I do, I bought the most expensive model a few weeks after launch. It cost 1/3 as much as my current gaming rig.
You (A) Purchased a stolen console at a heavy discount, or (B) Got ripped off on your PC in one way or another.
A good gaming rig costs no more than $500 to assemble (not including monitor, just like a console.) Spend anything more than that and you are heavily into the diminishing returns region of the price curve.
You call what I stated irrational, but all you did was take a global statistic (cubans hijack a lot of planes to/from cuba) and used it to rationalized a policy specific to the united states.
You learned just enough to justify your prior position, but not enough to be rational.
So what you're saying is that if there's a 0.00001% chance that somebody who looks like a nun is a terrorist, and a 0.01% chance that somebody who looks like a young Arab male is a terrorist, we should search every young Arab male and miss the terrorist nuns?
Yep.
We are talking about finite resources. Lets turn it around a bit and see how absurd your view of things are.
Lets suppose that there are two airlines. One of which gropes the privates of every middle-easterner and the other randomly gropes the privates of 1 out of every 25 passengers.
Which one will our enemies try to hijack?
As you see it is easier for our enemies, which are mainly middle-easterners, to hijack the one performing random groping.
Groping is a finite resource, which means we should intelligently allocate it.
Have you noticed that Firefox 4 doesnt render anything during the sunspider test? Whats that about? Opera displays the name of the current test and then the time...
It seems to me that Opera is rendering because its supposed to... so why isnt Firefox?
Not unusual, but it makes the function 1 statement longer..
If you knew anything about JIT compilers, you would know that they have simple heuristics on purpose (compile speed is a strict constraint.) Making something 1 statement longer could remove it as a candidate for quite a few optimizations (inlining, static loop evaluation, loop unrolling, dead code elimination, etc..)
These simple heuristics use quickly evaluated metrics once the source is translated into an abstract syntax tree. The number of nodes in the tree.. the depth of the tree.. the number of conditional nodes..
JIT's are not simply compilers that try to produce the best code possible. JIT's make tradeoff decisions between compile time and the resulting code quality.
Fear not, Slashdot, for I have read the fucking article!
The unnamed "Mozilla Engineer" didn't even bother adding his 'true' and "return' to non-sunspider code, but has the balls to declare that the only possible reason for the negative performance when added to the sunspider code is that Microsofts JavaScript engine is cheating.
Now, maybe Microsoft is cheating here and maybe they arent, but in this article the conclusion obviously preceded the result, that this unnamed mozilla hack didnt even do any of the extremely simple things that might nullify his hypothesis.
I just spent a day of my life looking at open source CDDA ripping software (ones that take hours to get a perfect rip) for Windows.. and pretty much all of them required folder virtualization of Program Files in one way or another.
Note to others: Take care if buying audio books from Blackstone Audio. They play fine in regular stand-alone CD players but in a CD/DVD-Rom drive (I tried 3 different drives) they have serious problems. I suppose thats why I cant find the Compact Disc Digital Audio logo anywhere on these discs or package.
The thing about the Beatles is the 'Phenomena' or 'Mania' people associate with them.
This isnt to say that they werent excellent.. but the proportions of it, the 'Mania', was caused by stubborn executives in the United States that just wouldn't play any Beatles on American radio stations in spite of them having racked up a number of #1 hits in Britain, and had both of the best selling albums of all time in that country.
Eventually those stubborn U.S. executives caved in and the flood-gates were opened. All those Beatles hits in Britain started being played on American air-waves all at once. The Beatles didnt just have a #1 spot on the American charts.. they also had the #2, the #3, the #4, AND the #5.
..and thus, Beatles Mania was born. More than the sum of its parts, the phenomena was in the timing of it all, and wasnt the result of any marketing genius.. just plain old happenstance caused by the idea that "A British Rock band can't succeed in the United States"
Toasters from the 1950's still work today, but modern toasters have micro-controllers and other assorted bullshit and might work for 5 years if you are lucky.
Re:Geek Trivia != IQ Assessment
on
2010 Geek IQ Test
·
· Score: 2, Funny
The secret to Mensa is to pass the "test", then prove that you didnt cheat by refusing to pay the fee to join.
There are two fucking monopolies I posted which inarguably appeared without regulation causing them: The Linseed Oil Trust and U.S. Steel.
You started with the one that was arguable because...?
Oh, yeah.. you didn't know that Standard Oil was created by a monopoly that only existed because of government interference.
