I have never seen any bar using a barcode scanner to scan drivers licenses. I don't have any barcodes on my drivers license. And for most people it makes no sense to bring a drivers license when you're drinking (don't drink and drive), so any scheme that requires a driving license as identification is beyond harebrained. Let me guess, this is a US-specific article?
a good HD image with a respectable amount of lumens
Your language usage is weird. The word you are looking for is "bright", not "a respectable amount of lumens". Similarly, it's "hot", not "a respectable amount of celcius". And Sahara is "big", not "a respectable amount of square kilometers". Finally, Bush is "dumb", not "having an embarassing amount of IQs".
Well dude, I'm from "here in Europe" too, which is such a nonsensical description of where you come from that I doubt you've ever been in more than one European country, if any at all. And I can fucking pretty much guarantee you that any old PC with win98 has "stopped working", simply because it doesn't do the things people use PCs for today. In particular, it will be almost useless when surfing todays webpages, given that it is to slow, has to little memory, and the software is no longer updated. And you can certainly give up on youtube, my old Pentium 90 struggled just to play mp3s. I'm sure there are people using their computer until it dies, but those are not the majority, they either do it because they are piss poor, or because their needs are very limited, and they didn't really want a computer but a typewriter, or something like that.
And I doubt there are more macs "here in Europe" than in the states either. The only people I know that has macs are either graphic designers, girls, metrosexuals, or gay (not that there's anything wrong about that), which pretty much means that it appeals more to people who want a nice-looking computer, than to people who want a cheap computer, or a raw computer, or something like that. In other words, still a niche market.
Just as an extra anecdote and illustration of what happens when such people finally get told about pointers (but still don't quite "get it"): one team's architect actually told everyone to use "Integer" instead of "int" in method definitions everywhere, because it's faster! See, it copies only a pointer instead of the whole int!
Tell me the name of the company. I want to invest money there!
src points to a char array in memory that is zero-terminated, and having length shorter than n. (n-1 if you don't count the termination character)
dst points to a char array in memory that has length equal to or above n
Part of the idea behind writing and checking preconditions (and postconditions, and invariants, and so on) is that by doing so, one gets a clear design that is easier to verify with formal methods, semiformal methods, a quick unformal code-inspection using techniques somewhat inspired by watered-down semi-formal methods, or even just handwaving.
The precondition that exists for strcpy() is notoriously difficult to verify without having already done the work done by strcpy() some other place in the program, even when you are just handwaving. And considering that it is intended to be used for external data (which strings usually are), it's also very difficult to ensure those preconditions in practice. All the "elegance" you get inside the function (which is a one-liner), is completely irrelevant when you consider the hoops programmers have to go through to actually be able to call this function safely. Basically it forces programmers to do book-keeping themselves, instead of helping them do the bookkeeping. And it's the bookkeeping that's the hard work, not copying the string, so the library function is typically of no use whatsoever.
I thing you are not being logically coherent, if strcpy is 'bad', then memcpy should be the devil!:)
strcpy() is bad, not because there's something inherently wrong about a function copying bytes from one pointer to another until it encounters a zero-byte, but because its name and how it is described in most C texts is misrepresenting this function as something one would want to use on text strings. Text strings are usually user input or at the very least, external data, and should be treated with caution. If you can't guarantee an upper bound on the length, and 0-termination, it shouldn't be used.
In practice, this means, strcpy() shouldn't be used, and if you (as unlikely as it sounds) actually need such a function, you can just as well write it yourself. That strcopy() can be written as easy as while(*dst++=*src++); should tell you something about the amount of thought that went into determining C's "string" functions in the first place.
memcpy(), is at least safe. And it has a name that corresponds with its function. Compared to the evils of strcpy(), memcpy() is salvation!
But the vast majority of the consumer base just isn't well educated enough in the subject to be able to make a choice between XP and Vista. They are still using Windows 98, and just want to replace the old busted one as conveniently as possible.
The vast majority of PC buyers certainly don't use Windows 98. Those are the guys who never buys a new PC. Either you are into buying PCs, or you're not. And people who buy PCs upgrade a little more often than that.
