You missed the point. People choose AIRLINES based on one dollar savings of COACH seats. That's why airlines do everything possible to cut costs, and one of the major ways to do that is to pack as many people as possible.
Blame other people for being too cheap to pay more money for more room, but don't blame the airlines. If they gave you more legroom, they would literally go bankrupt.
How about this for an answer? Let's make airline seats the same size and legroom as movie theater seats and see if the problem goes away.
You already have this option. It's called first class.
People have chosen this world of crammed airlines, because people will choose the airline that's $1 cheaper than the other guy. Very few people use any other factor as a consideration. They want cheap flights, and that's exactly what they have.
The same argument has been made historically to explain - and justify - the exclusion of women from every profession.
Not true. Historically, men didn't even bother to explain and justify the exclusion of women. Women simply had their place, and men had their place, and there was compelling reason to change anything.
That means nothing. All you're saying is that YOU WANT TO LIVE (right now).
Well, duh. Yes.
Once you cease to want to live, that is no longer true, so I still don't understand your objection to euthanasia. Additionally, that really doesn't explain why it's better to live than not, except, again, YOU WANT TO.
Of course after I die, I cease to care about anything. You seem to be debating from the point of view of the universe, and of course the universe doesn't care whether I exist or not. The only thing that ultimately matters is our own subjective viewpoint, because that's all we have access to. Ultimately nothing is "better" than anything else from an objective viewpoint. "Better" is purely a subjective opinion.
There is nothing on the other side. You simply cease to exist, and it's as if you had never existed. All your consciousness is gone. [...] Assuming that is true is as irrational as assuming the opposite.
Untrue. There is plenty of evidence for a mechanistic brain (i.e., cognitive malfunctions from brain damage. Read the great books by Oliver Sacks on odd neurological problems), and absolutely zero evidence for a "soul" or any sort of afterlife. Like everyone, I wish there was some sort of way to "go on", but it's like wishing for superpowers. It's nice to dream, but reality is harsh.
If there's nothing but oblivion, then you might well have never existed. Oblivion isn't some old folk's home where you can reflect on your life. Your thoughts, memories, experiences: *poof* gone. Whatever contributions you've made to the world will be forgotten in short-order, and history has shown everyone will be forgotten COMPLETELY in time.
All that is exactly correct. There is no point to my existence, any more than there was a point to some guy that lived 15,000 years ago who lived and died in Africa. Everything about him is *poof* gone, as you say.
But that's from the point of view of the objective universe. From the subjective point of view of my illusionary consciousness, it's better to hang around and exist, than wink out of existence for eternity.
And besides, it's entirely possible that the whole external universe is simply being manufactured by my own consciousness, and everything will die when I go. So you better hope I continue on, just in case.:)
I've actually never understood this attitude about wanting to end everything. Yeah, granted, life would suck compared to what it could have been, but on the other hand, if you die, you are GONE FOREVER. There is nothing on the other side. You simply cease to exist, and it's as if you had never existed. All your consciousness is gone.
I can see wanting to check out if you're in constant pain and will never recover, but if you have your thoughts, you can at least think and have some hope of someday recovering. And if you can hear, you can occasionally get news of the outside world.
I would want to stick around just to see what happens.
No offense to you, but you're parroting the Firefox team's take on this, and it's utter crapola. Firefox at this moment is taking 638 megabytes on my system, and I normally restart it when it hits 1 gigabyte. That is ABSURD. This is just normal browsing.
I've basically concluded that the Firefox team basically can't fix it. It's not like this hasn't been a problem for a long-ass time. There is absolutely no reason Firefox should cripple computers if you don't close it after a certain amount of time. There is just no excuse. That is plain and simple bad design.
And yes, I HAVE played with the memory caching settings. That's how I got it to "only" take 1 gigabyte.
Which takes all of.16 seconds on even a low-end 512k DSL/Cable connection. Even on dialup that's not even 2 seconds (but one would question why one would be going to a javascript heavy website on dialup).
Okay, first of all, that "512k" connection is 512 kilo-BITS. That means 64 kilo-BYTES / second. So that 80K download takes an extra one and a quarter seconds. That may not sound like much, but it adds up.
