Ok, let's take this from the top then. The x64 version of Windows XP is based on the Windows Server 2003 SP1 code base. Windows Server 2003 SP1 is built from both Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP SP2 -- if you do any reading on the matter, which you haven't, you'll find this all out for yourself. The changes made available in SP2 are in the 64 bit version of Windows, just like they're now in 2003 SP1.
And to go one further, yes, it is out of beta. It was out of beta a really long fucking time ago. It was in the release candidate stage for a while, but it was recently released to manufacturing. It's an interesting thing to note that SP1 for 2003 and the x64 version of XP were finished and released at nearly the exact same time.
Finally, if you're still convinced it's a pre-release version, please go to the MSDN website or your favorite torrent site to download the final code.
I make it a point not to visit drudge unless there's something to be read, but I've never had a pop up or under from there. Maybe it's your browser preferences; I use adblock and some custom settings in Firefox.
The above settings were, at one point, undocumented, though I don't know if they remain that way. Try it and see if the problem persists.
See another poster's link to a good set of adblock filters, though really the only way to have a good set of filters is to be patient for the first week while you block everything on the sites *you* visit. I don't need my browser running through a three megabyte text file every time it loads a page, just because some guy in Abu Dhabi needs ads blocked on the local dating website, you know?
The article doesn't even look like it's been proofread. It doesn't look like a grammar checker was run on it before PDFing it, either. Examples:
Page 1, section 2.1:
In the 1950s a consensus was reached, partly as a result of meetings such as famous meeting at Chapel Hill in 1957...
Page 2, section 2.2:
One thing that is wrong with black holes vis a vie quantum mechanics...
That's only up to the first couple of paragraphs of the second page. Sorry, Doctor, but next time maybe you could take the time to do it right, because if slipshod errors like this are getting through your work, I have to seriously doubt the efficacy of your other work.
It may be that iTunes isn't closing the session or the disc, leaving it unreadable on your older player. Try burning a playlist of MP3s to CD from iTunes and play it. If it doesn't work, try closing the CD using Roxio or Nero (by burning nothing to the disc and telling it to finalize the disc).
Nevertheless, that's not really what's being discussed here.. the paper talks about strong-force physics in the collision which is mathematically "dual" in a certain way to the gravitational description of a black hole.
Ahh, thanks for the clarification. I hadn't gone to the New Scientist page because it clearly said it was subscription only. The first couple of paragraphs from the paper are at the New Scientist link, for anyone who didn't check.
The second sentence is "A fireball created in a particle accelerator bears a striking similarity to a black hole." I'd be interested in reading it, too bad they require a script.
It was my understanding that Hawking radiation is the emission of either a particle or antiparticle from a pair of the two generated just this side of the event horizon of a black hole, where the particle's partner falls into the event horizon and the particle floats on to live another day, appearing as radiation emitting from the black hole. The pair only comes into existence with a boost from the gravity of the black hole.
If this is done in a particle accelerator, which is a vacuum, and the objects with which we're dealing are gluons and other sub-atomic particles, how can their resultant mass be high enough to generate the requisite gravity for such a thing, and from where is the pair made in the vacuum?
At the least, shouldn't the other forces override the strength of gravity by an enormous amount?
He said verbal, not oral. Written is verbal, as is oral. Perhaps he meant he had an email to that effect, which would then be susceptible to subpeona. If it is written, the first thing he should do is make an obscene number of copies of it available off-site, and tell no one that he has it until he can contact a lawyer.
Oh, I forgot. Who needs counsel when you have Ask Slashdot?
USB was invented in 1997. Cassini was launched in 1997. What would you use, the proven 20+ year old RS232 technology, or its replacement, USB?
I'm not saying why they went with what they did, or that there are no other alternatives, but NASA and the ESA probably did what they knew would work, and since they made it there and completed the mission, I'd say it worked.
It bears mentioning that RAR was designed from the get-go to support the features mentioned, and has for what, seven years now? What you mention is an effort to backport the technology that hasn't even been done yet.
I'm not trying to trash 7-zip, but I'm also not going trying 7-zip when RAR has the track record it does for doing what it was designed to do.
