Great. It's the cat-burglar trying to argue that he's better than the common thieves and muggers. You think it's a game? I think it's pure vandalism. I want to use Slashdot to read articles and comments. You want to ruin that for me.
But you've managed to justify to yourself that it's just a game. Why should you care if you ruin a resource for everybody else, so long as you have fun while you do it. Inconsiderate little shithead.
Slashdot trolls aim to show how the mod system sucks,...
Oh? Is that what the slashdot trolls are doing? Trying to use "civil disobedience" to demonstate what they perceive as inequity by the moderators?
So that's why they still think goatsecx is funny. And why there's still a stupid race for First Post. And why they think it's hilarious to write "you're a mother fucking cocknobber wankfuck" as Anonymous Coward. And why they'll insult somebody until the person is obviously offended, and then say "I WAS JUST JOKING AND YOU'RE STUPID AND SLASHDOT SUCKS". You think this is all some kind of peaceful protest?
No. I disagree with you. These people aren't trying to change the moderation system. They're just losers. They're no better than the vandals who spraypaint obscenities on church walls or break the windows at primary schools. Fuck them all.
In short, RAM is just like a ramdrive except more flexible.
The RAM in a solid-state drive is often slower - therefore cheaper - and battery backed. Your system RAM costs perhaps $100/gig now. The slower RAM used in your solid-state drive wouldn't be 1/10th that cost.
How the FUCK did you somehow twist my post into an assumption that I have some "other" face I wear on different days?
It doesn't matter what you say, what you do, or what you believe. The Slashdot Trolls are out in force lately. They'll cry "hypocrite" and "double standard", using the false logic that if two people have different opinions then they are both hypocrites.
The most bizarre aspect of the Slashdot bashing is the claim that Slashdot posters all have an irrational hatred of Microsoft. I've been watching this for months now and most of the highly moderated comments on any article - if they have bias at all - are PRO-Microsoft. This article is a perfect example because the majority of comments have been sympathetic for Microsoft... nobody likes bad patents.
It's simply the latest fad to bash Slashdot and defend Microsoft. All the trendy high school kids are doing it. Ignore it. Hopefully they'll get bored and go away. If anything it's a good sign: it shows that Linux is now popular enough to attract illogical hatred of it.
Do you think *scratch* that putting noises *burp* in your text *yawn* is helping anybody *fart*? Putting *sigh* in front of your comment only makes you look pompous. The person you were responding to is smart enough to read, write, and possibly even operate a computer. Is it too much to ask that you treat him with some dignity, instead of treating him like you would a small child.
The problem is, and will continue to be older distros. At least something like WindowsUpdate pushes the updates to your desktop more or less transparently. How do you update RedHat 6.2 transparently, or Mandrake 7? I have yet to see this kind of transparent updating under Linux, and I don't see that rosy a future for desktop Linux without it. I know RH7+ has RedHat network, but IMO it still doesn't work quite as slickly.
Not that I disagree with what you're saying - I agree that the Linux updaters that exist (RedHat, Debian, Ximian) are all fairly clunky - but I think you're going too far to say that Microsoft Windows Update is transparent. Very few important updates are in Windows Update (whole service packs and server application patches are omitted) and Windows Update doesn't seem to cover hardware drivers. Even worse, third party applications are completely ignored. I'd love it if Windows Update was a service that the various non-Microsoft vendors could subscribe to, publishing their non-Microsoft drivers and application patches through the simple Windows Update interface, but Microsoft isn't offering this service. I can only get Microsoft updates through the Windows Update "portal". As a result I find the Windows Update feature to be fairly useless, because I still have to maintain mountains of manually downloaded updates.
The Linux-based updaters are as clunky as all hell - unintuitive, buggy, ugly - but at least they provide a single source of updates for your applications, system and drivers.
That's what I love about this webpage. Someone posts an intelligent, well written post about how he feels Linux isn't all it's cracked up to be and he gets called a troll.
If he'd gone onto alt.christians.prolife and started defending abortion then he'd be a troll too, no matter how intelligent and well-written his arguments were. A troll is someone who goes out of his way to start an argument. The term is derived from the fishing technique "trolling". Lambasting Linux - no matter how well deserved and how truthful the statements - on slashdot is trolling, pure and simple. The fact that I agree with what he said doesn't sway my opinion of what he did.
The majority of you fuckers are so hypocritical I want to vomit bile. You claim to be all enlightened and open minded but you're the most hard headed, stubborn, and ignorant sub-niche of the entire computing universe.
Enlightened people don't feel the need to tell everybody how enlightened they are. Draw your own conclusions.
