I wrote networking code using Open Transport before I ever touched sockets, so I think I have a view as unbiased as you can get (or perhaps biased in favor of OT). I didn't mind OT, but I when I moved to sockets I was impressed with how easy and comfortable it is to work with them. The limitations of the classic Mac OS architecture probably made writing Open Transport code thornier than it would have been on a moden system, so I won't discount TLI or STREAMS in general, but I have to say that the particular implementation that was Open Transport on Mac OS is inferior to sockets on a UNIX system.
What really surprises me is that the (former) rock formation is the default destination for "Old Man of the Mountain" on Wikipedia, instead of the historical figure. When I hear "old man of the mountain", that guy is the first thing I think of. We need to fight the rampant New-Hampshire-centrism on Wikipedia!
(I was going to say that it was US-centric, but it looks like Americans don't care, either.)
Frankly, when I read she was a former cheerleader I expected better. Her looks are just average. But then, the entire Gizmodo story was embellished bullshit. I regret wasting time reading it.
Who says you have to have the same network all over the country? They could start by adding reasonably-priced data plans covering the major cities and surrounding areas, and work from there.
You have no idea what you're talking about. The army was in fact used against the mafia, in the operation "Vespri Siciliani" from 1992 to 1998. It was an exceptional measure, made necessary by the exceptionally violent strategy of direct opposition to the state adopted by Cosa nostra (the Sicilian mafia) in those years, which culminated in the murder of the magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992.
The army was tasked with strengthening control and surveillance of the Sicilian territory, cities and roads. This allowed the police to concentrate all its efforts on hunting down the mafia bosses. The strategy was very successful, leading to the capture of the head of Cosa nostra, Toto' Riina, in 1993, and of countless other mafiosi. The mafia was forced back underground, and it never again attempted to challenge the state directly. Cosa nostra was permanently crippled, and, though still powerful, to date it has not yet regained its former place as the strongest mafia in Italy (nowadays, the 'Ndrangheta in Calabria and the Camorra in Campania are considered more powerful).
Once the emergency was over, the army operation ended, and the fight against the mafia continued using the normal means of the police. High-profile arrests continue to be made to this day. As for Berlusconi, he was the head of government in 1994-1995, while the operation Vespri Siciliani was in full force, and again in 2006, when Bernardo Provenzano, the new head of Cosa Nostra after Riina, was arrested.
1) The government is constantly going after the mafia. There was a high-profile arrest just four days ago, the head of the Bidognetti clan of the camorra (the mafia of Naples).
2) In Italy, the government runs the police, but it has no control over the judiciary. Zero. Whether there is a Pirate Bay trial in Italy is completely outside the government's control.
3) The judiciary hasn't said that they want to do such a trial, either. All TFA (and its source) say is that the president of the Italian Music Industry Federation "expects" that the prosecution will seek a trial several months from now. There are no facts, just speculations from the Italian equivalent of the RIAA.
Whenever a discussion on free speech comes up on Slashdot, the canonical example of why some limitations are needed is "screaming fire in a crowded theater". This is exactly what happened here.
Though the article itself isn't the best, check out the introduction for references to many long-established results on this issue, the point being that media has a significant effect on its consumers.
Actually, the most evident common theme seems to be differences of perception between men and women. That suggests that causation mostly goes the other way: it's not the media that makes you male or female, but it's your sex that makes you perceive the media differently.
Also, on the subject of pornography, wouldn't consumption of it make people less interested in sex in the long run, and thus make them less likely to rape? Apparently, the more you watch it, the more boring porn gets.
World GDP: $65,000,000 million
Bailout: $170,000 million
Bonuses: $165 million
There: even more context and even more comparison. Surely this is even more insightful!
The fact of the matter is that:
1) $165 million is still a lot of money
2) At least the bailout was ostensibly aimed at preventing a financial meltdown that would have wrecked the economy even more. Giving bonuses to the people who caused this mess in the first place is just a big, open "fuck you" to the American taxpayers.
3) xkcd isn't a such a good comic. Yes, I get the references, but merely referencing things your audience is familiar with is a cheap excuse for humor.
