You know what's funny about Beryl/Vista ? They're doing the same stuff the Mac was doing years ago on puny hardware. I mean really, how frickin' hard is it to draw a window as a texture on a pair of triangles ? Seriously!
Programmers are sloppy, because sloppy is all the industry wants to pay for. Way back in the day when CPU cycles were super expensive, programmers were paid better money and given the time to tweak the crap out of everything, because if they didn't, the app would run dog slow and people wouldn't buy it. The problem is that somehow, people now tolerate underperforming software. They see it as a reason to upgrade... good god, they actually fall for it! Gee I certainly remember surfing the web on a 486 with 8mb of Ram back in the day. Now my OS needs a good 50-60mb to itself, and that's after I ripped out all the cruft. Normally it would be 100mb just for sitting idle with a background image and a neon-colored task bar. Gee uh, where'd all my system resources go ? Does it really require 7.3 million bytes to house a TCP/IP stack when some embedded devices pull it off with oh, 6kb or so ?
The truth however, is that if we were to write code as tightly and meticulously as we did in the 80's and 90's, software would perform, on average, at least 5 to 10 times faster than today, excluding hard bottlenecks like disk access and network bandwidth. It would also take 50 times longer to write the software, and I'd say less than 1% of people who call themselves "programmers" are even able to write such finely tuned code. Everyone doing VB ? Out. Everyone doing RAD ? Out. All you Ruby on Rails weenies ? follow me to this dark alley *BLAM*
I remember spending hours on little loops, with a CPU reference manual and a calculator. Sometimes I did little time sketches to figure out the best way to stagger memory accesses so as to not starve the execution pipes. Often times that meant weaving two disparate functions together, one being memory-hungry, the other CPU hungry. Together they filled each other's latency pockets, and my routine ran nearly thrice faster as a result. No C compiler I've ever seen could do such kinky things. Heck one time I even wrote a little assembler demo whose code executed twice: forward, then backward. The opcodes and data were carefully selected to represent valid instructions when reversed. It was more than a nerdy trick, it allowed my routine to fit entirely in the CPU's on-die cache, which gave it a huge speed boost but more importantly, it enabled a lowly 486 to mix 48 sound channels in real-time. Today's Cubase can't even handle a couple dozen channels without stuttering and/or crashing, on computers over 100 times faster than a 486.
I switched to laser a while ago, and I'm never going back to inkjet. One toner cartridge (3rd party) costs about $50, lasts a good 7k pages, never smears/clogs and the 15ppm speed doesn't hurt either:) What's even nicer is that I can get toner refills. $50 for a cart is cheap, but $15 for a bottle of toner is a joke. The only thing I dread replacing down the line is the drum.. there's no getting around that one, they can get costly. Still, when you look at the printer's lifetime, which can be anywhere from 5 to 10 years, it's much nicer than having to throw the inkjet out every 12 months.
I could vaguely be considered an AMD fanboy, well I used to be. The problem is AMD's been resting on their laurels for a while now. Intel released the Core 2 Duo which is pretty frickin' awesome, and of course the expensive but glamorous Quad cores, and AMD responded with 65nm rehashes of the same old X2 chips, same clock speeds, same cache sizes. I've seen no reason to upgrade my AMD in almost 2 years now, and that strikes me as very very wrong! AMD is now considered a budget processor, because even their fastest CPU is under 200 bucks. Good bang for the buck, and the lower power consumption is nice, but computers are one industry that isn't run by the jews... we want expensive screamers that can tear Supreme Commander a new asshole. This is the industry that spawned Quad-SLI, WD Raptors and desktop RAID. High end is where you build prestige for your brand, which helps sell the low-end stuff to the unwashed masses. The truly dedicated AMD fans resorted to Opterons because of their tighter tolerances, therefore higher overclocking potential. That's what we want, and we're willing to throw money at AMD as long as they give us the fastest chip on the market, so what the hell are they doing about it ?
AMD had been in the lead for a long time, but Intel finally leapfrogged them. Now AMD needs to pull one hell of a rabbit out of their hat if they want to stay in the game. To hell with 4x4, it's a waste. We can do that already with Opterons. Give us Quad-core Athlons NOW! Larger caches! Higher clocks! MORE! If AMD can't provide, then it's time to pack up their marketing department and go back to being a small-time OEM chip supplier.
You can't point the finger at one aspect of society and blame all the world's problems on that alone. Hell I get borderline homicidal from driving among imbeciles, but I can't blame Ford for my aggression problems. We live in a stressful, bullshit world and every day it gets a little bit crazier. People eventually crack. They decide they don't want to play by the rules and go wacko like this guy did. I don't know of many people who can go through a whole day without the slightest streak of anger coursing through their veins, unless they're on a 3 day MDMA party. Lacking drugs, we're faced with asshole drivers, arrogant pedestrians, ignorant cashiers, uncooperative coworkers, racial tension, sexual tension, classism, bill collectors, politicians, allergies... yadda yadda!
And that's just for a normal person's life. Throw in situational problems, mental disorders, dramatic personal events... some people bear enough weight that it crushes them until all that's left are the violent instincts of the human animal.
They're both guilty. Given the large number of companies named, I wouldn't be surprised if the conversation went like "I'm the purchasing coordinator for Ministry of X. Give me Y$ or I'll buy your competitor's product." and then just replayed the same tape reel to every competitor.
