They can only be proven true, by finding the so called dark matter, but cannot be proven false by any means.
You're saying that there are no crucial experiments relating to dark matter and never can be. That's a big claim, and one you're going to have to justify.
Well, the Principality Army could stay on site to prevent a coup. What? There is no army? Well then, the citizens can form a militia... You say there are no citizens either? So what does "Prince" Michael rule over?
This notion that an abandoned radar platform has somehow achieved sovereign nation status just because its squatters say it is has always been a bad joke. They've only gotten away with it because nobody gives a shit. They claim to have a legal decision, but what they really have is a court case the the UK crown won't appeal out of bureaucratic inertia. The very first time they'd done something to really piss people off, a platoon of Scotland Yard bobbies would have landed, sent the "Prince" back to his sheep, and that would have been the end of it.
Do remember that ultraportables deliberately sacrifices performance in favor of battery life. They'll always be inferior to bigger machines in raw processing power.
That said, I would think that a 220 MHz processor would be fine for most Flash presentations. Perhaps the ARM implementation of the plugin is less robust than the Pentium version. Or perhaps you're doing fancy animation that overtaxes the system.
And don't make the usual mistake of fixating on the CPU as the sole provider of application performance. Any application uses many different resources, and a bottleneck in any of them (in graphics applications, it's usually the video adapter, not the CPU) will screw you over.
Vi is the ultimate editor, for one main reason. It's a modal editor, so commands can be mnemonic.
EMACS is a modal editor too. Both EMACS and Vi were written to run on character terminals. Any interactive editor designed for that environment has to be modal, because that's the only way to separate commands from input. EMACS, being designed for powerful terminals with very fast connections, can make text entry the primary mode and commands brief escapes from text entry mode. Vi, which was designed for cheap terminals connected to 30 characters-per-second connections (and was even used on 11 CPS connections), did things exactly the opposite.
And a note to the usual vi-versus-EMACS flamers: which one you use in a modern GUI environment is matter of what you're used to. They're both equally out of date: good GUI programs do not have modes. And I'm not speaking theoretically: I've used vi (or nowadays, vim) almost every working day for 27 years, and I still screw up cut-and-pastes occasionally because I forget which mode I left the vim window in.
So if I think modes are dumb, why don't I switch to a modeless editor? Well, I have jedit, and I keep meaning to try to make it my working editor. But there are always bigger priorities than retooling my brain's text editor zones. I might feel differently if Bram Moolenar and the other vimmers hadn't done such a good job of adapting vi to the GUI world. Speaking of which, no vim user should forget to express their gratitude.
The $12.95 discount for low-income residents makes me go "WTF" though- if your family is "low-income" by the conventional measure (poverty line) you probably shouldn't be spending money on wi-fi.
Yeah, right. We wouldn't want poor people trying to improve their technical skills, take online courses, or any of that crap.
And while we're at it, let's close down the public libraries. Face it, people who aren't poor can afford to buy their own own books. And yet they're the ones who pay the taxes that support the public libraries. Another ripoff!
...there is none of this fancy renaming variables on the fly and obfuscating code with magic numbers stuff that is all the rage in C++, Java, and other "modern" languages.
You've got me scratching my head with that one. I have no idea how to "obfuscate code with magic numbers". As for "renaming variables" are you referring to the fact that modern languages allow you to declare variables with limited scope? (I seem to dimly recall that COBOL variables always have program scope, but it's been a couple of decades since I studied the language.) If so, you're right, the COBOL way is simpler — but totally inadequate for nontrivial programming, where unintended side effects are a major cause of bugs.
I think I'm tired of all the posts from people who think their own inability to read is extremely funny. And did you bother to (mis)read past the headline? They've invented a new UI metaphor, one that sounds pretty interesting. Novel enough.
Sure they're obsessed with ISDN, but only because it seemed like the only fast internet solution at the time.
It was the only fast solution, unless your needs justified the expense of a private T1 line. I still think it's a pity that ISDN didn't work out. If it had, the telephone network would be digital end-to-end by now. Instead, the line from the CO to your house is still analog with built-in bandwidth limitations.
DSL finally did what ISDN was supposed to do, but it took a long time to work out the kinks and get reliable plug-and-play DSL service. And it's still not available a certain distance from the CO.
But they really liked usenet. The web forum has supplanted it, but they didn't really see that.
Lots of people still don't see that. I've worked at companies that see it as the ideal support forum, because it's easy to deploy and administer. Only the other week, I was in a meeting where a guy was pushing Usenet for user forums. He cited the huge numbers for current Usenet participation. Of course, he didn't break out spam and Star Trek flame wars...
Given the bosses are just employees (duh, I hope), the rate of bad employees ought the be the same as the rate of bad bosses.