What about all those third-party toolbars that proliferated for previous versions of IE? Surely they were built on some kind of extension support. Has it been removed?
I thought of trying out Tribes 2 once, a while ago, when I heard fans recounting how great it was. But they also told me that everyone who still plays it is a master by now, and for a newbie to pick it up would be an exercise in pain. The fans actually explicitly advised me not to try their favorite game.
One problem with UT3 might be the name. I remembered playing the UT4 demo years ago, so when I first heard about the free weekend for 3 I thought "wow, that's a *really* old game!". It was only when I saw this slashdot entry mention "one and a half years ago" that I realized something was amiss. I checked wikipedia and sure enough, the game I remembered playing was UT 2004
And the bad part is that 10 minutes in, I can see if I've lost and now i have to sit through another 45 minutes until the actual loss.
My entire life is like that. I had a long bout of depression, starting around 18. I turn 27 this year, and I'm just finishing university. I'm no longer clinically depressed, but I haven't fully healed, either.
I had little social life and no love life in my teen years. I threw away my university years between depression and a degree I didn't like. Basically, I have missed my youth and I know I'm not getting it back. Worse yet, my future prospects are damaged beyond repair. All I can hope to accomplish now is a pale shadow of what could have been.
From skimming a selection of the linked sources, the gist is that they're using a false advertising angle: if a retailer says "we won't sell M-rated games to children" (like most do), and then sells them anyway, they will be fined; however, if a retailer makes no such claim, they'll be unaffected. So the safest choice for a retailer is to simply drop their voluntary policy not to sell M-rated games to minors, to avoid liability in case they ever make a mistake.
In other words, Microsoft is writing its own compliance tests. I'd be surprised if they didn't score 100%!
What determines standard compliance is not any test, but the standard itself. If you had ever tried coding a website to the standards, you'd know that IE has been the worst-conforming browser by far. For version 8, Microsoft has found CSS2 to be a low-hanging fruit (especially with an a basically abandoned compliance suite that they could resurrect and shape to their convenience to gain an appearance of legitimacy), and might actually deliver an implementation that's on par with the average modern browser - for that specific standard alone. Meanwhile, they've given up on getting decent DOM conformance in this version.
How up-to-date is that page? For example, it says that white-space pre-wrap is not supported, but a quick google search found that they were fixing bugs with pre-wrap in 2008 - which means support for it was implemented at least a year ago.
"Not yet CCS 1 compliant" is a joke. Look at the bugs that remain. They are things like this. If you hold WebKit to such a strict standard, you'll have to do the same with other browsers as well. I guarantee you'll find such bugs in Firefox too, as you will in IE8 when it ships.
The first two lines after the title on the CCS 2.1 test suite page are: "This is a development version of the CSS 2.1 Test Suite.
It is woefully incomplete and may contain incorrect tests." If you're using that as the basis to gauge CSS 2.1 compliance, I have a bridge to sell you.
The rendering engine. The browser itself will probably still be called Internet Explorer 9, no reason to throw away a strong brand. It will use a new layout engine with deep Silverlight integration.
I think the main problem with the Linux package management architecture is that it completely ignores the reality of the web.
For many people nowadays, the web is where you first discover an application: you might read a review of it, or see it mentioned in a forum thread, or in a mailing list archive you chanced upon while doing a google search for some problem you're having. Maybe a friend will recommend the application to you, and paste the url to its website during an IM section; or maybe he'll just give you the name, and you'll paste it into Google.
However you heard about the application, chances are you'll eventually end up at its website; which is a good thing, because that's where you can read up about it, look at some screenshots, and decide whether it's something you want to try or not.
And then what? Windows and Mac users will click the download link, run the installer (or just copy the application over, as is common on OS X), and be done. And that's exactly what a Linux newbie would try, too, as seen in TFA. It's not just because all other systems work that way: it's because it's actually a pretty streamlined experience (at least for the "look for new software" case that most newbies are likely to encounter; mass-installing a bunch of software you already know on two hundred computers you're administering is a different matter altogether).
