I will quote Steve Yegge's words to describe one of my favorite books. He made me read it. So here they are:
Douglas Hofstadter has spent a lifetime thinking about the way we think. He's written about it perhaps more than anyone else in the past century. Even if someone out there has beaten him in sheer quantity of words on the subject, nobody has come close to rivaling his style or his impact on programmers everywhere.
All of his books are wonderfully imaginative and are loads of fun to read, but if you're a programmer and you haven't yet read Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (usually known as "GEB"), then I envy you: you're in for a real treat. Get yourself a copy and settle in for one of the most interesting, maddening, awe-inspiring and just plain fun books ever written. The Pulitzer Prize it won doesn't nearly do it justice. It's one of the greatest and most unique works of imagination of all time.
You can find his original post, and you can obviously find the book on amazon.
You see to make a big deal that constructors only see Linux and not the other dudes floating around it*. IMO, even Windows Open Source drivers would be a nice ! An OS driver provides the info to port it back everywhere... The extra step you're talking about isn't necessarily the most painful. Especially compared to unavailable or poor technical data.
Of course if no ones does that extra step, your last option is to buy supported hardware only. Just as usual.
*: s/around/behind/ but that would trash the score
I do use 30+ open windows at a time : I just don't bother to close the tabs. Sometimes I can't tell where I'm going (like a google search result) and so I keep open a few results in separated tabs, never closing the search tab.
These days, dynamic compilation (which has available to it runtime and usage statistics) can optimize much more efficiently than static, leading to higher performance code. Citation needed. Especially, a relevant citation for Java would be appropriate.
As far as I know, "there is no optimization", especially when it comes down to "performance". Routines that can enhance the performance of matrix computations are different in every point from routines that enhance the performance of device bandwidth management (used in NIC drivers, of video adapters drivers), and have nothing in common with optimizations related to "responsiveness" (latency management).
What performance are you talking about ? Please be more specific.
Extremely dynamic linking Sorry, I can't guess what you can't spell. What is that already ?
And Java is extremely fast-- almost certainly faster than Objective-C Citation needed.
Looking for benchmarks, I found many references to a "String" benchmark is which Java is supposedly faster due to a certain amount of optimizations in the JVM String handling routines. More, I don't see any reason not to write an String handling library for objective-c that could provide the same kind of optimizations (come on, a String Handling Library. Such a thing is like "you're first assignment as a CS student ever").
I was unable to find benchmarks caring enough to be unbiased i.e. with a valid test methodology, and reasonable explanations of the choices made, measurement of the biases etc.... I didn't spend more than 10mn on google. I'm not trying to prove that either Java or Objective-C is faster than the other though.
I worked as an intern in a video game development studio, and they definitely used assembly, especially for those nice SSE2 tricks that MSVC++ doesn't really grasp.
Okular, part of KDE4, is fine too. And it's open source.
Some windows/macosx binaries should be made available any time soon, if not already done.
Linux binaries are available, source package are too.
You don't get any choice about when you were born, either -- but they'll still charge higher premiums for you when you're 70 than when you're 30.
You age seems directly relevant to what I was calling "personal history". Talking about choice was an error from me. You might argue that there are several things affecting the premiums that you don't choose. However, I draw a line between what describes you considering what you lived through, and what describes you considering the innerds of your genotype.
In black and white we would have on one side the idea that insurance companies should account for everything that relates to you, which would include DNA. On the other side, they shouldn't account for anything relating to you, which would give equal rates for everyone. The line I drawed is somewhere in between.
Having such a service with a guaranteed anonymity would solve many privacy issues.
You're not the first to mention related insurance costs. Is it funny or is it greedy ? that I can't tell.
What I thing about these costs is that they should relate to your personal history. DNA isn't part of your personal history (one could argue on that, I won't for now). You're not responsible in any way of what your DNA looks like. You never had any chance to modify it, nor to choose any part of it. If insurance companies had access to such information, they would presumably charge less for people who are less likely to cost money by being ill. It looks more like eugenics using money than anything else.
I find the following statement to be quite a scandal : "The poor, sick bastards will die, not because they're ill, but because we won't afford them the money that could have cured them.". People which have good reason (valid DNA results ?) to think they're "good enough" could disagree. My opinion on that matter is that egotism sucks, large scale egotism sucks even more, and DNA-backed egotism is worse than any other form of it.
