(Another interesting thing to note is that I have heard rumors that once Direct3d came out Microsoft, who also happens to sit on the OpenGL ARB, slowed down the adoption of some features into the main OpenGL spec. This left them ramping Direct3D at a faster rate.)
Not to mention the whole Farenheit boondoggle, which in retrospect looks suspiciously like microsoft playing their usual game of slowing down and screwing up competitors by pretending to cooperate with them (but really putting their effort into a microsoft-only solution).
SGI was breathtakingly clueless to play along, of course (and then there's SGI's disasterous flirtation with NT... how many times has microsoft screwed over SGI??).
I'm sorry, but, "Obama is young, and BLACK!" isn't a very convincing argument as to why he would be any different from the rest.
It's also not an argument that anybody is using.
People seem to respect, and adore, Obama; I'm not in the U.S., and haven't seen him, but apparently he just has that effect on people. My Illinois relatives describe him as being intelligent, respectful, and straight-forward, which is extremely refreshing in an occupation known more for toothy grins, attack ads, and cynical gaming of the system. To many people Obama seems like a chance to escape the horrid cycle of politics-as-usual.
I hear lots of people talk about cycling in the rain, but I actually find it very pleasant (provided one has dry clothes to change into at work...).
It's not cycling in the rain that I mind, it's the sub-zero winter days with high winds -- sure you can bundle up, but inevitably there's a gap and the wind gets through. When things start to deteriorate, the conflict between speeding up (to make the misery end sooner) and slowing down (to reduce the torturing wind) becomes maddening.
They remove an unnecessary and artificial restriction -- and also apparently simplify the code, which is always a good thing.
they add one feature.. in particular, the ability to configure left, right and middle click to do what you like. Which, ya know, is useful to like 3 people.
It sounds pretty useful to me... Obviously the MS-raised proles will never use it, but many more clueful people use Gnome too ("like, ya know").
Almost every one I've looked at recently -- wikipedia is a treasure-trove of great articles on "technical" -- math/physics/cs/etc -- topics. Quite often they're more useful than similar articles on other more traditional sites (e.g. wolfram's mathworld), because they tend to cover the same topic in multiple ways (e.g., formal description + intuitive explanation + related algorithms + diagrams). [Because it is wikipedia, I tend to cross-check against other sources for topics I'm unfamiliar with, but I find the wikipedia article is usually the most useful of the lot.]
If you don't like final fantasy articles, geez, stop looking them up!
And keep in mind where this guy Heckler works -- Spore is being developed at EA, which is pretty much the ultimate master of uninspired rehashes and artless greed-centered game development these days. Whatever you think of the Wii, Nintendo pretty much wipes EA all over the floor when it comes to gaming as an "art form."
Thanks for that pointer btw, it seems to be a rather nicely considered and practical set of rules. [A few of the rules are a bit too severe for general programming though -- e.g., "AV Rule 119 (MISRA Rule 70): no recursion"!]
I always dismiss research and statistics that come from people who have a direct stake in the outcome being a certain way.
Indeed. However given the absurd brokenness of our patent system, it's fairly likely that any non-trivial software is violating a slew of patents held by major patent holders.
Big companies don't really care because they hold enough cards (in the form of their own massive patent portfolio) to bargain their way out almost all the time, and enough cash to buy their way out the rest of the time.
Little players, however, get screwed. The best they can hope for is that they're so unimportant that nobody notices... but should they become successful and start annoying somebody powerful... well... Welcome to software-patent land!
I've only spent a bit of time playing the PS3, but the controller seems to be more or less the same horrid controller that the PS2 had... "simply painful" might be a bit more accurate.
I'm actually pretty surprised that the Yahoo mail beta doesn't get more press. It is, by FAR, the best web-based e-mail I've ever seen.
I've tried the new yahoo beta, and frankly it's just as sucky as yahoo's old interface, just in different ways -- it's a bit prettier, and the lack of full-page reloads is nice, but it's buggy, slow, cranky (interface full of "WTF" moments), and seems hacked up by developers with a bullet-list of features instead of a coherent vision of how email should work.
If this is the case, then at some point the client must have negotiated keys with each node in the selected path. Can't these negotiations be watched to see what path the packet takes?
Remember public-key encryption? The client doesn't need a private key for each node along the path, he just needs some key, so it may as well be a public one.
In fact, for many years Microsoft was seen in the same light as Google is today: as a savior from the iron-fisted "data processing overlords". It wasn't until the 1992-1994 timeframe that information professionals started thinking that Microsoft might have other designs.
