Of course, the "uncanny valley" happens to be exactly at the "animated corpse" stage. Maybe it's the corpse that's making it disturbing, not the closeness to human beings.
It has been repeatedly shown that taking guns away from law-abiding citizens makes them easy targets for violent criminals, who, by definition, do not obey laws, including gun regulation laws.
And yet, many countries do just well with gun regulation. Maybe it's time the good old US of A look past gun regulation and at culture.
I'm an immigrant to the States, and one thing that really surprised me is the general level of agressiveness. And it's contagious - I find that I'm getting more agressive, too.
So what about the USA makes people agressive, that's the main question. Not who can get guns how fast.
(Just for the record, I'm pro-gun control: Use both hands when shooting).
In fact, yes. I try to help them to find one, but I consider it *really* important they do find one. I don't believe in free handouts to people who don't try to get back. And this fat, happy bastard is donating quite a bit to charities that see this the same way.
Your view of cowardice might change quickly if you or your family were in danger. Can't speak for my family, because they never have been in danger. I myself have joined the protests for a united Germany back in 89, and I did have the same view on cowardice then. Have you ever spoken up against an oppressive regime while in their country?
Then what would you suggest, you smug bastard? A letter that the local post office/police can trace? An Op-Ed piece in the NYT? A short segement on CNN?
It's sad how fast people forget that there is so many ways to communicate outside of the government-sanctioned ways. There's plenty of other things you can do. E-Mail is a stupid choice, because it leaves perfect traces.
I really hate to break that to computer-literate people, but: If you want to stay anonymous, use paper. Anything you do on a computer is a problem because there's a perfect record.
You can certainly encrypt things. Even then, you don't e-mail it. That's a single sender and a single recipient, plus it's transient. Put it on a web page if you have to.
I wonder where the idea comes from that "free speech" includes anonymous speech. If we're talking about the 1st amendment, let me reference it quickly:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
No mention of guaranteed anonymity. In fact, it only mentions the government making laws. E-Mail warranties are a social contract between all involved parties - we're abdicating certain things to get other benefits.
As far as I'm concerned, anonymous speech is (mostly)cowardice, nothing else. There's the one exception where you're under an opressive regime - in which case I suggest you don't necessarily e-mail what you have to say...
Just looking at your code, and I haven't seen any/necessary/ comments. A few examples of how to get rid of them without losing info:// This function makes sure the user has a 'normal' track length. float vTL()
Change function to: ensureNormalTrackLength()
Next one:/* This is so if in a long (greater than\equal to 800M) race the user will
slow down gradually; to emulate the effect of tiredness. void slowDown() {
while ((realChoice[0] == 'y') || (realChoice[0] == 'Y') &&
(trackLength >= 800) && (firstCompSpeed >= 10))
Change to: void emulateTirednessForLongRaces() {
while(realChoiceIsYes() && raceIsLong() && speedIsHigh())
Now if I knew what realChoice was, the thing would be even more readable.
Result: Most comments can be expressed in code. Some can't. Try to put as many as possible directly in the code - that way code and comments can't disagree because you forgot to change one of them.
While I'm all for privacy, your assumptions are/completely/ unfounded.
Time Warner might be doing a lot of (maybe unethical) thinks - but blatantly hacking into another vendors software is a bit risky even for them.
And TiVo would be out of their minds if they/shared/ that information with media companies. They might sell it, but that will get them into trouble with Nielsen.
Since Nielsen represents corporate America/and/ has a vested interest in the privacy of that data (more money for them), that is actually a good thing.
And finally, TiVo sent out the software without consent. BFD. They do that all the time with their upgrades - that's why they're automatic. Nielsen Media will not touch that data until they have got their forms signed - there's too good a reputation at stake.
And even when - most people discuss what they saw on TV at the watercooler, and order porn over Pay-Per-View. How could anonymous data collection then be a violation of privacy?
Go wake up, and fight the real fight. There's lots of things that need opposition galore - this one is not among them
IANAL, but as far as I know, this violates a core priniciple of law suits. All law suits have to be brought forward in 'Good Faith'.
That means both parties have to truly believe they are within their rights. You can't just bring a fake lawsuit because it pleases you. If the judge finds out, you're BOTH likely to be sentenced...