I doubt it. Joe Bloggs is in my opinion one of these people
Doesn't know anything. Doesn't care. Buys whatever the salesman wants to sell him, assuming the price-range is right.
Doesn't know anything. Doesn't care. Buys the one with a colour she likes (which suprisingly often is a pretty good strategy;-)
Doesn't know anything. Asks his fourteen year old cousin. Ends up with a monster PC for gaming that is just as outdated in three years as the cheap one the salesman wanted to sell him
I doubt any of them will reflect much upon the choice of Vista or XP (or mac or linux). Given that the average PC-buyer doesn't know the difference between Gigabytes and Megahertz, they are not going to reflect much upon number of copies of this or that. Vista is newer, and therefore better. Those who complain about Vista are PC enthusiasts or corporate buyers.
Besides, selling Joe Bloggs anything but Windows is a recipe for disaster. What's he going to do when it will not work with his GPS, camera, cellphone, PDA, mp3-player, or other favourite gadget? Linux is good, but I still need access to windows once in a while.
Hardly. Modern SLR's are every bit as capable as any old film camera, and they're a thousand times more convenient, versatile, and forgiving
In fact, modern digital SLRs are even more capable, convenient, versatile, and forgiving than the earlier generation of SLRs. The only trouble with modern SLRs is that they don't use film. Because film is still superior to the photosensitive sensor in digital cameras (assuming you stay within a budget that's at least theoretically possible for the average photographer, i.e. by mortgaging your house, as opposed to being a government and buying Hubble). And with film, you can still scan your film afterwards, so you get the benefits of digital as well. Of course, for most of us, the convenience of straight-to-digital far outweighs the benefits of film, as films benefits are rather small, but still there.
Ditto for tube amps. It's true that right now the majority of artists still use them, but the main reasons for it is [snip] I guarantee you could get just as good a sound out of digital equipment as you can out of analog, but due to the nature of the music industry there isn't all that much demand for digital equipment.
This is speaking from ignorance. Compare your statement to this this one about Stradivarius violins: "I guarantee you oculd get just as good a sound out of a violin made of plywood or even plastic, but due to the nature of the music industry there isn't all that much demand for plywood or plastic violins". While it's possible to simulate tube distortion pretty good, it's not the same, and every musician using tube amps knows just that. And yeah, I still agree tube amps will be a rarity in 30 years. In fact, they already are.
While I agree with your argument (it's far from everybody who prefers vinyl to CDs or film to digital cameras), I must disagree with the proposition that it's only for nostalgic reasons. Film cameras are still objectively "better" than digital cameras, when you consider contrast and colour-balance and all that. And tube amps certainly have their uses, e.g. if you want the "warm analog" sound (which you can then easily record on to a CD). [By the way: It's not that the "warm analog" sound is a more accurate sound reproduction, it's only there when you abuse the electronics, but it's certainly more pleasant than the failure mode of digital electronics.]
The old saying "they don't make stuff like this today" is often true. Progress means the price goes down, and the product is thus available for more consumers, but still good enough for most. Some people however, are willing to pay extra, either in money or convenience, in order to get the "best", which often are what they made in the old days.
However, other things are better explained through fashion. People don't by vinyl because it's better. People buy vinyl for the same reason your grandfather always used a tie. It's the fashion.
You can't have lived long in the real world, if that's what you find "very depressing". Personally, I can't for the life of me see that it's possible to view this in any other way, but I'm far from cynic enough to make money in the real world, as a salesman. No sir, I live from my paycheck sent to me from a company who is willing to pay me so they can exploit my time and abilities. But if you believe you can make it in the world of business-deals yourself, with a soft heart, feel free to try.
This is total fabrication. The entire world is actively working to avoid Vista because the hardware support is terrible, it's full of bugs, and it doesn't support all the legacy windows programs people use.
Linux doesn't support all the legacy windows programs people use either. Besides, most linux programs people would actually use (e.g. firefox, openoffice) are as buggy, or buggier, than their windows counterparts. While linux may be a stable server, it's not much better for the average PC user.
