Hey, wasn't there a story out there a while back about a teacher who got canned because the overlords found a pic of her with a drink on the interweb? I'm too lazy to look for it... Anyway, ignoring the fact that you shouldn't expect any sort of protection of your ePrivacy from the likes of MySpace, it seems like a not entirely bad idea to try to limit the extent of exposure of some of the pics even as you share them with friends and even if most people would consider them benign. Of course the safest approach would be to not participate at all, but then one of your friends will post someting on your behalf and you won't even know about it... or something.
Gah, I was trying to be funny. Granted, I may have failed, but who'd launch a serious attack on someone else's choice of words by calling it "a bold declaration that is rife with interesting implications?" Maybe I strayed too far from the comedic mechanisms you're familiar with - maybe I should have started with "In Soviet Russia" instead? How about: In Soviet Russia, sieves leak like Firefox?
Maybe it's late and I'm looking to nitpick, but "it's obvious that past versions leaked like sieves" is a bold declaration that is rife with interesting implications that I don't think are strictly true.
Sieves leak by design. Judging by the sheer quality of the leaking, you may think that FF also did this by design but that's probably not the case.
When a sieve leaks, water entering from outside the system passes through the system at a constant rate. When FF leaks, the fixed amount of memory in your system is rendered unavailable at an arbitrary rate.
That question does not follow. As the section you quoted states and you repeat in your question, quasars are the theoretical source of the dust that cannot be otherwise attributed to old stars. Where did you get the impression that the absence of dust impedes quasar formation?
A man who stands to directly benefit from our fear of the cyberevil is telling us that said cyberevil is a) epic, b) growing in excess of other epic evils we are familiar with, and c) being grossly underestimated by everyone. Fantastic. Where's the credibility? We don't really need to attack his figures - the intractable flaw in the analysis is that his interpretation of them will never be without the looming spectre of disingenuousness, even if we cannot pinpoint it. Let's hear from people who aren't in line to make a few hundred million in salary, perks and bonuses if this ruse goes off without a hitch.
The important thing is, Bill Gates had an onion tied to his belt, as was the style at the time.
Has the poster RTFA? That's not even a rant - rants usually have a point or a specific grievance that they're aimed at. There's no point to that, no argument, he's not trying to meaningfully convince anyone of anything, offers no evidence, no logical or illogical basis for what's being concluded, nothing. It's just a loose collection of vague, meaningless assertions about how doomed MS is if they don't change. Does he even name one thing that MS is going to miss out on by not being OSS?
I think comparing email to letter mail/parcel delivery misses on some key details. Most importantly IMHO, for the purpose of mail/parcel delivery, you as a person or business own your address / front door/etc - it is either actually or essentially a public space. Therefore, I as the sender can choose anyone I want to delivery my message to you, based on the price, speed, service features and the willingness of any one service to deliver to wherever you are, and I can do this on a per-message basis. With email, there is no public infrastructure the way the street in front of your house is public and you have no choice but to pay someone to receive messages for you, and they're ostensibly paying for some of the infrastructure used to handle these messages. Also, while there's enough free webmail out there that you have some choice on where to send email from, your message will always end up passing through the same set of hands for any one recipient as it is being delivered, and you can do nothing about that save try to convince them to switch providers.
1)Viruses - I no longer worry and I no longer need to check my PC - that's a relief. You can pick nits here about security but the bottom line is Ubuntu is orders of magnitude better.
2)Vulnerabilities - Windows is like Swiss cheese with so many vulnerabilities that it's sick - you can't connect XP to a public Internet connection (i.e., behind a router is OK but direct to the net isn't). Ubuntu? It's Linux - no worries.
That's FANTASTIC! Who is this guy and what's his IP?
Yes, MS sucks, Windows sucks, bugs galore and all that, but all nontrivial software is going to have bugs, and some of those bugs will lead to vulnerabilities, and some of those vulnerabilities will lead to viruses, attacks and so on. The reason that there aren't a lot of Linux viruses/attacks prawling around the net is because the Windows population is orders of magnitude larger than than the Linux population, making the choice obvious for any would-be parasite. Maybe Ubuntu is way better software than Windows in any number of ways - ehm, I mean, of course it is, but if it were to sweep Windows clean off the face of the Earth and take its place, you'd be installing Symantec for Ubuntu and worrying about script kiddies, trojans and the like. If Ubuntu is better then it'll be harder to exploit, but exploits will happen - the perceived calm right now exists because too few people are trying to attack the platform.