Oh: and don't forget baseball bats, kitchen knives, etc. There are all sorts of people out there "intending to break the law" with those tools, too.
I'm not taking issue with what else you said, but keep in mind that baseball bats are made for hitting baseballs, kitchen knives are made for preparing food and occasionally opening envelopes, and guns are made for moving little pieces of metal very fast into people. They're also used as a deterrent, but the threat is always that those little pieces of metal can run faster than you.
Baseball bats, of course, are highly multi-functional devices. They're just sticks, after all. And knives? Very multi-function as well, and are just sticks with sharp metal for one end. And they've been around since, oh, the bronze age. Guns, on the other hand, are complicated devices of recent invention. They have no real purpose other than shooting bullets; they weren't designed on the concept of a stick, they were designed on the concept of shooting people. Guns are fundamentally different from the other items you mentioned, which is why they're treated differently.
It is the responsibility of the leader of the country to lead by example. Telling the democrats that he embraces bi-partisanship and welcomes their participation provided they do things his way, what with his 51% "mandate," is not setting an example for cooperation and friendliness. It's xenophobia, and right now the Republican party and GWB are working very hard to solidify their powerbase with it. Expect the next fifty years to be a direct reflection of the policies being put into place now and the leadership demonstrated by Bush.
Bush didn't cause the bitter socio-political divides in America, but he drives the wedge deeper every day. This is a man who casually disregarded the single largest world-wide demonstration ever, saying it didn't influence him a single bit. That's a man with blinders: everything should be considered by someone who leads. Unfortunately, Bush has the bad habit of "sticking to his guns" and not letting himself be swayed once he makes a decision. Even when it is the wrong decision or when that decision has been based on patently false information (e.g., wmd).
Leading by example means you admit your mistakes and listen to the people you lead, not 51% of them.
That's one of the issues I have with representatives in congress. They come to congress with an agenda, and that agenda is not to do the will of the people. I think more representatives, rather than toeing the party line, ought to ask their constituents what they think on issues and vote appropriately, not what do the people that voted for them and not the other guy or gal think. But hey, that's a pipedream. At least I don't try to force that agenda on people who don't agree with it.
It is useful to be able to have a way for moderators who know more to come along and mod something back down because it really isn't as good as its current mod bonus claims.
And it's very detrimental to have a way for moderators who know far less come along and undo what was fair with which to begin. That's the reason why the moderation system is broken. The rules of the system enable the system's failure, and the editors seem content to ride it all the way down.
You don't pay our taxes, so don't screw with our politics. Your option is for your government to work with ours diplomatically.
They pay levies for trade. It's certainly their right to show an interest in the politics of other countries. The United States has made a living out of manipulating the governments of other countries, so it's a bit of a kettle/pot deal.
Besides, you're seriously suggesting the restriction of free speech of people in another country when it comes to talking about the US. It's all about control. Just look at the words you used: don't screw with our politics, your option is. You seem to enjoy telling people what they can and can't do and restricting their ability to do anything about it by removing the fundamental part of any defense: speech. What if the US were to up and decide it wanted to invade a sovereign nation and occupy it for an undetermined amount of time? Would it not be the right of that country's people to take action to prevent that from happening? Can those people not voice their dissent? Should all work be done exclusively through diplomatic channels? Your answer may be yes, but reality may take issue with that.
Grow your ecomomy and military might to ours, then we won't have the most powerful president in the world.
It is the right of other peoples to grow their economies and militaries however they see fit, including by going on the Internet and saying "Frist sucks, Obama oh-eight."
If you want to influence our politics, you should at lease do so within our legal framework.
The US violated international law by invading and occupying Iraq, and you want to talk about doing things by the (that is, your) book? We're talking about free speech here, freedom of expression, freedom of life. Your argument sounds more and more like "Things would be perfect if only everyone would do things the way I think they should be done."
Remember these words the next time you trash China's human rights record or North Korea's human rights record or Sudan's human rights record or complain about Iran seeking nuclear weapons or complain about the French and their hairy women. Many of those countries don't allow such dissent, so why aren't you following their laws? Why do you have to persist with this massive grass-roots world-wide condemnation of rights abuses when you're clearly not doing it through diplomatic channels? Write your ambassador, don't encourage dissent by word of mouth. That's crazy free-speech talk.