They reviewed a bargain basement PC and recommended people spend more so they can use an OS that made every top 10 worst product of the year list that matters. Clearly, this isn't a review, it's a MS advertisement.
Alternatively, it could be interpreted to reinforce how much it really sucked. It sucked so much you'd be better off buying a product that made the "every top 10 worst product of the year list that matters". The only reason you people are complaining about the review is because the PC used linux. Still, it was cheap, and cheap stuff often sucks, regardless of whether it has your pet technology in it. I wouldn't buy my PC at Wal-Mart. Nor would I buy a piece of junk just because it used linux.
Actually, it was not a stupid part of the review. In fact, it was what I would consider the most useful part of the review. You get what you pay for, and sometimes (actually quite often) buying cheap junk is throwing money out of the window. If you spend money on something so bad you are never going to use it, those money are still spent, no matter how "cheap" the device was.
One of the reasons people read "independent" reviews like this, is exactly because they want to find out if their money is well spent. For most people, price is important, and they want to go as low as possible. That's why people read reviews, they want to avoid buying crap while still buying cheap. Where you draw the line is of course up to each person, and each reviewer, but at some point, you have to draw the line. And this reviewer found this cheap PC to be crap.
That cheap stuff can suck should come as no surprise to anybody. That cheap stuff can use linux should come as no surprise to anybody. Why it then is a surprise for anyone that cheap stuff using linux can suck, is beyond my comprehension. The computer was cheap, it used linux, and it sucked. Deal with it. (A Vista computer would still suck, but at least the reviewer mean it would suck significantly less. I tend to agree with him, the hardware in this Everex was unimpressive, and so was the software. With Vista, at least you get the "standard" low-end).
Google still has a helluva long way to go before it reaches Microsoft's level of unethical business practices
Sure, but when google acquired doubleclick, they certainly made sure they'd be able to walk that path. And while they've been careful not to trample over smaller companies the way Microsoft does, it's only because they're wiser, and moving slower, so they can achieve world dominance over Internet advertizing without too many people complaining loudly. Google is positioning themselves to be as important as any of the government-monopoly utilities, such as water, sewage, or electricity. What face they will show then is anyones guess, but they are certainly positioning themselves to become a monopoly.
Besides, there is a fundamental difference between a web-driven advertising company and a company that has a stranglehold on the actual computers on which the web is normally accessed
Uhm, no. Yesterday it was the computers themselves that was important. Today it's what's on the web that's important. Microsoft controls the operating system and browser. Google controls everything else. This is analogous to the situation between Intel and Microsoft a decade ago, only one level higher in the abstraction hierarchy. Google is todays equivalent of Microsoft 10 years ago.
But other than that, I fail to see what's wrong here. If you are making money by creating an exact replica of an Egyptian monument and using it commercially, I don't see anything at all wrong with you also being expected to help preserve that monument.
I too see nothing wrong with a voluntary arrangement of that sort. What I'm opposed to is making this into law. Making replicas pay for maintenance of historical artifacts is a good idea. Making it into law is a bad one. The same can be said of a number of other ides. Here's one example: Making horny men pay for prostitutes (instead of e.g. date-raping someone) is a good idea. Making it into law (if you're horny, you have to pay a prostitute) is a bad idea.
but surely if we expect the egyptian government to maintain these sorts of sites while other people continue to earn a profit off images of it and so on.. surely there has to be some part that goes to its preservation?
Uhm, no. Does not follow. The problem is the same with copyright. Copyright isn't there to ensure artists have an income. Because nobody is entitled to an income (except the state, through taxation, but that's another story). Copyright is there to stimulate people to invest their time into creating artistic works. Copyright is intended as a "create, and we will pay you"-arrangement, not a "You're still using my creation, pay me more!"-arrangement. One is about stimulating invention, the other about greed. Unfortunately, copyright has lately diverged into greed.
So it's got a slick UI. BFD. But even you qualified your own statement. I have an equally nice UI using the same IMAP client I've been using since before GMail existed. I don't "get" why anyone would give up desktop clients for webmail.
Eh, because I don't want to sit at my desktop to read email. Or because I don't want to lug around a laptop, simply to keep my mail in one place. Or because there's no such thing as a good standard email-client found anywhere, so I would have to lug around an installation CD if I wanted to read mail on somebody elses computer.
