"iPhone battery will last.023% longer than equivalent Nokia N95 battery" "Vista successfully installed printer driver" "Scientists in Norway discover that the sun rises each and every Tuesday." "iPhone cures herpes." "$company is forming a patent pact with Microsoft" "iPhone violates 221 Microsoft patents" "In Soviet Russia iPhone orders Calamari FOR you" "1337 H4XZ0R creates a beowulf cluster of iPhones running Ubuntu using his Wii Wifi"
Slow news night.
Seriously, why would slashdotters care about the iPhone curing herpes? I thought we were all too busy watching NASA TV to catch it.:)
Seriously, I probably wouldn't have taken any great notice of this shuttle launch, except for the fact that it happens to be the first time the shuttle has launched on my birthday. Since this is the first launch in six months, and the next few flights are all scheduled for two month intervals, it looks like the shuttle program may be back in business for the time being, which is pretty neat.
Thanks for the heads up about sunrises on Tuesdays. I'll keep an eye out for the paper on that!
Isn't coming back just falling back to earth? How can you not have enough power to fall? Ok maybe I'm trying to be a little bit funny, but it seems like if they have enough energy to bring it up, then there should be not problem bringing it back down.
There are a couple of things going on. Yes, do-orbit is basically falling. But, orbiting is also basically falling, and the devil is in the details. You see, the big fuel tanks and rockets that you see them using to get off the ground -- most of that energy isn't for going up. Some of the energy is used for going up, but the rest is for falling very very very fast. Sideways. So fast that you miss the Earth on the way down. Now, once you are in orbit you will basically stay there for a good long time. Eventually, orbits decay, but for the sake of simplicity, you will stay up there longer than you probably want to. So, to get back down, you can't just say "well, lets stop orbitting," and then magically make it down. You are already just falling, so you have to actively fight the fall in order to do somethng else. You need enough fuel to slow your fall down. You are going absurdly fast, and you may be well away from the atmosphere if you are in a high orbit, so you need to cut down quite a bit of velocity so that your falling will allow you to fall into the atmosphere. (Once you get into much of the atmosphere, you tend to slow down very fast, such that falling slowly enough to get back to the ground suddenly becomes an alarmingly easy thing to do.)
So, to cut that velocity in orbit, you need some fuel. How much fuel you need depends on how much mass you need to slow down. To slow down more mass, you need more fuel. Of course, that fuel is also extra mass. So, you need a bit more fuel. So, bringing down X mass needs Y fuel, which itself needs Z fuel. So, you need to launch with X*Y* Z extra mass in your space ship. Of course, launching that extra mass means a bigger rocket to get into orbit with more A more fuel, B more tank mass to hold A more fuel, and C more fuel to have the energy to launch A and B. So, bringing X mass back costs you X*Y*Z*A*B*C all in all. it turns out it may just be cheaper to build a new space suit for every mission.
I'm sort of absurdly oversimplifying things, but that is the gist of de-orbiting mechanics in a nut shell.
It's thinking like that which makes OEM Windows recovery CDs completely useless once you upgrade a motherboard or harddrive.
For the love of god, don't delete the IPv6 files to get back just a few meg of space. One day, you might want to lug your box over to a friends LAN and find that you actually need it.
To be fair, not everybody is installing Linux onto a desktop system with a ton of storage. I've recently been doing some research on building set top boxes with Linux, and the whole system would probably be done in something like 64 MB of flash. On a system like that, slimming things down really is quite reasonable.
Of course, on a system like that, I'd be doing a custom kernel build, so I'd just not build stuff I didn't need, rather then needing to delete it after install.:)
In keeping with the naming of capital-A Ages after prevalent use of materials, I like to refer to the period from 1912 to 2045 as the "Plastic Age" (or possibly the "Polymer Age" or "Polyfantasic! Age"), covering the use of Bakelite on up in consumer goods.
Your guess as to what happens after 2045:) (Hint: Ray Kurzweil has something to say about that)
--Rob
No, it seems like all the materials that are whizzy and new now days are "Space Age Materials." Stuff like carbon fiber. So, that makes this the "Space Age Materials Age."
Well, for anyone who has actually ever tried to use a touch screen in cold weather, with wet or dirty hands, or while driving, there are a TON of reasons why physical buttons (or at least the option of a stylus) are better than a touch screen. This is one aspect of the iphone that I'm really interested to see shake out in the real world.
