It reminds me of some new car stereos I looked at.
When I went to the shop there were two of interest. One of them, $150.00 au, has excellent amps, plays mp3 and wma, cd, radio and has an auxillary input on the face plate. It also has a really cheap looking old fashioned blocky LCD display. The other has all the same features, except for lower quality amps but a photo realistic full colour display with animations depicting not only a vu meter, but also groovy little "this is the source you have selected" things. $900.00 au.
Hmmm, car stereo - do I want a basic unit that sounds excellent but looks a bit basic, or do I want to spend the extra $750.00 on a unit that sounds crap but will ensure that I cause at least one fatality if I ever actually take the time to appreciate it while driving.
Fuck it, I thought, get the fancy display for my car. All the extra car accidents will boost the economy through smash repairers, lawyers, medical practitioners and funeral homes. It's our civic duty to buy this kind of useless shit.
If it weren't for AMD forcing innovation down Intel's throat we would still be stuck with that crap they called the Pentium 4.
This is true. An extension of this point is that AMD tends to produce better bus architecture and I use my home system primarily for internet/office type apps and sound mixing/music production.
I've found that performance for web browsing and office apps was more than adequate with my old 1.3GHz Athlon. When mixing multitrack audio from a combination of hard disk and live input combined with a few effects and soft synths, the bottleneck isn't usually the processor but I/O. I find AMDs offerings extremely competitive.
Given my cheap attitude to home upgrades, AMD seems to always come out on top for me, especially considering how cheap 64 bit CPUs are. I don't see this announcement changing anything for me.
Resellers will be the ones who get those prices established when they do the wholesale purchase in lots of 10,000. As long as they buy 10,000 at wholesale then we end up with the $1305 at retail.
TFA belongs in the pile with "Republicans fail to stop Hurricane Katrina, poor folks' houses destroyed!"
But the Republicans did fail to stop Katrina, and poor folks did lose houses, lives and entertainment units.
I don't think we can understate the significance of TFA which, while I haven't bothered to read it, is clearly about an innocent kid who had to print out his coupons an extra couple of thousand times cause his dog ate the first batches.
And now, just because he shared his experience on the interweb in the hope of some compassionate understanding from other dog owners, the RIAA's lawyers are going to murder him in his sleep with an ice pick!!!1!
While we're at it, let's point out how wonderful some of those tags are.
This story is tagged "lame" and "bastards" among other things. So yeah, if I'm interested in looking up info on OSS software being closed, I'll be sure to look for articles tagged "lame". That imediately makes so much sense to me, and you guys clearly know what good tagging's all about. Tagging's a great way of expressing opinions on entire stories without having to own up to them. You don't even have to have to LEAVE A FUCKING COMMENT WITH A USER NAME.
they photograph the license plate but do not identify the driver. Same difference I would think.
Almost the same, except here, it's like when you reverse out of a driveway and onto a street, you change license plates. Drive to the end of the street and turn onto the main road and you change license plates to the same plates as everyone who drives out of your street.
This research does not seem to be fair enough. These findings were already theorized by the French mathematician René Thom; he developed the catastrophe theory between 1968 and 1972.
That's right, he developed a theory. It wasn't until the early 1990s when I was playing in a band and I left a beer on my bass rig for one really short song that anyone proved the actual catastrophe.
But in order for beautiful castles to exist, there has to be slave-labor and famine among the peasants, to that the royalty may thrive. (That's the most freaking poetical thing I've said in a long time!!!)
The patents in this case would all expire by 2011 even if they are eventually found valid.
This is true, but I believe we still have to rethink what we let large corporations get away with, and government needs to take more action earlier, in many cases become a rival to large corporations rather than a prostitute.
The problem in this case is with cross-pollination. Farmers are growing GM crops whether they intend to or not. Courts to date have upheld the view that the farmers are infringing on Monsantos IP, rather than that Monsanto is poluting the gene stock of otherwise disinterested farmers. If the justice system was really a justice system, Monsanto would pay farmers for polluting their crops and relatively untested and potentially dangerous genetic material.
I hope for the sake of Monsantos' share holders that they are putting aside a large insurance policy in case firm evidence comes out about the dangers of some of their crops and human consumption. They'll they get sued out of existence. They could just do a James Hardy and shift to another jurisdiction, but I think the way they are pushing their wares internationally and the fact that the plaintifs are likely to be most of the human population will make it much harder to find a safe haven.
I used to break pencils in two, sharpen a point and shave the wood off the opposite end of each half. Then I'd tape the halves down with the sharpened points nearly touching, and put crocodile clips on the exposed ends.
The film suffers the same problem that all books over 300pages suffer.
I agree completely. I found the same thing with The Lord of the Rings trilogy; there were so many more omitions, and they still felt more rushed than the Potter films.
