This is the whole reason I own a Gameboy Advance.... I own only three games for it, Pitfall, Super Mario Bros., and Castlevania. The only reason I have this thing in the first place is to recapture a bit of my gaming youth, when games like Turrican and Turrican 2 trapped me for hours at a time. Man, I never realized before now exactly why I craved the GBA so much - it wss the years of repressed platformer lust!
I can't begin to count the number of times I was refused admittance to an 'R' rated movie as a teenager, despite the fact that my father was right with me, trying to bring me in.
He knew I loved sci-fi movies, and would try to take me to films like Robocop, since he knew damn well that the movie wouldn't scar me for life. Trust me, living in Canada, the amount of blood you see in blackfly season, or just cleaning fish you caught, is enough to make even the goriest movie look like a Disney flick. It would take a hell of a movie to scar a Canadian kid.
Movie ratings should be for parental guidance or unattended children only, if a parent is there with them, they should be able to do whatever they want with their kid.
I'm not going to dispute the "MS is dirty" part of your assertion - they are. But the french courts are hardly ones to be held in high esteem for their faultless assignment of blame. They are after all the ones who have decided to fine the entire world for not following french internal laws out in their own countries (i.e. Yahoo Auctions + Nazi memorabilia).
The French are not a society to be held up as paragons of virtue, regardless of their luck in catching Microsoft's hand in the cookie jar.
Whenever I buy a magazine, I automatically flip past the ads to the articles. This is an automatic process which takes no special interaction on my part. Am I therefore a thief?
Similarly, when a commercial comes on TV, I either walk the dog, go grab a snack, hit the washroom, or change the channel. This too is a completely automated process, handled by the lower functions of my brain without ever entering my consciousness. It's like blinking or breathing, you don't even notice you're doing it.
I suppose I'm somehow violating a sacred contract between me and the folks to whom I have already given my money for the priviledge of doing whatever the hell I choose to with their product, right? I guess I'd better feel guilty now.... nope, sorry, I can't manage it. I'm just a bad, bad person.
Yeah, I agree. People really shouldn't be surprised. But just to straddle the fence a little bit, just because we are in a capitalist system doesn't give companies moral authority to do whatever the hell sneaky crap they like in the name of profits. Sure they may legally be in the right, but I doubt many people other than slimy lawyers would agree with that assessment. Catch-22?
If all the payment you ever get is beer, you sound like you have a very limited diet. I hope to hell you're getting Guinness, so that you can at least get your daily recommended dose of vitamins, minerals, protein, carbohydrates, and that nice "I just ate a brick" feeling of fullness.
I can't argue with that, O Defender of Common Sense, but it's also common sense that if you're going to be inflicting something someone generally will NOT want upon them as an adjunct of an agreement, you should make it CLEAR to them that you're doing it so they can a) intelligently opt out, or b) decide to accept the consequences. In either case, you have a satisfied customer (or non-customer) rather than an irate one down the road. The point is that intentionally HIDING non-obvious downsides by burying them in legalese is not a forthright thing to do. Yes people should know better, but companies do have at least some obligation to behave themselves too.
Maybe you're not familiar with the notion of capitalism, but the only point of ANY company is to make money (not-for-profit companies aside, obviously).
Actually, rocks *can* hold a relatively small amount of water. That's why they had to change the saying to "trying to get BLOOD from a stone", after they found out you could, in fact, get water from one (if you picked the right one). Just my pedantic little tip for the day:)
It's not really like letting Hazelwood drive an oil tanker, itt's more like letting him fly Air Force One, while there's an open bar and it's bikini day for the stewardesses.
Re:What the hell is wrong with the Judiciary
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
·
· Score: 1
And just who should appoint them?
1. Political figures eager to have judges on the bench who will look favorably on their pet issues?
2. Other legal profession members eager to have judges appointed who will interpret the law in the way most likely to keep themselves and their cohorts employed and in power?
