Not a bad initial concept, but how do you match hashes against partial matches? If I type "hot" and it matches "hotmail" and "hotgirlongirlaction", that's straightforward. I can match against that and Hide it if it's flagged DontShow.
But given that two nearly identical strings have completely different hashes, how can you tell that "hot" occurs in the seed that hashes to 1DE4A5D7BE9EF6F3E2ED1FA1C0E? Is that even possible mathematically?
That's not the point. My computer, my software, my choice. Remember "choice"? Mozilla was all about it at one point in time. It seems with greater market share comes all the negatives we've come to expect from other software vendors.
By all means ask the question. But respect my answer.
I agree with this. However, as time goes on, things do change, and so my answer "NO" today might not be the same as my answer N months from now when they finally get around to updating all my plug-ins.
At the moment, they don't really appear to have the capability to do something like:
While response.Equals(No) {
FindOut(Why);
While (Why.StillRelevant())
{
STFU();
}
Alert("Reason no longer relevant. Upgrade now?"); }
Ah, but it was the Romans who appropriated the phoenician alphabet. So I think it's appropos to have a stupidly wrong base-26 counting system if it's based on phoenician glyphs.
Technically, you're probably right. However, I'll point out that there's no "Year 0" in our accepted western method of counting the years. There's 1AD, and 1BC, but no year 0. It's hardly a modern mathematical system.
I'll agree that it can be ethical to break a rule.
For example, if the IOC had a rule that said that the medal winners had to slay the remaining athletes, like in a gladiatorial contest, clearly it would be ethical to violate this rule and refuse to kill the losers.
However, participation in the Olympic games is not compulsory. If China objects to the age rule, they don't have to compete. No one's forcing them to participate. There is therefore no ethical reason for China to break the rule in this case.
Whether they feel that cheating is ethical in this case or not is immaterial. There are other, ethical avenues which they have chosen not to pursue, such as lobbying to have the age restriction rule dropped or modified, or to start up their own competition where they can set the rules as they see fit.
The way I see it, it is possible that China is acting within an ethical framework - albeit one that most Western societies don't agree with. From their point of view, they're putting their best athlete forward - and doing so seems natural. The age restriction is something that is there to satisfy Western mores; that children should not be competing at that level. Actually, I think our objection there is rather poorly defined. Why don't we allow children to compete?
From that point of view, China is adhering to the idea that you break rules you find unreasonable. What makes their actions unethical is that they're not owning them - presumably out of desire for the gold.
I don't follow what you're saying when you say "they're not owning them". What's unethical about this is that they agreed to participate, and that agreement is an agreement to follow ALL of the rules put forth in the agreement, not just the rules that they find "reasonable" and to stealthily break the "unreasonable" rules. If they disagree with the rules, great; dispute, protest, whatever. I
f they're unreasonable rules, don't participate or start your own games and make up whatever rules you want for them. They certainly have the resources available to do so. Claiming to follow the rules, but not doing so, is cheating.
The Chinese have a concept of honor, but are not following it, because to them, winning brings prestige. Winning at all costs, even. Except perhaps the cost of being found out and exposed as a cheater.
I've been stung before by buying new apple hardware immediately (core duo macbook pro).
Yeah, but I think most people will look at iPhone 3G and see it as iPhone 2.0, not iPhone+3G 1.0. I looked at iPhone 1.0 and saw non-removable battery, no hardware keyboard, no access SD memory slot, no 3G, and only available through Cingular/AT&T, and a really high price tag, and said, "Looks cool, but I'll wait."
I've waited. Price has come down. They've added 3G. If I was an AT&T cellular customer, I likely would have bought one, feeling smart for "waiting til rev 2" like they often say you should. Only, I guess I'd still be a little disappointed and frustrated.
I'm with T-Mobile, hoping I can resist the urge to buy the HTC Dream/Android phone when it comes out until I've seen whether it has any "1.0" issues.
Is this the road we're going down? Pseudo-homophones of idiomatic phrases?
Yes. It's like using l337speak to break through the lameness filter that prevents people from posting stupid cliches, only more pun-ishing for the discriminating reader.
Apple had to struggle to find a single carrier willing to allow the iPhone.
That's because the iPhone is locked down and controlled by Apple. If the iPhone were as open as Palm, Symbian, or Windows Mobile, every major carrier would be shipping it.
...and locking it down with their own controls. It's not a question of who wants the end-user to be freest, it's a question of who gets to lock down the phones so they can charge the end user for every little thing they want to do, like ringtones, applications, and text messages. Locked down and controlled by Apple, or Locked down and controlled by AT&T/Verizon/TMobile/Sprint/whoever, or hack your way to freedom. Those are the options we have right now.