Huh? You think managers are representative of the people that work for them? If promotions were decided by cutting a deck of cards, that would be true. But they're not. Managers are chosen, and by criteria that are very different from those used to hire the people under them.
Two groups that have similar labels don't automatically have similar statistical features.
And there's a body of thought that says that the average manager is less competent than the general work force. It's called The Peter Principle.
In many cases, the environment at a company is colored by the behavior and the policies of the boss (or bosses).
Your immediate boss doesn't "color" your environment; they are the single individual that has the most to do with creating your environment. They set your deadlines and goals, help you get resources, evaluate your performance, give you permission to take time off... it's a big list.
I've never worked for a big company that wasn't dysfunctional and overbureaucratic to some degree. I think it's just in the nature of organizations of a certain size. It can be a pain, but it's something you deal with. But a bad boss makes your life hell, no matter what the general environment is.
I didn't mean to imply that there was no user lockin in server land. Obviously there will always be server-side applications that only run on Windows. But you have to admit that there's less user lockin on the server side. All the server software you mention is closely linked to client-side software that only runs on Windows. Many more server applications don't care what the client is running. That's why Linux has done so well in the server world, even as it stagnates in the desktop world.
The business didn't "switch to Ubuntu". That phrase implies that they suddenly stopped using any Windows systems. In fact, they made the much smaller step of converting their servers to Ubuntu. Linux has always been a much easier sell in serverland, because on servers you don't have all the application lock-in that makes it hard to get end users to give up Windows.
Yes there's a prototype for the A380. There's also a demo for Spore. But until Airbus figures out how to insert those 300 miles of wiring, the prototype is meaningless. Without any wiring, a jetliner is just a... I want to say "big doorstop" but somehow that's not right.
You do sort of have a point. "Vaporware" originally described products that never got beyond the Breathless Announcement, and were usually created solely to stifle interest in competing products. Only one or two products on the Wired list fit that description. We really need a separate term for products that are really, honestly under development, but are way behind schedule. Deathmarchware?
I'm profoundly unsurprised that Spore is in trouble. IMHO, Will Wright is grossly overrated as a game designer. All his games pretend to be simulations, but the "realities" they pretend to implement are absurdly simplistic. (Why is every Sim a bisexual OJ?) People do enjoy playing them, but only because they enjoy fantasizing about their imaginary worlds. The game pretends to bring simulation to the fantasy, but really just provide fancy graphics. Judging from the videos I've seen, Spore isn't any different. And for a game that pretends to model the evolution of wholes species, that just isn't enough.
You're tired of vacuuming by hand, so you buy a robot vacuum that works all by itself. Then you add a clever hack that allows you to control the robot vacuum just like the manual vacuum you had before...
The key phrase in your post is "some cases". Let's look at this specific case. The guy has asked for advice on buying hardware, so he's not stuck with adapting an existing machine. And anybody buying a new machine these days needs to max out the RAM anyway, because RAM is cheap and today's software is RAM-hungry.
asinine marketing/pricing on the part of NeXT Inc.
Marketing, I don't know about. But as for pricing, they probably did the best they could. When you create a proprietary hardware platform, you're forgoing the economies of scale you get with a commodity hardware platform, and that makes everything more expensive. Which is why there are fewer proprietary hardware platforms every year.
The Wikipedia article on the company says that NeXTStep was originally meant to be a Windows toolkit. If that's true, then their expensive detour into the hardware world was their fatal mistake. By the time they finally created the toolkit that they should have started with, Microsoft and Borland owned that market. When you create a new technology, you have to get into place before the market window closes. After that, it doesn't matter how superior your technology is, you can't fight the lock-in that your competitors have created. Call it the QWERTY effect.
And even when you hit the market at the right time, you have to persuade people to retool to use your technology. Which means that you do not make it any harder than necessary for people to code against your API. Which means you don't totally reinvent your programming language and paradigm the way the NextStep people did.
Actually, if you have ever studied Stalin and the history of the purges (pre-WWII) you will notice the great similarity of what the Soviets did and the government in the book.
There are similarities and there are differences. The differences are pretty big. Stalin's ideology pervaded every aspect of Soviet life, and had every Soviet citizen under its thumb. It even had ideological rules for growing crops! (Which, naturally, led to many famines.)
By contrast, Orwell's INGSOC doesn't care about what most of its citizens do or think. They're "proles": ignorant unskilled workers who are seen as posing little threat to The Party. On the other hand, members of INGSOC itself are subject to brainwashing that goes way beyond anything Stalin's minions ever did. Indeed, some of the differences are described in the dialogs between O'Brian and Smith.
Orwell certainly had no use for Stalinism; he attacked that ideology in books like Homage to Catalonia and Animal Farm. But 1984 is about the future of totalitarianism, not its past.