3. The uneducated masses who are more concerned with who so-and-so slept with than they are with the pursuit of justice?
4. Some group of people who just know better than the rest of us and will put in place people who think "the right way" about legal quandaries?
No matter what you do, corrupt, incompetent, or just uninterested judges will always slip through. The only possible remedy is the prospect of removing a judge who abuses his/her duty, but even that is after the fact. At least election of judges gives SOME opportunity for the interested parties to pre-screen and possibly block bad candidates.
I've never had to sign a speeding ticket in my life in Canada (and believe me, I've had plenty). So am I now retroactively on my way to jail as a terrorist? That'd be a cool story to tell the family at christmas...
This may be a stupid question - but after all I only buy and use processors, I don't design them.
That said, how about Intel taking what seems to me to be the next logical step, and combining what is essentially simply a new insulator breakthrough with an actual design shift like clockless processor design - like we all read about a couple of weeks ago here on Slashdot.
Since clockless design is supposed to pave the way for faster, less power-hungry parts, and this new insulator technology allows you to use less power and achieve higher speed chips - wouldn't the two technologies be complementary?
Okay, stupid question finished - feel free to flame me!
Uhhh... you can browse perfectly well on a Commodore. Do you think the benefits of open-source development are restricted to Linux geeks? I have a friend who to this day still uses a Commodore Amiga 1000 as his primary machine. Why? Because he can, and because he likes it. Also he's a cheap bastard, but that's beside the point - he's a geek and he's having fun. Open-source developers have made browsers and mail clients available for AmigaDOS, as well as such niceties as ICQ clients. Throw in a modem and a long-distance call to an ISP in Pakistan, and poof! He's online, regardless of conditions in Afghanistan itself.
The rationalization for the Episode 1 look versus the Episodes 4-6 starship looks in Star Wars is that the Ep.1 era was the zenith of the Old Republic, just before a fall. The look and feel of everything was a lot more "classic" and "designed", because they had time to spend on the artistry of their work.
By Ep 4-6, the galaxy was embroiled in civil war (and had been for years), under the boot of the Empire. The Empire cared only about destructive power and plenty of it, while the Rebellion cared about getting any sort of fighting ship they could lay their hands on.
In such a situation, the "design" and "look" of the vehicles is obviously a far second behind their ability to produce them in mass quantities.
To cement the idea in your head, think about how cars looked in the mid-late 50's - all streamlined and fancy, and then think about how they looked in the 70's and early 80's - ugly crates on wheels. The 50's cars plainly looked better, but that was not important to people who wanted cheap cars that would consume less gas and be safer to drive.
'Historical integrity' as you put it does not mean 'things look better over time' - it means that the universe's history is self-consistent. It's not the "look" of Star Trek: Enterprise you should be concerned with, but rather its place in the Star Trek universe, and what impact it has on that universe's self-consistency.
You can't compile a working version anyway, as they didn't include the cryptographic keys in the source... so save yourself the bother and don't worry about compiling - just grok the source and learn from it.
Read the books again. Paul's first son, named Leto II was killed by the Harkonnen in the raids leading up to the climactic battle. The second go-around with Paul and Chani was the pregnancy which lead to the twins, Leto II (again, this one ultimately to become the God Emperor), and Ghanima. The miniseries is 100% correct in this respect.
Careful with that FUD you're slinging around there... Sure Cable has a higher peak bandwidth potential but neither you nor anyone else will ever actualize that potential...
Cable bandwidth is a shared resource, meaning that 10Mb/s is the most that can be flowing into or out of your neighborhood/apartment at one time. Furthermore, the bandwidth your modem can theoretically support is never the bandwidth your ISP will allocate to your area - typical individual cable connections are capped at around 500kb/s down and many are capped ridiculously low (in the order of 50kb/s) on the up side.
DSL bandwidths, although theoretically lower, are dedicated in the same way as T1 bandwidths are - you well never share that lower bandwidth potential with your neighbor the porn freak, or his friend the MP3 fanatic.
