Posts by Rattus Rattus 1068 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Oct 2009
Reading all of Luis' post nearly made my eyes bleed (not to mention my brain), but just one thing that immediately leapt out at me:
"we never found quarks in cosmic rays"
Cosmic rays = highly energetic nuclei = protons & neutrons.
Protons & neutrons - MADE OF SODDING QUARKS!
So yes, we do find quarks in cosmic rays.
Is it really? I've been a Gnome user for a long time and I was thinking about trying KDE. However, I absolutely despise the Win7 interface, it's crap. If KDE4 is really what Win7's ripping off then I think I'll keep away from KDE after all.
"For you want to minimise your use of the scarce resource. What you want is the best "system" at the lowest price."
I see what you're saying here, and I agree that the Western computer systems as a whole were better than their Eastern counterparts. At that point in the article, however, you were talking specifically about their software and I would contend that more efficient and elegant really is better in software terms. The brute force method of throwing more hardware at the problem may be the less expensive (and even quicker) way to get the job done in a particular economic situation, but I feel the ability to do more with less exhibited by the Eastern European programmers is something to be proud of.
@ Daniel Wilkie
Well, at least that's honest. Personally, I'm pretty happy with my comfortable situation in life too, but I want to see the great minds of the world strive to improve everybody's situation. I would sooner trust a Marx or a Trotsky than an Ayn Rand.
"It may have been more efficient, and relied less on brute force and memory and more on elegance of construction, but that was about it."
So in other words, it WAS better, no qualifiers or evasion necessary.
Overall, it sounds like you were all very successfully taking advantage of your fellow man in the greatest spirit of capitalism. Well done you.
"the rubble that a socialist attempt at the world leads to" - Surely you mean the rubble that a totalitarian, pseudo-socialist cock-up of an attempt leads to, which is a far more accurate characterisation of the Soviet system.
And no, the basic Marxist logic wasn't wrong, it was the totalitarian state that was implementing it, creating a political climate where it was far safer to toe the party line and, as you say, "adhere to every ridiculous detail" rather than try to come up with logical, workable methods and systems. Socialism was an attempt to come up with a fair and compassionate system of resource allocation. It may have failed, but the fault was more Stalin's than Marx's. Capitalism, on the other hand, is by it's very nature heartless and unfair.
Rather than sing it's praises, maybe we should realise that we still haven't found any particularly good economic system, and maybe we should all work together to find something new that works for everyone rather than the lucky few?
Yes, yes, Gordon Freeman, I for one welcome etc etc but honestly, this stuff is fascinating and really important. Basic research without an eye to the commercial implications, poking the fabric of space just to see what happens. I am really looking forward to the flipping of the Big Red Switch, and can't wait to see what kind of results start to appear once they start gethering data and analysing it.
I think the most disappointing result possible would be if nothing at all unusual is seen or even hinted at. After all, the most exciting phrase in science isn't "Eureka!" but rather "That's funny..."
Just what is wrong with the current Firefox UI? I _like_ it the way it is, thanks. Glass is ugly and I really don't want any of my apps to look like that. And how is the merged stop/reload button going to work? Sure, when I want to reload it doesn't really matter if it stops first, but there's plenty of times I want to stop what the browser is doing without reloading anything. How'm I going to do that? Will <ESC> still do that? I tend not to move my hand off my keyboard and onto the mouse unless absolutely necessary, anyway.
I certainly don't want my bookmarks in a toolbar, either. FFS, the bookmarks toolbar is one of the first things I turn off on a new install. And you can have my menu-bar when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
Seriously, WTF is it with companies and their screwed up ideas about changing interfaces that work perfectly well and making them shit? Have we had a new crop of design students graduate a couple years ago and got jobs en masse at flagship software companies?
<Sigh> I was so happy with my browser too. Time to start looking for a new one... I wonder if Opera is suffering from an overdose of "Design" yet?