Sure, it's bad that big business caves in to such dirty demands, but I think the government employees that were receiving the kickbacks are more responsible, whereas the vendors were just working a sale. Ideally I'd want to see the vendors stonewall the dirty buyer and turn them in for fraud, but corporations have no morals so that's a bit of a tall order.
Duuuuuuude chill out it's just a conservative rep whoring for attention. Just look at the lovely writing:
"a new power that would allow the Minister of Industry to order an ISP to block access to content that promotes violence against women, promotes hatred, or contains child pornography."
So according to this conservative asshat, violence against men still falls under the "don't ask don't tell" awning. It's this kind of lopsided tripe that enables minor political parties to stay puny forever. Their purpose is to express the retarded racist sexist views, making them easier to define and conveniently publicized in order to stimulate debate. In a sense, if we didn't have loudmouthed imbeciles in politics, it would be a lot harder to tell bad from good.
Hey, lots of people who work for Dell have Lenovos and HPs. Heck I think even Dell has (or had) HP servers at the call center where I once worked. The thing is, the worker drones aren't the ones in the TV spots selling the product. I really don't think William Ford would be caught dead driving a Nissan, then walk onto a stage set to shoot an ad for the F150. The boss of any company needs to project an image, a very strong one. They might not be movie stars, but they still get their share of voyeurs watching for any opportunity to stir controversy. What if Michael Dell walked around with a Lenovo ? People would say 2 things: 1. He doesn't even use his own notebooks, they must suck ass. and 2. This rich dude uses a Lenovo, they must be awesome! And you watch a ton of Dell customers defect over to IBM's chinese bastard cousin.
That's funny, I have six PC's tightly packed in and around my desk. Hell I even have one I built last week, I didn't have an empty ATX chassis so I just built it right into my desk with some carefully trimmed cardboard panels. Let's see... one Linux iptables box, one web server, one media server, a gaming rig, and a multicore opteron beast running Gentoo where I get actual work done. Number six is an old Pentium-150 with a 3Dfx card for classic gaming. Fun stuff!
Then there's the wife's computer, and the modded Xbox, and the laptop, and the three currently unbuilt rigs I've got sitting in a parts bin right now. One of them will hopefully end up in my car's boot, hooked up to the stereo and GPS. The other two I might just sell off to clear some room.
Let's not forget to mention I'm a broke ass just coming off of 6 months disability ? If it hadn't been for my accident, I'd probably have a second laptop, a Mac (for kicks) and an expansion card with 4 more Opterons and Ram for the beast; 8 cores is so last year!:P
Now I'm a die-hard computer freak. I'm most definitely a minority. Michael Dell may or may not be a computer freak, but one thing I'm 100% sure about him, he's the head of the world's largest computer distributor and every single one of those machines has his name stamped on the front. Even if he didn't like computers, he'd still have a showroom in his home with one of each model, as props for doing interviews and photo-ops at the very least. Everything this man says and does is very carefully thought out and calculated. Every word he speaks has a multi-million dollar effect on his business. I think even if he weren't a computer enthusiast, he would at least fake it where it matters, and more importantly he'd never let anyone think he didn't love his own products.
I hate to feed the rumors, but what other distro would they possibly use ? I don't know of any other that pulls off the user experience schmoozing as cleanly as Ubuntu, seeing as it's one of their main goals. As funny as it would be to toss a Gentoo boot disc in the box and watch the call center agents as they commit suicide one after another:
Joe - " I setup Portage to run off a CDB backend, and now my metadata is corrupt. Fix my box, bitch!"
Kerpal - " Ok, sir, please turn off the computer and remove the power cord for 2 minutes. "
Joe - " No, f*** you that won't fix it. I need a tarball of this and that, and a custom shell script to reindex those..."
Kerpal - " Ok, sir, I am going to put you on hold... (hold music) AAAAAAAAAH *BOOM* *SPLAT* *CLICK*"
Ultimately they want a nice easy distro to appeal to the masses, because that's the business they're in. I wouldn't be surprised if they came up with a nice idiot-proof restore CD as well, because the expensive part is training the thousands of tech support people worldwide. Having them pop in a restore disc is an easy way to deal with it, because ultimately that's what a lot of techs end up doing when Windows acts up too... just blow it away and start over. That's how they're trained. Advanced software troubleshooting is a luxury billed by the hour, not covered by the puny hardware warranty.
This is really cute, but why the hell would they want to peer with Alaska anyway ? I mean no offense to Alaskans, but of all the places to build a tunnel to, it seems rather arbitrary and I doubt the EU would play into these Russian tactics. It seems they just want to buy cheap American resources and resell them in Europe, at European prices. Things like electricity, petrol, and god-knows what else. Reminds me of the one buddy who always has some scam figured out, but needs to sell the idea to a partner to make it work. "Hey Bill, let's sell weed. I just need you to front the money to buy seeds." or "Hey Bill, let's cheat at poker... I'll deal you winning hands and we'll split the winnings. I just need you to take the beating when we get caught."
This time it's "Hey America, let's sell your crap over here in Europe and we'll split the profits (unevenly). Russia just needs to you exhaust your already-limited resources for their benefit."