Microsoft was actually rather widely despised in the 1980s for the crappiness of their software. In the pre-MSDOS days, most people didn't really think about them at all (even though microsoft's basic was in many popular machines, people tended to associate the software with the hardware manufacturer).
Of course they were not hated as much as they are today, and many people looked to them as the "face of a new generation" of companies, but it's quite a stretch to say they were adored in the same way google seems to be today.
MS-DOS used ^Z for EOF, like VMS. That's also where they got the forward slash for command line arguments.
The forward-slash and ^Z in MSDOS were probably copied from CP/M which was the big microcomputer OS at the time (at least for "business" use). CP/M in turn probably got them from earlier DEC operating systems (but CP/M predates VMS).
the login process is hidden anyways since a cookie stored in my browser keeps me logged in. theres no reason to dislike this change. get over it.
Seriously. It's just not an issue.
What's amusing is that "zooomr" (the flickr competitor run by the guy who's noted in the article for stirring up this latest round of moaning) has a login process which actually sucks much more than yahoo's -- it seems to never remember your login between sessions, and has a funny "web 2.0" type login dialogue that doesn't work with browser completion etc.
[Zooomr has its cool points, but it's a far less polished product in general than flickr, and lacks some of flickr's nicest features (like the great groups system).]
That's what I've always wondered -- has anyone really lost all their flickr photos because of a yahoo login?
The anti-yahoo complaints I've seen on the flickr groups tend to have a real "how dare they remove our old-sk00l l33t accounts!" tenor to them; mostly they just seem to be whining without much concrete basis. Indeed I've never seen anyone claim to have lost anything, but a lot of rather bizarre claims about what moving to a yahoo account implies (e.g., "it will force you to read all your flickr mail using yahoo mail!!!" which is certainly not true).
the bitter flavour can be a sign that the coffee was not correctly made.
I think the term "bitter" is rather vague in common usage anyway -- tastes are complex things, and people often don't have the words (or the patience) to describe them more accurately. There's "unpleasant" bitter, and there's "rich-delicious-chocolate" bitter. I love many "bitter" tastes, but bitterness is just one part of much more complicated sensations (maybe not the major part either, simply one for which I have a convenient word at hand).
Why? The original post said: "Market driven mass transit has been successful nowhere", it didn't limit that to car-oriented U.S. cities. I think Tokyo's a great example of how private companies can succeed handily at mass-transit given the right environment and good management.
a community can only support one primary mode of transportation. If most people drive to work then the road infrastructure will be pretty decent and public transportation horrible. If few people own cars it will be vice versa
I think it's a stretch to call Tokyo's road infrastructure "horrible". They have a lot of roads, and they're very high quality, but the population density is simply too high for U.S.-style car-obsession to ever be practical. If anything the roads in Tokyo are for the rich (there still seems to be a vague association of car ownership with success in urban Japan), but many normal people do own cars; they simply don't use them for commuting (that Just Wouldn't Work).
Some European cities get around this limitation by artificially injecting wads of taxpayer cash into the public transport infrastructure, so they can have functioning roads and public transport at the same time. But in the US very few communities would put up with this kind of "waste".
As I mentioned, Tokyo actually does have a pretty good road network -- and unlike much of the railroad infrastructure, the roads seem to be completely government funded. While there are no doubt a few highway-building boondoggles here and there, I assume most people wouldn't think of this as being "duplication", because the two networks (rail and road) serve different purposes, and both are vital components in the city's operation.
A place like NYC would seem to have a similar environment (too dense for reliance on the automobile, an established mass-transit "culture"), but NYC's mass-transit is embarrassingly primitive compared to Tokyo's, and I'd say part of this is probably the government-dominated decision-making in NYC. If you compare private and government railyway lines in Tokyo, the private lines are palpably more aggressive about expansion. Look at the Tokyu Corp financial report I linked to earlier in this thread: even with the huge costs of continual major construction (e.g., subway tunneling, new stations, major track and line expansion), they still manage a handy profit!
Huh? The city-run Toei lines (what you're referring to) are just one part of the Tokyo's mass-transit system, and certainly not what I was referring to. I was talking about the many private railway lines. After all, the original poster's assertion was that the government should be running mass-transit because the "market" had failed at it -- so examples of successful private operations seem apropos.
As an example of a sucessful private line in Tokyo, the Tokyu corporation (a major railway operator in/around Tokyo) had a profit from it's transportation (meaning mass-transit) operations of about $230 million, on revenues of $1.5 billion, in 2006:
Market driven mass transit has been successful nowhere. Transport infrastucture is (or should be) a government problem.