Is it really good insight? Sure, it tells you a lot about a chunk of the market that you collected data from but it tells you nothing beyond that. What about the people who run Steam but declined to take the survey? Their computer preferences could be totally different - maybe they are hot for Vista and would've significantly altered the apparent adoption rate as well as aggregate hardware specs have they participated? What of the people who hate Valve and spend their days playing Doom 3 or Unreal Tournament on dual ATI cards? (I agree, this might be a highly contrived scenario.) How about RTS freaks who are getting uber-monstrous machines of mad l33tness to play Supreme Commander? Or those who are happy playing Starcraft on a P3? None of them are counted or accounted for.
In short, this is only useful to Valve because it tells them explicitly and in agonizing detail about a large number of their customers, but nothing else. It's as good a survey as standing on a hill, regarding other hills with a scrupulous eye and concluding that you've surveyed the land - odds are you haven't seen more than you did see.
The internet is a marketplace and the ISPs are at the doors. If you're, say, Youtube, and have a really swell stand at the market selling refrigerators, they can in theory extort money out of Youtube by not letting people in to see the refrigerators at all, or by only letting people pass through turnstiles, thereby precluidng the purchase of refrigerators.
At the same time, they can fool people coming into the market by advertising having a really big gate that funnels down to turnstiles that you can't see from the outside. You pay to pass through the big gate and are later screwed at the turnstiles because you realize there's no way you can leave with a refrigerator. All this would be fine if the number of doors was large as market forces would dictate price and availability of access, but doors are few in any one area and it's hard to build new ones.
In the long run, the market may die from this, but it may not, and at any rate I don't like the situation.
How's my analogy meter?
On the upside, if there is an upside, the days of the current Canadian government are numbered. We have what you might call a multi-party system (multi > 2) and the current party rules only on account of tentative support from other parties, and that ought to run out on one issue or another sometime this calendar year. We can only hope they don't pass any legislation regarding this (or any other) matter in the meantime.
The article is just fearmongering. Aside from the questionable use of statistics that others pointed out, many of the choice quotes are from sources that are hardly objective, such as "Howard Schmidt, a former White House security adviser and now president and CEO of R&H Security Consulting" or a a "Ken van Wyk, principal consultant with KRvW Associates," which, you guessed it, is a security consulting firm. It's like asking a telemarketer if he thinks you need a new long distance plan. Of course these people are going to tell you everyone's out to get you and they have the answer, all based on the strength of one horrific case study! Sure, you need to check up on people with, as they put it, the keys to your kingdom, but the analysis in TFA is hardly a basis for a level-headed, thoughtful discussion.
Oh man, way to get advertising for your nerdy eBay sale on the busiest nerd blog in the universe, for free. I don't blame you for trying, but nonetheless, a part of me has died inside.
This reminds me of the time when John Smedley sent 1200 Krispy Kreme donuts to Penny Arcade. Arguably he was trying to give them diabetes and put an end to their assault on SOE, but it's entirely possible that bitter hatred and its lesser cousins, disdain and irritation, are no obstacle to having a sense of humour.
I think part of the difficulty you're facing is that this is, well, Slashdot. A lot of the posters are highly opinionated and are not really looking to be convinced of anything. If you're vague on a point someone feels passionately about, put on your asbestos pants. If you go against what people feel is right, you better be wearing a cup under those pants.
The other thing is that, from what I've been reading of the discussion, many people inadvertently confuse what they think is right with what you say about the legality of the matter. Us being technophiles, it seems natural that if you legally obtain music in one medium (CD), you can transfer it to whatever medium you find best for its consumption (IPod, phone, computer) and all is peachy. Given that, as you say (and there's some disagreement from Slashdotters about this) there is no right to listen, that whole idea of moving your music about how you like pretty much flies out the window. But that's not telling the audience what they want to hear, and it doens't mesh with what they feel is right, even if that (or something vaguely like it - I was paraphrasing at best) may be your interpretation of the law as it stands.