Well, this cold-hands issue explains why they are releasing it in June.:)
1. Pirate Bay, one of the flagships of the anti-copyright movement, makes thousands of euros from advertising on its site, while maintaining its anti-establishment "free music" rhetoric.
Okay, Pirate Bay makes money from advertising. Personally, I find that a bit annoying, and I would love it if they were perfectly altruistic and high-minded. How is this an inconvenient truth about file sharing?
2. AllOfMP3.com, the well-known Russian web site, has not been licensed by a single IFPI member, has been disowned by right holder groups worldwide and is facing criminal proceedings in Russia.
Ah, Russia... Great bastion of infinite tolerance and justice these days. Surely, the model for any political organisation anywhere. Like #1, I'm not sure what this proves? They sell MP3's. That isn't "file swapping."
3. Organized criminal gangs and even terrorist groups use the sale of counterfeit CDs to raise revenue and launder money.
Well, this certainly has nothing to do with file swapping.
4. Illegal file-sharers don't care whether the copyright-infringing work they distribute is from a major or independent label.
That's an absurdly broad claim. I'll agree that not every file-sharer takes this into account, but they imply that none do, which is absurd.
5. Reduced revenues for record companies mean less money available to take a risk on "underground" artists and more inclination to invest in "bankers" like American Idol stars.
Simply untrue, but admittedly a reasonable perspective, and the most reasonable point so far. Thoroughly debunking this claim would require more effort than a slashdot posting actually merits, but the recording industry really wasn't that interested in promoting diverse and new talent in the days before the internet started impacting their business. Look at the payola schemes. Look at the abusive contracts. If the record companies had more money available, they would buy more gold swimming pools.
6. ISPs often advertise music as a benefit of signing up to their service, but facilitate the illegal swapping on copyright infringing music on a grand scale.
There are perfectly legitimate sources of music online, so advertising that an Internet connection can be used to download music is perfectly reasonable. ISP's facilitate people having Internet Service. As near as I can tell, the recording industry means with this point that ISP's should either be outlawed, or music should be granted some sort of special legal status and ISP's should have to work for the music industry. Obviously, neither is reasonable, which is probably why they didn't just come out and say it.
7. The anti-copyright movement does not create jobs, exports, tax revenues and economic growth-it largely consists of people pontificating on a commercial world about which they know little.
Wait, I thought it made jobs for AllofMP3.com employees, Russian Prosecutors, Swedish Pirate Advertising Coordinators, and ISP's. People aren't allowed to pontificate? This point is a complete non-sequitor, given the previous points. It's also not at all obvious that if file swapping was eliminated, there would be more jobs or anything else. They don't even try to claim that there would be. It's a bit like claiming that the fact that I went jogging yesterday doesn't create jobs or exports. That doesn't make jogging bad.
8. Piracy is not caused by poverty. Professor Zhang of Nanjing University found the Chinese citizens who bought pirate products were mainly middle- or higher-income earners.
Okay, now we are back to people *buying* things in a list that claims to be about file swapping, which is just confusing. Anyhow, counterpoint... How many of the Chinese super-poor have CD players? Co
Well, there may be billions of pixels, but I am having some sort of transfer problem, so all I see is a pale red dot. I mean, with all I'm seeing, I have to wonder if we actually sent any space ships to Mars, or if they were all just pretend Space Ships of the Imagination...
Okay I really like my AMD system but they need to be slapped hard for inventing a new goofy marketing term. MEGATASKING. Dude if you have over a 1024 tasks running at once you need to run some malware clean up software.
My friend, you fail to appreciate the lunacy of the intricacies of marketing. That which you have described would, in fact, be merely kilotasking.
I digress. The point is - nothing seems much better in the user experience than before, for the vast majority of things we do - and that includes MacOS X, to my thinking. Nothing that makes me jump up and down and twist and shout anyway. What apps have I added in the last 10 years? Music players. Video players. Browsers. Pretty much it. I wonder where the hell my 4.5 billion clock cycles a second are actually going.
To be fair, there were a lot of projects that tried to create some really new stuff. In particular, I'm thinking of Taligent and Pink. Certainly, Newton would also count. I'm most familiar with Apple's history, but I'm sure a lot of other companies and research groups had similar ideas. They all failed. When the new revolutionary stuff failed, everybody went back to the old stuff and built on top of it.
