I'm French and our society is so 'laic' that raised without religious education, I'm now an atheist without any struggle depicted in the article, so if men were really hard-wired to believe in God, how could a 'laic' society could emerge?
Also in the article, the sentence "Why do we cross our fingers during turbulence, even the most atheistic among us?" annoyed me: sure there are atheists which are superstitious (which is kind of weird), but there are also sceptics atheists/agnostics, so this sentence is an outrageous exaggeration/lie..
While I respect the man, I'm a bit baffled by things like this "he wants to encourage public interest in spaceflight, which he believes is critical to the future of humanity."
The "future" covers a huge amount of time, so I'm not sure we need to take interest in space exploration *now*. If I was the one spending money, I'll put most of the credit into Drexler's style nanotechnology research, once we 'master' nanotechnology, then tackling space exploration makes sense as either: - at best a space elevator becomes possible and space access cost are reduced a lot, - at worst a space elevator is impossible, but the improved materials should still reduce the cost of space access a lot and the payload themselves would be lighter.
Having a file hierarchy standard with unknown name sucks. Then again, Unix poor naming isn't restricted to/etc..
Re:Does Vista have anything we need?
on
Is Vista a Trap?
·
· Score: 1
>The same technology used to stop software piracy could be used after the fact to switch off hospitals and clinics that don't pay their bills.
Only if these client X rent their software not buy it, or are too dumb to choose a software which cannot export data to a 'standard format' readable by other software.
Choosing X==hospital is the same logic than 'thinks of the children': an appeal to emotion not logics, which is really low.
While the combination of radix sort and linked list is interesting, the implementation is quite poor: to contain all the bit in a 16bit word you need an array of 65536 bits not 65535!!
Minor points: -It's using an ugly hack to split the 32bit values into the low or high 16b, why not just duplicate the function? -Ptrs and Tail are initialised manually instead of using memset which can be more efficient. -It would perhaps be worth using one combined array for Ptrs and Tail to improve cache locality (probably a very minor gain).
"But Perl has a reputation for taking an excessive cryptic nature which gives it an image especially among Perl novices as a language which is complex and hard to master"
Mmm, the bad Perl reputation is not especially among novices: at my beginning in Perl, I thought that it was a better, more powerful shell, and then I discovered Perl's maintenance hell and the more I used Perl, the more I disliked it.
Thank God for Ruby, it's funny it occupies exactly the same niche than Perl, but it's so different.. Ruby's creator has a 'really good aesthetic sense' and now that (at last) RoR is helping the Ruby language to spread, it has a chance to be used more often.
(sarcasm) The USA has a very good intelligence service, they will for sure find the correct location of the attackers, look how good they were to locate WMD recently!
Frankly, what's such a big point to allow anonymous commit?
Mandatory registration would weed out much crap, allowing better supervision of the rest.. Now that Wikipedia has such momentum, it wouldn't slow down much the rate of contributions.
Thanks for the specifications, they're interesting: > Switching time: 0,5-1s Not very good, it's too long to wait between switching pages.
>- Rolling radius: 0.75 cm Which means that a roll has a diameter of 1.5cm, and you have to add the casing thickness to have the height of the reader so it should be around 2cm, a bit thick but reasonable.
I cannot believe I'm reading this.. What matters for a GUI is the *ease of use* period, it could be implemented in OpenGL or in Tcl/Tk, who cares?
What the GP said is that the GUI is non-standard so it's more difficult to use, you may disagree with this point but answering that Blender is good because the GUI is written in OpenGL, sigh..
Agreed, if what I've seen on the web is true, Microsoft will provide an XPS reader in Vista, plus MS Office will generate XPS.
So with a monopoly on OS + monopoly on Office suite to leverage XPS, it shouldn't be too hard to displace PDF in a few years (the time for Vista to become widespread with the renewal of PCs).
Because the problem with drugs is the addiction triggered by them. I don't think that there are so many people addicted to coffee..
