Indeed. Aside from the fact that beach trips have been popular for decades and centuries, most people now work office jobs and that wasn't anywhere near as true 60 years ago.
As someone who uses Firefox on the mac about 14 hours/day, it is far and away the most annoying part of the experience, because all the other issues can be worked around. With this bug you simply need to keep dragging your window over and over until Firefox lets it stay where it is (it seems to have something to do with other windows actively refreshing at the time). It frequently takes me 4 or 5 sequential efforts to move a window where I want it.
Lots of users are working on trying to make a perfect test case - the bug annotations get a new note at least once a week - but AFAICT no coders are actively working on solving it. If you have the skills to work on this problem (I don't), please join the team and contribute.
Yes in a computer system you can make genes that are truly adaptively neutral. Even so they are subject to genetic drift.
But in a biological system the organism must expend energy to maintain and duplicate DNA. Therefore every codon has a small but implicit fitness cost. If the benefit of the gene does not overcome the fitness cost of carrying it around and copying it, natural selection will quickly eliminate it.
Junk DNA isn't "junk". It has a purpose, otherwise we would have gotten rid of it. In many cases we even now understand the purpose. The only identifying feature of junk DNA is that it does not directly code for proteins via the normal transcription and translation.
Bacteria are much more parsimonious about their chromosomes than eukaryotes. They generally have very small and efficient genomes; I wouldn't hold much stock in long-term data storage with this system.
I just hope that they are found by the Galactica and Adama promptly puts them all out their misery. Not bloody likely, now that we're in season three of Anguishstar Dramatica. When was the last time anyone fired a weapon or flew a ship in combat on that show? I think Adama's crew is getting soft on military tactics.
OTOH, if the Enterprise crew needs a showdown debating the finer points of depression, suffering, love triangles, class struggle, and generalized angst, Adama's crew will lick 'em good.
The article implies that we could replace sonar with the lateral line:
But sonar and other vision systems face various limitations. So why not imitating fish?
The lateral line is truly an amazing organ. It senses pressure and flow at numerous points on both flanks of fish, and that information helps it swim efficiently and indeed locate prey and avoid predators.
But it's fundamentally a local signal, because it can only detect within a certain range and with limited resolution. A fish can't use the lateral line to make sense of the 3D shape of an object ten meters away, because that information simply isn't transferred through the water that far.
Sonar can indeed do that, and can locate and take velocity measurements on objects *miles* away. So useful, in fact, that dolphins use it as one of their primary sensory systems, apparently getting almost as much detail from sonar as they do from vision.
A lateral line may be a very useful addition to an underwater craft, but it can't replace it as the summary implies. (TFA is smarter, BTW. Go figure.).
> The theory is that free trade will turn them into a democracy. So far its proven to be hooey.
This has never been the reason the U.S. promotes "free trade". You shouldn't repeat it without thinking about it.
Nonetheless it has been demonstrably true. Compare the China of today to the China the 1987 Tienamen Square incident, and that in turn to the 1969 cultural revolution. That nation is dramatically more free than it was, the government has had to significantly loosen its grip, and there is a rapidly growing middle and upper class who are relatively empowered with respect to their own affairs and the nation as a whole. There is a long way to go yet, but anyone who thinks China has not made improvements in freedom in the last 38 years is utterly blind.
Compare that to two more isolated / non-traded-with communist regimes: Cuba and North Korea. Cuba has at least received trade from everyone but the US, but isolating them from the US has made it fairly impossible to loosen Castro's stranglehold. North Korea has been totally isolated, and as a result still looks very much like it did in the 1960's.
Trying to force democracy/personal freedom before economic stability and freedom is there to support it generally leaves a nation that quickly descends back into dictatorship: compare Russia, where sudden democracy failed resulting in the "Putinization" of their fledgling freedom, and (probably) Iraq.
Economic reform has to come first: the Marshall plan worked because it spent fifteen years economically reconstructing Germany and Japan before letting them off the leash. As a result, they are both successful democracies that get along with the world today. We can't pull a Marshall Plan on China because we can't occupy them. But we can trade with them, and it is having an effect.
Current generations of lithium-ion degrade quickly: they lose about 20% of their capacity per year, starting from the day they are manufactured, whether or not they are used. In three years your car can go half as far as it could when you bought it.