And if the whole world was broadband, then I'd be less concerned, but a lot of the world is still on crappy dial-up connections. A typical dial-up connection is 33 Kbits or about 4K Bytes/second. That means that 80K download is 20 seconds. 20 seconds NOT EVEN RELATED TO CONTENT. Try counting off 20 seconds and see how long that really is.
I don't know about anyone else, but I want my web pages to pop. Snap! Snap! Snap! I HATE waiting for crappy designed web pages to load, and I'm on a 16 megabit connection.
How big was the calendar pop-up you finally programmed yourself? And, could it do everything the pre-fab jQuery one could do?
I didn't program it myself, I used one the numerous ones available around the web. I think it was like 8K or something. And no, it didn't have all the animation gimmicks the JQuery one did, but it did what I needed it do -- er, popup a calendar, and input a date in a functional, attractive way.
It's hard to complain that free code on the Internet is too big for your purposes. It's free. If you don't like it, roll your own.
Sheesh, retract the geek rage. All I did was point out that it's really heavy if all you want is a simple control, and it is. It's useful information for someone who is considering JQuery, whose web site claims that it's super light weight. You know, offering the benefit of my experience using this newfangled "forum thing."
And, if you note, since I didn't like it, I did "roll my own", as you suggested.
It's only 19kb and that tiny transfer only happens once because of browser caching. It's not too big for anything.
Maybe you got it down to 19K, but when I tried to do something actually useful (like the aforementioned Calendar popup), the sum of all the various components was pushing 70-80K (yes, using the compressed versions). Maybe there was some trick I wasn't using to get it down that small -- I wish there was, because I did actually want to use it. The JQuery site isn't the most straightforward in the world.
And you can run into problems with caching if you're using https.
I looked into JQuery recently for a web project, and while it is really, really cool, it's pretty heavy if all you want is (say) a Calendar popup. I think JQuery is really useful if you are going to basically do a desktop-style application using Javascript, like a spreadsheet or other major application. If all you want is a few controls for standard web forms, JQuery is overkill and too slow to download. There are better individual choices.
So buy a phone that's just a phone. No one is stopping you. Personally, I had been waiting a LONG ASS time for a useful pocket computer that happened to have a phone, and the iPhone finally delivered.
That's a terrible analogy. Municipal water is used for a lot more things than drinking, such as showers and watering plants. If all we needed was drinking water, then it probably wouldn't make sense to have big-ass pipes running to everyone's house. Using your theory, everyone ought to have milk pipes since so many people drink milk.
And the fact is, municipal water, while safe to drink, isn't all that great for drinking unless it's filtered.
I'm not ready to give up POTS yet necessarily, but there's no question about which direction society is moving. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of people until 25 don't have a POTS line. And if it's not there yet, it will be soon.
This is only barely related to this article, but hey... this is Slashdot.
Reading the word Ocean it struck me odd that it's two syllables. Generally, the older and more basic the concept, the shorter the word. But then I recalled that "sea" was another name for ocean, which is about as basic as sounds can be for something.
Then something struck me about that word: the sounds kind of sound like it describes, wind and waves splashing. Could the word 'sea' actually be an onomatopoeia? The dictionary doesn't really help me out on the question, but it seems like it could be.
Anyway, I know return you to your regularly scheduled article on cell phones.:)
Define "real objects" (in the context of object-oriented programming). (Hint: if you say anything other than "collections of bits in a computer" you're a deluded fool, there's nothing that makes PHP or Python's objects any more "real" than Perl's.)
A "real object" has a language syntax that is comprehensible, maintainable, and well-defined. Not to mention a syntax that I can use on a casual, daily basis without having to copy some other working code and/or consulting the manual.
(Hint: You're a dumb-ass. The important aspect of HLLs are how the abstractions make it easier to be productive. We all (i.e., knowledgeable people) understand that high-level languages are abstractions on low-level data manipulations over time. That you feel the need to point this out just tells me you fell off the turnip truck very recently. Congratulations. But you still don't get to eat at the adult table.)
I've been working with Perl 5 as my primary development language for about 10 years, and while I love what Perl does well, what Perl doesn't do well (particularly objects and error handling) SUCKS.
I've recently had the very surprising pleasure of doing a new project in PHP. Now, if you haven't used PHP lately, you would probably be moaning to some degree like I did, but you know what? PHP 5.3 has grown into a real language. Yes, there is still some library inconsistency and cruft, but it has most of the features one expects from a modern language, and PHP compares very favorably with Perl in terms available libraries and functions.
