By the way all the praises here and elsewhere about C and UNIX are ironically a bit overdone too. UNIX is better than Windows. But it isn't that wonderful. C might be preferable to Pascal, but it isn't that great either.
So a world without C and UNIX might not necessarily be worse. Maybe stuff would only start happening 10 years later but we might have a lot fewer stupid "buffer overflows" and "exploits".
We were taken on field trips to manufacturing plants and laboratories, so that we would know where the stuff comes from. That was considered important at the time. It's not anymore. Ignorance is bliss I suppose.
Heh milk comes from a carton, bacon and eggs from the supermarket, honey from a jar. Many people don't like the truth. Ignorance is bliss for them.
That's why some things have to be done before other things, not done immediately the moment they are technically feasible. Otherwise Society/Culture won't be "grown-up" enough to handle the results.
The way I see it, the "free market capitalist" path will be one that leads to much evil. The "crazy Scandinavian socialists" path might be viable- most people do what everyone else around them does, so if it becomes cultural norm to just keep other people around alive and well (even though they're kinda stupid compared to you), then we might be able to avoid lots of evil.
However, there are still many problems. Imagine if your pets could vote, would that be good for you and them in the long run?
So I daresay the otherwise benign post-humans might be willing to put up with those who can't "make it" only if those unfortunate ones gave up their rights to political power maybe temporarily/conditionally - e.g. as long as you are on "Welfare" and still sucking Society's teat you cannot vote. Once you consistently start putting more in than you take out, you can vote.
Yes that's rather elitist, but if the masses can save themselves with their votes, I guess they should get on with it already. Otherwise they''ll still keep being pwned by the elites.
Just wondering what people want to consider "thoughtcrime".
Is it legal in your country to have pics of naked/scantily clad women and "get off" on them if they happened to have been exploited (but not by you)? What if they weren't exploited - e.g. the photographer was taking artistic shots of them, paid them properly, treated them well etc.
What if they're young teenagers? What if they were children?
Doesn't seem that complex. The problem is most of the user problems are due to stupid reasons with stupid solutions like checking if the modem is plugged in, powered on, dead/alive etc. So naturally companies start using such scripts to provide "support".
You want smarter replies, you need "engineer to engineer" support which some companies provide. But smarter replies are wasted on users who aren't competent (they aren't necessarily stupid).
If I'm the developer/engineer that actually makes the stuff, I'd actually want to hear from the "competent in the area" people since they are more likely to be able to help me fix stuff.
Whereas which developer or engineer wants to personally deal with people who can't figure out whether their equipment is on or off? But there are often millions of such people out there, buying stuff and thus needing help, so that's why there are "hell-desks";).
A possible way to improve things would be to have the user opt to answer an automated "competence in the field" quiz, if the user aces it, the user "levels up" and now always qualifies for "higher level" support (unless they show incompetence/assholeness). Similarly if a user starts to show enough signs of knowing stuff to a helpful degree the user can be "levelled up".
Naked and nonnaked nonobscene pictures of women can still turn many people on.
So my guess is normal pictures of children would be able to turn pedophiles on too.
As the not reporting thing, I wonder what would happen if the cops start arresting "their own" for committing crimes without needing external complaints/reports and also arresting cops for not reporting on cops that commit crimes.:)
From my observation the reason why android phone and iphone batteries run out so fast is because people keep playing angry birds, plants vs zombies, tower defense, streetfighter and other games on them, watch videos, take pictures, post on facebook etc.
Whereas the blackberries are just for email/calls.
So no surprise if the BBs don't need charging so often.
My dumb phone which doesn't do email and only has games like "snake" can go for many days without charging.
I haven't tried the 2012 version, but the previous versions were not bad. My bro actually bought a copy coz he was pleased with it even though he noticed the spreadsheet didn't support matrix inversion (which he needed for work reasons).
The older version I tried made openoffice look really crap in comparison.
"Impress" is still crap even with it's own native formats. It's hard to get it to just keep the text/font sizes the way you set them, and it has trouble with bullets (the stuff that's used in many presentations, not the sorts that you mail to the developers;) ): https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=38000 https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=84526 https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=69692
And the last I checked "Writer" still can't even search and replace one by one within selection, after more than 8 years: https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=15501
This and many other bugs of this "order of magnitude" should show how behind they are.
