It's not moot, but if you lack the imagination to see how, you're a lost cause.
I mean it's a moot point in the case of Marquette.
On another note, let's not forget there have been groups who have worked very hard to get racial epithets classified as unprotected speech.
I agree that at a public institution, it is probably protected speech to scream racial epithets in a public area -- not wise, as it may result in a violent altercation (illegal, but a very possible consequense). But Marquette isn't a public institution, legally or otherwise.
Plus they receive federal funding anyway.
Receiving government money != strings attatched. There is much to be said for the context in which the money is given and received; as long as the money falls into certain categories (such as a grant, which is literally a gift of money -- no strings attatched), Marquette still retains all of its rights as a private institution. There is more than a little legal precedent, and Marquette is well within its rights to censor its students as they see fit.
In other words, Marquette wouldn't face any direct legal consequences for such draconian punishments.
Never forget there is a vast difference between justice and the law. What Marquette did is arguably unjust (depening on whom you talk to), but it is not illegal.
You idiot. You accuse the GP of hyperbole and you drop this pile of shit argument?
I must not have been as clear as I thought.
I had no intention of accusing the GP of hyperbole, or that the GP had used it. My intention was to fully acknowledge that the follwing statement: What's to stop somebody from expressing their "freedom of speech", and their "freedom of expression" by terminating your status as a living being? is hyperbole.
In other words, I was using hyperbole to make a point, and attempted to acknowlede that fact.
Apparently I wasn't clear enough, and my admission that my example is hyperbole was taken as an accusation that the GP was the one using it.
I doubt at this point there is any question that writing wasn't my major course of study.
Why yes, I would. Being vulgar is no reason to expel a student! "Freedom of Speech" and "Freedom of Expression" don't mean "Freedom of Speech for everything except what I don't like." That's the consequence for having freedom: people are free to do a bunch of mean, nasty, vulgar, and vile shit.
While this first example is obviously hyporbole, consider this: What's to stop somebody from expressing their "freedom of speech", and their "freedom of expression" by terminating your status as a living being? That's the consequence for having freedom: people are free to do a bunch of mean, nasty, vulger, and file shit!
There have been limits to "Freedom of Speech" in the United States since 1798; perhaps even earlier. (Actually, no buts about it considering slaves weren't entitled to free speech at all...) There are boundaries in the 'Freedom of Speech', some of which include penalties.
Such an example is the fact that a person can be incarcerated for the rest of his/her life for expressing their freedom of speech by divulging state secrets. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed for expressing their freedom of speech in this way; the real kick in the teeth is recent evidence seems to cast into doubt their guilt in having actually expressed anything.
Again, though: Marquette is still legally classified as a private institution. They can treat their students in a similar way you could treat a guest in your home: You are perfectly free to expel them from your house for behaving in a way that you do not approve. Marquette has the same rights.
(I'm just an observer, but that's what slashdot is for...)
IIRC, the big beef with Rambus cost isn't the royalty; as you point out, it's a rather small amount.
The big deal for price with RDRAM was that the stuff was more significantly expensive to manufacture; this meant that while RDRAM didn't cost much more (to a consumer) than DDR memory, it was far less profitable to the memory manufacturers.
How does this play into DDR and SDRAM? If Rambus's patents are held as valid, Rambus gets to set terms for how DDR and SDRAM is licensed.
Don't underestimate the effect this can have. For the sake of playing the 'worst case' scenerio (which may or may not be the end result). To obtain a license for DDR and SDR patents, the memory company (ie. Samsung, Hynix, Micron, Infineon, etc.) must also agree to: * License XDR (for another 3.5% fee). * Agree to halt all R&D into new RAM technologies. (ie. give up all ability to develop their own technologies, essentially making it impossible to be self-sufficient again.) * Agree to license every new whiz-bang buzzword Rambus develops, until the patent expires.
* All of which in turn requires:
* Licensing of all new Rambus IP
* The licensee must halt (or continue to not participate in) R&D into new RAM technologies. * Increase the price of all competing (non-RDRAM, non-XDR) memory by 300%. (Or even halt all production of competing products entirely.)
The thing to remember about a patent: it is a government granted monopoly. Price-fixing, gouging, and anti-trust do not apply. The patent holder gets to set all terms on the manufacture, and sale of the technology the patent covers, reguardless of how arbitrary, unreasonable, and selective those terms may be. It would be perfectly within their rights to allow any maker but brand 'X' to license their IP.
The broadness of what a patent holder can demand of its licensees is the reason why Hynix, Micron, Infineon, and others have been fighting these patents; the patents literally give Rambus the ability to force any (and all) of them out of business entirely. It's espescially galling to these companies as they feel that Rambus illegally took technologies that were discussed (and developed, depending on whom you talk to) at JEDEC, and patented work and ideas originating from JEDEC (and not Rambus). Hynix, Micron, and Infineon feel much like their IP was stolen, and some thug came pounding on their door for 'protection money.'
