Dear god, how this got a +4 Insightful I'll never know.
Madness? Using an illegal monopoly to muscle into other markets is madness. You're saying you'd be quite happy for the electric company to bundle a crappy washing machine that tears your clothes with your electricity bill?
Oh, and the electric company have ensured that even if you buy another washing machine, you can't remove theirs. And theirs insists on washing your clothes from time to time, no matter how hard you try to remove it. That's what MS did here - they used one product that you pretty much *had* to buy to bundle in a bug ridden piece of crap and force it on customers.
You can't remove IE from a system, they managed to bodge it in pretty well. And no matter how many competitors products you install, from time to time IE will pop up again.
If you're going to talk about the freedom of a company to sell it's product without interference, go speak to Netscape. They deserved to be able to sell their product without Microsoft illegally killing their market. And yes, it was illegal. Both the US and the EU have ruled on that now.
Calling decisions by some of the top courts on two continents insane just shows how much you're missing the point here. You're right about a line needing to be drawn though; the courts are telling Microsoft they've stepped over it, and it's about time.
It's more like a washing mashing that takes up no volume, works for most common washing tasks, is unable to cause any damage [like IE in a sandbox], and has a button that almost instantly provides me with any washing machine alternative that I'd like. I won't use it after I move in and hit the button, but I certainly don't think the power company should be legally required to provide me with several washing machines when they only make one.
Illegal just means the laws are wrong. Monopoly? MS has no internet browser monopoly. Come to think of it, why isn't Apple included in this ruling with Safari?
"And where do these stories come from? Who pays the reporters? Who keeps the servers running to deliver these stories?"
Who pays for the news broadcasts on NBC, ABC, and CBS?! Who pays the anchors, the journalists, and the cameramen? Who pays for your local news broadcasts?
Let me repeat from an earlier comment I made... Do you seriously think that CBS would make more money on its Evening News with Katie Couric if its stopped broadcasting it for free and made it solely pay-per-view? Think about it.
Television news sources are essentially well funded (ad revenue, which is more lucrative on TV than online) blogs with production budgets. Very little investigative journalism is done by TV news, and most of what is done is focused on special interest stories to make you feel good (or bad).
I just checked the top few movies in their top 100. Copyrighted. Wow golly gosh, what a surprise.
Let's reflect on how you failed. You tried to follow the GP's sound statistical suggestion ("Pick a bunch of random.torrent files and analyze what content they describe.") but you hadn't yet learned the meaning of "random."
I'll give you a hint. It doesn't mean "the most popular.torrents in the movie section." If you can figure out what random really does mean, you'll find that 80% of the.torrents point at legal content.
Questhelper has too large of a performance impact for me in my 3.8 GHz C2D with 4 gigs of ram.
Sir...I call bullshit. I can run Questhelper fine on a crappy Compaq laptop running Vista on 1 GB of RAM.
Although TourGuide (w/ the WoW-Pro guides) is better, and I use that now anyway.
60 FPS pegged in Fjord vs. 60 dropping to about 20 every few minutes. Not only is that my experience, but it's shared by most people I know who have used QH and it's mentioned in a number of "essential mods" guides. Acceptable performance varies from person to person, and we don't share the same threshold.
"I can't imagine much science was done, not that I've investigated AT ALL, and I must be right."
Welcome to Slashdot, where you are the king of kings.
YA, RLY
From your link, its missions were:
* Determine whether Life ever arose on Mars
An immobile probe that would have dug 5 meters under the surface would have had a far better chance to find living organisms (it could have reached water layers) than something that stays on the surface and scratches the rocks.
* Characterize the Climate of Mars
"Dude it's cloudy today". On the other hand, there are orbital observations that give a far better and deeper understanding of Mars' climate and weather.
* Characterize the Geology of Mars
That's the "scratching a rock" phase. From orbit we got a geological map of Mars and even of its underground, to some extent. The knowledge we have from the area where the rovers landed is probably only marginally better than what we scanned from orbit.
* Prepare for Human Exploration
How so ? Localizing water, minerals and so on was not made very efficiently by this rover team. It didn't build anything of use for explorers and I fail to see what new information it brought that the Viking probes didn't give us already.