If by "fixes a lot of the issues" you mean "loads the entire application and its plugins at startup rather than on demand," then yeah, they sure fixed those problems.
RealPlayer tried that crap once too, right around the time of the G2 player and straight through v8 at least. I don't know about since then, because I won't touch the software.
Adobe is basically saying "we can't write the reader without it being a piece of shit that's bloated and slow, so we'll just load it all into memory and hope for the best." They're not even trying; it's akin to Microsoft not trying to fix Windows and instead releasing anti-spyware software.
I'd be a lot happier if they would make some kind of admission that yes, their software does suck and that while they are taking these stop-gap measures, which suck and are very poorly thought-through, they are also fixing the problems with their software permanently. One problem that I see is that companies are stuck in the mindset that they should re-use all the code they can and never rewrite code. This leads to bloat upon bloat upon tangled messes of code that is eventually held together with silly-string. Take for example MFC, or worse ActiveX: Microsoft hasn't come clean or come out to say "don't use these, we didn't know what we were thinking," but they've since come out with.NET saying that it does all the things right that need to be done right and haven't been done right until now.
Adobe's in a similar position with Acrobat, except they don't have a solution (which isn't to say.NET resolves anything in particular). They seem to keep saying more of the same is better, and are getting away with it because their customers have been lulled into the idea that Acrobat needs to be a resource hog. Mac OS X users of Preview already know better, and I'm still in disbelief that there are no alternative readers for Windows given Adobe's piss-poor performance.
You've been paying too much attention in school. Despite what the prophets of capitalism will say, competition does not mean everyone wins. In fact, by definition, competition means that someone will win and someone will lose.
While there may be tangible benefits from competition by nations in space exploration, there are certainly benefits from cooperation as some recent explorations have shown, particularly Cassini/Huygens. Two nations with $10 billion each can do projects together that are impossible alone.
Part of the problem with your thinking is that you seem to think that nations aren't driven to innovate in the field of space research. The main problem right now is that there isn't enough money to do what they imagine they can do; we're not short on ideas by any means, but we're short on means to be sure.
My belief is that we're not going to see significant care shown to the space programs here in America any time soon, as most politicians are too busy solidifying their power bases by exploiting whatever hot-ticket item they can. Space exploration isn't going to win over Nascar dads, but being pro-life and imprisoning American citizens without hearings because they are suspected of terror ties that cannot be proven seems to work.
using the money that the Fed govt is no longer taking from them.
Um, you do realize that it isn't the plan to do away with income taxes and other taxes and replace them with nothing, right? Your argument is assuming they're going to do away with those taxes and go back to their dusty homes in Bumfuck Alabama; they're most certainly not. The idea is to maintain a very high income level for the government through a VAT, which means all that new-found disposable income you assume everyone will have will now be spent on a nice Federal sales tax.
Why would someone on a P2P network worry about downloads being logged by the servers if they weren't trading anything illegal?
Why would you worry about the police logging all the websites you visit and scanning all your email if you aren't doing anything illegal?
Why would you worry about the police putting a camera in your bedroom and bathroom to watch for subversive behavior if you aren't doing anything illegal?
What it really comes down to is, if they don't trust me, then I don't trust them. You might not care about your privacy, and you're welcome to that, but don't stand in the way of mine.
Actually, to make a difference, I'd go the other way around. When they ask for you, or the homeowner, or whomever, ask them to hold on while you find that person. Put the phone down, and walk away to do something else. If they hold for 10 minutes or more, you'll get a good laugh out of it.
This doesn't make a difference. Telemarketing companies aren't stupid; they know that the front-line marketers, the ones that actually make the calls, need to get a certain number of hooks each day to stay profitable. Just because people dislike telemarketing companies doesn't mean they're run by people without sense.