Whether that is actually the case may never be known; Rambus destroyed many of the documents that are involved (the article itself states that the Judge ruled that it was OK for Rambus to do this, because the documents were not intentionally destroyed to avoid incrimination in a lawsuit.) I'm quite certain similar things can be said of the various RAM makers; there are no white knights in this tale. The courts will continue to plod through the various cases, and eventually decisions will be made as to whether the patents are valid (and legal) or not.
Regardless of the outcome, a great many people feel that Rambus's patents were obtained in a dishonest way, and feel Rambus is going to be similarly dishonest in how the patents are licenced should they be deemed enforcable.
I've got to say, though, it's looking like the patents will have expired before the litigation ends... the issue is far from resolution, and the patents are about halfway through their lifetimes.
The real problem isn't necessarily server code. It's server hardware, and bandwidth; a mmorpg server can't run on the kind of hardware mere mortals can afford. And the amount of bandwidth isn't cheap either.
The reason why people get confused about 'photo-shop' is simple: the term was already defined as something else long before Adobe came around. Back in the day, 'photo shop' can meant an office/store where graphics professionals produce/modify/create images.
It wouldn't be much unlike causing confusion by naming a piece of software 'hobby shop.' The phrase is already in common use, having already been defined as a place in which a person can buy/sell goods related to one's hobby. Naming a piece of software 'hobby shop' would cause confusion among everybody else to whom 'hobby shop' has nothing to do with your software.
So it comes down to a name trying to re-define a term already in common use; calling a dry desert a 'sea' causes similar problems. "Sea of Tranquility -- You mean there's no water?!?" To someone who doesn't know where the Sea of Tranquility is, this can be the source of major confusion.
When you know the origin of the phrase, it's fairly simple. You know what WinAMP does; so the name seems easy and obvious.
If you only have the name, and not the purpose of the program, the name 'WinAMP' can have multiple meanings; WinAMP isn't an intuitive name to the uninitiated.
"Amp" is indeed a shortened word for amplifier; but it does not necessarily have to be electronic in nature.
AMP is also the name of a energy drink made by Pepsi. There's also the common usage of 'amp' as in "someone who's been 'Amped' up on steroids/caffiene, etc." (or the aforementioned energy drink...)
I look at it this way: WinAMP is an unclear name, simply on the basis that my mother wouldn't be able to figure out its purpose simply by the name of the program.
Actually, there was also sibling post complaining about kde using 'k' to prefix everything; yours was the more reasonably worded comment, so I replied to it.
I'm not really a fanboy of GNOME or KDE; I use both interchangably (and I like the occasional change of pace). I find it interesting how... rabid each side's fanboys can be towards the other.
It's interesting how often GNOME fanboys complain about the 'k' prefix for KDE programs, yet seem entirely oblivious to the fact that GNOME does the same thing. The famous telescope effect -- the other guys problems seem much larger than your own.
KDE users complain about similar nonsense about GNOME, all the while blissfully ignorant that KDE usually does the same things.
All in all, it's remarkable how similar the two environments are, and how many good ideas are passed between each other. (As well as how many bad ideas get dropped because the other project did the same thing in a better way).
To be honest, I don't see using the 'k' or 'g' as a prefix much different from Apple's use of 'i' (iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD,...)
It's interesting how the article also selects Linux programs that don't have a descriptive name, yet completely ignores unhelpful Windwos names.
Cases in point: Simple Text Editing Listed:
Windows: NotePad, WordPad, TextPad
Linux: gedit, kate Unlisted:
Linux: kwrite, kedit (only listed because they're quite obvious)
On the Windows side, how about: PowerPoint: (a powerful pointer? a SUPER laser pointer? WTF!?!) Excel: (Excel... excel at what?) Nero: (what is a dead Roman emperor doing on my hard disk?) WinAMP: (Apparently this amplifies windows; so it must make it better or more powerful somehow) PhotoShop: (Must be a photo printing service...)
Basically, the article takes what brand recognition Windows has for granted, while completely discounting the same effect for Linux. More astounding, is when you have a brand that exists on both platforms (GIMP, FireFox, Opera).
You see the same problem for people who move between a Mac and a Windows box; Mac users have such obscure program names as QuickTime, Pages, Keynote, Preview, Safari, BBEdit, Text Wrangler. iMovie... does this mean it plays or makes movies?
Basically, he's complaining because different platforms have their tools named differently. It happens everywhere; if I walk into a bar and ask for a screwdriver, I'm going to get something entirely different than I would if I were to ask for a screwdriver at the hardware store. Differences in the dialects of English spoken in Australia, the US, and England are good examples. The bottom line is you have to take the time to use the proper dialect, at leeast some of your meaning will get lost in translation.