I don't know that it'll be any different when Android ships, either. I have my hopes, but I don't really expect anything to be different. If Google doesn't ship Android locked to the provider's taste, then the providers will surely find a way to lock the phones down so they can sell "free" features back to their customers. The hackers who want to will set themselves free, everyone else will be satisfied to live with the artificial limitations imposed on them by either the carrier or handset manufacturer, or be ignorant.
Cities are unsustainable only if you draw a line around the city limits and say no outside resources can contribute to the city.
Cities are actually beneficial to the environment, as they concentrate the impact of the human environmental footprint, rather than spreading out the damage as suburban sprawl does.
As long as natural resources that cities depend on refresh themselves at a rate greater than that which the cities consume them, a city is perfectly sustainable.
When environmentalists talk about cattle being destructive to the environment, they're talking about the Brazilian rainforest that's being eradicated to create more land to raise cattle on.
It's interesting to think of cattle being essential in parts of the world where they belong, though. But really I think both points are valid.
And you might even have something in common with the environmentalists if you view the Brazilian farmer as competition that will undercut you in the market. Use the environmentalist argument to shut them down, then keep the price of your beef up where you can make a profit.
Agreed, although I can see why VIA is doing what they're doing.
Competition may be good for the market as a whole, but it is often bad for the losers, and it looks like they've determined that their fate along their previous course would ultimately lead to being driven out of the market, so they're cutting out while they still can.
VIA have been an also-ran in the x86 chipset business since around the time nVidia started making nForce boards for AMD. I haven't really considered them since the days of KT266.
I'd venture to guess that a lot of the electronics are too delicate to be able to survive such crushing pressures, and thus such a pressure-equalized submersible would not be feasible.
I should be able to take a flash drive (any flash drive) to Blockbuster and load on my drive a movie where I can play it anywhere.
Probably a good 90+% of Flash drives out there are sub-4GB. A DVD is 4.7GB.
You could easily strip the movie file down to fit in under 1GB, but then you'd be losing alternate audio tracks, bonus features, and video quality.
As well, at USB 2.0 speeds, it'll take a while to load your flash drive. Multiply that by the number of customers in the store, and you're waiting in line a lot longer for the "convenience" of flash media.
And of course, since they're putting a copy on your media, they're going to want to protect it so that the transaction fits the business model of "rental" rather than "purchase". So you're going to have to put up with DRM -- copy protection, time-limited playback, the whole nine yards.
Lastly, good luck to any non-geek who rents a movie this way getting it to play on their arbitrary media center PC using their arbitrary playback app with their arbitrary codecs. DVD players are simple and dumb enough that you can just put a disk in, and unless it's the wrong region or scratched, it'll 99.999% work in your player. That's not something you can say about any video file on any PC/playback device.
That's what standards are for. Surely you'd agree that, all else being equal, an open standard would be preferable to a proprietary standard.
No one needed MS to devise a proprietary version of HTML in order for the WWW to happen.
As far as OO.o is concerned, if you're sending files out to people who have unknown reader capabilities, your best bet would be to export to a common format, such as.rtf or.pdf, both of which I understand OO.o is very capable of doing for you.
If you're sending the document for collaboration purposes, rather than simply distributing information to be read, then you're best bet is to make sure your collaborators have agreed to standardized tools (or, better, standardized interchange formats) so you can all work together. You'll have the same problems collaborating with people who only have MS Works installed instead of Office (though that's rare this decade), or if you're using.docx format instead of.doc.
Microsoft isn't needed for any of this; they just happen to be there (as often as not, getting in the way, or at least soaking up everyone's $$$).
why does open source imitate more than innovate? and wort of all: imitate Microsoft? either you can say how bad MS is, or you can imitate it. you can't have both.)
Sure you can. Not everything Microsoft does is bad. A lot of people dislike MS because they're closed source. Most people dislike MS because they're an anticompetitive monopoly, and as a resulttheir products are frequently buggy (because there's no competition to push them to do better), and won't play well with competitor's products (because that would allow the competitors to compete), and are bloated resource hogs that perform poorly.
But most people like Microsoft's user interfaces. Not everything about MS UI design is great, but even where it sucks, it's what people are used to. Certainly things could be better, and it's not hard to come up with a list of things that should have been done better 10 years ago but haven't. But overall they have a decent, usable, familiar user environment.
Slashdot Mirror
Not a bad initial concept, but how do you match hashes against partial matches? If I type "hot" and it matches "hotmail" and "hotgirlongirlaction", that's straightforward. I can match against that and Hide it if it's flagged DontShow.
But given that two nearly identical strings have completely different hashes, how can you tell that "hot" occurs in the seed that hashes to 1DE4A5D7BE9EF6F3E2ED1FA1C0E? Is that even possible mathematically?
That's not the point. My computer, my software, my choice. Remember "choice"? Mozilla was all about it at one point in time. It seems with greater market share comes all the negatives we've come to expect from other software vendors.
