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Comment Re:List of folks with permanent rights of way (Score 1) 290

Riding a bicycle while making an honest attempt to follow the rules of the road is by far one of the most frightening experiences, period.
Car drivers will often merge into the bicycle lane to make a right turn. Some of the bicycle lines are dashed to show that this is acceptable, because it's technically the legal way things are supposed to be done. For the bicyclist however, this means that you're constantly at risk of being slammed into by car drivers who are doing what they're supposed to do and the only thing you can do about it is refuse to follow the rules. You don't always hear the car coming up behind you, especially if the streets are busy and traffic is getting hectic.
I've found that the safest way to ride is almost always by doing the OPPOSITE of what you're legally obligated to do. Ride against traffic in the bike lane, making it so you are face to face with the people who are most at risk of hitting you. Make eye contact with drivers as you approach. This also helps with people who are parked and opening their doors. People are more likely to recognize you are there because they have a face coming at them, which the human brain is very adept at spotting. I hang back at intersections and wait until it's actually safe to proceed because I can't trust drivers to accept that a bicyclist has any right-of-way. Too many near misses when doing things the "right" way. The rate of close calls that I've experienced has been drastically reduced since I stopped trying to "share the road".

Comment Re:Pointless (Score 1) 755

I point out GNOME because I actually think that GNOME 3 had some value to it. I was pleasantly surprised by some of the changes and genuinely felt they had made some improvements despite the complaints made about it. Unfortunately, it's a lot like the Windows 8 situation, where the honest improvements are drowned out by the silly bullshit. I think that SystemD is having a very similar predicament with the actual improvements being lost in the surrounding wasteland. We're not going to see an end to the tirade against SystemD unless we come out of this change with a system that's honestly better and has honestly solved the problems it's expected to solve.
I get this feeling from the comment I replied to that you expect SystemD to do something to solve driver issues. That's a great example of why I'm not fond of SystemD, the people who support it apparently think it's going to fix all these issues that it shouldn't actually have anything to do with. You're not going to fix drivers by rewriting the userland init system.

Comment Re:Pointless (Score 1, Insightful) 755

If you invested half the energy you folks use for whining about systemd into actually making an alternative available you might actually get something done.
The flaw in this statement is the fact that systemd is replacing alternatives in such a way that it breaks everything if you try to use an alternative. It makes it so being able to use the same alternatives that have existed since long before systemd came about, is no longer an option. It removes the alternatives. Every major piece of software for Linux that decides to become dependent on systemd removes the ability to consider alternatives.
What I see is projects like GNOME, with a growing dependence on SystemD, becoming unsuitable alternatives because they no longer support alternatives. I see this idea that other systems should be expected to conform to systemd architecture if they want to continue to benefit from said software.
I personally prefer to use cross-platform software. I prefer software that runs about the same regardless of the platform I'm using it on, and I prefer to have the option to use any supported platform to run the software. Now I'm afraid that software I've come to rely on is going to take that possibility away. I'm afraid that I won't be able to use my preferred cross-platform applications on OS X and Windows in the future because they gained some strange dependence on SystemD.
If we reach a point where a full featured Linux desktop cannot be run without SystemD, the entire idea of working on alternatives becomes moot.

Comment It's time to update RMS's firmware. (Score 1) 551

Richard Stallman needs to be brought up to spec on what computers are capable of. He's still living in a world where he doesn't experience even a small fraction of what technology has allowed. If we don't update his firmware soon, he's likely to become completely irrelevant within the decade. Unfortunately, I'm beginning to feel that decade may have already passed.

Comment Re: Does It Matter? (Score 1) 288

VMware Server was free, but I abandoned it for VirtualBox when they switched to a web-based interface that simply refused to function on my machine.
VMware Player must have added the creation of virtual machines because of VirtualBox taking a bite out of their pie. But I haven't seen any reason to switch back to it, especially given that it has more limited host operating system support.
I'm sitting here in awe that they turned VMware Player into a paid option. Wow. They really did not have a clue how to respond to VirtualBox.

