This decision by Google is symptomatic of so much that's wrong is software.
I remember when Google first came out, Altavista was the dominant search engine then and it was a mess. A page full of blinking ads, where one had to search for the search input. Google was a refreshing change, with that clean look. Now they are doing their best to throw it away. Pity.
But that's not so different from the software world in general, people seem to find it pretty hard to leave well enough alone, although one *remarkable* exception to this rule seems to be Linus Torvalds, he has definitely rejected an attempt to create Linux version 3.
There are so many examples of people who should have celebrated their success and gone to other projects. KDE and Python are the most relevant examples, IMHO. KDE 3 and Python 2 were superb, outstanding pieces of human creation. KDE 4 and Python 3 suck.
And there are many other examples of software that tried to fix inexistent problems. For example, there was a time when every Linux distro had a utility called Lilo, for "Linux Loader". Lilo was simple, easy to configure, worked perfectly. Then someone thought he could improve Lilo and created an abomination called "Grub". Last time I looked there were 185 files in the Grub configuration directory in my computer. How many files do you need to choose which partition you want to boot? Oh, but wait! Grub lets you configure an image that will be shown as the background when you choose the partition to boot! I guess that makes it worthwhile to have 185 files instead of one file to configure, right?
Another example, Linux used to have something called the open Sound System, or OSS. Then someone tried to improve it and created something called ALSA, for Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. The problem is that OSS followed the Unix philosophy being simple, modular, and following the principle that "everything looks like a file". ALSA does not, doing development in ALSA is a PITA.
Why, oh why, cannot people see the beauty of keeping things simple?
There's no reason why lawmakers should be allowed to take money from non-US citizens
How would you enforce that? How can you verify that none of the people who go around distributing fliers and organizing campaigns and all the ways money is spent in electing a politician have not received money from someone out of the country?
You know, it's not only the money that gets deposited in a bank account that counts.
As for google - they have deliberately been sniffing WAP's - and the extent of that means that they may have been breaking a law which has existed for a very long time in Aus.
Making it illegal to sniff WAPs seems dangerously close to - excuse me, Godwin - making it illegal to have Jewish grandparents. It seems that Australia has been, for a very long time as you say, a police state.
From your post it's obvious that you never did assembly programming.
The Z80 was a major improvement over the 8080 that it was derived from
The major advantage the z80 had over the 8080 was a reduced chip count. Its architecture and instruction set are ridiculous.
The 8086 was an extension of the 8080, and thus inherited all of its limitations as well
The 8086 was *truly* a major improvement over the 8080. It had exactly the registers a compiler needs, which the z80 lacked. While the z80 tried to extend the 8080 by duplicating the registers, the 8086 extended the 8080 by adding the registers and instructions needed to run efficiently structured code.
The 8086 had a set of four index registers, the Stack Pointer, Base Pointer, Source Index, and Destination Index, with which one could do efficiently operations with arrays and create a context for a subroutine very easily, allocating space for local variables in the stack. In the z80 such operations would need much more effort from the programmer.
This may seem irrelevant with the CPUs we have now, but in the 1980s any decent program needed at least some assembly language functions and the time the programmers spent on them could be crucial to a project.
The 68000 was better than the 8086, except for one detail: the 8086 was available, while the 68000 was vaporware. One of the first tasks I did in my first job in 1980 was to migrate a system that was aborted from the 68000, because Motorola couldn't deliver the chips, to the 8086. Sometimes being good is better than being perfect.
I did a lot of assembly programming in the 1980s, for nearly every major processor available at the time. The 8086 rocked, in comparison to the others, at least until the 68000 came out.
The one processor that really stunk, IMHO, was the z80, and that's why its lineage died after being so popular. But the others, like the 6809 and 6502, were rather limited in comparison to the 8086.
Of course, virtual memory is a different beast and adapting x86 was a kludge. But I don't see RISC as being any improvement. If anything, they should have gone to a *more* complex instruction set, otherwise you start losing efficiency at the lowest level with all the library function calls that are needed. One example of a superb implementation of CISC for virtual memory was the VAX instruction set. The VAX was easily the winner in ease of assembly programming.
In the end, I'd rather have a good CISC implementation than RISC. For an example of how RISC sucks, take the Microchip PIC architecture. They even claim "only 35 instructions to learn" in their marketing, as if this was an advantage.
In conclusion, here's the car analogy: RISC is like a muscle car, all power but cannot make curves.
the hogs will get crappy bandwidth during peak hours, but still be able to download to their hearts' content during off-hours when no one else is using the bandwidth
In science fiction circles this is known as "it was raining in planet X". The concept of "peak hours" only applies to your local time, not to the planet-wide internet.
