How is it "pretty obvious" ? Have you performed some type of statistical analysis on the entire set of torrents available on the site ? Do you have a magic tool that can instantly identify a torrent's legality based on its metadata ? Why aren't you offering this magic tool to the tracker admins so they can self-censor their content ?
If you're so omniscient, could you also gauge the ratio of illegal material on Usenet ? How about RapidShare ? What about all the private FTP caches ?
That's the problem: many armchair rocket scientists have lost faith in NASA's ability to accomplish anything of value. They're a big money sink in a time when the budgets could be far more beneficially applied elsewhere. Do people give a flying fuck about Mars ? Not when there are innumerable large-scale problems here on earth.
While it's no secret that Apple's markup on hardware upgrades is excessive, you're comparing apples to oranges. Those 4gb sticks for your Mac Pro are FB-DIMMs, while the ram you most likely saw at NewEgg is DDR2-SDRAM. The former is "server" memory, not unlike the "Registered SDRAM" of days gone by. It is significantly more expensive than regular desktop memory due to the higher density and the fact that they have a built-in serial controller. Right now, it's the only way to get more than 16gb of memory on a board, because regular memory modules are quite demanding on the motherboard's controller, while FB-DIMMs provide their own "smart" interface.
The differences don't matter to regular users, and likely not for servers either, but checklist-marketing aside the product is more expensive from the get-go.
If you were upgrading a PC with the same motherboard chipset as your Mac Pro, you would likely be spending upwards of $4000 for that same ram.
Dropping the price may well increase the number of copies sold, but Microsoft doesn't directly care about that metric. It's all about the bottom line.
If you sell 100 copies at $300, you have $30,000 total, and 100 users to support.
If you sell 1000 copies at $30, you still have $30,000, but now you must support 1000 users.
The lower volume at a higher price is thus more profitable due to reduced support/maintenance costs. There is also the argument to be said that people who pirate Windows are likely to pirate it regardless of price, because there is little if any incentive to go legit.
No, but seriously, just get out there dude. You don't become a social butterfly overnight by reading a book, you start small and as your communication skills improve, so will your network.
So they want to bust bloggers who accept bribes, but does the FTC plan to go after every single goddamned magazine ever ? It's not like Gamespot invented the practice. I can think of very few print publications that I consider "impartial", at least to a degree where I can soundly make purchasing decisions based on their reviews.
The FTC should be monitoring the channels and their operation, not the content therein.
The Sun is typically considered a "recreational" paper. It appeals to the lowest common denominator, and shies away from serious political issues. It's a light-minded read for the diner or crapper, when you want to read about some ginger kid's extracurricular achievement or the local bullshitter's take on the latest faux-classy meat market.
The Citizen takes itself far more seriously as a news outlet, aimed at an intellectually-present (but average) crowd. It's the print form of the 6 o'clock news, for the most part.
My big beef with any publication is the painfully obvious bias they all push forth. I used to get a kick out of reading two "free" dailies, "Metro" and "24". The former is rather liberal, while the latter is conservative. Comparing their coverage and verbiage of the same event was often more informative than the actual printed words, simply by filling in the gaps each side chooses to ignore, and sometimes extrapolating the real bits both sides hint at but don't dare spell out. Despite the meta-entertainment value, I am quick to invalidate any publication that so blatantly tries to pass opinion as news.
I'm a sharply opinionated person, but I certainly don't claim to have "the truth". My blog is just that, a blog where I rant on and on about things that piss me off, like a geekier version of Bill Maher. You woulnd't try to pass Bill Maher's rants as fact, would you ? That's my problem with newspapers. They can't stick to the facts, though instead of launching inflammatory tirades at specific people or groups by prefacing them with "I think/feel/believe", they strategically omit important facts to skew the viewer toward a certain side of the matter. That's the biggest problem with news disseminators: they're on someone's payroll, and that someone wants value for their money, so they push an agenda. Whether it's "political donations", advertising, outright municipal blackmail (if you print X we revoke your permit)... every newspaper has a puppetmaster.
