Also, his threat to leave Vista for Linux rings hollow to me...
Not so much a threat as sarcasm. He and his readers both know that Vista refugees are not going to migrate to Linux, not as long as XP remains available. Linux zealots may not believe this, but it's true. The application lock-in that's kept Microsoft on top all these years hasn't gone away. This will be obvious to PC Magazine readers, less obvious to those who refuse to recognize that lock-in exists.
You think a little extra tweaking will save Vista? Microsoft held it back for an extra year to tweak out the major bugs, and they still had a train wreck.
It seems obvious to me that Vista has reached "critical mass" in bug fixing. This concept is based on the average number of bugs accidentally generated by a bug fix. This value is always greater than zero, but a well-designed product keeps it very low. At all costs, you have to keep it well away from one. Once you're past this point, there's just no point point in fixing any more bugs — yours just making things worse.
Microsoft products have always been too complex and baroque. That's a good formula for the bug critical mass scenario. I'm only surprised it didn't happen before.
Green is relative. Tearing up the landscape with tracked vehicles and tossing supersonic projectiles around is not very green. But if the vehicles use less fuel and the projectiles are made of non-toxic substances (lead bullets are a big environmental hazard) warfare is a little greener than it was before.
However, I would guess the military's main concern is not the environment, it's logistics. The supply infrastructure needed to keep all those vehicles gassed up is mind-boggling. The less fuel a vehicle uses, the easier it is to keep it going.
Ok, you think that anybody who believes in creationism is a total idiot. But by that standard, a good chunk of the population consists of total idiots. In fact, it's a huge voting block — that's exactly why so many politicians are so vocal on the subject. Start lecturing a politician on the scientific flaws in their stated beliefs and all you accomplish is to help the pol to validate their credentials as a "Christian" candidate, and your own as a member of the "liberal elite".
The lesson to be learned here is that you should never believe anything you read on the Internet that you don't know to already be true or that you get from a source that has proven its trustworthiness repeatedly.
OK then, you come up with a revenue model that will cover the huge costs of running a major web site. Words like "theft" may not be technically accurate, but the fact remains that people who block ads are getting a free ride. If everybody did it, a lot of sites would have to shut down. Including Slashdot.
I don't see anything in the article about porting Solaris to the z-series. Which is hardly surprising: porting Solaris to a new architecture would be a huge amount of work, and it's difficult to see how anybody could sell enough extra systems or support contracts to make it pay.
On the other hand, Sun is already putting a lot of work into the x64 version of Solaris, because AMD-based systems is pretty much their best profit center. And the Sun/Intel deal only strengthens that. So it's not that much extra work to support Solaris running on IBM System x.
It's easy to excuse anything if you're a fan — especially a Star Trek. But I'm sorry, the "audio feedback" explanation is lame. If I were designing such a system, I wouldn't use ear-splitting noises.
However you rationalize it, they use sound because people expect it. The expectation is so strong for sounds in violent situations, they often dub it in even when the POV is for someone too far away to hear it!
For the same reason, sound in movies travels at the speed of light. So folks aren't confused by the sight of a bomb going off in the distance without making any noise right away.
This whole "expectation" thing is the reason most movie/TV science fiction is just crap.
So basically you're saying that plain soap is already an extremely effective antibacterial agent. Which is why consumer-market antibacterial soap is no more effective than plain soap: poisoning a bacterium that's already had its membranes ripped apart is kind of pointless.
So yeah, antibacterial soap is a scam. And a dangerous one, too, since it may be helping to breed antibiotic-resistant bugs. I see a good case for banning the stuff. But I have a question: does it make any sense to be using triclosan at all? Medical folks use it (at higher concentrations than in soap) to kill skin bacteria which might otherwise infect their patients. Wouldn't they get just as good a result with plain soap?
Quite right. And why? Because people are paranoid about infections (as they should be) and snap up any easy solution (which they should not).
A few weeks ago I had a really bad cold that took me a while to shake off. A friend who is otherwise an intelligent person wanted to know why I wasn't taking antibiotics. Two reasons: antibiotics have no effect on viral infections, and taking them unnecessarily helps breed resistant germs.
(Actually, there's a third reason: they give me the runs.)
People are dying, and also losing limbs, because of antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains. And yet folks continue to use antibiotics and antibacterials as placebos. Not cool.
You mean it's their fault for not wanting to help you bypass their main product? The product that generates almost all their revenue?
Now, I do agree that the cable company should be required to sell you internet-only service. But not wanting to subvert their own main business is hardly a criminal act.