Assuming you have a good enough webmail interface, the advantages of dropping the MUA should be pretty obvious. Gmail has a good enough webmail interface.
My IMAP client aslo has solid spam filtering. My IMAP client, while it may not offer Google's exact flavor of search technology, does a perfectly fine job of searching my mail. (Indexing and searching text isn't rocket science.)
I have no doubt your IMAP client is excellent. The trouble is that you need your IMAP client. All I need is a webbrowser. Another advantage I have is that I don't need to worry about a server, configuration, or any of that shit, google already does the work for me. I would be happy to pay a reasonable amount for someone to manage it for me (instead of advertizing financing it, as it is now), but mail just ain't important enough to pay for it with *my* time as well. Bothering with a vanity domain and all that shit, just doesn't sound that cool, when the end result is a solution that serves my needs slightly less than gmail, but still costs time and money.
Well, OK: if you were using webmail before GMail, I can see why you'd switch to GMail. But to me, that still begs the question of: why were you using webmail in the first place?
I use webmail for the same reason I use a mobile phone. It's more convenient to be able to read and write mail from anywhere, with the same convenient interface, just like it's more convenient with your phone in your pocket, than it is to constantly "borrow a phone" wherever you go. I have no more interest in running my own mail-server, than I have in running my own switchboard for my phone.
And this speaks in googles favour how? Changing from bad security to deliberately sabotaging their customers security needs is now a good thing?
While I agree that private URLs is not a good security mechanism, I would rather trust a private URL to remain private for a while, than any system based on giving more information based on whether someone is someones address book. Usually, if there's something I don't want someone to know, that person can be found in my address book. Very rarely do I worry about what somebody I don't even know who is, thinks about me.
I disagree. You may want to "share" these articles with your friends, even though you don't want to "share" them with your family. Which is exactly what many people did, they published their "private" URL containing their "shared" items to a select group of friends.
Then google decided that anyone in you address book should be able to see your "private" URL. In other words, google unilaterally (and without warning) decided that everyone you've ever communicated with, using email, is now in your select group of "friends". This may include things like your pain-in-the-ass boss, the lawyer of someone who is running a case against you, or that you are running a case against, your conservative christian family, your stalking ex-boyfriend, or just about anyone else who may live in your contacts but should not read every article you find on teh intarweb to share with your real friends. While it's possible to blame the users for clicking on "share" in the first place, the decision by google was infinitely more stupid than that.
I then want to make sure at that exact moment, that I'm drunk, eating nachos, whilst having sex with a super model and playing xbox.
Sounds unrealistic. If you can find a supermodel willing to have sex with you under those condititions, you can probably stop time from running out too.
I didn't object to kites being useful, or even "best" in certain situations. I did object to them being "several orders of magnitude more efficient", as modern sails are already pretty close to the theoretical maximum (and certainly not several orders of magnitude away from it). What you choose depends on a lot of factors, such as how much you want to invest up front, how much you want to pay for maintenance, reliability, practicality, performance, ease of use, legality, contest rules, etc...
Anyway, if they only planned to use the kite for a spinnaker, they are not truly experimenting with dropping sails. A spinnaker is merely a big garbage bag that needs to occupy the largest possible area, used when you're travelling almost exactly the same direction as the wind. Kites can be used to sail against the wind the same way (real) sails can (just ask any kiteboarder).
"Reduced windage when travelling against the wind" is a misnomer, as the "windage" is what propulses the boat forwards.
And while flying the kite back and forwards may increase wind speed at the kite, it will not drag the boat any faster through the water. There is an optimal position and adjustment of the kite (depending on where the wind is blowing compared to your direction), and that's where you put the kite. Flying it back and forwards merely removes the kite from the optimal position (and increases wear and tear).
Not really. It might be closer to a windmill than a sail... The idea of using the wind for power might be millions of years old, but new ways that do it several orders of magnitude more efficiently, and in significantly different ways, aren't the same tech by any stretch of the imagination.
