70% improvement in what? Kittens petted per minute? And is that an increase or a decrease - it rather depends on how you feel about kittens after all.
A 7x improvement over C++ for text I/O? Again, what are you measuring? Time spent correcting programmer errors? Time spent in meetings deciding a standard syntax for text i/o functions? Time spent by the compiler building the machine code?
Alienware focuses a great deal on selling high-end gaming machine. Thus, all of their marketing is more or less geared towards this end - even stuff for buisiness machines, media convergence boxes, etc.
Friend of mine who joined the US Army a couple years back was unable to read a non-digital clock when I began associating with him post high school.
I clearly recall my bafflement the day I had to teach him this simple task. Though I have to admit, after a while my amazement became acceptance of the inevitable...
I hope he's done well in the army - having someone paid to think for him is what he desperately needs.
I shall not to it tell this sad and dire news. It will be happier to believe that it's family still lives and grows. I cannot so crush it's spirit by telling it that that loathsome monster of poorly-designed calculating devices, TI, shall be triumphant.
Declairing war upon a nation, then dropping a bomb into the military command center of that nation is not a crime. It is an act of war. By using a civilian jet filled with civilians as your bomb, one treads into the area of war crimes.
But it is an act of war, first and foremost.
Dropping a pair of civilian plane bombs into a major civilian economic center in an area of maximum population density is an act of terrorism.
Sept 11th began as acts of terrorism, and became acts of war.
I am a student in an Electronic Game Design program at a Canadian College (I myself am American). As a requirement for graduation from the two-year program, a student must be a member of a group that has a final project - referred to as a Product - that is of sufficiant quality to be at the very least an excellent demo in ones resume. Ideally the product should be of sufficient quality to attempt to be published - and at least one product I can think of that has come out of the program has been published as a B title.
In the program, the product development groups form fairly early in Term 2 (the Winter Term) and the rest of the two years in the program is spent, barring breakups and expulsions, working with those same people. The groups spend the first year documenting their product - our detailed design document fills a couple big 5" binders to capacity.
In the second year the product is expected to be coded and built, to the specs laid down in the documentation. There is a prototyping process in place as well that expects a functioning prototype to be ready around the end of the first term of the second year (Term 4).
With all of this time spent working on a major project with a group, with weekly meetings with a faculty mentor and regular design review meetings with a board of instructors, those people who are not doing work are identified fairly quickly. There are procedures in place to remove these people from groups where they are not being productive. In fact, the group I am a member of has such an unproductive person who is skirting right now with removal from our group.
When I came into this program I had only had very negative experiences working in groups at other Universities and in High School. I have learned that group work is very good experience but it must be done over time with a large amount of close interaction with the faculty, so they and the students can constantly keep tabs on the expectations and performance of those on both sides of the classroom.
You obviously did not read the entirity of what I wrote.
Stating that the United States - in the course of pursuing it's interests around the world and what it felt were the interests of the Free World - made some decisions that paid off in the short term but in the long term led to resentment and hatred isn't simplistic, nor is it particularly hippy.
Besides, if one continues in my original post, one comes to understand my realization of the nescessity of the abandonment of an essentially peaceful position for one of total war.
I suspect you read merely the beginning and end of my post - thus interpreting my statement of hope that wiser heads will go for a moderate and reasoned military responce as opposed to my gut instinct to nuke them down to bedrock, as some sort of apologist position of appeasement.
horror and shame
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The obliteration of the World Trade Center, as well as the strike against the Pentagon, and the utterly needless deaths of those innocents in the planes turned missiles is something that I have been struggling to comprehend.
I have learned a great deal. We, the people of the United States of America, are responsible for a swath of violence and hate across the world, mostly in the wake of well-meaning but short-sighted policies designed to protect us from an array of threats from Communism to economic blackmail. Our leaders have made choices that have earned us deserved enmity. That is not to say that we are an unalloyed scourge upon the world. We have acted to protect our interests, as any sane country must, as well as what we saw as the greater interests of the free world. Given our status as superpower, our interests cover the entire globe and every conflict. Inevitably, those we oppose become our foes.
This in no way lessens the horror and sheer audacity of the terror perpetrated upon us. Issues of morality and justification aside, one who baits the tiger cannot expect anything but bestial fury in return. Factor into the equation the immoral slaughter of thousands of innocents without warning as the end result of a cold-blooded and calculated plan of terror, and the unsheathing of the naked blade of war is all but inevitable.