If we think back to the good old days of the first Gulf War and all that, we might remember the Patriot missile and what a dismal failure that was. Part of the problem there was that the missile's clock values were such that they would not convert to base 2 (and hence to float) accurately and so the tracking was off and lots of expensive misses happened. If you recall, lots of US soldiers died when a Scud that theoretically ought to have been shot down hit their barracks.
As usual, it's not just one thing that screws everything up, not even in the narrow confines of the Patriot's software problem. Here's a short write-up on that math/software part of it. There were other issues with the Patriot but that'd be blatant off-topic flamebait.;)
Sweet Fancy Moses, it's not quite April Fools yet and the internet's going shit-retarded already. Soon Oracle will buy MySQL, Microsoft will aquire Ubuntu, and Theo de Raadt will be seen playing footsies with Steve Jobs at a gay bar in San Francisco. Or something. Why-o-why does the entire internet have to turn into The Onion with such unmitigated predictability each and every year? Waaaaaah.
So we have "this review sucks" and "MySQL vs the world" debate all at once, which is a great treat for breakfast.
Yeah, alright, the review sucks. Not the first time and not the last time that someone posted something without reading it, and many people post replies without reading it, too. This still doesn't beat, in my book, the "nanotech sticker extends cellphone batterly life" post from a year or two ago that I can't seem to locate now...
As for MySQL, I have the same thing to say about it as I do about Windows; just because it's popular (even if I'm using it... teehee) doesn't mean it's good. It's just popular. This is true of everything. Our selection criteria is flawed, based on incomplete or flawed information and on the wrong reasons or reasoning (and, IIRC, on published benchmarks done without record locking, which all the other database vendors generally do not even allow to be disabled). That and the whole "what's better for you isn't better for me" deal - Slashdot is, after all, a biased audience.
To give a non-technical example, I believe that it's been shown a while ago that, on average, the nutritional value of fruits and vegetables available in your average supermarket is declining, because consumer preference selects for size and colour, which are at best loosly correlated with nutritional value. I'm not saying that software is getting worse - even Windows and MySQL continue to improve, but the aspects of the products that the consumers at large base their software decisions on are only loosly correlated to the quality of the code and the listed functional features of the software.
No, not mine - the story. Well, okay, maybe this post is flamebait too, but do allow me to go on: The discussion has jumped straight into "Canada better than US" or "US better than Canada," and there's 400 replies at the time of this rambling, which is a metric fuckton for a Saturday evening (you Yanks may not know it, but the fuckton is an official metric measure of bullshit that the rest of the world is using). That makes it a flamebait; there's not an objective way to quantify what we're talking about, even if anyone was so inclined, which they aren't. We instead have discussions about the virtue of one and the other, ranging from the philosophical to the political all the way to the asinine. The submitter of the original story cleverly disguised the whole thing beneath a thin veil of relevance, which makes him or her a troll. And the slashdot editors are, well, slashdot editors, and it's the weekend anyway.
I mean, we're not even arguing apples and apples here - we have two mighty white nations on the same continenet, born of the same decrepid empire, abusing their various minorities just as nicely though perhaps in slightly different ways and sharing a very similar set of values overall. If Canada had any place so warm that you could call it "the Deep South," we'd have crazy right-wing evangelical Christian nuts, too, but a good deal of them freeze every winter and what we're left with we call Alberta. And interior BC's no pro-choice-women's-rights picnic, either. Everything else is just details and misguided jingoism on both sides.
Now I'm sure everyone has their own personal experiences on both sides of the border, and will quote them judiciously as absolute evidence of one place being better than another, but that's all horseshit. New York is a lot more like Toronto than it is like Los Angeles, and New Yorkers and Torontonians are a similar breed of asshole who have a lot more in common than, say, New Yorkers and Texans, who pack heat for fun and not for protection and who like to execture retards - we don't in Canada, but there was a time when we chopped off their nuts.
So, in conclusion, we all fell off the same goddamn tree so let's not argue about who's got a bigger worm eating them, aight?
