Then couldn't ISPs theoretically just offer something crappy like 56K and nothing else unless content providers pony up? That still kills the small guy. It could work theoretically, but has great potential for abuse. I wouldn't support that.
Yeah, total waste of space. I'll never be able to read/. on my netbook. I can barely even see the entire left panel on my 15" laptop. Also, what was wrong with the high contrast buttons?
And what's this obsession with panels that impose a minimum size on your screen real estate? Do web developers not realize that the scrollbar was made for elements that don't fit on the whole screen? Do they no longer realize that some people like being able to view more in a smaller space? That not everyone runs their browser in full screen? That sometimes it's nice to have 2, or maybe even 3 windows visible at a time?
Fuck this. Does/. have a mobile version? I'll have to start using that on my computer. I'm so angry, I'm not even gonna use the Preview button when I submit this (edit: nevermind).
The sports companies are there for a very good reason: illegal streaming of live games and content. And they totally deserve it. Buying a yearly subscription for the NFL, NBA and MLB easily costs more than many cable subscriptions. They won't have success in taking the streams down (many are out of the US or P2P-based), but they can still threaten to stop providing money for their bought-off politicians and beaurocrats.
Everytime I think about it, I'm totally shocked by how good XFCE is. I was a bit misled when I was using Xubuntu (not as lightweght as I had hoped) so I dropped it for a bit, but then I came back when I installed Arch on my netbook. It makes Debian superfast and Arch superstable (and yes, I use both). And on top of all that are all the config tools, which are exceedingly comprehensive, the panel, with a plethora of widgets, and a really good WM (not as powerful as I wish, but I'm so satisfied with it that I can't convince myself to replace it with Openbox). And on top of it all, it's remarkably elegant and simple. Hot damn, it even has its own built-in compositor.
It's hard to think of things that I don't like about it... I do wish some of the config settings were more intuitive, or if they could all be placed in one spot so you could search for what you need... but other than that, for me at least, it's as close to perfect as could ever be hoped. It is, quite frankly, awesome. Sorry for the pun. Here's to hoping that 4.8 is just as good.
There's not much that can really be done about it though. As much as we may want to take care of our own privacy, there's still a good chance that our friends will expose our data for us. If, say, a someone who doesn't know you asks a mutual friend for your address, telephone number, SSN, transcoded genome, etc. - it could easily be gone as easily as that. And it could be even more innocuous still; what if they just post pictures or videos that happens to have something that could lead to more information about you (a barely visible business card, an envelope with your address, the results of an AFM scan on your HDD) Sure it's not useful for data mining per se, but still, if someone wants to get information from you, and even if you're doing well to take care of yourself, others may be undoing all your hard work for you.
Of late, of all programs that I run on my machine, it's the web browser that takes up the most CPU. More than Gimp, OpenOffice (I'm more of a Latex person meself, but still), PDF readers, or any other utility that you run in for core productivity, it's the fucking bloated webpages that are the most taxing on my CPU. It's the Flash plugins, and the javascript - I have to block/. in noscript or the scrolling becomes all laggy (and as you'd expect/. have more competent developers than other sites, it's better than most).
I have to upgrade my computers so i can browse the internets. Lame.
What if they blacklist specific plugins to break their functionality and come back to blame it on Google for making it buggy? Remember how Intel's compilers totally tank performance if they're used on an AMD processor?
Or judging by Apple's current vision for smartphones, tablets, and computers of the future, they'll pull all browser codecs and plugins into a "plugin store" and block all outside developers from creating add-ons without their approval. How would you like that, fanboy?
Yeah, I actually did think about it. Maybe you should think more before putting all your blind faith in Apple.
Why? Sometimes it's good to solve problems just for the sake of intellectual curiosity. Why do we even do Sudoku puzzles in the first place if there's nothing to be gained from solving them? And I mean, if you're, say, driving to work in the morning while solving the Sudoku (or maybe just taking the train), and then you arrive and have to go to work and just want to know what the solution is - well now you can have it and get on with your day (of course, having admitted bitter defeat and succumbing to puzzle-solving mortality).
And I think there's a lot that could potentially be gained from solving Sudoku via AI. What if more complex or heuristic problems could be modeled as solving a sudoku puzzle? And I can't imagine there's nothing to be gained in other fields - case studies and thought experiments in algorithms, threading, and so on. I can't imagine it was that hard to implement, just some signal processing to create the puzzle in memory and then applying some generic sudoku AI to solve it. And in the end, I guess the developers just wanted to have some fun and see what they could do. So no, I don't think it's totally useless
People will finally grasp what the rest of us grasped ages ago. That is, I have nothing worth saying that hundreds or thousands of people need to know about and none of them have anything worth saying that I give a damn about. We're all just a bunch of circle-jerking morons so wrapped up in ourselves and the trivial reciprocation (to ensure that those in our circle will continue to care about us, too). Eventually people will pull their heads out of their own asses and move on.