So, the Linux user is going to look for Linux installation instructions on the webpage, and be confronted with the usual mess of different downloads and instructions for different versions of Linux. And he'll probably get it wrong, because doing it right requires knowing a bunch of stuff he's not supposed to know (such as "what kind of package does your distro use?"); and if OpenOffice, one of the most important open source projects, couldn't make an easy to use installation page for Linux, most other projects are going to fare even worse.
Of course, what you'd like to do is for the user to stop reading the page, dig for the package manager inside the administration menu, run it, and search for the name of the program inside the list. But that requires switching out from the browser interface into a wholly unfamiliar realm.
What I think would help here is some standard for putting a "download link" on a webpage that actually invokes the right package manager for the user's distribution.
It could use a url with a custom protocol and a package identifier, eg "pkgman:openoffice.org/openoffice/3.0.0". The package manager would handle the url and look for the package matching the request in its repositories; if it's not found, it could explain the situation to the user (eg "We have an older version of this program, but not the one you're trying to download; would you like to be notified when it's added to our repository?"). To support less common software, the url could contain, in addition to the identifier, a path to a description file (eg "pkgman:example.com/mycoolprogram/0.1:example.com/downloads/mycoolprogram.pkgstuff"); if the program is not found in the known repositories, the package manager could attempt to download the descriptor file over http (http://example.com/downloads/mycoolprogram.pkgstuff), where the developer could put a list of custom repositories that host the program, tagged by package type/distro/version; and the package manager would tell the user "We don't have this in our repo, but it's hosted by blah.org; they don't have a version for ubuntu 8.10, but they have a generic deb; would you like to install it?".
I think something like that would be quite helpful to newbies.
Indeed, singling out games like the ad does only risks getting the wrong message across ("games are bad" instead of "a sedentary lifestyle is bad"). They should balance it out by making an ad showing a girl reading a book under the same "Risk an early DEATH, just do nothing" caption.
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote networking code using Open Transport before I ever touched sockets, so I think I have a view as unbiased as you can get (or perhaps biased in favor of OT). I didn't mind OT, but I when I moved to sockets I was impressed with how easy and comfortable it is to work with them. The limitations of the classic Mac OS architecture probably made writing Open Transport code thornier than it would have been on a moden system, so I won't discount TLI or STREAMS in general, but I have to say that the particular implementation that was Open Transport on Mac OS is inferior to sockets on a UNIX system.
What really surprises me is that the (former) rock formation is the default destination for "Old Man of the Mountain" on Wikipedia, instead of the historical figure. When I hear "old man of the mountain", that guy is the first thing I think of.
We need to fight the rampant New-Hampshire-centrism on Wikipedia!
(I was going to say that it was US-centric, but it looks like Americans don't care, either.)
Frankly, when I read she was a former cheerleader I expected better. Her looks are just average.
But then, the entire Gizmodo story was embellished bullshit. I regret wasting time reading it.
Who says you have to have the same network all over the country? They could start by adding reasonably-priced data plans covering the major cities and surrounding areas, and work from there.
Posting to undo erroneous mod. Will also undo the other three mods I did on this page. There really ought to be a "cancel mod" button.
You have no idea what you're talking about. The army was in fact used against the mafia, in the operation "Vespri Siciliani" from 1992 to 1998. It was an exceptional measure, made necessary by the exceptionally violent strategy of direct opposition to the state adopted by Cosa nostra (the Sicilian mafia) in those years, which culminated in the murder of the magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992.
The army was tasked with strengthening control and surveillance of the Sicilian territory, cities and roads. This allowed the police to concentrate all its efforts on hunting down the mafia bosses. The strategy was very successful, leading to the capture of the head of Cosa nostra, Toto' Riina, in 1993, and of countless other mafiosi. The mafia was forced back underground, and it never again attempted to challenge the state directly. Cosa nostra was permanently crippled, and, though still powerful, to date it has not yet regained its former place as the strongest mafia in Italy (nowadays, the 'Ndrangheta in Calabria and the Camorra in Campania are considered more powerful).
Once the emergency was over, the army operation ended, and the fight against the mafia continued using the normal means of the police. High-profile arrests continue to be made to this day.
As for Berlusconi, he was the head of government in 1994-1995, while the operation Vespri Siciliani was in full force, and again in 2006, when Bernardo Provenzano, the new head of Cosa Nostra after Riina, was arrested.