Several orders of magnitude more efficient? That sounds very unlikely, given that sailing technology is pretty competitive these days, with competitions like Americas cup where investors are practically standing in line to pour money into new and experimental designs.
A kite has the advantage of catching air at a somewhat higher altitude, on the other hand, it has the disadvantage of not working at all in lower wind, higher risk of collision with other kite-driven boats, and so on...
But the main advantage of a kite is that it can be retrofitted to boats not specifically designed for it (although they still need a good keel). If you were to start from scratch in designing a new sailing ship, I find it very likely that it would still have a mast and sails, rather than a kite. In any case, even with a mast, you can still use a kite.
Most of todays programming practices introduce serial dependency where it is not needed. A good example is how most C-style languages iterate over a set of objects. for(i=0;i++;i<n) is inherently serial with 'i' needing to be updated before the next iteration. Some of you will have seen OO constructs like 'var.each do |v|' in Ruby which is a parallel construct in a lot of cases (in the case of an Array where order is assures the programmer can make assumptions about serial execution).
And your point is? It shouldn't be particularly hard for the compiler to analyze the code in a for-loop to see if it can be paralellized. If the compiler can do loop-unrolling and all the other kinds of fancy tricks it does, this should be a piece of cake. The problem is that we haven't got the hardware to execute it on. And by the way, Ruby is not executed in parallel.
Erlang takes this to the extreme to make incredibility parallel systems, with the cravat that it is not as programmer friendly.
Erlang is very programmer-friendly. It may not be friends with you, but many people who have worked with it, swear by it. Personally, I haven't used it much, as it doesn't solve a problem I have, but I found it no harder to use than most other functional languages.
Think of all the operations done on tree structures that are clearly parallel with each branch analyzed independent of the others. Now consider how hard it is to convene a compiler to deal with them in that way.
If labels and conditional gotos are too hard to conceptualize for you, I doubt you will think it is easer to conseptualize how the compiler transforms branches into speculatively executed threads. But again, the problem isn't the languages we use. It's that we haven't got the hardware to execute very short-lived parallel threads at every junction. If such hardware existed, I'm sure we could create compilers for it.
The point is that the grammar of languages like Java and C force otherwise parallel operations to be serial. Using languages whose constructs assume a parallel operations will be much better then languages with additional 'thread' type constructions.
I disagree that Java and C are the problem. Sure, there are better languages for concurrent programming, but whether you choose to solve the problem through better languages, better compilers, libraries, or programming practice --- doesn't really matter. The important thing is that unless you have hardware to run it on, none of the proposed solutions will matter, because neither of them lead to any improvements. It took actual computers to design FORTRAN too.
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I have never seen any bar using a barcode scanner to scan drivers licenses. I don't have any barcodes on my drivers license. And for most people it makes no sense to bring a drivers license when you're drinking (don't drink and drive), so any scheme that requires a driving license as identification is beyond harebrained. Let me guess, this is a US-specific article?
Your language usage is weird. The word you are looking for is "bright", not "a respectable amount of lumens". Similarly, it's "hot", not "a respectable amount of celcius". And Sahara is "big", not "a respectable amount of square kilometers". Finally, Bush is "dumb", not "having an embarassing amount of IQs".
Yeah, and of course most cell phones already have vibrators. What we are all anxiously awaiting is one with an artificial vagina as well.
Well dude, I'm from "here in Europe" too, which is such a nonsensical description of where you come from that I doubt you've ever been in more than one European country, if any at all. And I can fucking pretty much guarantee you that any old PC with win98 has "stopped working", simply because it doesn't do the things people use PCs for today. In particular, it will be almost useless when surfing todays webpages, given that it is to slow, has to little memory, and the software is no longer updated. And you can certainly give up on youtube, my old Pentium 90 struggled just to play mp3s. I'm sure there are people using their computer until it dies, but those are not the majority, they either do it because they are piss poor, or because their needs are very limited, and they didn't really want a computer but a typewriter, or something like that.
And I doubt there are more macs "here in Europe" than in the states either. The only people I know that has macs are either graphic designers, girls, metrosexuals, or gay (not that there's anything wrong about that), which pretty much means that it appeals more to people who want a nice-looking computer, than to people who want a cheap computer, or a raw computer, or something like that. In other words, still a niche market.