When you include all the facts, DSL does not come out 'inferior' to cable in price/performance at all.
Ultimately the evaluation has to be extended to include customer service and technical know-how of the provider - and in this case, cable providers almost universally suck. Many DSL offerings are equally bad, but at least they don't come from the cable provider's "we'll fix you when we're good and ready" mindset.
Besides... there are secret projects underway at the Bells to provide ubiquitous T1-type access over existing infrastructures, at relatively negligible costs (I can't substatiate this as I'm under NDA, so feel free to take it with a huge grain of salt) in the very near future.
...one giant step for turning the lights back on in California!
Re:But why support Athlon first?
on
nVidia nForce
·
· Score: 1
You're mostly right, I think. Certainly compilation for a particular processor will help any application - optimizing the way they're feeding the pipelines and registers, I suppose - but code-level optimization is equally important. It's just that the PIV is crippled when fed code optimized for PIII or Athlon architectures - which is of course a glaring weakness. If you wrote a heavily cache-dependent application and tried to run it on an original Celeron, for instance, you'd be slaughtered in the benchmarks. Similarly, an awareness of how the PIV does its work is necessary to write efficient code for its quirks - the difference is that unlike the original Celerons, the PIV has huge upsides that can be taken advantage of. Whether developers choose to do this extra work is of course an open question, and will be driven by market adoption and of course by Intel developer incentives.
Don't even get me started on benchmarks - those can be twisted to say whatever the tester wishes said... properly used they should be a good comparison of actual platform limitations and capabilities between different architectures, and SHOULD be indicative of the degree to which real code can be optimized and expected to go toe-to-toe on those architectures. Reality however often differs...
Slashdot Mirror
This is the whole reason I own a Gameboy Advance.... I own only three games for it, Pitfall, Super Mario Bros., and Castlevania. The only reason I have this thing in the first place is to recapture a bit of my gaming youth, when games like Turrican and Turrican 2 trapped me for hours at a time. Man, I never realized before now exactly why I craved the GBA so much - it wss the years of repressed platformer lust!
Why in the hell would I go to Wawa for milk, instead of the local convenience store? It's not like I have a goose fetish or anything...
You americans have strange ideas.
I can't begin to count the number of times I was refused admittance to an 'R' rated movie as a teenager, despite the fact that my father was right with me, trying to bring me in.
He knew I loved sci-fi movies, and would try to take me to films like Robocop, since he knew damn well that the movie wouldn't scar me for life. Trust me, living in Canada, the amount of blood you see in blackfly season, or just cleaning fish you caught, is enough to make even the goriest movie look like a Disney flick. It would take a hell of a movie to scar a Canadian kid.
Movie ratings should be for parental guidance or unattended children only, if a parent is there with them, they should be able to do whatever they want with their kid.
I'm not going to dispute the "MS is dirty" part of your assertion - they are. But the french courts are hardly ones to be held in high esteem for their faultless assignment of blame. They are after all the ones who have decided to fine the entire world for not following french internal laws out in their own countries (i.e. Yahoo Auctions + Nazi memorabilia).
The French are not a society to be held up as paragons of virtue, regardless of their luck in catching Microsoft's hand in the cookie jar.
Whenever I buy a magazine, I automatically flip past the ads to the articles. This is an automatic process which takes no special interaction on my part. Am I therefore a thief?
Similarly, when a commercial comes on TV, I either walk the dog, go grab a snack, hit the washroom, or change the channel. This too is a completely automated process, handled by the lower functions of my brain without ever entering my consciousness. It's like blinking or breathing, you don't even notice you're doing it.
I suppose I'm somehow violating a sacred contract between me and the folks to whom I have already given my money for the priviledge of doing whatever the hell I choose to with their product , right? I guess I'd better feel guilty now.... nope, sorry, I can't manage it. I'm just a bad, bad person.
