"Complex software requires complex source code which is the source of code bloat."
Then we're meaning to different things by "bloat". To me, bloat is unneccessary.
(Since this article is about browsers: Opera has blown anything else out of the water for longer than I can think of, in terms of configurability, amount and quality of features, and it's also consistently been a much smaller download and performing much faster than any comparable browser. So other browser seem bloated to me in comparison: they do less and do it more slowly, while taking up more space. And I don't think Opera is coded in assembler, you know.)
Yes, features and complexity make executables bigger and sometimes make apps slower, but so do many other factors, like bad programmers, or corporate/open source bureaucracies, and sometimes the non-bloated version of something is not really that highly optimized, it's simply not bloated.
That wasn't "the German government" though, it was the German government of that time, namely the NSDAP. Oh, also: lots of countries were fascist during that time, just less horribly good at it. Spain didn't even go through any kind of Denazification process (you know, not even an attempt), America is happily invading countries left and right... but Germans? Those are fucking Nazis, all of them, forever. Well, those that aren't too busy making sheise porn of course ^^
I have yet to see a legal analysis that demonstrates that what Google violated any German laws.
So what's the harm of looking into it then?
The German government should educate people about the importance of encrypting their WiFi, not prosecute Google.
It's not either/or though. They can very well do both, or neither. One doesn't have any bearing on the other. FFS.
And if Google did violate laws, then German law needs to change; no country that calls itself democratic and free should have laws on the books that allows the government to throw people in jail for accidental reception of unencrypted broadcasts.
Okay, assuming Germany has laws on the book to "throw people in jail" for that (I highly doubt it): the way to change these laws would be to, uh, change them... not to simply ignore them and try to wiggle the way out of it. That doesn't achieve anything.
any prosecution of Google over this isn't going to deter the criminals that listen in on WiFi communications with the intent to defraud and harm people.
And again: the lack of prosecution wouldn't achieve anything, either. If what they did was illegal, well, that's a bummer for them, end of story. If they it wasn't, what's the big deal...?
You can talk a lot about how this isn't right, or how different things would be better, but even if laws do get changed, what happened happened, and the laws that were in place at that time, do apply. What is so hard to understand about that? Is it because it's Google, because it's Germany, or both? Who's "foaming at the mouth", exactly?
You realize that this comes from a one kilobyte executable, right?
There is never a good reason to waste resources. If computers have loads of RAM, let them do something useful and/or interesting with it... but even using it for disk cache is better than wasting it on bloatware. And no, I'm not saying everything that isn't super crazy optimized is bloatware, but there IS bloatware, and it needn't be accepted. If you care about your body, you don't eat shitty food, if you care about your computer, you don't put bloatware on it ^^
lolwut? I basically corrected the person I replied to, who claimed Google was just "being honest", which is simply not true. If you have anything to actually *say*, do so - instead of just skipping that "bit" and jumping to the caringly formatted conclusion heh...
Google: Oops! We accidentally collected all this data we weren't supposed to. Sorry, but we thought you should know.
But that's not what has happened *at all*. From the article of the slashdot story this story links to:
The Internet giant said it would stop collecting Wi-Fi data from its StreetView vans, which workers drive to capture street images and to locate Wi-Fi networks. The company said it would dispose of the data it had accidentally collected.
Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research for Google, wrote in a blog post that the company uncovered the mistake while responding to a German data-protection agency's request for it to audit the Wi-Fi data, amid mounting concerns that Google's practices violated users' privacy.
They're basically saying "let's just forget anything happened" by offering to delete the data. Uh-nuh, not really how it works. If they didn't pay attention and ran software that violated privacy laws, they should be punished. THEN we can delete the data...
it's exactly this sort of persecution which creates a culture where companies never admit anything, ever.
What are you talking about? What "persecution"? If they violated laws, they get punished. Where's the problem? I'd rather have corporations involuntarily investigated, than then "admitting their wrongdoings" and there being no consequences for it.
Compare 15 (1111 unsigned) to -1 (1111 signed). The answer is they are equal
when you compare the bits, yeah.. but when write "trivial" programs, you can do "(unsigned int) 5 == (signed int) 5" it will equal true. as I said, as long as all involved variables are small enough to fit into the smallest type involved.
But you talked about "comparisons and basic math operations", not bit operations (which hardly apply to keeping the score in a game btw)
I'm no coder by any stretch of the imagination... but I've never had any problem mixing types in any language, as long as the numbers are small enough to fit into the smallest type involved in the whole operation. And even when doing bit stuff: just be aware of what type the variables you are using and accomodate for that, instead of doing something utterly insane like using the same type for all numbers heh?!
