It is horrible, and actively supports the dumbing down of people.
This is where I take issue with your argument. I completely agree that having the page break catastrophically when there was an error would be easier and better for people who design websites professionally (like me), especially in this day and age.
However, I don't believe that it supports the dumbing down of people, I believe it support less knowledgeable users. To use the compiler as an example, when my sister-in-law learned programming, she learned Java; to get to the point where she could do basic things like "hello world," she had to instantiate objects and call functions. My wife learned with php, and she had to type one line, a command and a string. The barrier for entry was much lower and she was rewarded much faster, thereby gaining a greater desire to learn more. Br.
At the time, browsers taking incorrect HTML was the same philosophy: you lower the barrier of entry. When someone writes a lot of web pages, they tend to become more knowledgeable, not less. There are exceptions that make everyone serious about the craft cringe and want to beat their heads against a brick wall, but for the most part skills are progressing. I don't know whether the web landscape would be better or worse right now if they'd required strict HTML for every web site, but I can tell you that a lot of people who were enthusiastic supporters and creators of web pages in the early days wouldn't have gone down that route had the barrier for entry been higher.
Aren't those vendors built on top of open source? If I remember correctly, Google uses their own Linux distribution, Amazon uses redhat, and I have no clue what salesforce uses but I imagine that it's probably some form of open source OS since they can save a lot of time and money using that instead of Windows when we're talking thousands of servers. The cloud revolution, if anything, was brought on my open source since it's made deploying thousands of servers cheap and easy. If the companies had to pay for licensing of software on all of those servers or roll their own OS, they would have built up (buying fewer, more powerful servers) rather than building out.
Agreed. SQL is a generalized solution that works well for a lot of different things and works extremely well for a subset of those thing. For other applications (like indexing the internet), more specialized solutions are going to kick its ass. It's the same way as any programming you do: the easier and more general the tool, the more you sacrifice for it in terms of speed, efficiency, scalability, whatever.
More people get hurt and killed by cars every day then will ever have an adverse reaction with Acetaminophen and no one is banning cars.
People love apples because they are sweet and crunchy, therefore no one will ever like oranges.
Getting rid of it put the consumer into a position of "i need something" in which public health care can fill.
I don't know about that. I remember reading in Scientific American once that if aspirin were invented today, it would be prescription. I think what's happening is that we're living longer lives so we accept smaller and smaller risks. Apparently, the number of people with liver damage from acetaminophen is rising as well. When you look at how many things have it as an ingredient, then look at the danger of liver failure from overdose, then remember how little risk doctors are willing to take when it comes to medications, it makes sense that they would make this recommendation. I don't agree with it, but I don't think that you can attribute malice to it either.
From my kidney stone experience I can tell you that they have different ratios of narcotics to acetaminophen for people who need higher doses of the narcotic.
IMHO, this is a terrible thing. Acetoaminophen is still the best painkiller for most of my problems (migraines, etc), although ibuprofen does a decent job. If they were to pull it behind the pharmacy counter so that you had to at least talk to a pharmacist and realize that the medication contained acetaminophen, then they would increase awareness and help people avoid taking too much while also giving people the flexibility of using it on their own. I'll be quite irate if I lose all access to tylenol.
It's just a file so it could be *gasp* encrypted and bypass said filter
If any legitimate services do this, they'll be banned. This is a lose for game companies, honest consumers and the government (who loses out on tax revenue). Once again, this dosn't effect the pirates in the slightest, although (for once) this doesn't target them. Is it any wonder that piracy is so widespread?
This is the reason that I build my own computers whenever possible - the manufacturers install crap upon crap on your box. This is just taking it to the next level.
I wonder what it would cost to build computers without the annoying shit installed. Is that all that's making them profitable?
OSX is there to make their hardware more appealing. From the price of their computers, I'm pretty sure the hardware's where they make their money. At prices like that, I wouldn't be surprised if it's a loss leader to get people to stay on their platform.
there's nothing special about bits of paper when it comes to conveying information.