We have been engaged, around the world, in a number of battles and military actions since World War II. This attack upon our home presages the possible advent of the first real declared war, with no power or resource of the United States held in abeyance for concern of mercy. Those who perpetrated this attack cannot but have anticipated this response. I feel, surely, that they cannot have but have desired it.
Commit continual acts of blood and terror upon a country, and that country will stagger from the blows. Freedoms will be lost to expediency and need. Lines of social stress will flare as tensions rise. Inevitably, if no outlet for the strain can be found, the long slow onslaught of terrorism will bring a nation down - or warp it into something unrecognisable.
I watched the videos of disaster, from a score of angles and perspectives. Too, I sampled scores - thousands - of news stories, commentaries, posts, essays, and interviews. I have covered CNN.com to slashdot.org to CBC broadcasts to transcripts of interviews with terrorists to chat rooms and more others than I can remember. I have spoken directly with Americans and Canadians. I have sampled the opinion and thoughts of the world. All of it, searching for meaning.
This act was not unthinkable. The carnage was not unimaginable. This was a human act, carried out by human planning, directed by human will. All of it, birthed from a human understanding of something most people shy away from.
I have done my best to understand.
At first, I wanted revenge. I had fury-driven fancies of tank battalions driving across Afganastan, should bin Laden be at fault. Then I read, from the posts of people familiar with the region, of it's poverty. I read the CIA World Factbook entry on Afganastan.
To be blunt, from what I know, there isn't much there to bomb or blast. The people have had war for over twenty years, are dirt poor, and under the isolationist control of a fundamentalist Muslim faction that does it's best to deny them the benefits, amusements, and information of the West. Television is banned, along with a host of other things. Not that it matters much - no electricity.
No TV, no radio. Nothing remotely resembling a free press. I'm not even sure they have an unfree press. These poor bastards don't have any but the dimmest notions of what has been done to us, it's magnitude, nor the magnitude of what we could raise against them. They have been betrayed as much as we.
So, having come to understand who it is that massive American action in that poor blighted corner of the globe would be smiting, I came to hope for surgical strikes, as massive in their own way. Of course, that won't sate the American bloodlust, nor will a barrage of cruise missiles give us the confirmation of the eradication of a cancerous organization.
I came to wrestle with the question of having the stomach to watch our military force carve a bloody swath through a people who don't deserve another invasion to remove a man who has been waging a war from the shadows with religion and money. I hoped I would have the moral resolve to stand firm and let war be waged.
This didn't feel right. I spent another 12 hours trying to realize something fairly simple. I continued my reading and watching, canvassing any resource I found. In the end, I understood.
In a perfect world, were we a perfect people, we would absorb this violation done us. We would return, in a spirit of a peace, the violence in the form of aid and construction without taking resources both material and cultural in exchange. We would spend the long and difficult years, paying the high price in our lives and money, to rebuild shattered nations who we helped, with shortsightedness and poor thinking, to break. We would find those peoples who lived in fear, in the very grip of terror themselves, and raise them up. We would let them rebuilt while we took on our shoulders the brunt of the slaughter, so that they could raise forth new and free nations in the image of their own people. We would make terrorism needless in a world of understanding.
We are not a perfect people, and we are not living in a perfect world. It is not a question of wether I have the resolve to let justice be done. It is a question of my having the resolve to take a better path, to bear calmly as sacrifice the burden of horror while rebuilding the world.
I believed that I was a man of peace.
Let blood and fire reign down. Let us burn them out, whomever did this, and salt the earth with their blood, so that no son in the next generation may raise sword against us. Let this thing be done.
The truth of terrorism is that it is an act which creates terrorists.
I understand.
I hope that I am more alone that I suspect. I hope that cooler, saner heads than mine will prevail. I hope.
That sounds a great deal like my life story. We have, perhaps, similar pains, similar isolations.
In the end, when you become accustomed to rejection as your normal state...you end up carrying it with you, always.
Let's hear it for the onward march of technology! Marketer-speak aside, aren't we all just glad that our wonderful machines are going faster, going farther, and doing more?
I for one remember my first computer, a TI-99 4/A, with a tape cassette as it's read/write drive. It was a wonderful thing, and lasted until my mother threw it out when I went to college.
Now I sit in front of a Penium-2 on top of a nice fat DSL line, with winamp going, a linux partition just a dual-boot away, and my drives are full of luscious games and applications that would have exploded my good old TI-99/4A into so much hamburger if it had even thought about running them.
Where will we be 10 years from now? I don't know, but I was at a Zellers [Canadian sort of Wal-Mart, I'm an American-in-Canada, BTW] this past weekend and there was a glorified 3D snazzy-background Pong-clone for sale, with big plastic paddles. A few decades development from it's birth and it's now -3D- [with goofy controllers] Pong:)
Guns don't kill people.