By all means ask the question. But respect my answer.
I agree with this. However, as time goes on, things do change, and so my answer "NO" today might not be the same as my answer N months from now when they finally get around to updating all my plug-ins.
At the moment, they don't really appear to have the capability to do something like:
While response.Equals(No)
{
FindOut(Why);
While (Why.StillRelevant())
{
STFU();
}
Alert("Reason no longer relevant. Upgrade now?");
}
...But they SHOULD.
Ah, but it was the Romans who appropriated the phoenician alphabet. So I think it's appropos to have a stupidly wrong base-26 counting system if it's based on phoenician glyphs.
Technically, you're probably right. However, I'll point out that there's no "Year 0" in our accepted western method of counting the years. There's 1AD, and 1BC, but no year 0. It's hardly a modern mathematical system.
People who base their counting systems on the phonecian alphabet, that's who!
Happy Zth, CD!
You can put mp3 files on a CD, and play them in a CD player that has a mp3 codec in its embedded firmware.
Of course, .WAV or FLAC is better quality, but no one cares about quality for it to affect the market, apparently.
CDs compete with Flash memory and hard drives.
I'll agree that it can be ethical to break a rule.
For example, if the IOC had a rule that said that the medal winners had to slay the remaining athletes, like in a gladiatorial contest, clearly it would be ethical to violate this rule and refuse to kill the losers.
However, participation in the Olympic games is not compulsory. If China objects to the age rule, they don't have to compete. No one's forcing them to participate. There is therefore no ethical reason for China to break the rule in this case.
Whether they feel that cheating is ethical in this case or not is immaterial. There are other, ethical avenues which they have chosen not to pursue, such as lobbying to have the age restriction rule dropped or modified, or to start up their own competition where they can set the rules as they see fit.
The way I see it, it is possible that China is acting within an ethical framework - albeit one that most Western societies don't agree with. From their point of view, they're putting their best athlete forward - and doing so seems natural. The age restriction is something that is there to satisfy Western mores; that children should not be competing at that level. Actually, I think our objection there is rather poorly defined. Why don't we allow children to compete?
From that point of view, China is adhering to the idea that you break rules you find unreasonable. What makes their actions unethical is that they're not owning them - presumably out of desire for the gold.
I don't follow what you're saying when you say "they're not owning them". What's unethical about this is that they agreed to participate, and that agreement is an agreement to follow ALL of the rules put forth in the agreement, not just the rules that they find "reasonable" and to stealthily break the "unreasonable" rules. If they disagree with the rules, great; dispute, protest, whatever. I
f they're unreasonable rules, don't participate or start your own games and make up whatever rules you want for them. They certainly have the resources available to do so. Claiming to follow the rules, but not doing so, is cheating.
The Chinese have a concept of honor, but are not following it, because to them, winning brings prestige. Winning at all costs, even. Except perhaps the cost of being found out and exposed as a cheater.
I've been stung before by buying new apple hardware immediately (core duo macbook pro).
Yeah, but I think most people will look at iPhone 3G and see it as iPhone 2.0, not iPhone+3G 1.0. I looked at iPhone 1.0 and saw non-removable battery, no hardware keyboard, no access SD memory slot, no 3G, and only available through Cingular/AT&T, and a really high price tag, and said, "Looks cool, but I'll wait."
I've waited. Price has come down. They've added 3G. If I was an AT&T cellular customer, I likely would have bought one, feeling smart for "waiting til rev 2" like they often say you should. Only, I guess I'd still be a little disappointed and frustrated.
I'm with T-Mobile, hoping I can resist the urge to buy the HTC Dream/Android phone when it comes out until I've seen whether it has any "1.0" issues.
Is this the road we're going down? Pseudo-homophones of idiomatic phrases?
Yes. It's like using l337speak to break through the lameness filter that prevents people from posting stupid cliches, only more pun-ishing for the discriminating reader.
Apple had to struggle to find a single carrier willing to allow the iPhone.
That's because the iPhone is locked down and controlled by Apple. If the iPhone were as open as Palm, Symbian, or Windows Mobile, every major carrier would be shipping it.
...and locking it down with their own controls. It's not a question of who wants the end-user to be freest, it's a question of who gets to lock down the phones so they can charge the end user for every little thing they want to do, like ringtones, applications, and text messages. Locked down and controlled by Apple, or Locked down and controlled by AT&T/Verizon/TMobile/Sprint/whoever, or hack your way to freedom. Those are the options we have right now.
I don't know that it'll be any different when Android ships, either. I have my hopes, but I don't really expect anything to be different. If Google doesn't ship Android locked to the provider's taste, then the providers will surely find a way to lock the phones down so they can sell "free" features back to their customers. The hackers who want to will set themselves free, everyone else will be satisfied to live with the artificial limitations imposed on them by either the carrier or handset manufacturer, or be ignorant.