Nah. Our current PM, Stephen Harper, is a US-loving tool, a total sycophant to the Bushies and a kiss-ass to the upper-class.
The Liberals are currently the opposition, and their last few years have unbelievably weak. The previous leader Stephan Dion had no balls, and embarrassed himself every time he opened his mouth, couldn't win a debate against a Lisa bot. Their current leader has balls, but he comes off as a hypocrite and is constantly ridiculed by trash media over his daily contradictory statements. He's so busy negating the conservatives' platform that he often steamrolls over his own.
Politics is, by definition, dominated by idiots, but this is the first time I can truly say every single party is moronic beyond belief. Nobody's even trying to make sense, it doesn't matter who gets elected, they each have a laundry list of lopsided legislation to shove down our throats, and that itself is a very un-Canadian thing to do. This place is slowly turning into the illegitimate lovechild of the US and UK, a little more each day.
Or Apple could just build a damned iPhone that works with CDMA. The market's out there. Even up here in neoconia, Bell Canada is a CDMA network and they get CDMA versions of most of the same phones as their GSM competitors.
Personally, I wish they'd unify both networks and begone with this proprietary nonsense. This is 2009, fuck proprietary. People are starting to know better and it's just a matter of time before this BS gets called out for what it's worth.
I was interested until I saw that word: Phenom. I pronounce it "Phail".
It Phails to match Intel's offerings, and also Phails to compete on price. Perhaps most importantly, it Phails to offer a good selection of motherboards to put it on. Intel's entry-level quads are in the same price bracket yet are typically 10% to 20% faster for the same clock speed, under typical CPU-bound loads like media encoding and floating point math (graphics).
The reason AMD got so much love in the late 90's and early 00's is because they had faster chips at lower prices. They were also the first to bring x64 to the masses, at a reasonable price point with excellent performance. No matter what people think or say, AMD is the underdog in the PC industry, so they have to go above and beyond what Intel offers, else the latter's brand familiarity will win out every time. The Joe Randoms and Plain Janes, if you ask them what kind of processor they have, they will answer "AMD Pentium Duo-Core".
There's nothing wrong with being the underdog, but AMD needs to learn its role and stick to it. Intel has upped their game by slashing prices, which they can do at whim because they control the goddamned market. AMD has to play its cards right, and the last 3-4 years have been nothing but mistakes at every turn.
Larrabee doesn't change a damned thing. A beowulf cluster of shitty Intel GPUs doesn't magically remove the stench of failure. It's just a whole lotta more suckage on one die.
The whole idea of a jury trial is flawed to begin with. It's mob mentality in a courtroom, nothing more, nothing less. Jurors are in no way educated to responsibly act upon cases that will inevitably serve as legal precedent for future legislation.
Do you get your taxes done by a fry cook ? Do you want Joe Plumber to decide you whether or not you can have an abortion ?
Bullshit covered in clever-sounding legalese is still bullshit.
The problem is that for every one of us developers that hates IE, there are 10 more developers who know nothing else and think this Firefox thing is some hippie fad, and are very adamant about it. Frontpage and.Net have caused immeasurable damage to the web with their completely broken markup, but if you're the kind of imbecile who knows nothing but Frontpage, your P.O.V. is that all the other browsers suck.
No matter how you slice it, it is always easier to support a single platform, than to support all of them. It just so happens that when you develop "for" Firefox, you're usually closer to that cross-browser goal than had you aimed for IE in the first place. But then once in a while, I'll forget to test my template in IE and sure enough, that's the one that breaks.
The problem I see with police is it is run like a business. They have budgets, quotas, all sorts of very businesslike checks and balances that completely foul up the system. A low crime rate is "bad" for the police, because it worsens their stats, so there is more incentive in somewhat encouraging "crime", as long as you can catch your fabricated "criminals". And then there's the fines... and the service fees that get tacked onto said fines.