Now, if you asked the same question about Marijuana, this would be more interesting: I had some friends which on Saturday nights party smoked Marijuana: they didn't get addicted at all, they wouldn't smoke during the week, or at all parties.. Sure I knew also one guy who was addicted: he smoke everyday, so it's possible, but you can get addicted to anything..
There was no separate search box, you just typed in the location bar and entered 'Tab' and it did the search.
IMHO having a separate search box and location box as in Firefox/Opera is stupid: there should be just one box for URL or search strings (to search you do tab+enter), with a 'search menu' which allow you to select the engine (a bit like current FF search box but without the text box part).
> Maybe I'm in the minority of people here, but I've always gone to sites that have actual reviews of the card I will potentially be buying.
I doubt that a majority of slashdot readers don't do the same thing, that said I don't know if you have seen but the website usually compares boards in the same range but don't provide the prices of the boards, so you have to build yourself the graph with the performance/price comparison. So it's not so easy to do the comparison..
That's what I wanted to express, but then the example with the calculator was a good one: depend on the shape of the calculator, you may use your thumb with a calculator so it should be coherent with a phone..
Note that if we talk about coherency then: -keyboards should be ABCDE.. instead of QWERTY: we learn the alphabet much earlier than we learn how to use keyboards. -CPUs (x86 blah) should be big endian instead of little endian: this helps a lot when you dump a memory and try to read the result.
> I didn't see anything hypocritical about it. Well, you're not looking at it enough: so he didn't find any project providing the feature he wanted, why didn't he help any existing framework adding the feature?
He doesn't explain it, but that's clearly because he wants to do things his way and he doesn't really care about the users or the other developers to help any existing framework.
Then he is disappointed that people makes change to without sending patches? That's simple: they want to do things their way and they don't care really about him or the other users..
So yes, his article show how an OSS project started, but it's also show why real progress for the users or in the FLOSS codebase is slow..
Note that hierarchical path, allows easy browsing. But with non-hierarchical tags, you would have the following tags to choose from: pictures, trip, 2006, Christmas, etc..
Hundred of tags, what a mess! To sort those tags, maybe we should order them hierarchically?:-)
>why does the display always have to be 'on top of' the keypad?
Because if you put the display below the keypad, your hand will prevent you to see the screen, duh! In one handed typing my hand hide about half of the screen: a bad idea..
>who the hell decided that a phone's keypad should be the inverse of a standard numeric keypad?
Bah, like you type on the phone keypad, the same way you do on a keyboard! What matters, is that it is standardised on the phone keypads and on keyboards, but as you type differently with both devices, there is no real necessity/advantage that both should be the same.
Also, why do you take the keyboards as a 'standard', I wonder what happened first: phones with keypad or keyboards with keypad?
What you described is the current situation, it doesn't mean that this is a "good" situation.. If memory serves, USA is also the country which has a high rate of weapon accidents, suicide attempt using guns (which obviously have a high probability of success)..
And I stand by what I was saying: a kid shouldn't have access to weapons, a teen is a different situation as you said it depends on the maturity of the teen and if a parent doesn't judge adequately this or train him the proper way, yes he is liable for an injury/death that can happen.
> [], a neighbor kid was shot by one of the other kids in the neighborhood. This was in a horrible town in Texas, and it was an accident.
I disagree, if they were kids, this is *not* an accident: they shouldn't have access to weapons in the first place.
Of course, I don't know the specific, but if you have a weapon and don't ensure than kids cannot have access to it, then IMHO you're responsible for whatever happens.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm French and our society is so 'laic' that raised without religious education, I'm now an atheist without any struggle depicted in the article, so if men were really hard-wired to believe in God, how could a 'laic' society could emerge?
Also in the article, the sentence "Why do we cross our fingers during turbulence, even the most atheistic among us?" annoyed me: sure there are atheists which are superstitious (which is kind of weird), but there are also sceptics atheists/agnostics, so this sentence is an outrageous exaggeration/lie..