If you think newspapers need you buying papers to survive, think again.
People often say "if nobody pays for X, then nobody will want to do X". That's a gross misunderstanding. Just look at software, free software exists, even if you don't pay for it.
Then people say "but we need a big corporation to guarantee the quality of X". Sure, if you say so. Thank God there are people like thesemen looking for the integrity of our news, right?
Don't worry if some press magnates are unhappy right now, you can be sure they will always find a way to make some money.
you can still prove that certain forms of religion are wrong and self-contradicting. Like Islam, Christianity and all this creationist stuff...
Sure, but regardless of how contradicting they are, religions are still the source of most wars in the world.
Even without the logic contradictions, we would still have enough elements to ban all religions, based on the damage they cause to the fabric of society alone.
Water is not so scarce at all. It's just too expensive in some areas to waste in low-profit businesses like subsistence agriculture.
Meanwhile, the Amazon river is dumping 219000 tons of fresh water into the ocean per second.
When water really starts to become scarce, but long before the water wars start, Intel and Coca-Cola will have relocated their plants from China to Brazil.
The fact that they will build large installations in areas which are essential to the ecosystem. Many species of fish, shrimp, and crab in the Gulf need coastal marshes and mangroves to breed.
And in that world... just who will pay for movies to be made?
The same people who pay for movies to be shown on TV.
Willing or not, you pay for marketing in every product you buy. Part of that cost goes to putting ads on TV. You have paid for every movie that has been in programs sponsored by the products you buy.
Judging from the article author's name, he's obviously of Finnish origin. Now, Linux was created in Finland. Therefore, the Finnish government is the real controller behind Linux and this article is an attempt by the government of Finland to discredit a competitor in the world market for information technology.
See, pulling out conspiracy theories from one's ass is not so difficult...
You beat me to it. Symantec may have done some good stuff, but that was over twenty years ago. Same with Norton but, after they merged together, "scareware" seems the most appropriate name for what they have been doing.
I liked the "pink shirt" book, though, was of great use to me in the 1980s.
According to this site, most of the deaths happened in the first eight weeks after the blasts, and the total number of deaths for both atom bombs together are estimated to have been around 100000, the same number as in the Tokyo fire bombing.
Ironically, those who survived the first weeks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki have had a longer life expectancy than normal, because they had so much medical attention during their lives after the bombs.
>Tokyo was firebombed (which was worse than the nuke).
By what metric exactly ? I'm quite curious ? Total deaths ? If so are you comparing several months of bombing raids to one bomb and saying they were worse together ?
No, one single attack. Wikipedia says: "335 B-29s took off[1] to raid on the night of 9-10 March, with 279 of them[1] dropping around 1,700 tons of bombs. Fourteen B-29s were lost.[1] Approximately 16 square miles (41 km) of the city were destroyed and some 100,000 people are estimated to have died in the resulting firestorm, more than the immediate deaths of either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki atomic bombs".
The songs that this person was infringing were clearly copyrighted. You'd have to be a moron or living under a rock all your life to not know so
That's true in spirit, but not in the letter of the law. Let's see, in the Slashdot spirit, an analogy.
A few years ago I was in France and saw a small grocery store that had a fruit stand on the sidewalk. It was cold, in December, there was no one outside and the store door was closed. People picked their fruit in the stand and entered the store to pay.
That grocery store worked on an honor system. It worked, not because the French people are particularly honest, but because the fruit weren't too expensive. If a pear had cost $50 and a banana $100 you can bet a lot of people would just pick their fruit and walk away without paying.
The media industry is charging prices at least an order of magnitude more than they could reasonably do. A CD or DVD costing upwards of $30 is simply absurd, $3 would be enough to cover their costs plus a very nice profit. They cannot expect people to abide to an honor system with those prices.
If the industry isn't reasonable, the consumers need not be reasonable either. Any song could possibly have been released into the public domain, so we have the right to assume that public domain is the default status for any song. When the industry starts charging reasonable prices I will start to make reasonable guesses about copyright status.
Independent of the age at which something becomes "child porn", this expression is way too much overused. There was a time when someone saying "child porn" was sounding an alarm, today it's like background noise.
I admit I've seen lots and lots of porn on the web, but never anything that could be remotely called "child porn", unless you call adult women with small breasts and shaved pubic hair "children". If this "child porn" thing actually exists, which I doubt, it's so well hidden that any measures about blocking it are useless. Better try to block the Illuminati instead.