But that's not the point. It does not matter where it shows up if you miss out on the one MAJOR search engine of the internet.
Especially if it is returning hits for the competition.
As another suggestion, you might want to look to the game console market to leverage the knowledge you gained. God knows there are a lot of people out there who would pay $600 for a decent PS2 or Gamecube profiler....
That's perfectly possible with perforce. You just branch the file, and delete the appropriate parts in the two copies.
Voila, instant file splitting with preserved history. Granted, it would be cooler if the VCS could track that this was actually done for the purpose of splitting files, but progress is slow....
I don't think that the GIMP is any kind of enticment for artists to come to Linux. Sorry, but Photoshop still beats the pants off GIMP in terms of useability.
Even Photoshop LE can well hold its own against GIMP. Maybe we don't need artists, but UI designers on linux....
Good grief, do moderators ever stop to think? This is blatantly stupid stuff which qualifies as flamebait, if anything. But since it disses Word, it must be good, right?
Creating a new consoles is like creating a new computer. Creating an aircraft is a different league. Sending somebody to the moon is a whole nother univers
Having a monopoly means you do not invest as much as you would if you were under competitive pressure. After all, there's nobody to best you
PC technology is not exactly designed for running word. All the 3D cards, and all the newer chip architectures were created with multimedia and game users in mind
If there's a monopoly, there can be no competition. Just by definition. The game companies just compete with each other - no pressure on the console manufacturer. In fact, the console manufacture can squeeze the game companies for higher license fees.
Consoles do not compete with thin client PC's. They compete with settop boxes. Which are quite a bit thicker than a thin client. And a different idea...
Amazingly enough, consoles are sold at loss nowadays, so the poster got one fact straight (Out of 6). I guess that wins you an 'informative' on slashdot...
A monopoly is _never_ good for the consumer, BTW. Just try reading an economics book from time to time...
It is not offensive to think that XP fails if you don't install all practices. The XP practices form a net - they reinforce each other. If you weaken that net, XP degrades to pure hacking.
If you remove practices, you need to replace them with something that fills the void this left. It doesn't lead to failure on deviation if you think about what you're doing. Just leaving out stuff causes a crash.
He could deduce that their unit testing was not properly installed. You said stuff was never working - this is impossible if you have unit tests in place.
Now if that company tried to switch to XP in the middle of a running project, that might have the same result. XP relies on a strong testing framework. If you don't put it in place from the beginning, you _are_ heading for trouble.
But basically, you're just uncovering the fact that the code was bad to begin with.
And, if you switch in the middle of the project, chances are high that somebody believed XP to be a silver bullet. There still is no silver bullet.
XP has a limited scope. (See your XP is no panacea link. You can adopt practices. You can modify XP. Just don't call it XP then.
The problem is XP is a buzzword right now. So many shops claim to do XP. They only implement a few practices, without understanding what they leave out and why. This implies they're going to fail.
Not because they do not use XP correctly - because they do not understand their own development process enough to see the shortcomings.
Well, the problem is the author of the review obviously did not understand XP:-)
XP is not about being on time, under budget. XP is about giving the most business value to the customer at any given time. (And about writing [almost] bug-free code. And lots of other stuff..)
In a nutshell, you present 'stories' to your customer every 3 weeks, complete with estimates. Your customer gets to pick stories for the next 3 weeks that he deems most important. You go implement them.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Since you do it every 3 weeks and adjust your estimate every 3 weeks, your customer always knows what to expect, and when.
But it's not about fixed budgets. (In fact, XP proponents also have proposed a different contract framework to adress this)
Jesus Christ! Does anybody moderating the thread have _any_ clue. Or reads slashdot at least?
Point 1)
Speed != Security. Rijndael (the new AES) is faster and more secure than a lot of the currently used algorithms.
Now granted, you could argue that the faster the encryption is, the faster you can exhaust the keyspace. But for sufficiently long keys this is moot. Not to mention that this is essentially security by obscurity.
Point 2)
Sorry, but the time needed for encryption does not even effect the time you spend accessing your harddrive unless the HD is very fast or the encryption is very slow. The theoretical maximum throughput of a standard IDE drive leaves a lot of room for additional computations between blocks.
