I remember this dude that used to be an author, whose posts were nothing more than political rants and conspiracy theories. I don't remember his handle, though. It was a very long time ago... and I think most people had him blocked.
This place has become more shiny over the years. It never used to be all anal retentive about being "professional." Hell, there used to be a rather large wikipedia page dedicated to the slashdot trolling phenomenon.
I suppose I don't really understand where the expectation of "professional" came from.
The anecdote is nice, but not proof of anything. For as many burger-flippers that do weed, I could come up with as many MDs, or developers, or whatever that do the same.
Yet, when you're dealing with a high stress situation, and really wanting to unwind, the first thing you're probably going to think of is weed.
It is not physically addicting, but I'm convinced that there is a strong psychological addictiveness. There's a reason why people are "every day, all day long" types of smokers.
The Cloud in most cases, is usually a set of service endpoints hosted on a massive web farm. Amazon's cloud services allow you to stand up virtual machines. Microsoft's appears to revolve primarily around storage. Facebook's is for content delivery.
The front end is just a thin client to the cloud, be it through HTML/CSS/AJAX in some web browser, a thin client "app" sitting on an iphone / android, a windows service running in the background, or whatever. All of those clients utilize a set of services that are hosted in... the Cloud.
People that are "fed up" with the cloud are mostly ignorant of what cloud computing actually offers.
Note that nowhere in the Constitution is this authority explicitly granted to the judiciary. It's not explicitly granted to *anyone*. But early in the country's history, the Supreme Court arbitrarily decided that it was the the job of the judiciary to judge the constitutionality of laws, and since it's been 200 or so years without anyone amending the Constitution to say otherwise it's pretty much generally accepted that the courts *do* have this power.
Judicial review exists to allow the "boss" of the government to have a full check and balance against the actions of the government. "Of the people, by the people, for the people" is the intention of our governmental structure. If an unconstitutional law is passed, then it is the prerogative of the people, and within their power, to bring suit in order to nullify that law.
That suit lands squarely in the realm of the judiciary. Note that the courts can't arbitrarily audit a law once passed. Someone must file suit in order to initiate judicial review.
All that aside. I too, would rather support a single-payer system. We already have two in the US: Medicare for those 65+ and Tricare for those in the military. Medicare has the lowest overhead expense rate of all insurers - 2%. Even doubling that would be much lower than for private insurers. Heck, even all the old-folks in the Tea Party want to keep their Medicare. See this: Matt Taibbi on the Tea Party (How corporate interests and Republican insiders built the Tea Party monster.)
Medicare also bones the healthcare providers that choose to service Medicare patients. Many doctors find it a far more attractive option to be gainfully employed by Kaiser Permanente than to have a private practice with the prospect of treating Medicare patients (and billing Uncle Sam).
What's depressing is that you guys seem to have ended up with the worst of all possible health systems.
the expense, the inefficiency and the overall terribleness of a private system combined with the expense, the inefficiency and the overall terribleness of a public system.
Avoiding the advantages of either and getting the disadvantages of both.
There really isn't an inefficiency or terribleness of care in this system. The "issues" stem from how the insurance companies handle the money afterward. I can secure medication for X or Y issue within a day or two. I can also get treated for cancer, broken bones, internal injuries, etc, rather promptly.
Of course, I have insurance, which makes that promptness possible. Where the ship runs aground for me, is when the insurance decides that X% of the bill is not covered... The care was great, but the ass-reaming by the insurance companies really sucks.
That socially overactive bimboslut who's flunking math class is actually much smarter than the super nerd in the corner who doesn't have any friends but aces all his math tests. Yes, that's right, being social and interacting with others is the new measure of smart!
Going by the rule of passing on desirable traits, the bimboslut is the far more successful human in this case.
I have a humanities degree and an engineering degree. Neither was easier than the other to pass, they just required very different skills. I note that you "waffled" but he had to "structure" the ideas into a "well-formed English essay". Don't you wish more engineers had that ability? And why do you assume he only used your ideas? To get a first he would have had to have shown how it linked in to the rest of the course, something he would have had to do himself when he got back upstairs.
I have a CS degree and work in the industry, and this is fairly noticeable. One striking issue is that the way a programmer or "math-head" communicates is completely different from the expectation that the "Arts-Head" understands. The problem arises within the communication channels between developers and end users. Developers will list out key points and assume that the end user has the capacity and understanding of the key points to reassemble them in the way the developer expects.