I'd never thought I'd see the day that I enjoyed PHP, but it's really grown into a nice language. No, it still doesn't have the syntactical shortcuts that Perl has (e.g., regular expressions as fundamental operators), but I don't care. It's been such a pleasure having real objects and relatively real exceptions that I'm actually starting to hate using Perl and its ancient crap.
I probably should have known this, but I didn't realize that Google Android cripples the phone by requiring Java. I thought it was a truly open environment where you could write native applications like the iPhone.
Well, there goes any chance of Android getting the same level of applications as the iPhone. And no, I don't believe Java apps are ever going to be as fast and good as native apps. I thought I might be tempted to get an Android phone someday, but not as long as they don't have native apps.
(Queue the Javalytes telling me that "Java runtimes are getting really fast, and they'll be as fast as native code <i>real soon now...</i> In fact, even FASTER than native code, because the runtimes are so amazingly smart at optimization...)
You know what's sad about rockets and space... all that fire and fury, and the capacity of the shuttle (24.4K Kg) is lifting about one standard 20 foot shipping container (24K Kg). To LEO, mind you, not GEO. And not a "heavy" container, a standard container.
They certainly might flock to an app store on OS/X, but that's not the issue. The issue would be Apple making that the ONLY way to put apps on OS/X. In other words, Steve would love it if he could get away with OS/X having only Steve-approved apps with a Steve-approved cut of the profits. And if you want something that Steve doesn't like, then you can pound sand.
I can develop whatever I want for OSX and that works out just fine.
Do you really think -- really think -- that Apple wouldn't love to have a tightly controlled "App store" under OS/X where they were the gatekeepers for every single program that could be loaded? And get a share of the money?
Apple would do it if they could, but that genie is already out of the bottle.
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You missed the point. People choose AIRLINES based on one dollar savings of COACH seats. That's why airlines do everything possible to cut costs, and one of the major ways to do that is to pack as many people as possible.
Blame other people for being too cheap to pay more money for more room, but don't blame the airlines. If they gave you more legroom, they would literally go bankrupt.
How about this for an answer? Let's make airline seats the same size and legroom as movie theater seats and see if the problem goes away.
You already have this option. It's called first class.
People have chosen this world of crammed airlines, because people will choose the airline that's $1 cheaper than the other guy. Very few people use any other factor as a consideration. They want cheap flights, and that's exactly what they have.
The same argument has been made historically to explain - and justify - the exclusion of women from every profession.
Not true. Historically, men didn't even bother to explain and justify the exclusion of women. Women simply had their place, and men had their place, and there was compelling reason to change anything.
That means nothing. All you're saying is that YOU WANT TO LIVE (right now).
Well, duh. Yes.
Once you cease to want to live, that is no longer true, so I still don't understand your objection to euthanasia. Additionally, that really doesn't explain why it's better to live than not, except, again, YOU WANT TO.
Of course after I die, I cease to care about anything. You seem to be debating from the point of view of the universe, and of course the universe doesn't care whether I exist or not. The only thing that ultimately matters is our own subjective viewpoint, because that's all we have access to. Ultimately nothing is "better" than anything else from an objective viewpoint. "Better" is purely a subjective opinion.
There is nothing on the other side. You simply cease to exist, and it's as if you had never existed. All your consciousness is gone. [...] Assuming that is true is as irrational as assuming the opposite.
Untrue. There is plenty of evidence for a mechanistic brain (i.e., cognitive malfunctions from brain damage. Read the great books by Oliver Sacks on odd neurological problems), and absolutely zero evidence for a "soul" or any sort of afterlife. Like everyone, I wish there was some sort of way to "go on", but it's like wishing for superpowers. It's nice to dream, but reality is harsh.
If there's nothing but oblivion, then you might well have never existed. Oblivion isn't some old folk's home where you can reflect on your life. Your thoughts, memories, experiences: *poof* gone. Whatever contributions you've made to the world will be forgotten in short-order, and history has shown everyone will be forgotten COMPLETELY in time.
All that is exactly correct. There is no point to my existence, any more than there was a point to some guy that lived 15,000 years ago who lived and died in Africa. Everything about him is *poof* gone, as you say.