Now you are downplaying it, just like you are ignoring the fact that U.S. Steel only had 66% market share and then only for a few years.
It only had this market share because it borrowed money to buy some competitors.. that the natural order of things was not for a monopoly to form, but the exact opposite.. that immediately after acquiring those companies, it began losing market share to the remaining competition.
And no, monopolies and collusion are not synonymous. We have separate laws against collusion which apply with or without a monopoly.. as in the case of the Linseed Oil, which required no monopoly to violate..
Please explain how Standard Oil was created by legislation. You know, the reason we have anti-trust laws?
Its all right there is the courts decision on the matter.. you know, that case which was the reason we have anti-trust laws.
The courts in 1909, the finder of fact, determined that the railroads gave Standard Oil a significant advantage by discriminating against all of Standard Oil's competitors.
So your first question was easy.
Your second question is silly because there was no monopoly. The Linseed Oil Trust was an example of market collusion by individual non-monopolies.
Your third question answers itself. U.S. Steel was ruled a "monopoly" with (only) 67% market share, but was never broken up or regulated against because it wasnt doing anything wrong.
The end result is that the market destroyed the "monopoly" by competing with it, which it was allowed to do because U.S. Steel wasnt doing anything wrong. It has less than 10% market share today.
Standard Oil controlled a vast majority of the refined oil market and did it without the force of government.
What a bunch of shit. I think the AC is right, you people ARE regurgitating crap from tenured socialists.
The railroad monopolies, created by the government, enabled the Standard Oil monopoly.
This is all right there in the decision by the courts in the Standard Oil anti-trust suit of 1909, where the court stated:
Almost everywhere the rates from the shipping points used exclusively, or almost exclusively, by the Standard are relatively lower than the rates from the shipping points of its competitors. Rates have been made low to let the Standard into markets, or they have been made high to keep its competitors out of markets. Trifling differences in distances are made an excuse for large differences in rates favorable to the Standard Oil Company, while large differences in distances are ignored where they are against the Standard. Sometimes connecting roads prorate on oil—that is, make through rates which are lower than the combination of local rates; sometimes they refuse to prorate; but in either case the result of their policy is to favor the Standard Oil Company. Different methods are used in different places and under different conditions, but the net result is that from Maine to California the general arrangement of open rates on petroleum oil is such as to give the Standard an unreasonable advantage over its competitors
Now stop using Standard Oil as an example of a monopoly that wasnt created through government influence. The government created the Railroad monopolies, and the railroad monopolies created the Oil monopoly.
Everyone with any version of the Microsoft.NET framework has at least the C# and VB.NET compilers. Later versions of the framework come with several others.
These compilers are part of the framework itself because some of the capabilities of the framework (reflection/code generation/etc.) require them.
When one speaks of the free "Express" development packages, they are really talking about a stripped down version of the Visual Studio IDE with a language-specific configuration.
grandma would not be building CDE packages either, so your post is pretty pointless.
Grandma would be consuming CDE packages.
Now before you reply, please go back and read parents postings at least all the way back to where the person noted the issues with dependencies on obscure versions of things like GTK/etc.
Then observe that GTK (among others) is LGPL, so cannot be statically linked to anything with a license incompatible with LGPL... Also observe that other libraries are distributed with licenses incompatible with LGPL.
See where this is going? Static linking doesnt work, because you cant necessarily link everything statically and you can't expect grandma to do it herself.
It all starts with dependencies on unique library versions and unmaintained (or slowly maintained) distributions that prevent any real semblance of a unified ecosystem. Grandma can thus only use whats in the repository for her distribution, all because of resistance to "just drop it" installation mechanics that CDE solves.
Anyone can build any one or more of 1000s of programs from the source, and simply enable static libraries rather than dynamic in the./configure part of the build,
Would "anyone" be including my grandmother? If you knew my grandmother, you would know that a citation is needed here.
You can, take the proprietary game world of goo for example, you extract the.tar.gz and click on the world of goo script and bam, you are playing.
..it wasnt always that way.. for instance when you ran a 64-bit Linux, WoG wouldnt run without extra work (at a minimum you needed to manually compile 32-bit version of its dependencies)
Obviously doing it "right" means that the WoG people have intimate knowledge of lots of environment variations and account for them at runtime in a script.. if thats the "right" way.. then fuck being right. I'd rather have a CDE-style thing do the heavy lifting for me.