This is where there truly is value in the humanities. I've done all the math, science, and "difficult" material. Sure, it is brutal to those who don't understand. However, instruction in philosophy, languages, sociology, psychology, anthropology, or medicine could be just as brutal. Those studies are fascinating, because they deal with all of the shades of gray that appear in the world. There aren't strict rule sets that force a black and white way of solving things.
In CS, grammars are the backbone of languages. In humanity, grammar is a fluid structure that is subject to the whims of society, and its use of natural languages. I don't think that there are many people who can grasp both of those concepts at the same time, at all. Math and science are no more difficult than humanities, than humanities are more difficult than math and science.
If you have a 30" monitor and want to drive it at its native, beyond HD rez (2560x1600) you need some heavy hitting hardware to take care of that, particularly if you'd like the game to run nice and smooth, more around 60fps than around 30. You then need still more if you'd like to crank up anti-aliasing and so on.
Isn't the point of AA to make things look better at lower resolutions? Running at resolutions beyond the HD rez, even on large screens, eliminate any sort of need for FSAA. At that point, you just don't get jaggies that need to be smoothed.
Being OLD is never a good excuse to replace it. There may be other issues that need addressing but OLD is never it. If anything, OLD is a good reason to keep it. It's "survival of the fittest" and X11 apparently outlasted many attempts to replace it.
How about OLD, BLOATED, and CRAPPY, as well as built upon a foundation that is no longer necessary or desired?
When you install a standard distro as a desktop OS, you get a full blown X server. It's a massive beast, and causes a bit of a bottleneck. There are also design choices that were made which ended up being poor choices, though the reasoning for this was that it was a very new thing to everyone. Now, after many many years of experience and study, we finally have the opportunity to discard the old and outdated system in favor of a modern one.
You talk about power in the OS, but then also talk about X11 as doing what we need. X11 does do what we need, but it also provides more than what we need, to the detriment of what we need. Let it be the client that sits on top of a system that really is what we need. That way, we can actually realize more of the power of the OS platform we run on. mmkay?
I'm getting sick of this crap "journalism". if you want to make a comment, add a comment. Don't add your opinion to the summary. Just report the facts. If you really have to, blog about your opinion and add a link to that blog, stating that it's your opinion.
You must be new here. The summary of an article is nearly always the *opinion* of whoever submitted it. The "news" part is in the original source to which the link(s) in the summary point (assuming the original source isn't itself just an opinion or troll). The summary IS the "blog" part, and it acts as the root of the entire discussion thread. That's the way it has always worked on this site, and it's not very hard to figure out.
This is pretty much spot on./. is a tech blog. It always has been. There are very few original/. stories, most of them being book or video game reviews.
I don't know where this idea that this place is a news source came from.
That isn't really a feature of Excel 2010, and more a feature of SSRS.
I mean, let's be realistic here. If you've replaced a Crystal report with an Excel Spreadsheet, then you're using the wrong tool for the job. If you've replaced the Crystal report with an SSRS backend that reads the file that Excel generates, then that's completely different. At that point, Excel is less a spreadsheet and more a report builder.
One of the many roles of development is to eliminate as much Excel abuse as possible. Excel is not a database, and should not be used as such. There are far too many business types that don't get that, and then complain when their network shared "Excel database" gets slow, unstable, etc. That's partly Microsoft's fault though. They enable that type of behavior, and people just eat it up.
On topic, why the Hell is this a story? Reasons to work at Microsoft? They pay you money. Or is that out of fashion these days?;)
slowly accepting their continuing decline... is trying to reinvigorate what they perceive to be their original driving force...
You don't have to change to decline at all if everyone else is improving around you...
This also applies to Microsoft. Since the bubbles burst, I think more and more people are pursuing a combination of their interests, and a quality of work life, more than the money.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. At least, that's the justification for my company keeping an accounting system around that sits on top of a 45 year old technology. It is very difficult to pull data out of this system, and with the company's recent push toward data accessibility, this just complicates things.
But, again, it's a very old and stable system that does what it's supposed to do fairly well. It would cost an enormous amount of money to switch, and the benefits don't outweigh that expenditure. We *can* pull data out, it just isn't very easy.
So, if a technology seems "Flat," it sticks around because it's old and proven, and typically very expensive to replace.
The point he's trying to make is that Google seems to be trying to get in the middle of your primary TV viewing-- I gather from the article that it's supposed to sit between your cable box and your TV. He's saying that might be scary for some people, since part of the continued success of cable TV is that it's "the devil you know" and people are comfortable with it, so they may not want Google screwing around with that experience.
