I was a youth BEFORE the invention of the microprocessor. I did my growing up years on a CDC Cyber 72 mainframe, but we were all pretty excited when the 4004 came out. The 4004 was actually the first microprocessor I ever owned: in a Mattel Electronics Football game. Before that, I had an ENIAC -- which was just six really smart switches I could wire to do all sorts of cool tasks. And when I was really little, I had a Dr. Nym, which was a marble-and-gravity cascading flip-flop game.
Actually, I think he may owe a lot more than a handful of apologies.
How many people were duped into investing in SCO because a reputable magazine like Forbes backed them? How many had their shares wiped out completely because his "analysis" of the legal situation turned out to be a mere parroting of the paid corporate shills?
I'd be more than mad if I lost my money because of this man's inept journalism. I'd be hiring a lawyer.
That reminds me of one of the more interesting conflicts we had in Minnesota when Jesse Ventura was governor. He once referred to the media as "jackals", and discovered that favorable coverage wasn't quite as easy to come by after having said that.
But this issue was neither. This issue really was "Who should you take legal advice from? Nerds, Forbes, armchair lawyers, real lawyers, P.J., or Alberto Gonzales?"
I still don't have an answer, but IANAL so don't listen to me!
I don't think quantum computing will be the future for general-purpose computing, and certainly not in 10 years. I think you're nearly right in that the future will lie in parallel computing -- increasing the number of CPUs will be the path to higher throughputs (which coincidentally aligns nicely with Intel's goal: sell more CPUs.)
Either way, when Gordon Moore eventually dies he will still be overflowing the (long)money; variable.
If you are getting a crappy picture on the analog stations on your cable that originated as analog, you need to phone up your cable company and complain about the installation of your cable feed as it's not done correctly.
I had this problem a few years ago and called the cable provider. The technician who came out identified a simple barrel connector in the cable demarc box was attenuating the signal by about 12 db instead of the expected 0.5 db. It took him just minutes to trace out the wires and replace the connector (he also replaced the cable ends while he was at it,) and it didn't cost me a cent.
So I agree that you should do a bit more investigation before calling shenanigans.
Your post reminded me of the stupid TV commercials from a while back that featured "humorous" do-it-yourself satellite installations gone awry: a dish balanced on the top of a bookshelf or duct-taped to a cinder block, a hole bored through a tree to improve reception, or featuring the same football game on every TV in the house. And satellite advertisements claiming their over-compressed digital signals were somehow magically better simply because they were digital.
Both cable and satellite providers effectively called their viewers "idiots" with these spots, yet they continued to run them. I found their race to be the lowest common denominator personally offensive. (Almost like a political campaign.)
There's a frequency that seems to be somewhere between 50 and 72 Hz at which the perception of flicker ends for most people. I know that on a CRT a 60 Hz refresh rate is quite bothersome to me but at 72 Hz it's not, while on an LCD screen a 60 Hz refresh rate doesn't bother me at all. This makes me believe my perceptions are related to the overall luminance of the screen ( which is evened out on an LCD by the backlighting, ) rather than the display rate of the bits themselves.
Of course, I'm not playing as many first-person shooters these days, so I don't have the same incentive to install monster-sized video cards as I used to. But when I did, keeping the frame rate above the refresh rate was important to avoid "tearing".
Please call us back when the majority of your citizens are measuring their weight in Newtons instead of Kilograms, and we'll consider addressing your charge of Pound-related bias.
Sincerely,
The People of the United States of America
Rear Peephole of the Unix Tates of Ammonium,
Wii are using Newtons, butt wood prefer Palm Pilates.
Hardly. The problem wasn't the levees or Katrina or the pumps or the response. The problem is the idea that you can keep a historic city below sea level and nothing bad will ever happen.
Levees will fail. Pumps will fail. FEMA will fail to respond. The solution is much simpler: prohibit building anything (except a boat ramp) below the waterline, or be prepared to change the name from New Orleans to New Venice.
Hey, since the place is already there, why not just open it up to any commercial flights that want to come in?
RTFA. They still aren't opening the strip to just anyone, and it's not just about the money. Gooogle is also allowing NASA to fly scientific instruments and researchers on the plane.
Translated, that really means "Of course it's about the money, you f*cktards. NASA's got enough planes. Google's got enough money. The whole researcher thing is just there to justify the deal in the newspapers."