Yeah, I agree. People really shouldn't be surprised. But just to straddle the fence a little bit, just because we are in a capitalist system doesn't give companies moral authority to do whatever the hell sneaky crap they like in the name of profits. Sure they may legally be in the right, but I doubt many people other than slimy lawyers would agree with that assessment. Catch-22?
If all the payment you ever get is beer, you sound like you have a very limited diet. I hope to hell you're getting Guinness, so that you can at least get your daily recommended dose of vitamins, minerals, protein, carbohydrates, and that nice "I just ate a brick" feeling of fullness.
I can't argue with that, O Defender of Common Sense, but it's also common sense that if you're going to be inflicting something someone generally will NOT want upon them as an adjunct of an agreement, you should make it CLEAR to them that you're doing it so they can a) intelligently opt out, or b) decide to accept the consequences. In either case, you have a satisfied customer (or non-customer) rather than an irate one down the road. The point is that intentionally HIDING non-obvious downsides by burying them in legalese is not a forthright thing to do. Yes people should know better, but companies do have at least some obligation to behave themselves too.
Maybe you're not familiar with the notion of capitalism, but the only point of ANY company is to make money (not-for-profit companies aside, obviously).
Actually, rocks *can* hold a relatively small amount of water. That's why they had to change the saying to "trying to get BLOOD from a stone", after they found out you could, in fact, get water from one (if you picked the right one). Just my pedantic little tip for the day :)
Technically, it's not a chord until you've got three notes, since by definition a chord is a grouping of 3 or more notes.
I work for a major bank in Canada, and our ATMs run OS/2, the same platform as our branch teller systems.
Yes, pity us...
Sure it works as a joystick, but with Force Feedback (the whole reason I paid so much)?
Maybe it's different with the original FF (which I brok), but my FF2 (which I bought to replace it) gets no feedback at all in Win2K or WinXP.
It's not really like letting Hazelwood drive an oil tanker, itt's more like letting him fly Air Force One, while there's an open bar and it's bikini day for the stewardesses.
And just who should appoint them?
1. Political figures eager to have judges on the bench who will look favorably on their pet issues?
2. Other legal profession members eager to have judges appointed who will interpret the law in the way most likely to keep themselves and their cohorts employed and in power?
3. The uneducated masses who are more concerned with who so-and-so slept with than they are with the pursuit of justice?
4. Some group of people who just know better than the rest of us and will put in place people who think "the right way" about legal quandaries?
No matter what you do, corrupt, incompetent, or just uninterested judges will always slip through. The only possible remedy is the prospect of removing a judge who abuses his/her duty, but even that is after the fact. At least election of judges gives SOME opportunity for the interested parties to pre-screen and possibly block bad candidates.
I've never had to sign a speeding ticket in my life in Canada (and believe me, I've had plenty). So am I now retroactively on my way to jail as a terrorist? That'd be a cool story to tell the family at christmas...
This may be a stupid question - but after all I only buy and use processors, I don't design them.
That said, how about Intel taking what seems to me to be the next logical step, and combining what is essentially simply a new insulator breakthrough with an actual design shift like clockless processor design - like we all read about a couple of weeks ago here on Slashdot.
Since clockless design is supposed to pave the way for faster, less power-hungry parts, and this new insulator technology allows you to use less power and achieve higher speed chips - wouldn't the two technologies be complementary?
Okay, stupid question finished - feel free to flame me!
Uhhh... you can browse perfectly well on a Commodore. Do you think the benefits of open-source development are restricted to Linux geeks? I have a friend who to this day still uses a Commodore Amiga 1000 as his primary machine. Why? Because he can, and because he likes it. Also he's a cheap bastard, but that's beside the point - he's a geek and he's having fun. Open-source developers have made browsers and mail clients available for AmigaDOS, as well as such niceties as ICQ clients. Throw in a modem and a long-distance call to an ISP in Pakistan, and poof! He's online, regardless of conditions in Afghanistan itself.