I don't see how putting the 'K' in front of everything is substantially different from GNOME:
gpdf, gedit, ggv, gnometris (or pretty much any of the default GNOME games), gnumeric, gfloppy, gtop, gcalctool, gucharmap...
Nothing like a good double-standard; apparently it's OK for the GNOME project to use 'g' or some variant of 'gnome' to prefix their programs, but it's out of the question for KDE to prefix their programs with 'K' or 'kde'.
If it can get you within 20 meters (or let's say even 50) and you still can't locate a particular address, I don't think that problem is with the GPS system.
Careful there; youre asking geeks to look away from their shiny for a few seconds.
First off: The subsidies removed are quite paltry in comparison with the total amount. In other words: Much ado about nothing. The agreements made are little more than token gestures, and will have very little real impact.
And the US doesn't cave because the sanctions are large enough; the view is that the WTO will help the US more than it can hurt it, so it's generally better to simply comply with the rules when possible.
For instance, the US still holds that genetically modified foods cannot be labeled (or sold) as such under WTO regulations, and has a fair chance of winning that case.
Another example of where the US feels it is being wronged is the massive subsidies given to Airbus by various European governments (in addition to lucrative military contracts that Airbus receives), whereas the US competitor, Boeing, doesn't receive any government subsidy (although it also receives military contracts). In the case of both Airbus and Boeting, the military contracts aren't enough to keep the companies afloat; both make the vast majority of their income from bulding commercial airliners; only Airbus gets nearly all of their development costs subsidized by various governments throughout the EU.
So, like in most things, it's felt that the benefit of the one outweighs the possible loss of the others. The US (like most governments) generally disobeys WTO rules when it feels they are unjust.
IIRC, the US is still voluntarily eating the sanctions imposed due to its protection of its steel industry, and I doubt that's going to change, as most Americans feel it's very important to have a steel industry capable of providing self-sufficiency in this strategic resource.
More programs than realtime have this fundamental problem with garbage collection.
Take a massively parallel program (such as an MPI program on a thousand-node cluster). The jitter induced by garbage collection causes a huge decrease in systemwide efficiency, and as a result, the app runs much slower than it would on a non-GC language.
Cosidering the cost of running these systems, runtime is more expensive than a developer's time, and as a result, it's much more cost-effective to use an 'old fashioned' language like C, C++, or Fortran.
plenty of desktop applications exist for GC based languages now, there are many.Net and Java applications which work fine on the desktop
Care to name one that I might use (or see in a store for purchase)?
I've made usable, powerful and secure desktop apps in Java, if you can't do this, then you either don't know Java properly or haven't tried.
Funny... I know more than a few (highly experienced) Java programmers who believed thier code was usable, powerful, and secure. The problem is that the software was none of the above, and I had the privilege of having to 'prove the impossible' before the Java coders would admit there was a problem.
Java,.Net, C#... these are just tools, just like C++, C, Objective C, and Assembler. I've seen far too many people who somehow think that Java (or.Net, or whatever the 'new' language dujour happens to be) make claims about a language being some sort of magic bullet.
Magic bullets do not exist.
Objective-C is a backwater language with poor security which for some strange reason, only Apple prefer over other more mainstream and IMHO more productive languages.
Obscure? Funny, I think the same thing about Java programmers; every thing I see is written in either C, C++, or Fortran. Java is still widely reguarded as little more than a 'toy' language used by web developers. Its performance hit is simply too large to be taken seriously.
Apple prefers Cocoa because it's the native API for their OS. ObjectiveC is a big part of that; OS X is a decendant of NeXTStep and OpenSTEP; it shouldn't be a suprise, then, that OS X will use ObjectiveC to its advantage. It's a nice thing to be able to directly use core OS components in your own programs; this isn't something that.Net or Java allow. (For that matter, Microsoft keeps much of the Windows API unavailable to non-Microsoft shops.)
I'd say it's not much different than Microsoft promoting.Net, except that major portions of Windows are not written in.Net.
ObjectiveC has poor security?!? No worse than any other language (actually, much better than most). The fact that ObjC doesn't have garbage collection isn't a strong argument about its security.
Garbage Collection isn't a magic bullet, it doesn't fix all of the world's problems, and it comes with its own unwanted baggage. Pointers are not a bad thing; nor is doing your own memory management. Believe it or not, if a coder can see beyond his own arrogant level of self-importance, he finds that his time (and cost) is frequently inconsequential compared to the cost of slow and inefficient code. (ie. a developer and his time are worth far less than he wants to believe.)
