Why do publishers believe it's an all or nothing proposition? Surely they can make books available on a case by case basis? Your (her) objection doesn't apply in many cases, e.g. fiction.
Most of the books you do see in this system are either 1) books from minor publishers too stupid to have thought this through, or 2) a very short list of throwaway books from major publishers to prove to Amazon and themselves that it actually eats sales rather than driving them -- the consensus of the publishing industry.
7 of the current top 20 Amazon fiction and literature books have the "search inside" logo. Another to have "look inside". Are you trying to claim that nearly 50% of Amazon's top 20 fiction and literature books are either from stupid minor publishers or are throwaway books? In fact 5 of the top 25 books of any type are searchable. Maybe you're not getting the real story from your girlfriend?
You're wrong about Amazon requiring a login, and Google is presenting the content as an image, and limiting the number of pages each user can view from each book. In summary, Amazon and Google are going about this in the exact same way.
That's because it's just part of the regular web search. Try doing a search for the ISBN of the book they used in the example (1592001149) and you'll see a book result at the top.
Provided that you are willing to declare OSS a hobbiest thing and not for serious consideration by bussinesses. If the rule is "It might get fixed, if we feel like it" then it's not something that can really be considered to be on the same level as commercial sofware.
I said "we do have the right to fix the bugs ourselves or pay someone else to fix them, of course." If you want to rely on OSS software commercially then you should be willing to pay to fix problems you encounter. That may mean internally or it may mean paying a third party to provide support. That's why the likes of RedHat exist. OSS can be a good choice for commerical choice because it allows a company to take control of support themselves. That's a option you don't normally have with closed source software.
That's fine, but it's mutually exclusive with the "OSS is much more secure and fixed much faster/better than commercial software." If that is the case then OSS developers, espically for major projects which are used as examples of OSS ruling, need to be on the stick with it and have to be held to the same standard.
Not at all. The fact is that many OSS packages are more secure and fixed more quickly than equivalent closed source software. That there is no guarantee of support doesn't make it any less true. Mozilla is not a particularly good example, but there are plenty of better ones. Apache, Sendmail, and the Linux kernel for starters.
Note that "it might get fixed, if we feel like it" isn't all that different from the closed source world anyway. There are no guarantee from Microsoft (for example) that they'll fix security vulnerabilities or any other bug, but since we paid for the software I think we have a moral right to expect them to (in the case of security vulnerabilities).
I was speaking about the slashbot collective. Certainly there are exceptions to the rule.
There is no Slashdot collective. That's where your mistake lies. You are trying to make a point by railing against the beliefs of this entity that you created. That's a strawman argument, and not valid.
That's up to their paying clients to decide, not you. And certainly not the obnoxious sheep herd that unfortunately seems permanently attached to the open source movement and seems so full of insight into how to better manage a 50 million customer base.
I am a paying client. What made you assume I wasn't? What makes you assume that the people who complain about Microsoft's tardy resolution of security vulnerabilities are not paying clients?
Please remember that it is illogical to accuse a group of hypocrisy unless that group has made a common position clear. Since neither the Open Source community nor Slashdot are groups which speak with a single voice it is only reasonable to accuse specific individuals of hypocrisy. Your l33t-speak cuteness doesn't apply to me as I have never claimed that OSS fixes bugs quicker than Microsoft. Therefore your point is not valid.
Of course there are cases where Microsoft have been faster and vice versa. I'm not sure which group is faster on average, though OSS certainly has the potential to be faster. But the fact remains that it is not unreasonable to hold Microsoft to a higher standard because they are not free (as in beer) and open.
One point you seem to have missed is that people pay Microsoft for their software and therefore have a right to expect Microsoft to correct security vulnerabilities in a timely manner. As we are not paying for Mozilla we really have no right to make demands. We do have the right to fix the bugs ourselves or pay someone else to fix them, of course.
Yes, these are all advantages of gmail over Yahoo mail or Hotmail. But not over locally running email clients. Why use gmail if there are apps which are completely ad-free, work with any number of great spam filters, are faster than gmail, and work without a network connection?
Access from multiple machines, particularly from machines you are only using temporarily.