I highly doubt this. I'm sure that you (and possibly everyone else on/. - and myself included) has that sort of attitude with respect to what we say, but when we come out of our caves and look at how others in society work, we still see that there are tons of people who keep spewing shit out of their mouth that they expect the whole world to be interested in (I mean, in which they expect the whole workd to be interested). Like that guy on the bus or subway that wants to talk about every damn word he reads in the paper. Or the girl waiting in line at the fast food counter talking on the top of her lungs into the phone while ordering. No - people will continue talking. There's just a small demographic (mostly on/.) that really doesn't, in fact, want to broadcast everything we know.
They'll return to the way things should be done. If you have something important to say and there are people in your life that are important enough to tell it to, you email them or call them. You have a direct dialogue with them, rather than this self-absorbed mass-broadcasting of everything, where those who are on the other end are merely absorbers of your greatness. And they'll contact you directly when they have something to talk about, too. Everything else doesn't need to be shared and you can have actual individual relationships and discussions with people.
Again, I disagree. First of all, if there's something you need to say to many people (like, It's a boy! or, I got a new job!), why would you go through the effort of telling everyone you know individually? Why wouldn't you bother letting everyone in the world know at once (keeping in mind that most people couldn't care less about their privacy or security of course)? Especially since everyone communicates through it instantly and en masse, whereas via a phone you can only have one-on-one dialogue.
For those things that you need to communicate individually, nothing will stop you from doing it, but Facebook offers a new medium for different needs. Plus the fact that you can send 'private' messages to those that you want to talk to exclusively at once, or create private groups for that matter.
It's the same way we went through the whole web thing.
Maybe the web just wasn't what a lot of people needed. A lot of people want Facebook as a medium for communication.
On the whole, I think most of this discussion is a false analogy. Facebook is different. It's something people actually want, and it's something that makes their lives easier and more enjoyable. The Web, AOL, they were all largely novelties that died down when people realized it wasn't relevant to them. Facebook is, however. And while there are few, and mostly inferior alternatives to it, it will remain large.
Of course, any sane person would have facebook blocked in their hosts file by now.
Aha, sure. The ISPs are going to provide new features for users. The ISPs are going to improve their networks. And they're going to encourage greater bandwidth use on their networks. You must have not beeing paying attention to what's been going around for the past decade or so.
Now before you liberals get all self-congratulatory on your enlightened position.... none of my liberal friends can think for themselves on several liberal bandwaggon issues either.
There's nothing to feel proud about in calling one's self a liberal (or for affiliating in whatever party). The only real pride to be had is in knowing the facts and using them to make an intelligent, honest and uncompromising decision.
You're right - what's really destroying politics is simply ignorance and a lack of interest in doing anything about it. It's obvious, common knowledge to anyone aware of what's going on that corporate bribes (AKA lobbyists) are running the government and that they have no interest in it outside of their selfish interests. They are what define 'left' and 'right' in what's really an artificial, meaningless discrimination which simply boils down to wherever there's more power to be gained.
What we need is for people to stand up to this practice. That is where the next battle will truly be waged. Forget left and right. Let's start discriminating between knowledgeable citizens with honesty and clear judgement and well, whatever you want to call America/country of choice.
It's nice. I wish academics more often had the balls to call these crooks out. Maybe it will serve as a memo to more people that there's a greater sense to be had. I mean, it's not gonna fix the world's problems, but at least it will stop peopel from worshipping the corporate machine (at least to the extent that they are so worshipped in the US).
Totally opposite. If there's one thing I hate about top 10 lists, it's when something important is omitted to keep it to 10, or when a few meaningless and unrelated items are added to stretch it to said arbitrary number. If you're making a list about something, make as many items as you need. Don't artificially stretch/condense whatever items just to make some round number. Do justice to whatever topic about which you're talking, then tack on the number when you're done.
Great. Thanks for letting us know that you've succumbed to the notion that the world revolves around nothing but money. I haven't stooped to that level yet, and I hope I never do, but let me at least say this: no matter how great your product may be, there's never any justification for closing it off in order to prevent your customers for actually harnessing it to its full potential. Just because it doesn't harm _you_ doesn't mean it's okay to support it when its limiting the potential of real users who want to to use it for what its worth, not for what some executive thinks its worth.