Performance does matter to users, and it does make the difference between a sale and a rejected offer. There are times when execution time costs a few dollars per minute, and taking five minutes to execute code that would take two minutes in a different language is an inexcusable offense.
This is espescailly true in my field; when you have to wait weeks just to get cycles on a supercomputer, then you had better take the time to write your code for performance. A garbage-collected language is a liability; its performance penalty is simply unacceptable, as is its resident memory size, and the amount of jitter that garbage collection adds to code executing in parrallel. Neither Java or.Net hold a candle to C and Fortran in this arena. (ObjC isn't there either; make no mistake. C++ is only starting to take a weak hold.)
It's trivial to write insecure applications in any language. Java is not immune, nor is.Net. Choice of a programming language does not provide insurance against a coder's incompetence. Stability and security have far less to do with the language it's written in than it does with the coder's ability. The 'saf
The fact that most of them are barking mad doesn't help matters.
That depends on what you consider 'help.'
In a way, I'd say it helps matters greatly; it's easier to disprove (to the reasoning observer) the views of someone who's bat-shit crazy, because those views tend to self-contradicting.
Plus, the insane are entertaining in their own way; at least if they're otherwise harmless.
Jamie and I have done the research, and figured that the only way to end the debate about the "myth" of the Apollo moon landing is to go there, and bring back something that was left there during one of the Apollo moon landings.
Except that then the conspiracy theorists would then claim that the artifacts left on the moon were placed there by a separate unmanned mission. They could also argue that the artifacts really didn't come from the moon-- the new visit to the moon was also faked, because it's impossible to get past the Van Allen Belts, and the artifacts never left Earth.
The people who are so insistent that the moon landings were a hoax simply re-interpret and filter what facts will fit their cospiracy theory; anything that disagrees with their conclusions are simply ignored or swept under the rug.
So Mr. Ballmer held a press conference and denied it happened. Whoopie!
This isn't exactly a new thing; it's been happening in business an politics for years. Sports stars are also famous for denying an accusation.
Just because Mr. Ballmer held a press conference, it means that he's telling the truth? I recall a recent President holding a press conference stating that he did not have an affair; he couldn't change the truth with a press conference.
I don't see Mr. Ballmer's actions as anything more (or less) than a knee-jerk reflex: * If the accusation is false, it annoyed him, and he wanted to set the record straight; a perfectly reasonable reflex reaction. * If the accusation is true, than it's also a perfectly reasonable reaction to try to deny everything.
Either way, it comes down one man's word aganst another; in this case, there's no compelling reason to believe either side.
Except for those who've seen (even videos) of Mr. Ballmer in action (public speeches, etc.) He's not exactly a dispassionate orator; which leads one to believe he'd be much more likely to stomp, shout, and toss a chair around than one of my college professors.
Frankly, it's actually difficult to believe Mr. Ballmer's claim that he's never thrown a chair in his life. I say this because it's difficult to believe anyone who makes this claim; I've tossed chairs around plenty -- espescially when I'm moving to a new place.
Those great big ugly transformers you see on every other pole are used to step the voltage down to 110 so your Xbox doesn't light on fire (note: the Xbox 360 has other means for accomplishing this)
Um... have you forgotten the recall of every x-box power cord from its release until about this time last year?
The original x-box could start fires way before the 360 could.
I'm getting pretty sick of people claiming that only the newest console technology can do this kind of stuff. Pretty soon we'll hear PlayStation and Nintendo fanboys talking about how their consoles can create better fires than the X-Box 360 ever could.
The difference is auto owners realize that GTA is a game. The ??AA and their cronies are so detatched from reality they can't see the difference.
I don't want to know what the ??AA thinks about the idea that a person using their right of free speech to express their political/economic views, in a copyrighted, reproduced, and marketed way, is a valuable thing (in a monetary sense).
This is exactly how pundits make their living; they excersize their free speech, people pay to hear it, and the circle of life completes itself.
Pundits have a funny way of swaying public opinion... a popular pundit may be many things (including a liar), but stupid isn't one of them. Espescially when the subject is about expressing the same kind of views that earns a pundit a soft life.
Slashdot Mirror
I keep pressing the escape button, but I can't seem to get off this crazy planet. What am I doing wrong?
After hitting the escape key, you then have to type ':qa!'
It's not moot, but if you lack the imagination to see how, you're a lost cause.
I mean it's a moot point in the case of Marquette.
On another note, let's not forget there have been groups who have worked very hard to get racial epithets classified as unprotected speech.
I agree that at a public institution, it is probably protected speech to scream racial epithets in a public area -- not wise, as it may result in a violent altercation (illegal, but a very possible consequense). But Marquette isn't a public institution, legally or otherwise.
Plus they receive federal funding anyway.