That means humongously expensive and wasteful replacement cycles; Lithium-ions are not so environmentally friendly for dumping in landfills, and not so economically useful for recycling. This is bad enough with cellphones and laptops, how bad will it be when the entire US auto fleet (400 million cars or so?) is replacing 200 pounds of batteries every two years?
Fast charging is great. But unless they can give these things a better lifetime, there's more work to be done.
At the nano scale, momentum of objects is near zero and friction forces, van der waals, and the like dominate entirely. Macro-scale motion, and even intense vibration, simply won't move things around relative to each other.
A real encyclopedia rests on authority, that is its sole reason for existance.
Interestingly, I often prefer not to rest on authority. Being an academic, I prefer citations wherein I can verify for myself the data in the primary source.
Note that in Britannica, one is expected to rely on the accuracy of the article's editor. In wikipedia, it is expected these days that article editors cite their sources... witness the massive number of (citation needed) links and the growing number of actual citations, particularly on articles of academic import.
I do not claim that Wikipedia serves the same function as Britannica. It has both advantages and disadvantages. The fact that articles generally cite their sources is a huge advantage to any academic.
Defending Wikipedia is the most direct way to show that you are an idiot. Simply using Wikipedia, as a reader or an editor, for more than five days demonstrates how worthless it is as a resource, and particularly as a replacement for a real encyclopedia.
What's interesting is that you state this with authority in your voice... as if you were an authority... without any evidence that you *are* an authority on this matter. Or, for that matter, any evidence whatsovere.
Which, of course, is exactly what you claim is wrong with Wikipedia.
if you are well enough versed in a subject... why are you even reading the entry? To fix it? Why bother? The same idiot that messed it up in the first place may well be back in an hour to revert your changes.
I *am* an authority on a few subjects (and would happily show my credentials to anyone who cared), and I have written several wikipedia articles on topics close to my expertise. They are, in general, full of careful citations; I give them the same attention to academic honesty, verifiability, and evidential support that I do my published work.
What you claim has not at all been my experience with the articles I've contributed to. I check in on them periodically, and only very rarely find edits that concern me in any way.
You are making a bunch of contentions without support or verifiability (exactly the crime you accuse Wikipedia of), and those contentions run quite contrary to my own experience as a Wikipedia user and contributor.
Are you going to waste the rest of your life policing an ever-changing page of folk-wisdom?
Whatever. Keeping an eye on the pages I care about as an authority takes about an hour per month.
Not only is this not true for "any computer" (won't work on my Dell)..
The fact that my mac OS disc won't install on your Dell is no more relevant to this discussion than the fact that your Windows disc won't install on my Mac.
it's not even true for macs. You know the copy of Tiger you got with your mac? It will only work on macs that are the same model as yours... no others.
Which is also entirely, because what you're talking about is not in any way copy protection. Those disks are still copyable and can be installed on any computer of the same model. Show me a copy of windows that does the same.
The primary reason they are model-specific is that they contain not just the Mac OS but a whole host of 3rd-party software that is sold as part of the package for that model of mac. Those manufacturers have their own licenses and negotiated specific deals with apple for distribution of their software pre-installed on a specific model.
Meanwhile, the copies of Mac OS (by itself, no 3rd party apps) one buys as a separate box at the store will install on any macs of any model that make minimum system specs, and they do not have any form of activation key or copy protection.
Nothing Microsoft does is even remotely like that. If you still fail to see the difference, post again and I or someone else will explain.
Feh, he's only saying the exact same thing ("don't blame us, they made us do it!") that Microsoft says. Actions speak louder than words. Of course, this is Slashdot, so it will be proof of Apple's godliness and Microsoft's perfidy.
Nonsense. It is right in line with M$' copyright control policies on their own products, and contrary to Apple's.
[b]Windows:[/b] Requires activation with a key and a connection to the mothership. It tracks your computer's hardware, refusing to boot if it suddenly finds on different hardware. They call this "Genuine Advantage".
[b]Mac OS:[/b] No license key or serial whatsoever. Any install disc will work on any computer.
You can't invoke "Apple makes money off the hardware" as a pure explanation for this difference, either. This is *still* true of copies of the OS sold aftermarket as upgrades of existing machines. Apple has merely learned that friendly pricing ($150 for the OS) leads more people to buy and fewer people to steal. Whereas Microsoft has found that when you charge $450 for the OS most people prefer to pirate it (shocker). So rather than attempt friendlier pricing that might drive sales, they resort to lockdown tactics that add complexity to use and expense to development.