As time passes by, more things are being criminalized, quite blatantly creating work to justify bigger, badder, overreaching police forces. They don't ever solve society's problems, they just push them around while collecting a paycheque.
I also have very little trust in cops. I have a clean record but they still find ways to piss me off, and I just don't like the concept of a small group of average-intellect people being entrusted with special powers over everyone else.
All the larger enterprise storage vendors are full of shit. They say the SSD is "ready" because it's the hottest buzzword in the industry, which always commands huge profit margins.
On one hand, I can use cheap fast 2.0TB SATA drives for 11 cents a gig, or I can go the SSD route with 256gb drives at $4.00 a gig. That's OEM cost, which means EMC and friends will triple that number, to convince your boss these drives are "special".
Yeahhh... give me the one that costs 36 times more, takes up 4 times more space, requires 8 times more controllers and is guaranteed to wear out in a few years. If your I/O patterns are so messed up that today's horrendous SSDs actually lower your cost per I/O, you need to rethink your information architecture.
Like so many people, you fail to distinguish criminal cases from civil cases. RIAA vs Anything is a civil case.
If I decide I don't like you (and you're off to a slow start), and I accuse you of defrauding me for some arbitrary amount, that does not grant me the right to barge into your home with an armed rent-a-cop and confiscate your bank records. I have to present reasonable proof by my own means, the court can't ask the defendant to self-incriminate.
Think of natural selection as a statistical study. You launch a dozen different variations on a themes, let things run their course, then see what worked and what didn't. Market studies work this way, as well as a large spectrum of biomedical research.
Baby-screening is the idea of having that dozen possibilities, choosing one based on arbitrary preference, and then believing/hoping you made the right choice. It's wholly unscientific, you're really just playing baby-lotto. If so-called genetic experts haven't yet figured out how to create the perfect human, then what makes you think Joe Random and Jane Vapid are somehow qualified to outwit nature ?
Every time you see a road being repaved, you see ten guys standing around staring at the one dude driving the roller. Sure, the material cost may well be a significant part of the total bill, but here even a 5% trimming of the fat would result in a rather large dollar amount, which could be better used elsewhere. I think it's also safe to assume there could be material efficiency improvements from the use of modern machinery, rather than relying on a bunch of uneducated laborers eyeballing the whole job.
Having a bunch of relatives in the trucking and construction industry, and hearing them complain about the sloppy management and coordination, I have no problem suggesting that the whole process is in need of some serious rethinking and tweaking. It wouldn't take a million dollars in engineers' salaries to tighten up the whole operation by at least 5%, which means that optimization exercise could pay for itself within a month in a single city.
Even if it's found to be "impossible" to reduce costs, a secondary goal should be to reduce the time expenditure. In the city, there are few things more annoying than having a bunch of major roads closed for several weeks while they work on them. When you consider 100k vehicles per day being rerouted around the repair op, the net cost to commuters in wasted time, of a single 2-minute detour, greatly exceeds whatever the road service itself cost.
Ob.: Move closer to work, or get a job somewhere more convenient ?
You only have one life to live. I'd rather not spend mine stuck in traffic, which is why I'm quite glad my office is only 2 miles away from my apartment and an 8 minute bike/bus/cab ride.
A long commute does not add value to your job. If you work a 40-hour work week, and your commute is an hour each way, it's kind of like taking a 20% pay cut. Well I'd rather take a job that pays 20% less and spend those two free hours on something else, like arguing on slashdot;)
Javascript has nothing to do with it. An IMG tag is sufficient.
IMHO there's a pretty big difference between accidentally having a porn popup, and having a meticulously curated folder of underage erotica in your "My Documents" folder.
Slashdot Mirror
How is it "pretty obvious" ? Have you performed some type of statistical analysis on the entire set of torrents available on the site ? Do you have a magic tool that can instantly identify a torrent's legality based on its metadata ? Why aren't you offering this magic tool to the tracker admins so they can self-censor their content ?
If you're so omniscient, could you also gauge the ratio of illegal material on Usenet ? How about RapidShare ? What about all the private FTP caches ?