Re:Are you kidding?
on
Halloween VII
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Your argument is based around the cost of software being excessive. Well lets see; I was a student until recently (June 02) and I've bought all my software so...
... so now you need to rebuy all that software. The student discount prices only apply WHILE YOU ARE A STUDENT. Once you stop being a student you have to purchase the full copies. If you're still using those "cheap" student versions then you're no better than a warez pirate.
Perhaps you should check what people do before assuming that MS software is very expensive.
Microsoft software is expensive. You have already admitted that you're stealing it, so of course it seems cheaper to you.
It is quite revealing that apparently no slashdot reader ever mentions the number one reason to copy a CD: children.
You have a selective memory or defective reading skills. Children are mentioned as a reason for CD-R copies on almost every Slashdot story about fair-use and the MIAA.
It's not just context switches. You will probably be forced to copy data between user and kernel space. And you won't have access to internal kernel APIs, so certain problems will simply be unsolvable.
I really like this statement. It's the ideal comeback against claims that the "GPL is viral". The GPL only affects derivative works and "hereditary" describes that perfectly.
For any license to be viral it would have to infect unrelated third party software. The GPL doesn't do that. You must first intentionally "have sex" with a GPL'd product (using an editor and a compiler!) before the GPL spreads. Even then only the direct descendant of the software is affected.
Yup, you can't touch heros.. no matter how much they squelch free speech.
Whether you're trolling or just stupid, I can't tell, but this wasn't squelching free speech. This was harrassment - plain and simple - and the guy got what he deserved. Free speech does not grant you the right to harrass somebody.
It's good to see that the goverment won't give this guy due process of law / defend his rights.
He got as much due process as anybody else would in his situation. If you want to believe otherwise, how about you go harrass a big drunk redneck until you get punched out and then go crying to the police. I bet they'll tell you the same thing they told this idiot.
The problem with fuzzy logic is that if it would be useful, something else would be more useful. Sure, you can have a fuzzy truth value for whether something is hot or not, but you'd do better with a temperature measurement instead of a value between 0 and 1.
No, you wouldn't. Imagine you have a value WEIGHT equal to 1kg. Is that "heavy"? If you're talking about the weight of planets then "not heavy at all". If you're talking about the weight carrying capacity of an ant then "very heavy". Fuzzy logic conveniently bundles the values and the bounds into a single number.
There's very little that's useful when converted into a bounded linear range.
The second problem with what you're saying is that most measurement systems are linear (ie, temperature, weight, length) or exponential (ie, volume). Fuzzy logic lets you choose the most convenient "mapping" between actual measurements and fuzzy logic values. Apparently triangular mappings are very common, though I wouldn't know why.
I think many people find it far too easy to dismiss fuzzy logic. It's not a stupid concept. It
is not so obvious for the simple examples, but once you start combining multiple bounded-values you'll appreciate the conciseness and logical provability of fuzzy logic. It's very easy to go from your mathematically proven fuzzy logic statement to some C code, but it's much harder to extract the logical reasoning from existing C code.
That 0.1 could easily be a probability - the probability that the person thinks all Ford Explorers are cool. So in a large population of people who all rate cars the same way, you'll find 1 person in 10 who thinks Ford Explorers are cool.
No, the "proportion of truth" isn't a subjective thing. You don't get to pick another person and get a different answer because the person's opinion plays no part in it. We've already explicitly defined the fuzzy logic statement:
cool car = (sports OR red) AND NOT(suv)
And if my example was more complete I would have explicitly defined the mapping between the car and the tuple (sports, red, suv). I didn't explicitly list the mapping but that's just my laziness. Create whatever mapping you like and we'll go with that.
There's no room for subjective interpretation. That's why it's called fuzzy logic. Two people can start with the same statement and the same tuples and get the same answer. That's the whole point. The fuzzy logic statement isn't asking whether you think the Ford Explorer is cool, or whether somebody thinks the Ford Explorer is cool, but rather it's saying "this is how we are defining coolness for this particular problem".
Now to be perfectly clear, the statement and the method of getting the tuples is the subjective part. You might think "red" has nothing to do with cool. You might think "suv" is very cool. You might disagree that a Type-R sticker turns a car into a sports car. That's OK. Fuzzy Logic isn't about defining an Absolute Truth. It's about defining a convenient definition of truth for a particular problem. You get to choose what suits your particular problem.
So an air-conditioner might say that 18C and 35C with a linear scale are a good definition for "hot". A refrigerator might choose -4C to 2C with an exponential scale. A quantum physicist might pick 0K to 10^27K with a logarithmic scale. But once you choose the mapping and you have the statement there's no room for argument. Fuzzy Logic is not about probabilities!