Ah. Slashdot moderation.
'A flower pot having a drainage tray, an outer shell supported on said drainage tray, an upper insert, a lower insert and a top block. The upper insert is disposed between the lower insert and the top block. A soil groove is provided in the upper insert for receiving soil to determine the wetness of the soil above the top block.'
Unfortunately, that one's for real. Do I still qualify for the prize?
Geography-based is good as META information on a domain name. You don't think that somebody who wants to look at the Ford (Motor) web site wants to remember or look up where the hell the company is located, do you?
Nothing like a good geography based search as additional information. But it should not be encoded in the domain name. You don't throw it away to appease the pundits - you throw it away because statically encoding information that is either volatile (in the case of the individual moving around) or meaningless (in the case of a global business) is just a bad idea.
For the same reason, we don't have domain names like MYPHONE.312.1.phone - They don't contain any information the user is interested in.
Domain names are the way they are because they transport a maximum of information in a minimum of characters.
I don't know about fucking dimes - mine just sit'n'wait. But I guarantee you (want to bet?) that this is only the first step. Once they nailed you to CDDB as the only provider (That's one of the requirements to get the license!), they'll start charging the user. Just give it time.
First law of the open market - if you CAN charge for something, you WILL
You want CDDB to continue to provide and pay for an absolutely free service for you and your friends.
Why should they?
Because we'll make them. Information will be free.
As to why they should provide it for free - they got users to enter information under the false pretense that the service would be free.
The linux-mentality is that any service should be free, just because there are some people in the world that COULD or WOULD set it up for free.
Exactly. As long as somebody WOULD set it up for free, let him set it up for free. If he relies on user input to make it into a valuable service, he's morally bound to keep it free. (Ugh. Moral. Ethics. How do you convert that into cash?)
Maybe Sourceforge can take up cause, and hire a few for just that purpose
Before SourceForge does that, maybe they should allow users to weed out all those "I've got no code, but a cool idea" projects that never go anywhere?
SourceForge was great in the beginning, but it's a pain to look through nowadays. OpenSource's biggest risk right now is that the great project may drown in a flood of mediocre to bad projects - signal to noise is getting pretty low recently.
3. I suppose that it will make things 'legal' when I take my generic, private libraries and classes that I've written from one employer to the next, but who really concerns themselves about this anyway?
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, the "uncanny valley" happens to be exactly at the "animated corpse" stage. Maybe it's the corpse that's making it disturbing, not the closeness to human beings.
It has been repeatedly shown that taking guns away from law-abiding citizens makes them easy targets for violent criminals, who, by definition, do not obey laws, including gun regulation laws.
And yet, many countries do just well with gun regulation. Maybe it's time the good old US of A look past gun regulation and at culture.
I'm an immigrant to the States, and one thing that really surprised me is the general level of agressiveness. And it's contagious - I find that I'm getting more agressive, too.
So what about the USA makes people agressive, that's the main question. Not who can get guns how fast.
(Just for the record, I'm pro-gun control: Use both hands when shooting).
Do you tell homeless people to "get a job", too?
In fact, yes. I try to help them to find one, but I consider it *really* important they do find one. I don't believe in free handouts to people who don't try to get back. And this fat, happy bastard is donating quite a bit to charities that see this the same way.
Your view of cowardice might change quickly if you or your family were in danger.
Can't speak for my family, because they never have been in danger. I myself have joined the protests for a united Germany back in 89, and I did have the same view on cowardice then. Have you ever spoken up against an oppressive regime while in their country?
Then what would you suggest, you smug bastard? A letter that the local post office/police can trace? An Op-Ed piece in the NYT? A short segement on CNN?
It's sad how fast people forget that there is so many ways to communicate outside of the government-sanctioned ways. There's plenty of other things you can do. E-Mail is a stupid choice, because it leaves perfect traces.
I really hate to break that to computer-literate people, but: If you want to stay anonymous, use paper. Anything you do on a computer is a problem because there's a perfect record.
You can certainly encrypt things. Even then, you don't e-mail it. That's a single sender and a single recipient, plus it's transient. Put it on a web page if you have to.