We are finally starting to see some of what we could have had in 1994, with things like iPhone and MS Surface. Interfaces that really aren't just gussied up versions of the user experience from 1984. Will these new multitouch interfaces blaze a trail to ubiquitous computing and some really new ways of working with technology? I have no idea. From what I have seen of MS Surface, I still have to say no. At least, it still has a lot of growing up to do. Palm is trying to reinvent the subnotebook with its new gear as a peripheral for your phone. Is that the future? I dunno, maybe. Probably not. We are at over 20 years since the Macintosh came into existence, and it would still be trivial to get a Macintosh user from 1985 who fell through a time warp up to speed on a modern Mac OS X / KDE / Vista / Gnome machine with dual monitors and many bells and whistles. Nothing fundamental has changed in over 20 years.
LiveJournal's official news blog has filled up with hundreds of complaints protesting the decision, so we could have another Digg-style user rebellion brewing.
Let's show solidarity with them:
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
Dude, that's a disgusting way to show solidarity. 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0 totally sleeps with 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c1.
This is the standard state of affairs. It turns out that slashdot isn't actually a more intelligent group than any other bunch of people who like computers and have web access; probably 90-95% of the story submissions suffer from the same problems. There would be a lot more stories on the slashdot front page if the majority of people who submit them weren't dumbfucks. The sad thing is that a lot of the submitted stories are quite interesting, but a leet-speaking myspacecase would do a better job with the submission. At least kids know how to make links in HTML.
Sadly, yes. I have been spending quite some time in the firehose myself, and it is pretty terrible. IMHO, the firehose needs some additional options besides just a thumbs up/thumbs down.
This submission should be on the front page. This submission is terrible but the subject should be posted on the front page. The subject is terrible. The linked-to article is obviously stupid/hoax/idiotic, but merits some discussion anyway. This submission is on the same subject as (identify another submission)
This way, the editors could see, "Hey, this block of 20 submissions were all identified by firehosers as being of the same subject, and the subject is considered important, I'll look at a few of the submissions and cobble together something."
You never know where technology will take us, even in the near future. Some say that we might experience technological singularity within the next 20 years. Then it might be a rather short time until FTL, or at least the ability to prolong one's life/consciousness. Then again, it might also be a rather short time until our extinction.
As far as my dad is concerned, we passed the technological singularity a while ago.
Department of Defense Network Information Center 21.0.0.0 - 22.255.255.255
True, but the OP did say "company." DoD isn't really playing in the same league as HP. (Despite HP's best efforts to go into the spying business.) Besides, DoD was responsible for DARPA, which was responsible for the early Internet, so I figure if one group deserves an absurd allocation, it is probably them.
So that's... about 330 MILLION IP addresses for the US DoD alone? And people bitch about MIT hoarding
Well, think about it... If you were desperate for an IP and you needed to take somebody else's, who would you pick a fight with?!
They could delay the inevitable by reallocating existing IPv4 space more efficiently. Many old/historical allocations are inefficient. Apple Computer, for example, has all of the 17.x.x.x space, comprising 256^3 = more than 16 million addresses, which is just plain absurd in this day and age.
So, why don't all MacBook Pro's come with a static IP? Seriously, it seems like Apple could integrate some sort of VPN into Mac OS X and make it so that you always can be accessed by a static IP that is routed to Apple, and then through the VPN connection to your mobile laptop. If Apple has that many IP's, you would think that they'd use them for something instead of just letting them sit idle...
This has been bugging me for the last couple of days. Mac's run some sort of UNIX, don't they? Does mac have DirectX, or what graphics library is blizzard using? If it compiles for mac, why dosen't it compile for any other *nix? (as always, by *nix i mean linux)
In short... Yes, the guts of Mac OS X will be familiar to anyone with a UNIX background. No, Mac doesn't have Direct X. It has OpenGL for 3D graphics, and various other libraries which manage other Direct X features such as sound and input.
There are many programs which, if they are working fine on Mac OS X, they will work just fine without any trouble on Linux or BSD or some other common *nix. A game is pretty much a shining example of a program where I would not expect that to be true. (We don't know for sure that SC2 wouldn't build on some additional platforms -- I just expect that it wouldn't.) When making a game you will generally use some platform specific code for the UI, graphics, low level audio handling, etc. A port to Linux might not be very difficult, but it would still require some work to rip out the Mac sound code and replace it with ALSA, and to replace the Quartz window management code with X11 code.