It seems successful in Tokyo. Many of the more important commuter train lines here are 100% private[*]. They're apparently pretty profitable too, as they're constantly expanding their infrastructure in major ways.
[*] others, like JR, are sort of "semi-private"; they seem to be fairly independent, but the government still exerts some control over them.
There are some quite capable eBook readers on the market, lead by the Sony Reader and the iRex iLiad. Both feature an e-ink screen which uses a matrix of charged dark and light particles at a resolution of around 160 dpi to represent a paper page.
I tried the original version of the Sony reader, and found it extremely overhyped -- it had nice resolution, sure, but frankly it wasn't that nice, and the contrast was quite low (and the display color somewhat unpleasant); overall it was almost as annoying to read as a normal LCD in the bright florescent lighting of the store. That, combined with the glacial update speed, awful UI, clunky form factor, and typical sony DRM crap, pretty much killed any interested I had in it. Maybe the the iRex thing is better, but given the horrid Sony offering, I'm kind of skeptical that the technology is anywhere near ready...
Ebooks obviously have many advantages, but so do physical books. Not only is the latter usually much easier to read no ebook has even come close to the quality (or size for a portable ebook) of the "display" on a good book -- but also I find the ability to use one's physical intuition to relate different pages to be invaluable when doing more than just reading in linear order. [Searching, bookmarks, and other ebook mechanisms are also good, but they're different, and I find them useful at different times.]
What I often really want is simply to have both! I wish physical books (especially reference/textbooks) would come with an electronic copy of the text in some form that is widely usable (i.e., no stupid proprietary windows-only crap). Then I could use the physical book when convenient but also keep a copy to refer to when I'm not at home or need text searching more than I need good readability.
Many reference books already come with a CD, so this might even be fairly easy for them, if only they'd think of it...
Slashdot Mirror
(Another interesting thing to note is that I have heard rumors that once Direct3d came out Microsoft, who also happens to sit on the OpenGL ARB, slowed down the adoption of some features into the main OpenGL spec. This left them ramping Direct3D at a faster rate.)
Not to mention the whole Farenheit boondoggle, which in retrospect looks suspiciously like microsoft playing their usual game of slowing down and screwing up competitors by pretending to cooperate with them (but really putting their effort into a microsoft-only solution).
SGI was breathtakingly clueless to play along, of course (and then there's SGI's disasterous flirtation with NT... how many times has microsoft screwed over SGI??).
I'm sorry, but, "Obama is young, and BLACK!" isn't a very convincing argument as to why he would be any different from the rest.
It's also not an argument that anybody is using.
People seem to respect, and adore, Obama; I'm not in the U.S., and haven't seen him, but apparently he just has that effect on people. My Illinois relatives describe him as being intelligent, respectful, and straight-forward, which is extremely refreshing in an occupation known more for toothy grins, attack ads, and cynical gaming of the system. To many people Obama seems like a chance to escape the horrid cycle of politics-as-usual.
That's why he's a potential candidate...
I hear lots of people talk about cycling in the rain, but I actually find it very pleasant (provided one has dry clothes to change into at work...).
It's not cycling in the rain that I mind, it's the sub-zero winter days with high winds -- sure you can bundle up, but inevitably there's a gap and the wind gets through. When things start to deteriorate, the conflict between speeding up (to make the misery end sooner) and slowing down (to reduce the torturing wind) becomes maddening.
And then you hit the icy section...
I tried using public transportation for a short while when I moved to San Jose, and if you're not a spot-on nine-to-five commuter, it's hopeless.
It's depressing that the business benefits pull so many companies into Silicon Valley, because in just about every other respect, it basically sucks.
Linus' patches don't "fix" anything.
They remove an unnecessary and artificial restriction -- and also apparently simplify the code, which is always a good thing.
they add one feature.. in particular, the ability to configure left, right and middle click to do what you like. Which, ya know, is useful to like 3 people.
It sounds pretty useful to me... Obviously the MS-raised proles will never use it, but many more clueful people use Gnome too ("like, ya know").
How many of them are even worth reading?
Almost every one I've looked at recently -- wikipedia is a treasure-trove of great articles on "technical" -- math/physics/cs/etc -- topics. Quite often they're more useful than similar articles on other more traditional sites (e.g. wolfram's mathworld), because they tend to cover the same topic in multiple ways (e.g., formal description + intuitive explanation + related algorithms + diagrams). [Because it is wikipedia, I tend to cross-check against other sources for topics I'm unfamiliar with, but I find the wikipedia article is usually the most useful of the lot.]
If you don't like final fantasy articles, geez, stop looking them up!
