Walmart is inefficient? They run the biggest logistics operation in human history! With their paper-thin margins, they'd go out of business in a week if they didn't have their huge supply chain in total lock step. Your local underpaid clerk and manager may be clueless, but that's a superficial problem, representing Walmart's calculation that people will put up with had service if it saves them money.
This desktop sold out quickly and has been cited as proof that consumers are tired of the Windows tax and ready for Linux. Not so according to PC Magazine, which gave the gPC a 1.5 star rating."
Huh? All the review says is that the machine sucks. How does that imply that people aren't rebelling against the "Windows tax"? Actually, that says just the opposite: that people are so sick of Windows, they're willing to try a POS alternative.
Are all the negative points it brought up real or fair? Of course not. For one thing, I don't like how the author criticizes gPC for not preinstalling the flash player. I believe that was due to licensing limitations.
The end user doesn't care about licensing issues. They just care about how easy the system is to use. Getting Flash to work properly in Firefox is a pain, and not providing it pre-installed is a major usability failure. The fact that it's not a technical failure doesn't change that. It's a reviewer's responsibility to take note of this kind of problem, never mind the excuses.
..and the rest of us can choose to ignore their absurdity. You can try. Lawyers are hard to ignore. But since (I'm guessing) you don't own a casino, you probably don't care.
I want to make a point.. But.. how the fuck can I make an mp3 of the Sphinx? I suggest a YouTube video of "Walk Like an Egyptian".
You would think that there would be a decent-sized market out there.
You would be wrong. Do you think Heathkit would have shut down their core business if they had any customers? Once integrated circuits made it possible to buy cheap, sophisticated gadgets, people lost interest in do-it-yourself kits that were less powerful and more expensive.
The division of the company that once sold kits to ham operators and electronics geeks no longer exists
To be precise, the marketplace that the old Heathkit sold to no longer exists. Its may be fun and educational to build a gadget from a kit, but it's hard to sell such a kit when the factory version is a fraction of the cost, smaller, and easier to use.
I drive like you, but I don't need to touch the brakes that often. If people are annoyed with us, it's probably because they're one of those compulsive overoptimizers who think that any visible pavement in front of a car means that the driver isn't going fast enough.
If it's strong enough to temporarily blind a helicopter pilot, it's pretty fucking strong. It's difficult to see a legitimate use for it. It certainly shouldn't be sold as a toy.
And dude, any laser can damage your eyes, even the wimpy little red ones. If you want to prove you're not a pussy, go ahead and screw up your own eyesight. But shine one in my direction and you'll learn the meaning of damage.
Or yet another way: if the government isn't accountable at all, extremism is justifiable. That's how the U.S. got founded in the first place.
But there's a big caveat: everything that pisses you off isn't proof that the government isn't accountable. I've heard people cite insecticide bans, stoplight cameras, and high taxes (or rather, more taxes than the person likes; taxes in the U.S. are actually pretty low) as proof that the government is off the rails, in the hands of an evil cabal, and that armed insurrection is the only solution. None of these comes close. And noisy police helicopters, while obnoxious, don't either.
Here's one reason this is a Slashdot issue: Slashdot's sister site ThinkGeek sells an overpowered "skypointing" laser, possibly the very model used in this incident. Kind of a dumb thing to be selling.
So because you feel politically helpless, you're justified in shining a laser beam at a police helicopter, possibly making it crash? If you want to take civil disobedience to that level, you should remove the uncertainty and get a rocket launcher. And while you're at it, I suggest you join Al Qaida or Christian Identity or some such organization. Because if you're going to be a terrorist, you might as well belong to the union.
I was going to post that, but you beat me to it. So I'll karma whore in the opposite direction.
The criteria for a project being vaporware is that it's highly hyped and way past any reasonable and/or announced release date. The fact that the project ignores the laws of physics is neither here nor there.
Did nobody vote for Last Dangerous Visions? Harlan must be crushed!
The problem here is not that the ISP took some software off its own servers. The problem here is that the ISP is charging extortionate rates to access any servers not its own. Which means 99% of the internet. That's a very bad thing and you should do something about it. But it has nothing to do with net neutrality. It has to do with the fact that you're paying an extortionate per-packet charge, something that's peculiar to Oz.