Maybe I'm being rude, but I just don't think Russia is ready for any grand plans yet. Get that Putin tyrant out of there first, clean up the friggin country and then we'll talk.
*frozen by terror* What you do in private is your business and yours alone. That said, I wouldn't want to work a photo shoot with a guy who gets aroused by deformed fantasy girls whose breasts are bigger than my head.
The thing is, it shouldn't be harder to support multiple browsers because if they could quit comparing epeens for a moment and actually agree on published standards, they would all work with the same HTML and it would truly boil down to features and personal preference. As it is now, the browser war is about compatibility more than personality, in which case diversity is actually a detriment.
If you're doing kinky ActiveX stuff or other hacks that only work with IE, I'd dig up the bastard that built the web site in the first place and get him to deliver a FULLY FUNCTIONAL replacement. The IE-exclusive features are only necessary in very limited scenarios and certainly don't belong on a publicly-accessible web site on the net. I can think of very few exceptions such as the Trend Micro ActiveX virus scanner, but even they have a Java version that's browser-agnostic.
The other thing to consider is that if 92% of the logs show IE7, is that really because your clients don't use other browsers, or is it because your site's so broken that the Firefox/Safari/Opera users just go to another vendor that knows how to properly code a friggin web site ? That 8% of "outcasts" are probably hitting your page once, realizing it doesn't work with their preferred browser, then switching to IE because they love you too much to go elsewhere. That's what I have to do with certain Government sites because 1. their web developers are idiots who can't code and 2. they're oblivious to anything developed in the last decade. Thing is, I don't really have a choice; it's either I switch to IE and get my tax files uploaded, or I don't and they send the men in black after me. How about you ditch the server logs and ask your paying customers which browsers they want to see supported ? It could go one of two ways: either that 92% turns into something more representative like 60-70%, or it tips the other way and everyone says "I love IE, screw the rest". At least then you have documentation to support your decision.
I've been an IE user forever, I also scoffed at Firefox way back, but ever since IE7 went final I had been having weird lag issues that were driving me batty. I'm a heavy multitasker, so if an MS app decides to lock up my whole PC on a whim, even for just a half-second, I clench my teeth because it affects the other 3-4 things I'm doing. IE7 would sometimes hit a little snag while loading/rendering a page, and through some exclusive lock it would freeze my SMP machine unlike anything else I've ever seen. I got fed up and tried Firefox 2.0 maybe a month or two ago. I imported all my IE favorites into FF, then I forced myself to use the rebellious little browser as much as possible. For the first couple days it was a bit frustrating/disorienting, as FF works a teeny bit differently with features like autocomplete, where years of IE experience got in the way at times, for things like keyboard shortcuts and the many MS-centric quirks I had grown accustomed to, but it wasn't too bad.
I installed a bunch of addons, which is where Firefox really shines. They are plentiful and extremely useful... I've got the Web Developer addon that's great for tinkering with HTML and CSS, the "Down Them All" plugin that adds a multi-stream download manager and simple site ripper to every file dialog, Firefox Showcase recreates IE7's tab preview feature, Greasemonkey lets you write (or steal) little javascripts that alter any page or even add completely new features to sites like GMail and Flickr. I've also got fluffers like PermaTabs whose name says it all: you can lock a tab to keep it from being closed, and you can also lock it in-place, which means any links open in a different tab. This is great for things like control panels, web mail or dynamic home pages. Another favorite of mine is SearchStatus, which shows the Google/Alexa page rank for every site. It's a nice simple research tool for SEO.
Last but not least, there's this little wonder called IE Tab. It lets you embed an IE renderer right in Firefox, for those sites that are too MS-centric. What's nice is you can make certain sites automatically load in the IE engine. The other addons don't function on IE tabs, but just keeping them inside Firefox alongside your other tabs is wonderful as you don't need to juggle two separate browsers. Even then, the new Firefox seems to render just about every site quite well, I only use the IE engine on broken sites like the Canadian Government's e-services, which all use nasty Entrust java applets and horrible HTML that seems purposely designed to piss off non-IE users. That's government for ya:P
I still think Firefox takes too long to load up, but I tend to keep at least one browser window open all the time so it's a minor nuisance. Then again I criticize just about everything I see so maybe it's not so bad after all.
You lay out these rules for hunters, but I'd love to hear your reasoning when it comes to mass-killing humans for profit and power. We don't eat humans, and there are more respectable ways to grow a nation than invading lands half a globe away.
Well yes, discrimination exists... we try to pretend it doesn't, but whether it's sexism, racism, or just friggin social classism, it's there and it's ugly and willing it away just doesn't work, at least not while there are still stubborn ingrained bigots living in this world.