Web based email and POP/IMAP email are complimentary services and GMail is the best web based service I've used.
Lack of air is not the problem. It's a heavy car with 4WD and 4WS and without power steering it's very difficult to turn the wheel when the car is stationary or moving slowly (i.e. being pushed). I haven't tried it at highway speeds so I'm not saying it's impossible to steer in that situation, but it would be difficult. I can't understand why anyone would want to cut the ignition anyway. Use the clutch and/or neutral.
I've driven long distances with power steering offline, it's not that hard.
It very much depends on the car. I drive a Mitsubishi 3000GT, and it's virtually impossible to steer at all without the power steering. With the car stationary I find it very difficult to turn the wheel, my wife can't turn it at all. If the car was moving it'd be somewhat easier, but still difficult. I wouldn't want to have it happen at highway speeds.
Ok, I hereby withdraw my statement where I claimed to know absolutely everything about garbage collection. It is a weird statement, you know, considering how I ended it with a question mark. Usually we call those questions. But then again the internet is all about not reading but insulting someone for asking a question you consider stupid.
Someone asked a question, I answered it and asked another. If anyone who knows anyone about garbage collection wouldn't ask a stupid question like mine, what do you say to the parent's question? He must be some grade A idiot.
You made a blanket statement about how crap GC is, and then revealed, via your question, that you don't know the first thing about GC. As you clearly have absolutely no understanding of GC at all your opinion is worthless. Thus the reaction you've got. You probably would have got a few troll moderations if wasn't so obvious that you're just ignorant and not actually being malicious with the crap you're spouting.
I agree, operator overloading is a huge plus for numeric classes. But it's not without it's problems for other types of classes.
In the case of Java, one problem I have with it is the distinction between primitive types and objects. There doesn't seem to be a lot of reason for it and while they've seen the light to a degree with the auto-boxing stuff in the latest version, they should have done it properly in the first place. If all types behaved like real objects then they could have had a superclass for all numeric classes and they could have allow operator overloading on numeric classes only. That way operator overloading could have been used where it most makes sense, without allowing it for general classes.
This isn't all that different from tempting programmers to write
int i = 1 + 2 * 3;
and expect i to be 9 instead of 7.
Except that people expect to deal with precedence when doing arithmetic. They don't expect to deal with precedence simply because a particular symbol is being used to represent a function name.
CrazyObjectNumber c = ((a = a.multiply(b)).add(53)).clone();
Which one is easier to read?
Operator overloading is perfect for number classes, obviously. But how often do you write number classes?
The problem with operator overloading is not just confusion over the meaning of the operator, it also that operators have an additional attribute that needs to be remembered and accounted for: precedence. Say you've got a String class that has append() and replicate() methods. You do:
String s = "<"; s.append(">"); s.replicate(3);
The meaning is clear. You'll end up with s = "".
If you overload + to mean append and * to mean replicate you'll be tempted to do:
String s = "<" + ">" * 3;
You'll get s = ">>", assuming you're language converts string literals to Strings automatically. And this stupid example of overloading is really obvious, far more obvious than many real world uses.
The bottom line is that operator overloading can both clarify and obfuscate code. It's nice to have the option in a language, but the argument against it is not a meritless one.
The line seems distinct enough for you to distinguish Star Wars as fantasy.;)
But a lot of people wouldn't - that's my point - it's not easy to really say.
Semantics aside, my point is that nearly all SF now being produced is much closer to "The Net" or "Hackers" or "Bride of the Atom" than "Permutation City" or "Cryptonomicon". Nearly everything I see onscreen now inserts absolute gibberish into the script, and as long as the words have more than two syllables, it is accepted as a Scientific Incantation(TM).
In terms of movies, it's never been that great. I don't think we're doing any worse than before. Movies like The Minority Report and even I, Robot are reasonable attempts at true SF, even if they're not great. When you compare them to stuff like Star Wars or E.T. they're more than holding their own in terms SF-ness.