Net neutrality means that the ISP provides equal priority to network traffic whatever the source. The alternative is to allow ISPs to strike deals with content providers to give their traffic priority. That means that applications that require a lot of bandwidth such as VoIP or streaming video could become the monopoly of a few companies. So if all the California ISPs decided to give priority to AT&T VoIP (quite possible, since AT&T is itself a big ISP in the state, and provides network infrastructure to most other ISPs), you can forget about using Vonage. I don't mean that Vonage would costs extra, I mean that you wouldn't be able to get it for any price.
Screwing over your customers by making them pay too much for most services, and screwing over your customers by restricting what services they can access at all are both evil. But they are two completely different evils. And the one evil is peculiar to where you live, whereas the other is a global issue.
Agreed that most HTML code generators are crap. But good ones do exist. And if you insist on hacking out every little bit of HTML yourself, you can forget about doing a web site of any size. Even if you could type fast enough, there wouldn't be room in your brain for all the structural information that you need to tie the bits of the web site together.
Nowadays, most of the web content I create starts out as FrameMaker files. (Yes, I know, FrameMaker is an evil program, but it has an obscene degree of lockin in the technical documentation world.) These get transformed to HTML files. I can't say I'm in love with the generated HTML, but it is compliant with HTML and CSS specs. And over the next year we're moving to structured FrameMaker, which maps directly to XML, which is easily transformed to XHTML via XSLT scripts. Highly tweakable XSLT scripts. This should give us web output far superior to anything we could get by hand-coding the HTML. Even assuming we had time to do that, which we don't.
So in other words, it will be standards compliant but at the same time render all the old crap that wasn't even close to standards compliant??? So what's the point?!!
Because different kinds of pages are rendered with different rendering engines. The rendering engine that handles all the ugly old hand-written crap is known as "quirks mode" and is full of all their weird kludges that make those pages readable. If the page has the right document type declaration, it uses a standards compliance mode. The problem with IE has always been that it didn't implement most of the HTML and CSS specs, so there was little to be gained by forcing it into standards compliance mode. In other words, standards compliance mode wasn't really standards compliant. It didn't help that clueless MS spokespeople would talk about somebody supporting "more CSS features", indicating a nasty lack of understanding of standards issues. Since the specs weren't supported on the #1 browser, there were effectively meaningless.
Apparently that's now changed, and that's a very good thing. Personally, I credit the fact that Gates has given up the role of "software architect" in order to spend more time on his philanthropy. When he left, he seemed to take a lot of organizational arrogance with him.
Somebody is going to point out that ACID2 is not that great an example of real world CSS usage. That's perfectly true (how often do you use CSS to make silly pictures?) but the mere fact that MS has made passing the test a priority indicates a shift in attitude that we should all applaud.
Slashdot Mirror
Walmart is inefficient? They run the biggest logistics operation in human history! With their paper-thin margins, they'd go out of business in a week if they didn't have their huge supply chain in total lock step. Your local underpaid clerk and manager may be clueless, but that's a superficial problem, representing Walmart's calculation that people will put up with had service if it saves them money.
IANAL, but I suspect that Adobe's lawyers don't consider "distribute" and "preinstall" to be synonyms.
Grandma should adjust the default font size, not the resolution.
I'd guess it'd he faster — but not as fast as increasing your RAM so you didn't swap as much.
..and the rest of us can choose to ignore their absurdity. You can try. Lawyers are hard to ignore. But since (I'm guessing) you don't own a casino, you probably don't care. I want to make a point.. But.. how the fuck can I make an mp3 of the Sphinx? I suggest a YouTube video of "Walk Like an Egyptian".Who said I was going to beat you up? There are more sophisticated ways of harming an idiot who doesn't know better than to play with dangerous toys.
I drive like you, but I don't need to touch the brakes that often. If people are annoyed with us, it's probably because they're one of those compulsive overoptimizers who think that any visible pavement in front of a car means that the driver isn't going fast enough.
Yeah, it's easy to blind a helicopter pilot and it's easy to be an asshole. Maybe you should try for grownup goals.