So, in short, for many types of programs it doesn't matter if the guts of an OS share a lot in common. There are some programs where the guts can be very different and it will work without any trouble, and others which rely mostly on higher level libraries and don't really care that the implimentation of some particular syscall is the same between two different platforms.
That 15GB consists mostly of other software bundled with, not OS X. A typical fresh OS X install (with nothing else on it) is around 4GB. Besides, I don't know why anyone would sell a computer with 8GB of flash memory now anyway; that flash HD replacement from SanDisk is already 32GB. If you wanted more, you could always allow for any 1.8" HD (same size as the SanDisk thingy, I think).
True, but people do seem to like a lot of the stuff that gets bundled with their new Mac. Stuff like iLife suite is pretty popular, after all. Anyhow, yeah, with flash hitting quite remarkable sizes these days, I think it is fair to say that Apple could jam a workable software platform with quite a bit of room leftover in a flash based subnotebook.
Of course, I'm incredibly cheap at the moment, so I can't promise to put my money where my mouth is for the next six months or so, until I get a few life transitions taken care of.:)
Now, look, judge. To call this involuntary is just inappropriate. Clearly, my client volunteered for it. So, half the people involved volunteered. At worst, this is semivoluntary...
That's supposed to be LESS confusing? My eye jumps to the colored words first, which appear to be picked almost randomly. (It looks like they are actually the verbs of the sentences.) Then I have to force my eye back to the beginning of the sentence and try to ignore the different colors. Then, because there's a break between that sentence and the next, I have to do the same thing all over again.
And what's the difference if my eyes are pulling words from the previous and next sentence or the pieces of the current one? It's still giving me information that I don't need -right now- in the sentence.
And the additional poem-like formatting is also confusing, as special formatting usually -means- something.
Training myself to read this, which is only used online and only if licensed by this company, would be a hassle. And used very little.
I agree that the poem like formatting is screwing me up and causing me to think in a rhythm that isn't actually intended by the content. OTOH, I actually quite like the idea of giving text some vertical structure to hang on to when moving from line to line. I think we have all found ourselves reading the same line three times or skipping a line because our eye managed to lose track of "V-Sync." I'd hate it if a few web pages did this, but I could see a firefox extension that could do a milder form of this for all web pages as being interesting to a small minority that appreciates it.
Multi-column ragged-right printing basically has a similar advantage over justified long lines that this does. More readily identifiable vertical structure so that they eye can zoom along like it was being guided by sprocket holes in film.
Of course, the hypothetical firefox extension would need to be able to tone down the degree to which the formatting is messed up, compared to the example. The example is too extreme for my tastes. I'd make the randomly colored words a bit more subtle, so the eye can catch them, but isn't as horribly drawn to them, and I'd waste a lot less space. Maybe give every work an X % variation from the main color text so that you don't wind up with specific words being inexplicably emphasized, but you do still get chromatic variation to aid tracking. As an extension on that, perhaps the algorithm could use a tendency toward pastels if it doesn't know the part of speech, warm tones if it thinks it is a verb with good certainty, and cool tones if it thinks it is a noun.
Tiny laptops are neat, and they might be popular outside the US, and I think they're great, but you're right, Apple probably won't make them. I could see them bringing back a 12" model, or maybe even making a 10" one*, but they'll probably never get really tiny. (Then again, with the iPhone, maybe they won't have to.)
* I dream of the "MacBook Elite": 10" screen, solid state/CF storage (only 8-10 GB or so), no optical drive; light, thin, and great battery life.
You aren't the only one! (Just in case anybody important is reading this thread...) I wouldn't call it "Elite" but I won't quibble about the name.:) Anyhow, I agree that no optical drive wouldn't be a problem for me. I have an external firewire/USB drive that I could plug into it if I need to, and in practice I find that I almost never actually use the optical drive of my iBook while I am out and about with it. I think the only problem is that you suggest 10 GB of flash, but my iBook came with 15 GB worth of Mac OS X, and it came with 10.3. I don't know what a typical machine with 10.5 will require in terms of storage with all the standard bundled software, but I have a funny hunch that 8 GB would wind being a whisker cramped.
Incidentally, I think Apple is pretty much also the only vendor in a position to be able to do something like make ARM laptops. It would take them a while to deploy software tools, but it really wouldn't be that hard for them to support another architecture.
As a nerd, I memorize a lot of quotes. And, one can use this to one's advantage. Whether it be Star Wars, Futurama, Orson Scott Card, The Bible, or whatever your favorite work is, you can take a quote & turn it into an easily memorable password.