640K qubits ought to be enough for anybody
That's the problem: many armchair rocket scientists have lost faith in NASA's ability to accomplish anything of value. They're a big money sink in a time when the budgets could be far more beneficially applied elsewhere. Do people give a flying fuck about Mars ? Not when there are innumerable large-scale problems here on earth.
Why not just replace the whole damned window ? Or does that also require 26 engineers and twelve million dollars like every other NASA doodad ?
While it's no secret that Apple's markup on hardware upgrades is excessive, you're comparing apples to oranges. Those 4gb sticks for your Mac Pro are FB-DIMMs, while the ram you most likely saw at NewEgg is DDR2-SDRAM. The former is "server" memory, not unlike the "Registered SDRAM" of days gone by. It is significantly more expensive than regular desktop memory due to the higher density and the fact that they have a built-in serial controller. Right now, it's the only way to get more than 16gb of memory on a board, because regular memory modules are quite demanding on the motherboard's controller, while FB-DIMMs provide their own "smart" interface.
The differences don't matter to regular users, and likely not for servers either, but checklist-marketing aside the product is more expensive from the get-go.
If you were upgrading a PC with the same motherboard chipset as your Mac Pro, you would likely be spending upwards of $4000 for that same ram.
Dropping the price may well increase the number of copies sold, but Microsoft doesn't directly care about that metric. It's all about the bottom line.
If you sell 100 copies at $300, you have $30,000 total, and 100 users to support.
If you sell 1000 copies at $30, you still have $30,000, but now you must support 1000 users.
The lower volume at a higher price is thus more profitable due to reduced support/maintenance costs. There is also the argument to be said that people who pirate Windows are likely to pirate it regardless of price, because there is little if any incentive to go legit.
This sort of attitude is one of the main reasons why anti-piracy lobbyists get so much love from legislators.
If you pirate Windows, why the hell would you care about "alternatives" ? And vice-versa: if you're a linux fan, you don't need to pirate Windows.
One thing is certain: bragging about your hypocritical stance on /. is not going to make Microsoft lower their prices.
bride.ru FTW
No, but seriously, just get out there dude. You don't become a social butterfly overnight by reading a book, you start small and as your communication skills improve, so will your network.
And yet, the 12 people are cheaper than you and your sidekick.
Whether their work carries the same value, that's a whole other debate, but in the U.S. of quarterly A., the outsourced crew is "better" on paper.
So they want to bust bloggers who accept bribes, but does the FTC plan to go after every single goddamned magazine ever ? It's not like Gamespot invented the practice. I can think of very few print publications that I consider "impartial", at least to a degree where I can soundly make purchasing decisions based on their reviews.
The FTC should be monitoring the channels and their operation, not the content therein.
The Sun is typically considered a "recreational" paper. It appeals to the lowest common denominator, and shies away from serious political issues. It's a light-minded read for the diner or crapper, when you want to read about some ginger kid's extracurricular achievement or the local bullshitter's take on the latest faux-classy meat market.
The Citizen takes itself far more seriously as a news outlet, aimed at an intellectually-present (but average) crowd. It's the print form of the 6 o'clock news, for the most part.
My big beef with any publication is the painfully obvious bias they all push forth. I used to get a kick out of reading two "free" dailies, "Metro" and "24". The former is rather liberal, while the latter is conservative. Comparing their coverage and verbiage of the same event was often more informative than the actual printed words, simply by filling in the gaps each side chooses to ignore, and sometimes extrapolating the real bits both sides hint at but don't dare spell out. Despite the meta-entertainment value, I am quick to invalidate any publication that so blatantly tries to pass opinion as news.