You're quite right. INGSOC (the crazy ideologues who run everything in 1984) pretty much ignore the "proles", the working stiffs who make up 90% of the population, except to disappear the odd troublemaker. By contrast, they don't just repress dissidents within INGSOC, they insist on "curing" them of their "mental disorder", with a treatment that consists of physical and psychological torture.
But I felt I had to simplify my description of the book in order to make my point. If I listed all the differences between what people assume the book is about and what the book is actually about, I'd be here all day.
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Well, the Principality Army could stay on site to prevent a coup. What? There is no army? Well then, the citizens can form a militia... You say there are no citizens either? So what does "Prince" Michael rule over?
This notion that an abandoned radar platform has somehow achieved sovereign nation status just because its squatters say it is has always been a bad joke. They've only gotten away with it because nobody gives a shit. They claim to have a legal decision, but what they really have is a court case the the UK crown won't appeal out of bureaucratic inertia. The very first time they'd done something to really piss people off, a platoon of Scotland Yard bobbies would have landed, sent the "Prince" back to his sheep, and that would have been the end of it.
Do remember that ultraportables deliberately sacrifices performance in favor of battery life. They'll always be inferior to bigger machines in raw processing power.
That said, I would think that a 220 MHz processor would be fine for most Flash presentations. Perhaps the ARM implementation of the plugin is less robust than the Pentium version. Or perhaps you're doing fancy animation that overtaxes the system.
And don't make the usual mistake of fixating on the CPU as the sole provider of application performance. Any application uses many different resources, and a bottleneck in any of them (in graphics applications, it's usually the video adapter, not the CPU) will screw you over.
EMACS is a modal editor too. Both EMACS and Vi were written to run on character terminals. Any interactive editor designed for that environment has to be modal, because that's the only way to separate commands from input. EMACS, being designed for powerful terminals with very fast connections, can make text entry the primary mode and commands brief escapes from text entry mode. Vi, which was designed for cheap terminals connected to 30 characters-per-second connections (and was even used on 11 CPS connections), did things exactly the opposite.
And a note to the usual vi-versus-EMACS flamers: which one you use in a modern GUI environment is matter of what you're used to. They're both equally out of date: good GUI programs do not have modes. And I'm not speaking theoretically: I've used vi (or nowadays, vim) almost every working day for 27 years, and I still screw up cut-and-pastes occasionally because I forget which mode I left the vim window in.
So if I think modes are dumb, why don't I switch to a modeless editor? Well, I have jedit, and I keep meaning to try to make it my working editor. But there are always bigger priorities than retooling my brain's text editor zones. I might feel differently if Bram Moolenar and the other vimmers hadn't done such a good job of adapting vi to the GUI world. Speaking of which, no vim user should forget to express their gratitude.
Yeah, right. We wouldn't want poor people trying to improve their technical skills, take online courses, or any of that crap.
And while we're at it, let's close down the public libraries. Face it, people who aren't poor can afford to buy their own own books. And yet they're the ones who pay the taxes that support the public libraries. Another ripoff!
And don't get me started on "public" schools....
Yeah, my first thought was, "Well gee, all my life I've been worrying about WW III, and when it finally happens, it doesn't even make the front page!"
There are no applications because running applications is not the platform's purpose.
I think I'm tired of all the posts from people who think their own inability to read is extremely funny. And did you bother to (mis)read past the headline? They've invented a new UI metaphor, one that sounds pretty interesting. Novel enough.
It was the only fast solution, unless your needs justified the expense of a private T1 line. I still think it's a pity that ISDN didn't work out. If it had, the telephone network would be digital end-to-end by now. Instead, the line from the CO to your house is still analog with built-in bandwidth limitations.
DSL finally did what ISDN was supposed to do, but it took a long time to work out the kinks and get reliable plug-and-play DSL service. And it's still not available a certain distance from the CO.
Lots of people still don't see that. I've worked at companies that see it as the ideal support forum, because it's easy to deploy and administer. Only the other week, I was in a meeting where a guy was pushing Usenet for user forums. He cited the huge numbers for current Usenet participation. Of course, he didn't break out spam and Star Trek flame wars...
Huh? You think managers are representative of the people that work for them? If promotions were decided by cutting a deck of cards, that would be true. But they're not. Managers are chosen, and by criteria that are very different from those used to hire the people under them.
Two groups that have similar labels don't automatically have similar statistical features.
And there's a body of thought that says that the average manager is less competent than the general work force. It's called The Peter Principle.
Your immediate boss doesn't "color" your environment; they are the single individual that has the most to do with creating your environment. They set your deadlines and goals, help you get resources, evaluate your performance, give you permission to take time off... it's a big list.