The case is often that once the marketer gets someone on the line to say "Sure, I'm interested," they kick the call to the actual sales rep, who'll do all the finessing. The marketer then goes back to the next call to try again. Depending on the product, the marketer will have to run through about fifty more calls before they catch another fish, with calls running--at most--sixty seconds, with an average of about twenty. Do you really believe that the policy of the company is to spend ten minutes on a fifty-to-one shot just because someone asks you to hold on? Moreso, do you really believe that an employee is going to give up on thirty calls for the same fifty-to-one shot? There are quotas to meet each day, and those who do not meet them are terminated.
These companies also often have a monitoring system to check the length of all calls -- anyone on the line for more than a minute is likely to be listened in on, and have the call disconnected if the need is there. On top of that, the marketers typically have a timer on their computer display that shows how long the current call has been connected. These ideas aren't new; it's not like you're catching telemarketers off-guard.
I understand where the thought is in asking them to hold for ten minutes, and you're possibly going to reel in one every now and then for a minute or two at most, but these are sticks in the riverbed to impede a flood; telemarketing companies make money--they wouldn't be around if they didn't. These tricks aren't going to make a lick of difference.
If USA can attack another country "Just Like That"(tm), I would consider Chinese's censorship a godsend given it's only imposed within its own country. If you decided to move there, respect its laws; if you don't agree with its laws, go somewhere else. You always have a choice.
There's a difference between invading another country and taking it by force--killing tens of thousands of people in the process--and restricting Internet access. Your comparison is ridiculous, at best.
The parent makes a good point about how fucking dumb many programmers are when it comes to versioning..16?.0.1.0.3? Seriously, when your product is at the version.0 stage, you have an idea, motherfuckers, not software. That MediaPortal has written code that's been released and updated shows it is on its way to v1.0, not v.0.1.
I've even seen jackasses give complex numbering systems to visual styles for Windows XP. Myr0x0rstyle v1.1.2.90.1a alpha RC2 is not a goddamned version number. When you have a code base of thirty-million lines, THEN you have release candidates. When you change the height of a PNG by three pixels it is a bugfix.
That said, I have to disagree with the general feel of comments for this article thus far. Sure, Microsoft sucks and all, but most people that've tried to run MediaPortal will say the same of it. I tried, and spent a decent amount of time trying to get it to work. It was about hour five that I was trying to get the TV tuner to work, which requires that every single channel be manually entered, when I realized that the reason I wanted to use it, for the TV guide and PVR capabilities, was not worth the hassle of trying to get very immature software to work. The rest of it hadn't worked well anyway. Entering full screen mode caused the application to lock up three out of four times. Entering one module and attempting to return to the root locked up the application about half the time.
I applaud the writers of the software for their work (my only beef being how they number their releases, as though they were illiterate oog cave-spawn), and understand they release it to get help, but no one should consider MediaPortal to be any kind of half-serious solution for anything. I can download ATi's Multimedia Center, install it without having to install the.NET Framework, set the source to Cable and click "Autoscan." One minute later it knows every channel I have and begins playing the television. That is a half-serious solution.
And school SHOULD mimic the real world as closely as possible- that's called job training, and it's what the school is supposed to be doing.
Again, my point is that school does many things for many people; do you think that as a student in continuing education one should be forced to learn the hard way about the "real world" despite the fact that one's been working in said world for the preceding twenty years, and no less continues that work while getting an education?
NOT arbitrarily- there should be a method to the madness. The method I suggested is the same one that is in place in the real world- those who band together and work the system within the system do better than those who merely complain. Those who stay silent often get what is not deserved.
There should be a method--your method, in particular, you seem to say. Any methodology by definition is based on principles of exclusivity; your basis is that it prepares specifically for this loosely defined "real world" whose nature is colloquial.
If your education does not prepare you for the real world- then it is worthless.
Again with the real world; these are not concrete and objective ideas at play here, but you're imparting unilateral values. That's the part with which I disagree.
the real world is not fair and never will be
So neither should school be? We should avoid opportunities at fairness because other people are dicks? You should follow up your last line with "Trust me, I checked into it."
You realize that you're saying he should not fail them because it's unfair, but that he should give lower grades to students that he arbitrarily doesn't like? When that dislike is borne merely of how someone reacts to realizing their professor will fail an otherwise A student for her mis-calculated and impossible examination?