While I respect the man, I'm a bit baffled by things like this "he wants to encourage public interest in spaceflight, which he believes is critical to the future of humanity."
The "future" covers a huge amount of time, so I'm not sure we need to take interest in space exploration *now*. If I was the one spending money, I'll put most of the credit into Drexler's style nanotechnology research, once we 'master' nanotechnology, then tackling space exploration makes sense as either:
- at best a space elevator becomes possible and space access cost are reduced a lot,
- at worst a space elevator is impossible, but the improved materials should still reduce the cost of space access a lot and the payload themselves would be lighter.
Having a file hierarchy standard with unknown name sucks. /etc..
Then again, Unix poor naming isn't restricted to
>The same technology used to stop software piracy could be used after the fact to switch off hospitals and clinics that don't pay their bills.
Only if these client X rent their software not buy it, or are too dumb to choose a software which cannot export data to a 'standard format' readable by other software.
Choosing X==hospital is the same logic than 'thinks of the children': an appeal to emotion not logics, which is really low.
While the combination of radix sort and linked list is interesting, the implementation is quite poor: to contain all the bit in a 16bit word you need an array of 65536 bits not 65535!!
Minor points:
-It's using an ugly hack to split the 32bit values into the low or high 16b, why not just duplicate the function?
-Ptrs and Tail are initialised manually instead of using memset which can be more efficient.
-It would perhaps be worth using one combined array for Ptrs and Tail to improve cache locality (probably a very minor gain).
I wonder if it's true, after all there are two implementations of ODF: OOo and KOffice, it'd be interesting to hear KOffice developers on the subject.
Recently I hear a criticism of ODF by Miguel de Icaza is that ODF doesn't reuse standards like SVG as much as it should..
"But Perl has a reputation for taking an excessive cryptic nature which gives it an image especially among Perl novices as a language which is complex and hard to master"
Mmm, the bad Perl reputation is not especially among novices: at my beginning in Perl, I thought that it was a better, more powerful shell, and then I discovered Perl's maintenance hell and the more I used Perl, the more I disliked it.
Thank God for Ruby, it's funny it occupies exactly the same niche than Perl, but it's so different.. Ruby's creator has a 'really good aesthetic sense' and now that (at last) RoR is helping the Ruby language to spread, it has a chance to be used more often.
>I still want one bad.
Given that the keyboard is made for children (i.e. it's small), I'm not sure that it would be a good computer for adults..
Google 'look how much we spent for "You tube", we did this to increase the global bandwith'.
Uh? The money spent by Google on "You tube" was given to the previous owners, not to increase the backbone bandwith..
(sarcasm) The USA has a very good intelligence service, they will for sure find the correct location of the attackers, look how good they were to locate WMD recently!
Only if you're an addict..
Frankly, what's such a big point to allow anonymous commit?
Mandatory registration would weed out much crap, allowing better supervision of the rest..
Now that Wikipedia has such momentum, it wouldn't slow down much the rate of contributions.
Thanks for the specifications, they're interesting:
> Switching time: 0,5-1s
Not very good, it's too long to wait between switching pages.
>- Rolling radius: 0.75 cm
Which means that a roll has a diameter of 1.5cm, and you have to add the casing thickness to have the height of the reader so it should be around 2cm, a bit thick but reasonable.
>It's got a fully OpenGL accelerated GUI
I cannot believe I'm reading this..
What matters for a GUI is the *ease of use* period, it could be implemented in OpenGL or in Tcl/Tk, who cares?
What the GP said is that the GUI is non-standard so it's more difficult to use, you may disagree with this point but answering that Blender is good because the GUI is written in OpenGL, sigh..
Agreed, if what I've seen on the web is true, Microsoft will provide an XPS reader in Vista, plus MS Office will generate XPS.
So with a monopoly on OS + monopoly on Office suite to leverage XPS, it shouldn't be too hard to displace PDF in a few years (the time for Vista to become widespread with the renewal of PCs).
>they'll experience headaches and become very irritable.