The problem I see with this article, is the fact that they are changing CS programs to better suit women. Now granted computer science is a fuzzy field, unlike pure sciences like physics and chemistry, but the fact that they can adapt the program to attract women just feels kind of wrong. Is male science that much different from female science ? Am I going to have to learn a whole new set of CS terms and concepts just so I can work with women ? Can they also adapt the CS program to better suit people of certain ethnic backgrounds ? Black computing, latino computing, hell give me Quebecer computing while you're at it... oh no wait, we already have Quebecer computing, it's called "screw the customer hard and fast" *rimshot*
Seriously women, if you're not tempted to become CS grads, that's just fine. The money sucks ass, everyone's out to steal your job and the clients are all whiney imbeciles who still don't know why they need I.T. in the first place. Maybe that's why women are less likely to follow the CS career path. Or maybe it's because all the I.T. geeks get all weird and creepy when a woman walks by. From my personal experience (as a non-drooly geek), whenever a woman from HR or other, walks past the tech cubes, all the heads pop up and start making D&D jokes about rolling a +3 Erection, or I'll be talking about my fun times as an adult webmaster and I'll get blasted with ignorant crap like "Bill, hook me up for a date with a stripper" in my personal inbox. Maybe women don't work in tech because a disproportionate chunk of techies are disrespectful and immature. Why are we labeled as losers and weirdos ? Well probably because the losers and weirdos among us are the most visible, the rest of us, the sane well-mannered ones, we're too busy getting our work done and living normal lives.
If they want more women in CS, get rid of the wackos. The same is true of any field. If half the guys in psychology whacked off to hentai and tried to hit on every woman that had the misfortune of being in the same building, there'd be very few women psychologists.
Yep the Canadian music industry is just as ass-backwards as the RIAA, we just don't have as lawsuit-happy a country (yet). What's worse is that most of the "benefits" offered by the AFM are either overbooked or unavailable in most areas. You'll get greater "benefits" by buying a few rounds at the local indie club and chatting it up with the real talent, not the office-dwelling cocksuckers who ruin the industry.
Hey hey! I'm antisocial and generally angry, doesn't mean I'm planning a "mass killing spree", though I must admit if I had a big red button I might be tempted to push it:)
The concept of the killing spree is, at least from my observation, a self-gratifying exercise. When a person reaches such lows that nothing brings them up, they seek refuge in the forbidden pleasures. Some guys hire prostitutes (in an addictive manner), and some other guys seek the thrills of violence. Some pompous old talking heads speak of the reptilian mind. The brain gets hungry for pleasure, satisfaction. When those needs cannot be fulfilled through diplomatic relations (society), human instincts take over and manifest themselves as gluttony, lust and violence, usually in that order as the mind grows more and more desperate for titillation.
Gee that's funny, it runs under VMWare for me. I must be special!
Truth be told, a properly implemented VM hypervisor should be able to run everything under the sun, even itself. In practice, they cut corners for various reasons, usually political like intentionally crippling the product to accommodate MS restrictions. This is one area where open source could beat the commercial guys and help turn things back around.
Why is it that a "watchdog" organization, whose purpose is solely to find stuff to nitpick, can wield this kind of "power" whenever they spot someone they don't like ? I'm looking forward to the day when a political group picks a fight with me over my loudly expressed rebellious/anarchic opinions. It seems everyone needs someone to mess with. Left-wingers calling Right-wingers offensive. Right-wingers calling left-wingers repressive. Black people calling white people racist. White people calling black people racist. I choose to keep it simple, I just hate everyone unless otherwise indicated. How's that ? It seems like we've pretended to come a long way since the age of raping and pillaging, when deep down we're still the same retarded bloodthirsty lawless racist sexist apes our ancestors were centuries ago. The main difference is we've grown too lazy and weak to fight with our fists, so now we just point fingers and call people names until it somehow ends up hurting. It didn't work in kindergarten, why would it work with modern adults ?
That's odd, I know nothing about bikes, but I would have expected much better mileage. You've got a small fraction of the weight and significantly less drag and friction.
This naturally leads into my own personal favorite: smaller cars. The Smart ForTwo is a step in the right direction. I have a spacious yet compact car, a Focus hatchback. The only time I ever need the back seat is if I'm giving rides, which is extremely rare. It's a 50/50 split between me driving alone, or with passenger. I'd like to see it taken to the next level, with a one-seater. At least where I live, public transportation is a huge failure. The bobble-heads in charge couldn't manage a McDonalds, how are they supposed to manage a system serving nearly a half million riders daily ? A lot of people take the bus because there's not enough parking in this stupidly built city. If they could buy/rent a car that's 1/4 the size (or less!) and 1/4 the fuel consumption, I think lots of people would go for it! Then the buses could focus on best serving the student and elderly crowds, rather than going in spirals around the city to pick up every office drone. The key thing here is the rental aspect. Make these cars cheap as dirt, don't treat them like luxury items, just tools to get from A to B and carry a briefcase or a few grocery bags. Then sit back and watch as commuters, city dwellers and delivery guys jump on the tiny utilitarian vehicles. Make it so you can rent them by the week, or day even! Sure, it will kill the taxi drivers but sometimes you have to break a few eggs.
All of my phones were made within the last decade. Prior to that, I didn't use one. My current phone is less than a year old. It still makes every speaker-like device within range chirp like goddamned euro music, even ones that are unpowered or unplugged.
I guess on the upside, this "feature" allows me to "hear" a call coming in while I drive down the highway while pushing 138db of noise through the stereo. It also makes me instinctively turn it way down because it sounds like a rocket is launching out of my trunk:P
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You know what's funny about Beryl/Vista ? They're doing the same stuff the Mac was doing years ago on puny hardware. I mean really, how frickin' hard is it to draw a window as a texture on a pair of triangles ? Seriously!