Tell me the name of the company. I want to invest money there!
Part of the idea behind writing and checking preconditions (and postconditions, and invariants, and so on) is that by doing so, one gets a clear design that is easier to verify with formal methods, semiformal methods, a quick unformal code-inspection using techniques somewhat inspired by watered-down semi-formal methods, or even just handwaving.
The precondition that exists for strcpy() is notoriously difficult to verify without having already done the work done by strcpy() some other place in the program, even when you are just handwaving. And considering that it is intended to be used for external data (which strings usually are), it's also very difficult to ensure those preconditions in practice. All the "elegance" you get inside the function (which is a one-liner), is completely irrelevant when you consider the hoops programmers have to go through to actually be able to call this function safely. Basically it forces programmers to do book-keeping themselves, instead of helping them do the bookkeeping. And it's the bookkeeping that's the hard work, not copying the string, so the library function is typically of no use whatsoever.
strcpy() is bad, not because there's something inherently wrong about a function copying bytes from one pointer to another until it encounters a zero-byte, but because its name and how it is described in most C texts is misrepresenting this function as something one would want to use on text strings. Text strings are usually user input or at the very least, external data, and should be treated with caution. If you can't guarantee an upper bound on the length, and 0-termination, it shouldn't be used.
In practice, this means, strcpy() shouldn't be used, and if you (as unlikely as it sounds) actually need such a function, you can just as well write it yourself. That strcopy() can be written as easy as while(*dst++=*src++); should tell you something about the amount of thought that went into determining C's "string" functions in the first place.
memcpy(), is at least safe. And it has a name that corresponds with its function. Compared to the evils of strcpy(), memcpy() is salvation!
I doubt any of them will reflect much upon the choice of Vista or XP (or mac or linux). Given that the average PC-buyer doesn't know the difference between Gigabytes and Megahertz, they are not going to reflect much upon number of copies of this or that. Vista is newer, and therefore better. Those who complain about Vista are PC enthusiasts or corporate buyers.
Besides, selling Joe Bloggs anything but Windows is a recipe for disaster. What's he going to do when it will not work with his GPS, camera, cellphone, PDA, mp3-player, or other favourite gadget? Linux is good, but I still need access to windows once in a while.
In fact, modern digital SLRs are even more capable, convenient, versatile, and forgiving than the earlier generation of SLRs. The only trouble with modern SLRs is that they don't use film. Because film is still superior to the photosensitive sensor in digital cameras (assuming you stay within a budget that's at least theoretically possible for the average photographer, i.e. by mortgaging your house, as opposed to being a government and buying Hubble). And with film, you can still scan your film afterwards, so you get the benefits of digital as well. Of course, for most of us, the convenience of straight-to-digital far outweighs the benefits of film, as films benefits are rather small, but still there.
This is speaking from ignorance. Compare your statement to this this one about Stradivarius violins: "I guarantee you oculd get just as good a sound out of a violin made of plywood or even plastic, but due to the nature of the music industry there isn't all that much demand for plywood or plastic violins". While it's possible to simulate tube distortion pretty good, it's not the same, and every musician using tube amps knows just that. And yeah, I still agree tube amps will be a rarity in 30 years. In fact, they already are.
You mean, like this one?
While I agree with your argument (it's far from everybody who prefers vinyl to CDs or film to digital cameras), I must disagree with the proposition that it's only for nostalgic reasons. Film cameras are still objectively "better" than digital cameras, when you consider contrast and colour-balance and all that. And tube amps certainly have their uses, e.g. if you want the "warm analog" sound (which you can then easily record on to a CD). [By the way: It's not that the "warm analog" sound is a more accurate sound reproduction, it's only there when you abuse the electronics, but it's certainly more pleasant than the failure mode of digital electronics.]
The old saying "they don't make stuff like this today" is often true. Progress means the price goes down, and the product is thus available for more consumers, but still good enough for most. Some people however, are willing to pay extra, either in money or convenience, in order to get the "best", which often are what they made in the old days.