Bullets don't kill people.
It's that pesky transfer of kinetic energy that kills people.
Re:We both know there is more to D & D than that..
on
D&D Trailer
·
· Score: 1
Bah. Just because someone has a personality trait [D&D Player] does that mean that trait is a cause of any action by that person. It's like saying I locked myself out of the car this evening because I like cats. It's a spurious argument.
(IANAL but pissed) What this sad mess points out is the regretable effects poorly written & designed laws have on those who are (deliberately or not) amoral. Microsoft, having been caught out in another of their typical shady deals to disrupt someone elses buisiness, is using the extremely flawed DMCA to bullyboy what is essentially a content-carrier (venerable/.) into removing content _that under other conditions might very well be free speech_. The DMCA allows for amoral corporations to strong-arm those institutions governed by the DMCA into dropping whatever content they object to. In fact, carriers of information are held liable if they do not bow to the slightest whim of the bullyboys in removing the information. Posting of information legally held by Microsoft is wrong (just because they are slime doesn't reduce their rights, unfortunately) but the person who should be held responsible are the posters. To make the information carrier or site provider (as/. is) responsible for what is posted by people in a free and open public forum is monstrous. To create the legal obligation to remove said content before a proper court hearing is simply wrong. Worse, it incites corporations to continue in their habitual practice of strong-arming those who cannot afford fancy lawyers, though hopefully/. has enough powerful geek backing to have the wisdom and the deep pockets to shrug M$ off.
We all hate spam. As gratifying as it is for the net-savvy to see spammers get theirs it is, we need to look beyond the immediate visceral rush.
This is going to make us look bad. Now, not only is the net the playground of pr0n vendors and the dreadful capitalism-destroying mp3s, we're a bunch of gun-toting vigilantes who work out our grudges with guns as well as harmless flames.
A crime like this could lead to even more net-hysteria among the clueless.
Poor guys...scummy as they were, nothing it looks like they did would make them deserve to be gunned down like an animal.
Slashdot Mirror
Your post is meaningless.
70% improvement in what? Kittens petted per minute? And is that an increase or a decrease - it rather depends on how you feel about kittens after all.
A 7x improvement over C++ for text I/O? Again, what are you measuring? Time spent correcting programmer errors? Time spent in meetings deciding a standard syntax for text i/o functions? Time spent by the compiler building the machine code?
What?
Alienware focuses a great deal on selling high-end gaming machine. Thus, all of their marketing is more or less geared towards this end - even stuff for buisiness machines, media convergence boxes, etc.
Disclaimer: I've got an alienware and I like it.
You disgust me as well. I've been living in Canada the past two years, going to school, and they have been most supportive.
You disgust me.
Friend of mine who joined the US Army a couple years back was unable to read a non-digital clock when I began associating with him post high school.
I clearly recall my bafflement the day I had to teach him this simple task. Though I have to admit, after a while my amazement became acceptance of the inevitable...
I hope he's done well in the army - having someone paid to think for him is what he desperately needs.
It's April Fool's...relax!
Both of you, best of wishes.
Ho humm, he ho, off to the wedding we go...*sings a little ditty*
*mobbed by millions with gags and cones-of-silence*
I shall not to it tell this sad and dire news. It will be happier to believe that it's family still lives and grows. I cannot so crush it's spirit by telling it that that loathsome monster of poorly-designed calculating devices, TI, shall be triumphant.
Alas.
Declairing war upon a nation, then dropping a bomb into the military command center of that nation is not a crime. It is an act of war. By using a civilian jet filled with civilians as your bomb, one treads into the area of war crimes.
But it is an act of war, first and foremost.
Dropping a pair of civilian plane bombs into a major civilian economic center in an area of maximum population density is an act of terrorism.
Sept 11th began as acts of terrorism, and became acts of war.
I am a student in an Electronic Game Design program at a Canadian College (I myself am American). As a requirement for graduation from the two-year program, a student must be a member of a group that has a final project - referred to as a Product - that is of sufficiant quality to be at the very least an excellent demo in ones resume. Ideally the product should be of sufficient quality to attempt to be published - and at least one product I can think of that has come out of the program has been published as a B title.
In the program, the product development groups form fairly early in Term 2 (the Winter Term) and the rest of the two years in the program is spent, barring breakups and expulsions, working with those same people. The groups spend the first year documenting their product - our detailed design document fills a couple big 5" binders to capacity.