Programmers are sloppy, because sloppy is all the industry wants to pay for. Way back in the day when CPU cycles were super expensive, programmers were paid better money and given the time to tweak the crap out of everything, because if they didn't, the app would run dog slow and people wouldn't buy it. The problem is that somehow, people now tolerate underperforming software. They see it as a reason to upgrade... good god, they actually fall for it! Gee I certainly remember surfing the web on a 486 with 8mb of Ram back in the day. Now my OS needs a good 50-60mb to itself, and that's after I ripped out all the cruft. Normally it would be 100mb just for sitting idle with a background image and a neon-colored task bar. Gee uh, where'd all my system resources go ? Does it really require 7.3 million bytes to house a TCP/IP stack when some embedded devices pull it off with oh, 6kb or so ?
The truth however, is that if we were to write code as tightly and meticulously as we did in the 80's and 90's, software would perform, on average, at least 5 to 10 times faster than today, excluding hard bottlenecks like disk access and network bandwidth. It would also take 50 times longer to write the software, and I'd say less than 1% of people who call themselves "programmers" are even able to write such finely tuned code. Everyone doing VB ? Out. Everyone doing RAD ? Out. All you Ruby on Rails weenies ? follow me to this dark alley *BLAM*
I remember spending hours on little loops, with a CPU reference manual and a calculator. Sometimes I did little time sketches to figure out the best way to stagger memory accesses so as to not starve the execution pipes. Often times that meant weaving two disparate functions together, one being memory-hungry, the other CPU hungry. Together they filled each other's latency pockets, and my routine ran nearly thrice faster as a result. No C compiler I've ever seen could do such kinky things. Heck one time I even wrote a little assembler demo whose code executed twice: forward, then backward. The opcodes and data were carefully selected to represent valid instructions when reversed. It was more than a nerdy trick, it allowed my routine to fit entirely in the CPU's on-die cache, which gave it a huge speed boost but more importantly, it enabled a lowly 486 to mix 48 sound channels in real-time. Today's Cubase can't even handle a couple dozen channels without stuttering and/or crashing, on computers over 100 times faster than a 486.
Amen brother!
:) What's even nicer is that I can get toner refills. $50 for a cart is cheap, but $15 for a bottle of toner is a joke. The only thing I dread replacing down the line is the drum.. there's no getting around that one, they can get costly. Still, when you look at the printer's lifetime, which can be anywhere from 5 to 10 years, it's much nicer than having to throw the inkjet out every 12 months.
I switched to laser a while ago, and I'm never going back to inkjet. One toner cartridge (3rd party) costs about $50, lasts a good 7k pages, never smears/clogs and the 15ppm speed doesn't hurt either
I could vaguely be considered an AMD fanboy, well I used to be. The problem is AMD's been resting on their laurels for a while now. Intel released the Core 2 Duo which is pretty frickin' awesome, and of course the expensive but glamorous Quad cores, and AMD responded with 65nm rehashes of the same old X2 chips, same clock speeds, same cache sizes. I've seen no reason to upgrade my AMD in almost 2 years now, and that strikes me as very very wrong! AMD is now considered a budget processor, because even their fastest CPU is under 200 bucks. Good bang for the buck, and the lower power consumption is nice, but computers are one industry that isn't run by the jews... we want expensive screamers that can tear Supreme Commander a new asshole. This is the industry that spawned Quad-SLI, WD Raptors and desktop RAID. High end is where you build prestige for your brand, which helps sell the low-end stuff to the unwashed masses. The truly dedicated AMD fans resorted to Opterons because of their tighter tolerances, therefore higher overclocking potential. That's what we want, and we're willing to throw money at AMD as long as they give us the fastest chip on the market, so what the hell are they doing about it ?
AMD had been in the lead for a long time, but Intel finally leapfrogged them. Now AMD needs to pull one hell of a rabbit out of their hat if they want to stay in the game. To hell with 4x4, it's a waste. We can do that already with Opterons. Give us Quad-core Athlons NOW! Larger caches! Higher clocks! MORE! If AMD can't provide, then it's time to pack up their marketing department and go back to being a small-time OEM chip supplier.
You can't point the finger at one aspect of society and blame all the world's problems on that alone. Hell I get borderline homicidal from driving among imbeciles, but I can't blame Ford for my aggression problems. We live in a stressful, bullshit world and every day it gets a little bit crazier. People eventually crack. They decide they don't want to play by the rules and go wacko like this guy did. I don't know of many people who can go through a whole day without the slightest streak of anger coursing through their veins, unless they're on a 3 day MDMA party. Lacking drugs, we're faced with asshole drivers, arrogant pedestrians, ignorant cashiers, uncooperative coworkers, racial tension, sexual tension, classism, bill collectors, politicians, allergies... yadda yadda!
And that's just for a normal person's life. Throw in situational problems, mental disorders, dramatic personal events... some people bear enough weight that it crushes them until all that's left are the violent instincts of the human animal.
They're both guilty. Given the large number of companies named, I wouldn't be surprised if the conversation went like "I'm the purchasing coordinator for Ministry of X. Give me Y$ or I'll buy your competitor's product." and then just replayed the same tape reel to every competitor.