No, but there is something special about the difference between the people who read the bits of paper and those who don't. The people who read the paper want the news in a longer format that takes more time. They want to read the news enough that they pay for it. When you put something on the web, it's usually accompanied by a place to put comments, many of which will cheapen the experience and provide a very shallow or biased viewpoint on the article. It's like saying that there's nothing special about the china cabinet when it comes to storing priceless antiques: you're correct in one sense, but mistaken in another.
I find it deliciously ironic that you're using perl to mock php on the same day that the slashcode team apparently decided that they hadn't fucked this site up enough in the past few months. Of course, just because slashdot can't write perl worth a shit doesn't mean that all perl is bad, but if we were to take that attitude, I'm guessing the majority of the criticisms against php would dry up as well.
Did I mention that I'm really, really fucking tired of having slashdot render badly because they can't do a half-decent job of quality control or even, you know, click through the damn site with the new code before pushing it to the live servers? Seriously, slashdot coders, this is unacceptable. If my team released half the mistakes that you have in the past few months, we'd all be fired and probably end up committing suicide because we'd be forced to admit that we were terrible coders who'd never amount to anything in life.
I thought they were able to examine the drive by court order because they'd already gathered enough evidence of wrongdoing (through the ISP's logs) that she'd committed a crime. It's like saying that the police shouldn't be able to search your house because you're innocent until proven guilty: that's correct, until they've got enough evidence that the judge thinks the search is reasonable.
When you've created your model, if you create a scatterplot of the deviations from that model, there shouldn't be a pattern or else there was something from the model. It looks like there was a pattern, so he's honestly saying that he can't determine anything because of that strange result. That strangeness needs to be accounted for before anything can be said one way or the other.
It seems unlikely that they took the fever reducers strictly as a means of fooling the scanners. Common flu signs include aches and pains, and most of the pain relievers also reduce fevers.
Exactly. The Wii is fun, functional, and innovative. The problem isn't the Wii, it's the damn publishers. The Wii's more powerful than the most powerful gaming machines a few years ago and there were a lot of good games back then (unreal tournament 2004, Doom 3, etc). There's enough power in the console, but the creators of the game apparently can't adapt to lesser hardware, so they throw a public tantrum or water the game down so that they don't have to actually think about the problem and develop around it.
The really ironic thing here is that the market for the Wii is so much larger than the market for the other consoles. Publishers and developers are really shooting themselves in the foot here.
I'll have to disagree with you there. In my opinion the final half of the season was easily some of the best Whedon I've ever seen. The first half was crap, but it was worth it to get to the second half.
Why can't it be both? The criminals are indeed stupid for shooting a video of their crime, and even more stupid for posting it on the internet for the world to see. But does their stupidity mean that the faceless masses on the internet can harass them until they lose their jobs or scrawl death threats on their doors? Those stories are nothing more than a return to anarchy and lawlessness dressed up as something noble by the article. The only story with redeeming qualities is when they found the name of an official that was bragging about his ability to censor the internet, but you'll notice the end result of that story wasn't anywhere near as dramatic as the others.
why does linux have so many release cycles...It's funny how many people here bitched that windows was coming out with Win 7 so soon after vista, but they don't mind that linux seems to release something every couple months depending on the distro. Odd./quote.
Not really. If you knew which packages to download, it would be relatively easy to upgrade from one version of the distro to another. With Windows, you're on one version or another, and there's no way for you to get the latest version of their kernel unless you upgrade. As long as you get onto one of the LTS versions of Ubuntu, you'd be able to wait for as long as you could on Windows. Moving quickly is the biggest strength of open source development. That and choice, so that'd be the two big strengths of open source. And the community.
google is not processing data that way any more. We have to re-learn how to do our specific searches.