Why? No offence, but you dream small. This seems barely one step up from what we've had in the past. Why SHOULD you have to do any of this? A real improvement shouldn't involve any of this mundane stuff. You shouldn't have to go download anything yourself, and you shouldn't have to think about managing where you want to extract things.
The true goal should be to automate all this and make it transparent. If you want to run a program, that's all that should be needed from you, by the interface. The computer should figure everything out for you and do it, including putting things in your preferred locations if that's what you like.
We can argue over semantics, but in the end people want control over their UI application organization.
That might be what folders they are put in, or it could be what submenu of a launcher its icon is placed in. Your dream system just sweeps this issue under the rug like it suddenly wont matter. It still matters.
So the question then is, why this arbitrary distinction between things like folders and menus in a launcher?
One of the essential problems is that this distinction is made at all. Another is that in the case of folders, people dont always have full control over where things are put, which creates a complex interplay between applications which share arbitrarily located dependencies.
This solution in this article gives people significant control over that second issue, and if an application launcher was designed around most apps being this way, a good chunk of the first could be eliminated as well (that it should be an exceptional condition when a programs hierarchal folder location differs from its hierarchal UI launching location.)
But the #1 reason to use such a tool right now is because you can make distro-oblivious packages. Claims like "just make a package" ignores THAT issue. Packages arent distro-oblivious. You cant take a package made for Ubuntu and throw it at Slack successfully. So the developer ends up needed intimate knowledge of many distributions.. several package management systems.. and so forth..
The biggest competitor to Linux right now is another Linux.
Well, I imagine that most Javascript code ends up being pointer-heavy when compiled, and I'm not sure that the extra registers are going to offset the downsides of double-sized pointers.
Indeed. VB6 is still one of the greatest RAD for GUI building suites that has ever existed.
Sure, the interfaces you can trivially build are looking dated now (and even did so 8 years ago), but its still got all the UI functionality a business/enterprise application requires.
Thats why the move from VB6 to VB.NET is taking so long. Its not nearly as trivial in VB.NET to make the same things as you were in VB6.
Slashdot Mirror
I do, I bought the most expensive model a few weeks after launch. It cost 1/3 as much as my current gaming rig.
You (A) Purchased a stolen console at a heavy discount, or (B) Got ripped off on your PC in one way or another.
A good gaming rig costs no more than $500 to assemble (not including monitor, just like a console.) Spend anything more than that and you are heavily into the diminishing returns region of the price curve.
Please.
You call what I stated irrational, but all you did was take a global statistic (cubans hijack a lot of planes to/from cuba) and used it to rationalized a policy specific to the united states.
You learned just enough to justify your prior position, but not enough to be rational.
So what you're saying is that if there's a 0.00001% chance that somebody who looks like a nun is a terrorist, and a 0.01% chance that somebody who looks like a young Arab male is a terrorist, we should search every young Arab male and miss the terrorist nuns?
Yep.
We are talking about finite resources. Lets turn it around a bit and see how absurd your view of things are.
Lets suppose that there are two airlines. One of which gropes the privates of every middle-easterner and the other randomly gropes the privates of 1 out of every 25 passengers.
Which one will our enemies try to hijack?
As you see it is easier for our enemies, which are mainly middle-easterners, to hijack the one performing random groping.
Groping is a finite resource, which means we should intelligently allocate it.
Have you noticed that Firefox 4 doesnt render anything during the sunspider test? Whats that about? Opera displays the name of the current test and then the time...
It seems to me that Opera is rendering because its supposed to... so why isnt Firefox?
x64 Firefox 4.0b8pre
Sunspider = 285.1ms +/- 5.6%
x86 Firefox 4.0b8pre
Sunspider = 249.3ms +/- 4.4%
x86 Opera 11 Alpha
Sunspider = 233.4ms +/- 0.8%
You were saying that Firefox was the fastest at Sunspider. No. Opera is faster (not sure of its fastest.. not installing any IE pre-release)
Not unusual, but it makes the function 1 statement longer..
If you knew anything about JIT compilers, you would know that they have simple heuristics on purpose (compile speed is a strict constraint.) Making something 1 statement longer could remove it as a candidate for quite a few optimizations (inlining, static loop evaluation, loop unrolling, dead code elimination, etc..)
These simple heuristics use quickly evaluated metrics once the source is translated into an abstract syntax tree. The number of nodes in the tree.. the depth of the tree.. the number of conditional nodes..
JIT's are not simply compilers that try to produce the best code possible. JIT's make tradeoff decisions between compile time and the resulting code quality.