You sum it up nicely. (Though I'm not sure that Aristotle would consider the coyote's hanging in midair to be a valid interpretation of his physics.) In fact the problem is exactly the reverse: movies have bad physics — and bad science in general — because it's what people expect.
Two examples: on Star Trek TOS, they tried very hard to be scientifically correct (later versions were less careful) but wimped out when they depicted the Enterprise moving through space. They tried doing it without sound (no sound in a vacuum), but everybody complained that it "felt wrong". So we got the famous "whoosh" during the opening credits and a strange rumble when the ship orbited a planet..
In Babylon 5, they tried even harder. ("Conceptual Consultant" Harlan Ellison has many unendearing qualities, but he's always a stickler for scientific details.) So when spaceships docked, they had to pitch 180% so they could use their reaction engines to slow down. Perfectly good physics — but many casual viewers wondered why all the ships were flying backwards!
Ronald Reagan didn't understand why ballistic missiles couldn't return to base. Wouldn't have been so bad if he'd still been an actor, but he was Commander in Chief at the time.
No, you pay $60+ for all the "bundled" content the content providers force them to buy in order to get the few channels people actually watch.
Don't get me wrong: I think cable TV is a horrible ripoff. (Which is just one of several reasons I don't subscribe.) But the cable companies aren't the bad guys here. That's the media monopolies who've become obsessed with sequestering content and squeezing every penny they can out of it. And when you subscribe to cable, you're feeding that pathology, no matter how much you bitch and moan about it.
Re:Can we give "1984" a rest?
on
Manhattan 1984
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· Score: 1
Jeez, you're dense. I said that some Internet conventions date back to a period when people didn't worry about security; as an example I mentioned that people didn't even secure their smtp servers. You said "smart people always secured their servers." Which isn't true.
If you can't follow that argument, I'm certainly not going to try to parse it for you.
You mean, besides the fact that DHS still has the same inept upper management they had during Katrina? And the fact that voters won't have any say in the matter until November 2008?
Can we give "1984" a rest?
on
Manhattan 1984
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
People should not be allowed to reference 1984 (or say "Orwellian") unless they've actually read the thing. It describes a totalitarian state that makes Stalin look like a libertarian. It's not just about a government that spies on its people (though only the upper classes). It's about people willfully changing their own memories of the past and a ruling party that claims to control reality. All of this is set in a world of permanent war and grinding poverty for almost all of humanity.
People are right to be concerned about the government spying on them. But most of the intrusions that people are up in arms about is a long way from "1984" territory. Being added to a database every time you drive into Manhattan does raise privacy concerns, but it's many orders of magnitude away from the nightmare Orwell described.
Warning: it's illegal to follow the above Gutenberg Australia link if you live in the U.S. or some other country that has effectively made copyrights permanent. That's a bad thing, but it's not "Orwellian" either.
Actually, the problem is not the compiler, it's the machine. As any machine language programmer knows, you don't need a character type to manipulate characters — you just need a character-sized unit of storage. The PDP-10 didn't have one, because it used word addressing.
Word-addressable systems force the programmer to deal with data in a unit (the machine word) that is convenient for the computer as opposed to those that are appropriate for the application. The PDP-10 was a "scientific" computer, so it had a large word size, the better to manipulate large numbers. Crowther and Woods would have been better off with a "business" system, which would have had 8- or 16-bit words, making it unnecessary to pack characters. But then they would have had to write Adventure in COBOL!
Oops! I'm forgetting that Adventure came out in 1976, a full decade after the first byte-addressable computer (the IBM 360) was introduced, making all this weird character packing unnecessary. I learned to program FORTRAN on the 360; I don't remember exactly how to manipulate characters, but it wasn't very hard. But like many a programmer before and since, Crowther and Wood preferred to use the tools they knew & mdash; however poorly suited.
I use both Google and Yahoo, and I rarely see the home page of either. When I need to search Google, I use the toolbar. If the Yahool toolbar ever catches up, I'll use that instead.
When I use other features of Yahoo (movie listings, games, groups) I go directly to the particular subdomain, where the ads tend to be a little less obnoxious. Yes, they're still a lot more obnoxious than Google's — but it's worth it for superior applications. Google's movie listings and groups are implemented in a haphazard, way with less than complete information and sloppy documentation. Google's game site doesn't exist.
I used to be a serious Google fan boy. But they've used up my devotion.
Any poll needs to be taken with a grain (or a pound) of salt. There are many ways they can go wrong, and all the crap pollsters give out about "margin of error" is sneered at by real statisticians.
That said, this poll is not totally detached from reality. Maybe you think Google is still number one, but many others are disenchanted. If the Yahoo toolbar for Firefox ever replicates all the better features of its Google counterpart (hopefully without the bugs!) I'd stop using Google altogether.