Sadly, the politicians have learned to use "child porn" like they use "terrorism", a convenient handle by which they are able to manipulate the masses.
Print news has always been funded primarily by advertising
Same as the media industry in general. Radio and TV used to be funded primarily by advertising.
Those were relatively low revenue businesses, after all no one cared to pay too much for a newspaper they throw away at the end of the day, and no one cared to pay to listen to the radio or watch TV. It's different from buying a car or clothes or any other durable item that you would use for years.
Then pure unadulterated greed came in. Now they want to charge us for every image we see, for every sound we hear. They want to put meters in our eyes and ears. I say fuck them.
Let them go broke if advertising doesn't pay enough. Let other investors come in, investors who are smart enough to know they cannot charge more than people are ready to pay.
If you do a search you can easily find tales of IRS agents abusing their authority to look up info on celebrities, political candidates, and even their ex-wives
Abuse of authority is wrong, no matter which method is used, but if the data is obtained legally I have nothing against that. If the IRS agents are doing their job, good for them! The more cheaters they catch, the less taxes we will have to pay.
I have nothing against law enforcement using technology, what I don't like are absurd regulations. It's OK to have traffic cameras, and if those cameras are used to catch stolen cars then it's even better. What I don't approve is using unreasonable speed limits, unnecessary stop signs, and short yellow light times to issue more traffic tickets. But then it's the regulation that's unfair, not the method used to catch the violators, it would be the same thing if no camera is used and a cop is waiting behind a bush.
One should realize that there's no reason to expect privacy when you are in public. There was a famous case years ago when a National Enquirer journalist carried Henry Kissinger's trash away and published what he found there. According to the State Department, Kissinger was "really revolted". But why should he expect privacy about something he left on the sidewalk for other people to carry away?
The big difference between me and Kissinger is that the contents of my trash will not help the National Enquirer to sell more papers, but I'm aware that everything I throw away could be used against me. That's why I shred all my bank and credit card receipts and other financial documents before throwing them away. But I don't care if Google collects data about my searches, I feel it's like someone going through my garbage to see what kind of food I eat.
Now, if someone is stalking me, let's say an IRS agent has a personal reason to incriminate me, then that's illegal, period, no matter how he does it. He could go through my Google searches looking for the Ferrari dealers I searched, or he could go through my trash can looking for the $4500 wine bottle I threw away.
It's like the gun nuts say, guns don't kill people, people kill people. Websites don't spy on people, people spy on people.
Slashdot Mirror
This decision by Google is symptomatic of so much that's wrong is software.
I remember when Google first came out, Altavista was the dominant search engine then and it was a mess. A page full of blinking ads, where one had to search for the search input. Google was a refreshing change, with that clean look. Now they are doing their best to throw it away. Pity.
But that's not so different from the software world in general, people seem to find it pretty hard to leave well enough alone, although one *remarkable* exception to this rule seems to be Linus Torvalds, he has definitely rejected an attempt to create Linux version 3.
There are so many examples of people who should have celebrated their success and gone to other projects. KDE and Python are the most relevant examples, IMHO. KDE 3 and Python 2 were superb, outstanding pieces of human creation. KDE 4 and Python 3 suck.
And there are many other examples of software that tried to fix inexistent problems. For example, there was a time when every Linux distro had a utility called Lilo, for "Linux Loader". Lilo was simple, easy to configure, worked perfectly. Then someone thought he could improve Lilo and created an abomination called "Grub". Last time I looked there were 185 files in the Grub configuration directory in my computer. How many files do you need to choose which partition you want to boot? Oh, but wait! Grub lets you configure an image that will be shown as the background when you choose the partition to boot! I guess that makes it worthwhile to have 185 files instead of one file to configure, right?
Another example, Linux used to have something called the open Sound System, or OSS. Then someone tried to improve it and created something called ALSA, for Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. The problem is that OSS followed the Unix philosophy being simple, modular, and following the principle that "everything looks like a file". ALSA does not, doing development in ALSA is a PITA.
Why, oh why, cannot people see the beauty of keeping things simple?
Google is your friend.
How would you enforce that? How can you verify that none of the people who go around distributing fliers and organizing campaigns and all the ways money is spent in electing a politician have not received money from someone out of the country?
You know, it's not only the money that gets deposited in a bank account that counts.
You mean charge the taxpayers, as in you and me, right? I disagree.
Making it illegal to sniff WAPs seems dangerously close to - excuse me, Godwin - making it illegal to have Jewish grandparents. It seems that Australia has been, for a very long time as you say, a police state.