After all, it's still Google, and their motto is still "Don't be caught being evil."
You're welcome. And just so you can feel doubly victorious over me, you should also know that you shamed me into finally sponsoring User Friendly too, which is only fair since I've read his strip daily since it came out.
Well, I expect that half that $10 should go to the people who spent the money footing the bandwidth bill, so I just put $5.00 on my Slashdot subscription.
Feel free to keep expecting your other half of the $10.
My point is "block it yourself." If you want to be honest with the web page owners (and I realize you think you don't owe them even that much) you'll take the responsibility for blocking the ads you don't want to see. The real problem is automating the process and sharing adblock lists with everyone is going to speed up adoption of the counter-ad-blocker movement, and then we'll have yet another stupid technology arms race.
The bottom line is I'm selfish. I like adblock, and I like that I put ad sites in it and I never see them again. I like the status quo. I do not care if other people don't block ads, or don't know how to block ads, or are never smart enough to figure it out on their own. I do not want to see the rise of the ad-blocker-detectors, because then I'm going to have to adapt to counter their strategies. It'll add complexity to the browser and to the adblocking software, causing more bugs and more false-positives. It'll cost me time and effort that could be better spent on other things.
What has been "stolen" is bandwidth, a.k.a. opportunity cost. Site operators pay to carry all their site's traffic. If they are paying to have a 6GB pipe to carry their user load, and 5.4GB of that is delivered ad-free, it costs them actual real cash.
In the case of Walm*rt, you might be there only to warm up on a cold winter day, or to cool down in their air conditioning, or to use their bathroom and their soap and towels. They still let you in the door even though you have no intention of purchasing anything from them, because they can't "see" your intentions. Did that cost them anything? Sure, it cost a bit of lost heat while the door was open, maybe two cents for the toilet paper, and maybe even fifty cents for the attention of the security person who thinks you look suspicious. It's part of their cost of doing business.
But they got something out of it, too. You set foot in their store: statistically, you're much closer to buying something from them than someone who never entered their store. They delivered dozens of advertising impressions to you, from the logos on the walls to the products on the shelves to the giant ugly floor stickers. They may even have left a favorable impression on you, such that you would choose walm*rt again if you ever needed to buy plastic Chinese crap.
In the case of a web site, none of that happened. They paid for the bandwidth for you to view their stuff. That's the end. No benefit went to the site owner. You might have liked their site, and you might return, but that doesn't help them at all if you don't view the ads next time, either. Their only possibility of recompense is if they are selling a product or service, (even if it's just a "gift shop" featuring site-logoed t-shirts from kewlshirts.com)
It may not be exactly "stealing," but there is real monetary loss to the web site owner attributable directly to every site visitor; and that fact doesn't change regardless of your claims of "there is no agreement or EULA."
I disagree. I think automated block lists (such as filterset G) are a bad idea, because not everyone is intentionally "uninterested" in their ads. Do you know which ads are blocked by that list? I don't.
I look at ad blocking as a personal activity. If I don't like an ad, I block it, and if it's particularly annoying I block its server. But I do not subscribe to ad blocking lists -- my idea of ads to be blocked is my own. The list may block some company I deem worthy, without my knowledge.
And partly for this reason, I do not install adblocking software on other people's computers. If they get fed up or offended by advertising, then they can take on the burden of learning how to deal with the problem. But I'm not going to make that judgment for them. (The other reason I don't install adblockers on other people's equipment is that I don't want to encourage the "blocker/anti-blocker wars", as that would just be more work for me personally.)
So while Adblock is one of the coolest filters ever, I don't personally spread its use to others.
Why the hell would they care about de-anonymizing? No money in that.
Are you kidding? If you could trace back a tor link to gaysex.com/bathroomEncounters.mpg to Senator Larry Craig's machine, don't you think TV shows like Dateline would be offering you tens of thousands of dollars for it?
Because the modestly intelligent person you are hoping for might think, "This says to install tor, let me open a new window and google for it. Hey, this tor thing looks pretty good!" It's the sort of reaction we encourage people to have, to do some research before installing.
Of course, they then follow the original link from the worm and they still get the trojan. So close, and yet so far... sigh.
It seemed like a bunch of statistical mumbo-jumbo to me. They had a cause, and they found some statistics to reinforce what they were saying. Had the result not been what they were looking for, they would not have posted the story. That's not good journalism.