Yes, the army is useless. Realistic, but nevertheless useless.
look behind them and fire on their left when I was in the army... there must be a reason...
The reason is that soldiers are wetware-based bots which are (somewhat) expensive, so they have to be used wisely, while playing a video game is a bit more free than that. I think your misunderstanding here is that what single-purpose drones do or don't do should somehow be relevant to the choices of more fully developed human beings.
There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted and you create a nation of law-breakers.
The Information Age has democratized knowledge to a huge degree. Historians centuries or millennia hence will have plenty of sources other than the lens of the Catholic Church.
I kinda disagree. We are, for the most part, very confined and very conform in our opinions, very much brainwashed. Maybe even more so than in the dark ages, because there the priests wore uniforms, and the churches were easily identifiable buildings, while today we're just as much gullible puppets than the people in the past, but the strings have become much less visible and weaved much deeper into our society.
You could also argue that because the church had total power, it had no reason to not be candid in internal records, while what people post in their personal blogs and tweets is, for the most part, insecure people lying to themselves.
Yeah, I'm partly playing devils advocate here... just saying it ain't so easy, and there's no reason to declare freedom and enlightement just yet...
As long as there are a few people in the world interested in preserving it, modern history should be safe.
As long as the people who are interested in preserving history are somewhat right in the head maybe, and not interested in "preserving" history because they're using it as their little vehicle.
The very idea of objectively preserving history is either hilarious or insane, I'm not sure. I'm not saying you shouldn't try, or that nothing insightful comes of it - but know what you're doing, or rather, what you're not doing.
Why say more when that is all there is to say? And contrary to twitter, this isn't just for reading, but also for replying, as you aptfully demonstrated. Oh yeah, I know twitter allows replies too, in a twisted, convoluted way that forces you to stay glued to it to know what the snippets mean in context... thanks, but no thanks. We have forums for the talking, RSS and email for the instant updates. What does twitter offer on top of that? Why so defensive, passive-aggressive, and implying a point* which you don't even have ? Because I called a bunch of morons morons? Well hey, don't shoot the messenger ^^ Apologies to retarded people though, it was not called for (and no, that's not a joke).
* (that what I said is wrong because I'm "doing the same thing one does on twitter", which is a.) not true and b.) would just be an ad-hominem even if it was true, and therefore stupid and giving further credibility to my claim that the only people that really *care* about Twitter are, in fact, idiots)
Slashdot Mirror
"Complex software requires complex source code which is the source of code bloat."
Then we're meaning to different things by "bloat". To me, bloat is unneccessary.
(Since this article is about browsers: Opera has blown anything else out of the water for longer than I can think of, in terms of configurability, amount and quality of features, and it's also consistently been a much smaller download and performing much faster than any comparable browser. So other browser seem bloated to me in comparison: they do less and do it more slowly, while taking up more space. And I don't think Opera is coded in assembler, you know.)
Yes, features and complexity make executables bigger and sometimes make apps slower, but so do many other factors, like bad programmers, or corporate/open source bureaucracies, and sometimes the non-bloated version of something is not really that highly optimized, it's simply not bloated.
yeah thanks, something didn't felt quite right about that =/
That wasn't "the German government" though, it was the German government of that time, namely the NSDAP. Oh, also: lots of countries were fascist during that time, just less horribly good at it. Spain didn't even go through any kind of Denazification process (you know, not even an attempt), America is happily invading countries left and right... but Germans? Those are fucking Nazis, all of them, forever. Well, those that aren't too busy making sheise porn of course ^^
So what's the harm of looking into it then?
It's not either/or though. They can very well do both, or neither. One doesn't have any bearing on the other. FFS.
Okay, assuming Germany has laws on the book to "throw people in jail" for that (I highly doubt it): the way to change these laws would be to, uh, change them... not to simply ignore them and try to wiggle the way out of it. That doesn't achieve anything.
And again: the lack of prosecution wouldn't achieve anything, either. If what they did was illegal, well, that's a bummer for them, end of story. If they it wasn't, what's the big deal...?
You can talk a lot about how this isn't right, or how different things would be better, but even if laws do get changed, what happened happened, and the laws that were in place at that time, do apply. What is so hard to understand about that? Is it because it's Google, because it's Germany, or both? Who's "foaming at the mouth", exactly?
You realize that this comes from a one kilobyte executable, right?
There is never a good reason to waste resources. If computers have loads of RAM, let them do something useful and/or interesting with it... but even using it for disk cache is better than wasting it on bloatware. And no, I'm not saying everything that isn't super crazy optimized is bloatware, but there IS bloatware, and it needn't be accepted. If you care about your body, you don't eat shitty food, if you care about your computer, you don't put bloatware on it ^^
Context menus on everything, everything configurable and rearrangable. It's not just robust, it's slick.