Fuzzy logic is not the same thing as probabilities. You and the original poster are both confused.
Fuzzy logic assigns a proportion of truth (between 0 and 1) to each fuzzy logic value. A proportion of truth is not the same thing as a probability. A probability assigns a value to the chance of a particular outcome for an as-yet-unknown event. Fuzzy logic assigns a value - the proportion of truth - to already known data. The difference is not even subtle or semantic: it's a huge difference.
I'll try to explain this better. In boolean logic a statement is either false (0) or true (1). In fuzzy logic the truth of a statement is any value between 0 and 1 inclusive. So for example you might have a value OLD with a baby being 0 and a pensioner being 1 and a linear slope between those two extremes. You don't have to choose a linear slope, of course.
Once you have the truth of a statement as a number you can use logic tables. So NOT(x) equals 1-x, OR(x,y) = maximum(x, y), and AND(x,y) = minimum(x,y). So the statement
cool car = (sports OR red) AND NOT (suv)
Is equivalent to
cool car = minimum(maximum(sports, red), 1 - suv)
You then convert raw data for a given car into truth values and pass it through the fuzzy logic statement to determine the truth value of a complicated concept like "cool car". A pink station wagon would have (sports,red,suv) values of (0.0, 0.5, 0.0). A green Ford Explorer with an Type-R sticker would have values of (0.2, 0.0, 0.9).
So to take this example further, a Ford Explorer would rate highly on the suv value, so 1 - suv would be low and the minimum(..., 1-suv) statement would drive cool car towards zero. Imagine that cool car was 0.1 after doing the calculations. What that value means is that the truth value of the statement "The Ford Explorer Is a Cool Car" is 0.1... which is not very true.
Notice how this isn't a probability! If that value of 0.1 was a probability then it would mean that every 10th Ford Explorer is cool while the other 9 Ford Explorers are not cool. Clearly that's nonsense. Ford Explorers are all equally uncool. I hope this example makes it clear that Fuzzy Logic is not the same thing as probabilities.
Though they probably will never be able to skateboard, a warm, loving puppy with emotions and feelings will warm your heart in ways a cheesy, overpriced piece of plastic toy cannot.
What sickens me is the people who do keep pets and then treat them poorly. And I don't mean not feeding them. I mean not paying attention to them. Keeping them in cramped quarters. Giving them nothing to do while the owner spends half their time at work and the other half their time at the club or on holiday.
A dog living in an apartment slowly goes insane. It's like shutting a human inside a broom closet. Even worse are the people who get active dogs - heelers and such - and then keep them cooped up inside small backyards. This is pure hell for a dog. They might as well tie the dog to a stake during the day and kick it when they get home.
Most people do not know how to look after a dog. I'm fully supportive of AIBO because it reduces the number of animals who have to suffer at the hands of inconsiderate idiots who wanted a "warm loving puppy" without considering the responsibilities that comes with a pet.
Slashdot Mirror
Great. It's the cat-burglar trying to argue that he's better than the common thieves and muggers. You think it's a game? I think it's pure vandalism. I want to use Slashdot to read articles and comments. You want to ruin that for me.
But you've managed to justify to yourself that it's just a game. Why should you care if you ruin a resource for everybody else, so long as you have fun while you do it. Inconsiderate little shithead.
Oh? Is that what the slashdot trolls are doing? Trying to use "civil disobedience" to demonstate what they perceive as inequity by the moderators?
So that's why they still think goatsecx is funny. And why there's still a stupid race for First Post. And why they think it's hilarious to write "you're a mother fucking cocknobber wankfuck" as Anonymous Coward. And why they'll insult somebody until the person is obviously offended, and then say "I WAS JUST JOKING AND YOU'RE STUPID AND SLASHDOT SUCKS". You think this is all some kind of peaceful protest?
No. I disagree with you. These people aren't trying to change the moderation system. They're just losers. They're no better than the vandals who spraypaint obscenities on church walls or break the windows at primary schools. Fuck them all.
The RAM in a solid-state drive is often slower - therefore cheaper - and battery backed. Your system RAM costs perhaps $100/gig now. The slower RAM used in your solid-state drive wouldn't be 1/10th that cost.
It doesn't matter what you say, what you do, or what you believe. The Slashdot Trolls are out in force lately. They'll cry "hypocrite" and "double standard", using the false logic that if two people have different opinions then they are both hypocrites.