I've often wondered what role that plays in Google's dominance. They have ways of phrasing your searches that work much better than other ways, and I've slowly learned how to do the phrasing. Let's say some cool new search engine comes along that's easier to use. It uses natural language and finds exactly what you were looking for when you describe it. Who's going to go to that site and type in their natural language after learning the language that Google likes you to use? Furthermore, who's going to be able to convince us that they're better than Google when you use the terms that Google prefers?
Google's the standard by which all others are judged, and Google's quirks may have long since become requirements without us even realizing it. If that's the case, then the hard part isn't going to be making a search engine that's better than Google, it'll be making a search engine that people can use better than Google, and that's hard when Google's all anyone's ever known.
Yes, but that requires us to believe that the government will implement digital security right and well. I agree with the statement that is can be done right, but I vote the other way because of the chance that it actually will be done right. Besides, the failure mode of bad internet security is worse than the failure mode of bad physical security imho. There are always people around for physical voting, which itself is a security measure. It's not a foolproof one, but the wrong internet voting system will provide a greater opportunity, both in ease and magnitude of cheating, than physical voting.
Wii Sports and the rest of the "Wii" series are glorified tech demos
Wii Sports and Wii Play are still widely played among the people that I know. Wii Fit is extremely well selling. Wii Music is the only flop that I can see off the top of my head from the "Wii" series. All told, even if they are just "glorified tech demos," they're still more popular than any game that I can think of on the other systems. Between that, the new Metroid, and a co-op version of their most popular game on their systems, they had something for everybody this year. I would say that 3 games which are practically guaranteed to be hits would qualify them for something slightly better than "meh".
That attitude is the one I share, and I think shows the difference between the two shows. After all, E3 is about game companies showing off to each other, PAX is about people who love gaming getting together. I belong to the second group, but not to the first.
Slashdot Mirror
They should have XMLized HTML in the first place.
They did. It's called XHTML.
And now it's failed. What does that tell us?
It is horrible, and actively supports the dumbing down of people.
This is where I take issue with your argument. I completely agree that having the page break catastrophically when there was an error would be easier and better for people who design websites professionally (like me), especially in this day and age.
However, I don't believe that it supports the dumbing down of people, I believe it support less knowledgeable users. To use the compiler as an example, when my sister-in-law learned programming, she learned Java; to get to the point where she could do basic things like "hello world," she had to instantiate objects and call functions. My wife learned with php, and she had to type one line, a command and a string. The barrier for entry was much lower and she was rewarded much faster, thereby gaining a greater desire to learn more.
Br. At the time, browsers taking incorrect HTML was the same philosophy: you lower the barrier of entry. When someone writes a lot of web pages, they tend to become more knowledgeable, not less. There are exceptions that make everyone serious about the craft cringe and want to beat their heads against a brick wall, but for the most part skills are progressing. I don't know whether the web landscape would be better or worse right now if they'd required strict HTML for every web site, but I can tell you that a lot of people who were enthusiastic supporters and creators of web pages in the early days wouldn't have gone down that route had the barrier for entry been higher.
Aren't those vendors built on top of open source? If I remember correctly, Google uses their own Linux distribution, Amazon uses redhat, and I have no clue what salesforce uses but I imagine that it's probably some form of open source OS since they can save a lot of time and money using that instead of Windows when we're talking thousands of servers. The cloud revolution, if anything, was brought on my open source since it's made deploying thousands of servers cheap and easy. If the companies had to pay for licensing of software on all of those servers or roll their own OS, they would have built up (buying fewer, more powerful servers) rather than building out.
Agreed. SQL is a generalized solution that works well for a lot of different things and works extremely well for a subset of those thing. For other applications (like indexing the internet), more specialized solutions are going to kick its ass. It's the same way as any programming you do: the easier and more general the tool, the more you sacrifice for it in terms of speed, efficiency, scalability, whatever.
More people get hurt and killed by cars every day then will ever have an adverse reaction with Acetaminophen and no one is banning cars.
People love apples because they are sweet and crunchy, therefore no one will ever like oranges.