I guess being a dick is ok as long as they're your kind of dick. That's not to say I don't see that you have a reason for believing it's a wise course of action, whereby you're encouraging people to "work the chain of command," but an ego-trip is an ego-trip, and coercing people in such a manner is exactly that.
That explains the retarded names from Intel and AMD ever since then. Such examples of horrible names - Athlon XP, Centrino, etc. I prefer 1.4 GHZ 686 myself. You know exactly what you're getting then, same goes for the stupid PR numbers.
That's my point - people would read the packaging and not the retarded name the cpu was given.
You need to make up your mind. You say the names are retarded and you would prefer it if they had names that reflected a feature of the processor that is meaningless by itself, with the indication being that by having this non-representative number in the name you will know exactly what you're getting, which you won't. You then say that if people read the packaging they'd be able to figure out what the products really are. But if they read the damned package, then it doesn't matter what it's called. You have an inability to pick -- either the name matters or it doesn't.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, let's take this from the top then. The x64 version of Windows XP is based on the Windows Server 2003 SP1 code base. Windows Server 2003 SP1 is built from both Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP SP2 -- if you do any reading on the matter, which you haven't, you'll find this all out for yourself. The changes made available in SP2 are in the 64 bit version of Windows, just like they're now in 2003 SP1.
And to go one further, yes, it is out of beta. It was out of beta a really long fucking time ago. It was in the release candidate stage for a while, but it was recently released to manufacturing. It's an interesting thing to note that SP1 for 2003 and the x64 version of XP were finished and released at nearly the exact same time.
Finally, if you're still convinced it's a pre-release version, please go to the MSDN website or your favorite torrent site to download the final code.
I make it a point not to visit drudge unless there's something to be read, but I've never had a pop up or under from there. Maybe it's your browser preferences; I use adblock and some custom settings in Firefox.
The settings in Firefox are:
user_pref("browser.link.open_newwindow", 1);
user_pref("browser.link.open_newwindow.ui", 1);
The above settings were, at one point, undocumented, though I don't know if they remain that way. Try it and see if the problem persists.
See another poster's link to a good set of adblock filters, though really the only way to have a good set of filters is to be patient for the first week while you block everything on the sites *you* visit. I don't need my browser running through a three megabyte text file every time it loads a page, just because some guy in Abu Dhabi needs ads blocked on the local dating website, you know?
The article doesn't even look like it's been proofread. It doesn't look like a grammar checker was run on it before PDFing it, either. Examples:
Page 1, section 2.1:
In the 1950s a consensus was reached, partly as a result of meetings such as famous meeting at Chapel Hill in 1957...
Page 2, section 2.2:
One thing that is wrong with black holes vis a vie quantum mechanics...
That's only up to the first couple of paragraphs of the second page. Sorry, Doctor, but next time maybe you could take the time to do it right, because if slipshod errors like this are getting through your work, I have to seriously doubt the efficacy of your other work.
It may be that iTunes isn't closing the session or the disc, leaving it unreadable on your older player. Try burning a playlist of MP3s to CD from iTunes and play it. If it doesn't work, try closing the CD using Roxio or Nero (by burning nothing to the disc and telling it to finalize the disc).
The second sentence is "A fireball created in a particle accelerator bears a striking similarity to a black hole." I'd be interested in reading it, too bad they require a script.
It was my understanding that Hawking radiation is the emission of either a particle or antiparticle from a pair of the two generated just this side of the event horizon of a black hole, where the particle's partner falls into the event horizon and the particle floats on to live another day, appearing as radiation emitting from the black hole. The pair only comes into existence with a boost from the gravity of the black hole.
If this is done in a particle accelerator, which is a vacuum, and the objects with which we're dealing are gluons and other sub-atomic particles, how can their resultant mass be high enough to generate the requisite gravity for such a thing, and from where is the pair made in the vacuum?
At the least, shouldn't the other forces override the strength of gravity by an enormous amount?