The most bizarre aspect of the Slashdot bashing is the claim that Slashdot posters all have an irrational hatred of Microsoft. I've been watching this for months now and most of the highly moderated comments on any article - if they have bias at all - are PRO-Microsoft. This article is a perfect example because the majority of comments have been sympathetic for Microsoft... nobody likes bad patents.
It's simply the latest fad to bash Slashdot and defend Microsoft. All the trendy high school kids are doing it. Ignore it. Hopefully they'll get bored and go away. If anything it's a good sign: it shows that Linux is now popular enough to attract illogical hatred of it.
What a load of shit. The editors on TheReg have their opinions, but to brand them as liars is completely ungrounded.
Do you think *scratch* that putting noises *burp* in your text *yawn* is helping anybody *fart*? Putting *sigh* in front of your comment only makes you look pompous. The person you were responding to is smart enough to read, write, and possibly even operate a computer. Is it too much to ask that you treat him with some dignity, instead of treating him like you would a small child.
And this affects me... how?
Sure they do, for video walls.
Because Linux doesn't cost $369.
Not that I disagree with what you're saying - I agree that the Linux updaters that exist (RedHat, Debian, Ximian) are all fairly clunky - but I think you're going too far to say that Microsoft Windows Update is transparent. Very few important updates are in Windows Update (whole service packs and server application patches are omitted) and Windows Update doesn't seem to cover hardware drivers. Even worse, third party applications are completely ignored. I'd love it if Windows Update was a service that the various non-Microsoft vendors could subscribe to, publishing their non-Microsoft drivers and application patches through the simple Windows Update interface, but Microsoft isn't offering this service. I can only get Microsoft updates through the Windows Update "portal". As a result I find the Windows Update feature to be fairly useless, because I still have to maintain mountains of manually downloaded updates.
The Linux-based updaters are as clunky as all hell - unintuitive, buggy, ugly - but at least they provide a single source of updates for your applications, system and drivers.
If he'd gone onto alt.christians.prolife and started defending abortion then he'd be a troll too, no matter how intelligent and well-written his arguments were. A troll is someone who goes out of his way to start an argument. The term is derived from the fishing technique "trolling". Lambasting Linux - no matter how well deserved and how truthful the statements - on slashdot is trolling, pure and simple. The fact that I agree with what he said doesn't sway my opinion of what he did.
Enlightened people don't feel the need to tell everybody how enlightened they are. Draw your own conclusions.
... so now you need to rebuy all that software. The student discount prices only apply WHILE YOU ARE A STUDENT. Once you stop being a student you have to purchase the full copies. If you're still using those "cheap" student versions then you're no better than a warez pirate.
Microsoft software is expensive. You have already admitted that you're stealing it, so of course it seems cheaper to you.
You have a selective memory or defective reading skills. Children are mentioned as a reason for CD-R copies on almost every Slashdot story about fair-use and the MIAA.
Nope. It's his tree and his rules. If you want different rules then start your own tree.
Definitely not.
It's not just context switches. You will probably be forced to copy data between user and kernel space. And you won't have access to internal kernel APIs, so certain problems will simply be unsolvable.
I really like this statement. It's the ideal comeback against claims that the "GPL is viral". The GPL only affects derivative works and "hereditary" describes that perfectly.
For any license to be viral it would have to infect unrelated third party software. The GPL doesn't do that. You must first intentionally "have sex" with a GPL'd product (using an editor and a compiler!) before the GPL spreads. Even then only the direct descendant of the software is affected.
Whether you're trolling or just stupid, I can't tell, but this wasn't squelching free speech. This was harrassment - plain and simple - and the guy got what he deserved. Free speech does not grant you the right to harrass somebody.
He got as much due process as anybody else would in his situation. If you want to believe otherwise, how about you go harrass a big drunk redneck until you get punched out and then go crying to the police. I bet they'll tell you the same thing they told this idiot.
No, you wouldn't. Imagine you have a value WEIGHT equal to 1kg. Is that "heavy"? If you're talking about the weight of planets then "not heavy at all". If you're talking about the weight carrying capacity of an ant then "very heavy". Fuzzy logic conveniently bundles the values and the bounds into a single number.
The second problem with what you're saying is that most measurement systems are linear (ie, temperature, weight, length) or exponential (ie, volume). Fuzzy logic lets you choose the most convenient "mapping" between actual measurements and fuzzy logic values. Apparently triangular mappings are very common, though I wouldn't know why.
I think many people find it far too easy to dismiss fuzzy logic. It's not a stupid concept. It is not so obvious for the simple examples, but once you start combining multiple bounded-values you'll appreciate the conciseness and logical provability of fuzzy logic. It's very easy to go from your mathematically proven fuzzy logic statement to some C code, but it's much harder to extract the logical reasoning from existing C code.