The latest Potter film also had a huge sense of being the bit between the previous episode and the next one rather than a story in itself. The whole thing was like the last half hour of Star Wars episode III without the apallingly weak plot. It was a filler, but a necessary one and I forgave it for that.
Unless mainstream audiences are prepared to sit through week long movies, large literary series will never be truly satisfying when translated to film.
To put it bluntly, CSS projects that lose their core development teams don't exactly fair any better do they?
On the contrary. A CSS product could be rebadged as openMosix 2008 Horizons(R), given some fancy UI tools and sold for more than double to a bunch of mums and dads who believe they need a cluster of 4 new core duo PCs to run a web browsing platform which fully enables their personal web experience for tomorrow today.
It's soooo much easier to make money from closed source software.
I was intending (dreaming) of starting a company to develop a proposal to place a wind turbine field in Bass Strait. Such a venture might be useful in offsetting the impact of Steve Brack's enormous desalination project./*shudder*/
That really is a good idea. I've been wondering about the logic of burning coal to deal with a water shortage which may in part be caused by burning coal.
And a desalination plant could be designed to work really well on irregular wind power. Now we just need a neat way of using the waste salts for batteries and we're set.
Let me make this clear: your ability to write code in no way makes you a computer scientist. It's like saying that the ability to operate a forklift makes you a structural engineer. Stop it already.
I'm kind of torn between agreeing with TFA and not. On the one hand, I see the subject of this story as being akin to the statement "Forget physics to become an astro-physisist", or the concept of not needing maths to do something which is essentially based in maths is nonsensical. On the other hand, if you consider mathemetics to be a language, I wondwer whether writing code, or drawing circuit diagrams could be considered valid mathematical language, which makes the jist of TFA valid, even if the summary is poorly worded.
I think comparing someone who writes code to a forklift driver is a bit harsh. I would be more likely to compare someone who writes good code to an engineer, even if they don't have a strong mathematical background. Engineering is about applying established thought patterns to problems. It is not science. It's true that "computer scientists" are for the most part not scientists, but that's a seperate issue.
Some of the worst code I have ever had to maintain has been written by mathematics majors, the absolute worst shit fight I ever had to deal with was from a mathematics PhD. The maths was solid, but the design was shitful spagetti code that, while discreet algorithms performed well, the way thay were put together made the whole system run like an absolute fucking dog.
So I would say, if people insist on calling software engineers computer scientists, you certainly don't need to worry about mathematics to become a great computer scientist.
To easiest way to harden one's understanding is to take a normal soft understanding and add the cement of surety. Fill any holes in your understanding with a quick setting rigid factual putty until your mind is completely closed. Softening one's outlook and poking holes in facades has the opposite effect.
Another way to gain a hard understanding is to construct one's mind from steel. In this way one may obtain a mind like a steel trap, although over time and exposed to natural elements, such a trap will inevitably be rusted shut.
It is not wacky in the least. It is completely serious.
I've heard Swing is the word for GUI, but I have no clue how to get it into my Eclipse
Eclipse is a bitch when it comes to Swing development. At the moment you really need to be comfortable with hand coding your UI and reading a crap load of javadoc and tutorials.
You could try NetBeans, but last time I used it, it wrote code that it wouldn't let you hand edit, so you have to do everything through the IDE. This can get annoying if you want to quickly hand edit something.
I recommend Oracle JDeveloper for getting started with Swing. It has a nice visual designer, it's quick to get started and it's free to download and use.
How do the built-in components and 3rd party components in modern Java compare to Visual Studio.Net?
I'll start by saying up front that my last exposure to a.Net project was a couple of years ago.
.Net controls are great if you have a standard task to perform and you're doing it exactly as the developers intended, but as soon as you deviate from their path, you're in for a world of pain and sometimes deviation from the path is necessary because of a requirement the third party, or in some cases Microsoft, didn't envision. This leads you down the slippery slope to workaround hell.
Java has been around a bit longer, so it actually has a bit more 3rd party support industry wide, certainly more stable support. It has a lot of open source libraries which are commonly shared across the industry, so new tools/products are generally very quick to learn and if you need to work around something a library doesn't handle well, it's a bit easier to do it in a maintainable way. When including all third party apps and across all devices, I find the Java platform a bit more powerful as a whole, although for some specific applications, I'd certainly recommend.Net.
High mouse mileage, or high mouse hand mileage from switching between keyoard and mouse, is something that really irks me so the whole "control" thing sucks for me. When I work with VS.Net, I find myself falling into the trap of using the mouse a little too much. I know this is a personal prefenence thing, and that VS can be keyboard driven, but that's how it occurs for me.