There's an incorrect assumption being made here in how the world revolves, which is that the really large software companies are the shit. Bill Gates may wipe his ass with greenbacks because of the high opportunity cost of reaching for tp given the value of his time, but he does not get to tell everyone what to do. Yeah, he's arguably pushing around the mom&pops out there, the mainstream private computer users, with whatever MS thinks is best, but there are plenty of large, powerful corporations out there with a finite threshhold for taking bullshit from others who are, regardless of size, still their vendors. They may not be able to tell Oracle or MS of whoever what to do, but they certainly can't be ignored or have their needs pissed away. Or something like that.
I worked at Siebel a long time ago, briefly. I am not aware of the details of what went down between Tom Siebel and Oracle, but he didn't like them very much and this was common knowledge. So, we had a some sort of company-wide meeting, where the execs orated at length about various things I no longer remember. This was webcast to all the remote offices, so we got to watch. At one point, while discussing the goals of Siebel for the next little while, Tom muttered, half under his breath, that they hope to complete the transition from an Oracle to DB2 as soon as possible. This wasn't meant to be funny but the entire auditorium (a few hundred people at least) howled. Truly, a high point in any meeting. He looked rather unhappy.
Risk 2210 is actually a lot of fun. I was sceptical when all the new variants of Risk started coming out, one for everyone and their uncle, but having played this one extensively I must say that it's very satisfying, and going back to the original on the occassions that, for whatever reason, we had to go back to the original, was met with a lot of grumbling.
It's way more complicated than the original Risk so it takes a while to get into, but some of the complexity goes a long way to alleviating the problems that made the original such a pain in the ass to play some times, like exponentially increasing army sizes and the potential for the game to never end. The rest of it is just fun.
If you haven't played this version but played the original, here are some highlights of what's new/different:
there's a moon that you can fight over
there are tons cards that do all sorts of horrible, horrible things to players
there's a limited number of turns (5) and at the start of each, you get to bid for the order in which you can go, which adds a cool layer of strategy - even though there are only five turns, there's so much to do that a game can easily last 4-5h
three territories get randomly taken out of the game at the start, so the map could potentially be really really wacky, with wide-open continents suddenly isolated, etc.
the map is pretty wacky to begin with
there are special units called commanders which give you bonuses in combat and each has its own set of cards (you need to have the commander to play them), and which consequently end up as a magnet for all sorts of evil coming your way form other players
there's limited resource management of "energy" - you get it much like you get troops, from the number of territories you control + some from cards, and you use it to buy commanders, troops, space stations & cards, and to activate some cards and bid for turn order
Having said all that, there's nothing preventing people from being very very bad losers, throwing pieces, getting whiny... I hope the next version comes with a tazer.
Call me a bitch about details, but... (I know, someone else will be a detail bitch about my details.)
Quasars radiate tremendous amounts of energy not because matter "disintergrates" as it falls inwards but merely because it falls inwards.
It's as if a bucket of bricks fell on your head from ten stories up (well, almost) - while up there, the bricks & bucket have potential gravitational energy. As the whole thing falls, gravitational potential energy is converted to kinetic energy, some of which is lost to friction with the surrounding air. It may generate sound, like a low whistle or thunderous roar, depending on the aerodynamic properties of the bucket. When the bucket hits, all the remaining kinetic energy is dissipated by your skull and brain, and "radiates away" as sounds and splattering gore. (This last part about the brain and plattering is not necessary for the analogy but I just like talking about gore.)
So, same thing with quasars, more or less. Stuff far away from the quasar has a lot of gravitational potential energy because quasars are so damn massive, which leads to powerful gravity. As it falls inwards, it trades this energy for kinetic enrgy, moving faster, and, as it grinds against other stuff in the accretion disk around the quasar, some of which is moving slower, some of this energy is lost to friction, except instead of sound (whistling) with the bucket & bricks, you get EM radiation. (If the bucket fell from really high up, it might heat up from friction and start emmiting some radiation of its own, in infra red and then in visible light.)
Sice the black holes at the centre of galaxies are so damn huge, and because falling into a black hole release several orders of magnitude more of the massenergy of a piece of matter than fission or fusion ever could (astronomy textbook not at hand, so can't quote the numbers), we get a whole lot of radiation this way, and so quasars are really really bright.