But that's from the point of view of the objective universe. From the subjective point of view of my illusionary consciousness, it's better to hang around and exist, than wink out of existence for eternity.
And besides, it's entirely possible that the whole external universe is simply being manufactured by my own consciousness, and everything will die when I go. So you better hope I continue on, just in case. :)
I've actually never understood this attitude about wanting to end everything. Yeah, granted, life would suck compared to what it could have been, but on the other hand, if you die, you are GONE FOREVER. There is nothing on the other side. You simply cease to exist, and it's as if you had never existed. All your consciousness is gone.
I can see wanting to check out if you're in constant pain and will never recover, but if you have your thoughts, you can at least think and have some hope of someday recovering. And if you can hear, you can occasionally get news of the outside world.
I would want to stick around just to see what happens.
No offense to you, but you're parroting the Firefox team's take on this, and it's utter crapola. Firefox at this moment is taking 638 megabytes on my system, and I normally restart it when it hits 1 gigabyte. That is ABSURD. This is just normal browsing.
I've basically concluded that the Firefox team basically can't fix it. It's not like this hasn't been a problem for a long-ass time. There is absolutely no reason Firefox should cripple computers if you don't close it after a certain amount of time. There is just no excuse. That is plain and simple bad design.
And yes, I HAVE played with the memory caching settings. That's how I got it to "only" take 1 gigabyte.
Which takes all of .16 seconds on even a low-end 512k DSL/Cable connection. Even on dialup that's not even 2 seconds (but one would question why one would be going to a javascript heavy website on dialup).
Okay, first of all, that "512k" connection is 512 kilo-BITS. That means 64 kilo-BYTES / second. So that 80K download takes an extra one and a quarter seconds. That may not sound like much, but it adds up.
And if the whole world was broadband, then I'd be less concerned, but a lot of the world is still on crappy dial-up connections. A typical dial-up connection is 33 Kbits or about 4K Bytes/second. That means that 80K download is 20 seconds. 20 seconds NOT EVEN RELATED TO CONTENT. Try counting off 20 seconds and see how long that really is.
I don't know about anyone else, but I want my web pages to pop. Snap! Snap! Snap! I HATE waiting for crappy designed web pages to load, and I'm on a 16 megabit connection.
It's really cool, but the packed version + CSS file = 54K... Ouch. But I'm pretty obsessive about keeping web pages light and fast loading.
How big was the calendar pop-up you finally programmed yourself? And, could it do everything the pre-fab jQuery one could do?
I didn't program it myself, I used one the numerous ones available around the web. I think it was like 8K or something. And no, it didn't have all the animation gimmicks the JQuery one did, but it did what I needed it do -- er, popup a calendar, and input a date in a functional, attractive way.
It's hard to complain that free code on the Internet is too big for your purposes. It's free. If you don't like it, roll your own.
Sheesh, retract the geek rage. All I did was point out that it's really heavy if all you want is a simple control, and it is. It's useful information for someone who is considering JQuery, whose web site claims that it's super light weight. You know, offering the benefit of my experience using this newfangled "forum thing."
And, if you note, since I didn't like it, I did "roll my own", as you suggested.
It's only 19kb and that tiny transfer only happens once because of browser caching. It's not too big for anything.
Maybe you got it down to 19K, but when I tried to do something actually useful (like the aforementioned Calendar popup), the sum of all the various components was pushing 70-80K (yes, using the compressed versions). Maybe there was some trick I wasn't using to get it down that small -- I wish there was, because I did actually want to use it. The JQuery site isn't the most straightforward in the world.
And you can run into problems with caching if you're using https.
I looked into JQuery recently for a web project, and while it is really, really cool, it's pretty heavy if all you want is (say) a Calendar popup. I think JQuery is really useful if you are going to basically do a desktop-style application using Javascript, like a spreadsheet or other major application. If all you want is a few controls for standard web forms, JQuery is overkill and too slow to download. There are better individual choices.
So buy a phone that's just a phone. No one is stopping you. Personally, I had been waiting a LONG ASS time for a useful pocket computer that happened to have a phone, and the iPhone finally delivered.
That's a terrible analogy. Municipal water is used for a lot more things than drinking, such as showers and watering plants. If all we needed was drinking water, then it probably wouldn't make sense to have big-ass pipes running to everyone's house. Using your theory, everyone ought to have milk pipes since so many people drink milk.