He said verbal, not oral. Written is verbal, as is oral. Perhaps he meant he had an email to that effect, which would then be susceptible to subpeona. If it is written, the first thing he should do is make an obscene number of copies of it available off-site, and tell no one that he has it until he can contact a lawyer.
Oh, I forgot. Who needs counsel when you have Ask Slashdot?
USB was invented in 1997. Cassini was launched in 1997. What would you use, the proven 20+ year old RS232 technology, or its replacement, USB?
I'm not saying why they went with what they did, or that there are no other alternatives, but NASA and the ESA probably did what they knew would work, and since they made it there and completed the mission, I'd say it worked.
It bears mentioning that RAR was designed from the get-go to support the features mentioned, and has for what, seven years now? What you mention is an effort to backport the technology that hasn't even been done yet.
I'm not trying to trash 7-zip, but I'm also not going trying 7-zip when RAR has the track record it does for doing what it was designed to do.
Oh: and don't forget baseball bats, kitchen knives, etc. There are all sorts of people out there "intending to break the law" with those tools, too.
I'm not taking issue with what else you said, but keep in mind that baseball bats are made for hitting baseballs, kitchen knives are made for preparing food and occasionally opening envelopes, and guns are made for moving little pieces of metal very fast into people. They're also used as a deterrent, but the threat is always that those little pieces of metal can run faster than you.
Baseball bats, of course, are highly multi-functional devices. They're just sticks, after all. And knives? Very multi-function as well, and are just sticks with sharp metal for one end. And they've been around since, oh, the bronze age. Guns, on the other hand, are complicated devices of recent invention. They have no real purpose other than shooting bullets; they weren't designed on the concept of a stick, they were designed on the concept of shooting people. Guns are fundamentally different from the other items you mentioned, which is why they're treated differently.
It is the responsibility of the leader of the country to lead by example. Telling the democrats that he embraces bi-partisanship and welcomes their participation provided they do things his way, what with his 51% "mandate," is not setting an example for cooperation and friendliness. It's xenophobia, and right now the Republican party and GWB are working very hard to solidify their powerbase with it. Expect the next fifty years to be a direct reflection of the policies being put into place now and the leadership demonstrated by Bush.
Bush didn't cause the bitter socio-political divides in America, but he drives the wedge deeper every day. This is a man who casually disregarded the single largest world-wide demonstration ever, saying it didn't influence him a single bit. That's a man with blinders: everything should be considered by someone who leads. Unfortunately, Bush has the bad habit of "sticking to his guns" and not letting himself be swayed once he makes a decision. Even when it is the wrong decision or when that decision has been based on patently false information (e.g., wmd).
Leading by example means you admit your mistakes and listen to the people you lead, not 51% of them.
That's one of the issues I have with representatives in congress. They come to congress with an agenda, and that agenda is not to do the will of the people. I think more representatives, rather than toeing the party line, ought to ask their constituents what they think on issues and vote appropriately, not what do the people that voted for them and not the other guy or gal think. But hey, that's a pipedream. At least I don't try to force that agenda on people who don't agree with it.
It is useful to be able to have a way for moderators who know more to come along and mod something back down because it really isn't as good as its current mod bonus claims.
And it's very detrimental to have a way for moderators who know far less come along and undo what was fair with which to begin. That's the reason why the moderation system is broken. The rules of the system enable the system's failure, and the editors seem content to ride it all the way down.
While you and your friends are screaming about Bush or the collapse of american society, you miss the benefits you take advantage of as an american.
So your response to people who voice their own ideas is, "pipe down, you've been given enough already"?
You don't pay our taxes, so don't screw with our politics. Your option is for your government to work with ours diplomatically.
They pay levies for trade. It's certainly their right to show an interest in the politics of other countries. The United States has made a living out of manipulating the governments of other countries, so it's a bit of a kettle/pot deal.
Besides, you're seriously suggesting the restriction of free speech of people in another country when it comes to talking about the US. It's all about control. Just look at the words you used: don't screw with our politics, your option is. You seem to enjoy telling people what they can and can't do and restricting their ability to do anything about it by removing the fundamental part of any defense: speech. What if the US were to up and decide it wanted to invade a sovereign nation and occupy it for an undetermined amount of time? Would it not be the right of that country's people to take action to prevent that from happening? Can those people not voice their dissent? Should all work be done exclusively through diplomatic channels? Your answer may be yes, but reality may take issue with that.