I think that's somewhat besides the point. What GP was saying is that the manager wants to have someone else to blame, not someone else to fix it. Wrong mentality, sure, but how else do you get to be a manager?
That's exactly how I got through my university (on a tier similar to that of Duke) - by reading the book and learning from the homework. If you want to succeed in any university, you have to be your own teacher. If you can't teach yourself, you won't succeed without someone else's help - which you're not always gonna have.
So what did I gain from my experiences? Well for one thing, a high-level college pushes you to your limit. In my opinion, you have to learn most from homeworks, exams, labs, projects and papers, and if your instructor doesn't push you as hard on exams, assignments, etc., in spite of his better teaching skills, he won't help you as much. And aside from that, there are other valuable experiences such as research positions and whatnot.
It's all about what you're able to make of what you're given. In some classes, you have to take advantage of a good professor, or a good TA. Sometimes you just have to rely on books or lecture notes. I recall one class in my second year where the teacher was absolutely awful and the TAs couldn't speak English - thank god I started reading the textbook when the class started, and when we stopped using the book for the last third of the course, well that got interesting. But if your learning experience is simply hampered by not having good teachers, well there are still other things you can do to make the most of where you are.
But in all honesty, undergrads are useless to professors. What do they have to gain from teaching? Well sometimes an undergrad will ask to work with them, but that's pretty rare. They have to real reason to care that much about teaching (outside of doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, which many do of course). And sure, there are teaching excellence awards and incentives, but they still aren't really useful when what defines a professor's distinction is his research.
In any case, if you're not aware of these things before you choose your university, then you're already drawing dead. You have to know what you want to achieve and what you need to make it happen when you choose your undergrad. I was pretty confident in my independent learning abilities and it paid off. If you can't do that, take it into consideration when making your choice and don't go to a research university.
Slashdot Mirror
Do it yourself ;-)
Then couldn't ISPs theoretically just offer something crappy like 56K and nothing else unless content providers pony up? That still kills the small guy. It could work theoretically, but has great potential for abuse. I wouldn't support that.
Yeah, total waste of space. I'll never be able to read /. on my netbook. I can barely even see the entire left panel on my 15" laptop. Also, what was wrong with the high contrast buttons?
And what's this obsession with panels that impose a minimum size on your screen real estate? Do web developers not realize that the scrollbar was made for elements that don't fit on the whole screen? Do they no longer realize that some people like being able to view more in a smaller space? That not everyone runs their browser in full screen? That sometimes it's nice to have 2, or maybe even 3 windows visible at a time?
Fuck this. Does /. have a mobile version? I'll have to start using that on my computer. I'm so angry, I'm not even gonna use the Preview button when I submit this (edit: nevermind).
Because being a lawyer or a businessperson sucks. And as an aside, want to know how well those budding lawyers are doing? http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/business/09law.html?_r=3&src=me&ref=business
Whatever happened to doing what you enjoy?
The sports companies are there for a very good reason: illegal streaming of live games and content. And they totally deserve it. Buying a yearly subscription for the NFL, NBA and MLB easily costs more than many cable subscriptions. They won't have success in taking the streams down (many are out of the US or P2P-based), but they can still threaten to stop providing money for their bought-off politicians and beaurocrats.
Everytime I think about it, I'm totally shocked by how good XFCE is. I was a bit misled when I was using Xubuntu (not as lightweght as I had hoped) so I dropped it for a bit, but then I came back when I installed Arch on my netbook. It makes Debian superfast and Arch superstable (and yes, I use both). And on top of all that are all the config tools, which are exceedingly comprehensive, the panel, with a plethora of widgets, and a really good WM (not as powerful as I wish, but I'm so satisfied with it that I can't convince myself to replace it with Openbox). And on top of it all, it's remarkably elegant and simple. Hot damn, it even has its own built-in compositor.
It's hard to think of things that I don't like about it... I do wish some of the config settings were more intuitive, or if they could all be placed in one spot so you could search for what you need... but other than that, for me at least, it's as close to perfect as could ever be hoped. It is, quite frankly, awesome. Sorry for the pun. Here's to hoping that 4.8 is just as good.