... doesn't mean it's tougher than diamond. Any mechanical engineer will remind you that strength, stiffness, and toughness are three different properties. IIRC my materials engineering class 15 years ago, they are approximately:
strength: maximum load before failure
stiffness: resistance to deformation
toughness: tendency to avoid reduction in strength over time in the face of repeated deformation
also:
hardness: ability to resist permanent deformation, particularly vs. small surface insults like scratches and indentations.
Diamond is very strong, very stiff, and very hard but it is definitely not tough: large blocks of the stuff are fairly brittle and tend to crack and chip. In fact extremely stiff materials are often not tough because they are brittle. OP has a very screwed-up title.
From TFA, we have no idea whether or not this new material is either strong or tough or hard: only that it is extremely stiff. (cue tasteless jokes)
This would be a hysterical MMORPG. You can either play a leathery old grandpa sitting on his porch swing with a shotgun or a 13-year-old street punk with staples in his ears and a spraypaint can.
Punks gain EXP for tagging houses and retirement centers.
Gramps characters get EXP for filling punks' asses with high velocity rock salt.
Definitely X-Com. Bring us back to that intensely creepy, suspenseful ambience that it had.
Another game I'd like to see sequeled... or perhaps finished in the first place is Oni, which was a brilliant concept by Bungie that was short-circuited in the mix when Bungie was bought by M$. The primary trouble was that they had to kill multiplayer because it cannot handle any kind of lag at all, but also they never quite finished the single-player levels, cutting several of them out at the last minute. Even so, it was an exhilarating game to play, with a hand-to-hand combat system that actually *worked* and a third-person shooter combined into one seamless experience. Plus a protagonist who was much cooler and sexier than Lara Croft.:-)
They showed pairs of pictures of 30 women to a group of observers. Suppose there were 25 people in the test group ("observers"). Each was shown all 30 pairs of pictures. That's 25*30=750 observations, each with an opportunity to pick the right one.
Chance would say they'd pick the high-fertility picture 50% of the time; 325 out of 750 observations. Instead they picked it 60% more often than that, i.e. 520 times. (=1.6 * 325). The fact that there were 520 "correct" picks instead of 325 is more than enough for a statistically significant result.
(Those aren't the actual numbers, 25 was a guess, but it makes the point.)
I'll give you a very depressing example. Everyone knows about the well-documented IE CSS bugs on Position is everything. A pain they are, but with sufficient hours of slaving away you can hack-around or workaround them, because they are known problems.
But nearly every project, I run into some mysterious *new* IE bug that takes hours to figure out. Here's my favorite example.
Circa 2004, I'm working on the site for Ecliptic Enterprises when I discover that the drop-down navigator menu doesn't work on all the pages. On the staff profile / resume pages, mousing over the menu does not cause it to drop down. It works on all the other pages.
But those menus are defined in an external file that is included on every page. So why would they work on some pages, but not the others? I check several times to make sure that the php code is rendering the menus identically on every page. diff confirms that the HTML, css, and javascript for the menus are 100% identical on all pages. So obviously (I think), some weird interaction with the page's content is breaking the javascript.
I begin systematically removing blocks of HTML trying to find what is breaking the menus on these specific pages. I remove each block, reload to see if the problem is fixed, diff the PHP outputs to check what I've done, replace the block, move on to the next block. I get to the end of the file and nothing has fixed the problem. So I try it over again from the beginning, removing code blocks and NOT replacing them before going on to the next.
After quite some time, I have stripped these pages down to zero content -- just the menus and other nav structure that is common to all pages. Yet the menus still won't function! I strip the remaining common parts of the page until there is nothing but a bare menu in my test file -- it still doesn't work! But the menus work happily on ~50 other pages on the site! About four hours have gone by.
By now I have so many copies of the page (dozens) that I am losing track of what I've tried in what order. profile_test001.php. profile_test002.php profile_whatthehellisgoingonhere.php. Eventually I copy the original page to an entirely different name to start anew. That copy, apparently identical to the original... works just fine. I start to think I am losing my mind. I have been at this for five hours. I must have copied a different file than I thought. I try it again, using fresh copy of the file from backup. Menus don't work. I copy it to a different file name. Now the menus work. I really am losing my mind.