I try to do the exact opposite. Whenever I need a new password, I have one randomly generated, and then come up with a phraze for it. I'll adjust capitalisation and add/drop characters to make it easier, but I'll use the randomly generated password basically in entireity.
I'll just randomly bang on my keyboard to generate an example or two, rather than bother to generate proper random ones...
owgijh... Oh, will God inject Jesus hastily? Then, to make a proper password... OwG1iJ2h? (Calling "God" number one and "Jesus" number two seemed like an easy enough way to add some complexity)
iuyfesa... I understand you fuckers eat sausage all-day!... Iu,Yf,Es,Ad (I just did a pattern for punctuation and capitalisation for this -- simple pattern seemed easier than remembering arbitrary capitalisation, since there were no proper names in this one...)
Are you proposing that the users design the mockups? Because you are then ensuring that only those who have familiarity with a graphics program have a voice.
Yes, it forces people suggesting ideas to think through it enough to actually figure out what it should look like. A lot of what people think is obviously practical will actually turn out to be obviously stupid once they try to actually work out exactly how it will get used and where it goes. The OP was concerned about getting a hundred thousand suggestions, so it seemed like a practical way to "keep out the riff raff" so that anybody who really cared could submit an idea, and anybody who just wants to hear themselves talk will get bored and not bother.
As an alternate idea, you could ask people to write documentation for the new feature as if it existed, or write a mock review of a future version. You still keep the effort involved just high enough to avoid a zillion different inconsequential suggestions like "make it not suck," "give it 3D stuff" or "make it have AI."
It makes far more sense just to have users suggest features, then tabulate them up, let them see which ones are most popular already, and then vote on them.
Of course, the users will expect you to actually respect their vote...
Yes, it'll need to be explained in enourmous red blinking letters that the most popular things will get looked at, with absolutely no guarantee of ever being implimented.
I work on a program with somewhere between 100,000-400,000 users. That's a relatively small market compared to OSes. Even with relatively few users, there's far too many voices for suggestions to listen to. Users ask how to submit wishes, but it's really not worth it for us to make it easy. There's already far too many wishes just from our beta testers, not to mention that many requests are either contradictory, would break the database model we've developed, or are in fact already in the program and they just haven't realized it. And that's not counting the fact that my fellow developers, marketers, and I have our own "brilliant" ideas on how to best improve the program.
So I can't see blaming the users; I couldn't listen to all of them even if they were trying to tell us about their problems.
This is certainly a fair point -- too many cooks spoil the borth and all that. But, it still may be a valuable idea if you can set up a filtering process. If you have some sort of community forum, you might be able to set up a "mockup screenshot contest" where users can imagine a new feature with a screenshot walkthrough of how it should work. Then, let other users vote on which ideas they find most interesting. Every month, during a development meeting, everybody looks at the highest rated idea, or five ideas or whatever, and see if it is worth implimenting or adding to a roadmap, or whatever.
This way, you don't have to deal with 400,000 piddly complaints, but you can still notice if half your customer base is demanding a particular feature.
I don't care how hard you fight the damn cat, it's out of the bag, and it's not getting back in.
It isn't getting back in. But, the middle managers have to tell the managers that they are pushing on the cat hard enough that they deserve to keep their jobs. I just posted a short story to my blog. Happens to be pronounced just like the famous AACS key. Stuff like T-shirts with stories inspired by a number can never be eradicated fully. In terms of piracy, it just takes one person knowing how to rip a disc to get it on the Internet.
Of course, what all the supression seems to ignore is that once one person knows about it, piracy happens. Period. But, if many people know about it then many people can do whatever they want with the *paid for disc.* So, many people have a reason to buy the disc. If only a handful of people know the secret, then only a handful of people get the incentive to buy the disc and everybody else gets the incentive to download it.
Anyhow, if anybody wants to read my scene, it is at forkforge.org -- I started it with a slashdot post, but finished it today to include the whole number. No rights claimed on the scene if anybody wants to copy it and put it in a gallery of ways people have expressed the number.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, why would slashdotters care about the iPhone curing herpes? I thought we were all too busy watching NASA TV to catch it.
Seriously, I probably wouldn't have taken any great notice of this shuttle launch, except for the fact that it happens to be the first time the shuttle has launched on my birthday. Since this is the first launch in six months, and the next few flights are all scheduled for two month intervals, it looks like the shuttle program may be back in business for the time being, which is pretty neat.