Yes Microsoft Office has bugs. But no they don't have as many "obvious" ones of this level.
A typical user can find bugs in OOo/LibreOffice within minutes/hours of using them "normally": e.g. https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=109063
Yes I know it's free etc etc. But with such bugs, you'd save more money if you buy stuff like KingSoft Office, or even Microsoft Office.
Seriously though, when I pack for travelling I roll up my clothes tightly but I don't twist them. That way they aren't really creased (in fact they are less creased than if I folded them "neatly")
Sometimes if I need more space I stuff the rolled up clothes in a plastic bag, and use a vacuum cleaner to suck some air out of the bag (to squeeze stuff more) - but you shouldn't do this if you might not have access to a vacuum cleaner for repacking and you won't have extra space (given away gifts, used consumables etc). Also be aware that the luggage compartments in many planes isn't pressurized so...;)
He might have been wrong about those people fighting, but they did attack HIM, so it's not like they were innocent.
If some crazy guy in tights rushed in and gatecrashed your party, I think it's justified if he gets hit in the process - they could say they were trying to do to him what he claims to be trying to do to them.
He should have made sure he had evidence that they were fighting first (and not just play fighting too - yes people do play fight with each other).
As is the video isn't clear enough. Maybe someone needs to use the Adobe software to un-motion-blur the frames:).
Yeah and thing is I know it would still be technically possible for them to track me across all their offerings. They can give me a unique internal ID. So why force me to merge the accounts?
It's not just photographers who crop and frame. There are also those interviews with people (random or not) where journalists only publishing the quotes/soundbites that match their agenda of the day.
So if you've signed up for the Antarctic, don't be surprised if other people's idea of "As Soon As Possible" differs from your idea of ASAP when it comes to sending you a rescue flight ASAP.
Yes it's terrible that she got a stroke, but the rest of her plight is in a way self-inflicted. It's like volunteering to fight in a war. If the commanders don't think it's the right time to send a rescue team to you yet, you either save yourself, or wait.
Facebook had custom friend lists way before Google+ came out. You can also do stuff like post/photo visible to "Friends except those in listX". I've been using that feature for ages.
Meet the new dictator, even more fascist than the old one? No thanks. Fascist Dictator Google can have the data they already have, if they want more they can talk to Dictator Facebook, with hopefully amusing results.
Google made one big mistake.... and that was to kill accounts that appeared not to be "real" people.
Yeah that made the decision for me. In theory Facebook does that too, but in practice they hardly ever do (they do shutdown spammers but that's a plus IMO). In contrast Google visibly did it for many people.
If I have to live in countries ruled by evil fascist dictators, I'm going to keep my options open and spread stuff around rather than put all my stuff in one country.
So some stuff will be on Facebook, some on Google, some on Yahoo and some on whatever Microsoft calls their crap nowadays;).
It's not really difficult if you or your browser or password manager can remember the passwords.
If I ever get blocked from facebook for whatever stupid reason, nothing happens to the Google stuff.
Seems Google's philosophy is one account for everything. I tried before to keep my youtube and google accounts separate, but Google forced me to merge them. I didn't like that. Many buildings aren't just "one big room" for good reasons, similarly there are good reasons to have more than one account for different things.
If Google want more data about me they can go ask Facebook for it;).
Eudora (registered version) is better than Outlook for search (and other stuff). With Eudora you can easily search with multiple criteria at the same time. e.g. look for email where subject contains XYZ and body contains ABC and body does NOT contain TTT. For the unregistered version you can only do simple contains searches with multiple criteria but you need to press alt+M to add criteria;).
Eudora may not be as fast, but I am more confident of the results[1] - e.g. if something is not found, I can be more certain that it really isn't there rather than the search or index being broken.
Another thing it's much easier to see the email headers AND actual _email_addresses_ with Eudora.
Outlook is crap as an email program but Lotus Notes makes Outlook look good.