Sure, it's bad that big business caves in to such dirty demands, but I think the government employees that were receiving the kickbacks are more responsible, whereas the vendors were just working a sale. Ideally I'd want to see the vendors stonewall the dirty buyer and turn them in for fraud, but corporations have no morals so that's a bit of a tall order.
Duuuuuuude chill out it's just a conservative rep whoring for attention. Just look at the lovely writing:
"a new power that would allow the Minister of Industry to order an ISP to block access to content that promotes violence against women, promotes hatred, or contains child pornography."
So according to this conservative asshat, violence against men still falls under the "don't ask don't tell" awning. It's this kind of lopsided tripe that enables minor political parties to stay puny forever. Their purpose is to express the retarded racist sexist views, making them easier to define and conveniently publicized in order to stimulate debate. In a sense, if we didn't have loudmouthed imbeciles in politics, it would be a lot harder to tell bad from good.
Hey, lots of people who work for Dell have Lenovos and HPs. Heck I think even Dell has (or had) HP servers at the call center where I once worked. The thing is, the worker drones aren't the ones in the TV spots selling the product. I really don't think William Ford would be caught dead driving a Nissan, then walk onto a stage set to shoot an ad for the F150. The boss of any company needs to project an image, a very strong one. They might not be movie stars, but they still get their share of voyeurs watching for any opportunity to stir controversy. What if Michael Dell walked around with a Lenovo ? People would say 2 things: 1. He doesn't even use his own notebooks, they must suck ass. and 2. This rich dude uses a Lenovo, they must be awesome! And you watch a ton of Dell customers defect over to IBM's chinese bastard cousin.
That's funny, I have six PC's tightly packed in and around my desk. Hell I even have one I built last week, I didn't have an empty ATX chassis so I just built it right into my desk with some carefully trimmed cardboard panels. Let's see... one Linux iptables box, one web server, one media server, a gaming rig, and a multicore opteron beast running Gentoo where I get actual work done. Number six is an old Pentium-150 with a 3Dfx card for classic gaming. Fun stuff!
:P
Then there's the wife's computer, and the modded Xbox, and the laptop, and the three currently unbuilt rigs I've got sitting in a parts bin right now. One of them will hopefully end up in my car's boot, hooked up to the stereo and GPS. The other two I might just sell off to clear some room.
Let's not forget to mention I'm a broke ass just coming off of 6 months disability ? If it hadn't been for my accident, I'd probably have a second laptop, a Mac (for kicks) and an expansion card with 4 more Opterons and Ram for the beast; 8 cores is so last year!
Now I'm a die-hard computer freak. I'm most definitely a minority. Michael Dell may or may not be a computer freak, but one thing I'm 100% sure about him, he's the head of the world's largest computer distributor and every single one of those machines has his name stamped on the front. Even if he didn't like computers, he'd still have a showroom in his home with one of each model, as props for doing interviews and photo-ops at the very least. Everything this man says and does is very carefully thought out and calculated. Every word he speaks has a multi-million dollar effect on his business. I think even if he weren't a computer enthusiast, he would at least fake it where it matters, and more importantly he'd never let anyone think he didn't love his own products.
I hate to feed the rumors, but what other distro would they possibly use ? I don't know of any other that pulls off the user experience schmoozing as cleanly as Ubuntu, seeing as it's one of their main goals. As funny as it would be to toss a Gentoo boot disc in the box and watch the call center agents as they commit suicide one after another:
Joe - " I setup Portage to run off a CDB backend, and now my metadata is corrupt. Fix my box, bitch!"
Kerpal - " Ok, sir, please turn off the computer and remove the power cord for 2 minutes. "
Joe - " No, f*** you that won't fix it. I need a tarball of this and that, and a custom shell script to reindex those..."
Kerpal - " Ok, sir, I am going to put you on hold... (hold music) AAAAAAAAAH *BOOM* *SPLAT* *CLICK*"
Ultimately they want a nice easy distro to appeal to the masses, because that's the business they're in. I wouldn't be surprised if they came up with a nice idiot-proof restore CD as well, because the expensive part is training the thousands of tech support people worldwide. Having them pop in a restore disc is an easy way to deal with it, because ultimately that's what a lot of techs end up doing when Windows acts up too... just blow it away and start over. That's how they're trained. Advanced software troubleshooting is a luxury billed by the hour, not covered by the puny hardware warranty.
Maybe IBM's been doing stealth OS releases all these years... OS/2 Warp Version 10. :P Now that would be one ugly Dos Shell.
This is really cute, but why the hell would they want to peer with Alaska anyway ? I mean no offense to Alaskans, but of all the places to build a tunnel to, it seems rather arbitrary and I doubt the EU would play into these Russian tactics. It seems they just want to buy cheap American resources and resell them in Europe, at European prices. Things like electricity, petrol, and god-knows what else. Reminds me of the one buddy who always has some scam figured out, but needs to sell the idea to a partner to make it work. "Hey Bill, let's sell weed. I just need you to front the money to buy seeds." or "Hey Bill, let's cheat at poker... I'll deal you winning hands and we'll split the winnings. I just need you to take the beating when we get caught."
This time it's "Hey America, let's sell your crap over here in Europe and we'll split the profits (unevenly). Russia just needs to you exhaust your already-limited resources for their benefit."