I've never worked for a big company that wasn't dysfunctional and overbureaucratic to some degree. I think it's just in the nature of organizations of a certain size. It can be a pain, but it's something you deal with. But a bad boss makes your life hell, no matter what the general environment is.
I didn't mean to imply that there was no user lockin in server land. Obviously there will always be server-side applications that only run on Windows. But you have to admit that there's less user lockin on the server side. All the server software you mention is closely linked to client-side software that only runs on Windows. Many more server applications don't care what the client is running. That's why Linux has done so well in the server world, even as it stagnates in the desktop world.
The business didn't "switch to Ubuntu". That phrase implies that they suddenly stopped using any Windows systems. In fact, they made the much smaller step of converting their servers to Ubuntu. Linux has always been a much easier sell in serverland, because on servers you don't have all the application lock-in that makes it hard to get end users to give up Windows.
A gift, not a bribe? You should go into politics.
It's worth noting that a lot of bloggers have no notion of journalistic ethics. Here's a particularly nasty story about bloggers who can't even be bothered to get their quotes straight.
Yes there's a prototype for the A380. There's also a demo for Spore. But until Airbus figures out how to insert those 300 miles of wiring, the prototype is meaningless. Without any wiring, a jetliner is just a ... I want to say "big doorstop" but somehow that's not right.
You do sort of have a point. "Vaporware" originally described products that never got beyond the Breathless Announcement, and were usually created solely to stifle interest in competing products. Only one or two products on the Wired list fit that description. We really need a separate term for products that are really, honestly under development, but are way behind schedule. Deathmarchware?
I'm profoundly unsurprised that Spore is in trouble. IMHO, Will Wright is grossly overrated as a game designer. All his games pretend to be simulations, but the "realities" they pretend to implement are absurdly simplistic. (Why is every Sim a bisexual OJ?) People do enjoy playing them, but only because they enjoy fantasizing about their imaginary worlds. The game pretends to bring simulation to the fantasy, but really just provide fancy graphics. Judging from the videos I've seen, Spore isn't any different. And for a game that pretends to model the evolution of wholes species, that just isn't enough.
You're tired of vacuuming by hand, so you buy a robot vacuum that works all by itself. Then you add a clever hack that allows you to control the robot vacuum just like the manual vacuum you had before...
The key phrase in your post is "some cases". Let's look at this specific case. The guy has asked for advice on buying hardware, so he's not stuck with adapting an existing machine. And anybody buying a new machine these days needs to max out the RAM anyway, because RAM is cheap and today's software is RAM-hungry.
As may be. But that's not what the book is about.
If you're going to create an OS that nobody will use, does it matter whether there's any hardware to run it on?
Marketing, I don't know about. But as for pricing, they probably did the best they could. When you create a proprietary hardware platform, you're forgoing the economies of scale you get with a commodity hardware platform, and that makes everything more expensive. Which is why there are fewer proprietary hardware platforms every year.
The Wikipedia article on the company says that NeXTStep was originally meant to be a Windows toolkit. If that's true, then their expensive detour into the hardware world was their fatal mistake. By the time they finally created the toolkit that they should have started with, Microsoft and Borland owned that market. When you create a new technology, you have to get into place before the market window closes. After that, it doesn't matter how superior your technology is, you can't fight the lock-in that your competitors have created. Call it the QWERTY effect.
And even when you hit the market at the right time, you have to persuade people to retool to use your technology. Which means that you do not make it any harder than necessary for people to code against your API. Which means you don't totally reinvent your programming language and paradigm the way the NextStep people did.
If you think that's what the book is about, you didn't read it very carefully.
There are similarities and there are differences. The differences are pretty big. Stalin's ideology pervaded every aspect of Soviet life, and had every Soviet citizen under its thumb. It even had ideological rules for growing crops! (Which, naturally, led to many famines.)
By contrast, Orwell's INGSOC doesn't care about what most of its citizens do or think. They're "proles": ignorant unskilled workers who are seen as posing little threat to The Party. On the other hand, members of INGSOC itself are subject to brainwashing that goes way beyond anything Stalin's minions ever did. Indeed, some of the differences are described in the dialogs between O'Brian and Smith.
Orwell certainly had no use for Stalinism; he attacked that ideology in books like Homage to Catalonia and Animal Farm. But 1984 is about the future of totalitarianism, not its past.
You're quite right. INGSOC (the crazy ideologues who run everything in 1984) pretty much ignore the "proles", the working stiffs who make up 90% of the population, except to disappear the odd troublemaker. By contrast, they don't just repress dissidents within INGSOC, they insist on "curing" them of their "mental disorder", with a treatment that consists of physical and psychological torture.
But I felt I had to simplify my description of the book in order to make my point. If I listed all the differences between what people assume the book is about and what the book is actually about, I'd be here all day.