Receiving government money != strings attatched. There is much to be said for the context in which the money is given and received; as long as the money falls into certain categories (such as a grant, which is literally a gift of money -- no strings attatched), Marquette still retains all of its rights as a private institution. There is more than a little legal precedent, and Marquette is well within its rights to censor its students as they see fit.
In other words, Marquette wouldn't face any direct legal consequences for such draconian punishments.
Never forget there is a vast difference between justice and the law. What Marquette did is arguably unjust (depening on whom you talk to), but it is not illegal.
Cool. (well, cool that there is information I was unaware of; I like learning more about history...)
The beauty of pessimism is that the worst thing that can happen is being right; somehow being wrong doesn't feel so bad anymore.
You idiot. You accuse the GP of hyperbole and you drop this pile of shit argument?
I must not have been as clear as I thought.
I had no intention of accusing the GP of hyperbole, or that the GP had used it. My intention was to fully acknowledge that the follwing statement: What's to stop somebody from expressing their "freedom of speech", and their "freedom of expression" by terminating your status as a living being? is hyperbole.
In other words, I was using hyperbole to make a point, and attempted to acknowlede that fact.
Apparently I wasn't clear enough, and my admission that my example is hyperbole was taken as an accusation that the GP was the one using it.
I doubt at this point there is any question that writing wasn't my major course of study.
A moot point, since Marquette isn't a public university.
Why yes, I would. Being vulgar is no reason to expel a student! "Freedom of Speech" and "Freedom of Expression" don't mean "Freedom of Speech for everything except what I don't like." That's the consequence for having freedom: people are free to do a bunch of mean, nasty, vulgar, and vile shit.
While this first example is obviously hyporbole, consider this: What's to stop somebody from expressing their "freedom of speech", and their "freedom of expression" by terminating your status as a living being? That's the consequence for having freedom: people are free to do a bunch of mean, nasty, vulger, and file shit!
There have been limits to "Freedom of Speech" in the United States since 1798; perhaps even earlier. (Actually, no buts about it considering slaves weren't entitled to free speech at all...) There are boundaries in the 'Freedom of Speech', some of which include penalties.
Such an example is the fact that a person can be incarcerated for the rest of his/her life for expressing their freedom of speech by divulging state secrets. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed for expressing their freedom of speech in this way; the real kick in the teeth is recent evidence seems to cast into doubt their guilt in having actually expressed anything.
Again, though: Marquette is still legally classified as a private institution. They can treat their students in a similar way you could treat a guest in your home: You are perfectly free to expel them from your house for behaving in a way that you do not approve. Marquette has the same rights.
(I'm just an observer, but that's what slashdot is for...)
IIRC, the big beef with Rambus cost isn't the royalty; as you point out, it's a rather small amount.
The big deal for price with RDRAM was that the stuff was more significantly expensive to manufacture; this meant that while RDRAM didn't cost much more (to a consumer) than DDR memory, it was far less profitable to the memory manufacturers.
How does this play into DDR and SDRAM? If Rambus's patents are held as valid, Rambus gets to set terms for how DDR and SDRAM is licensed.
Don't underestimate the effect this can have. For the sake of playing the 'worst case' scenerio (which may or may not be the end result). To obtain a license for DDR and SDR patents, the memory company (ie. Samsung, Hynix, Micron, Infineon, etc.) must also agree to:
* License XDR (for another 3.5% fee).
* Agree to halt all R&D into new RAM technologies. (ie. give up all ability to develop their own technologies, essentially making it impossible to be self-sufficient again.)
* Agree to license every new whiz-bang buzzword Rambus develops, until the patent expires.
* All of which in turn requires:
* Licensing of all new Rambus IP
* The licensee must halt (or continue to not participate in) R&D into new RAM technologies.
* Increase the price of all competing (non-RDRAM, non-XDR) memory by 300%. (Or even halt all production of competing products entirely.)
The thing to remember about a patent: it is a government granted monopoly. Price-fixing, gouging, and anti-trust do not apply. The patent holder gets to set all terms on the manufacture, and sale of the technology the patent covers, reguardless of how arbitrary, unreasonable, and selective those terms may be. It would be perfectly within their rights to allow any maker but brand 'X' to license their IP.
The broadness of what a patent holder can demand of its licensees is the reason why Hynix, Micron, Infineon, and others have been fighting these patents; the patents literally give Rambus the ability to force any (and all) of them out of business entirely. It's espescially galling to these companies as they feel that Rambus illegally took technologies that were discussed (and developed, depending on whom you talk to) at JEDEC, and patented work and ideas originating from JEDEC (and not Rambus). Hynix, Micron, and Infineon feel much like their IP was stolen, and some thug came pounding on their door for 'protection money.'