What about privacy ? How could one be sure that they don't keep the records in some kind of database ? The possibility to make comparisons with friends/family seems like a pretext to keep that kind of data.
What about the genetic information that cannot be interpreted as of today ? Will it get stored anyways, leaving future analysis possible ? (Is there a subscription for updates ??
What kind of questions these sort of tests can answer that you can't answer ? Besides disease detection (I thought there were people specialized in such matters... like... doctors...), what purpose serve the answers ?
I think you should have checked the pictures at http://www.news.com/2300-13833_3-6216805-4.html?tag=ne.gall.pg that someone already posted in this thread. You can see that the car stacks are put next to subway entries. I'm sure that Prague's subway is fine (never been there through), but you'll agree that some places in Prague ior its suburbs cannot be reached using the subway. Self-service car rental packed like bikes seems like a fine complement to that.
You might also consider the case where you'd like to transport goods, where having a huge bag and strong shoulders might not be enough, and so you would rather go by car.
IANAA (not an american) but I think they have subways too there... at least in some cities.
Invoking busy schedule as an excuse for not doing anything else is cowardice. Lazy people don't deserve to be punished. Busy people shouldn't be that proud of it. IMHO, Beeing busy sucks. Not beeing busy allows you to do STUFF. You could even enter one of these "bring-your-own-violin pick-up jazz concert".
Don't think the US is unique in this regard Sorry if I seem to pretend so, but I don't think so. However, I think they are leading the way in the field.
The "richest" lost this case and have to pay the legal fees of the defendant. How is this revolting ? What I find revolting is that:
1. Nothing "guarantees" it would have come to a good end. My "revolt" is based on what I perceive as a strike of good luck. If there wasn't any financial incentive for lawyer to defend this case, the "richest" would have won the case. How come ?
2. I understand that this is creating a precedent, and it's more likely that in the future the RIAA will pay for defendant's legal fees. However, looking at the past history of the RIAA, I'm still seriously inclined to think that in most cases there won't be enough money in the balance in order to overturn "money's lawyers". The revolting point for me is that this strange pattern of "unfairness from the start, correct it later if it's worth it" is likely to hold in other kind of cases. Perhaps that the RIAA will loose more and more ground in the future. But for the rest (i.e. which is not related to RIAA in any way..) I don't see any slight hint of a change.
Only tech news is so fragile that it can be conveyed by blogs. For other subjects (international analysis, arts, music, politic), most subjects treated are not really news. It might be for some readers but it's not the point. The editorial policies are what makes the content worth reading. Automatic RSS aggregators poorly replaces editors.
Personally, I find that even if I can customize to a point the content I get from the net, I got the huge problem of being spectator of what already interests me. I still have the curiosity to look out for new things that could interest me. My bookmarks or my subscribed feeds do a poor job for bringing me new sites (have you noticed how many blogs never change their subject and then die out of exhaustion ?).
Until there is a GoogleBot ready for handling the way I discover relevant intellectual information, I will need some human piece of advice. That's why journalists always were for I think. That's why they would stay. That started without an audience, I don't think audience is that relevant for journalism.
I read some comment saying that "paper press is dead". It's not. At least I seriously hope so. The ad-driven papers are suffering, I hope they will suffer more and more. Ad-free media has a price, pay for it if you can! Don't you think that ad-driven news will abuse you again, and again, and again, and again... until the last drop of ink on earth will have been spent on attempting to make you buy something you didn't even think about before; on feeding you altered news; on conveying lies in the sole purpose of the interest of something or someone or some people that is not you, nor your family, nor your friends or anyone else for that matter ?
Sounds like the law is ruled by offer and demand... Although I should have expected this from the United States of America*, I'm really surprised of the contradiction between the way you** handle the law on one side and the way you** (are supposed to) write them on the other side. I think that when laws are written, it's in order to achieve something specific either by coercion or by attraction***. The market seems the allow the richest to bend the rules, even if they end up to be in contradiction with what the law was attempting to do in the first place. Instead of judging, it just sounds like bargaining. This is just revolting (for me). Though I don't have any idea of how you could extract the business from the court... Perhaps this is what some people call "moral corruption", although I've never been able to put a good definition on that expression.