I wonder where the idea comes from that "free speech" includes anonymous speech. If we're talking about the 1st amendment, let me reference it quickly:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
No mention of guaranteed anonymity. In fact, it only mentions the government making laws. E-Mail warranties are a social contract between all involved parties - we're abdicating certain things to get other benefits.
As far as I'm concerned, anonymous speech is (mostly)cowardice, nothing else. There's the one exception where you're under an opressive regime - in which case I suggest you don't necessarily e-mail what you have to say...
It would be called Bob, then.
I wish I had the time - instead, I have to work on Mortal Kombat
Just looking at your code, and I haven't seen any /necessary/ comments. A few examples of how to get rid of them without losing info: // This function makes sure the user has a 'normal' track length.
/* This is so if in a long (greater than\equal to 800M) race the user will
float vTL()
Change function to:
ensureNormalTrackLength()
Next one:
slow down gradually; to emulate the effect of tiredness.
void slowDown()
{
while ((realChoice[0] == 'y') || (realChoice[0] == 'Y') &&
(trackLength >= 800) && (firstCompSpeed >= 10))
Change to:
void emulateTirednessForLongRaces()
{
while(realChoiceIsYes() && raceIsLong() && speedIsHigh())
Now if I knew what realChoice was, the thing would be even more readable.
Result: Most comments can be expressed in code. Some can't. Try to put as many as possible directly in the code - that way code and comments can't disagree because you forgot to change one of them.
- Robert
While I'm all for privacy, your assumptions are /completely/ unfounded.
/shared/ that information with media companies. They might sell it, but that will get them into trouble with Nielsen.
/and/ has a vested interest in the privacy of that data (more money for them), that is actually a good thing.
Time Warner might be doing a lot of (maybe unethical) thinks - but blatantly hacking into another vendors software is a bit risky even for them.
And TiVo would be out of their minds if they
Since Nielsen represents corporate America
And finally, TiVo sent out the software without consent. BFD. They do that all the time with their upgrades - that's why they're automatic. Nielsen Media will not touch that data until they have got their forms signed - there's too good a reputation at stake.
And even when - most people discuss what they saw on TV at the watercooler, and order porn over Pay-Per-View. How could anonymous data collection then be a violation of privacy?
Go wake up, and fight the real fight. There's lots of things that need opposition galore - this one is not among them
IANAL, but as far as I know, this violates a core priniciple of law suits. All law suits have to be brought forward in 'Good Faith'.
That means both parties have to truly believe they are within their rights. You can't just bring a fake lawsuit because it pleases you. If the judge finds out, you're BOTH likely to be sentenced...
- Robert
But that's not the point. It does not matter where it shows up if you miss out on the one MAJOR search engine of the internet.
Especially if it is returning hits for the competition.
As another suggestion, you might want to look to the game console market to leverage the knowledge you gained. God knows there are a lot of people out there who would pay $600 for a decent PS2 or Gamecube profiler....
That's perfectly possible with perforce. You just branch the file, and delete the appropriate parts in the two copies.
Voila, instant file splitting with preserved history. Granted, it would be cooler if the VCS could track that this was actually done for the purpose of splitting files, but progress is slow....
I don't think that the GIMP is any kind of enticment for artists to come to Linux. Sorry, but Photoshop still beats the pants off GIMP in terms of useability.
Even Photoshop LE can well hold its own against GIMP. Maybe we don't need artists, but UI designers on linux....
Does that mean we need to make it illegal to send noise by email?
:-)
YES PLEASE! End SPAM now!
Good grief, do moderators ever stop to think? This is blatantly stupid stuff which qualifies as flamebait, if anything. But since it disses Word, it must be good, right?
- Creating a new consoles is like creating a new computer. Creating an aircraft is a different league. Sending somebody to the moon is a whole nother univers
- Having a monopoly means you do not invest as much as you would if you were under competitive pressure. After all, there's nobody to best you
- PC technology is not exactly designed for running word. All the 3D cards, and all the newer chip architectures were created with multimedia and game users in mind
- If there's a monopoly, there can be no competition. Just by definition. The game companies just compete with each other - no pressure on the console manufacturer. In fact, the console manufacture can squeeze the game companies for higher license fees.