I've never known someone who had that, how long last these effects?
If it's one day or two, that's still a mild addiction.
>Why is caffeine not a drug in America?
Because the problem with drugs is the addiction triggered by them.
I don't think that there are so many people addicted to coffee..
Now, if you asked the same question about Marijuana, this would be more interesting: I had some friends which on Saturday nights party smoked Marijuana: they didn't get addicted at all, they wouldn't smoke during the week, or at all parties..
Sure I knew also one guy who was addicted: he smoke everyday, so it's possible, but you can get addicted to anything..
I don't like Opera's solution: you have to type the g before the text, and I'm used to Mozilla when I could just use Tab+Enter to do the search.
Now in the absolute, I don't know which is best..
There was no separate search box, you just typed in the location bar and entered 'Tab' and it did the search.
IMHO having a separate search box and location box as in Firefox/Opera is stupid: there should be just one box for URL or search strings (to search you do tab+enter), with a 'search menu' which allow you to select the engine (a bit like current FF search box but without the text box part).
> Maybe I'm in the minority of people here, but I've always gone to sites that have actual reviews of the card I will potentially be buying.
I doubt that a majority of slashdot readers don't do the same thing, that said I don't know if you have seen but the website usually compares boards in the same range but don't provide the prices of the boards, so you have to build yourself the graph with the performance/price comparison.
So it's not so easy to do the comparison..
That's what I wanted to express, but then the example with the calculator was a good one: depend on the shape of the calculator, you may use your thumb with a calculator so it should be coherent with a phone..
Note that if we talk about coherency then:
-keyboards should be ABCDE.. instead of QWERTY: we learn the alphabet much earlier than we learn how to use keyboards.
-CPUs (x86 blah) should be big endian instead of little endian: this helps a lot when you dump a memory and try to read the result.
> I didn't see anything hypocritical about it.
Well, you're not looking at it enough: so he didn't find any project providing the feature he wanted, why didn't he help any existing framework adding the feature?
He doesn't explain it, but that's clearly because he wants to do things his way and he doesn't really care about the users or the other developers to help any existing framework.
Then he is disappointed that people makes change to without sending patches?
That's simple: they want to do things their way and they don't care really about him or the other users..
So yes, his article show how an OSS project started, but it's also show why real progress for the users or in the FLOSS codebase is slow..
Note that hierarchical path, allows easy browsing.
:-)
But with non-hierarchical tags, you would have the following tags to choose from:
pictures, trip, 2006, Christmas, etc..
Hundred of tags, what a mess!
To sort those tags, maybe we should order them hierarchically?
Muahah, *evil laugh*
>why does the display always have to be 'on top of' the keypad?
Because if you put the display below the keypad, your hand will prevent you to see the screen, duh!
In one handed typing my hand hide about half of the screen: a bad idea..
>who the hell decided that a phone's keypad should be the inverse of a standard numeric keypad?
Bah, like you type on the phone keypad, the same way you do on a keyboard!
What matters, is that it is standardised on the phone keypads and on keyboards, but as you type differently with both devices, there is no real necessity/advantage that both should be the same.
Also, why do you take the keyboards as a 'standard', I wonder what happened first: phones with keypad or keyboards with keypad?
What you described is the current situation, it doesn't mean that this is a "good" situation..
If memory serves, USA is also the country which has a high rate of weapon accidents, suicide attempt using guns (which obviously have a high probability of success)..
And I stand by what I was saying: a kid shouldn't have access to weapons, a teen is a different situation as you said it depends on the maturity of the teen and if a parent doesn't judge adequately this or train him the proper way, yes he is liable for an injury/death that can happen.
> [], a neighbor kid was shot by one of the other kids in the neighborhood. This was in a horrible town in Texas, and it was an accident.
I disagree, if they were kids, this is *not* an accident: they shouldn't have access to weapons in the first place.
Of course, I don't know the specific, but if you have a weapon and don't ensure than kids cannot have access to it, then IMHO you're responsible for whatever happens.