Ahh, I see, thank you.
No, the "proportion of truth" isn't a subjective thing. You don't get to pick another person and get a different answer because the person's opinion plays no part in it. We've already explicitly defined the fuzzy logic statement:
And if my example was more complete I would have explicitly defined the mapping between the car and the tuple (sports, red, suv). I didn't explicitly list the mapping but that's just my laziness. Create whatever mapping you like and we'll go with that.
There's no room for subjective interpretation. That's why it's called fuzzy logic. Two people can start with the same statement and the same tuples and get the same answer. That's the whole point. The fuzzy logic statement isn't asking whether you think the Ford Explorer is cool, or whether somebody thinks the Ford Explorer is cool, but rather it's saying "this is how we are defining coolness for this particular problem".
Now to be perfectly clear, the statement and the method of getting the tuples is the subjective part. You might think "red" has nothing to do with cool. You might think "suv" is very cool. You might disagree that a Type-R sticker turns a car into a sports car. That's OK. Fuzzy Logic isn't about defining an Absolute Truth. It's about defining a convenient definition of truth for a particular problem. You get to choose what suits your particular problem.
So an air-conditioner might say that 18C and 35C with a linear scale are a good definition for "hot". A refrigerator might choose -4C to 2C with an exponential scale. A quantum physicist might pick 0K to 10^27K with a logarithmic scale. But once you choose the mapping and you have the statement there's no room for argument. Fuzzy Logic is not about probabilities!
Actually you said exactly what I said.
Just confused. Did you think you were explaining something to me?
Fuzzy logic is not the same thing as probabilities. You and the original poster are both confused.
Fuzzy logic assigns a proportion of truth (between 0 and 1) to each fuzzy logic value. A proportion of truth is not the same thing as a probability. A probability assigns a value to the chance of a particular outcome for an as-yet-unknown event. Fuzzy logic assigns a value - the proportion of truth - to already known data. The difference is not even subtle or semantic: it's a huge difference.
I'll try to explain this better. In boolean logic a statement is either false (0) or true (1). In fuzzy logic the truth of a statement is any value between 0 and 1 inclusive. So for example you might have a value OLD with a baby being 0 and a pensioner being 1 and a linear slope between those two extremes. You don't have to choose a linear slope, of course.
Once you have the truth of a statement as a number you can use logic tables. So NOT(x) equals 1-x, OR(x,y) = maximum(x, y), and AND(x,y) = minimum(x,y). So the statement
Is equivalent to
You then convert raw data for a given car into truth values and pass it through the fuzzy logic statement to determine the truth value of a complicated concept like "cool car". A pink station wagon would have (sports,red,suv) values of (0.0, 0.5, 0.0). A green Ford Explorer with an Type-R sticker would have values of (0.2, 0.0, 0.9).
So to take this example further, a Ford Explorer would rate highly on the suv value, so 1 - suv would be low and the minimum(..., 1-suv) statement would drive cool car towards zero. Imagine that cool car was 0.1 after doing the calculations. What that value means is that the truth value of the statement "The Ford Explorer Is a Cool Car" is 0.1... which is not very true.
Notice how this isn't a probability! If that value of 0.1 was a probability then it would mean that every 10th Ford Explorer is cool while the other 9 Ford Explorers are not cool. Clearly that's nonsense. Ford Explorers are all equally uncool. I hope this example makes it clear that Fuzzy Logic is not the same thing as probabilities.
Perhaps you missed the bit where the original poster wrote...
The original poster is correct. Microsoft managed to make Windows look free to the average consumer. Brilliant piece of marketting.
I've never heard of this happening, but they'd be damn useless lawyers if they didn't write in a clause that covered the unimaginable but possible.
They're not stupid. They're covering all their bases... even the bases they haven't seen yet.
What sickens me is the people who do keep pets and then treat them poorly. And I don't mean not feeding them. I mean not paying attention to them. Keeping them in cramped quarters. Giving them nothing to do while the owner spends half their time at work and the other half their time at the club or on holiday.
A dog living in an apartment slowly goes insane. It's like shutting a human inside a broom closet. Even worse are the people who get active dogs - heelers and such - and then keep them cooped up inside small backyards. This is pure hell for a dog. They might as well tie the dog to a stake during the day and kick it when they get home.
Most people do not know how to look after a dog. I'm fully supportive of AIBO because it reduces the number of animals who have to suffer at the hands of inconsiderate idiots who wanted a "warm loving puppy" without considering the responsibilities that comes with a pet.