Meanwhile, the AppleTV (in the author's view, at least) is not supposed to screw with your cable TV experience. Instead, it's an additional device, perhaps taking the place of a DVD player. So the author is saying that this is less scary, and probably more likely to work.
So that's what the "input 1 vs. input 2" thing is about.
The fact that Tivo sits comfortably at "input 1" without its users objecting makes the argument somewhat fallacious. I doubt that regular Joes really give a crap about where a device sits, be it between the wall plug and the TV, or as an accessory to the side. If the user experience is good enough, they'll go for it.
The purpose of an editor is to edit any submissions to make them ready for print.
If the summary was too long, the editor should have got off his arse rather than wait for the summary that fits the word count to come along.
Or... They could choose the shorter submission out of the firehouse. I highly doubt that there was a serious intention to wait around until a shorter submission showed up.
While the vernacular changes, the words also take on additional meaning. 20-30 years ago, "shit" was more of an exclamation than anything else. Now, it's a stand-in for nearly any noun in the language. Terms like "I don't give a shit," "I have to get my shit together," and "...and shit" weren't really as common then. Now that the term has become common, it's passed from vulgarity into common acceptance.
The "new" cuss words showing up can also be related to the important issues in today's society. "Cunt," while being incredibly old, is referred to as the "C-word," and my perception is that "nigger" carries far more negative impact and weight than "fuck" ever did.
This community is all about FOSS, and cheers on the enforcement of the GPL through law, and determining whether or not it's legally valid. The last time I checked, GPL stood for "General Public License." If it's to C or Assembly, or machine code, this ruling only ensures that GPL has a legal precedent to fall back upon.
The proper owners of software are the owners of the copyright. It's the copyright that allows click through EULAs to exist, just as much as it's the thing that allows the GPL to exist. It seems like it's common sense that AutoCAD would control the rights of sale of that software, it's their software to sell. The company that sold the copies to eBay guy are the ones that faulted on their agreement. They should be pinned up and made an example of.
I wouldn't whine and complain about first sale here. It's enforcement of a license, which to me, is a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
There's also the "waste 2-3 hours more" option.
I didn't realize that there were no alternatives to Chrome!
I remember this dude that used to be an author, whose posts were nothing more than political rants and conspiracy theories. I don't remember his handle, though. It was a very long time ago... and I think most people had him blocked.
This place has become more shiny over the years. It never used to be all anal retentive about being "professional." Hell, there used to be a rather large wikipedia page dedicated to the slashdot trolling phenomenon.
I suppose I don't really understand where the expectation of "professional" came from.
The anecdote is nice, but not proof of anything. For as many burger-flippers that do weed, I could come up with as many MDs, or developers, or whatever that do the same.
Yet, when you're dealing with a high stress situation, and really wanting to unwind, the first thing you're probably going to think of is weed.
It is not physically addicting, but I'm convinced that there is a strong psychological addictiveness. There's a reason why people are "every day, all day long" types of smokers.
I think you're missing the point.
The Cloud in most cases, is usually a set of service endpoints hosted on a massive web farm. Amazon's cloud services allow you to stand up virtual machines. Microsoft's appears to revolve primarily around storage. Facebook's is for content delivery.
The front end is just a thin client to the cloud, be it through HTML/CSS/AJAX in some web browser, a thin client "app" sitting on an iphone / android, a windows service running in the background, or whatever. All of those clients utilize a set of services that are hosted in... the Cloud.
People that are "fed up" with the cloud are mostly ignorant of what cloud computing actually offers.
You forced us into the fucking stupid one.
Ahh, that nebulous you that always works against the righteous us.
Note that nowhere in the Constitution is this authority explicitly granted to the judiciary. It's not explicitly granted to *anyone*. But early in the country's history, the Supreme Court arbitrarily decided that it was the the job of the judiciary to judge the constitutionality of laws, and since it's been 200 or so years without anyone amending the Constitution to say otherwise it's pretty much generally accepted that the courts *do* have this power.
Judicial review exists to allow the "boss" of the government to have a full check and balance against the actions of the government. "Of the people, by the people, for the people" is the intention of our governmental structure. If an unconstitutional law is passed, then it is the prerogative of the people, and within their power, to bring suit in order to nullify that law.
That suit lands squarely in the realm of the judiciary. Note that the courts can't arbitrarily audit a law once passed. Someone must file suit in order to initiate judicial review.