[1] I have many bad experiences with Microsoft's "desktop" search. e.g. Windows 7 search is broken- you need to add ALL the extra file extensions you want to search to the preferences, too bad if you don't know what they are in advance. And often you cannot find stuff inside the files because the default parser for the file just doesn't do it properly, even though if you open up the file with an editor, the text string is right there. Whereas even though it takes a while, it works with Windows XP search.
But I don't remember the last time I got an ad page I wasn't expecting.
But how would you know if stuff is being censored or changed?
I've noticed an ISP tampering with some of my http connections, but this was only because noscript was preventing certain requests (I couldn't post data to certain sites after the tampering). So I switched to https where possible. But if they did it in other ways I might not have noticed.
So the rest of the writers will just have to get by with less, like most of us?
The real enemy of authors is not 1 buck/download.
The real enemy of authors is obscurity. If people don't know that your work exists, they are unlikely to buy it no matter how good it is.
You could be the greatest author in the world as judged by all the book critics, so what?
It's been proven that hardly anyone cares if a great violinist busks in the subway, he'll get 30 bucks or so[1]. Whereas if Justin Bieber did a little song and dance in a subway there'd be chaos from all the screaming fans.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way all the praises here and elsewhere about C and UNIX are ironically a bit overdone too. UNIX is better than Windows. But it isn't that wonderful. C might be preferable to Pascal, but it isn't that great either.
1) C and UNIX are the "Worse is Better" approach: http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
2) There was already a "unix" before UNIX. It was called Multics, and it was better in many areas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics and after UNIX there was Plan9: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs .
So a world without C and UNIX might not necessarily be worse. Maybe stuff would only start happening 10 years later but we might have a lot fewer stupid "buffer overflows" and "exploits".
We were taken on field trips to manufacturing plants and laboratories, so that we would know where the stuff comes from. That was considered important at the time. It's not anymore. Ignorance is bliss I suppose.
Heh milk comes from a carton, bacon and eggs from the supermarket, honey from a jar. Many people don't like the truth. Ignorance is bliss for them.
simple dietary and behavioral changes will make such diseases fleetingly rare.
It's obvious already. Finish a supersize meal or two at McD every day and you're unlikely to get Alzheimer's nor die of cancer.
p.s. meanwhile they should sequence the DNA of some of the ultra-obese, and figure out how they manage to get so fat ( > 500kg) without dying.
That's why some things have to be done before other things, not done immediately the moment they are technically feasible. Otherwise Society/Culture won't be "grown-up" enough to handle the results.
The way I see it, the "free market capitalist" path will be one that leads to much evil. The "crazy Scandinavian socialists" path might be viable- most people do what everyone else around them does, so if it becomes cultural norm to just keep other people around alive and well (even though they're kinda stupid compared to you), then we might be able to avoid lots of evil.
However, there are still many problems. Imagine if your pets could vote, would that be good for you and them in the long run?
So I daresay the otherwise benign post-humans might be willing to put up with those who can't "make it" only if those unfortunate ones gave up their rights to political power maybe temporarily/conditionally - e.g. as long as you are on "Welfare" and still sucking Society's teat you cannot vote. Once you consistently start putting more in than you take out, you can vote.
Yes that's rather elitist, but if the masses can save themselves with their votes, I guess they should get on with it already. Otherwise they''ll still keep being pwned by the elites.
Just wondering what people want to consider "thoughtcrime".
Is it legal in your country to have pics of naked/scantily clad women and "get off" on them if they happened to have been exploited (but not by you)? What if they weren't exploited - e.g. the photographer was taking artistic shots of them, paid them properly, treated them well etc.
What if they're young teenagers? What if they were children?
Doesn't seem that complex.
;).
The problem is most of the user problems are due to stupid reasons with stupid solutions like checking if the modem is plugged in, powered on, dead/alive etc. So naturally companies start using such scripts to provide "support".
You want smarter replies, you need "engineer to engineer" support which some companies provide. But smarter replies are wasted on users who aren't competent (they aren't necessarily stupid).
If I'm the developer/engineer that actually makes the stuff, I'd actually want to hear from the "competent in the area" people since they are more likely to be able to help me fix stuff.