It goes for anything, really. Baseball bats? Golf clubs? Cars? Why is software any different? Conceptually, it ought not to be, but I'm cynical, so I'll say that it's because software ostensibly has the ability to "illegally" undermine the established commercial interests on a large scale, like the movie and music industries are allegedly being done in by p2p. Someone using a car to run down his ex-girlfriend isn't a counter-capitalist activity - add to that the fact that there is [an illusion of] physical control over the commodity (the car has to be bought, can be locked up/taken away, etc.) and the user (a license has to be issued to the driver) and all is rosy. Meanwhile, it takes me a minute to download bittorrent or whatever and costs me barely anything, and all of the sudden I'm sticking to the man by downloading the latest and greatest hits of Hilary Duff. I'm just that much of a rebel.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, wasn't there a story out there a while back about a teacher who got canned because the overlords found a pic of her with a drink on the interweb? I'm too lazy to look for it... Anyway, ignoring the fact that you shouldn't expect any sort of protection of your ePrivacy from the likes of MySpace, it seems like a not entirely bad idea to try to limit the extent of exposure of some of the pics even as you share them with friends and even if most people would consider them benign. Of course the safest approach would be to not participate at all, but then one of your friends will post someting on your behalf and you won't even know about it... or something.
Gah, I was trying to be funny. Granted, I may have failed, but who'd launch a serious attack on someone else's choice of words by calling it "a bold declaration that is rife with interesting implications?" Maybe I strayed too far from the comedic mechanisms you're familiar with - maybe I should have started with "In Soviet Russia" instead? How about: In Soviet Russia, sieves leak like Firefox?
Maybe it's late and I'm looking to nitpick, but "it's obvious that past versions leaked like sieves" is a bold declaration that is rife with interesting implications that I don't think are strictly true.
That question does not follow. As the section you quoted states and you repeat in your question, quasars are the theoretical source of the dust that cannot be otherwise attributed to old stars. Where did you get the impression that the absence of dust impedes quasar formation?
A man who stands to directly benefit from our fear of the cyberevil is telling us that said cyberevil is a) epic, b) growing in excess of other epic evils we are familiar with, and c) being grossly underestimated by everyone. Fantastic. Where's the credibility? We don't really need to attack his figures - the intractable flaw in the analysis is that his interpretation of them will never be without the looming spectre of disingenuousness, even if we cannot pinpoint it. Let's hear from people who aren't in line to make a few hundred million in salary, perks and bonuses if this ruse goes off without a hitch.
The important thing is, Bill Gates had an onion tied to his belt, as was the style at the time.
Has the poster RTFA? That's not even a rant - rants usually have a point or a specific grievance that they're aimed at. There's no point to that, no argument, he's not trying to meaningfully convince anyone of anything, offers no evidence, no logical or illogical basis for what's being concluded, nothing. It's just a loose collection of vague, meaningless assertions about how doomed MS is if they don't change. Does he even name one thing that MS is going to miss out on by not being OSS?
I think comparing email to letter mail/parcel delivery misses on some key details. Most importantly IMHO, for the purpose of mail/parcel delivery, you as a person or business own your address / front door/etc - it is either actually or essentially a public space. Therefore, I as the sender can choose anyone I want to delivery my message to you, based on the price, speed, service features and the willingness of any one service to deliver to wherever you are, and I can do this on a per-message basis. With email, there is no public infrastructure the way the street in front of your house is public and you have no choice but to pay someone to receive messages for you, and they're ostensibly paying for some of the infrastructure used to handle these messages. Also, while there's enough free webmail out there that you have some choice on where to send email from, your message will always end up passing through the same set of hands for any one recipient as it is being delivered, and you can do nothing about that save try to convince them to switch providers.
From TFA:
That's FANTASTIC! Who is this guy and what's his IP?
Yes, MS sucks, Windows sucks, bugs galore and all that, but all nontrivial software is going to have bugs, and some of those bugs will lead to vulnerabilities, and some of those vulnerabilities will lead to viruses, attacks and so on. The reason that there aren't a lot of Linux viruses/attacks prawling around the net is because the Windows population is orders of magnitude larger than than the Linux population, making the choice obvious for any would-be parasite. Maybe Ubuntu is way better software than Windows in any number of ways - ehm, I mean, of course it is, but if it were to sweep Windows clean off the face of the Earth and take its place, you'd be installing Symantec for Ubuntu and worrying about script kiddies, trojans and the like. If Ubuntu is better then it'll be harder to exploit, but exploits will happen - the perceived calm right now exists because too few people are trying to attack the platform.