There's not much that can really be done about it though. As much as we may want to take care of our own privacy, there's still a good chance that our friends will expose our data for us. If, say, a someone who doesn't know you asks a mutual friend for your address, telephone number, SSN, transcoded genome, etc. - it could easily be gone as easily as that. And it could be even more innocuous still; what if they just post pictures or videos that happens to have something that could lead to more information about you (a barely visible business card, an envelope with your address, the results of an AFM scan on your HDD) Sure it's not useful for data mining per se, but still, if someone wants to get information from you, and even if you're doing well to take care of yourself, others may be undoing all your hard work for you.
THANK YOU.
Of late, of all programs that I run on my machine, it's the web browser that takes up the most CPU. More than Gimp, OpenOffice (I'm more of a Latex person meself, but still), PDF readers, or any other utility that you run in for core productivity, it's the fucking bloated webpages that are the most taxing on my CPU. It's the Flash plugins, and the javascript - I have to block /. in noscript or the scrolling becomes all laggy (and as you'd expect /. have more competent developers than other sites, it's better than most).
I have to upgrade my computers so i can browse the internets. Lame.
What if they blacklist specific plugins to break their functionality and come back to blame it on Google for making it buggy? Remember how Intel's compilers totally tank performance if they're used on an AMD processor?
Or judging by Apple's current vision for smartphones, tablets, and computers of the future, they'll pull all browser codecs and plugins into a "plugin store" and block all outside developers from creating add-ons without their approval. How would you like that, fanboy?
Yeah, I actually did think about it. Maybe you should think more before putting all your blind faith in Apple.
Something tells me that MS and Apple (and especially, Apple) will do all they can to break the plugin's functionality.
I'm sure it'll eventually get patented so no one can use it
Why? Sometimes it's good to solve problems just for the sake of intellectual curiosity. Why do we even do Sudoku puzzles in the first place if there's nothing to be gained from solving them? And I mean, if you're, say, driving to work in the morning while solving the Sudoku (or maybe just taking the train), and then you arrive and have to go to work and just want to know what the solution is - well now you can have it and get on with your day (of course, having admitted bitter defeat and succumbing to puzzle-solving mortality).
And I think there's a lot that could potentially be gained from solving Sudoku via AI. What if more complex or heuristic problems could be modeled as solving a sudoku puzzle? And I can't imagine there's nothing to be gained in other fields - case studies and thought experiments in algorithms, threading, and so on. I can't imagine it was that hard to implement, just some signal processing to create the puzzle in memory and then applying some generic sudoku AI to solve it. And in the end, I guess the developers just wanted to have some fun and see what they could do. So no, I don't think it's totally useless
No smartphones use an x86 chip.
Even better here! I just dump a little note to everyone in /var/mail - and I firmly expect them to pick it up immediately!
People will finally grasp what the rest of us grasped ages ago. That is, I have nothing worth saying that hundreds or thousands of people need to know about and none of them have anything worth saying that I give a damn about. We're all just a bunch of circle-jerking morons so wrapped up in ourselves and the trivial reciprocation (to ensure that those in our circle will continue to care about us, too). Eventually people will pull their heads out of their own asses and move on.
I highly doubt this. I'm sure that you (and possibly everyone else on /. - and myself included) has that sort of attitude with respect to what we say, but when we come out of our caves and look at how others in society work, we still see that there are tons of people who keep spewing shit out of their mouth that they expect the whole world to be interested in (I mean, in which they expect the whole workd to be interested). Like that guy on the bus or subway that wants to talk about every damn word he reads in the paper. Or the girl waiting in line at the fast food counter talking on the top of her lungs into the phone while ordering. No - people will continue talking. There's just a small demographic (mostly on /.) that really doesn't, in fact, want to broadcast everything we know.
They'll return to the way things should be done. If you have something important to say and there are people in your life that are important enough to tell it to, you email them or call them. You have a direct dialogue with them, rather than this self-absorbed mass-broadcasting of everything, where those who are on the other end are merely absorbers of your greatness. And they'll contact you directly when they have something to talk about, too. Everything else doesn't need to be shared and you can have actual individual relationships and discussions with people.
Again, I disagree. First of all, if there's something you need to say to many people (like, It's a boy! or, I got a new job!), why would you go through the effort of telling everyone you know individually? Why wouldn't you bother letting everyone in the world know at once (keeping in mind that most people couldn't care less about their privacy or security of course)? Especially since everyone communicates through it instantly and en masse, whereas via a phone you can only have one-on-one dialogue.
For those things that you need to communicate individually, nothing will stop you from doing it, but Facebook offers a new medium for different needs. Plus the fact that you can send 'private' messages to those that you want to talk to exclusively at once, or create private groups for that matter.
It's the same way we went through the whole web thing.