If you do like WYSIWYG IDEs and are interested in checking out Java, Oracle JDeveloper is a nice free (as in beer) IDE you can download and play with and I think it's a bit quicker to get productive for new users than Eclipse. Can't hurt expanding your tool set.
Slashdot Mirror
It reminds me of some new car stereos I looked at.
When I went to the shop there were two of interest. One of them, $150.00 au, has excellent amps, plays mp3 and wma, cd, radio and has an auxillary input on the face plate. It also has a really cheap looking old fashioned blocky LCD display. The other has all the same features, except for lower quality amps but a photo realistic full colour display with animations depicting not only a vu meter, but also groovy little "this is the source you have selected" things. $900.00 au.
Hmmm, car stereo - do I want a basic unit that sounds excellent but looks a bit basic, or do I want to spend the extra $750.00 on a unit that sounds crap but will ensure that I cause at least one fatality if I ever actually take the time to appreciate it while driving.
Fuck it, I thought, get the fancy display for my car. All the extra car accidents will boost the economy through smash repairers, lawyers, medical practitioners and funeral homes. It's our civic duty to buy this kind of useless shit.
This is true. An extension of this point is that AMD tends to produce better bus architecture and I use my home system primarily for internet/office type apps and sound mixing/music production.
I've found that performance for web browsing and office apps was more than adequate with my old 1.3GHz Athlon. When mixing multitrack audio from a combination of hard disk and live input combined with a few effects and soft synths, the bottleneck isn't usually the processor but I/O. I find AMDs offerings extremely competitive.
Given my cheap attitude to home upgrades, AMD seems to always come out on top for me, especially considering how cheap 64 bit CPUs are. I don't see this announcement changing anything for me.
There, fixed that for you.
But the Republicans did fail to stop Katrina, and poor folks did lose houses, lives and entertainment units.
I don't think we can understate the significance of TFA which, while I haven't bothered to read it, is clearly about an innocent kid who had to print out his coupons an extra couple of thousand times cause his dog ate the first batches.
And now, just because he shared his experience on the interweb in the hope of some compassionate understanding from other dog owners, the RIAA's lawyers are going to murder him in his sleep with an ice pick!!!1!
This is the thin end of the wedge, friends.
If the title was "Rocket Fuel Powered Bionic Arm Sucessfully Tested", I would never have read the summary.
Now that you've blown it for me, I don't think I'll bother with TFA.
Where's my warp-enabled rocket pack?
I flat out refuse to do any research with the copper nanotubes.
OpenRyanFentonKabuke.
And rather than going from version 0.9 to version 1.0, it will go from 0.9 towards 0.9.1.16rc(NaN-Inf) without ever getting to 1.0. Just you wait...
While we're at it, let's point out how wonderful some of those tags are.
This story is tagged "lame" and "bastards" among other things. So yeah, if I'm interested in looking up info on OSS software being closed, I'll be sure to look for articles tagged "lame". That imediately makes so much sense to me, and you guys clearly know what good tagging's all about. Tagging's a great way of expressing opinions on entire stories without having to own up to them. You don't even have to have to LEAVE A FUCKING COMMENT WITH A USER NAME.
C'mon, at least post AC, dickheads.
Almost the same, except here, it's like when you reverse out of a driveway and onto a street, you change license plates. Drive to the end of the street and turn onto the main road and you change license plates to the same plates as everyone who drives out of your street.
That's right, he developed a theory. It wasn't until the early 1990s when I was playing in a band and I left a beer on my bass rig for one really short song that anyone proved the actual catastrophe.
Completely flat.
So was that poetical (sic) license or a typo?
When I've been a very, very naughty boy, I'll pinch myself in the genitals if matron Dorris tells me to, you insensitive clod!
This is true, but I believe we still have to rethink what we let large corporations get away with, and government needs to take more action earlier, in many cases become a rival to large corporations rather than a prostitute.
The problem in this case is with cross-pollination. Farmers are growing GM crops whether they intend to or not. Courts to date have upheld the view that the farmers are infringing on Monsantos IP, rather than that Monsanto is poluting the gene stock of otherwise disinterested farmers. If the justice system was really a justice system, Monsanto would pay farmers for polluting their crops and relatively untested and potentially dangerous genetic material.
I hope for the sake of Monsantos' share holders that they are putting aside a large insurance policy in case firm evidence comes out about the dangers of some of their crops and human consumption. They'll they get sued out of existence. They could just do a James Hardy and shift to another jurisdiction, but I think the way they are pushing their wares internationally and the fact that the plaintifs are likely to be most of the human population will make it much harder to find a safe haven.
Theirs is truly a short sighted strategy.
I used to break pencils in two, sharpen a point and shave the wood off the opposite end of each half. Then I'd tape the halves down with the sharpened points nearly touching, and put crocodile clips on the exposed ends.