No, it's exemplary journalism, according to the Rupert Murdoch Standard of Journalism. It's just not the same as saying "unbiased".
#2 operates strongly in favor of the service provider, not the consumer.
Microsoft is pushing software services hard for a simple reason: money. How many new features do you need in a word processor? It may not be perfect, but Word 2003 is a pretty feature-complete application, and reasonably stable for my use. Hell, I haven't used any new "features" they've added since about Office 97, although I'm glad it's more stable now. I have no compelling reason to upgrade.
So how is the Office team going to continue to make money for Microsoft? I'm personally not going to spend another $300 just because they invented a new "Dynamic Address Label Tab Margin Mail Merge Feature!" Given their track record over the last 10 years, they have failed to invent enough "new features" to warrant these upgrades.
And if they can lease Office for $10 per month, they can sell it to businesses by using a fallacious cost model. "Look, you spent $300 in 1995 for Office 95, $300 in 1997 for Office 97, $300 in 2000 for Office 2k, $300 in 2003 for Office 2003, and $300 in 2005 for Office 2005. That's a pretty steady cost of about $130 per year for Office. The new leasing model of $10/month is only $120 per year, so you'll be saving $10 per year!" This conveniently ignores the fact that the reasons for upgrading were always marginal to begin with, and it gets Microsoft off the hook of trying to invent and sell useless upgrades.
It happened when they added a movie studio and a recording label to the corporation. The media side of the house demanded copy protection from the technical side of the house, without understanding the technical limitations.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, sorry, it was a GENIAC, not an ENIAC.
They say when you get old, the mind is the second thing to go.
I was a youth BEFORE the invention of the microprocessor. I did my growing up years on a CDC Cyber 72 mainframe, but we were all pretty excited when the 4004 came out. The 4004 was actually the first microprocessor I ever owned: in a Mattel Electronics Football game. Before that, I had an ENIAC -- which was just six really smart switches I could wire to do all sorts of cool tasks. And when I was really little, I had a Dr. Nym, which was a marble-and-gravity cascading flip-flop game.
Now get off my lawn, you damn kids!
Could it really have ended any other way?
How many people were duped into investing in SCO because a reputable magazine like Forbes backed them? How many had their shares wiped out completely because his "analysis" of the legal situation turned out to be a mere parroting of the paid corporate shills?
I'd be more than mad if I lost my money because of this man's inept journalism. I'd be hiring a lawyer.
That reminds me of one of the more interesting conflicts we had in Minnesota when Jesse Ventura was governor. He once referred to the media as "jackals", and discovered that favorable coverage wasn't quite as easy to come by after having said that.
I still don't have an answer, but IANAL so don't listen to me!
This is slashdot, so ...
no.
Either way, when Gordon Moore eventually dies he will still be overflowing the (long)money; variable.
I had this problem a few years ago and called the cable provider. The technician who came out identified a simple barrel connector in the cable demarc box was attenuating the signal by about 12 db instead of the expected 0.5 db. It took him just minutes to trace out the wires and replace the connector (he also replaced the cable ends while he was at it,) and it didn't cost me a cent.
So I agree that you should do a bit more investigation before calling shenanigans.
Both cable and satellite providers effectively called their viewers "idiots" with these spots, yet they continued to run them. I found their race to be the lowest common denominator personally offensive. (Almost like a political campaign.)
Of course, I'm not playing as many first-person shooters these days, so I don't have the same incentive to install monster-sized video cards as I used to. But when I did, keeping the frame rate above the refresh rate was important to avoid "tearing".
Rear Peephole of the Unix Tates of Ammonium,
Wii are using Newtons, butt wood prefer Palm Pilates.
Sincerely,
Matrix Using Counties
Levees will fail. Pumps will fail. FEMA will fail to respond. The solution is much simpler: prohibit building anything (except a boat ramp) below the waterline, or be prepared to change the name from New Orleans to New Venice.
RTFA. They still aren't opening the strip to just anyone, and it's not just about the money. Gooogle is also allowing NASA to fly scientific instruments and researchers on the plane.
Translated, that really means "Of course it's about the money, you f*cktards. NASA's got enough planes. Google's got enough money. The whole researcher thing is just there to justify the deal in the newspapers."
After all, it's still Google, and their motto is still "Don't be caught being evil."