It's done, in unbearably slow Flash. I can't use Yahoo maps at all, it's a PITArse!
It's not slow on my computer. If you're going to insist on using your old Windows 98 system, switch back to the old version (click on the "dialup" link). It may not be as sexy as Google maps, but it has a lot of practical features Google never got around to implementing.
Now that is a vintage computer. I'm pretty long in the tooth, but I'm not old enough to have experience on a non-byte architecture. Unless you count CompuServe (the pre-internet version) and playing Zork on ITS.
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You think a little extra tweaking will save Vista? Microsoft held it back for an extra year to tweak out the major bugs, and they still had a train wreck.
It seems obvious to me that Vista has reached "critical mass" in bug fixing. This concept is based on the average number of bugs accidentally generated by a bug fix. This value is always greater than zero, but a well-designed product keeps it very low. At all costs, you have to keep it well away from one. Once you're past this point, there's just no point point in fixing any more bugs — yours just making things worse.
Microsoft products have always been too complex and baroque. That's a good formula for the bug critical mass scenario. I'm only surprised it didn't happen before.
Green is relative. Tearing up the landscape with tracked vehicles and tossing supersonic projectiles around is not very green. But if the vehicles use less fuel and the projectiles are made of non-toxic substances (lead bullets are a big environmental hazard) warfare is a little greener than it was before.
However, I would guess the military's main concern is not the environment, it's logistics. The supply infrastructure needed to keep all those vehicles gassed up is mind-boggling. The less fuel a vehicle uses, the easier it is to keep it going.
OK, somebody explain to me why TPP is a troll.
Ok, you think that anybody who believes in creationism is a total idiot. But by that standard, a good chunk of the population consists of total idiots. In fact, it's a huge voting block — that's exactly why so many politicians are so vocal on the subject. Start lecturing a politician on the scientific flaws in their stated beliefs and all you accomplish is to help the pol to validate their credentials as a "Christian" candidate, and your own as a member of the "liberal elite".
OK then, you come up with a revenue model that will cover the huge costs of running a major web site. Words like "theft" may not be technically accurate, but the fact remains that people who block ads are getting a free ride. If everybody did it, a lot of sites would have to shut down. Including Slashdot.
I don't see anything in the article about porting Solaris to the z-series. Which is hardly surprising: porting Solaris to a new architecture would be a huge amount of work, and it's difficult to see how anybody could sell enough extra systems or support contracts to make it pay.
On the other hand, Sun is already putting a lot of work into the x64 version of Solaris, because AMD-based systems is pretty much their best profit center. And the Sun/Intel deal only strengthens that. So it's not that much extra work to support Solaris running on IBM System x.
It's easy to excuse anything if you're a fan — especially a Star Trek. But I'm sorry, the "audio feedback" explanation is lame. If I were designing such a system, I wouldn't use ear-splitting noises.
However you rationalize it, they use sound because people expect it. The expectation is so strong for sounds in violent situations, they often dub it in even when the POV is for someone too far away to hear it!
For the same reason, sound in movies travels at the speed of light. So folks aren't confused by the sight of a bomb going off in the distance without making any noise right away.
This whole "expectation" thing is the reason most movie/TV science fiction is just crap.
So basically you're saying that plain soap is already an extremely effective antibacterial agent. Which is why consumer-market antibacterial soap is no more effective than plain soap: poisoning a bacterium that's already had its membranes ripped apart is kind of pointless.
So yeah, antibacterial soap is a scam. And a dangerous one, too, since it may be helping to breed antibiotic-resistant bugs. I see a good case for banning the stuff. But I have a question: does it make any sense to be using triclosan at all? Medical folks use it (at higher concentrations than in soap) to kill skin bacteria which might otherwise infect their patients. Wouldn't they get just as good a result with plain soap?
Quite right. And why? Because people are paranoid about infections (as they should be) and snap up any easy solution (which they should not).
A few weeks ago I had a really bad cold that took me a while to shake off. A friend who is otherwise an intelligent person wanted to know why I wasn't taking antibiotics. Two reasons: antibiotics have no effect on viral infections, and taking them unnecessarily helps breed resistant germs.
(Actually, there's a third reason: they give me the runs.)
People are dying, and also losing limbs, because of antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains. And yet folks continue to use antibiotics and antibacterials as placebos. Not cool.
Actually, I despise B5. Good physics and CGI are not enough for me: I need dialog that doesn't make me gag. I only mention it as an example.
You mean it's their fault for not wanting to help you bypass their main product? The product that generates almost all their revenue?
Now, I do agree that the cable company should be required to sell you internet-only service. But not wanting to subvert their own main business is hardly a criminal act.