*: ok that sounds length. how should I spell "U.S." in order that it sounds like "T.H.E.M." ? **: well, it's not personal, it's more about the about the "American way of handling the law" ***: as one might figure out, this is YAUT**** ****: Yet Another Unproven Theory
DoS is also sometimes called "nasty crash". (Like the ones you get with Firefox fairly often.)
I'd like to point out that when there is no 'service' involved, there cannot be a 'denial of service'. I don't think dumb browsing is a service in any way. (Perhaps someone has an idea on this ?)
Slashdot Mirror
You can find his original post, and you can obviously find the book on amazon.
You see to make a big deal that constructors only see Linux and not the other dudes floating around it*. IMO, even Windows Open Source drivers would be a nice ! An OS driver provides the info to port it back everywhere ... The extra step you're talking about isn't necessarily the most painful. Especially compared to unavailable or poor technical data.
Of course if no ones does that extra step, your last option is to buy supported hardware only. Just as usual.
*: s/around/behind/ but that would trash the score
I do use 30+ open windows at a time : I just don't bother to close the tabs. Sometimes I can't tell where I'm going (like a google search result) and so I keep open a few results in separated tabs, never closing the search tab.
As far as I know, "there is no optimization", especially when it comes down to "performance". Routines that can enhance the performance of matrix computations are different in every point from routines that enhance the performance of device bandwidth management (used in NIC drivers, of video adapters drivers), and have nothing in common with optimizations related to "responsiveness" (latency management).
What performance are you talking about ? Please be more specific. Extremely dynamic linking Sorry, I can't guess what you can't spell. What is that already ? And Java is extremely fast-- almost certainly faster than Objective-C Citation needed.Looking for benchmarks, I found many references to a "String" benchmark is which Java is supposedly faster due to a certain amount of optimizations in the JVM String handling routines. More, I don't see any reason not to write an String handling library for objective-c that could provide the same kind of optimizations (come on, a String Handling Library. Such a thing is like "you're first assignment as a CS student ever").
I was unable to find benchmarks caring enough to be unbiased i.e. with a valid test methodology, and reasonable explanations of the choices made, measurement of the biases etc.... I didn't spend more than 10mn on google. I'm not trying to prove that either Java or Objective-C is faster than the other though.
I worked as an intern in a video game development studio, and they definitely used assembly, especially for those nice SSE2 tricks that MSVC++ doesn't really grasp.
Okular, part of KDE4, is fine too. And it's open source. Some windows/macosx binaries should be made available any time soon, if not already done. Linux binaries are available, source package are too.
Build yourself a huge set of rainbow tables, and show to your users how weak their passwords are :)
You age seems directly relevant to what I was calling "personal history". Talking about choice was an error from me. You might argue that there are several things affecting the premiums that you don't choose. However, I draw a line between what describes you considering what you lived through, and what describes you considering the innerds of your genotype.
In black and white we would have on one side the idea that insurance companies should account for everything that relates to you, which would include DNA. On the other side, they shouldn't account for anything relating to you, which would give equal rates for everyone. The line I drawed is somewhere in between.
Having such a service with a guaranteed anonymity would solve many privacy issues.
You're not the first to mention related insurance costs. Is it funny or is it greedy ? that I can't tell.
What I thing about these costs is that they should relate to your personal history. DNA isn't part of your personal history (one could argue on that, I won't for now). You're not responsible in any way of what your DNA looks like. You never had any chance to modify it, nor to choose any part of it. If insurance companies had access to such information, they would presumably charge less for people who are less likely to cost money by being ill. It looks more like eugenics using money than anything else.
I find the following statement to be quite a scandal : "The poor, sick bastards will die, not because they're ill, but because we won't afford them the money that could have cured them.". People which have good reason (valid DNA results ?) to think they're "good enough" could disagree. My opinion on that matter is that egotism sucks, large scale egotism sucks even more, and DNA-backed egotism is worse than any other form of it.
What about privacy ? How could one be sure that they don't keep the records in some kind of database ? The possibility to make comparisons with friends/family seems like a pretext to keep that kind of data.
What about the genetic information that cannot be interpreted as of today ? Will it get stored anyways, leaving future analysis possible ? (Is there a subscription for updates ??