And the fact is, municipal water, while safe to drink, isn't all that great for drinking unless it's filtered.
I'm not ready to give up POTS yet necessarily, but there's no question about which direction society is moving. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of people until 25 don't have a POTS line. And if it's not there yet, it will be soon.
That's really interesting... I've never heard of a legend being able to be dated precisely like that. Do you have a reference for it?
This is only barely related to this article, but hey... this is Slashdot.
Reading the word Ocean it struck me odd that it's two syllables. Generally, the older and more basic the concept, the shorter the word. But then I recalled that "sea" was another name for ocean, which is about as basic as sounds can be for something.
Then something struck me about that word: the sounds kind of sound like it describes, wind and waves splashing. Could the word 'sea' actually be an onomatopoeia? The dictionary doesn't really help me out on the question, but it seems like it could be.
Anyway, I know return you to your regularly scheduled article on cell phones. :)
Define "real objects" (in the context of object-oriented programming). (Hint: if you say anything other than "collections of bits in a computer" you're a deluded fool, there's nothing that makes PHP or Python's objects any more "real" than Perl's.)
A "real object" has a language syntax that is comprehensible, maintainable, and well-defined. Not to mention a syntax that I can use on a casual, daily basis without having to copy some other working code and/or consulting the manual.
(Hint: You're a dumb-ass. The important aspect of HLLs are how the abstractions make it easier to be productive. We all (i.e., knowledgeable people) understand that high-level languages are abstractions on low-level data manipulations over time. That you feel the need to point this out just tells me you fell off the turnip truck very recently. Congratulations. But you still don't get to eat at the adult table.)
I've been working with Perl 5 as my primary development language for about 10 years, and while I love what Perl does well, what Perl doesn't do well (particularly objects and error handling) SUCKS.
I've recently had the very surprising pleasure of doing a new project in PHP. Now, if you haven't used PHP lately, you would probably be moaning to some degree like I did, but you know what? PHP 5.3 has grown into a real language. Yes, there is still some library inconsistency and cruft, but it has most of the features one expects from a modern language, and PHP compares very favorably with Perl in terms available libraries and functions.
I'd never thought I'd see the day that I enjoyed PHP, but it's really grown into a nice language. No, it still doesn't have the syntactical shortcuts that Perl has (e.g., regular expressions as fundamental operators), but I don't care. It's been such a pleasure having real objects and relatively real exceptions that I'm actually starting to hate using Perl and its ancient crap.
I probably should have known this, but I didn't realize that Google Android cripples the phone by requiring Java. I thought it was a truly open environment where you could write native applications like the iPhone.
Well, there goes any chance of Android getting the same level of applications as the iPhone. And no, I don't believe Java apps are ever going to be as fast and good as native apps. I thought I might be tempted to get an Android phone someday, but not as long as they don't have native apps.
(Queue the Javalytes telling me that "Java runtimes are getting really fast, and they'll be as fast as native code <i>real soon now...</i> In fact, even FASTER than native code, because the runtimes are so amazingly smart at optimization...)
You know what's sad about rockets and space... all that fire and fury, and the capacity of the shuttle (24.4K Kg) is lifting about one standard 20 foot shipping container (24K Kg). To LEO, mind you, not GEO. And not a "heavy" container, a standard container.
(and yes, I realize in the future we probably won't even have channels, but the image is funnier with TVs and channels)
In the future...
"Wait, Dad, you mean you used to have to move your arm to change the channel on the TV?"
"That's nothing, son. Great-Grandpa had to actually get up off the sofa and move to the TV to turn a dial."
Son physically reels. "Whoa, stop, you're blowin' my mind. But they did have motor-sofas to move you to the TV, right?"
They certainly might flock to an app store on OS/X, but that's not the issue. The issue would be Apple making that the ONLY way to put apps on OS/X. In other words, Steve would love it if he could get away with OS/X having only Steve-approved apps with a Steve-approved cut of the profits. And if you want something that Steve doesn't like, then you can pound sand.
I can develop whatever I want for OSX and that works out just fine.
Do you really think -- really think -- that Apple wouldn't love to have a tightly controlled "App store" under OS/X where they were the gatekeepers for every single program that could be loaded? And get a share of the money?
Apple would do it if they could, but that genie is already out of the bottle.