to do with any of that? There are a lot of free programs (uppercase or lowercase F) that are easy to install and use; why isn't ivtv?
I'm not a 1337 Linux0rz hax0r, but I say put in ANYTHING that makes drivers easier to install. Have you tried to install ivtv for Hauppauge video capture cards recently? Holy crap! The documentation that's there is self-contradictory, incomplete, and doesn't cover every distro. It can't be done without at least a half-dozen lines in the terminal. It assumes a level of computer knowledge that 99% of people won't have. (For instance, assuming that people *know* what commands they need to use SUDO with and what commands they don't. I just gave up halfway through as command after command failed, and did SUDO for everything which I'm sure is wrong, but eh.)
Then when you finally have the process finished, and it looks like it's all working... you install tvtime (which was easy) and the whole thing doesn't work! All you get is static. There's no troubleshooting documentation with tvtime (whose documentation, BTW, is also incomplete) and there's no troubleshooting documentation with ivtv, and there's no way to search for useful information if you're not up to your neck in Linux terminology.
The word "bug" did exist. They wrote that there as a *JOKE*.
I don't think anybody's claimed that the word "bug" didn't exist before computers. People have been "working the bugs out" for probably a hundred years or more. You could reasonably claim that was the first use of the term "computer bug" possibly, but adding the word "computer" doesn't change the word "bug."
From answers.com:
http://www.answers.com/bug&r=67
A persistent error in software or hardware. If the bug is in software, it can be corrected by changing the program. If the bug is in hardware, new circuits have to be designed.
Although the derivation of bug is generally attributed to the moth that was found squashed between the points of an electromechanical relay in a computer in the 1940s, the term goes back to the 1800s to refer to flaws in mechanical systems. See buggy, bug fix, software bug, broken and Web bug. Contrast with glitch.
A Note from the Author
On October 19, 1992, I found my first "real bug." When I fired up my laser printer, it printed blotchy pages. Upon inspection, I found a bug lying belly up in the trough below the corona wire. The printer worked fine after removing it!
This post is like "free karma." It shows up for every damned book review, and some moderator bumps it up every time. Like clockwork.
Yes. Look at the set of knowledge you need for the Linux way:
1) You need to know that the terminal exists.
2) You need to know how to get to the terminal.
3) You need to know that the urpmi command exists.
4) You need to know what the syntax of the urpmi command is, at least basically.
5) You need to know what name the people who organize the repository gave Open Office. For instance, I wouldn't assume the ".org" would be at the end of it.
6) You need to know how to run the program after its installed. Some Linux repositories add an icon to a handy menu, some do not.
Compare that to the knowledge required to install from the Office CD:
1) You need to know the serial key.
Yeah. It really, really sucked. It's best to forget it existed and focus on Sands of Time. ;)
Also BeOS was developed in the early 90s, but they might have started in the late 80s. I'm pretty sure I recall seeing interviews in which the creators said that it was written from scratch.
How is that insightful? If you don't want to run it, don't run it. There's no insight there.
*Every* console game is sold on the strength of the single-player experience.
Next time I'm playing Counter-Strike on Xbox, I'll remember reading your post and laugh and laugh...
You would have been right a few years ago, though.
Hehe.
"But I come to realize a Good Interface especially for Desktop applications actually helps productivity."
Sorry, I'm not trying to pick on you specifically, but I see this all the time and, as a long-term Mac user, my response is usually, "well, DUUUUUH!"
MacOS has had full support for drag&drop since version 7.0. MacOS 7 is roughly equilivant to Windows 95. (And that's more-or-less the same time Windows got drag&drop support, or at least Office did.) It's not just an OS X thing. It also has had clipping support that long... if you select some text and drag it to the desktop, it creates a "text clipping" file, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Unfortunately, the OS X Finder handles clipping files in an intensely stupid way, but at least MacOS can still create them.
And I think the feature is very useful. The easiest way to save an image from a webpage (a task I do a lot) in MacOS is to grab that image and drag it to the desktop, or a folder, or where ever you want it. And creating clippings is handy as hell... I have something like 5 years of interesting dialog and quotes from a MUD I play all stored as clippings in a folder. If I see something interesting, I select the text and drag it in there... DONE! No copy, open SimpleText/TextEdit, paste, save, choose path, quit SimpleText/TextEdit.
X-Rays are typically 11"x17". No way it'd fit in any Epson scanner I've ever seen.
At the hospital where we work we do have a Kodak scanner specifically designed for X-Rays, but of course it costs probably in the range of $10,000-$15,000.
Of course this entire question is moronic. Go to the Radiology department, ask for a copy of your X-Rays to keep, and they'll charge you like $15. $15 is about two orders of magnitude cheaper than ANY method you could do yourself, and three orders of magnitude of any method you could do yourself that has enough resolution for the doctor to actually read.
This reminds me of the Slashdot story a few years ago about the programmer who was self-treating an illness he had and he was in bad shape. Healthcare is *not* something you can apply the "open source" philosophy to. Everyone you meet in your typical hospital visit has 12 or more years of training and *no one doctor* has all that training... it's impossible for one person to learn everything in the medical field, and that's assuming they did nothing but going to school full-time. If you're doing it as a hobby, you have no chance whatsoever.
Give up. Go to the hospital, find the Radiology depart, ask for a copy of your X-Ray.
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter was an expansion pack to Serious Sam, not a sequel. It used the same engine, same weapons and (mostly) the same enemies as the first.
Hey, if you like The Prisoner, buy it. I want them to release a new print of the DVDs that don't have the quality problems of the existing prints, and the only way that's going to happen is if people pay for the merchandise. Besides, it is an excellent show, well worth the money spent. Even if you believe piracy is OK for modern movies and TV shows that "suck" (as is the common Slashdot thinking; it's ok to pirate bad, modern movies and shows), "The Prisoner definitely is worth the money you'd spend.
At the very laest, if you're going to pirate it, be more polite to the people who paid for it and don't add "thank jeebus for Bittorrent!" to your statement. At least attempt to feel some shame.
And *pay attention to them*. If you try to watch a (good) show while you're working on something else or distracted, which is very common and easy with television, and it'll be a lesser experience than if you're not. If I watch the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey on my TV with the lights dimmed and the ringer on my phone off, I'm in tears. If it's running in a window on my computer while I'm answering email and the ending comes, it's kind of 'eh.'
But yeah, anybody who says TV is worse now than it was before cable networks is saying more about themselves than the television. TV is targetted now; if you're interested in home improvement, you get 24/7 on the Home and Garden channel, not 2 hours a week on NBC if you're lucky. That's a *good thing*.
But they probably have better critical thinking skills than generations past, that's the point. Every generation memorizes tons of useless crap, I can guarantee it. I know the theme song to "Mr. Ed" from watching it every night on Nick and Night when I was a kid. (Back when it was the same network as Nickelodeon.) Knowing the theme song to "Mr. Ed" doesn't say anything about my IQ. You're kind of missing the point of the argument, I think.
The NPR listeners are almost as bad as the people who always have to mention they don't own a TV. Look, NPR is great, ok? I'm sure it stimulates your mind. But I don't care. I like listening to alternative rock, and I have a good station for that.