Wow. Thank you. This is actually quite concerning. I'm now at a loss as to how they justify this under their privacy policy. Unless I can find some kind of clarification of or control to disable this, I guess I will be deleting my account. Thanks again.
Because there's no serious risk that they'll get into legal trouble because of their privacy policy, duh. Privacy policies are worthless. No one in power is interested in privacy, and a lot of people with money want to violate it.
Microsoft has a history of abusing their employees.
They were taken to court a couple of decades back because they didn't want to pay their cleaners overtime.
They were taken to court over "perma-temps". Ask anyone from the "BOGUS. badge" time (people wearing badges that said BOGUS, which stood for "Bend Over, Grease Up Sucker, 'cuz I'm vested and you ain't") how bad it was.
They have a culture of abuse, including screaming at people, as well as paranoia - you have to be at your desk at least as long as your boss, or you're not a "team player" - but you don't get overtime.
A headhunter was looking for c/c++ programmers in the early '90s, and I told her I was interested - unless it was Microsoft. She wanted to know why. Even then, their "culture" was well-known.
Microsoft products are crappy for a reason. You treat people like crap, they're going to produce crap. After all, GIGO - garbage in, garbage out.
People need a life away from work. That's not being a "team player" or a "'softie."
They should learn The Toyota Way - quality as consequence. Then change their actions.
Of course none of that is as bad as working for Steve Jobs.
A bureaucracy is neither evil, good, nor even conscious; it just seems that way. Who said, "never ascribe to evil what can be explained by stupidity"? They call bureaucracies "mindless" for a reason.
I think one could make a good argument for bureaucracies exhibiting consciousness. I think that they long ago reached the point that computerized AI will reach in the future, but with humans and rules as their brains. It's always fascinating to see a bureaucracy do something that no one within it wants or understands, and it happens more than one might expect.
Neat idea, but how do they get rid of the heat of 1000 suns? Does the IR escape because it isn't reflected the same way?
About 80% of the energy is absorbed across the entire solar spectrum. Yes, it will radiate some heat away as IR, but mostly the heat is convected away by the surrounded air. You're right, though--this is a design concern for these devices, as temperature effects efficiency and lifetime.
If you're just looking for something to look up info there is no need for a browser in WoW.
Install the Questhelper and lightheaded addons and you're all set.
Questhelper points you to the quest locations and lightheaded parses all comments from wowhead on quests in a ingame addon.
Questhelper has too large of a performance impact for me in my 3.8 GHz C2D with 4 gigs of ram. I'm glad you mention wowhead, which the GP should be using instead of thotbot. I think a good solution is cartographer and playing the game in windowed (but maximized) mode. In windowed mode, alt tabbing out is instant instead of incurring the 2 second delay of full screen. Of course, windowed mode incurs a performance penalty too, but it's less than QH and it can easily be turned off when not in need of constant reference material.
If Twitter was the worst, with 84 hours downtime, one year is 8765.81277 hours, which means that Twitter was down.958268243% of the time. Not.9 (90%), but.009 (nine tenths of one percent). IOW, it has an uptime of 99.05%. Sure, that's not great compared to 99.95%, but it was down less than 1 in every 100 times you tried to reach it. I'm pretty sure Yahoo! doesn't manage that, and I know Microsoft's download servers don't manage that...
Good numerical point, but Yahoo hasn't failed to load for me any time in the last 10 years, with something like 10-50 page views per day. Their uptime is thus no worse than based 0.99997 on my experience, which is means 300x less downtime than twitter.
Right. Let's see... Quicktime still works but the Sims 2 doesn't. Quicktime doesn't seem to break anything else, so logically, it MUST be Apple's fault. I think the rest of the Quicktime users who aren't playing the Sims 2 would disagree with your placement of blame.:)
Brainwashed much? You're basically implying that if I hit you in the head with a hammer and you're knocked out, but the hammer, nearby mailbox, and tree are unharmed, that proves that the hammer isn't to blame - your head is.
You're missing the point of the PS3. Don't think of it as a gaming system with hardware arguably equivalent to that of the 360 but a poorer overall gaming experience due to poor software implementation. Think of it as a media center with hardware significantly superior to that of the 360 but a poorer overall media serving experience due to poor software implementation.