Thanks for the heads up about sunrises on Tuesdays. I'll keep an eye out for the paper on that!
There are a couple of things going on. Yes, do-orbit is basically falling. But, orbiting is also basically falling, and the devil is in the details. You see, the big fuel tanks and rockets that you see them using to get off the ground -- most of that energy isn't for going up. Some of the energy is used for going up, but the rest is for falling very very very fast. Sideways. So fast that you miss the Earth on the way down. Now, once you are in orbit you will basically stay there for a good long time. Eventually, orbits decay, but for the sake of simplicity, you will stay up there longer than you probably want to. So, to get back down, you can't just say "well, lets stop orbitting," and then magically make it down. You are already just falling, so you have to actively fight the fall in order to do somethng else. You need enough fuel to slow your fall down. You are going absurdly fast, and you may be well away from the atmosphere if you are in a high orbit, so you need to cut down quite a bit of velocity so that your falling will allow you to fall into the atmosphere. (Once you get into much of the atmosphere, you tend to slow down very fast, such that falling slowly enough to get back to the ground suddenly becomes an alarmingly easy thing to do.)
So, to cut that velocity in orbit, you need some fuel. How much fuel you need depends on how much mass you need to slow down. To slow down more mass, you need more fuel. Of course, that fuel is also extra mass. So, you need a bit more fuel. So, bringing down X mass needs Y fuel, which itself needs Z fuel. So, you need to launch with X*Y* Z extra mass in your space ship. Of course, launching that extra mass means a bigger rocket to get into orbit with more A more fuel, B more tank mass to hold A more fuel, and C more fuel to have the energy to launch A and B. So, bringing X mass back costs you X*Y*Z*A*B*C all in all. it turns out it may just be cheaper to build a new space suit for every mission.
I'm sort of absurdly oversimplifying things, but that is the gist of de-orbiting mechanics in a nut shell.
To be fair, not everybody is installing Linux onto a desktop system with a ton of storage. I've recently been doing some research on building set top boxes with Linux, and the whole system would probably be done in something like 64 MB of flash. On a system like that, slimming things down really is quite reasonable.
Of course, on a system like that, I'd be doing a custom kernel build, so I'd just not build stuff I didn't need, rather then needing to delete it after install.
No, it seems like all the materials that are whizzy and new now days are "Space Age Materials." Stuff like carbon fiber. So, that makes this the "Space Age Materials Age."
Chiefly by the differentiating degree of buzzword compliance.
Well, this cold-hands issue explains why they are releasing it in June.
Okay, Pirate Bay makes money from advertising. Personally, I find that a bit annoying, and I would love it if they were perfectly altruistic and high-minded. How is this an inconvenient truth about file sharing?
Ah, Russia... Great bastion of infinite tolerance and justice these days. Surely, the model for any political organisation anywhere. Like #1, I'm not sure what this proves? They sell MP3's. That isn't "file swapping."
Well, this certainly has nothing to do with file swapping.
That's an absurdly broad claim. I'll agree that not every file-sharer takes this into account, but they imply that none do, which is absurd.
Simply untrue, but admittedly a reasonable perspective, and the most reasonable point so far. Thoroughly debunking this claim would require more effort than a slashdot posting actually merits, but the recording industry really wasn't that interested in promoting diverse and new talent in the days before the internet started impacting their business. Look at the payola schemes. Look at the abusive contracts. If the record companies had more money available, they would buy more gold swimming pools.
There are perfectly legitimate sources of music online, so advertising that an Internet connection can be used to download music is perfectly reasonable. ISP's facilitate people having Internet Service. As near as I can tell, the recording industry means with this point that ISP's should either be outlawed, or music should be granted some sort of special legal status and ISP's should have to work for the music industry. Obviously, neither is reasonable, which is probably why they didn't just come out and say it.
Wait, I thought it made jobs for AllofMP3.com employees, Russian Prosecutors, Swedish Pirate Advertising Coordinators, and ISP's. People aren't allowed to pontificate? This point is a complete non-sequitor, given the previous points. It's also not at all obvious that if file swapping was eliminated, there would be more jobs or anything else. They don't even try to claim that there would be. It's a bit like claiming that the fact that I went jogging yesterday doesn't create jobs or exports. That doesn't make jogging bad.