The rationalization for the Episode 1 look versus the Episodes 4-6 starship looks in Star Wars is that the Ep.1 era was the zenith of the Old Republic, just before a fall. The look and feel of everything was a lot more "classic" and "designed", because they had time to spend on the artistry of their work.
By Ep 4-6, the galaxy was embroiled in civil war (and had been for years), under the boot of the Empire. The Empire cared only about destructive power and plenty of it, while the Rebellion cared about getting any sort of fighting ship they could lay their hands on.
In such a situation, the "design" and "look" of the vehicles is obviously a far second behind their ability to produce them in mass quantities.
To cement the idea in your head, think about how cars looked in the mid-late 50's - all streamlined and fancy, and then think about how they looked in the 70's and early 80's - ugly crates on wheels. The 50's cars plainly looked better, but that was not important to people who wanted cheap cars that would consume less gas and be safer to drive.'Historical integrity' as you put it does not mean 'things look better over time' - it means that the universe's history is self-consistent. It's not the "look" of Star Trek: Enterprise you should be concerned with, but rather its place in the Star Trek universe, and what impact it has on that universe's self-consistency.
You can't compile a working version anyway, as they didn't include the cryptographic keys in the source... so save yourself the bother and don't worry about compiling - just grok the source and learn from it.
Read the books again. Paul's first son, named Leto II was killed by the Harkonnen in the raids leading up to the climactic battle. The second go-around with Paul and Chani was the pregnancy which lead to the twins, Leto II (again, this one ultimately to become the God Emperor), and Ghanima. The miniseries is 100% correct in this respect.
We already have billions of sweat-eating bacteria on our bodies... this is what leads to the phenomenon known as "stank-ass body odour".
Careful with that FUD you're slinging around there... Sure Cable has a higher peak bandwidth potential but neither you nor anyone else will ever actualize that potential...
Cable bandwidth is a shared resource, meaning that 10Mb/s is the most that can be flowing into or out of your neighborhood/apartment at one time. Furthermore, the bandwidth your modem can theoretically support is never the bandwidth your ISP will allocate to your area - typical individual cable connections are capped at around 500kb/s down and many are capped ridiculously low (in the order of 50kb/s) on the up side.
DSL bandwidths, although theoretically lower, are dedicated in the same way as T1 bandwidths are - you well never share that lower bandwidth potential with your neighbor the porn freak, or his friend the MP3 fanatic.
When you include all the facts, DSL does not come out 'inferior' to cable in price/performance at all.
Ultimately the evaluation has to be extended to include customer service and technical know-how of the provider - and in this case, cable providers almost universally suck. Many DSL offerings are equally bad, but at least they don't come from the cable provider's "we'll fix you when we're good and ready" mindset.
Besides... there are secret projects underway at the Bells to provide ubiquitous T1-type access over existing infrastructures, at relatively negligible costs (I can't substatiate this as I'm under NDA, so feel free to take it with a huge grain of salt) in the very near future.
...one giant step for turning the lights back on in California!
You're mostly right, I think. Certainly compilation for a particular processor will help any application - optimizing the way they're feeding the pipelines and registers, I suppose - but code-level optimization is equally important. It's just that the PIV is crippled when fed code optimized for PIII or Athlon architectures - which is of course a glaring weakness. If you wrote a heavily cache-dependent application and tried to run it on an original Celeron, for instance, you'd be slaughtered in the benchmarks. Similarly, an awareness of how the PIV does its work is necessary to write efficient code for its quirks - the difference is that unlike the original Celerons, the PIV has huge upsides that can be taken advantage of. Whether developers choose to do this extra work is of course an open question, and will be driven by market adoption and of course by Intel developer incentives.
Don't even get me started on benchmarks - those can be twisted to say whatever the tester wishes said... properly used they should be a good comparison of actual platform limitations and capabilities between different architectures, and SHOULD be indicative of the degree to which real code can be optimized and expected to go toe-to-toe on those architectures. Reality however often differs...