After Vista drove me to Linux, I was considering giving Windows 7 a chance, but news like this means I'll probably skip it and wait for Windows 8.
I guess I'll have to keep the XP machine I use for games running a little while longer.
I used Ubuntu and Gimp wouldn't start after my machine crashed, and my sound card inputs didn't work at all. Of course, that information is useless, just like the random anecdotes and wild conclusions in TFA.
No, it's correct. Since Windows is so bloated, all task on windows (including the calculator) are hugely CPU intensive. Whereas if you want to run "intensive" tasks like encoding video or real number crunching, linux is your best bet.
Except openoffice's calc is a lot slower than excel at the 10 minute (on excel, 20 minute on calc) simple simulations I had to run in grad school. And no, the Windows Calculator is incredibly resource light and feels literally instantly responsive, just like Notepad and a million other little Windows tools.
Just because you want it to be different doesn't make it so.
Mod parent up. "This would only go into affect after enough states totaling 270 electoral votes (enough to elect a president) adopted similar resolutions."" means that the GGP is shockingly mistaken and the people who modded him insightful didn't even read, or perhaps couldn't understand the implications of, the summary.
As the GP stated, the reasoning behind the EC was to allow the fancy electors to ignore the state's vote if they thought the people voted incorrectly.
States don't pick an executive, and never did. They express the will of their citizens. You're right, a state can't pick 51% of an executive, but a state also can't pick 100% of an executive, since it takes a majority of the national EC votes to create a victor. The goal of the states is to express the will of their citizens, and a 50.1% winner receiving every vote based on the total number of citizens in the state instead of just who voted for him is unreasonable. If we keep our general system of government, only a true popular vote-based system is able to express the will of the people.
I read an article (I think in a math journal) a few years ago arguing that the EC system is better because it makes it more likely for a single person's vote to decide the election. The flaw in the argument, however, was assuming that the goal of democracy is to maximize the chance of a single ballot deciding an outcome.
While they're being accused of squandering billions, it is quite possible that they have provided that much value to the industry as a whole. What the investors are really complaining about is their inability to produce something unique and patentable that is so compelling it sells licenses regardless of the (lack of) value elsewhere.
Investors are complaining because there's an economic downturn and they're losing money. They complain about different things with every company, but yes, they all complain.
Not A HTML page, HTML pages . i-bench is a browser torture test discontinued in 2003 and the HTML dates back to 2001 so it's not too relevant to today's web where CSS and DOM dominate, not table based layouts.
You, sir, need to be modded informative before another dozen "my netbook renders web pages in 2 seconds - they must be using Vista lolz" posts go up.
Current versions all read the old formats, you just need to select the obsolete formats you want to be able to open on install. Not realizing this cost you your computer literacy card. Tear it up or burn it within 24 hours, please.
OMG, they probably never even considered that! It's not as if they are trained archaeologists or anything...oh, wait.
Archaeologists do make this sort of mistake, and can often be found guilty of wishful thinking. If there were a picture attached to TFA we could judge for ourselves. Being too lazy to look up related journal articles, I'm going to guess that most likely the conclusions are correct, but not beyond a certainty of about 90%.
* Faster on Less Hardware - They did make it work better on older slower hardware with less memory.
But still slower than XP on the same hardware. Faster than Vista is not saying much.
This should be included into Vista with a service pack
The whole thing strikes me as Vista SP3.
As we saw in the/. coverage of a cnet or zdnet story a couple weeks ago, for something like 68 of 72 common tasks, 7 is faster than XP. In fact, even Vista was faster than XP for most of those tasks. This was on midrange, extreme budget hardware, remember.
Vista/7 are definitely slower for some things, and they're important things for people here, but in terms of opening Word or Photoshop, browsing the web, etc., they're at no disadvantage as long as you have a gig of memory.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear god, how this got a +4 Insightful I'll never know.
Madness? Using an illegal monopoly to muscle into other markets is madness. You're saying you'd be quite happy for the electric company to bundle a crappy washing machine that tears your clothes with your electricity bill?