In the second year the product is expected to be coded and built, to the specs laid down in the documentation. There is a prototyping process in place as well that expects a functioning prototype to be ready around the end of the first term of the second year (Term 4).
With all of this time spent working on a major project with a group, with weekly meetings with a faculty mentor and regular design review meetings with a board of instructors, those people who are not doing work are identified fairly quickly. There are procedures in place to remove these people from groups where they are not being productive. In fact, the group I am a member of has such an unproductive person who is skirting right now with removal from our group.
When I came into this program I had only had very negative experiences working in groups at other Universities and in High School. I have learned that group work is very good experience but it must be done over time with a large amount of close interaction with the faculty, so they and the students can constantly keep tabs on the expectations and performance of those on both sides of the classroom.
You obviously did not read the entirity of what I wrote.
Stating that the United States - in the course of pursuing it's interests around the world and what it felt were the interests of the Free World - made some decisions that paid off in the short term but in the long term led to resentment and hatred isn't simplistic, nor is it particularly hippy.
Besides, if one continues in my original post, one comes to understand my realization of the nescessity of the abandonment of an essentially peaceful position for one of total war.
I suspect you read merely the beginning and end of my post - thus interpreting my statement of hope that wiser heads will go for a moderate and reasoned military responce as opposed to my gut instinct to nuke them down to bedrock, as some sort of apologist position of appeasement.
The obliteration of the World Trade Center, as well as the strike against the Pentagon, and the utterly needless deaths of those innocents in the planes turned missiles is something that I have been struggling to comprehend.
I have learned a great deal. We, the people of the United States of America, are responsible for a swath of violence and hate across the world, mostly in the wake of well-meaning but short-sighted policies designed to protect us from an array of threats from Communism to economic blackmail. Our leaders have made choices that have earned us deserved enmity. That is not to say that we are an unalloyed scourge upon the world. We have acted to protect our interests, as any sane country must, as well as what we saw as the greater interests of the free world. Given our status as superpower, our interests cover the entire globe and every conflict. Inevitably, those we oppose become our foes.
This in no way lessens the horror and sheer audacity of the terror perpetrated upon us. Issues of morality and justification aside, one who baits the tiger cannot expect anything but bestial fury in return. Factor into the equation the immoral slaughter of thousands of innocents without warning as the end result of a cold-blooded and calculated plan of terror, and the unsheathing of the naked blade of war is all but inevitable.
We have been engaged, around the world, in a number of battles and military actions since World War II. This attack upon our home presages the possible advent of the first real declared war, with no power or resource of the United States held in abeyance for concern of mercy. Those who perpetrated this attack cannot but have anticipated this response. I feel, surely, that they cannot have but have desired it.
Commit continual acts of blood and terror upon a country, and that country will stagger from the blows. Freedoms will be lost to expediency and need. Lines of social stress will flare as tensions rise. Inevitably, if no outlet for the strain can be found, the long slow onslaught of terrorism will bring a nation down - or warp it into something unrecognisable.
I watched the videos of disaster, from a score of angles and perspectives. Too, I sampled scores - thousands - of news stories, commentaries, posts, essays, and interviews. I have covered CNN.com to slashdot.org to CBC broadcasts to transcripts of interviews with terrorists to chat rooms and more others than I can remember. I have spoken directly with Americans and Canadians. I have sampled the opinion and thoughts of the world. All of it, searching for meaning.
This act was not unthinkable. The carnage was not unimaginable. This was a human act, carried out by human planning, directed by human will. All of it, birthed from a human understanding of something most people shy away from.
I have done my best to understand.
At first, I wanted revenge. I had fury-driven fancies of tank battalions driving across Afganastan, should bin Laden be at fault. Then I read, from the posts of people familiar with the region, of it's poverty. I read the CIA World Factbook entry on Afganastan.
To be blunt, from what I know, there isn't much there to bomb or blast. The people have had war for over twenty years, are dirt poor, and under the isolationist control of a fundamentalist Muslim faction that does it's best to deny them the benefits, amusements, and information of the West. Television is banned, along with a host of other things. Not that it matters much - no electricity.
No TV, no radio. Nothing remotely resembling a free press. I'm not even sure they have an unfree press. These poor bastards don't have any but the dimmest notions of what has been done to us, it's magnitude, nor the magnitude of what we could raise against them. They have been betrayed as much as we.
So, having come to understand who it is that massive American action in that poor blighted corner of the globe would be smiting, I came to hope for surgical strikes, as massive in their own way. Of course, that won't sate the American bloodlust, nor will a barrage of cruise missiles give us the confirmation of the eradication of a cancerous organization.