Whether that is actually the case may never be known; Rambus destroyed many of the documents that are involved (the article itself states that the Judge ruled that it was OK for Rambus to do this, because the documents were not intentionally destroyed to avoid incrimination in a lawsuit.) I'm quite certain similar things can be said of the various RAM makers; there are no white knights in this tale. The courts will continue to plod through the various cases, and eventually decisions will be made as to whether the patents are valid (and legal) or not.
Regardless of the outcome, a great many people feel that Rambus's patents were obtained in a dishonest way, and feel Rambus is going to be similarly dishonest in how the patents are licenced should they be deemed enforcable.
I've got to say, though, it's looking like the patents will have expired before the litigation ends... the issue is far from resolution, and the patents are about halfway through their lifetimes.
The real problem isn't necessarily server code. It's server hardware, and bandwidth; a mmorpg server can't run on the kind of hardware mere mortals can afford. And the amount of bandwidth isn't cheap either.
You state it yourself -- a shop is a place.
The reason why people get confused about 'photo-shop' is simple: the term was already defined as something else long before Adobe came around. Back in the day, 'photo shop' can meant an office/store where graphics professionals produce/modify/create images.
It wouldn't be much unlike causing confusion by naming a piece of software 'hobby shop.' The phrase is already in common use, having already been defined as a place in which a person can buy/sell goods related to one's hobby. Naming a piece of software 'hobby shop' would cause confusion among everybody else to whom 'hobby shop' has nothing to do with your software.
So it comes down to a name trying to re-define a term already in common use; calling a dry desert a 'sea' causes similar problems. "Sea of Tranquility -- You mean there's no water?!?" To someone who doesn't know where the Sea of Tranquility is, this can be the source of major confusion.
When you know the origin of the phrase, it's fairly simple. You know what WinAMP does; so the name seems easy and obvious.
If you only have the name, and not the purpose of the program, the name 'WinAMP' can have multiple meanings; WinAMP isn't an intuitive name to the uninitiated.
"Amp" is indeed a shortened word for amplifier; but it does not necessarily have to be electronic in nature.
AMP is also the name of a energy drink made by Pepsi. There's also the common usage of 'amp' as in "someone who's been 'Amped' up on steroids/caffiene, etc." (or the aforementioned energy drink...)
I look at it this way: WinAMP is an unclear name, simply on the basis that my mother wouldn't be able to figure out its purpose simply by the name of the program.
Actually, there was also sibling post complaining about kde using 'k' to prefix everything; yours was the more reasonably worded comment, so I replied to it.
...)
I'm not really a fanboy of GNOME or KDE; I use both interchangably (and I like the occasional change of pace). I find it interesting how... rabid each side's fanboys can be towards the other.
It's interesting how often GNOME fanboys complain about the 'k' prefix for KDE programs, yet seem entirely oblivious to the fact that GNOME does the same thing. The famous telescope effect -- the other guys problems seem much larger than your own.
KDE users complain about similar nonsense about GNOME, all the while blissfully ignorant that KDE usually does the same things.
All in all, it's remarkable how similar the two environments are, and how many good ideas are passed between each other. (As well as how many bad ideas get dropped because the other project did the same thing in a better way).
To be honest, I don't see using the 'k' or 'g' as a prefix much different from Apple's use of 'i' (iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD,
It's interesting how the article also selects Linux programs that don't have a descriptive name, yet completely ignores unhelpful Windwos names.
Cases in point:
Simple Text Editing
Listed:
Windows: NotePad, WordPad, TextPad
Linux: gedit, kate
Unlisted:
Linux: kwrite, kedit (only listed because they're quite obvious)
On the Windows side, how about:
PowerPoint: (a powerful pointer? a SUPER laser pointer? WTF!?!)
Excel: (Excel... excel at what?)
Nero: (what is a dead Roman emperor doing on my hard disk?)
WinAMP: (Apparently this amplifies windows; so it must make it better or more powerful somehow)
PhotoShop: (Must be a photo printing service...)
Basically, the article takes what brand recognition Windows has for granted, while completely discounting the same effect for Linux. More astounding, is when you have a brand that exists on both platforms (GIMP, FireFox, Opera).
You see the same problem for people who move between a Mac and a Windows box; Mac users have such obscure program names as QuickTime, Pages, Keynote, Preview, Safari, BBEdit, Text Wrangler. iMovie... does this mean it plays or makes movies?
Basically, he's complaining because different platforms have their tools named differently. It happens everywhere; if I walk into a bar and ask for a screwdriver, I'm going to get something entirely different than I would if I were to ask for a screwdriver at the hardware store. Differences in the dialects of English spoken in Australia, the US, and England are good examples. The bottom line is you have to take the time to use the proper dialect, at leeast some of your meaning will get lost in translation.