What kind of questions these sort of tests can answer that you can't answer ? Besides disease detection (I thought there were people specialized in such matters ... like ... doctors ...), what purpose serve the answers ?
I think you should have checked the pictures at http://www.news.com/2300-13833_3-6216805-4.html?tag=ne.gall.pg that someone already posted in this thread. You can see that the car stacks are put next to subway entries. I'm sure that Prague's subway is fine (never been there through), but you'll agree that some places in Prague ior its suburbs cannot be reached using the subway. Self-service car rental packed like bikes seems like a fine complement to that. You might also consider the case where you'd like to transport goods, where having a huge bag and strong shoulders might not be enough, and so you would rather go by car. IANAA (not an american) but I think they have subways too there ... at least in some cities.
Parent is my favourite comment of the week.
Invoking busy schedule as an excuse for not doing anything else is cowardice. Lazy people don't deserve to be punished. Busy people shouldn't be that proud of it. IMHO, Beeing busy sucks. Not beeing busy allows you to do STUFF. You could even enter one of these "bring-your-own-violin pick-up jazz concert".
1. Nothing "guarantees" it would have come to a good end. My "revolt" is based on what I perceive as a strike of good luck. If there wasn't any financial incentive for lawyer to defend this case, the "richest" would have won the case. How come ?
2. I understand that this is creating a precedent, and it's more likely that in the future the RIAA will pay for defendant's legal fees. However, looking at the past history of the RIAA, I'm still seriously inclined to think that in most cases there won't be enough money in the balance in order to overturn "money's lawyers". The revolting point for me is that this strange pattern of "unfairness from the start, correct it later if it's worth it" is likely to hold in other kind of cases. Perhaps that the RIAA will loose more and more ground in the future. But for the rest (i.e. which is not related to RIAA in any way..) I don't see any slight hint of a change.
Only tech news is so fragile that it can be conveyed by blogs. For other subjects (international analysis, arts, music, politic), most subjects treated are not really news. It might be for some readers but it's not the point. The editorial policies are what makes the content worth reading. Automatic RSS aggregators poorly replaces editors.
Personally, I find that even if I can customize to a point the content I get from the net, I got the huge problem of being spectator of what already interests me. I still have the curiosity to look out for new things that could interest me. My bookmarks or my subscribed feeds do a poor job for bringing me new sites (have you noticed how many blogs never change their subject and then die out of exhaustion ?).
Until there is a GoogleBot ready for handling the way I discover relevant intellectual information, I will need some human piece of advice. That's why journalists always were for I think. That's why they would stay. That started without an audience, I don't think audience is that relevant for journalism.
I read some comment saying that "paper press is dead". It's not. At least I seriously hope so. The ad-driven papers are suffering, I hope they will suffer more and more. Ad-free media has a price, pay for it if you can! Don't you think that ad-driven news will abuse you again, and again, and again, and again ... until the last drop of ink on earth will have been spent on attempting to make you buy something you didn't even think about before; on feeding you altered news; on conveying lies in the sole purpose of the interest of something or someone or some people that is not you, nor your family, nor your friends or anyone else for that matter ?
Sounds like the law is ruled by offer and demand ... Although I should have expected this from the United States of America*, I'm really surprised of the contradiction between the way you** handle the law on one side and the way you** (are supposed to) write them on the other side. I think that when laws are written, it's in order to achieve something specific either by coercion or by attraction***. The market seems the allow the richest to bend the rules, even if they end up to be in contradiction with what the law was attempting to do in the first place. Instead of judging, it just sounds like bargaining. This is just revolting (for me). Though I don't have any idea of how you could extract the business from the court ... Perhaps this is what some people call "moral corruption", although I've never been able to put a good definition on that expression.
*: ok that sounds length. how should I spell "U.S." in order that it sounds like "T.H.E.M." ?**: well, it's not personal, it's more about the about the "American way of handling the law"
***: as one might figure out, this is YAUT****
****: Yet Another Unproven Theory
PS: I do like the stars. -*- outline-mode -*-
DoS is also sometimes called "nasty crash". (Like the ones you get with Firefox fairly often.) I'd like to point out that when there is no 'service' involved, there cannot be a 'denial of service'. I don't think dumb browsing is a service in any way. (Perhaps someone has an idea on this ?)