But no, after testing for an hour, I come to this bizarre, but inescapable conclusion: if the filename of the webpage contains the string "profile", the drop-menus do not work in IE6. And no, the javascript does not examine the URL or any part of it in any way.
I rename all of the resume pages from "profile_.php" to "bio_.php". Suddenly the drop-menus on those pages work again in IE. My problem is fixed.
That's right, a sensitivity to the filename caused a javascript fault that broke my menus.
You can see it yourself, the files are still around. Boot up IE6, and visit the two following pages. They are bytewise identical, differing only in the filename. You can diff them to check:
This bug, which I have never bothered to characterize further, cost me almost an entire workday. And in my experience, that kind of crap is absolutely typical of IE and has plagued me in every web project.
Whoever modded the parent funny has never tried to make a modern CSS-driven website that simultaneously worked correctly in IE5.x/win, IE6.x/win, and IE5.x/mac.
I am not kidding when I say that historically about 30% of my time is spent making a nice site layout and navigation tools that work correctly in all versions of Mozilla, Safari, and Opera 7.x+, while the remaining 70% of the development effort is spent trying to hack the code to render correctly in IE.
Lately I've finally given up on compatibility with IE5.x, it's just not worth the effort. Of course, there are still a fair number of users who then write in to complain that the site doesn't work for them.
On the other hand, not knowing much about particle physics, I had always assumed that the "science" in Buckaroo Banzai was just so much vapid technobabble.
The fact that phrases like "intermediate vector bosons" tossed around in the movie actually have a connection of any sort at all to the issues being discussed puts BB already a few parsecs ahead of the typical S.F. junk that hollywood puts out.
I'd always thought of BB as a camp fantasy classic. It's refreshing to know that the writers actually knew a little science and applied it, even if the final product was entirely improbable.
The entire IT reporting industry, and Slashdot. Writes about languages these days as if there is only one task in the world: web apps whereby users insert and retrieve basic data to/from a database. Yeah, for those apps you bet Java is losing ground to modern interpreted languages.
But there are a thousand other types of projects for which other environments might excel.
One of my current projects is a desktop app that does real-time signal processing on a live microphone feed, and produces a full-screen GUI with output of the signal that updates at 30+ FPS. Between the signal processing and graphics, it needs to do some hundreds of megaflops, effective - interpreted languages are a couple of orders of magnitude slower doing raw math. Java is pushing the low end of speed for this app.
At the same time, we want the benefit of a multiplatform release, because the project is for the education and music professional markets - there are an awful lot of macs among our target market, and our competitors are PC-only. Java has actually come through on the write-once-run-anywhere promise for us, straight down to the live audio input. We're just 2 developers - how much longer would it have taken us to have to port C++ between different platforms' APIs? Way too long. And we can't even consider platform-specific environments like C# or ObjectiveC/Cocoa.
Use the right tool for the right job. There are times when Ruby's the right tool - and times when it ain't. There are plenty of niches still where nothing else can remotely fill Java's shoes.
I understand you, but Texans are hardly the only ones on the receiving end of stereotypes. Consider "Commiefornia", the Bible Belt (TM), effete and grumpy New Yorkers, for that matter the stereotype of San Francisco, Idaho survivalists and skinheads, Appalachian inbreeding, Southern trailer trash. Not to mention the horrible stereotypes that get heaped on regional minorites and ethnicities.
Frankly Texas doesn't get pounded half as hard as the rest of the South. Not to mention foreign nations!
Welcome to being human. "Hunting-besotted" is a long way from the worst stereotype being slung around.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. Aside from the fact that beach trips have been popular for decades and centuries, most people now work office jobs and that wasn't anywhere near as true 60 years ago.
This bug has been there since Firefox 1.0. It's been in the bugzilla database for mozilla, item 306276 since August of 2005, and is marked "critical".
As someone who uses Firefox on the mac about 14 hours/day, it is far and away the most annoying part of the experience, because all the other issues can be worked around. With this bug you simply need to keep dragging your window over and over until Firefox lets it stay where it is (it seems to have something to do with other windows actively refreshing at the time). It frequently takes me 4 or 5 sequential efforts to move a window where I want it.