God save us from amateur lawyers. I suggest you consult a real lawyer before starting that backyard pot garden.
If it's strong enough to temporarily blind a helicopter pilot, it's pretty fucking strong. It's difficult to see a legitimate use for it. It certainly shouldn't be sold as a toy.
And dude, any laser can damage your eyes, even the wimpy little red ones. If you want to prove you're not a pussy, go ahead and screw up your own eyesight. But shine one in my direction and you'll learn the meaning of damage.
Or yet another way: if the government isn't accountable at all, extremism is justifiable. That's how the U.S. got founded in the first place.
But there's a big caveat: everything that pisses you off isn't proof that the government isn't accountable. I've heard people cite insecticide bans, stoplight cameras, and high taxes (or rather, more taxes than the person likes; taxes in the U.S. are actually pretty low) as proof that the government is off the rails, in the hands of an evil cabal, and that armed insurrection is the only solution. None of these comes close. And noisy police helicopters, while obnoxious, don't either.
Here's one reason this is a Slashdot issue: Slashdot's sister site ThinkGeek sells an overpowered "skypointing" laser, possibly the very model used in this incident. Kind of a dumb thing to be selling.
So because you feel politically helpless, you're justified in shining a laser beam at a police helicopter, possibly making it crash? If you want to take civil disobedience to that level, you should remove the uncertainty and get a rocket launcher. And while you're at it, I suggest you join Al Qaida or Christian Identity or some such organization. Because if you're going to be a terrorist, you might as well belong to the union.
I was going to post that, but you beat me to it. So I'll karma whore in the opposite direction.
The criteria for a project being vaporware is that it's highly hyped and way past any reasonable and/or announced release date. The fact that the project ignores the laws of physics is neither here nor there.
Did nobody vote for Last Dangerous Visions? Harlan must be crushed!
DON'T SHOUT. IT'S RUDE!
The problem here is not that the ISP took some software off its own servers. The problem here is that the ISP is charging extortionate rates to access any servers not its own. Which means 99% of the internet. That's a very bad thing and you should do something about it. But it has nothing to do with net neutrality. It has to do with the fact that you're paying an extortionate per-packet charge, something that's peculiar to Oz.
Net neutrality means that the ISP provides equal priority to network traffic whatever the source. The alternative is to allow ISPs to strike deals with content providers to give their traffic priority. That means that applications that require a lot of bandwidth such as VoIP or streaming video could become the monopoly of a few companies. So if all the California ISPs decided to give priority to AT&T VoIP (quite possible, since AT&T is itself a big ISP in the state, and provides network infrastructure to most other ISPs), you can forget about using Vonage. I don't mean that Vonage would costs extra, I mean that you wouldn't be able to get it for any price.
Screwing over your customers by making them pay too much for most services, and screwing over your customers by restricting what services they can access at all are both evil. But they are two completely different evils. And the one evil is peculiar to where you live, whereas the other is a global issue.
Agreed that most HTML code generators are crap. But good ones do exist. And if you insist on hacking out every little bit of HTML yourself, you can forget about doing a web site of any size. Even if you could type fast enough, there wouldn't be room in your brain for all the structural information that you need to tie the bits of the web site together.
Nowadays, most of the web content I create starts out as FrameMaker files. (Yes, I know, FrameMaker is an evil program, but it has an obscene degree of lockin in the technical documentation world.) These get transformed to HTML files. I can't say I'm in love with the generated HTML, but it is compliant with HTML and CSS specs. And over the next year we're moving to structured FrameMaker, which maps directly to XML, which is easily transformed to XHTML via XSLT scripts. Highly tweakable XSLT scripts. This should give us web output far superior to anything we could get by hand-coding the HTML. Even assuming we had time to do that, which we don't.
Apparently that's now changed, and that's a very good thing. Personally, I credit the fact that Gates has given up the role of "software architect" in order to spend more time on his philanthropy. When he left, he seemed to take a lot of organizational arrogance with him.
Somebody is going to point out that ACID2 is not that great an example of real world CSS usage. That's perfectly true (how often do you use CSS to make silly pictures?) but the mere fact that MS has made passing the test a priority indicates a shift in attitude that we should all applaud.