You're welcome. And just so you can feel doubly victorious over me, you should also know that you shamed me into finally sponsoring User Friendly too, which is only fair since I've read his strip daily since it came out.
Feel free to keep expecting your other half of the $10.
The bottom line is I'm selfish. I like adblock, and I like that I put ad sites in it and I never see them again. I like the status quo. I do not care if other people don't block ads, or don't know how to block ads, or are never smart enough to figure it out on their own. I do not want to see the rise of the ad-blocker-detectors, because then I'm going to have to adapt to counter their strategies. It'll add complexity to the browser and to the adblocking software, causing more bugs and more false-positives. It'll cost me time and effort that could be better spent on other things.
In the case of Walm*rt, you might be there only to warm up on a cold winter day, or to cool down in their air conditioning, or to use their bathroom and their soap and towels. They still let you in the door even though you have no intention of purchasing anything from them, because they can't "see" your intentions. Did that cost them anything? Sure, it cost a bit of lost heat while the door was open, maybe two cents for the toilet paper, and maybe even fifty cents for the attention of the security person who thinks you look suspicious. It's part of their cost of doing business.
But they got something out of it, too. You set foot in their store: statistically, you're much closer to buying something from them than someone who never entered their store. They delivered dozens of advertising impressions to you, from the logos on the walls to the products on the shelves to the giant ugly floor stickers. They may even have left a favorable impression on you, such that you would choose walm*rt again if you ever needed to buy plastic Chinese crap.
In the case of a web site, none of that happened. They paid for the bandwidth for you to view their stuff. That's the end. No benefit went to the site owner. You might have liked their site, and you might return, but that doesn't help them at all if you don't view the ads next time, either. Their only possibility of recompense is if they are selling a product or service, (even if it's just a "gift shop" featuring site-logoed t-shirts from kewlshirts.com)
It may not be exactly "stealing," but there is real monetary loss to the web site owner attributable directly to every site visitor; and that fact doesn't change regardless of your claims of "there is no agreement or EULA."
I look at ad blocking as a personal activity. If I don't like an ad, I block it, and if it's particularly annoying I block its server. But I do not subscribe to ad blocking lists -- my idea of ads to be blocked is my own. The list may block some company I deem worthy, without my knowledge.
And partly for this reason, I do not install adblocking software on other people's computers. If they get fed up or offended by advertising, then they can take on the burden of learning how to deal with the problem. But I'm not going to make that judgment for them. (The other reason I don't install adblockers on other people's equipment is that I don't want to encourage the "blocker/anti-blocker wars", as that would just be more work for me personally.)
So while Adblock is one of the coolest filters ever, I don't personally spread its use to others.
Are you kidding? If you could trace back a tor link to gaysex.com/bathroomEncounters.mpg to Senator Larry Craig's machine, don't you think TV shows like Dateline would be offering you tens of thousands of dollars for it?
Of course, they then follow the original link from the worm and they still get the trojan. So close, and yet so far... sigh.
No, it's exemplary journalism, according to the Rupert Murdoch Standard of Journalism. It's just not the same as saying "unbiased".
Microsoft is pushing software services hard for a simple reason: money. How many new features do you need in a word processor? It may not be perfect, but Word 2003 is a pretty feature-complete application, and reasonably stable for my use. Hell, I haven't used any new "features" they've added since about Office 97, although I'm glad it's more stable now. I have no compelling reason to upgrade.
So how is the Office team going to continue to make money for Microsoft? I'm personally not going to spend another $300 just because they invented a new "Dynamic Address Label Tab Margin Mail Merge Feature!" Given their track record over the last 10 years, they have failed to invent enough "new features" to warrant these upgrades.
And if they can lease Office for $10 per month, they can sell it to businesses by using a fallacious cost model. "Look, you spent $300 in 1995 for Office 95, $300 in 1997 for Office 97, $300 in 2000 for Office 2k, $300 in 2003 for Office 2003, and $300 in 2005 for Office 2005. That's a pretty steady cost of about $130 per year for Office. The new leasing model of $10/month is only $120 per year, so you'll be saving $10 per year!" This conveniently ignores the fact that the reasons for upgrading were always marginal to begin with, and it gets Microsoft off the hook of trying to invent and sell useless upgrades.
It happened when they added a movie studio and a recording label to the corporation. The media side of the house demanded copy protection from the technical side of the house, without understanding the technical limitations.
Given the nature of the testing, I thought the word was effluent.