Is it really good insight? Sure, it tells you a lot about a chunk of the market that you collected data from but it tells you nothing beyond that. What about the people who run Steam but declined to take the survey? Their computer preferences could be totally different - maybe they are hot for Vista and would've significantly altered the apparent adoption rate as well as aggregate hardware specs have they participated? What of the people who hate Valve and spend their days playing Doom 3 or Unreal Tournament on dual ATI cards? (I agree, this might be a highly contrived scenario.) How about RTS freaks who are getting uber-monstrous machines of mad l33tness to play Supreme Commander? Or those who are happy playing Starcraft on a P3? None of them are counted or accounted for.
In short, this is only useful to Valve because it tells them explicitly and in agonizing detail about a large number of their customers, but nothing else. It's as good a survey as standing on a hill, regarding other hills with a scrupulous eye and concluding that you've surveyed the land - odds are you haven't seen more than you did see.
This sounds a whole lot like RFC #3514 to me, except on a higher level, which makes the idea at least four years old.
Yay flamebait... but I'm cold, so what the hell.
The internet is a marketplace and the ISPs are at the doors. If you're, say, Youtube, and have a really swell stand at the market selling refrigerators, they can in theory extort money out of Youtube by not letting people in to see the refrigerators at all, or by only letting people pass through turnstiles, thereby precluidng the purchase of refrigerators.
At the same time, they can fool people coming into the market by advertising having a really big gate that funnels down to turnstiles that you can't see from the outside. You pay to pass through the big gate and are later screwed at the turnstiles because you realize there's no way you can leave with a refrigerator. All this would be fine if the number of doors was large as market forces would dictate price and availability of access, but doors are few in any one area and it's hard to build new ones.
In the long run, the market may die from this, but it may not, and at any rate I don't like the situation.
How's my analogy meter?
On the upside, if there is an upside, the days of the current Canadian government are numbered. We have what you might call a multi-party system (multi > 2) and the current party rules only on account of tentative support from other parties, and that ought to run out on one issue or another sometime this calendar year. We can only hope they don't pass any legislation regarding this (or any other) matter in the meantime.
The article is just fearmongering. Aside from the questionable use of statistics that others pointed out, many of the choice quotes are from sources that are hardly objective, such as "Howard Schmidt, a former White House security adviser and now president and CEO of R&H Security Consulting" or a a "Ken van Wyk, principal consultant with KRvW Associates," which, you guessed it, is a security consulting firm. It's like asking a telemarketer if he thinks you need a new long distance plan. Of course these people are going to tell you everyone's out to get you and they have the answer, all based on the strength of one horrific case study! Sure, you need to check up on people with, as they put it, the keys to your kingdom, but the analysis in TFA is hardly a basis for a level-headed, thoughtful discussion.
Oh man, way to get advertising for your nerdy eBay sale on the busiest nerd blog in the universe, for free. I don't blame you for trying, but nonetheless, a part of me has died inside.
Oops, I may already be a troll.
This reminds me of the time when John Smedley sent 1200 Krispy Kreme donuts to Penny Arcade. Arguably he was trying to give them diabetes and put an end to their assault on SOE, but it's entirely possible that bitter hatred and its lesser cousins, disdain and irritation, are no obstacle to having a sense of humour.
I think part of the difficulty you're facing is that this is, well, Slashdot. A lot of the posters are highly opinionated and are not really looking to be convinced of anything. If you're vague on a point someone feels passionately about, put on your asbestos pants. If you go against what people feel is right, you better be wearing a cup under those pants.
The other thing is that, from what I've been reading of the discussion, many people inadvertently confuse what they think is right with what you say about the legality of the matter. Us being technophiles, it seems natural that if you legally obtain music in one medium (CD), you can transfer it to whatever medium you find best for its consumption (IPod, phone, computer) and all is peachy. Given that, as you say (and there's some disagreement from Slashdotters about this) there is no right to listen, that whole idea of moving your music about how you like pretty much flies out the window. But that's not telling the audience what they want to hear, and it doens't mesh with what they feel is right, even if that (or something vaguely like it - I was paraphrasing at best) may be your interpretation of the law as it stands.