I'm a sharply opinionated person, but I certainly don't claim to have "the truth". My blog is just that, a blog where I rant on and on about things that piss me off, like a geekier version of Bill Maher. You woulnd't try to pass Bill Maher's rants as fact, would you ? That's my problem with newspapers. They can't stick to the facts, though instead of launching inflammatory tirades at specific people or groups by prefacing them with "I think/feel/believe", they strategically omit important facts to skew the viewer toward a certain side of the matter. That's the biggest problem with news disseminators: they're on someone's payroll, and that someone wants value for their money, so they push an agenda. Whether it's "political donations", advertising, outright municipal blackmail (if you print X we revoke your permit)... every newspaper has a puppetmaster.
Nah. Our current PM, Stephen Harper, is a US-loving tool, a total sycophant to the Bushies and a kiss-ass to the upper-class.
The Liberals are currently the opposition, and their last few years have unbelievably weak. The previous leader Stephan Dion had no balls, and embarrassed himself every time he opened his mouth, couldn't win a debate against a Lisa bot. Their current leader has balls, but he comes off as a hypocrite and is constantly ridiculed by trash media over his daily contradictory statements. He's so busy negating the conservatives' platform that he often steamrolls over his own.
Politics is, by definition, dominated by idiots, but this is the first time I can truly say every single party is moronic beyond belief. Nobody's even trying to make sense, it doesn't matter who gets elected, they each have a laundry list of lopsided legislation to shove down our throats, and that itself is a very un-Canadian thing to do. This place is slowly turning into the illegitimate lovechild of the US and UK, a little more each day.
Or Apple could just build a damned iPhone that works with CDMA. The market's out there. Even up here in neoconia, Bell Canada is a CDMA network and they get CDMA versions of most of the same phones as their GSM competitors.
Personally, I wish they'd unify both networks and begone with this proprietary nonsense. This is 2009, fuck proprietary. People are starting to know better and it's just a matter of time before this BS gets called out for what it's worth.
I was interested until I saw that word: Phenom. I pronounce it "Phail".
It Phails to match Intel's offerings, and also Phails to compete on price. Perhaps most importantly, it Phails to offer a good selection of motherboards to put it on. Intel's entry-level quads are in the same price bracket yet are typically 10% to 20% faster for the same clock speed, under typical CPU-bound loads like media encoding and floating point math (graphics).
The reason AMD got so much love in the late 90's and early 00's is because they had faster chips at lower prices. They were also the first to bring x64 to the masses, at a reasonable price point with excellent performance. No matter what people think or say, AMD is the underdog in the PC industry, so they have to go above and beyond what Intel offers, else the latter's brand familiarity will win out every time. The Joe Randoms and Plain Janes, if you ask them what kind of processor they have, they will answer "AMD Pentium Duo-Core".
There's nothing wrong with being the underdog, but AMD needs to learn its role and stick to it. Intel has upped their game by slashing prices, which they can do at whim because they control the goddamned market. AMD has to play its cards right, and the last 3-4 years have been nothing but mistakes at every turn.
Larrabee doesn't change a damned thing. A beowulf cluster of shitty Intel GPUs doesn't magically remove the stench of failure. It's just a whole lotta more suckage on one die.
The whole idea of a jury trial is flawed to begin with. It's mob mentality in a courtroom, nothing more, nothing less. Jurors are in no way educated to responsibly act upon cases that will inevitably serve as legal precedent for future legislation.
Do you get your taxes done by a fry cook ? Do you want Joe Plumber to decide you whether or not you can have an abortion ?
Bullshit covered in clever-sounding legalese is still bullshit.
The problem is that for every one of us developers that hates IE, there are 10 more developers who know nothing else and think this Firefox thing is some hippie fad, and are very adamant about it. Frontpage and .Net have caused immeasurable damage to the web with their completely broken markup, but if you're the kind of imbecile who knows nothing but Frontpage, your P.O.V. is that all the other browsers suck.
No matter how you slice it, it is always easier to support a single platform, than to support all of them. It just so happens that when you develop "for" Firefox, you're usually closer to that cross-browser goal than had you aimed for IE in the first place. But then once in a while, I'll forget to test my template in IE and sure enough, that's the one that breaks.