Well it's nice to see that MS is gender neutral in their shill hiring. I guess they've always been pretty socially progressive.
EXR is a very specialized format used mostly in "film" (ie movie production.)
Huh? OpenEXR isn't particularly "specialized" (in fact it's pretty flexible) and it's what you want to be using if you're doing HDR photos.
[If it's currently used mostly in film production, that's more likely due to history and the fact that they're incredibly picky about image quality.]
And keep in mind where this guy Heckler works -- Spore is being developed at EA, which is pretty much the ultimate master of uninspired rehashes and artless greed-centered game development these days. Whatever you think of the Wii, Nintendo pretty much wipes EA all over the floor when it comes to gaming as an "art form."
Thanks for that pointer btw, it seems to be a rather nicely considered and practical set of rules. [A few of the rules are a bit too severe for general programming though -- e.g., "AV Rule 119 (MISRA Rule 70): no recursion"!]
I always dismiss research and statistics that come from people who have a direct stake in the outcome being a certain way.
... but should they become successful and start annoying somebody powerful... well... Welcome to software-patent land!
Indeed. However given the absurd brokenness of our patent system, it's fairly likely that any non-trivial software is violating a slew of patents held by major patent holders.
Big companies don't really care because they hold enough cards (in the form of their own massive patent portfolio) to bargain their way out almost all the time, and enough cash to buy their way out the rest of the time.
Little players, however, get screwed. The best they can hope for is that they're so unimportant that nobody notices
The controller is simply amazing
I've only spent a bit of time playing the PS3, but the controller seems to be more or less the same horrid controller that the PS2 had... "simply painful" might be a bit more accurate.
"Sony batteries -- We light up your life!"
I'm actually pretty surprised that the Yahoo mail beta doesn't get more press. It is, by FAR, the best web-based e-mail I've ever seen.
I've tried the new yahoo beta, and frankly it's just as sucky as yahoo's old interface, just in different ways -- it's a bit prettier, and the lack of full-page reloads is nice, but it's buggy, slow, cranky (interface full of "WTF" moments), and seems hacked up by developers with a bullet-list of features instead of a coherent vision of how email should work.
Gmail is far, far, better.
If this is the case, then at some point the client must have negotiated keys with each node in the selected path. Can't these negotiations be watched to see what path the packet takes?
Remember public-key encryption? The client doesn't need a private key for each node along the path, he just needs some key, so it may as well be a public one.
In fact, for many years Microsoft was seen in the same light as Google is today: as a savior from the iron-fisted "data processing overlords". It wasn't until the 1992-1994 timeframe that information professionals started thinking that Microsoft might have other designs.
Microsoft was actually rather widely despised in the 1980s for the crappiness of their software. In the pre-MSDOS days, most people didn't really think about them at all (even though microsoft's basic was in many popular machines, people tended to associate the software with the hardware manufacturer).
Of course they were not hated as much as they are today, and many people looked to them as the "face of a new generation" of companies, but it's quite a stretch to say they were adored in the same way google seems to be today.
MS-DOS used ^Z for EOF, like VMS. That's also where they got the forward slash for command line arguments.
The forward-slash and ^Z in MSDOS were probably copied from CP/M which was the big microcomputer OS at the time (at least for "business" use). CP/M in turn probably got them from earlier DEC operating systems (but CP/M predates VMS).
the login process is hidden anyways since a cookie stored in my browser keeps me logged in. theres no reason to dislike this change. get over it.
Seriously. It's just not an issue.
What's amusing is that "zooomr" (the flickr competitor run by the guy who's noted in the article for stirring up this latest round of moaning) has a login process which actually sucks much more than yahoo's -- it seems to never remember your login between sessions, and has a funny "web 2.0" type login dialogue that doesn't work with browser completion etc.
[Zooomr has its cool points, but it's a far less polished product in general than flickr, and lacks some of flickr's nicest features (like the great groups system).]
That's what I've always wondered -- has anyone really lost all their flickr photos because of a yahoo login?
The anti-yahoo complaints I've seen on the flickr groups tend to have a real "how dare they remove our old-sk00l l33t accounts!" tenor to them; mostly they just seem to be whining without much concrete basis. Indeed I've never seen anyone claim to have lost anything, but a lot of rather bizarre claims about what moving to a yahoo account implies (e.g., "it will force you to read all your flickr mail using yahoo mail!!!" which is certainly not true).
the bitter flavour can be a sign that the coffee was not correctly made.