Living in Australia, it's lovely and cool in the winter, and not too bright. Come summer though it's friggin' 'orrible. Bright actinic glare all day with blast-furnace heat, humid nights where it's too hot to sleep. Leaves me a very grumpy bugger all summer, but when the first of the winter clouds roll in I finally relax and start to perk up again. It's enough to make me want to go live in the UK from October to March and only come back here for the other half of the year.
...looks nice, and since getting used to a multi-touch trackpad I actually find a regular mouse a bit clunky for some kinds of pointer manipulation (while being head and shoulders above a trackpad for others). I don't have a Mac though, and I'm not going to be buying a Mac, so the big question is "can you use it with Linux?"
Only place I still use Windows at all is on my gaming box. I've played with the 7 RC as well as with Vista and my conclusion is that XP is staying until I really want to get a game that just will not run at all without Windows 7.
W7 runs pretty much the same as my XP install, no faster and no slower (unlike Vista) so I don't see the point of paying so much money for essentially no change. Any more serious applications will be running on my Linux boxen, anyway.
I also understand 7 to have largely the same DRM mechanisms that are built into Vista, which I don't like on what I consider ethical grounds. I may not try to infringe copyright but if I do at some point choose to, it will be for reasons I have decided are very good reasons and I don't feel it's the role of my OS to say I can't.
And finally, the biggest reason I'm not replacing XP - the interface. The warm steaming pile of interface. I don't care if it's pretty, I don't care if it's shiny, I just want an interface that works, that doesn't require a dozen clicks to do a task that could be performed by just one or two clicks. I want an interface that doesn't keep asking me "Are you sure you want to do that?" I am in full agreement with a previous commenter who complained bitterly about the stupid "Button of Screaming Death" (haha). Sometimes I want to reset, sometimes I want to shut down, sometimes I want to log off. Why do I have to click on a tiny little sliver next to the massive button two thirds of the time? Could they not at least have given the two buttons equal screen real estate? And speaking of massive buttons, what's with the giant close button on the windows? I'm quite capable of seeing three buttons with three symbols and choosing the right one for that task at hand. I don't need a giant oblong red button yelling "This is it! Over here!" to close a program.
Ok, I think I'll stop it there. Once I started talking about the interface I could feel my temperature rising along with the hyperbole level, which should tell you something about my opinion of the interface.
Long story short (too late!), W7 sucks less than Vista, but I won't be using it.
and if it could arrive in 2022 that's surprisingly early for such an ambitious mission. If they're going to send a probe that far though, why not get as much science out of it as possible and send a wheeled rover as well? After all, with the expense of going that kind of distance and all the other destinations in the outer solar system, it'll probably be a long time before another mission goes to Titan.
Would a RTG really be practical in seas of liquid hydrocarbons? Surely it'd need a lot of (heavy and expensive to launch) shielding to prevent it evaporating the sea around it.
I lurve my netbook, it does everything I need a laptop for. Email on the go, web access wherever I am, I have hundreds of ebooks on it and can wander the house reading while I do other things, almost as good as a real book - something that'd be far too awkward with a full-size laptop.
I can watch movies in bed, or read in bed, again without all the space taken up by the footprint of a full size laptop. And yes, I can run games on it - Homeworld 2 or Warcraft 3 for example run great.
I also don't have to go find a place to plug it in after a couple hours, a good six hours or more of use before my battery gets low is the norm. It's pretty amazing really - a piece of technology that actually doesn't suck!
If I'm doing something that needs number crunching, I'll use my desktop machine with my comfy chair, ergonomic desk arrangement, etc. Why would I want to play serious games on a laptop anyway? Unless it's set up much like a desktop would be, with external monitor, keyboard, comfy chair/desk/etc then hunching over even a 17in laptop is gonna start hurting my neck and back after a little while, so why not use a cheaper yet more powerful full desktop for those times?
Between my desktop and my netbook I have everything covered nicely - what I can't really see a need for is a normal laptop. So yeah, Michael Dell can get stuffed.
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