Maybe the web just wasn't what a lot of people needed. A lot of people want Facebook as a medium for communication.
On the whole, I think most of this discussion is a false analogy. Facebook is different. It's something people actually want, and it's something that makes their lives easier and more enjoyable. The Web, AOL, they were all largely novelties that died down when people realized it wasn't relevant to them. Facebook is, however. And while there are few, and mostly inferior alternatives to it, it will remain large.
Of course, any sane person would have facebook blocked in their hosts file by now.
Aha, sure. The ISPs are going to provide new features for users. The ISPs are going to improve their networks. And they're going to encourage greater bandwidth use on their networks. You must have not beeing paying attention to what's been going around for the past decade or so.
Now before you liberals get all self-congratulatory on your enlightened position.... none of my liberal friends can think for themselves on several liberal bandwaggon issues either.
There's nothing to feel proud about in calling one's self a liberal (or for affiliating in whatever party). The only real pride to be had is in knowing the facts and using them to make an intelligent, honest and uncompromising decision.
You're right - what's really destroying politics is simply ignorance and a lack of interest in doing anything about it. It's obvious, common knowledge to anyone aware of what's going on that corporate bribes (AKA lobbyists) are running the government and that they have no interest in it outside of their selfish interests. They are what define 'left' and 'right' in what's really an artificial, meaningless discrimination which simply boils down to wherever there's more power to be gained.
What we need is for people to stand up to this practice. That is where the next battle will truly be waged. Forget left and right. Let's start discriminating between knowledgeable citizens with honesty and clear judgement and well, whatever you want to call America/country of choice.
It's nice. I wish academics more often had the balls to call these crooks out. Maybe it will serve as a memo to more people that there's a greater sense to be had. I mean, it's not gonna fix the world's problems, but at least it will stop peopel from worshipping the corporate machine (at least to the extent that they are so worshipped in the US).
The first part was very useful to me, the second absolutely useless - but to him it was all just interesting.
Yup. Sounds like a mathematician alright.
Totally opposite. If there's one thing I hate about top 10 lists, it's when something important is omitted to keep it to 10, or when a few meaningless and unrelated items are added to stretch it to said arbitrary number. If you're making a list about something, make as many items as you need. Don't artificially stretch/condense whatever items just to make some round number. Do justice to whatever topic about which you're talking, then tack on the number when you're done.
Great. Thanks for letting us know that you've succumbed to the notion that the world revolves around nothing but money. I haven't stooped to that level yet, and I hope I never do, but let me at least say this: no matter how great your product may be, there's never any justification for closing it off in order to prevent your customers for actually harnessing it to its full potential. Just because it doesn't harm _you_ doesn't mean it's okay to support it when its limiting the potential of real users who want to to use it for what its worth, not for what some executive thinks its worth.
I think that's somewhat besides the point. What GP was saying is that the manager wants to have someone else to blame, not someone else to fix it. Wrong mentality, sure, but how else do you get to be a manager?
That's exactly how I got through my university (on a tier similar to that of Duke) - by reading the book and learning from the homework. If you want to succeed in any university, you have to be your own teacher. If you can't teach yourself, you won't succeed without someone else's help - which you're not always gonna have.
So what did I gain from my experiences? Well for one thing, a high-level college pushes you to your limit. In my opinion, you have to learn most from homeworks, exams, labs, projects and papers, and if your instructor doesn't push you as hard on exams, assignments, etc., in spite of his better teaching skills, he won't help you as much. And aside from that, there are other valuable experiences such as research positions and whatnot.
It's all about what you're able to make of what you're given. In some classes, you have to take advantage of a good professor, or a good TA. Sometimes you just have to rely on books or lecture notes. I recall one class in my second year where the teacher was absolutely awful and the TAs couldn't speak English - thank god I started reading the textbook when the class started, and when we stopped using the book for the last third of the course, well that got interesting. But if your learning experience is simply hampered by not having good teachers, well there are still other things you can do to make the most of where you are.
But in all honesty, undergrads are useless to professors. What do they have to gain from teaching? Well sometimes an undergrad will ask to work with them, but that's pretty rare. They have to real reason to care that much about teaching (outside of doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, which many do of course). And sure, there are teaching excellence awards and incentives, but they still aren't really useful when what defines a professor's distinction is his research.
In any case, if you're not aware of these things before you choose your university, then you're already drawing dead. You have to know what you want to achieve and what you need to make it happen when you choose your undergrad. I was pretty confident in my independent learning abilities and it paid off. If you can't do that, take it into consideration when making your choice and don't go to a research university.