All that aside. I too, would rather support a single-payer system. We already have two in the US: Medicare for those 65+ and Tricare for those in the military. Medicare has the lowest overhead expense rate of all insurers - 2%. Even doubling that would be much lower than for private insurers. Heck, even all the old-folks in the Tea Party want to keep their Medicare. See this: Matt Taibbi on the Tea Party (How corporate interests and Republican insiders built the Tea Party monster.)
Medicare also bones the healthcare providers that choose to service Medicare patients. Many doctors find it a far more attractive option to be gainfully employed by Kaiser Permanente than to have a private practice with the prospect of treating Medicare patients (and billing Uncle Sam).
What's depressing is that you guys seem to have ended up with the worst of all possible health systems. the expense, the inefficiency and the overall terribleness of a private system combined with the expense, the inefficiency and the overall terribleness of a public system.
Avoiding the advantages of either and getting the disadvantages of both.
There really isn't an inefficiency or terribleness of care in this system. The "issues" stem from how the insurance companies handle the money afterward. I can secure medication for X or Y issue within a day or two. I can also get treated for cancer, broken bones, internal injuries, etc, rather promptly.
Of course, I have insurance, which makes that promptness possible. Where the ship runs aground for me, is when the insurance decides that X% of the bill is not covered... The care was great, but the ass-reaming by the insurance companies really sucks.
That socially overactive bimboslut who's flunking math class is actually much smarter than the super nerd in the corner who doesn't have any friends but aces all his math tests. Yes, that's right, being social and interacting with others is the new measure of smart!
Going by the rule of passing on desirable traits, the bimboslut is the far more successful human in this case.
I have a humanities degree and an engineering degree. Neither was easier than the other to pass, they just required very different skills. I note that you "waffled" but he had to "structure" the ideas into a "well-formed English essay". Don't you wish more engineers had that ability? And why do you assume he only used your ideas? To get a first he would have had to have shown how it linked in to the rest of the course, something he would have had to do himself when he got back upstairs.
I have a CS degree and work in the industry, and this is fairly noticeable. One striking issue is that the way a programmer or "math-head" communicates is completely different from the expectation that the "Arts-Head" understands. The problem arises within the communication channels between developers and end users. Developers will list out key points and assume that the end user has the capacity and understanding of the key points to reassemble them in the way the developer expects.
This is where there truly is value in the humanities. I've done all the math, science, and "difficult" material. Sure, it is brutal to those who don't understand. However, instruction in philosophy, languages, sociology, psychology, anthropology, or medicine could be just as brutal. Those studies are fascinating, because they deal with all of the shades of gray that appear in the world. There aren't strict rule sets that force a black and white way of solving things.
In CS, grammars are the backbone of languages. In humanity, grammar is a fluid structure that is subject to the whims of society, and its use of natural languages. I don't think that there are many people who can grasp both of those concepts at the same time, at all. Math and science are no more difficult than humanities, than humanities are more difficult than math and science.
If you have a 30" monitor and want to drive it at its native, beyond HD rez (2560x1600) you need some heavy hitting hardware to take care of that, particularly if you'd like the game to run nice and smooth, more around 60fps than around 30. You then need still more if you'd like to crank up anti-aliasing and so on.
Isn't the point of AA to make things look better at lower resolutions? Running at resolutions beyond the HD rez, even on large screens, eliminate any sort of need for FSAA. At that point, you just don't get jaggies that need to be smoothed.
Being OLD is never a good excuse to replace it. There may be other issues that need addressing but OLD is never it. If anything, OLD is a good reason to keep it. It's "survival of the fittest" and X11 apparently outlasted many attempts to replace it.
How about OLD, BLOATED, and CRAPPY, as well as built upon a foundation that is no longer necessary or desired?
When you install a standard distro as a desktop OS, you get a full blown X server. It's a massive beast, and causes a bit of a bottleneck. There are also design choices that were made which ended up being poor choices, though the reasoning for this was that it was a very new thing to everyone. Now, after many many years of experience and study, we finally have the opportunity to discard the old and outdated system in favor of a modern one.
You talk about power in the OS, but then also talk about X11 as doing what we need. X11 does do what we need, but it also provides more than what we need, to the detriment of what we need. Let it be the client that sits on top of a system that really is what we need. That way, we can actually realize more of the power of the OS platform we run on. mmkay?
they write them for GTK+, QT.
FTFY
I'm getting sick of this crap "journalism". if you want to make a comment, add a comment. Don't add your opinion to the summary. Just report the facts. If you really have to, blog about your opinion and add a link to that blog, stating that it's your opinion.