Fear not, Slashdot, for I have read the fucking article!
The unnamed "Mozilla Engineer" didn't even bother adding his 'true' and "return' to non-sunspider code, but has the balls to declare that the only possible reason for the negative performance when added to the sunspider code is that Microsofts JavaScript engine is cheating.
Now, maybe Microsoft is cheating here and maybe they arent, but in this article the conclusion obviously preceded the result, that this unnamed mozilla hack didnt even do any of the extremely simple things that might nullify his hypothesis.
If the dead voted, they would be able to own property.
I just spent a day of my life looking at open source CDDA ripping software (ones that take hours to get a perfect rip) for Windows .. and pretty much all of them required folder virtualization of Program Files in one way or another.
Note to others: Take care if buying audio books from Blackstone Audio. They play fine in regular stand-alone CD players but in a CD/DVD-Rom drive (I tried 3 different drives) they have serious problems. I suppose thats why I cant find the Compact Disc Digital Audio logo anywhere on these discs or package.
The thing about the Beatles is the 'Phenomena' or 'Mania' people associate with them.
..and thus, Beatles Mania was born. More than the sum of its parts, the phenomena was in the timing of it all, and wasnt the result of any marketing genius.. just plain old happenstance caused by the idea that "A British Rock band can't succeed in the United States"
This isnt to say that they werent excellent.. but the proportions of it, the 'Mania', was caused by stubborn executives in the United States that just wouldn't play any Beatles on American radio stations in spite of them having racked up a number of #1 hits in Britain, and had both of the best selling albums of all time in that country.
Eventually those stubborn U.S. executives caved in and the flood-gates were opened. All those Beatles hits in Britain started being played on American air-waves all at once. The Beatles didnt just have a #1 spot on the American charts.. they also had the #2, the #3, the #4, AND the #5.
Like toasters.
Toasters from the 1950's still work today, but modern toasters have micro-controllers and other assorted bullshit and might work for 5 years if you are lucky.
The secret to Mensa is to pass the "test", then prove that you didnt cheat by refusing to pay the fee to join.
There are two fucking monopolies I posted which inarguably appeared without regulation causing them: The Linseed Oil Trust and U.S. Steel.
You started with the one that was arguable because...?
Oh, yeah.. you didn't know that Standard Oil was created by a monopoly that only existed because of government interference.
Now you are downplaying it, just like you are ignoring the fact that U.S. Steel only had 66% market share and then only for a few years.
It only had this market share because it borrowed money to buy some competitors.. that the natural order of things was not for a monopoly to form, but the exact opposite.. that immediately after acquiring those companies, it began losing market share to the remaining competition.
And no, monopolies and collusion are not synonymous. We have separate laws against collusion which apply with or without a monopoly.. as in the case of the Linseed Oil, which required no monopoly to violate..
They didnt leverage a market position. They simply bribed the owners of the government created monopolies. This was the courts finding of fact.
Are you second guessing the court on the issue of Standard Oil?
Please explain how Standard Oil was created by legislation. You know, the reason we have anti-trust laws?
Its all right there is the courts decision on the matter.. you know, that case which was the reason we have anti-trust laws.
The courts in 1909, the finder of fact, determined that the railroads gave Standard Oil a significant advantage by discriminating against all of Standard Oil's competitors.
So your first question was easy.
Your second question is silly because there was no monopoly. The Linseed Oil Trust was an example of market collusion by individual non-monopolies.
Your third question answers itself. U.S. Steel was ruled a "monopoly" with (only) 67% market share, but was never broken up or regulated against because it wasnt doing anything wrong.
The end result is that the market destroyed the "monopoly" by competing with it, which it was allowed to do because U.S. Steel wasnt doing anything wrong. It has less than 10% market share today.
..and as others have clearly forgotten, it was the railroad monopolies that created the Oil monopoly.
Each regions respective railroads heavily discriminated against Standard Oil's competitors.
Standard Oil controlled a vast majority of the refined oil market and did it without the force of government.
What a bunch of shit. I think the AC is right, you people ARE regurgitating crap from tenured socialists.
The railroad monopolies, created by the government, enabled the Standard Oil monopoly.