Lots of users are working on trying to make a perfect test case - the bug annotations get a new note at least once a week - but AFAICT no coders are actively working on solving it. If you have the skills to work on this problem (I don't), please join the team and contribute.
"Still no word on whether or not it plays DivX files."
With an Apple product, "no word" definitely means it doesn't play them.
if an Army private can purchase a hammer for $5 at the local Home Depot
You haven't shopped at Home Depot recently, have you?
I have a client who uses quotes at totally random places in her sentences in every email. I can never tell exactly what she is trying to say by that.
Typical: Evan, can you "update" the web pages with the information I've attached below?
What, do you want me to update it or not? Is this a joke?
... in the biological world.
Yes in a computer system you can make genes that are truly adaptively neutral. Even so they are subject to genetic drift.
But in a biological system the organism must expend energy to maintain and duplicate DNA. Therefore every codon has a small but implicit fitness cost. If the benefit of the gene does not overcome the fitness cost of carrying it around and copying it, natural selection will quickly eliminate it.
Junk DNA isn't "junk". It has a purpose, otherwise we would have gotten rid of it. In many cases we even now understand the purpose. The only identifying feature of junk DNA is that it does not directly code for proteins via the normal transcription and translation.
Bacteria are much more parsimonious about their chromosomes than eukaryotes. They generally have very small and efficient genomes; I wouldn't hold much stock in long-term data storage with this system.
OTOH, if the Enterprise crew needs a showdown debating the finer points of depression, suffering, love triangles, class struggle, and generalized angst, Adama's crew will lick 'em good.
Bubble: Your IP/WormTP space-time tunnel has been formed successfully. ... click ... ... later ...
... click ... ... later ...
... click ... ... later ...
Bubble: A new space time anomaly has been connected.
Bubble: Your new spacewarp has been configured and is ready for use.
Bubble: Linksys Etherwarp X45J: A network wormhole is unplugged.
Damn!
The article implies that we could replace sonar with the lateral line:
But sonar and other vision systems face various limitations. So why not imitating fish?
The lateral line is truly an amazing organ. It senses pressure and flow at numerous points on both flanks of fish, and that information helps it swim efficiently and indeed locate prey and avoid predators.
But it's fundamentally a local signal, because it can only detect within a certain range and with limited resolution. A fish can't use the lateral line to make sense of the 3D shape of an object ten meters away, because that information simply isn't transferred through the water that far.
Sonar can indeed do that, and can locate and take velocity measurements on objects *miles* away. So useful, in fact, that dolphins use it as one of their primary sensory systems, apparently getting almost as much detail from sonar as they do from vision.
A lateral line may be a very useful addition to an underwater craft, but it can't replace it as the summary implies. (TFA is smarter, BTW. Go figure.).
> The theory is that free trade will turn them into a democracy. So far its proven to be hooey.
This has never been the reason the U.S. promotes "free trade". You shouldn't repeat it without thinking about it.
Nonetheless it has been demonstrably true. Compare the China of today to the China the 1987 Tienamen Square incident, and that in turn to the 1969 cultural revolution. That nation is dramatically more free than it was, the government has had to significantly loosen its grip, and there is a rapidly growing middle and upper class who are relatively empowered with respect to their own affairs and the nation as a whole. There is a long way to go yet, but anyone who thinks China has not made improvements in freedom in the last 38 years is utterly blind.
Compare that to two more isolated / non-traded-with communist regimes: Cuba and North Korea. Cuba has at least received trade from everyone but the US, but isolating them from the US has made it fairly impossible to loosen Castro's stranglehold. North Korea has been totally isolated, and as a result still looks very much like it did in the 1960's.
Trying to force democracy/personal freedom before economic stability and freedom is there to support it generally leaves a nation that quickly descends back into dictatorship: compare Russia, where sudden democracy failed resulting in the "Putinization" of their fledgling freedom, and (probably) Iraq.
Economic reform has to come first: the Marshall plan worked because it spent fifteen years economically reconstructing Germany and Japan before letting them off the leash. As a result, they are both successful democracies that get along with the world today. We can't pull a Marshall Plan on China because we can't occupy them. But we can trade with them, and it is having an effect.