Getting rid of it put the consumer into a position of "i need something" in which public health care can fill.
I don't know about that. I remember reading in Scientific American once that if aspirin were invented today, it would be prescription. I think what's happening is that we're living longer lives so we accept smaller and smaller risks. Apparently, the number of people with liver damage from acetaminophen is rising as well. When you look at how many things have it as an ingredient, then look at the danger of liver failure from overdose, then remember how little risk doctors are willing to take when it comes to medications, it makes sense that they would make this recommendation. I don't agree with it, but I don't think that you can attribute malice to it either.
From my kidney stone experience I can tell you that they have different ratios of narcotics to acetaminophen for people who need higher doses of the narcotic.
IMHO, this is a terrible thing. Acetoaminophen is still the best painkiller for most of my problems (migraines, etc), although ibuprofen does a decent job. If they were to pull it behind the pharmacy counter so that you had to at least talk to a pharmacist and realize that the medication contained acetaminophen, then they would increase awareness and help people avoid taking too much while also giving people the flexibility of using it on their own. I'll be quite irate if I lose all access to tylenol.
It's just a file so it could be *gasp* encrypted and bypass said filter
If any legitimate services do this, they'll be banned. This is a lose for game companies, honest consumers and the government (who loses out on tax revenue). Once again, this dosn't effect the pirates in the slightest, although (for once) this doesn't target them. Is it any wonder that piracy is so widespread?
This is the reason that I build my own computers whenever possible - the manufacturers install crap upon crap on your box. This is just taking it to the next level.
I wonder what it would cost to build computers without the annoying shit installed. Is that all that's making them profitable?
OSX is there to make their hardware more appealing. From the price of their computers, I'm pretty sure the hardware's where they make their money. At prices like that, I wouldn't be surprised if it's a loss leader to get people to stay on their platform.
there's nothing special about bits of paper when it comes to conveying information.
No, but there is something special about the difference between the people who read the bits of paper and those who don't. The people who read the paper want the news in a longer format that takes more time. They want to read the news enough that they pay for it. When you put something on the web, it's usually accompanied by a place to put comments, many of which will cheapen the experience and provide a very shallow or biased viewpoint on the article. It's like saying that there's nothing special about the china cabinet when it comes to storing priceless antiques: you're correct in one sense, but mistaken in another.
I find it deliciously ironic that you're using perl to mock php on the same day that the slashcode team apparently decided that they hadn't fucked this site up enough in the past few months. Of course, just because slashdot can't write perl worth a shit doesn't mean that all perl is bad, but if we were to take that attitude, I'm guessing the majority of the criticisms against php would dry up as well.
Did I mention that I'm really, really fucking tired of having slashdot render badly because they can't do a half-decent job of quality control or even, you know, click through the damn site with the new code before pushing it to the live servers? Seriously, slashdot coders, this is unacceptable. If my team released half the mistakes that you have in the past few months, we'd all be fired and probably end up committing suicide because we'd be forced to admit that we were terrible coders who'd never amount to anything in life.
She doesn't.
I thought they were able to examine the drive by court order because they'd already gathered enough evidence of wrongdoing (through the ISP's logs) that she'd committed a crime. It's like saying that the police shouldn't be able to search your house because you're innocent until proven guilty: that's correct, until they've got enough evidence that the judge thinks the search is reasonable.
When you've created your model, if you create a scatterplot of the deviations from that model, there shouldn't be a pattern or else there was something from the model. It looks like there was a pattern, so he's honestly saying that he can't determine anything because of that strange result. That strangeness needs to be accounted for before anything can be said one way or the other.
It seems unlikely that they took the fever reducers strictly as a means of fooling the scanners. Common flu signs include aches and pains, and most of the pain relievers also reduce fevers.
critics argue about the hypothetical "Scissors CPU" that competitors may be secretly developing
I've seen the supposed specs for the scissors cpu, and I can attest that rock would have absolutely crushed it.