Maybe I'm being rude, but I just don't think Russia is ready for any grand plans yet. Get that Putin tyrant out of there first, clean up the friggin country and then we'll talk.
*frozen by terror* What you do in private is your business and yours alone. That said, I wouldn't want to work a photo shoot with a guy who gets aroused by deformed fantasy girls whose breasts are bigger than my head.
The thing is, it shouldn't be harder to support multiple browsers because if they could quit comparing epeens for a moment and actually agree on published standards, they would all work with the same HTML and it would truly boil down to features and personal preference. As it is now, the browser war is about compatibility more than personality, in which case diversity is actually a detriment.
If you're doing kinky ActiveX stuff or other hacks that only work with IE, I'd dig up the bastard that built the web site in the first place and get him to deliver a FULLY FUNCTIONAL replacement. The IE-exclusive features are only necessary in very limited scenarios and certainly don't belong on a publicly-accessible web site on the net. I can think of very few exceptions such as the Trend Micro ActiveX virus scanner, but even they have a Java version that's browser-agnostic.
The other thing to consider is that if 92% of the logs show IE7, is that really because your clients don't use other browsers, or is it because your site's so broken that the Firefox/Safari/Opera users just go to another vendor that knows how to properly code a friggin web site ? That 8% of "outcasts" are probably hitting your page once, realizing it doesn't work with their preferred browser, then switching to IE because they love you too much to go elsewhere. That's what I have to do with certain Government sites because 1. their web developers are idiots who can't code and 2. they're oblivious to anything developed in the last decade. Thing is, I don't really have a choice; it's either I switch to IE and get my tax files uploaded, or I don't and they send the men in black after me. How about you ditch the server logs and ask your paying customers which browsers they want to see supported ? It could go one of two ways: either that 92% turns into something more representative like 60-70%, or it tips the other way and everyone says "I love IE, screw the rest". At least then you have documentation to support your decision.
I've been an IE user forever, I also scoffed at Firefox way back, but ever since IE7 went final I had been having weird lag issues that were driving me batty. I'm a heavy multitasker, so if an MS app decides to lock up my whole PC on a whim, even for just a half-second, I clench my teeth because it affects the other 3-4 things I'm doing. IE7 would sometimes hit a little snag while loading/rendering a page, and through some exclusive lock it would freeze my SMP machine unlike anything else I've ever seen. I got fed up and tried Firefox 2.0 maybe a month or two ago. I imported all my IE favorites into FF, then I forced myself to use the rebellious little browser as much as possible. For the first couple days it was a bit frustrating/disorienting, as FF works a teeny bit differently with features like autocomplete, where years of IE experience got in the way at times, for things like keyboard shortcuts and the many MS-centric quirks I had grown accustomed to, but it wasn't too bad.
:P
I installed a bunch of addons, which is where Firefox really shines. They are plentiful and extremely useful... I've got the Web Developer addon that's great for tinkering with HTML and CSS, the "Down Them All" plugin that adds a multi-stream download manager and simple site ripper to every file dialog, Firefox Showcase recreates IE7's tab preview feature, Greasemonkey lets you write (or steal) little javascripts that alter any page or even add completely new features to sites like GMail and Flickr. I've also got fluffers like PermaTabs whose name says it all: you can lock a tab to keep it from being closed, and you can also lock it in-place, which means any links open in a different tab. This is great for things like control panels, web mail or dynamic home pages. Another favorite of mine is SearchStatus, which shows the Google/Alexa page rank for every site. It's a nice simple research tool for SEO.
Last but not least, there's this little wonder called IE Tab. It lets you embed an IE renderer right in Firefox, for those sites that are too MS-centric. What's nice is you can make certain sites automatically load in the IE engine. The other addons don't function on IE tabs, but just keeping them inside Firefox alongside your other tabs is wonderful as you don't need to juggle two separate browsers. Even then, the new Firefox seems to render just about every site quite well, I only use the IE engine on broken sites like the Canadian Government's e-services, which all use nasty Entrust java applets and horrible HTML that seems purposely designed to piss off non-IE users. That's government for ya
I still think Firefox takes too long to load up, but I tend to keep at least one browser window open all the time so it's a minor nuisance. Then again I criticize just about everything I see so maybe it's not so bad after all.
You lay out these rules for hunters, but I'd love to hear your reasoning when it comes to mass-killing humans for profit and power. We don't eat humans, and there are more respectable ways to grow a nation than invading lands half a globe away.
Well yes, discrimination exists... we try to pretend it doesn't, but whether it's sexism, racism, or just friggin social classism, it's there and it's ugly and willing it away just doesn't work, at least not while there are still stubborn ingrained bigots living in this world.