Is Obama's stance really evolving? I think it's clear that his policy on NASA is a result of intelligent design.
From the summary:
Come on, link! I'm lazy!
I'll forward you some of my spam. Wouldn't want you to feel lonely.
The summary makes absolutely no sense.
Can anyone shed light on what is going on?
Well, you see, it's like this: Chewbacca is a Wookie from the planet Kashyyyk...
Cities are unsustainable only if you draw a line around the city limits and say no outside resources can contribute to the city.
Cities are actually beneficial to the environment, as they concentrate the impact of the human environmental footprint, rather than spreading out the damage as suburban sprawl does.
As long as natural resources that cities depend on refresh themselves at a rate greater than that which the cities consume them, a city is perfectly sustainable.
When environmentalists talk about cattle being destructive to the environment, they're talking about the Brazilian rainforest that's being eradicated to create more land to raise cattle on.
It's interesting to think of cattle being essential in parts of the world where they belong, though. But really I think both points are valid.
And you might even have something in common with the environmentalists if you view the Brazilian farmer as competition that will undercut you in the market. Use the environmentalist argument to shut them down, then keep the price of your beef up where you can make a profit.
Agreed, although I can see why VIA is doing what they're doing.
Competition may be good for the market as a whole, but it is often bad for the losers, and it looks like they've determined that their fate along their previous course would ultimately lead to being driven out of the market, so they're cutting out while they still can.
VIA have been an also-ran in the x86 chipset business since around the time nVidia started making nForce boards for AMD. I haven't really considered them since the days of KT266.
When's the last time Mickey actually starred in something new, anyway?
I'd venture to guess that a lot of the electronics are too delicate to be able to survive such crushing pressures, and thus such a pressure-equalized submersible would not be feasible.
What I'd like to see is a tool which tracks where I comment without me having to do anything.
While the Director of Homeland Security doesn't appreciate being called a "tool", he is glad that someone values his work.
I should be able to take a flash drive (any flash drive) to Blockbuster and load on my drive a movie where I can play it anywhere.
Probably a good 90+% of Flash drives out there are sub-4GB. A DVD is 4.7GB.
You could easily strip the movie file down to fit in under 1GB, but then you'd be losing alternate audio tracks, bonus features, and video quality.
As well, at USB 2.0 speeds, it'll take a while to load your flash drive. Multiply that by the number of customers in the store, and you're waiting in line a lot longer for the "convenience" of flash media.
And of course, since they're putting a copy on your media, they're going to want to protect it so that the transaction fits the business model of "rental" rather than "purchase". So you're going to have to put up with DRM -- copy protection, time-limited playback, the whole nine yards.
Lastly, good luck to any non-geek who rents a movie this way getting it to play on their arbitrary media center PC using their arbitrary playback app with their arbitrary codecs. DVD players are simple and dumb enough that you can just put a disk in, and unless it's the wrong region or scratched, it'll 99.999% work in your player. That's not something you can say about any video file on any PC/playback device.
Apple employees should just switch which pins are connected via the jumper. It's clearly labeled on the top of the drive.
Pervasiveness is a good thing, yes. But...
That's what standards are for. Surely you'd agree that, all else being equal, an open standard would be preferable to a proprietary standard.
No one needed MS to devise a proprietary version of HTML in order for the WWW to happen.
As far as OO.o is concerned, if you're sending files out to people who have unknown reader capabilities, your best bet would be to export to a common format, such as .rtf or .pdf, both of which I understand OO.o is very capable of doing for you.
If you're sending the document for collaboration purposes, rather than simply distributing information to be read, then you're best bet is to make sure your collaborators have agreed to standardized tools (or, better, standardized interchange formats) so you can all work together. You'll have the same problems collaborating with people who only have MS Works installed instead of Office (though that's rare this decade), or if you're using .docx format instead of .doc.
Microsoft isn't needed for any of this; they just happen to be there (as often as not, getting in the way, or at least soaking up everyone's $$$).
why does open source imitate more than innovate? and wort of all: imitate Microsoft? either you can say how bad MS is, or you can imitate it. you can't have both.)
Sure you can. Not everything Microsoft does is bad. A lot of people dislike MS because they're closed source. Most people dislike MS because they're an anticompetitive monopoly, and as a resulttheir products are frequently buggy (because there's no competition to push them to do better), and won't play well with competitor's products (because that would allow the competitors to compete), and are bloated resource hogs that perform poorly.
But most people like Microsoft's user interfaces. Not everything about MS UI design is great, but even where it sucks, it's what people are used to. Certainly things could be better, and it's not hard to come up with a list of things that should have been done better 10 years ago but haven't. But overall they have a decent, usable, familiar user environment.