Grow your ecomomy and military might to ours, then we won't have the most powerful president in the world.
It is the right of other peoples to grow their economies and militaries however they see fit, including by going on the Internet and saying "Frist sucks, Obama oh-eight."
If you want to influence our politics, you should at lease do so within our legal framework.
The US violated international law by invading and occupying Iraq, and you want to talk about doing things by the (that is, your) book? We're talking about free speech here, freedom of expression, freedom of life. Your argument sounds more and more like "Things would be perfect if only everyone would do things the way I think they should be done."
Remember these words the next time you trash China's human rights record or North Korea's human rights record or Sudan's human rights record or complain about Iran seeking nuclear weapons or complain about the French and their hairy women. Many of those countries don't allow such dissent, so why aren't you following their laws? Why do you have to persist with this massive grass-roots world-wide condemnation of rights abuses when you're clearly not doing it through diplomatic channels? Write your ambassador, don't encourage dissent by word of mouth. That's crazy free-speech talk.
If by "fixes a lot of the issues" you mean "loads the entire application and its plugins at startup rather than on demand," then yeah, they sure fixed those problems.
.NET saying that it does all the things right that need to be done right and haven't been done right until now.
.NET resolves anything in particular). They seem to keep saying more of the same is better, and are getting away with it because their customers have been lulled into the idea that Acrobat needs to be a resource hog. Mac OS X users of Preview already know better, and I'm still in disbelief that there are no alternative readers for Windows given Adobe's piss-poor performance.
RealPlayer tried that crap once too, right around the time of the G2 player and straight through v8 at least. I don't know about since then, because I won't touch the software.
Adobe is basically saying "we can't write the reader without it being a piece of shit that's bloated and slow, so we'll just load it all into memory and hope for the best." They're not even trying; it's akin to Microsoft not trying to fix Windows and instead releasing anti-spyware software.
I'd be a lot happier if they would make some kind of admission that yes, their software does suck and that while they are taking these stop-gap measures, which suck and are very poorly thought-through, they are also fixing the problems with their software permanently. One problem that I see is that companies are stuck in the mindset that they should re-use all the code they can and never rewrite code. This leads to bloat upon bloat upon tangled messes of code that is eventually held together with silly-string. Take for example MFC, or worse ActiveX: Microsoft hasn't come clean or come out to say "don't use these, we didn't know what we were thinking," but they've since come out with
Adobe's in a similar position with Acrobat, except they don't have a solution (which isn't to say
You've been paying too much attention in school. Despite what the prophets of capitalism will say, competition does not mean everyone wins. In fact, by definition, competition means that someone will win and someone will lose.
While there may be tangible benefits from competition by nations in space exploration, there are certainly benefits from cooperation as some recent explorations have shown, particularly Cassini/Huygens. Two nations with $10 billion each can do projects together that are impossible alone.
Part of the problem with your thinking is that you seem to think that nations aren't driven to innovate in the field of space research. The main problem right now is that there isn't enough money to do what they imagine they can do; we're not short on ideas by any means, but we're short on means to be sure.
My belief is that we're not going to see significant care shown to the space programs here in America any time soon, as most politicians are too busy solidifying their power bases by exploiting whatever hot-ticket item they can. Space exploration isn't going to win over Nascar dads, but being pro-life and imprisoning American citizens without hearings because they are suspected of terror ties that cannot be proven seems to work.
Why would you worry about the police putting a camera in your bedroom and bathroom to watch for subversive behavior if you aren't doing anything illegal?
Probably for the same reason the rest of us would worry, and I think it has to do with a dead woman being sued for downloading music.
What it really comes down to is, if they don't trust me, then I don't trust them. You might not care about your privacy, and you're welcome to that, but don't stand in the way of mine.