Whereas which developer or engineer wants to personally deal with people who can't figure out whether their equipment is on or off? But there are often millions of such people out there, buying stuff and thus needing help, so that's why there are "hell-desks"
A possible way to improve things would be to have the user opt to answer an automated "competence in the field" quiz, if the user aces it, the user "levels up" and now always qualifies for "higher level" support (unless they show incompetence/assholeness). Similarly if a user starts to show enough signs of knowing stuff to a helpful degree the user can be "levelled up".
And now they mostly drop the Sun?
Naked and nonnaked nonobscene pictures of women can still turn many people on.
:)
So my guess is normal pictures of children would be able to turn pedophiles on too.
As the not reporting thing, I wonder what would happen if the cops start arresting "their own" for committing crimes without needing external complaints/reports and also arresting cops for not reporting on cops that commit crimes.
From my observation the reason why android phone and iphone batteries run out so fast is because people keep playing angry birds, plants vs zombies, tower defense, streetfighter and other games on them, watch videos, take pictures, post on facebook etc.
Whereas the blackberries are just for email/calls.
So no surprise if the BBs don't need charging so often.
My dumb phone which doesn't do email and only has games like "snake" can go for many days without charging.
You could try a chinese knockoff instead of pirating Microsoft Office. Outsource the pirating:
http://www.kingsoftstore.com/index.html
I haven't tried the 2012 version, but the previous versions were not bad. My bro actually bought a copy coz he was pleased with it even though he noticed the spreadsheet didn't support matrix inversion (which he needed for work reasons).
The older version I tried made openoffice look really crap in comparison.
"Impress" is still crap even with it's own native formats. It's hard to get it to just keep the text/font sizes the way you set them, and it has trouble with bullets (the stuff that's used in many presentations, not the sorts that you mail to the developers ;) ): https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=38000
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=84526
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=69692
And the last I checked "Writer" still can't even search and replace one by one within selection, after more than 8 years: https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=15501
This and many other bugs of this "order of magnitude" should show how behind they are.
Yes Microsoft Office has bugs. But no they don't have as many "obvious" ones of this level.
A typical user can find bugs in OOo/LibreOffice within minutes/hours of using them "normally": e.g. https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=109063
Yes I know it's free etc etc. But with such bugs, you'd save more money if you buy stuff like KingSoft Office, or even Microsoft Office.
Seriously though, when I pack for travelling I roll up my clothes tightly but I don't twist them. That way they aren't really creased (in fact they are less creased than if I folded them "neatly")
;)
Sometimes if I need more space I stuff the rolled up clothes in a plastic bag, and use a vacuum cleaner to suck some air out of the bag (to squeeze stuff more) - but you shouldn't do this if you might not have access to a vacuum cleaner for repacking and you won't have extra space (given away gifts, used consumables etc). Also be aware that the luggage compartments in many planes isn't pressurized so...
Colonel Korn uses Sarcasm. It's not very effective...
subsequently Global foundries fumbled the ball on the production, meaning Bulldozer isnt hitting the clock speeds needed for being competitive.
125W TDP, 3.6GHz and still not competitive? Why don't they rename it P4/Prescott AMD Edition while they're at it?
Kinda ironic don't you think?
He might have been wrong about those people fighting, but they did attack HIM, so it's not like they were innocent.
If some crazy guy in tights rushed in and gatecrashed your party, I think it's justified if he gets hit in the process - they could say they were trying to do to him what he claims to be trying to do to them.
He should have made sure he had evidence that they were fighting first (and not just play fighting too - yes people do play fight with each other).
As is the video isn't clear enough. Maybe someone needs to use the Adobe software to un-motion-blur the frames :).
Yeah and thing is I know it would still be technically possible for them to track me across all their offerings. They can give me a unique internal ID. So why force me to merge the accounts?
It's not just photographers who crop and frame. There are also those interviews with people (random or not) where journalists only publishing the quotes/soundbites that match their agenda of the day.
On a lighter note, here are more examples of what editing can do:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekXxi9IKZSA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmkVWuP_sO0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T5_0AGdFic
It's not just the temperature. Here's the sort of stuff you wear for that environment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPRxdxtzQsM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMoJz6lFXNo
Note both videos are sped up, so it takes quite a while just to gear up.