What the hell?
1) The government is constantly going after the mafia. There was a high-profile arrest just four days ago, the head of the Bidognetti clan of the camorra (the mafia of Naples).
2) In Italy, the government runs the police, but it has no control over the judiciary. Zero. Whether there is a Pirate Bay trial in Italy is completely outside the government's control.
3) The judiciary hasn't said that they want to do such a trial, either. All TFA (and its source) say is that the president of the Italian Music Industry Federation "expects" that the prosecution will seek a trial several months from now. There are no facts, just speculations from the Italian equivalent of the RIAA.
Are you enjoying being a prejudiced jerk?
Minor quakes had been occurring in the area since mid February. The people were already aware of the risk.
Whenever a discussion on free speech comes up on Slashdot, the canonical example of why some limitations are needed is "screaming fire in a crowded theater". This is exactly what happened here.
Though the article itself isn't the best, check out the introduction for references to many long-established results on this issue, the point being that media has a significant effect on its consumers.
Actually, the most evident common theme seems to be differences of perception between men and women. That suggests that causation mostly goes the other way: it's not the media that makes you male or female, but it's your sex that makes you perceive the media differently.
Also, on the subject of pornography, wouldn't consumption of it make people less interested in sex in the long run, and thus make them less likely to rape? Apparently, the more you watch it, the more boring porn gets.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ostensibly
As you can see, it was right the first time.
World GDP: $65,000,000 million
Bailout: $170,000 million
Bonuses: $165 million
There: even more context and even more comparison. Surely this is even more insightful!
The fact of the matter is that:
1) $165 million is still a lot of money
2) At least the bailout was ostensibly aimed at preventing a financial meltdown that would have wrecked the economy even more. Giving bonuses to the people who caused this mess in the first place is just a big, open "fuck you" to the American taxpayers.
3) xkcd isn't a such a good comic. Yes, I get the references, but merely referencing things your audience is familiar with is a cheap excuse for humor.
What about all those third-party toolbars that proliferated for previous versions of IE? Surely they were built on some kind of extension support. Has it been removed?
I thought of trying out Tribes 2 once, a while ago, when I heard fans recounting how great it was. But they also told me that everyone who still plays it is a master by now, and for a newbie to pick it up would be an exercise in pain. The fans actually explicitly advised me not to try their favorite game.
One problem with UT3 might be the name. I remembered playing the UT4 demo years ago, so when I first heard about the free weekend for 3 I thought "wow, that's a *really* old game!". It was only when I saw this slashdot entry mention "one and a half years ago" that I realized something was amiss. I checked wikipedia and sure enough, the game I remembered playing was UT 2004
And that's why descriptivism sucks.
And the bad part is that 10 minutes in, I can see if I've lost and now i have to sit through another 45 minutes until the actual loss.
My entire life is like that. I had a long bout of depression, starting around 18. I turn 27 this year, and I'm just finishing university. I'm no longer clinically depressed, but I haven't fully healed, either.
I had little social life and no love life in my teen years. I threw away my university years between depression and a degree I didn't like. Basically, I have missed my youth and I know I'm not getting it back. Worse yet, my future prospects are damaged beyond repair. All I can hope to accomplish now is a pale shadow of what could have been.
Too bad there's no reset button.
From skimming a selection of the linked sources, the gist is that they're using a false advertising angle: if a retailer says "we won't sell M-rated games to children" (like most do), and then sells them anyway, they will be fined; however, if a retailer makes no such claim, they'll be unaffected. So the safest choice for a retailer is to simply drop their voluntary policy not to sell M-rated games to minors, to avoid liability in case they ever make a mistake.
In other words, Microsoft is writing its own compliance tests. I'd be surprised if they didn't score 100%!
What determines standard compliance is not any test, but the standard itself. If you had ever tried coding a website to the standards, you'd know that IE has been the worst-conforming browser by far. For version 8, Microsoft has found CSS2 to be a low-hanging fruit (especially with an a basically abandoned compliance suite that they could resurrect and shape to their convenience to gain an appearance of legitimacy), and might actually deliver an implementation that's on par with the average modern browser - for that specific standard alone. Meanwhile, they've given up on getting decent DOM conformance in this version.