Current generations of lithium-ion degrade quickly: they lose about 20% of their capacity per year, starting from the day they are manufactured, whether or not they are used. In three years your car can go half as far as it could when you bought it.
That means humongously expensive and wasteful replacement cycles; Lithium-ions are not so environmentally friendly for dumping in landfills, and not so economically useful for recycling. This is bad enough with cellphones and laptops, how bad will it be when the entire US auto fleet (400 million cars or so?) is replacing 200 pounds of batteries every two years?
Fast charging is great. But unless they can give these things a better lifetime, there's more work to be done.
At the nano scale, momentum of objects is near zero and friction forces, van der waals, and the like dominate entirely. Macro-scale motion, and even intense vibration, simply won't move things around relative to each other.
A real encyclopedia rests on authority, that is its sole reason for existance.
... witness the massive number of (citation needed) links and the growing number of actual citations, particularly on articles of academic import.
... as if you were an authority ... without any evidence that you *are* an authority on this matter. Or, for that matter, any evidence whatsovere.
... why are you even reading the entry? To fix it? Why bother? The same idiot that messed it up in the first place may well be back in an hour to revert your changes.
Interestingly, I often prefer not to rest on authority. Being an academic, I prefer citations wherein I can verify for myself the data in the primary source.
Note that in Britannica, one is expected to rely on the accuracy of the article's editor. In wikipedia, it is expected these days that article editors cite their sources
I do not claim that Wikipedia serves the same function as Britannica. It has both advantages and disadvantages. The fact that articles generally cite their sources is a huge advantage to any academic.
Defending Wikipedia is the most direct way to show that you are an idiot. Simply using Wikipedia, as a reader or an editor, for more than five days demonstrates how worthless it is as a resource, and particularly as a replacement for a real encyclopedia.
What's interesting is that you state this with authority in your voice
Which, of course, is exactly what you claim is wrong with Wikipedia.
if you are well enough versed in a subject
I *am* an authority on a few subjects (and would happily show my credentials to anyone who cared), and I have written several wikipedia articles on topics close to my expertise. They are, in general, full of careful citations; I give them the same attention to academic honesty, verifiability, and evidential support that I do my published work.
What you claim has not at all been my experience with the articles I've contributed to. I check in on them periodically, and only very rarely find edits that concern me in any way.
You are making a bunch of contentions without support or verifiability ( exactly the crime you accuse Wikipedia of), and those contentions run quite contrary to my own experience as a Wikipedia user and contributor.
Are you going to waste the rest of your life policing an ever-changing page of folk-wisdom?
Whatever. Keeping an eye on the pages I care about as an authority takes about an hour per month.
Not only is this not true for "any computer" (won't work on my Dell)..
The fact that my mac OS disc won't install on your Dell is no more relevant to this discussion than the fact that your Windows disc won't install on my Mac.
it's not even true for macs. You know the copy of Tiger you got with your mac? It will only work on macs that are the same model as yours... no others.
Which is also entirely, because what you're talking about is not in any way copy protection. Those disks are still copyable and can be installed on any computer of the same model. Show me a copy of windows that does the same.
The primary reason they are model-specific is that they contain not just the Mac OS but a whole host of 3rd-party software that is sold as part of the package for that model of mac. Those manufacturers have their own licenses and negotiated specific deals with apple for distribution of their software pre-installed on a specific model.
Meanwhile, the copies of Mac OS (by itself, no 3rd party apps) one buys as a separate box at the store will install on any macs of any model that make minimum system specs, and they do not have any form of activation key or copy protection.
Nothing Microsoft does is even remotely like that. If you still fail to see the difference, post again and I or someone else will explain.
Feh, he's only saying the exact same thing ("don't blame us, they made us do it!") that Microsoft says. Actions speak louder than words. Of course, this is Slashdot, so it will be proof of Apple's godliness and Microsoft's perfidy.
Nonsense. It is right in line with M$' copyright control policies on their own products, and contrary to Apple's.
[b]Windows:[/b] Requires activation with a key and a connection to the mothership. It tracks your computer's hardware, refusing to boot if it suddenly finds on different hardware. They call this "Genuine Advantage".
[b]Mac OS:[/b] No license key or serial whatsoever. Any install disc will work on any computer.