You sum it up nicely. (Though I'm not sure that Aristotle would consider the coyote's hanging in midair to be a valid interpretation of his physics.) In fact the problem is exactly the reverse: movies have bad physics — and bad science in general — because it's what people expect.
Two examples: on Star Trek TOS, they tried very hard to be scientifically correct (later versions were less careful) but wimped out when they depicted the Enterprise moving through space. They tried doing it without sound (no sound in a vacuum), but everybody complained that it "felt wrong". So we got the famous "whoosh" during the opening credits and a strange rumble when the ship orbited a planet..
In Babylon 5, they tried even harder. ("Conceptual Consultant" Harlan Ellison has many unendearing qualities, but he's always a stickler for scientific details.) So when spaceships docked, they had to pitch 180% so they could use their reaction engines to slow down. Perfectly good physics — but many casual viewers wondered why all the ships were flying backwards!
Ronald Reagan didn't understand why ballistic missiles couldn't return to base. Wouldn't have been so bad if he'd still been an actor, but he was Commander in Chief at the time.
Don't get me wrong: I think cable TV is a horrible ripoff. (Which is just one of several reasons I don't subscribe.) But the cable companies aren't the bad guys here. That's the media monopolies who've become obsessed with sequestering content and squeezing every penny they can out of it. And when you subscribe to cable, you're feeding that pathology, no matter how much you bitch and moan about it.
Read. The. Fucking. Book.
Jeez, you're dense. I said that some Internet conventions date back to a period when people didn't worry about security; as an example I mentioned that people didn't even secure their smtp servers. You said "smart people always secured their servers." Which isn't true.
If you can't follow that argument, I'm certainly not going to try to parse it for you.
People should not be allowed to reference 1984 (or say "Orwellian") unless they've actually read the thing. It describes a totalitarian state that makes Stalin look like a libertarian. It's not just about a government that spies on its people (though only the upper classes). It's about people willfully changing their own memories of the past and a ruling party that claims to control reality. All of this is set in a world of permanent war and grinding poverty for almost all of humanity.
People are right to be concerned about the government spying on them. But most of the intrusions that people are up in arms about is a long way from "1984" territory. Being added to a database every time you drive into Manhattan does raise privacy concerns, but it's many orders of magnitude away from the nightmare Orwell described.
Warning: it's illegal to follow the above Gutenberg Australia link if you live in the U.S. or some other country that has effectively made copyrights permanent. That's a bad thing, but it's not "Orwellian" either.
Actually, the problem is not the compiler, it's the machine. As any machine language programmer knows, you don't need a character type to manipulate characters — you just need a character-sized unit of storage. The PDP-10 didn't have one, because it used word addressing.
Word-addressable systems force the programmer to deal with data in a unit (the machine word) that is convenient for the computer as opposed to those that are appropriate for the application. The PDP-10 was a "scientific" computer, so it had a large word size, the better to manipulate large numbers. Crowther and Woods would have been better off with a "business" system, which would have had 8- or 16-bit words, making it unnecessary to pack characters. But then they would have had to write Adventure in COBOL!
Oops! I'm forgetting that Adventure came out in 1976, a full decade after the first byte-addressable computer (the IBM 360) was introduced, making all this weird character packing unnecessary. I learned to program FORTRAN on the 360; I don't remember exactly how to manipulate characters, but it wasn't very hard. But like many a programmer before and since, Crowther and Wood preferred to use the tools they knew & mdash; however poorly suited.
I use both Google and Yahoo, and I rarely see the home page of either. When I need to search Google, I use the toolbar. If the Yahool toolbar ever catches up, I'll use that instead.
When I use other features of Yahoo (movie listings, games, groups) I go directly to the particular subdomain, where the ads tend to be a little less obnoxious. Yes, they're still a lot more obnoxious than Google's — but it's worth it for superior applications. Google's movie listings and groups are implemented in a haphazard, way with less than complete information and sloppy documentation. Google's game site doesn't exist.
I used to be a serious Google fan boy. But they've used up my devotion.
Any poll needs to be taken with a grain (or a pound) of salt. There are many ways they can go wrong, and all the crap pollsters give out about "margin of error" is sneered at by real statisticians.
That said, this poll is not totally detached from reality. Maybe you think Google is still number one, but many others are disenchanted. If the Yahoo toolbar for Firefox ever replicates all the better features of its Google counterpart (hopefully without the bugs!) I'd stop using Google altogether.
Now that is a vintage computer. I'm pretty long in the tooth, but I'm not old enough to have experience on a non-byte architecture. Unless you count CompuServe (the pre-internet version) and playing Zork on ITS.