Oh, and the electric company have ensured that even if you buy another washing machine, you can't remove theirs. And theirs insists on washing your clothes from time to time, no matter how hard you try to remove it. That's what MS did here - they used one product that you pretty much *had* to buy to bundle in a bug ridden piece of crap and force it on customers.
You can't remove IE from a system, they managed to bodge it in pretty well. And no matter how many competitors products you install, from time to time IE will pop up again.
If you're going to talk about the freedom of a company to sell it's product without interference, go speak to Netscape. They deserved to be able to sell their product without Microsoft illegally killing their market. And yes, it was illegal. Both the US and the EU have ruled on that now.
Calling decisions by some of the top courts on two continents insane just shows how much you're missing the point here. You're right about a line needing to be drawn though; the courts are telling Microsoft they've stepped over it, and it's about time.
It's more like a washing mashing that takes up no volume, works for most common washing tasks, is unable to cause any damage [like IE in a sandbox], and has a button that almost instantly provides me with any washing machine alternative that I'd like. I won't use it after I move in and hit the button, but I certainly don't think the power company should be legally required to provide me with several washing machines when they only make one.
Illegal just means the laws are wrong. Monopoly? MS has no internet browser monopoly. Come to think of it, why isn't Apple included in this ruling with Safari?
That's because it's CORRECT. There's no such thing as 'absolute time'.
1054AD _was_ the time of birth of the Crab Nebula from _our_ point of view.
I'm amused that this was modded Funny. You know that this is what a relativistic physicist will tell you, right?
"And where do these stories come from? Who pays the reporters? Who keeps the servers running to deliver these stories?"
Who pays for the news broadcasts on NBC, ABC, and CBS?! Who pays the anchors, the journalists, and the cameramen? Who pays for your local news broadcasts?
Let me repeat from an earlier comment I made... Do you seriously think that CBS would make more money on its Evening News with Katie Couric if its stopped broadcasting it for free and made it solely pay-per-view? Think about it.
Television news sources are essentially well funded (ad revenue, which is more lucrative on TV than online) blogs with production budgets. Very little investigative journalism is done by TV news, and most of what is done is focused on special interest stories to make you feel good (or bad).
hahahahaha
you believe that?
I just checked the top few movies in their top 100. Copyrighted. Wow golly gosh, what a surprise.
Let's reflect on how you failed. You tried to follow the GP's sound statistical suggestion ("Pick a bunch of random .torrent files and analyze what content they describe.") but you hadn't yet learned the meaning of "random."
I'll give you a hint. It doesn't mean "the most popular .torrents in the movie section." If you can figure out what random really does mean, you'll find that 80% of the .torrents point at legal content.
Questhelper has too large of a performance impact for me in my 3.8 GHz C2D with 4 gigs of ram.
Sir...I call bullshit. I can run Questhelper fine on a crappy Compaq laptop running Vista on 1 GB of RAM.
Although TourGuide (w/ the WoW-Pro guides) is better, and I use that now anyway.
60 FPS pegged in Fjord vs. 60 dropping to about 20 every few minutes. Not only is that my experience, but it's shared by most people I know who have used QH and it's mentioned in a number of "essential mods" guides. Acceptable performance varies from person to person, and we don't share the same threshold.
Your speculation is rampant.
"I can't imagine much science was done, not that I've investigated AT ALL, and I must be right."
Welcome to Slashdot, where you are the king of kings.
YA, RLY
From your link, its missions were :
* Determine whether Life ever arose on Mars
An immobile probe that would have dug 5 meters under the surface would have had a far better chance to find living organisms (it could have reached water layers) than something that stays on the surface and scratches the rocks.
* Characterize the Climate of Mars
"Dude it's cloudy today". On the other hand, there are orbital observations that give a far better and deeper understanding of Mars' climate and weather.
* Characterize the Geology of Mars
That's the "scratching a rock" phase. From orbit we got a geological map of Mars and even of its underground, to some extent. The knowledge we have from the area where the rovers landed is probably only marginally better than what we scanned from orbit.
* Prepare for Human Exploration
How so ? Localizing water, minerals and so on was not made very efficiently by this rover team. It didn't build anything of use for explorers and I fail to see what new information it brought that the Viking probes didn't give us already.