Here's what it looks like when it gets bad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz2SeEzxMuE
Walking to work in July (note it's dark in the day during much of winter): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXpqVplsydo
Walking to work in April:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8JMSZYMhtY
So if you've signed up for the Antarctic, don't be surprised if other people's idea of "As Soon As Possible" differs from your idea of ASAP when it comes to sending you a rescue flight ASAP.
Yes it's terrible that she got a stroke, but the rest of her plight is in a way self-inflicted. It's like volunteering to fight in a war. If the commanders don't think it's the right time to send a rescue team to you yet, you either save yourself, or wait.
Facebook had custom friend lists way before Google+ came out. You can also do stuff like post/photo visible to "Friends except those in listX". I've been using that feature for ages.
What put me off was stuff like this:
http://courtneyengle.com/2011/07/22/banned-by-google-plus/
http://gawker.com/5824622/names-banned-by-google-plus
Meet the new dictator, even more fascist than the old one? No thanks. Fascist Dictator Google can have the data they already have, if they want more they can talk to Dictator Facebook, with hopefully amusing results.
Google+ is built around privacy
Huh? We're talking about Google here. You are the product they sell to their customers. Same with Facebook.
Google made one big mistake.... and that was to kill accounts that appeared not to be "real" people.
Yeah that made the decision for me. In theory Facebook does that too, but in practice they hardly ever do (they do shutdown spammers but that's a plus IMO). In contrast Google visibly did it for many people.
If I have to live in countries ruled by evil fascist dictators, I'm going to keep my options open and spread stuff around rather than put all my stuff in one country.
So some stuff will be on Facebook, some on Google, some on Yahoo and some on whatever Microsoft calls their crap nowadays ;).
It's not really difficult if you or your browser or password manager can remember the passwords.
That's why I use facebook and not Google+.
;).
If I ever get blocked from facebook for whatever stupid reason, nothing happens to the Google stuff.
Seems Google's philosophy is one account for everything. I tried before to keep my youtube and google accounts separate, but Google forced me to merge them. I didn't like that. Many buildings aren't just "one big room" for good reasons, similarly there are good reasons to have more than one account for different things.
If Google want more data about me they can go ask Facebook for it
Eudora (registered version) is better than Outlook for search (and other stuff). With Eudora you can easily search with multiple criteria at the same time. e.g. look for email where subject contains XYZ and body contains ABC and body does NOT contain TTT. For the unregistered version you can only do simple contains searches with multiple criteria but you need to press alt+M to add criteria ;).
Eudora may not be as fast, but I am more confident of the results[1] - e.g. if something is not found, I can be more certain that it really isn't there rather than the search or index being broken.
Another thing it's much easier to see the email headers AND actual _email_addresses_ with Eudora.
Outlook is crap as an email program but Lotus Notes makes Outlook look good.
[1] I have many bad experiences with Microsoft's "desktop" search. e.g. Windows 7 search is broken- you need to add ALL the extra file extensions you want to search to the preferences, too bad if you don't know what they are in advance. And often you cannot find stuff inside the files because the default parser for the file just doesn't do it properly, even though if you open up the file with an editor, the text string is right there. Whereas even though it takes a while, it works with Windows XP search.
But I don't remember the last time I got an ad page I wasn't expecting.
But how would you know if stuff is being censored or changed?
I've noticed an ISP tampering with some of my http connections, but this was only because noscript was preventing certain requests (I couldn't post data to certain sites after the tampering). So I switched to https where possible. But if they did it in other ways I might not have noticed.
So the rest of the writers will just have to get by with less, like most of us?
The real enemy of authors is not 1 buck/download.
The real enemy of authors is obscurity. If people don't know that your work exists, they are unlikely to buy it no matter how good it is.
You could be the greatest author in the world as judged by all the book critics, so what?
It's been proven that hardly anyone cares if a great violinist busks in the subway, he'll get 30 bucks or so[1]. Whereas if Justin Bieber did a little song and dance in a subway there'd be chaos from all the screaming fans.
Go figure.
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html