From your post it's obvious that you never did assembly programming.
The major advantage the z80 had over the 8080 was a reduced chip count. Its architecture and instruction set are ridiculous.
The 8086 was *truly* a major improvement over the 8080. It had exactly the registers a compiler needs, which the z80 lacked. While the z80 tried to extend the 8080 by duplicating the registers, the 8086 extended the 8080 by adding the registers and instructions needed to run efficiently structured code.
The 8086 had a set of four index registers, the Stack Pointer, Base Pointer, Source Index, and Destination Index, with which one could do efficiently operations with arrays and create a context for a subroutine very easily, allocating space for local variables in the stack. In the z80 such operations would need much more effort from the programmer.
This may seem irrelevant with the CPUs we have now, but in the 1980s any decent program needed at least some assembly language functions and the time the programmers spent on them could be crucial to a project.
The 68000 was better than the 8086, except for one detail: the 8086 was available, while the 68000 was vaporware. One of the first tasks I did in my first job in 1980 was to migrate a system that was aborted from the 68000, because Motorola couldn't deliver the chips, to the 8086. Sometimes being good is better than being perfect.
I did a lot of assembly programming in the 1980s, for nearly every major processor available at the time. The 8086 rocked, in comparison to the others, at least until the 68000 came out.
The one processor that really stunk, IMHO, was the z80, and that's why its lineage died after being so popular. But the others, like the 6809 and 6502, were rather limited in comparison to the 8086.
Of course, virtual memory is a different beast and adapting x86 was a kludge. But I don't see RISC as being any improvement. If anything, they should have gone to a *more* complex instruction set, otherwise you start losing efficiency at the lowest level with all the library function calls that are needed. One example of a superb implementation of CISC for virtual memory was the VAX instruction set. The VAX was easily the winner in ease of assembly programming.
In the end, I'd rather have a good CISC implementation than RISC. For an example of how RISC sucks, take the Microchip PIC architecture. They even claim "only 35 instructions to learn" in their marketing, as if this was an advantage.
In conclusion, here's the car analogy: RISC is like a muscle car, all power but cannot make curves.
the hogs will get crappy bandwidth during peak hours, but still be able to download to their hearts' content during off-hours when no one else is using the bandwidth
In science fiction circles this is known as "it was raining in planet X". The concept of "peak hours" only applies to your local time, not to the planet-wide internet.
If you think newspapers need you buying papers to survive, think again.
People often say "if nobody pays for X, then nobody will want to do X". That's a gross misunderstanding. Just look at software, free software exists, even if you don't pay for it.
Then people say "but we need a big corporation to guarantee the quality of X". Sure, if you say so. Thank God there are people like these men looking for the integrity of our news, right?
Don't worry if some press magnates are unhappy right now, you can be sure they will always find a way to make some money.
Sure, but regardless of how contradicting they are, religions are still the source of most wars in the world.
Even without the logic contradictions, we would still have enough elements to ban all religions, based on the damage they cause to the fabric of society alone.
OTOH, Why focus on defending religion since you can't prove it right?
It seems to me that everyone would be much better off if we entirely forgot everything about religion.
Too much blood, too much terror, religion is not how we want to live at all.
Water is not so scarce at all. It's just too expensive in some areas to waste in low-profit businesses like subsistence agriculture.
Meanwhile, the Amazon river is dumping 219000 tons of fresh water into the ocean per second.
When water really starts to become scarce, but long before the water wars start, Intel and Coca-Cola will have relocated their plants from China to Brazil.
The fact that they will build large installations in areas which are essential to the ecosystem. Many species of fish, shrimp, and crab in the Gulf need coastal marshes and mangroves to breed.
The same people who pay for movies to be shown on TV.
Willing or not, you pay for marketing in every product you buy. Part of that cost goes to putting ads on TV. You have paid for every movie that has been in programs sponsored by the products you buy.
Judging from the article author's name, he's obviously of Finnish origin. Now, Linux was created in Finland. Therefore, the Finnish government is the real controller behind Linux and this article is an attempt by the government of Finland to discredit a competitor in the world market for information technology.
See, pulling out conspiracy theories from one's ass is not so difficult...
You beat me to it. Symantec may have done some good stuff, but that was over twenty years ago. Same with Norton but, after they merged together, "scareware" seems the most appropriate name for what they have been doing.
I liked the "pink shirt" book, though, was of great use to me in the 1980s.