In terms of books I think we're doing much better than we were 10 or 20 years ago. This SF is dead trip that Slashdot has been on lately is certainly nothing new, and things were looking pretty bleak back in the 80's and 90's. That's why Larry Niven was known as the "last, best hope for hard SF". These days things are looking up. We've got authors like Banks, Baxter, Pournelle, and Barnes. We've got the cyberpunk authors like Sterling, Gibson, and Stephenson. I think some people see the lack of gadgets in new SF as implying the demise of SF, where really it's a sign that SF has matured.
Science fiction is a form of fiction which deals principally with the impact of imagined science and/or technology upon society or individuals.
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fiction
The job of SF is to ask "what if", and examine the effects. It's a way of auditioning scientific priorities socially. Remove the science and you just have fiction.
I'm not sure what you're refering to as Fantasy, but the line is certainly blurry. The job of both SF and Fantasy is to tell a good story. The secondary role is often to examine the implications of "what if". This is the case in both SF and Fantasy (though much more obvious in SF), which is why they are often included together under the umbrella term "speculative fiction".
The generally accepted difference between Fantasy and SF (or at least hard SF) is that SF employs self-consistent rules and does not break them, while in Fantasy the rules can be bent or broken. This includes coherent, scientific sounding explanations for fantastic effects. Thus stories such Star Wars are really more Fantasy then SF, despite Lucas' Midichlorians.
Accordind to TFA, variation between the genes which control red perception is very high - as many as 40% of women may have significant variation. That means that some degree of tetrachromacy is much more common than previously thought.
How many people are really doing this, and what is/.'s rationale for not allowing under/over rating to be meta-moderated? Anyone?
It's a fairly well known fact that over/under-rated moderations are not metamodded. Personally I use over-rated fairly often as the equivalent of "-1, factually incorrect", since the other negative moderations often don't really fit.
The rationale for not putting over/under-rated through M2 is simple: to evaluate whether a post is over/under-rated you need to know the score of the post at the time the mod was made. That context is not available so it is not possible to accurately metamoderate. Abuses should be reported to an editor.
Wake me when someone verifies his work. I can claim to solve anything, but it doesn't mean much unless the community says I'm right. Right off the bat it seems fishy: no journal submission, just a web post? No referee? And he's not answering questions about his work? He's either a genius or a nutcase, possibly both.
The claim has been around for a while. From the referenced MathWorld article:
Almost exactly a year later, Perelman's results appear to be much more robust. While it will be months before mathematicians can digest and verify the details of the proof, mathematicians familiar with Perelman's work describe it as well thought out and expect that it will prove difficult to locate any significant mistakes.
That was in April 2003. It's now over a year later again and it hasn't been disproven.
I may not have done any research before posting, but at least I can read the post I'm replying to.
Oops! Should have read more carefully. I have to question the point of saying Russia leads except for the Moon, in the context of manned spaceflight. The Moon is the big achievement in manned spaceflight so far, and the USSR failed spectacularly at it. To take out the Moon is kind of like talking about who's winning the race for second.
The Russian combination of expendable manned launchers and expendable cargo boosters has basically the same capabilities as the US shuttle system, at lower cost and lower risk to human life. Expendables work; reusables have never been shown to be anything more than a pipe dream.
That's not quite true. The Russians' Soyuz launchers don't have the crew capacity and their unmanned vehicles don't have the cargo capacity of the Shuttle. In fact no expendable has ever had the crew capacity of the Shuttle. Without the Shuttle there would not be an ISS, or a Hubble. No one else has the capability at this time (the Russians would have, had the Energia platform that was used with Buran been continued or restarted). As it is the ISS is severly limited by the capacity of the Soyuz "lifeboat". Of course the US doesn't have an alternative to the Shuttle either, but the argument there is that they have the Shuttle so they don't need an alternative (or more realistically, they can't afford a second high-capacity system).
Ultimately both sides have capabilities the other doesn't and have had triumphs. At the moment the US have no manned lauch capacity at all, so at this instant it's hard to deny that Russian are doing better. Over all though I don't think there is much basis to the claim that the USSR and/or Russia are/were better at manned spaceflight.
It's not layers, per se; each window is rendered to a separate area of memory, and the composition manager builds the final screen from the various windows.