You can't invoke "Apple makes money off the hardware" as a pure explanation for this difference, either. This is *still* true of copies of the OS sold aftermarket as upgrades of existing machines. Apple has merely learned that friendly pricing ($150 for the OS) leads more people to buy and fewer people to steal. Whereas Microsoft has found that when you charge $450 for the OS most people prefer to pirate it (shocker). So rather than attempt friendlier pricing that might drive sales, they resort to lockdown tactics that add complexity to use and expense to development.
... doesn't mean it's tougher than diamond. Any mechanical engineer will remind you that strength, stiffness, and toughness are three different properties. IIRC my materials engineering class 15 years ago, they are approximately:
strength: maximum load before failure
stiffness: resistance to deformation
toughness: tendency to avoid reduction in strength over time in the face of repeated deformation
also:
hardness: ability to resist permanent deformation, particularly vs. small surface insults like scratches and indentations.
Diamond is very strong, very stiff, and very hard but it is definitely not tough: large blocks of the stuff are fairly brittle and tend to crack and chip. In fact extremely stiff materials are often not tough because they are brittle. OP has a very screwed-up title.
From TFA, we have no idea whether or not this new material is either strong or tough or hard: only that it is extremely stiff. (cue tasteless jokes)
This would be a hysterical MMORPG. You can either play a leathery old grandpa sitting on his porch swing with a shotgun or a 13-year-old street punk with staples in his ears and a spraypaint can.
Punks gain EXP for tagging houses and retirement centers.
Gramps characters get EXP for filling punks' asses with high velocity rock salt.
I like! Who wants to join the development team?
Definitely X-Com. Bring us back to that intensely creepy, suspenseful ambience that it had.
... or perhaps finished in the first place is Oni, which was a brilliant concept by Bungie that was short-circuited in the mix when Bungie was bought by M$. The primary trouble was that they had to kill multiplayer because it cannot handle any kind of lag at all, but also they never quite finished the single-player levels, cutting several of them out at the last minute. Even so, it was an exhilarating game to play, with a hand-to-hand combat system that actually *worked* and a third-person shooter combined into one seamless experience. Plus a protagonist who was much cooler and sexier than Lara Croft. :-)
Another game I'd like to see sequeled
60% increase in observations picked correctly.
They showed pairs of pictures of 30 women to a group of observers. Suppose there were 25 people in the test group ("observers"). Each was shown all 30 pairs of pictures. That's 25*30=750 observations, each with an opportunity to pick the right one.
Chance would say they'd pick the high-fertility picture 50% of the time; 325 out of 750 observations. Instead they picked it 60% more often than that, i.e. 520 times. (=1.6 * 325). The fact that there were 520 "correct" picks instead of 325 is more than enough for a statistically significant result.
(Those aren't the actual numbers, 25 was a guess, but it makes the point.)
I'll give you a very depressing example. Everyone knows about the well-documented IE CSS bugs on Position is everything. A pain they are, but with sufficient hours of slaving away you can hack-around or workaround them, because they are known problems.
... works just fine. I start to think I am losing my mind. I have been at this for five hours. I must have copied a different file than I thought. I try it again, using fresh copy of the file from backup. Menus don't work. I copy it to a different file name. Now the menus work. I really am losing my mind.
But nearly every project, I run into some mysterious *new* IE bug that takes hours to figure out. Here's my favorite example.
Circa 2004, I'm working on the site for Ecliptic Enterprises when I discover that the drop-down navigator menu doesn't work on all the pages. On the staff profile / resume pages, mousing over the menu does not cause it to drop down. It works on all the other pages.
But those menus are defined in an external file that is included on every page. So why would they work on some pages, but not the others? I check several times to make sure that the php code is rendering the menus identically on every page. diff confirms that the HTML, css, and javascript for the menus are 100% identical on all pages. So obviously (I think), some weird interaction with the page's content is breaking the javascript.
I begin systematically removing blocks of HTML trying to find what is breaking the menus on these specific pages. I remove each block, reload to see if the problem is fixed, diff the PHP outputs to check what I've done, replace the block, move on to the next block. I get to the end of the file and nothing has fixed the problem. So I try it over again from the beginning, removing code blocks and NOT replacing them before going on to the next.
After quite some time, I have stripped these pages down to zero content -- just the menus and other nav structure that is common to all pages. Yet the menus still won't function! I strip the remaining common parts of the page until there is nothing but a bare menu in my test file -- it still doesn't work! But the menus work happily on ~50 other pages on the site! About four hours have gone by.