Comment Re:Does Anyone Actually Want it? (Score 1) 141

Perhaps not right this moment, but I think the consumer will want it soon. You can do reasonable stereo viewing on almost any smartphone by using a Google Cardboard type setup. A few have their own manufactured enclosures for it, like the Galaxy Note4 with GearVR or the iPhone4 with the Hasbro My3D. The content for them is a little sparse, but the entire concept is still in infancy. Lots of us grew up with the ViewMaster and I don't think it's going to be long before we start enjoying a true advancement of that age-old technology. The wild west had stereoscopic viewers using the same optical trick, we have programmable screens being mounted into boxes that strap to your head.

I'm excited.

Comment Re:Stop developing 64bit (Score 1) 242

It's using the same technique that they used on the early consoles. It's a really nasty hack and if you were running that kind of workload, you'd damn well better know the particulars of why it sucked then and is now completely ridiculous. We've had 64bit options available for decades and it's truly sad that a workload of that size would be forced to run under paging hacks to access that much RAM.

Comment Re:clockspeed really? (Score 1) 338

There isn't enough information there.
That's a single core, 4GHz Pentium 4.
Did they give it a proper refurb before running that test, or are they using the original thermal grease and a clogged fan and heatsink?
Because I highly doubt that test machine (the ONE sample of that CPU) was actually in WORKING condition, given that the 3.8GHz model doubles the score.
That's not even getting into the higher multimedia instruction sets that the i7s have which newer Passmark probably bangs on.
Plus, we saw this happen. The Core line of CPUs was ridiculous in comparison to the previous Pentium 4. Not 'Core i7', but 'Intel Core Solo' and 'Intel Core Duo'.
They made the Pentium 4 look like a serious lemon.

Comment Re:What a fitting name! (Score 1) 469

I must say, I see something like 'portable to other compilers but gcc', and it gets me thinking.
What are those guys smoking? The systemd guys. The GNOME guys.
If I'm a GNOME on Linux user, I'm essentially being forced to migrate to a new operating system to keep using GNOME.
systemd doesn't support other libcs. systemd requires gcc extensions.
Linux, a fine OS kernel which is supported by a wide variety of userland options, and it looks like we're trying to homogenize everything to a degree which is frankly the opposite of what makes Linux itself an amazing piece of work. Things are becoming inextricably linked to components they previously may have INTERACTED with but did not RELY on. The alternatives are being pushed aside by the very depth and breadth with which these newer projects are gobbling up system responsibility.
These issues lie at such a basic level that it's poisoning the entire ecosystem.

Comment Re:Some criticism (Score 1) 184

There's a problem with this idea of intuitive. "using or based on what one feels to be true even without conscious reasoning; instinctive."
I'm curious about how a computer is supposed to be intuitive.
Let's take a journey into the past for a moment and look at historical computing machines, what they were used for, why they were built. I'll take as an example the artillery computer on a warship from the great war that brought the technology upon us. Differential Analyzers were mechanical devices which performed calculators. When it came to the use of these devices in ship-board artillery, the interface was simplified to assorted knobs and gauges where the operator dialed in the appropriate parameters to get the necessary result. However, the action being performed - the calculation of trajectory using mathematics - was in no way simpler or more intuitive, it was buried under an appropriate interface that hid the details necessary for performing the task at hand. This had the result of making it so an artillery man no longer needed to concern himself with the deeper understanding of the task he was performing.
I fear we've run head-long into this case where we expect our tools to do the work for us rather than allowing us to work more efficiently.
I'm seeing 'simplified' interfaces slapped onto complex machines that end up overlooking the details. I'm seeing this idea that the tool needs to to the job, that the user need not understand how the job is done. That is not a good thing.
Computers don't have the potential to change the world, they already have. Unfortunately, as a direct result of how deeply they've changed the world, we no longer feel it necessary to actually learn what we're doing.
We just want the computer to do it for us.

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