However, other things are better explained through fashion. People don't by vinyl because it's better. People buy vinyl for the same reason your grandfather always used a tie. It's the fashion.
You can't have lived long in the real world, if that's what you find "very depressing". Personally, I can't for the life of me see that it's possible to view this in any other way, but I'm far from cynic enough to make money in the real world, as a salesman. No sir, I live from my paycheck sent to me from a company who is willing to pay me so they can exploit my time and abilities. But if you believe you can make it in the world of business-deals yourself, with a soft heart, feel free to try.
Alternatively, it could be interpreted to reinforce how much it really sucked. It sucked so much you'd be better off buying a product that made the "every top 10 worst product of the year list that matters". The only reason you people are complaining about the review is because the PC used linux. Still, it was cheap, and cheap stuff often sucks, regardless of whether it has your pet technology in it. I wouldn't buy my PC at Wal-Mart. Nor would I buy a piece of junk just because it used linux.
Actually, it was not a stupid part of the review. In fact, it was what I would consider the most useful part of the review. You get what you pay for, and sometimes (actually quite often) buying cheap junk is throwing money out of the window. If you spend money on something so bad you are never going to use it, those money are still spent, no matter how "cheap" the device was.
One of the reasons people read "independent" reviews like this, is exactly because they want to find out if their money is well spent. For most people, price is important, and they want to go as low as possible. That's why people read reviews, they want to avoid buying crap while still buying cheap. Where you draw the line is of course up to each person, and each reviewer, but at some point, you have to draw the line. And this reviewer found this cheap PC to be crap.
That cheap stuff can suck should come as no surprise to anybody. That cheap stuff can use linux should come as no surprise to anybody. Why it then is a surprise for anyone that cheap stuff using linux can suck, is beyond my comprehension. The computer was cheap, it used linux, and it sucked. Deal with it. (A Vista computer would still suck, but at least the reviewer mean it would suck significantly less. I tend to agree with him, the hardware in this Everex was unimpressive, and so was the software. With Vista, at least you get the "standard" low-end).
I too see nothing wrong with a voluntary arrangement of that sort. What I'm opposed to is making this into law. Making replicas pay for maintenance of historical artifacts is a good idea. Making it into law is a bad one. The same can be said of a number of other ides. Here's one example: Making horny men pay for prostitutes (instead of e.g. date-raping someone) is a good idea. Making it into law (if you're horny, you have to pay a prostitute) is a bad idea.
Uhm, no. Does not follow. The problem is the same with copyright. Copyright isn't there to ensure artists have an income. Because nobody is entitled to an income (except the state, through taxation, but that's another story). Copyright is there to stimulate people to invest their time into creating artistic works. Copyright is intended as a "create, and we will pay you"-arrangement, not a "You're still using my creation, pay me more!"-arrangement. One is about stimulating invention, the other about greed. Unfortunately, copyright has lately diverged into greed.
Eh, because I don't want to sit at my desktop to read email. Or because I don't want to lug around a laptop, simply to keep my mail in one place. Or because there's no such thing as a good standard email-client found anywhere, so I would have to lug around an installation CD if I wanted to read mail on somebody elses computer.
Assuming you have a good enough webmail interface, the advantages of dropping the MUA should be pretty obvious. Gmail has a good enough webmail interface.
I have no doubt your IMAP client is excellent. The trouble is that you need your IMAP client. All I need is a webbrowser. Another advantage I have is that I don't need to worry about a server, configuration, or any of that shit, google already does the work for me. I would be happy to pay a reasonable amount for someone to manage it for me (instead of advertizing financing it, as it is now), but mail just ain't important enough to pay for it with *my* time as well. Bothering with a vanity domain and all that shit, just doesn't sound that cool, when the end result is a solution that serves my needs slightly less than gmail, but still costs time and money.
I use webmail for the same reason I use a mobile phone. It's more convenient to be able to read and write mail from anywhere, with the same convenient interface, just like it's more convenient with your phone in your pocket, than it is to constantly "borrow a phone" wherever you go. I have no more interest in running my own mail-server, than I have in running my own switchboard for my phone.