Okay, now we are back to people *buying* things in a list that claims to be about file swapping, which is just confusing. Anyhow, counterpoint... How many of the Chinese super-poor have CD players? Co
Well, there may be billions of pixels, but I am having some sort of transfer problem, so all I see is a pale red dot. I mean, with all I'm seeing, I have to wonder if we actually sent any space ships to Mars, or if they were all just pretend Space Ships of the Imagination...
My friend, you fail to appreciate the lunacy of the intricacies of marketing. That which you have described would, in fact, be merely kilotasking.
To be fair, there were a lot of projects that tried to create some really new stuff. In particular, I'm thinking of Taligent and Pink. Certainly, Newton would also count. I'm most familiar with Apple's history, but I'm sure a lot of other companies and research groups had similar ideas. They all failed. When the new revolutionary stuff failed, everybody went back to the old stuff and built on top of it.
We are finally starting to see some of what we could have had in 1994, with things like iPhone and MS Surface. Interfaces that really aren't just gussied up versions of the user experience from 1984. Will these new multitouch interfaces blaze a trail to ubiquitous computing and some really new ways of working with technology? I have no idea. From what I have seen of MS Surface, I still have to say no. At least, it still has a lot of growing up to do. Palm is trying to reinvent the subnotebook with its new gear as a peripheral for your phone. Is that the future? I dunno, maybe. Probably not. We are at over 20 years since the Macintosh came into existence, and it would still be trivial to get a Macintosh user from 1985 who fell through a time warp up to speed on a modern Mac OS X / KDE / Vista / Gnome machine with dual monitors and many bells and whistles. Nothing fundamental has changed in over 20 years.
Dude, that's a disgusting way to show solidarity. 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0 totally sleeps with 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c1.
Sadly, yes. I have been spending quite some time in the firehose myself, and it is pretty terrible. IMHO, the firehose needs some additional options besides just a thumbs up/thumbs down.
This submission should be on the front page.
This submission is terrible but the subject should be posted on the front page.
The subject is terrible.
The linked-to article is obviously stupid/hoax/idiotic, but merits some discussion anyway.
This submission is on the same subject as (identify another submission)
This way, the editors could see, "Hey, this block of 20 submissions were all identified by firehosers as being of the same subject, and the subject is considered important, I'll look at a few of the submissions and cobble together something."
As far as my dad is concerned, we passed the technological singularity a while ago.
True, but the OP did say "company." DoD isn't really playing in the same league as HP. (Despite HP's best efforts to go into the spying business.) Besides, DoD was responsible for DARPA, which was responsible for the early Internet, so I figure if one group deserves an absurd allocation, it is probably them.
Well, think about it... If you were desperate for an IP and you needed to take somebody else's, who would you pick a fight with?!
So, why don't all MacBook Pro's come with a static IP? Seriously, it seems like Apple could integrate some sort of VPN into Mac OS X and make it so that you always can be accessed by a static IP that is routed to Apple, and then through the VPN connection to your mobile laptop. If Apple has that many IP's, you would think that they'd use them for something instead of just letting them sit idle...
God had done gone smoted Bob, and he was pissed.
In short... Yes, the guts of Mac OS X will be familiar to anyone with a UNIX background. No, Mac doesn't have Direct X. It has OpenGL for 3D graphics, and various other libraries which manage other Direct X features such as sound and input.
There are many programs which, if they are working fine on Mac OS X, they will work just fine without any trouble on Linux or BSD or some other common *nix. A game is pretty much a shining example of a program where I would not expect that to be true. (We don't know for sure that SC2 wouldn't build on some additional platforms -- I just expect that it wouldn't.) When making a game you will generally use some platform specific code for the UI, graphics, low level audio handling, etc. A port to Linux might not be very difficult, but it would still require some work to rip out the Mac sound code and replace it with ALSA, and to replace the Quartz window management code with X11 code.
So, in short, for many types of programs it doesn't matter if the guts of an OS share a lot in common. There are some programs where the guts can be very different and it will work without any trouble, and others which rely mostly on higher level libraries and don't really care that the implimentation of some particular syscall is the same between two different platforms.
True, but people do seem to like a lot of the stuff that gets bundled with their new Mac. Stuff like iLife suite is pretty popular, after all. Anyhow, yeah, with flash hitting quite remarkable sizes these days, I think it is fair to say that Apple could jam a workable software platform with quite a bit of room leftover in a flash based subnotebook.
Of course, I'm incredibly cheap at the moment, so I can't promise to put my money where my mouth is for the next six months or so, until I get a few life transitions taken care of.
