Wow, Samsung's Bada website has a 456K background image on the front page, mostly of water ripples. I guess it's not meant to be viewed on a mobile connection...
I want a mainstream OS that allows fine-grained privileges for programs. Why should I have to give my screensaver permission to do anything except display graphics, and perhaps read some data files from its own directory?
If you download an already-ripped mp3 when you already own the CD and could have ripped and encoded it yourself, could your action be found fair use, yet the actions of the site who provided you the mp3 be found as infringing? I love the bizarro world of copyright infringement, where for example a bit is more than just a 1 or 0.
You can't blame bad US management of SPAM distribution. I think it's the economic situation. Give us a few years and we'll be on top again. As an American, I take pride that we are the top at everything, and have no doubt we'll return there once this bad economic weather blows over.
I have to disagree with that. Malware problem is usually because of user stupidity. Like any other OS, you can run Windows securely if you don't do stupid things.
Agreed; Mac users are no more bright, so they should set up a call center for Mac OS X malware infections too, though they could staff it less, perhaps with one person. Oh wait, Mac OS X doesn't have the malware level as Windows, even given the same level of user carelessness.
"So two theories remain: either the gas is created as a by-product of reactions between volcanic rock and water, or it is a by-product of a lifeform's metabolism."
Or C: There is some, as of yet, unidentified method of methane production.
That's nothing. Just yesterday I downloaded an app, and my computer produced a knock-off on the spot! And when I saved it on the hard drive, it produced another one. I couldn't tell the difference, but I've heard from Apple that they are indeed knock-offs.
These car analogies break down because they describe new design ideas. The summary makes it sound more like a mechanic opening the hood to do an oil change and seeing a new kind of engine that's not described anywhere, that apparently lots of people have had in their cars for thousands of years.
How does it mean "one step away from"? "All" is all and "but" is like "except". So the house is everything, except destroyed, i.e. not destroyed.
If a house is intact, it's little else. It's not damaged, doesn't have peeling paint, isn't falling apart, isn't rotting. So if a house is all but destroyed, it is all of the above things, except destroyed (I suppose it's contradictory in that this includes "intact", but whatever).
It did take me a while to come to understand the phrase "all but" as well. I still avoid it since I write words to communicate, not confuse, so I agree with you on some level.
Believe it or not, I live with a women and she could care less about an IQ test. I would also like to go on record as saying that she is much smarter than me
I like the concept of having both e-Ink and LCD screens, each optimized for a different purpose. I think they could improve it further by adding a third screen that's plasma, in case you need some high-speed animation. And for ultimate readability, they could add a mini printer (perhaps two, one thermal, the other inkjet... oh and of course a third for laser, argh, forgot dye sublim as well). They could also have multiple input devices, to optimize for various users and needs. You could have touch pad, touch screen, mouse, and perhaps a camera tracking device. I mean why should we have a book that's presented in a coherent way, when we can have it 5% better by having lots of different media to switch between?
A program is simply a precise specification of exactly what we want done. The reason we have to give so many details is that there are that many degrees of freedom. Even if we write up a requirements document, it still leaves details out; it's not some deficiency of the programming language that we have to specify details.
We always have flexibility in exactly what is done that will still meet our needs, for example I don't care whether the file is copied 512 bytes at a time or 32768 bytes at a time, or what the variable names in the source code are. Within this flexibility we can choose a way of doing things that makes the program easy for a human to make sense of as well.
And then there are comments, not executable and thus not testable. They should represent things that can't be tested or don't need to be, like the reasons for doing something a particular way.
Well, I thought they paid for the licenses for the airwaves, but you do have a point about easements and overhead wires between cell towers. But your ultimate point seems to be that we can dictate anything we want to these companies; if that's the case, why not just have it government run, rather than under the guise of a private enterprise?
Indeed, this will replace my past use of dict.org. Decently-featured ad-free site using the open dict format, but too big of a page header, and the URLs were overly long in comparison:
This is an example of a computer trying to be smart. The way it behaves changes over time with your interactions with it, but this modified behavior is particular to your connection. If you go search on another machine elsewhere, you'll get different behavior, and you might not know why you aren't finding something you could find easily on your home machines. Smart computers frustrate users. Give me a dumb, predictable computer any way, then I can accuractly predict how it'll respond to my input, and this tailor my input for the exact response I want, every time.
Optimization is fine, as long as you're "optimizing" the code to be more clear. This is a good way to redirect the energy that programmers often put into pointless performance optimization. Most understand that optimizing for one thing often de-optimizes somthing else, so they understand that you can't optimize for speed and clarity in many cases. Always looking for ways to make code clearer can become an enjoyable habit, as optimizing for speed is for many. Then you spend your idle moments eliminating many lines of code that you realize are unnecessary, bringing the code closer to its essence. My experience anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, Samsung's Bada website has a 456K background image on the front page, mostly of water ripples. I guess it's not meant to be viewed on a mobile connection...
Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure. Wait, what were we talking about again?
I want a mainstream OS that allows fine-grained privileges for programs. Why should I have to give my screensaver permission to do anything except display graphics, and perhaps read some data files from its own directory?
If you download an already-ripped mp3 when you already own the CD and could have ripped and encoded it yourself, could your action be found fair use, yet the actions of the site who provided you the mp3 be found as infringing? I love the bizarro world of copyright infringement, where for example a bit is more than just a 1 or 0.
I, for one, welcome our soon-to-be Macaque monkey overlords with my open puny-muscled arms.
Conceded.
You can't blame bad US management of SPAM distribution. I think it's the economic situation. Give us a few years and we'll be on top again. As an American, I take pride that we are the top at everything, and have no doubt we'll return there once this bad economic weather blows over.
Agreed; Mac users are no more bright, so they should set up a call center for Mac OS X malware infections too, though they could staff it less, perhaps with one person. Oh wait, Mac OS X doesn't have the malware level as Windows, even given the same level of user carelessness.
Taco Bell?
That's nothing. Just yesterday I downloaded an app, and my computer produced a knock-off on the spot! And when I saved it on the hard drive, it produced another one. I couldn't tell the difference, but I've heard from Apple that they are indeed knock-offs.
Why, because all the ironed clothes would get wrinkled or something, requiring re-ironing?
Next you'll be telling me that we should read the articles before commenting. Pshaw!
Well, OK, then this book might help when speaking to a large group in an IRC channel.
These car analogies break down because they describe new design ideas. The summary makes it sound more like a mechanic opening the hood to do an oil change and seeing a new kind of engine that's not described anywhere, that apparently lots of people have had in their cars for thousands of years.
If a house is intact, it's little else. It's not damaged, doesn't have peeling paint, isn't falling apart, isn't rotting. So if a house is all but destroyed, it is all of the above things, except destroyed (I suppose it's contradictory in that this includes "intact", but whatever).
It did take me a while to come to understand the phrase "all but" as well. I still avoid it since I write words to communicate, not confuse, so I agree with you on some level.
I would have been first but I'm posting from Iran.
And I don't think anyone would disagree.
It's not supposed to fill the screen; it's merely supposed to expand the window so that all the content is visible, if possible.
I like the concept of having both e-Ink and LCD screens, each optimized for a different purpose. I think they could improve it further by adding a third screen that's plasma, in case you need some high-speed animation. And for ultimate readability, they could add a mini printer (perhaps two, one thermal, the other inkjet... oh and of course a third for laser, argh, forgot dye sublim as well). They could also have multiple input devices, to optimize for various users and needs. You could have touch pad, touch screen, mouse, and perhaps a camera tracking device. I mean why should we have a book that's presented in a coherent way, when we can have it 5% better by having lots of different media to switch between?
We always have flexibility in exactly what is done that will still meet our needs, for example I don't care whether the file is copied 512 bytes at a time or 32768 bytes at a time, or what the variable names in the source code are. Within this flexibility we can choose a way of doing things that makes the program easy for a human to make sense of as well.
And then there are comments, not executable and thus not testable. They should represent things that can't be tested or don't need to be, like the reasons for doing something a particular way.
I love how his example uses the most confusing variable names possible. Just using proper names should make it clear to almost anyone:
Well, I thought they paid for the licenses for the airwaves, but you do have a point about easements and overhead wires between cell towers. But your ultimate point seems to be that we can dictate anything we want to these companies; if that's the case, why not just have it government run, rather than under the guise of a private enterprise?
http://dict.org/bin/Dict?Strategy=*&Form=Dict1&Database=*&Query=bloated
now versus
http://google.com/dictionary?langpair=en|en&q=bloated
This is an example of a computer trying to be smart. The way it behaves changes over time with your interactions with it, but this modified behavior is particular to your connection. If you go search on another machine elsewhere, you'll get different behavior, and you might not know why you aren't finding something you could find easily on your home machines. Smart computers frustrate users. Give me a dumb, predictable computer any way, then I can accuractly predict how it'll respond to my input, and this tailor my input for the exact response I want, every time.
Optimization is fine, as long as you're "optimizing" the code to be more clear. This is a good way to redirect the energy that programmers often put into pointless performance optimization. Most understand that optimizing for one thing often de-optimizes somthing else, so they understand that you can't optimize for speed and clarity in many cases. Always looking for ways to make code clearer can become an enjoyable habit, as optimizing for speed is for many. Then you spend your idle moments eliminating many lines of code that you realize are unnecessary, bringing the code closer to its essence. My experience anyway.