- Consoles do not compete with thin client PC's. They compete with settop boxes. Which are quite a bit thicker than a thin client. And a different idea...
Amazingly enough, consoles are sold at loss nowadays, so the poster got one fact straight (Out of 6). I guess that wins you an 'informative' on slashdot...A monopoly is _never_ good for the consumer, BTW. Just try reading an economics book from time to time...
Informative! Sheesh!
If you remove practices, you need to replace them with something that fills the void this left. It doesn't lead to failure on deviation if you think about what you're doing. Just leaving out stuff causes a crash.
He could deduce that their unit testing was not properly installed. You said stuff was never working - this is impossible if you have unit tests in place.
Now if that company tried to switch to XP in the middle of a running project, that might have the same result. XP relies on a strong testing framework. If you don't put it in place from the beginning, you _are_ heading for trouble.
But basically, you're just uncovering the fact that the code was bad to begin with.
And, if you switch in the middle of the project, chances are high that somebody believed XP to be a silver bullet. There still is no silver bullet.
XP has a limited scope. (See your XP is no panacea link. You can adopt practices. You can modify XP. Just don't call it XP then.
The problem is XP is a buzzword right now. So many shops claim to do XP. They only implement a few practices, without understanding what they leave out and why. This implies they're going to fail.
Not because they do not use XP correctly - because they do not understand their own development process enough to see the shortcomings.
XP is not about being on time, under budget. XP is about giving the most business value to the customer at any given time. (And about writing [almost] bug-free code. And lots of other stuff..)
In a nutshell, you present 'stories' to your customer every 3 weeks, complete with estimates. Your customer gets to pick stories for the next 3 weeks that he deems most important. You go implement them.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Since you do it every 3 weeks and adjust your estimate every 3 weeks, your customer always knows what to expect, and when.
But it's not about fixed budgets. (In fact, XP proponents also have proposed a different contract framework to adress this)
Try www.xprogramming.com for more info. (It has a PDF of XP installed, I think)
Hey, RPN is just a dream come true... All you C++ wusses don't appreciate Forth
Point 1)
Speed != Security. Rijndael (the new AES) is faster and more secure than a lot of the currently used algorithms.
Now granted, you could argue that the faster the encryption is, the faster you can exhaust the keyspace. But for sufficiently long keys this is moot. Not to mention that this is essentially security by obscurity.
Point 2)
Sorry, but the time needed for encryption does not even effect the time you spend accessing your harddrive unless the HD is very fast or the encryption is very slow. The theoretical maximum throughput of a standard IDE drive leaves a lot of room for additional computations between blocks.
Ah. Slashdot moderation.
Unfortunately, that one's for real. Do I still qualify for the prize?
Nothing like a good geography based search as additional information. But it should not be encoded in the domain name. You don't throw it away to appease the pundits - you throw it away because statically encoding information that is either volatile (in the case of the individual moving around) or meaningless (in the case of a global business) is just a bad idea.
For the same reason, we don't have domain names like MYPHONE.312.1.phone - They don't contain any information the user is interested in.
Domain names are the way they are because they transport a maximum of information in a minimum of characters.
I don't know about fucking dimes - mine just sit'n'wait. But I guarantee you (want to bet?) that this is only the first step. Once they nailed you to CDDB as the only provider (That's one of the requirements to get the license!), they'll start charging the user. Just give it time.
First law of the open market - if you CAN charge for something, you WILL
Because we'll make them. Information will be free.
As to why they should provide it for free - they got users to enter information under the false pretense that the service would be free.
The linux-mentality is that any service should be free, just because there are some people in the world that COULD or WOULD set it up for free.
Exactly. As long as somebody WOULD set it up for free, let him set it up for free. If he relies on user input to make it into a valuable service, he's morally bound to keep it free. (Ugh. Moral. Ethics. How do you convert that into cash?)
Before SourceForge does that, maybe they should allow users to weed out all those "I've got no code, but a cool idea" projects that never go anywhere?
SourceForge was great in the beginning, but it's a pain to look through nowadays. OpenSource's biggest risk right now is that the great project may drown in a flood of mediocre to bad projects - signal to noise is getting pretty low recently.
Anybody who has some sort of work ethics?