And this speaks in googles favour how? Changing from bad security to deliberately sabotaging their customers security needs is now a good thing?
While I agree that private URLs is not a good security mechanism, I would rather trust a private URL to remain private for a while, than any system based on giving more information based on whether someone is someones address book. Usually, if there's something I don't want someone to know, that person can be found in my address book. Very rarely do I worry about what somebody I don't even know who is, thinks about me.
I disagree. You may want to "share" these articles with your friends, even though you don't want to "share" them with your family. Which is exactly what many people did, they published their "private" URL containing their "shared" items to a select group of friends.
Then google decided that anyone in you address book should be able to see your "private" URL. In other words, google unilaterally (and without warning) decided that everyone you've ever communicated with, using email, is now in your select group of "friends". This may include things like your pain-in-the-ass boss, the lawyer of someone who is running a case against you, or that you are running a case against, your conservative christian family, your stalking ex-boyfriend, or just about anyone else who may live in your contacts but should not read every article you find on teh intarweb to share with your real friends. While it's possible to blame the users for clicking on "share" in the first place, the decision by google was infinitely more stupid than that.
Sounds unrealistic. If you can find a supermodel willing to have sex with you under those condititions, you can probably stop time from running out too.
I didn't object to kites being useful, or even "best" in certain situations. I did object to them being "several orders of magnitude more efficient", as modern sails are already pretty close to the theoretical maximum (and certainly not several orders of magnitude away from it). What you choose depends on a lot of factors, such as how much you want to invest up front, how much you want to pay for maintenance, reliability, practicality, performance, ease of use, legality, contest rules, etc...
Anyway, if they only planned to use the kite for a spinnaker, they are not truly experimenting with dropping sails. A spinnaker is merely a big garbage bag that needs to occupy the largest possible area, used when you're travelling almost exactly the same direction as the wind. Kites can be used to sail against the wind the same way (real) sails can (just ask any kiteboarder).
"Reduced windage when travelling against the wind" is a misnomer, as the "windage" is what propulses the boat forwards.
And while flying the kite back and forwards may increase wind speed at the kite, it will not drag the boat any faster through the water. There is an optimal position and adjustment of the kite (depending on where the wind is blowing compared to your direction), and that's where you put the kite. Flying it back and forwards merely removes the kite from the optimal position (and increases wear and tear).
Several orders of magnitude more efficient? That sounds very unlikely, given that sailing technology is pretty competitive these days, with competitions like Americas cup where investors are practically standing in line to pour money into new and experimental designs.
A kite has the advantage of catching air at a somewhat higher altitude, on the other hand, it has the disadvantage of not working at all in lower wind, higher risk of collision with other kite-driven boats, and so on...
But the main advantage of a kite is that it can be retrofitted to boats not specifically designed for it (although they still need a good keel). If you were to start from scratch in designing a new sailing ship, I find it very likely that it would still have a mast and sails, rather than a kite. In any case, even with a mast, you can still use a kite.
And your point is? It shouldn't be particularly hard for the compiler to analyze the code in a for-loop to see if it can be paralellized. If the compiler can do loop-unrolling and all the other kinds of fancy tricks it does, this should be a piece of cake. The problem is that we haven't got the hardware to execute it on. And by the way, Ruby is not executed in parallel.
Erlang is very programmer-friendly. It may not be friends with you, but many people who have worked with it, swear by it. Personally, I haven't used it much, as it doesn't solve a problem I have, but I found it no harder to use than most other functional languages.
If labels and conditional gotos are too hard to conceptualize for you, I doubt you will think it is easer to conseptualize how the compiler transforms branches into speculatively executed threads. But again, the problem isn't the languages we use. It's that we haven't got the hardware to execute very short-lived parallel threads at every junction. If such hardware existed, I'm sure we could create compilers for it.
I disagree that Java and C are the problem. Sure, there are better languages for concurrent programming, but whether you choose to solve the problem through better languages, better compilers, libraries, or programming practice --- doesn't really matter. The important thing is that unless you have hardware to run it on, none of the proposed solutions will matter, because neither of them lead to any improvements. It took actual computers to design FORTRAN too.