According to this site, most of the deaths happened in the first eight weeks after the blasts, and the total number of deaths for both atom bombs together are estimated to have been around 100000, the same number as in the Tokyo fire bombing.
Ironically, those who survived the first weeks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki have had a longer life expectancy than normal, because they had so much medical attention during their lives after the bombs.
No, one single attack. Wikipedia says: "335 B-29s took off[1] to raid on the night of 9-10 March, with 279 of them[1] dropping around 1,700 tons of bombs. Fourteen B-29s were lost.[1] Approximately 16 square miles (41 km) of the city were destroyed and some 100,000 people are estimated to have died in the resulting firestorm, more than the immediate deaths of either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki atomic bombs".
That's true in spirit, but not in the letter of the law. Let's see, in the Slashdot spirit, an analogy.
A few years ago I was in France and saw a small grocery store that had a fruit stand on the sidewalk. It was cold, in December, there was no one outside and the store door was closed. People picked their fruit in the stand and entered the store to pay.
That grocery store worked on an honor system. It worked, not because the French people are particularly honest, but because the fruit weren't too expensive. If a pear had cost $50 and a banana $100 you can bet a lot of people would just pick their fruit and walk away without paying.
The media industry is charging prices at least an order of magnitude more than they could reasonably do. A CD or DVD costing upwards of $30 is simply absurd, $3 would be enough to cover their costs plus a very nice profit. They cannot expect people to abide to an honor system with those prices.
If the industry isn't reasonable, the consumers need not be reasonable either. Any song could possibly have been released into the public domain, so we have the right to assume that public domain is the default status for any song. When the industry starts charging reasonable prices I will start to make reasonable guesses about copyright status.
You're right, Japanese seem to prefer octopus porn
Japan tried this once. They failed.
Independent of the age at which something becomes "child porn", this expression is way too much overused. There was a time when someone saying "child porn" was sounding an alarm, today it's like background noise.
I admit I've seen lots and lots of porn on the web, but never anything that could be remotely called "child porn", unless you call adult women with small breasts and shaved pubic hair "children". If this "child porn" thing actually exists, which I doubt, it's so well hidden that any measures about blocking it are useless. Better try to block the Illuminati instead.
Sadly, the politicians have learned to use "child porn" like they use "terrorism", a convenient handle by which they are able to manipulate the masses.
Same as the media industry in general. Radio and TV used to be funded primarily by advertising.
Those were relatively low revenue businesses, after all no one cared to pay too much for a newspaper they throw away at the end of the day, and no one cared to pay to listen to the radio or watch TV. It's different from buying a car or clothes or any other durable item that you would use for years.
Then pure unadulterated greed came in. Now they want to charge us for every image we see, for every sound we hear. They want to put meters in our eyes and ears. I say fuck them.
Let them go broke if advertising doesn't pay enough. Let other investors come in, investors who are smart enough to know they cannot charge more than people are ready to pay.
I was really thinking about Google, not Facebook. I opted out of Facebook from the beginning.
Abuse of authority is wrong, no matter which method is used, but if the data is obtained legally I have nothing against that. If the IRS agents are doing their job, good for them! The more cheaters they catch, the less taxes we will have to pay.
I have nothing against law enforcement using technology, what I don't like are absurd regulations. It's OK to have traffic cameras, and if those cameras are used to catch stolen cars then it's even better. What I don't approve is using unreasonable speed limits, unnecessary stop signs, and short yellow light times to issue more traffic tickets. But then it's the regulation that's unfair, not the method used to catch the violators, it would be the same thing if no camera is used and a cop is waiting behind a bush.
One should realize that there's no reason to expect privacy when you are in public. There was a famous case years ago when a National Enquirer journalist carried Henry Kissinger's trash away and published what he found there. According to the State Department, Kissinger was "really revolted". But why should he expect privacy about something he left on the sidewalk for other people to carry away?
The big difference between me and Kissinger is that the contents of my trash will not help the National Enquirer to sell more papers, but I'm aware that everything I throw away could be used against me. That's why I shred all my bank and credit card receipts and other financial documents before throwing them away. But I don't care if Google collects data about my searches, I feel it's like someone going through my garbage to see what kind of food I eat.
Now, if someone is stalking me, let's say an IRS agent has a personal reason to incriminate me, then that's illegal, period, no matter how he does it. He could go through my Google searches looking for the Ferrari dealers I searched, or he could go through my trash can looking for the $4500 wine bottle I threw away.
It's like the gun nuts say, guns don't kill people, people kill people. Websites don't spy on people, people spy on people.