I don't see how putting the 'K' in front of everything is substantially different from GNOME:
gpdf, gedit, ggv, gnometris (or pretty much any of the default GNOME games), gnumeric, gfloppy, gtop, gcalctool, gucharmap...
Nothing like a good double-standard; apparently it's OK for the GNOME project to use 'g' or some variant of 'gnome' to prefix their programs, but it's out of the question for KDE to prefix their programs with 'K' or 'kde'.
If it can get you within 20 meters (or let's say even 50) and you still can't locate a particular address, I don't think that problem is with the GPS system.
Careful there; youre asking geeks to look away from their shiny for a few seconds.
First off: The subsidies removed are quite paltry in comparison with the total amount. In other words: Much ado about nothing. The agreements made are little more than token gestures, and will have very little real impact.
And the US doesn't cave because the sanctions are large enough; the view is that the WTO will help the US more than it can hurt it, so it's generally better to simply comply with the rules when possible.
For instance, the US still holds that genetically modified foods cannot be labeled (or sold) as such under WTO regulations, and has a fair chance of winning that case.
Another example of where the US feels it is being wronged is the massive subsidies given to Airbus by various European governments (in addition to lucrative military contracts that Airbus receives), whereas the US competitor, Boeing, doesn't receive any government subsidy (although it also receives military contracts). In the case of both Airbus and Boeting, the military contracts aren't enough to keep the companies afloat; both make the vast majority of their income from bulding commercial airliners; only Airbus gets nearly all of their development costs subsidized by various governments throughout the EU.
So, like in most things, it's felt that the benefit of the one outweighs the possible loss of the others. The US (like most governments) generally disobeys WTO rules when it feels they are unjust.
IIRC, the US is still voluntarily eating the sanctions imposed due to its protection of its steel industry, and I doubt that's going to change, as most Americans feel it's very important to have a steel industry capable of providing self-sufficiency in this strategic resource.
More programs than realtime have this fundamental problem with garbage collection.
Take a massively parallel program (such as an MPI program on a thousand-node cluster). The jitter induced by garbage collection causes a huge decrease in systemwide efficiency, and as a result, the app runs much slower than it would on a non-GC language.
Cosidering the cost of running these systems, runtime is more expensive than a developer's time, and as a result, it's much more cost-effective to use an 'old fashioned' language like C, C++, or Fortran.
plenty of desktop applications exist for GC based languages now, there are many .Net and Java applications which work fine on the desktop
.Net, C# ... these are just tools, just like C++, C, Objective C, and Assembler. I've seen far too many people who somehow think that Java (or .Net, or whatever the 'new' language dujour happens to be) make claims about a language being some sort of magic bullet.
.Net or Java allow. (For that matter, Microsoft keeps much of the Windows API unavailable to non-Microsoft shops.)
.Net, except that major portions of Windows are not written in .Net.
.Net hold a candle to C and Fortran in this arena. (ObjC isn't there either; make no mistake. C++ is only starting to take a weak hold.)
.Net. Choice of a programming language does not provide insurance against a coder's incompetence. Stability and security have far less to do with the language it's written in than it does with the coder's ability. The 'saf
Care to name one that I might use (or see in a store for purchase)?
I've made usable, powerful and secure desktop apps in Java, if you can't do this, then you either don't know Java properly or haven't tried.
Funny... I know more than a few (highly experienced) Java programmers who believed thier code was usable, powerful, and secure. The problem is that the software was none of the above, and I had the privilege of having to 'prove the impossible' before the Java coders would admit there was a problem.
Java,
Magic bullets do not exist.
Objective-C is a backwater language with poor security which for some strange reason, only Apple prefer over other more mainstream and IMHO more productive languages.
Obscure? Funny, I think the same thing about Java programmers; every thing I see is written in either C, C++, or Fortran. Java is still widely reguarded as little more than a 'toy' language used by web developers. Its performance hit is simply too large to be taken seriously.
Apple prefers Cocoa because it's the native API for their OS. ObjectiveC is a big part of that; OS X is a decendant of NeXTStep and OpenSTEP; it shouldn't be a suprise, then, that OS X will use ObjectiveC to its advantage. It's a nice thing to be able to directly use core OS components in your own programs; this isn't something that
I'd say it's not much different than Microsoft promoting
ObjectiveC has poor security?!? No worse than any other language (actually, much better than most). The fact that ObjC doesn't have garbage collection isn't a strong argument about its security.
Garbage Collection isn't a magic bullet, it doesn't fix all of the world's problems, and it comes with its own unwanted baggage. Pointers are not a bad thing; nor is doing your own memory management. Believe it or not, if a coder can see beyond his own arrogant level of self-importance, he finds that his time (and cost) is frequently inconsequential compared to the cost of slow and inefficient code. (ie. a developer and his time are worth far less than he wants to believe.)