They're not fooling anyone, and neither are you.
How up-to-date is that page? For example, it says that white-space pre-wrap is not supported, but a quick google search found that they were fixing bugs with pre-wrap in 2008 - which means support for it was implemented at least a year ago.
"Not yet CCS 1 compliant" is a joke. Look at the bugs that remain. They are things like this. If you hold WebKit to such a strict standard, you'll have to do the same with other browsers as well. I guarantee you'll find such bugs in Firefox too, as you will in IE8 when it ships.
The first two lines after the title on the CCS 2.1 test suite page are: "This is a development version of the CSS 2.1 Test Suite. It is woefully incomplete and may contain incorrect tests." If you're using that as the basis to gauge CSS 2.1 compliance, I have a bridge to sell you.
Ah well, maybe one day someone will have the courage / time to properly balance a game again.
I hear Blizzard is working on StarCraft 2.
was using his electromagnetic telephone to talk to his wife from his basement lab to their second-floor bedroom in 1856.
The rendering engine. The browser itself will probably still be called Internet Explorer 9, no reason to throw away a strong brand. It will use a new layout engine with deep Silverlight integration.
I think the main problem with the Linux package management architecture is that it completely ignores the reality of the web.
For many people nowadays, the web is where you first discover an application: you might read a review of it, or see it mentioned in a forum thread, or in a mailing list archive you chanced upon while doing a google search for some problem you're having. Maybe a friend will recommend the application to you, and paste the url to its website during an IM section; or maybe he'll just give you the name, and you'll paste it into Google.
However you heard about the application, chances are you'll eventually end up at its website; which is a good thing, because that's where you can read up about it, look at some screenshots, and decide whether it's something you want to try or not.
And then what? Windows and Mac users will click the download link, run the installer (or just copy the application over, as is common on OS X), and be done. And that's exactly what a Linux newbie would try, too, as seen in TFA. It's not just because all other systems work that way: it's because it's actually a pretty streamlined experience (at least for the "look for new software" case that most newbies are likely to encounter; mass-installing a bunch of software you already know on two hundred computers you're administering is a different matter altogether).
So, the Linux user is going to look for Linux installation instructions on the webpage, and be confronted with the usual mess of different downloads and instructions for different versions of Linux. And he'll probably get it wrong, because doing it right requires knowing a bunch of stuff he's not supposed to know (such as "what kind of package does your distro use?"); and if OpenOffice, one of the most important open source projects, couldn't make an easy to use installation page for Linux, most other projects are going to fare even worse.
Of course, what you'd like to do is for the user to stop reading the page, dig for the package manager inside the administration menu, run it, and search for the name of the program inside the list. But that requires switching out from the browser interface into a wholly unfamiliar realm.
What I think would help here is some standard for putting a "download link" on a webpage that actually invokes the right package manager for the user's distribution.
It could use a url with a custom protocol and a package identifier, eg "pkgman:openoffice.org/openoffice/3.0.0". The package manager would handle the url and look for the package matching the request in its repositories; if it's not found, it could explain the situation to the user (eg "We have an older version of this program, but not the one you're trying to download; would you like to be notified when it's added to our repository?"). To support less common software, the url could contain, in addition to the identifier, a path to a description file (eg "pkgman:example.com/mycoolprogram/0.1:example.com/downloads/mycoolprogram.pkgstuff"); if the program is not found in the known repositories, the package manager could attempt to download the descriptor file over http (http://example.com/downloads/mycoolprogram.pkgstuff), where the developer could put a list of custom repositories that host the program, tagged by package type/distro/version; and the package manager would tell the user "We don't have this in our repo, but it's hosted by blah.org; they don't have a version for ubuntu 8.10, but they have a generic deb; would you like to install it?".
I think something like that would be quite helpful to newbies.
Indeed, singling out games like the ad does only risks getting the wrong message across ("games are bad" instead of "a sedentary lifestyle is bad"). They should balance it out by making an ad showing a girl reading a book under the same "Risk an early DEATH, just do nothing" caption.