If we think back to the good old days of the first Gulf War and all that, we might remember the Patriot missile and what a dismal failure that was. Part of the problem there was that the missile's clock values were such that they would not convert to base 2 (and hence to float) accurately and so the tracking was off and lots of expensive misses happened. If you recall, lots of US soldiers died when a Scud that theoretically ought to have been shot down hit their barracks.
;)
As usual, it's not just one thing that screws everything up, not even in the narrow confines of the Patriot's software problem. Here's a short write-up on that math/software part of it. There were other issues with the Patriot but that'd be blatant off-topic flamebait.
It is indeed a huge and purty penis extension, but he put it on the wrong end of the carfor that... or did he?
I actually have no idea what I'm insinuating here.
Sweet Fancy Moses, it's not quite April Fools yet and the internet's going shit-retarded already. Soon Oracle will buy MySQL, Microsoft will aquire Ubuntu, and Theo de Raadt will be seen playing footsies with Steve Jobs at a gay bar in San Francisco. Or something. Why-o-why does the entire internet have to turn into The Onion with such unmitigated predictability each and every year? Waaaaaah.
So we have "this review sucks" and "MySQL vs the world" debate all at once, which is a great treat for breakfast.
Yeah, alright, the review sucks. Not the first time and not the last time that someone posted something without reading it, and many people post replies without reading it, too. This still doesn't beat, in my book, the "nanotech sticker extends cellphone batterly life" post from a year or two ago that I can't seem to locate now...
As for MySQL, I have the same thing to say about it as I do about Windows; just because it's popular (even if I'm using it... teehee) doesn't mean it's good. It's just popular. This is true of everything. Our selection criteria is flawed, based on incomplete or flawed information and on the wrong reasons or reasoning (and, IIRC, on published benchmarks done without record locking, which all the other database vendors generally do not even allow to be disabled). That and the whole "what's better for you isn't better for me" deal - Slashdot is, after all, a biased audience.
To give a non-technical example, I believe that it's been shown a while ago that, on average, the nutritional value of fruits and vegetables available in your average supermarket is declining, because consumer preference selects for size and colour, which are at best loosly correlated with nutritional value. I'm not saying that software is getting worse - even Windows and MySQL continue to improve, but the aspects of the products that the consumers at large base their software decisions on are only loosly correlated to the quality of the code and the listed functional features of the software.
And that's my breakfast rant.
No, not mine - the story. Well, okay, maybe this post is flamebait too, but do allow me to go on: The discussion has jumped straight into "Canada better than US" or "US better than Canada," and there's 400 replies at the time of this rambling, which is a metric fuckton for a Saturday evening (you Yanks may not know it, but the fuckton is an official metric measure of bullshit that the rest of the world is using). That makes it a flamebait; there's not an objective way to quantify what we're talking about, even if anyone was so inclined, which they aren't. We instead have discussions about the virtue of one and the other, ranging from the philosophical to the political all the way to the asinine. The submitter of the original story cleverly disguised the whole thing beneath a thin veil of relevance, which makes him or her a troll. And the slashdot editors are, well, slashdot editors, and it's the weekend anyway.
I mean, we're not even arguing apples and apples here - we have two mighty white nations on the same continenet, born of the same decrepid empire, abusing their various minorities just as nicely though perhaps in slightly different ways and sharing a very similar set of values overall. If Canada had any place so warm that you could call it "the Deep South," we'd have crazy right-wing evangelical Christian nuts, too, but a good deal of them freeze every winter and what we're left with we call Alberta. And interior BC's no pro-choice-women's-rights picnic, either. Everything else is just details and misguided jingoism on both sides.
Now I'm sure everyone has their own personal experiences on both sides of the border, and will quote them judiciously as absolute evidence of one place being better than another, but that's all horseshit. New York is a lot more like Toronto than it is like Los Angeles, and New Yorkers and Torontonians are a similar breed of asshole who have a lot more in common than, say, New Yorkers and Texans, who pack heat for fun and not for protection and who like to execture retards - we don't in Canada, but there was a time when we chopped off their nuts.
So, in conclusion, we all fell off the same goddamn tree so let's not argue about who's got a bigger worm eating them, aight?