The problem I see with police is it is run like a business. They have budgets, quotas, all sorts of very businesslike checks and balances that completely foul up the system. A low crime rate is "bad" for the police, because it worsens their stats, so there is more incentive in somewhat encouraging "crime", as long as you can catch your fabricated "criminals". And then there's the fines... and the service fees that get tacked onto said fines.
As time passes by, more things are being criminalized, quite blatantly creating work to justify bigger, badder, overreaching police forces. They don't ever solve society's problems, they just push them around while collecting a paycheque.
I also have very little trust in cops. I have a clean record but they still find ways to piss me off, and I just don't like the concept of a small group of average-intellect people being entrusted with special powers over everyone else.
Somehow, I doubt Osama's in the mood for an office job.
All the larger enterprise storage vendors are full of shit. They say the SSD is "ready" because it's the hottest buzzword in the industry, which always commands huge profit margins.
On one hand, I can use cheap fast 2.0TB SATA drives for 11 cents a gig, or I can go the SSD route with 256gb drives at $4.00 a gig. That's OEM cost, which means EMC and friends will triple that number, to convince your boss these drives are "special".
Yeahhh... give me the one that costs 36 times more, takes up 4 times more space, requires 8 times more controllers and is guaranteed to wear out in a few years. If your I/O patterns are so messed up that today's horrendous SSDs actually lower your cost per I/O, you need to rethink your information architecture.
Like so many people, you fail to distinguish criminal cases from civil cases. RIAA vs Anything is a civil case.
If I decide I don't like you (and you're off to a slow start), and I accuse you of defrauding me for some arbitrary amount, that does not grant me the right to barge into your home with an armed rent-a-cop and confiscate your bank records. I have to present reasonable proof by my own means, the court can't ask the defendant to self-incriminate.
Think of natural selection as a statistical study. You launch a dozen different variations on a themes, let things run their course, then see what worked and what didn't. Market studies work this way, as well as a large spectrum of biomedical research.
Baby-screening is the idea of having that dozen possibilities, choosing one based on arbitrary preference, and then believing/hoping you made the right choice. It's wholly unscientific, you're really just playing baby-lotto. If so-called genetic experts haven't yet figured out how to create the perfect human, then what makes you think Joe Random and Jane Vapid are somehow qualified to outwit nature ?
Every time you see a road being repaved, you see ten guys standing around staring at the one dude driving the roller. Sure, the material cost may well be a significant part of the total bill, but here even a 5% trimming of the fat would result in a rather large dollar amount, which could be better used elsewhere. I think it's also safe to assume there could be material efficiency improvements from the use of modern machinery, rather than relying on a bunch of uneducated laborers eyeballing the whole job.
Having a bunch of relatives in the trucking and construction industry, and hearing them complain about the sloppy management and coordination, I have no problem suggesting that the whole process is in need of some serious rethinking and tweaking. It wouldn't take a million dollars in engineers' salaries to tighten up the whole operation by at least 5%, which means that optimization exercise could pay for itself within a month in a single city.
Even if it's found to be "impossible" to reduce costs, a secondary goal should be to reduce the time expenditure. In the city, there are few things more annoying than having a bunch of major roads closed for several weeks while they work on them. When you consider 100k vehicles per day being rerouted around the repair op, the net cost to commuters in wasted time, of a single 2-minute detour, greatly exceeds whatever the road service itself cost.
Ob.: Move closer to work, or get a job somewhere more convenient ?
You only have one life to live. I'd rather not spend mine stuck in traffic, which is why I'm quite glad my office is only 2 miles away from my apartment and an 8 minute bike/bus/cab ride.
A long commute does not add value to your job. If you work a 40-hour work week, and your commute is an hour each way, it's kind of like taking a 20% pay cut. Well I'd rather take a job that pays 20% less and spend those two free hours on something else, like arguing on slashdot ;)
Javascript has nothing to do with it. An IMG tag is sufficient.
IMHO there's a pretty big difference between accidentally having a porn popup, and having a meticulously curated folder of underage erotica in your "My Documents" folder.