By now I have so many copies of the page (dozens) that I am losing track of what I've tried in what order. profile_test001.php. profile_test002.php profile_whatthehellisgoingonhere.php. Eventually I copy the original page to an entirely different name to start anew. That copy, apparently identical to the original
But no, after testing for an hour, I come to this bizarre, but inescapable conclusion:
if the filename of the webpage contains the string "profile", the drop-menus do not work in IE6. And no, the javascript does not examine the URL or any part of it in any way.
I rename all of the resume pages from "profile_.php" to "bio_.php". Suddenly the drop-menus on those pages work again in IE. My problem is fixed.
That's right, a sensitivity to the filename caused a javascript fault that broke my menus.
You can see it yourself, the files are still around. Boot up IE6, and visit the two following pages. They are bytewise identical, differing only in the filename. You can diff them to check:
http://www.eclipticenterprises.com/bio_ridenoure.p hp (menus work)
http://www.eclipticenterprises.com/profile_ridenou re2.php (menus break)
This bug, which I have never bothered to characterize further, cost me almost an entire workday. And in my experience, that kind of crap is absolutely typical of IE and has plagued me in every web project.
I haven't tested it in IE7. My windo
+5 Funny?
Whoever modded the parent funny has never tried to make a modern CSS-driven website that simultaneously worked correctly in IE5.x/win, IE6.x/win, and IE5.x/mac.
I am not kidding when I say that historically about 30% of my time is spent making a nice site layout and navigation tools that work correctly in all versions of Mozilla, Safari, and Opera 7.x+, while the remaining 70% of the development effort is spent trying to hack the code to render correctly in IE.
Lately I've finally given up on compatibility with IE5.x, it's just not worth the effort. Of course, there are still a fair number of users who then write in to complain that the site doesn't work for them.
On the other hand, not knowing much about particle physics, I had always assumed that the "science" in Buckaroo Banzai was just so much vapid technobabble.
The fact that phrases like "intermediate vector bosons" tossed around in the movie actually have a connection of any sort at all to the issues being discussed puts BB already a few parsecs ahead of the typical S.F. junk that hollywood puts out.
I'd always thought of BB as a camp fantasy classic. It's refreshing to know that the writers actually knew a little science and applied it, even if the final product was entirely improbable.
The entire IT reporting industry, and Slashdot. Writes about languages these days as if there is only one task in the world: web apps whereby users insert and retrieve basic data to/from a database. Yeah, for those apps you bet Java is losing ground to modern interpreted languages.
But there are a thousand other types of projects for which other environments might excel.
One of my current projects is a desktop app that does real-time signal processing on a live microphone feed, and produces a full-screen GUI with output of the signal that updates at 30+ FPS. Between the signal processing and graphics, it needs to do some hundreds of megaflops, effective - interpreted languages are a couple of orders of magnitude slower doing raw math. Java is pushing the low end of speed for this app.
At the same time, we want the benefit of a multiplatform release, because the project is for the education and music professional markets - there are an awful lot of macs among our target market, and our competitors are PC-only. Java has actually come through on the write-once-run-anywhere promise for us, straight down to the live audio input. We're just 2 developers - how much longer would it have taken us to have to port C++ between different platforms' APIs? Way too long. And we can't even consider platform-specific environments like C# or ObjectiveC/Cocoa.
Use the right tool for the right job. There are times when Ruby's the right tool - and times when it ain't. There are plenty of niches still where nothing else can remotely fill Java's shoes.
they are damned if they do, damned if they don't.
Oh, so that must be the ultimate reason I say "Damned Microsoft!" a dozen times a day when I'm working with Windows.
I understand you, but Texans are hardly the only ones on the receiving end of stereotypes. Consider "Commiefornia", the Bible Belt (TM), effete and grumpy New Yorkers, for that matter the stereotype of San Francisco, Idaho survivalists and skinheads, Appalachian inbreeding, Southern trailer trash. Not to mention the horrible stereotypes that get heaped on regional minorites and ethnicities.
Frankly Texas doesn't get pounded half as hard as the rest of the South. Not to mention foreign nations!
Welcome to being human. "Hunting-besotted" is a long way from the worst stereotype being slung around.