Wow. Thank you. This is actually quite concerning. I'm now at a loss as to how they justify this under their privacy policy. Unless I can find some kind of clarification of or control to disable this, I guess I will be deleting my account. Thanks again.
Because there's no serious risk that they'll get into legal trouble because of their privacy policy, duh. Privacy policies are worthless. No one in power is interested in privacy, and a lot of people with money want to violate it.
Microsoft has a history of abusing their employees.
They were taken to court a couple of decades back because they didn't want to pay their cleaners overtime.
They were taken to court over "perma-temps". Ask anyone from the "BOGUS. badge" time (people wearing badges that said BOGUS, which stood for "Bend Over, Grease Up Sucker, 'cuz I'm vested and you ain't") how bad it was.
They have a culture of abuse, including screaming at people, as well as paranoia - you have to be at your desk at least as long as your boss, or you're not a "team player" - but you don't get overtime.
A headhunter was looking for c/c++ programmers in the early '90s, and I told her I was interested - unless it was Microsoft. She wanted to know why. Even then, their "culture" was well-known.
Microsoft products are crappy for a reason. You treat people like crap, they're going to produce crap. After all, GIGO - garbage in, garbage out.
People need a life away from work. That's not being a "team player" or a "'softie."
They should learn The Toyota Way - quality as consequence. Then change their actions.
Of course none of that is as bad as working for Steve Jobs.
A bureaucracy is neither evil, good, nor even conscious; it just seems that way. Who said, "never ascribe to evil what can be explained by stupidity"? They call bureaucracies "mindless" for a reason.
I think one could make a good argument for bureaucracies exhibiting consciousness. I think that they long ago reached the point that computerized AI will reach in the future, but with humans and rules as their brains. It's always fascinating to see a bureaucracy do something that no one within it wants or understands, and it happens more than one might expect.
Neat idea, but how do they get rid of the heat of 1000 suns? Does the IR escape because it isn't reflected the same way?
About 80% of the energy is absorbed across the entire solar spectrum. Yes, it will radiate some heat away as IR, but mostly the heat is convected away by the surrounded air. You're right, though--this is a design concern for these devices, as temperature effects efficiency and lifetime.
If you're just looking for something to look up info there is no need for a browser in WoW.
Install the Questhelper and lightheaded addons and you're all set.
Questhelper points you to the quest locations and lightheaded parses all comments from wowhead on quests in a ingame addon.
Questhelper has too large of a performance impact for me in my 3.8 GHz C2D with 4 gigs of ram. I'm glad you mention wowhead, which the GP should be using instead of thotbot. I think a good solution is cartographer and playing the game in windowed (but maximized) mode. In windowed mode, alt tabbing out is instant instead of incurring the 2 second delay of full screen. Of course, windowed mode incurs a performance penalty too, but it's less than QH and it can easily be turned off when not in need of constant reference material.
If Twitter was the worst, with 84 hours downtime, one year is 8765.81277 hours, which means that Twitter was down .958268243% of the time. Not .9 (90%), but .009 (nine tenths of one percent). IOW, it has an uptime of 99.05%. Sure, that's not great compared to 99.95%, but it was down less than 1 in every 100 times you tried to reach it. I'm pretty sure Yahoo! doesn't manage that, and I know Microsoft's download servers don't manage that...
Good numerical point, but Yahoo hasn't failed to load for me any time in the last 10 years, with something like 10-50 page views per day. Their uptime is thus no worse than based 0.99997 on my experience, which is means 300x less downtime than twitter.
Right. Let's see... Quicktime still works but the Sims 2 doesn't. Quicktime doesn't seem to break anything else, so logically, it MUST be Apple's fault. I think the rest of the Quicktime users who aren't playing the Sims 2 would disagree with your placement of blame. :)
Brainwashed much? You're basically implying that if I hit you in the head with a hammer and you're knocked out, but the hammer, nearby mailbox, and tree are unharmed, that proves that the hammer isn't to blame - your head is.