Exactly. The Wii is fun, functional, and innovative. The problem isn't the Wii, it's the damn publishers. The Wii's more powerful than the most powerful gaming machines a few years ago and there were a lot of good games back then (unreal tournament 2004, Doom 3, etc). There's enough power in the console, but the creators of the game apparently can't adapt to lesser hardware, so they throw a public tantrum or water the game down so that they don't have to actually think about the problem and develop around it.
The really ironic thing here is that the market for the Wii is so much larger than the market for the other consoles. Publishers and developers are really shooting themselves in the foot here.
I'll have to disagree with you there. In my opinion the final half of the season was easily some of the best Whedon I've ever seen. The first half was crap, but it was worth it to get to the second half.
Why can't it be both? The criminals are indeed stupid for shooting a video of their crime, and even more stupid for posting it on the internet for the world to see. But does their stupidity mean that the faceless masses on the internet can harass them until they lose their jobs or scrawl death threats on their doors? Those stories are nothing more than a return to anarchy and lawlessness dressed up as something noble by the article. The only story with redeeming qualities is when they found the name of an official that was bragging about his ability to censor the internet, but you'll notice the end result of that story wasn't anywhere near as dramatic as the others.
It's just so fucking overdone. Please, please, please stop making dumb comparisons to Hans Reiser, we'd all appreciate it.
why does linux have so many release cycles...It's funny how many people here bitched that windows was coming out with Win 7 so soon after vista, but they don't mind that linux seems to release something every couple months depending on the distro. Odd./quote. Not really. If you knew which packages to download, it would be relatively easy to upgrade from one version of the distro to another. With Windows, you're on one version or another, and there's no way for you to get the latest version of their kernel unless you upgrade. As long as you get onto one of the LTS versions of Ubuntu, you'd be able to wait for as long as you could on Windows. Moving quickly is the biggest strength of open source development. That and choice, so that'd be the two big strengths of open source. And the community.
google is not processing data that way any more. We have to re-learn how to do our specific searches.
I've often wondered what role that plays in Google's dominance. They have ways of phrasing your searches that work much better than other ways, and I've slowly learned how to do the phrasing. Let's say some cool new search engine comes along that's easier to use. It uses natural language and finds exactly what you were looking for when you describe it. Who's going to go to that site and type in their natural language after learning the language that Google likes you to use? Furthermore, who's going to be able to convince us that they're better than Google when you use the terms that Google prefers?
Google's the standard by which all others are judged, and Google's quirks may have long since become requirements without us even realizing it. If that's the case, then the hard part isn't going to be making a search engine that's better than Google, it'll be making a search engine that people can use better than Google, and that's hard when Google's all anyone's ever known.
Yes, but that requires us to believe that the government will implement digital security right and well. I agree with the statement that is can be done right, but I vote the other way because of the chance that it actually will be done right. Besides, the failure mode of bad internet security is worse than the failure mode of bad physical security imho. There are always people around for physical voting, which itself is a security measure. It's not a foolproof one, but the wrong internet voting system will provide a greater opportunity, both in ease and magnitude of cheating, than physical voting.
So, we'd be where we're at right now, just with 100x the storage? That wouldn't be too bad in my book.
Wii Sports and the rest of the "Wii" series are glorified tech demos
Wii Sports and Wii Play are still widely played among the people that I know. Wii Fit is extremely well selling. Wii Music is the only flop that I can see off the top of my head from the "Wii" series. All told, even if they are just "glorified tech demos," they're still more popular than any game that I can think of on the other systems. Between that, the new Metroid, and a co-op version of their most popular game on their systems, they had something for everybody this year. I would say that 3 games which are practically guaranteed to be hits would qualify them for something slightly better than "meh".
That attitude is the one I share, and I think shows the difference between the two shows. After all, E3 is about game companies showing off to each other, PAX is about people who love gaming getting together. I belong to the second group, but not to the first.