Isn't that what "layers" is? That's what I get, but then I'm thinking in terms of the old AmigaOS layers stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
You're wrong about Amazon requiring a login, and Google is presenting the content as an image, and limiting the number of pages each user can view from each book. In summary, Amazon and Google are going about this in the exact same way.
That's because it's just part of the regular web search. Try doing a search for the ISBN of the book they used in the example (1592001149) and you'll see a book result at the top.
Note that "it might get fixed, if we feel like it" isn't all that different from the closed source world anyway. There are no guarantee from Microsoft (for example) that they'll fix security vulnerabilities or any other bug, but since we paid for the software I think we have a moral right to expect them to (in the case of security vulnerabilities).
Of course there are cases where Microsoft have been faster and vice versa. I'm not sure which group is faster on average, though OSS certainly has the potential to be faster. But the fact remains that it is not unreasonable to hold Microsoft to a higher standard because they are not free (as in beer) and open.
One point you seem to have missed is that people pay Microsoft for their software and therefore have a right to expect Microsoft to correct security vulnerabilities in a timely manner. As we are not paying for Mozilla we really have no right to make demands. We do have the right to fix the bugs ourselves or pay someone else to fix them, of course.
Web based email and POP/IMAP email are complimentary services and GMail is the best web based service I've used.
Lack of air is not the problem. It's a heavy car with 4WD and 4WS and without power steering it's very difficult to turn the wheel when the car is stationary or moving slowly (i.e. being pushed). I haven't tried it at highway speeds so I'm not saying it's impossible to steer in that situation, but it would be difficult. I can't understand why anyone would want to cut the ignition anyway. Use the clutch and/or neutral.
In the case of Java, one problem I have with it is the distinction between primitive types and objects. There doesn't seem to be a lot of reason for it and while they've seen the light to a degree with the auto-boxing stuff in the latest version, they should have done it properly in the first place. If all types behaved like real objects then they could have had a superclass for all numeric classes and they could have allow operator overloading on numeric classes only. That way operator overloading could have been used where it most makes sense, without allowing it for general classes.
Yes, oops. Thanks.
The problem with operator overloading is not just confusion over the meaning of the operator, it also that operators have an additional attribute that needs to be remembered and accounted for: precedence. Say you've got a String class that has append() and replicate() methods. You do:
The meaning is clear. You'll end up with s = "".If you overload + to mean append and * to mean replicate you'll be tempted to do:You'll get s = ">>", assuming you're language converts string literals to Strings automatically. And this stupid example of overloading is really obvious, far more obvious than many real world uses.
The bottom line is that operator overloading can both clarify and obfuscate code. It's nice to have the option in a language, but the argument against it is not a meritless one.
In terms of books I think we're doing much better than we were 10 or 20 years ago. This SF is dead trip that Slashdot has been on lately is certainly nothing new, and things were looking pretty bleak back in the 80's and 90's. That's why Larry Niven was known as the "last, best hope for hard SF". These days things are looking up. We've got authors like Banks, Baxter, Pournelle, and Barnes. We've got the cyberpunk authors like Sterling, Gibson, and Stephenson. I think some people see the lack of gadgets in new SF as implying the demise of SF, where really it's a sign that SF has matured.
The generally accepted difference between Fantasy and SF (or at least hard SF) is that SF employs self-consistent rules and does not break them, while in Fantasy the rules can be bent or broken. This includes coherent, scientific sounding explanations for fantastic effects. Thus stories such Star Wars are really more Fantasy then SF, despite Lucas' Midichlorians.
Accordind to TFA, variation between the genes which control red perception is very high - as many as 40% of women may have significant variation. That means that some degree of tetrachromacy is much more common than previously thought.
The rationale for not putting over/under-rated through M2 is simple: to evaluate whether a post is over/under-rated you need to know the score of the post at the time the mod was made. That context is not available so it is not possible to accurately metamoderate. Abuses should be reported to an editor.
Ultimately both sides have capabilities the other doesn't and have had triumphs. At the moment the US have no manned lauch capacity at all, so at this instant it's hard to deny that Russian are doing better. Over all though I don't think there is much basis to the claim that the USSR and/or Russia are/were better at manned spaceflight.