You're missing the point of the PS3. Don't think of it as a gaming system with hardware arguably equivalent to that of the 360 but a poorer overall gaming experience due to poor software implementation. Think of it as a media center with hardware significantly superior to that of the 360 but a poorer overall media serving experience due to poor software implementation.
After Vista drove me to Linux, I was considering giving Windows 7 a chance, but news like this means I'll probably skip it and wait for Windows 8.
I guess I'll have to keep the XP machine I use for games running a little while longer.
I used Ubuntu and Gimp wouldn't start after my machine crashed, and my sound card inputs didn't work at all. Of course, that information is useless, just like the random anecdotes and wild conclusions in TFA.
No, it's correct. Since Windows is so bloated, all task on windows (including the calculator) are hugely CPU intensive. Whereas if you want to run "intensive" tasks like encoding video or real number crunching, linux is your best bet.
Except openoffice's calc is a lot slower than excel at the 10 minute (on excel, 20 minute on calc) simple simulations I had to run in grad school. And no, the Windows Calculator is incredibly resource light and feels literally instantly responsive, just like Notepad and a million other little Windows tools.
Just because you want it to be different doesn't make it so.
Mod parent up. "This would only go into affect after enough states totaling 270 electoral votes (enough to elect a president) adopted similar resolutions."" means that the GGP is shockingly mistaken and the people who modded him insightful didn't even read, or perhaps couldn't understand the implications of, the summary.
As the GP stated, the reasoning behind the EC was to allow the fancy electors to ignore the state's vote if they thought the people voted incorrectly.
States don't pick an executive, and never did. They express the will of their citizens. You're right, a state can't pick 51% of an executive, but a state also can't pick 100% of an executive, since it takes a majority of the national EC votes to create a victor. The goal of the states is to express the will of their citizens, and a 50.1% winner receiving every vote based on the total number of citizens in the state instead of just who voted for him is unreasonable. If we keep our general system of government, only a true popular vote-based system is able to express the will of the people.
I read an article (I think in a math journal) a few years ago arguing that the EC system is better because it makes it more likely for a single person's vote to decide the election. The flaw in the argument, however, was assuming that the goal of democracy is to maximize the chance of a single ballot deciding an outcome.
While they're being accused of squandering billions, it is quite possible that they have provided that much value to the industry as a whole. What the investors are really complaining about is their inability to produce something unique and patentable that is so compelling it sells licenses regardless of the (lack of) value elsewhere.
Investors are complaining because there's an economic downturn and they're losing money. They complain about different things with every company, but yes, they all complain.
Not A HTML page, HTML pages . i-bench is a browser torture test discontinued in 2003 and the HTML dates back to 2001 so it's not too relevant to today's web where CSS and DOM dominate, not table based layouts.
You, sir, need to be modded informative before another dozen "my netbook renders web pages in 2 seconds - they must be using Vista lolz" posts go up.
Current versions all read the old formats, you just need to select the obsolete formats you want to be able to open on install. Not realizing this cost you your computer literacy card. Tear it up or burn it within 24 hours, please.
You are correct. The ArsTechnica article from yesterday answers every question people here have.
OMG, they probably never even considered that! It's not as if they are trained archaeologists or anything...oh, wait.
Archaeologists do make this sort of mistake, and can often be found guilty of wishful thinking. If there were a picture attached to TFA we could judge for ourselves. Being too lazy to look up related journal articles, I'm going to guess that most likely the conclusions are correct, but not beyond a certainty of about 90%.
Half of my linux boxes only get re-booted during a power outage, like once in 3 years. What's all the hype about?
I think it's about not everyone being you.
* Faster on Less Hardware - They did make it work better on older slower hardware with less memory.
But still slower than XP on the same hardware. Faster than Vista is not saying much.
This should be included into Vista with a service pack
The whole thing strikes me as Vista SP3.
As we saw in the /. coverage of a cnet or zdnet story a couple weeks ago, for something like 68 of 72 common tasks, 7 is faster than XP. In fact, even Vista was faster than XP for most of those tasks. This was on midrange, extreme budget hardware, remember.
Vista/7 are definitely slower for some things, and they're important things for people here, but in terms of opening Word or Photoshop, browsing the web, etc., they're at no disadvantage as long as you have a gig of memory.