I came to wrestle with the question of having the stomach to watch our military force carve a bloody swath through a people who don't deserve another invasion to remove a man who has been waging a war from the shadows with religion and money. I hoped I would have the moral resolve to stand firm and let war be waged.
This didn't feel right. I spent another 12 hours trying to realize something fairly simple. I continued my reading and watching, canvassing any resource I found. In the end, I understood.
In a perfect world, were we a perfect people, we would absorb this violation done us. We would return, in a spirit of a peace, the violence in the form of aid and construction without taking resources both material and cultural in exchange. We would spend the long and difficult years, paying the high price in our lives and money, to rebuild shattered nations who we helped, with shortsightedness and poor thinking, to break. We would find those peoples who lived in fear, in the very grip of terror themselves, and raise them up. We would let them rebuilt while we took on our shoulders the brunt of the slaughter, so that they could raise forth new and free nations in the image of their own people. We would make terrorism needless in a world of understanding.
We are not a perfect people, and we are not living in a perfect world. It is not a question of wether I have the resolve to let justice be done. It is a question of my having the resolve to take a better path, to bear calmly as sacrifice the burden of horror while rebuilding the world.
I believed that I was a man of peace.
Let blood and fire reign down. Let us burn them out, whomever did this, and salt the earth with their blood, so that no son in the next generation may raise sword against us. Let this thing be done.
The truth of terrorism is that it is an act which creates terrorists.
I understand.
I hope that I am more alone that I suspect. I hope that cooler, saner heads than mine will prevail. I hope.
That sounds a great deal like my life story. We have, perhaps, similar pains, similar isolations. In the end, when you become accustomed to rejection as your normal state...you end up carrying it with you, always.
Let's hear it for the onward march of technology! Marketer-speak aside, aren't we all just glad that our wonderful machines are going faster, going farther, and doing more? I for one remember my first computer, a TI-99 4/A, with a tape cassette as it's read/write drive. It was a wonderful thing, and lasted until my mother threw it out when I went to college. Now I sit in front of a Penium-2 on top of a nice fat DSL line, with winamp going, a linux partition just a dual-boot away, and my drives are full of luscious games and applications that would have exploded my good old TI-99/4A into so much hamburger if it had even thought about running them. Where will we be 10 years from now? I don't know, but I was at a Zellers [Canadian sort of Wal-Mart, I'm an American-in-Canada, BTW] this past weekend and there was a glorified 3D snazzy-background Pong-clone for sale, with big plastic paddles. A few decades development from it's birth and it's now -3D- [with goofy controllers] Pong :)
Guns don't kill people. Bullets don't kill people. It's that pesky transfer of kinetic energy that kills people.
Bah. Just because someone has a personality trait [D&D Player] does that mean that trait is a cause of any action by that person. It's like saying I locked myself out of the car this evening because I like cats. It's a spurious argument.
(IANAL but pissed) What this sad mess points out is the regretable effects poorly written & designed laws have on those who are (deliberately or not) amoral. Microsoft, having been caught out in another of their typical shady deals to disrupt someone elses buisiness, is using the extremely flawed DMCA to bullyboy what is essentially a content-carrier (venerable /.) into removing content _that under other conditions might very well be free speech_. The DMCA allows for amoral corporations to strong-arm those institutions governed by the DMCA into dropping whatever content they object to. In fact, carriers of information are held liable if they do not bow to the slightest whim of the bullyboys in removing the information. Posting of information legally held by Microsoft is wrong (just because they are slime doesn't reduce their rights, unfortunately) but the person who should be held responsible are the posters. To make the information carrier or site provider (as /. is) responsible for what is posted by people in a free and open public forum is monstrous. To create the legal obligation to remove said content before a proper court hearing is simply wrong. Worse, it incites corporations to continue in their habitual practice of strong-arming those who cannot afford fancy lawyers, though hopefully /. has enough powerful geek backing to have the wisdom and the deep pockets to shrug M$ off.
We all hate spam. As gratifying as it is for the net-savvy to see spammers get theirs it is, we need to look beyond the immediate visceral rush.
This is going to make us look bad. Now, not only is the net the playground of pr0n vendors and the dreadful capitalism-destroying mp3s, we're a bunch of gun-toting vigilantes who work out our grudges with guns as well as harmless flames.
A crime like this could lead to even more net-hysteria among the clueless.
Poor guys...scummy as they were, nothing it looks like they did would make them deserve to be gunned down like an animal.