Performance does matter to users, and it does make the difference between a sale and a rejected offer. There are times when execution time costs a few dollars per minute, and taking five minutes to execute code that would take two minutes in a different language is an inexcusable offense.
This is espescailly true in my field; when you have to wait weeks just to get cycles on a supercomputer, then you had better take the time to write your code for performance. A garbage-collected language is a liability; its performance penalty is simply unacceptable, as is its resident memory size, and the amount of jitter that garbage collection adds to code executing in parrallel. Neither Java or
It's trivial to write insecure applications in any language. Java is not immune, nor is
Fascinating, and, oh, look! Dvorak is little endian!
Could someone please tell me why there's a war between the big-enders and the little-enders?
vi vs emacs is at least entertaining; I fail to see the entertainment (or any other) value in the endianness of a chip...
The fact that most of them are barking mad doesn't help matters.
That depends on what you consider 'help.'
In a way, I'd say it helps matters greatly; it's easier to disprove (to the reasoning observer) the views of someone who's bat-shit crazy, because those views tend to self-contradicting.
Plus, the insane are entertaining in their own way; at least if they're otherwise harmless.
There is one thing that I wonder, though:
What do you do when two experts disagree? (As is often the case)
This is sorta like complaining that the new version of gcc doesn't have any major new features.
For most gcc users, this is 100% true; insert valid C code, get a working binary out-- what happens in the middle doesn't matter to them.
Therefore, the new release of gcc does not have any new features, and there was no reason for a major version number bump.
Can't someone just point a really good telescope up there and get pictures of the stuff left behind?
Unfortunatelly, no, because no such telescope exists. A great explanation of why is at http://www.ucolick.org/~robin/moonhoax.html
Jamie and I have done the research, and figured that the only way to end the debate about the "myth" of the Apollo moon landing is to go there, and bring back something that was left there during one of the Apollo moon landings.
Except that then the conspiracy theorists would then claim that the artifacts left on the moon were placed there by a separate unmanned mission. They could also argue that the artifacts really didn't come from the moon-- the new visit to the moon was also faked, because it's impossible to get past the Van Allen Belts, and the artifacts never left Earth.
The people who are so insistent that the moon landings were a hoax simply re-interpret and filter what facts will fit their cospiracy theory; anything that disagrees with their conclusions are simply ignored or swept under the rug.
So Mr. Ballmer held a press conference and denied it happened. Whoopie!
This isn't exactly a new thing; it's been happening in business an politics for years. Sports stars are also famous for denying an accusation.
Just because Mr. Ballmer held a press conference, it means that he's telling the truth? I recall a recent President holding a press conference stating that he did not have an affair; he couldn't change the truth with a press conference.
I don't see Mr. Ballmer's actions as anything more (or less) than a knee-jerk reflex:
* If the accusation is false, it annoyed him, and he wanted to set the record straight; a perfectly reasonable reflex reaction.
* If the accusation is true, than it's also a perfectly reasonable reaction to try to deny everything.
Either way, it comes down one man's word aganst another; in this case, there's no compelling reason to believe either side.
Except for those who've seen (even videos) of Mr. Ballmer in action (public speeches, etc.) He's not exactly a dispassionate orator; which leads one to believe he'd be much more likely to stomp, shout, and toss a chair around than one of my college professors.
Frankly, it's actually difficult to believe Mr. Ballmer's claim that he's never thrown a chair in his life. I say this because it's difficult to believe anyone who makes this claim; I've tossed chairs around plenty -- espescially when I'm moving to a new place.
Those great big ugly transformers you see on every other pole are used to step the voltage down to 110 so your Xbox doesn't light on fire (note: the Xbox 360 has other means for accomplishing this)
Um... have you forgotten the recall of every x-box power cord from its release until about this time last year?
The original x-box could start fires way before the 360 could.
I'm getting pretty sick of people claiming that only the newest console technology can do this kind of stuff. Pretty soon we'll hear PlayStation and Nintendo fanboys talking about how their consoles can create better fires than the X-Box 360 ever could.
The difference is auto owners realize that GTA is a game. The ??AA and their cronies are so detatched from reality they can't see the difference.
I don't want to know what the ??AA thinks about the idea that a person using their right of free speech to express their political/economic views, in a copyrighted, reproduced, and marketed way, is a valuable thing (in a monetary sense).
This is exactly how pundits make their living; they excersize their free speech, people pay to hear it, and the circle of life completes itself.
Pundits have a funny way of swaying public opinion... a popular pundit may be many things (including a liar), but stupid isn't one of them. Espescially when the subject is about expressing the same kind of views that earns a pundit a soft life.