There's an incorrect assumption being made here in how the world revolves, which is that the really large software companies are the shit. Bill Gates may wipe his ass with greenbacks because of the high opportunity cost of reaching for tp given the value of his time, but he does not get to tell everyone what to do. Yeah, he's arguably pushing around the mom&pops out there, the mainstream private computer users, with whatever MS thinks is best, but there are plenty of large, powerful corporations out there with a finite threshhold for taking bullshit from others who are, regardless of size, still their vendors. They may not be able to tell Oracle or MS of whoever what to do, but they certainly can't be ignored or have their needs pissed away. Or something like that.
An amusing anecdote:
I worked at Siebel a long time ago, briefly. I am not aware of the details of what went down between Tom Siebel and Oracle, but he didn't like them very much and this was common knowledge. So, we had a some sort of company-wide meeting, where the execs orated at length about various things I no longer remember. This was webcast to all the remote offices, so we got to watch. At one point, while discussing the goals of Siebel for the next little while, Tom muttered, half under his breath, that they hope to complete the transition from an Oracle to DB2 as soon as possible. This wasn't meant to be funny but the entire auditorium (a few hundred people at least) howled. Truly, a high point in any meeting. He looked rather unhappy.
Risk 2210 is actually a lot of fun. I was sceptical when all the new variants of Risk started coming out, one for everyone and their uncle, but having played this one extensively I must say that it's very satisfying, and going back to the original on the occassions that, for whatever reason, we had to go back to the original, was met with a lot of grumbling.
It's way more complicated than the original Risk so it takes a while to get into, but some of the complexity goes a long way to alleviating the problems that made the original such a pain in the ass to play some times, like exponentially increasing army sizes and the potential for the game to never end. The rest of it is just fun.
If you haven't played this version but played the original, here are some highlights of what's new/different:
Having said all that, there's nothing preventing people from being very very bad losers, throwing pieces, getting whiny... I hope the next version comes with a tazer.
Call me a bitch about details, but... (I know, someone else will be a detail bitch about my details.)
Quasars radiate tremendous amounts of energy not because matter "disintergrates" as it falls inwards but merely because it falls inwards.
It's as if a bucket of bricks fell on your head from ten stories up (well, almost) - while up there, the bricks & bucket have potential gravitational energy. As the whole thing falls, gravitational potential energy is converted to kinetic energy, some of which is lost to friction with the surrounding air. It may generate sound, like a low whistle or thunderous roar, depending on the aerodynamic properties of the bucket. When the bucket hits, all the remaining kinetic energy is dissipated by your skull and brain, and "radiates away" as sounds and splattering gore. (This last part about the brain and plattering is not necessary for the analogy but I just like talking about gore.)
So, same thing with quasars, more or less. Stuff far away from the quasar has a lot of gravitational potential energy because quasars are so damn massive, which leads to powerful gravity. As it falls inwards, it trades this energy for kinetic enrgy, moving faster, and, as it grinds against other stuff in the accretion disk around the quasar, some of which is moving slower, some of this energy is lost to friction, except instead of sound (whistling) with the bucket & bricks, you get EM radiation. (If the bucket fell from really high up, it might heat up from friction and start emmiting some radiation of its own, in infra red and then in visible light.)
Sice the black holes at the centre of galaxies are so damn huge, and because falling into a black hole release several orders of magnitude more of the massenergy of a piece of matter than fission or fusion ever could (astronomy textbook not at hand, so can't quote the numbers), we get a whole lot of radiation this way, and so quasars are really really bright.
It goes for anything, really. Baseball bats? Golf clubs? Cars? Why is software any different? Conceptually, it ought not to be, but I'm cynical, so I'll say that it's because software ostensibly has the ability to "illegally" undermine the established commercial interests on a large scale, like the movie and music industries are allegedly being done in by p2p. Someone using a car to run down his ex-girlfriend isn't a counter-capitalist activity - add to that the fact that there is [an illusion of] physical control over the commodity (the car has to be bought, can be locked up/taken away, etc.) and the user (a license has to be issued to the driver) and all is rosy. Meanwhile, it takes me a minute to download bittorrent or whatever and costs me barely anything, and all of the sudden I'm sticking to the man by downloading the latest and greatest hits of Hilary Duff. I'm just that much of a rebel.