Now, look, judge. To call this involuntary is just inappropriate. Clearly, my client volunteered for it. So, half the people involved volunteered. At worst, this is semivoluntary...
I agree that the poem like formatting is screwing me up and causing me to think in a rhythm that isn't actually intended by the content. OTOH, I actually quite like the idea of giving text some vertical structure to hang on to when moving from line to line. I think we have all found ourselves reading the same line three times or skipping a line because our eye managed to lose track of "V-Sync." I'd hate it if a few web pages did this, but I could see a firefox extension that could do a milder form of this for all web pages as being interesting to a small minority that appreciates it.
Multi-column ragged-right printing basically has a similar advantage over justified long lines that this does. More readily identifiable vertical structure so that they eye can zoom along like it was being guided by sprocket holes in film.
Of course, the hypothetical firefox extension would need to be able to tone down the degree to which the formatting is messed up, compared to the example. The example is too extreme for my tastes. I'd make the randomly colored words a bit more subtle, so the eye can catch them, but isn't as horribly drawn to them, and I'd waste a lot less space. Maybe give every work an X % variation from the main color text so that you don't wind up with specific words being inexplicably emphasized, but you do still get chromatic variation to aid tracking. As an extension on that, perhaps the algorithm could use a tendency toward pastels if it doesn't know the part of speech, warm tones if it thinks it is a verb with good certainty, and cool tones if it thinks it is a noun.
You aren't the only one! (Just in case anybody important is reading this thread...) I wouldn't call it "Elite" but I won't quibble about the name.
Incidentally, I think Apple is pretty much also the only vendor in a position to be able to do something like make ARM laptops. It would take them a while to deploy software tools, but it really wouldn't be that hard for them to support another architecture.
I try to do the exact opposite. Whenever I need a new password, I have one randomly generated, and then come up with a phraze for it. I'll adjust capitalisation and add/drop characters to make it easier, but I'll use the randomly generated password basically in entireity.
I'll just randomly bang on my keyboard to generate an example or two, rather than bother to generate proper random ones...
owgijh
iuyfesa
Yes, it forces people suggesting ideas to think through it enough to actually figure out what it should look like. A lot of what people think is obviously practical will actually turn out to be obviously stupid once they try to actually work out exactly how it will get used and where it goes. The OP was concerned about getting a hundred thousand suggestions, so it seemed like a practical way to "keep out the riff raff" so that anybody who really cared could submit an idea, and anybody who just wants to hear themselves talk will get bored and not bother.
As an alternate idea, you could ask people to write documentation for the new feature as if it existed, or write a mock review of a future version. You still keep the effort involved just high enough to avoid a zillion different inconsequential suggestions like "make it not suck," "give it 3D stuff" or "make it have AI."
Yes, it'll need to be explained in enourmous red blinking letters that the most popular things will get looked at, with absolutely no guarantee of ever being implimented.
This is certainly a fair point -- too many cooks spoil the borth and all that. But, it still may be a valuable idea if you can set up a filtering process. If you have some sort of community forum, you might be able to set up a "mockup screenshot contest" where users can imagine a new feature with a screenshot walkthrough of how it should work. Then, let other users vote on which ideas they find most interesting. Every month, during a development meeting, everybody looks at the highest rated idea, or five ideas or whatever, and see if it is worth implimenting or adding to a roadmap, or whatever.
This way, you don't have to deal with 400,000 piddly complaints, but you can still notice if half your customer base is demanding a particular feature.
It isn't getting back in. But, the middle managers have to tell the managers that they are pushing on the cat hard enough that they deserve to keep their jobs. I just posted a short story to my blog. Happens to be pronounced just like the famous AACS key. Stuff like T-shirts with stories inspired by a number can never be eradicated fully. In terms of piracy, it just takes one person knowing how to rip a disc to get it on the Internet.
Of course, what all the supression seems to ignore is that once one person knows about it, piracy happens. Period. But, if many people know about it then many people can do whatever they want with the *paid for disc.* So, many people have a reason to buy the disc. If only a handful of people know the secret, then only a handful of people get the incentive to buy the disc and everybody else gets the incentive to download it.
Anyhow, if anybody wants to read my scene, it is at forkforge.org -- I started it with a slashdot post, but finished it today to include the whole number. No rights claimed on the scene if anybody wants to copy it and put it in a gallery of ways people have expressed the number.