You must be new here. The summary of an article is nearly always the *opinion* of whoever submitted it. The "news" part is in the original source to which the link(s) in the summary point (assuming the original source isn't itself just an opinion or troll). The summary IS the "blog" part, and it acts as the root of the entire discussion thread. That's the way it has always worked on this site, and it's not very hard to figure out.
This is pretty much spot on. /. is a tech blog. It always has been. There are very few original /. stories, most of them being book or video game reviews.
I don't know where this idea that this place is a news source came from.
That isn't really a feature of Excel 2010, and more a feature of SSRS.
I mean, let's be realistic here. If you've replaced a Crystal report with an Excel Spreadsheet, then you're using the wrong tool for the job. If you've replaced the Crystal report with an SSRS backend that reads the file that Excel generates, then that's completely different. At that point, Excel is less a spreadsheet and more a report builder.
One of the many roles of development is to eliminate as much Excel abuse as possible. Excel is not a database, and should not be used as such. There are far too many business types that don't get that, and then complain when their network shared "Excel database" gets slow, unstable, etc. That's partly Microsoft's fault though. They enable that type of behavior, and people just eat it up.
On topic, why the Hell is this a story? Reasons to work at Microsoft? They pay you money. Or is that out of fashion these days? ;)
slowly accepting their continuing decline... is trying to reinvigorate what they perceive to be their original driving force...
You don't have to change to decline at all if everyone else is improving around you...
This also applies to Microsoft. Since the bubbles burst, I think more and more people are pursuing a combination of their interests, and a quality of work life, more than the money.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. At least, that's the justification for my company keeping an accounting system around that sits on top of a 45 year old technology. It is very difficult to pull data out of this system, and with the company's recent push toward data accessibility, this just complicates things.
But, again, it's a very old and stable system that does what it's supposed to do fairly well. It would cost an enormous amount of money to switch, and the benefits don't outweigh that expenditure. We *can* pull data out, it just isn't very easy.
So, if a technology seems "Flat," it sticks around because it's old and proven, and typically very expensive to replace.
The point he's trying to make is that Google seems to be trying to get in the middle of your primary TV viewing-- I gather from the article that it's supposed to sit between your cable box and your TV. He's saying that might be scary for some people, since part of the continued success of cable TV is that it's "the devil you know" and people are comfortable with it, so they may not want Google screwing around with that experience.
Meanwhile, the AppleTV (in the author's view, at least) is not supposed to screw with your cable TV experience. Instead, it's an additional device, perhaps taking the place of a DVD player. So the author is saying that this is less scary, and probably more likely to work.
So that's what the "input 1 vs. input 2" thing is about.
The fact that Tivo sits comfortably at "input 1" without its users objecting makes the argument somewhat fallacious. I doubt that regular Joes really give a crap about where a device sits, be it between the wall plug and the TV, or as an accessory to the side. If the user experience is good enough, they'll go for it.
The purpose of an editor is to edit any submissions to make them ready for print. If the summary was too long, the editor should have got off his arse rather than wait for the summary that fits the word count to come along.
Or... They could choose the shorter submission out of the firehouse. I highly doubt that there was a serious intention to wait around until a shorter submission showed up.
Timothy posts often enough.
Exactly.
While the vernacular changes, the words also take on additional meaning. 20-30 years ago, "shit" was more of an exclamation than anything else. Now, it's a stand-in for nearly any noun in the language. Terms like "I don't give a shit," "I have to get my shit together," and "...and shit" weren't really as common then. Now that the term has become common, it's passed from vulgarity into common acceptance.
The "new" cuss words showing up can also be related to the important issues in today's society. "Cunt," while being incredibly old, is referred to as the "C-word," and my perception is that "nigger" carries far more negative impact and weight than "fuck" ever did.
Seriously, all of you? What were you expecting?
This community is all about FOSS, and cheers on the enforcement of the GPL through law, and determining whether or not it's legally valid. The last time I checked, GPL stood for "General Public License." If it's to C or Assembly, or machine code, this ruling only ensures that GPL has a legal precedent to fall back upon.
The proper owners of software are the owners of the copyright. It's the copyright that allows click through EULAs to exist, just as much as it's the thing that allows the GPL to exist. It seems like it's common sense that AutoCAD would control the rights of sale of that software, it's their software to sell. The company that sold the copies to eBay guy are the ones that faulted on their agreement. They should be pinned up and made an example of.
I wouldn't whine and complain about first sale here. It's enforcement of a license, which to me, is a good thing.
Welcome to the year 2000! You must have just replaced your 3Dfx card.