This is all right there in the decision by the courts in the Standard Oil anti-trust suit of 1909, where the court stated:
Almost everywhere the rates from the shipping points used exclusively, or almost exclusively, by the Standard are relatively lower than the rates from the shipping points of its competitors. Rates have been made low to let the Standard into markets, or they have been made high to keep its competitors out of markets. Trifling differences in distances are made an excuse for large differences in rates favorable to the Standard Oil Company, while large differences in distances are ignored where they are against the Standard. Sometimes connecting roads prorate on oil—that is, make through rates which are lower than the combination of local rates; sometimes they refuse to prorate; but in either case the result of their policy is to favor the Standard Oil Company. Different methods are used in different places and under different conditions, but the net result is that from Maine to California the general arrangement of open rates on petroleum oil is such as to give the Standard an unreasonable advantage over its competitors
Now stop using Standard Oil as an example of a monopoly that wasnt created through government influence. The government created the Railroad monopolies, and the railroad monopolies created the Oil monopoly.
Everyone with any version of the Microsoft .NET framework has at least the C# and VB.NET compilers. Later versions of the framework come with several others.
These compilers are part of the framework itself because some of the capabilities of the framework (reflection/code generation/etc.) require them.
When one speaks of the free "Express" development packages, they are really talking about a stripped down version of the Visual Studio IDE with a language-specific configuration.
Developers developers developers...
grandma would not be building CDE packages either, so your post is pretty pointless.
Grandma would be consuming CDE packages.
Now before you reply, please go back and read parents postings at least all the way back to where the person noted the issues with dependencies on obscure versions of things like GTK/etc.
Then observe that GTK (among others) is LGPL, so cannot be statically linked to anything with a license incompatible with LGPL... Also observe that other libraries are distributed with licenses incompatible with LGPL.
See where this is going? Static linking doesnt work, because you cant necessarily link everything statically and you can't expect grandma to do it herself.
It all starts with dependencies on unique library versions and unmaintained (or slowly maintained) distributions that prevent any real semblance of a unified ecosystem. Grandma can thus only use whats in the repository for her distribution, all because of resistance to "just drop it" installation mechanics that CDE solves.
Anyone can build any one or more of 1000s of programs from the source, and simply enable static libraries rather than dynamic in the ./configure part of the build,
Would "anyone" be including my grandmother? If you knew my grandmother, you would know that a citation is needed here.
You can, take the proprietary game world of goo for example, you extract the .tar.gz and click on the world of goo script and bam, you are playing.
Here is a citation.
Obviously doing it "right" means that the WoG people have intimate knowledge of lots of environment variations and account for them at runtime in a script
Why? No offence, but you dream small. This seems barely one step up from what we've had in the past. Why SHOULD you have to do any of this? A real improvement shouldn't involve any of this mundane stuff. You shouldn't have to go download anything yourself, and you shouldn't have to think about managing where you want to extract things. The true goal should be to automate all this and make it transparent. If you want to run a program, that's all that should be needed from you, by the interface. The computer should figure everything out for you and do it, including putting things in your preferred locations if that's what you like.
We can argue over semantics, but in the end people want control over their UI application organization.
That might be what folders they are put in, or it could be what submenu of a launcher its icon is placed in. Your dream system just sweeps this issue under the rug like it suddenly wont matter. It still matters.
So the question then is, why this arbitrary distinction between things like folders and menus in a launcher?
One of the essential problems is that this distinction is made at all. Another is that in the case of folders, people dont always have full control over where things are put, which creates a complex interplay between applications which share arbitrarily located dependencies.
This solution in this article gives people significant control over that second issue, and if an application launcher was designed around most apps being this way, a good chunk of the first could be eliminated as well (that it should be an exceptional condition when a programs hierarchal folder location differs from its hierarchal UI launching location.)
But the #1 reason to use such a tool right now is because you can make distro-oblivious packages. Claims like "just make a package" ignores THAT issue. Packages arent distro-oblivious. You cant take a package made for Ubuntu and throw it at Slack successfully. So the developer ends up needed intimate knowledge of many distributions.. several package management systems.. and so forth..
The biggest competitor to Linux right now is another Linux.
Are you suggesting that MSDOS didnt have the same level of dominance?
Well, I imagine that most Javascript code ends up being pointer-heavy when compiled, and I'm not sure that the extra registers are going to offset the downsides of double-sized pointers.
Indeed. VB6 is still one of the greatest RAD for GUI building suites that has ever existed.
Sure, the interfaces you can trivially build are looking dated now (and even did so 8 years ago), but its still got all the UI functionality a business/enterprise application requires.
Thats why the move from VB6 to VB.NET is taking so long. Its not nearly as trivial in VB.NET to make the same things as you were in VB6.