You sound like someone who has never used Opera, or hasn't digged very deep.
o_O
Either you have live on Venus, or you are sick.
lolwut? I basically corrected the person I replied to, who claimed Google was just "being honest", which is simply not true. If you have anything to actually *say*, do so - instead of just skipping that "bit" and jumping to the caringly formatted conclusion heh...
it's something about finding the location of wi-fi hotspots.
But that's not what has happened *at all*. From the article of the slashdot story this story links to:
They're basically saying "let's just forget anything happened" by offering to delete the data. Uh-nuh, not really how it works. If they didn't pay attention and ran software that violated privacy laws, they should be punished. THEN we can delete the data...
What are you talking about? What "persecution"? If they violated laws, they get punished. Where's the problem? I'd rather have corporations involuntarily investigated, than then "admitting their wrongdoings" and there being no consequences for it.
when you compare the bits, yeah.. but when write "trivial" programs, you can do "(unsigned int) 5 == (signed int) 5" it will equal true. as I said, as long as all involved variables are small enough to fit into the smallest type involved.
But you talked about "comparisons and basic math operations", not bit operations (which hardly apply to keeping the score in a game btw)
I'm no coder by any stretch of the imagination... but I've never had any problem mixing types in any language, as long as the numbers are small enough to fit into the smallest type involved in the whole operation. And even when doing bit stuff: just be aware of what type the variables you are using and accomodate for that, instead of doing something utterly insane like using the same type for all numbers heh?!
if you're on Windows, check out ROM Check Fail ^^
Hmmm. Looking at the stunt Valve pulled off with Left 4 Dead, I'm not so sure Valve is as saintly as you make them out to be.
Besides, it's really not hard to be less evil than Microsoft.
You don't believe you can have an influence on the world around you? Who's on drugs here, exactly?
Yes, the army is useless. Realistic, but nevertheless useless.
The reason is that soldiers are wetware-based bots which are (somewhat) expensive, so they have to be used wisely, while playing a video game is a bit more free than that. I think your misunderstanding here is that what single-purpose drones do or don't do should somehow be relevant to the choices of more fully developed human beings.
--- Ayn Rand
so? as in, who gives a shit? if you don't have an answer, don't answer..
You mean, of the parts of our society who use Twitter... it's bad enough they exist, but preserving their brain farts?
Good for you.. brain fart for me.
I kinda disagree. We are, for the most part, very confined and very conform in our opinions, very much brainwashed. Maybe even more so than in the dark ages, because there the priests wore uniforms, and the churches were easily identifiable buildings, while today we're just as much gullible puppets than the people in the past, but the strings have become much less visible and weaved much deeper into our society.
You could also argue that because the church had total power, it had no reason to not be candid in internal records, while what people post in their personal blogs and tweets is, for the most part, insecure people lying to themselves.
Yeah, I'm partly playing devils advocate here... just saying it ain't so easy, and there's no reason to declare freedom and enlightement just yet...
As long as the people who are interested in preserving history are somewhat right in the head maybe, and not interested in "preserving" history because they're using it as their little vehicle.
The very idea of objectively preserving history is either hilarious or insane, I'm not sure. I'm not saying you shouldn't try, or that nothing insightful comes of it - but know what you're doing, or rather, what you're not doing.
flame? yeah.. but trolling?! o_O is that the shitty, cowardly way of saying "he's right and it hurts - so let's bury it"?
Why say more when that is all there is to say? And contrary to twitter, this isn't just for reading, but also for replying, as you aptfully demonstrated. Oh yeah, I know twitter allows replies too, in a twisted, convoluted way that forces you to stay glued to it to know what the snippets mean in context... thanks, but no thanks. We have forums for the talking, RSS and email for the instant updates. What does twitter offer on top of that? Why so defensive, passive-aggressive, and implying a point* which you don't even have ? Because I called a bunch of morons morons? Well hey, don't shoot the messenger ^^ Apologies to retarded people though, it was not called for (and no, that's not a joke).
* (that what I said is wrong because I'm "doing the same thing one does on twitter", which is a.) not true and b.) would just be an ad-hominem even if it was true, and therefore stupid and giving further credibility to my claim that the only people that really *care* about Twitter are, in fact, idiots)
Twitter = RSS for retards. It's neither for nerds, nor does it matter ^^
nah.
why so sore? why so stupid? doesn't it suck to play foul and still lose? just... move over already.