Carbon arcs are awesome for retina burns!
Hey, from the evidence he's gathered he's reached the conclusion that Vista is spying on him. He may well be running XP as a firewall.....
I agree completely. I found the same thing with The Lord of the Rings trilogy; there were so many more omitions, and they still felt more rushed than the Potter films.
The latest Potter film also had a huge sense of being the bit between the previous episode and the next one rather than a story in itself. The whole thing was like the last half hour of Star Wars episode III without the apallingly weak plot. It was a filler, but a necessary one and I forgave it for that.
Unless mainstream audiences are prepared to sit through week long movies, large literary series will never be truly satisfying when translated to film.
I sure as hell wouldn't call it a "hard disk success"
Returns on RAM for 32 bit PCs diminish to 0 once you get past 4GB. You just can't address any more.
On the contrary. A CSS product could be rebadged as openMosix 2008 Horizons(R), given some fancy UI tools and sold for more than double to a bunch of mums and dads who believe they need a cluster of 4 new core duo PCs to run a web browsing platform which fully enables their personal web experience for tomorrow today.
It's soooo much easier to make money from closed source software.
That really is a good idea. I've been wondering about the logic of burning coal to deal with a water shortage which may in part be caused by burning coal.
And a desalination plant could be designed to work really well on irregular wind power. Now we just need a neat way of using the waste salts for batteries and we're set.
I'm kind of torn between agreeing with TFA and not. On the one hand, I see the subject of this story as being akin to the statement "Forget physics to become an astro-physisist", or the concept of not needing maths to do something which is essentially based in maths is nonsensical. On the other hand, if you consider mathemetics to be a language, I wondwer whether writing code, or drawing circuit diagrams could be considered valid mathematical language, which makes the jist of TFA valid, even if the summary is poorly worded.
I think comparing someone who writes code to a forklift driver is a bit harsh. I would be more likely to compare someone who writes good code to an engineer, even if they don't have a strong mathematical background. Engineering is about applying established thought patterns to problems. It is not science. It's true that "computer scientists" are for the most part not scientists, but that's a seperate issue.
Some of the worst code I have ever had to maintain has been written by mathematics majors, the absolute worst shit fight I ever had to deal with was from a mathematics PhD. The maths was solid, but the design was shitful spagetti code that, while discreet algorithms performed well, the way thay were put together made the whole system run like an absolute fucking dog.
So I would say, if people insist on calling software engineers computer scientists, you certainly don't need to worry about mathematics to become a great computer scientist.
To easiest way to harden one's understanding is to take a normal soft understanding and add the cement of surety. Fill any holes in your understanding with a quick setting rigid factual putty until your mind is completely closed. Softening one's outlook and poking holes in facades has the opposite effect.
Another way to gain a hard understanding is to construct one's mind from steel. In this way one may obtain a mind like a steel trap, although over time and exposed to natural elements, such a trap will inevitably be rusted shut.
It is not wacky in the least. It is completely serious.
Eclipse is a bitch when it comes to Swing development. At the moment you really need to be comfortable with hand coding your UI and reading a crap load of javadoc and tutorials.
You could try NetBeans, but last time I used it, it wrote code that it wouldn't let you hand edit, so you have to do everything through the IDE. This can get annoying if you want to quickly hand edit something.
I recommend Oracle JDeveloper for getting started with Swing. It has a nice visual designer, it's quick to get started and it's free to download and use.
I'll start by saying up front that my last exposure to a .Net project was a couple of years ago.
.Net controls are great if you have a standard task to perform and you're doing it exactly as the developers intended, but as soon as you deviate from their path, you're in for a world of pain and sometimes deviation from the path is necessary because of a requirement the third party, or in some cases Microsoft, didn't envision. This leads you down the slippery slope to workaround hell.
Java has been around a bit longer, so it actually has a bit more 3rd party support industry wide, certainly more stable support. It has a lot of open source libraries which are commonly shared across the industry, so new tools/products are generally very quick to learn and if you need to work around something a library doesn't handle well, it's a bit easier to do it in a maintainable way. When including all third party apps and across all devices, I find the Java platform a bit more powerful as a whole, although for some specific applications, I'd certainly recommend .Net.
High mouse mileage, or high mouse hand mileage from switching between keyoard and mouse, is something that really irks me so the whole "control" thing sucks for me. When I work with VS .Net, I find myself falling into the trap of using the mouse a little too much. I know this is a personal prefenence thing, and that VS can be keyboard driven, but that's how it occurs for me.
If you do like WYSIWYG IDEs and are interested in checking out Java, Oracle JDeveloper is a nice free (as in beer) IDE you can download and play with and I think it's a bit quicker to get productive for new users than Eclipse. Can't hurt expanding your tool set.