I think the term "bitter" is rather vague in common usage anyway -- tastes are complex things, and people often don't have the words (or the patience) to describe them more accurately. There's "unpleasant" bitter, and there's "rich-delicious-chocolate" bitter. I love many "bitter" tastes, but bitterness is just one part of much more complicated sensations (maybe not the major part either, simply one for which I have a convenient word at hand).
Tokyo is an unfair example
Why? The original post said: "Market driven mass transit has been successful nowhere", it didn't limit that to car-oriented U.S. cities. I think Tokyo's a great example of how private companies can succeed handily at mass-transit given the right environment and good management.
a community can only support one primary mode of transportation. If most people drive to work then the road infrastructure will be pretty decent and public transportation horrible. If few people own cars it will be vice versa
I think it's a stretch to call Tokyo's road infrastructure "horrible". They have a lot of roads, and they're very high quality, but the population density is simply too high for U.S.-style car-obsession to ever be practical. If anything the roads in Tokyo are for the rich (there still seems to be a vague association of car ownership with success in urban Japan), but many normal people do own cars; they simply don't use them for commuting (that Just Wouldn't Work).
Some European cities get around this limitation by artificially injecting wads of taxpayer cash into the public transport infrastructure, so they can have functioning roads and public transport at the same time. But in the US very few communities would put up with this kind of "waste".
As I mentioned, Tokyo actually does have a pretty good road network -- and unlike much of the railroad infrastructure, the roads seem to be completely government funded. While there are no doubt a few highway-building boondoggles here and there, I assume most people wouldn't think of this as being "duplication", because the two networks (rail and road) serve different purposes, and both are vital components in the city's operation.
A place like NYC would seem to have a similar environment (too dense for reliance on the automobile, an established mass-transit "culture"), but NYC's mass-transit is embarrassingly primitive compared to Tokyo's, and I'd say part of this is probably the government-dominated decision-making in NYC. If you compare private and government railyway lines in Tokyo, the private lines are palpably more aggressive about expansion. Look at the Tokyu Corp financial report I linked to earlier in this thread: even with the huge costs of continual major construction (e.g., subway tunneling, new stations, major track and line expansion), they still manage a handy profit!
I'd look for a better example if I were you.
d f
Huh? The city-run Toei lines (what you're referring to) are just one part of the Tokyo's mass-transit system, and certainly not what I was referring to. I was talking about the many private railway lines. After all, the original poster's assertion was that the government should be running mass-transit because the "market" had failed at it -- so examples of successful private operations seem apropos.
As an example of a sucessful private line in Tokyo, the Tokyu corporation (a major railway operator in/around Tokyo) had a profit from it's transportation (meaning mass-transit) operations of about $230 million, on revenues of $1.5 billion, in 2006:
http://www.ir.tokyu.co.jp/files/pdf/er_200609_0.p
Market driven mass transit has been successful nowhere. Transport infrastucture is (or should be) a government problem.
It seems successful in Tokyo. Many of the more important commuter train lines here are 100% private[*]. They're apparently pretty profitable too, as they're constantly expanding their infrastructure in major ways.
[*] others, like JR, are sort of "semi-private"; they seem to be fairly independent, but the government still exerts some control over them.
There are some quite capable eBook readers on the market, lead by the Sony Reader and the iRex iLiad. Both feature an e-ink screen which uses a matrix of charged dark and light particles at a resolution of around 160 dpi to represent a paper page.
I tried the original version of the Sony reader, and found it extremely overhyped -- it had nice resolution, sure, but frankly it wasn't that nice, and the contrast was quite low (and the display color somewhat unpleasant); overall it was almost as annoying to read as a normal LCD in the bright florescent lighting of the store. That, combined with the glacial update speed, awful UI, clunky form factor, and typical sony DRM crap, pretty much killed any interested I had in it. Maybe the the iRex thing is better, but given the horrid Sony offering, I'm kind of skeptical that the technology is anywhere near ready...
Ebooks obviously have many advantages, but so do physical books. Not only is the latter usually much easier to read no ebook has even come close to the quality (or size for a portable ebook) of the "display" on a good book -- but also I find the ability to use one's physical intuition to relate different pages to be invaluable when doing more than just reading in linear order. [Searching, bookmarks, and other ebook mechanisms are also good, but they're different, and I find them useful at different times.]
What I often really want is simply to have both! I wish physical books (especially reference/textbooks) would come with an electronic copy of the text in some form that is widely usable (i.e., no stupid proprietary windows-only crap). Then I could use the physical book when convenient but also keep a copy to refer to when I'm not at home or need text searching more than I need good readability.
Many reference books already come with a CD, so this might even be fairly easy for them, if only they'd think of it...