The case is often that once the marketer gets someone on the line to say "Sure, I'm interested," they kick the call to the actual sales rep, who'll do all the finessing. The marketer then goes back to the next call to try again. Depending on the product, the marketer will have to run through about fifty more calls before they catch another fish, with calls running--at most--sixty seconds, with an average of about twenty. Do you really believe that the policy of the company is to spend ten minutes on a fifty-to-one shot just because someone asks you to hold on? Moreso, do you really believe that an employee is going to give up on thirty calls for the same fifty-to-one shot? There are quotas to meet each day, and those who do not meet them are terminated.
These companies also often have a monitoring system to check the length of all calls -- anyone on the line for more than a minute is likely to be listened in on, and have the call disconnected if the need is there. On top of that, the marketers typically have a timer on their computer display that shows how long the current call has been connected. These ideas aren't new; it's not like you're catching telemarketers off-guard.
I understand where the thought is in asking them to hold for ten minutes, and you're possibly going to reel in one every now and then for a minute or two at most, but these are sticks in the riverbed to impede a flood; telemarketing companies make money--they wouldn't be around if they didn't. These tricks aren't going to make a lick of difference.
Further, unjust laws remain unjust.
The parent makes a good point about how fucking dumb many programmers are when it comes to versioning. .16? .0.1.0.3? Seriously, when your product is at the version .0 stage, you have an idea, motherfuckers, not software. That MediaPortal has written code that's been released and updated shows it is on its way to v1.0, not v.0.1.
.NET Framework, set the source to Cable and click "Autoscan." One minute later it knows every channel I have and begins playing the television. That is a half-serious solution.
I've even seen jackasses give complex numbering systems to visual styles for Windows XP. Myr0x0rstyle v1.1.2.90.1a alpha RC2 is not a goddamned version number. When you have a code base of thirty-million lines, THEN you have release candidates. When you change the height of a PNG by three pixels it is a bugfix.
That said, I have to disagree with the general feel of comments for this article thus far. Sure, Microsoft sucks and all, but most people that've tried to run MediaPortal will say the same of it. I tried, and spent a decent amount of time trying to get it to work. It was about hour five that I was trying to get the TV tuner to work, which requires that every single channel be manually entered, when I realized that the reason I wanted to use it, for the TV guide and PVR capabilities, was not worth the hassle of trying to get very immature software to work. The rest of it hadn't worked well anyway. Entering full screen mode caused the application to lock up three out of four times. Entering one module and attempting to return to the root locked up the application about half the time.
I applaud the writers of the software for their work (my only beef being how they number their releases, as though they were illiterate oog cave-spawn), and understand they release it to get help, but no one should consider MediaPortal to be any kind of half-serious solution for anything. I can download ATi's Multimedia Center, install it without having to install the
And school SHOULD mimic the real world as closely as possible- that's called job training, and it's what the school is supposed to be doing.
Again, my point is that school does many things for many people; do you think that as a student in continuing education one should be forced to learn the hard way about the "real world" despite the fact that one's been working in said world for the preceding twenty years, and no less continues that work while getting an education?
Hubris and petard, dude.
NOT arbitrarily- there should be a method to the madness. The method I suggested is the same one that is in place in the real world- those who band together and work the system within the system do better than those who merely complain. Those who stay silent often get what is not deserved.
There should be a method--your method, in particular, you seem to say. Any methodology by definition is based on principles of exclusivity; your basis is that it prepares specifically for this loosely defined "real world" whose nature is colloquial.
If your education does not prepare you for the real world- then it is worthless.
Again with the real world; these are not concrete and objective ideas at play here, but you're imparting unilateral values. That's the part with which I disagree.
the real world is not fair and never will be
So neither should school be? We should avoid opportunities at fairness because other people are dicks? You should follow up your last line with "Trust me, I checked into it."
You realize that you're saying he should not fail them because it's unfair, but that he should give lower grades to students that he arbitrarily doesn't like? When that dislike is borne merely of how someone reacts to realizing their professor will fail an otherwise A student for her mis-calculated and impossible examination?
I guess being a dick is ok as long as they're your kind of dick. That's not to say I don't see that you have a reason for believing it's a wise course of action, whereby you're encouraging people to "work the chain of command," but an ego-trip is an ego-trip, and coercing people in such a manner is exactly that.