The problem I see with this article, is the fact that they are changing CS programs to better suit women. Now granted computer science is a fuzzy field, unlike pure sciences like physics and chemistry, but the fact that they can adapt the program to attract women just feels kind of wrong. Is male science that much different from female science ? Am I going to have to learn a whole new set of CS terms and concepts just so I can work with women ? Can they also adapt the CS program to better suit people of certain ethnic backgrounds ? Black computing, latino computing, hell give me Quebecer computing while you're at it... oh no wait, we already have Quebecer computing, it's called "screw the customer hard and fast" *rimshot*
Seriously women, if you're not tempted to become CS grads, that's just fine. The money sucks ass, everyone's out to steal your job and the clients are all whiney imbeciles who still don't know why they need I.T. in the first place. Maybe that's why women are less likely to follow the CS career path. Or maybe it's because all the I.T. geeks get all weird and creepy when a woman walks by. From my personal experience (as a non-drooly geek), whenever a woman from HR or other, walks past the tech cubes, all the heads pop up and start making D&D jokes about rolling a +3 Erection, or I'll be talking about my fun times as an adult webmaster and I'll get blasted with ignorant crap like "Bill, hook me up for a date with a stripper" in my personal inbox. Maybe women don't work in tech because a disproportionate chunk of techies are disrespectful and immature. Why are we labeled as losers and weirdos ? Well probably because the losers and weirdos among us are the most visible, the rest of us, the sane well-mannered ones, we're too busy getting our work done and living normal lives.
If they want more women in CS, get rid of the wackos. The same is true of any field. If half the guys in psychology whacked off to hentai and tried to hit on every woman that had the misfortune of being in the same building, there'd be very few women psychologists.
Keep on clearing those cookies, advertisers pay for traffic :) More uniques means more money for me!
Yep the Canadian music industry is just as ass-backwards as the RIAA, we just don't have as lawsuit-happy a country (yet). What's worse is that most of the "benefits" offered by the AFM are either overbooked or unavailable in most areas. You'll get greater "benefits" by buying a few rounds at the local indie club and chatting it up with the real talent, not the office-dwelling cocksuckers who ruin the industry.
Hey hey! I'm antisocial and generally angry, doesn't mean I'm planning a "mass killing spree", though I must admit if I had a big red button I might be tempted to push it :)
The concept of the killing spree is, at least from my observation, a self-gratifying exercise. When a person reaches such lows that nothing brings them up, they seek refuge in the forbidden pleasures. Some guys hire prostitutes (in an addictive manner), and some other guys seek the thrills of violence. Some pompous old talking heads speak of the reptilian mind. The brain gets hungry for pleasure, satisfaction. When those needs cannot be fulfilled through diplomatic relations (society), human instincts take over and manifest themselves as gluttony, lust and violence, usually in that order as the mind grows more and more desperate for titillation.
Gee that's funny, it runs under VMWare for me. I must be special!
Truth be told, a properly implemented VM hypervisor should be able to run everything under the sun, even itself. In practice, they cut corners for various reasons, usually political like intentionally crippling the product to accommodate MS restrictions. This is one area where open source could beat the commercial guys and help turn things back around.
If someone dies of terrorism while stuck in traffic, where do they get counted ? 1/2 each ? Or does terrorism always win ?
Why is it that a "watchdog" organization, whose purpose is solely to find stuff to nitpick, can wield this kind of "power" whenever they spot someone they don't like ? I'm looking forward to the day when a political group picks a fight with me over my loudly expressed rebellious/anarchic opinions. It seems everyone needs someone to mess with. Left-wingers calling Right-wingers offensive. Right-wingers calling left-wingers repressive. Black people calling white people racist. White people calling black people racist. I choose to keep it simple, I just hate everyone unless otherwise indicated. How's that ? It seems like we've pretended to come a long way since the age of raping and pillaging, when deep down we're still the same retarded bloodthirsty lawless racist sexist apes our ancestors were centuries ago. The main difference is we've grown too lazy and weak to fight with our fists, so now we just point fingers and call people names until it somehow ends up hurting. It didn't work in kindergarten, why would it work with modern adults ?
That's odd, I know nothing about bikes, but I would have expected much better mileage. You've got a small fraction of the weight and significantly less drag and friction.
This naturally leads into my own personal favorite: smaller cars. The Smart ForTwo is a step in the right direction. I have a spacious yet compact car, a Focus hatchback. The only time I ever need the back seat is if I'm giving rides, which is extremely rare. It's a 50/50 split between me driving alone, or with passenger. I'd like to see it taken to the next level, with a one-seater. At least where I live, public transportation is a huge failure. The bobble-heads in charge couldn't manage a McDonalds, how are they supposed to manage a system serving nearly a half million riders daily ? A lot of people take the bus because there's not enough parking in this stupidly built city. If they could buy/rent a car that's 1/4 the size (or less!) and 1/4 the fuel consumption, I think lots of people would go for it! Then the buses could focus on best serving the student and elderly crowds, rather than going in spirals around the city to pick up every office drone. The key thing here is the rental aspect. Make these cars cheap as dirt, don't treat them like luxury items, just tools to get from A to B and carry a briefcase or a few grocery bags. Then sit back and watch as commuters, city dwellers and delivery guys jump on the tiny utilitarian vehicles. Make it so you can rent them by the week, or day even! Sure, it will kill the taxi drivers but sometimes you have to break a few eggs.
All of my phones were made within the last decade. Prior to that, I didn't use one. My current phone is less than a year old. It still makes every speaker-like device within range chirp like goddamned euro music, even ones that are unpowered or unplugged.
:P
I guess on the upside, this "feature" allows me to "hear" a call coming in while I drive down the highway while pushing 138db of noise through the stereo. It also makes me instinctively turn it way down because it sounds like a rocket is launching out of my trunk