That will go well with my continuous baster. I've found that basting a duck every 15 minutes is labor intensive, and am working on a solution to the problem.
It's sad but true: there are some people out there who have gone their entire lives eating dry meat. They've never had a properly basted fowl or roast, and even think that adding gravy afterwards somehow fixes things. Mes amis, you must baste the meat before it is fully cooked, or all flavor leaves it!
But the compressed files have been specially mastered so that doesn't matter! What are you saying, that you're playing them on something that isn't an iPod? Tssh, you would, as a member of the 1%!
Agreed. I have a copy of Keynes's treatise on probability, that has been so badly OCR'ed, that I can't make heads or tails of it.
Then there are a few Pratchett eBooks where the type-setting is on par with something from a second grader's attempt at using Word, the least of which is that Death, in a few sections, does not speak in small caps. If you are a fan, then you know what an atrocity that is. Actually, I think they italicized him once or twice.
Arguably, this is not what HP should be focusing its attention on at the moment. It won't make the company any money worth pursuing; if anything, it'll cost HP, forcing them to divert resources away from its core, at a time when it can ill afford to.
I favor it being company paranoia. See, from HP's view, they've been hemorrhaging money for a long period of time; they seem to be getting the worst of every deal, and all of their ventures seem to be ending in failure; after a while of this, the mind enters a dark phase, when it begins entertaining unnatural thoughts; Why? Because it's trying to learn, adapt, cope, understand why it is continually failing; and one of the things you learn from school, is that sometimes there are people, acting in unison, against you; doing so quietly, and you are the last to know; as such, minor things become 'hints' of bigger things lurking under the surface; so, HP thinks that GM has actually been working to steal HP's employees for months, possibly years; and perhaps that is why HP hasn't been able to negotiate as much from GM as it could have (it had been working to undermine HP); again, this is money potentially lost, and in HP's mind, it's a clear case that GM has been thieving its goods (remember how paranoid HP is about money right now).
Think of it being like a police department that is particularly bad at its job; so when they finally catch someone in the act of a crime, they punish them brutally, thinking that it will serve as a deterrent to others; in reality, it just shows them losing their grip.
If HP wants to save itself, it needs to find the willpower to do a powerful sanity check, and oust the people who have been ailing it (from the inside). Anyone who isn't focused on creating new products, or keeping track of the accounts, or helping HP keep itself out of hot water (legally or from a business standpoint), and doing so with some level of aggression, needs to go. HP needs to R&D itself out of this hole, and that won't happen if R&D isn't being run by technology people; HP does not need flash in the pan, this is the current trend but won't be in six months technology; it needs something stable, something that it can build future products on, something that isn't an also-ran product that has to compete purely on price with the competition. That means features that can't be easily copied. And those take engineers, scientists, and so on to build; they also take time. HP should trim its sails, and prepare to re-enter the market in five years.
Indeed. Were I chairman of MS, HP, or AMD, I'd be looking at the summary executions of the CxOs who ran my companies. I mean, we're making business history here with the sheer number of large companies seemingly capsizing through ineptitude.
Well, the thinking goes, if you sue the talent for leaving, then in the future, the talent will be too afraid to leave; thus, you retain the talent, through the use of fear, and don't spend any extra money (the other way of retaining talent), which is a good thing, because that talent is overpriced anyway...they need to get with the real world, and realize that the days of paying high five-figures or even six-figures jobs are over, especially when the mid-level manager over them (who has a MBA, and spends his weekends networking with the right people) isn't earning that much more. I mean, we need to preserve the company hierarchy, with managers getting paid more than the talent, no matter how badly we need that talent (who spent several years in college, studying & working on problems we can't begin to understand, sacrificing their nights and weekends for a better life at some point in the future), otherwise we'll have anarchy! That's what all the best performing companies out there have, a clear, delineated company structure! I read about that in the books from the management section of Barnes & Noble (like the Secret! Who knew that if you pictured yourself wanting it, it would just come to you?), as well as the trade mags that seem to appear in my mail after way too much drinking with the vendor's sales staff (they're so nice too, and it's important to remember that we're all in this together! One hand washes the other, I always say; I don't understand what the techs are complaining about this ten-one-hundred stuff being last year; who's the manager? I am! That's why I am paid the big bucks, to do the thinking, and they're paid whatever commoners get paid these days (which is always too much), to be my personal servants or whatever.).
RIP, HP. You had a great legacy, and many were proud to work for you; but the people up top apparently have no understanding how to actually grow a business, and do so profitably.
That's under the assumption that that's all the machine will do for the next two hours. Installing updates in the background, etc., etc. and you'll definitely want a faster hard drive.
Dear God, this is the worst version (or a contender for it) of how things are supposed to work with the internet.
It seriously ranks up there with people who repeatedly stream the same YouTube clip or NetFlix movie over and over again. You're supposed to download things locally, then use them; not stream / tether them to a server. Why? Because it's the equivalent of driving your car to the super market to buy a single can of coke, driving back home, drinking it, then driving back to the store again...and so on, a few dozen times. As bad as it is for the environment for you to be driving your car as such, so it is bad for traffic on the internet.
Do you know why the people behind VOIP and other fun techologies want to regulate the internet (aside from the control / money angle)? It's because these idiots are creating so much traffic with their tethered apps; so much traffic, that (and this is the head trip), rather than inform the customers / providers that this shit needs to stop (use a cache you morons, and a big one), they're going to give them priority over other, non-latency specific traffic (like you downloading a regular file). Anyone who has studied networking should be facepalming at the thought of this design.
But no, the content providers like it, because it keeps people tethered, and their *precious* (said in Golum's voice) safe from thieves.
For the longest period of time, I couldn't understand why MS / Sony shipped their consoles with such tiny HDs. It now makes sense.
Indeed. C# is a rapid prototype language; as such, if you need more performance than C# provides (which uses a pretty greased JIT), you'd write the components that needed it in C/C++/ASM, and just call them from higher-level functions.
The point was to speed up development; what would take an eternity in C/C++, with mind-boggling errors, is now easy to debug and get running in a few hours / weeks. With DllImport and other fun things, it's easy to link to C/C++ dlls, which is where you would throw the code, once again, that needs that extra 10% performance boost. If you were doing a video transcode app, you'd write the majority of the UI / backend in C#, and link to the actual C/C++ dlls for the encoding.
Let's be honest, UIs are painful for most programmers. C# makes them a hell of a lot easier to build, almost a joy to use. C#, however, is not limited to UIs; it's exceedingly useful everywhere else. Switch statements which support strings, and strings which are not insane!
Perhaps they're trying to rebuild lost people from the past, you know, once you get that whole immortality thing working correctly. Bringing back George Washington and other fan favorites to give lectures or whatever on what they did during their lives.
Or they could be looking for something they missed: sometimes people miss out on new inventions, etc. and up in trapped in a similar way of thought; by slightly altering some values (your dad had a beard, your mom had blond hair, etc.), perhaps they are attempting to create alternate histories with hopefully new inventions / ways of thought, which can then be added to their 'collection.'
Imagine a future where the Allies lost WWII, and the language constructs / thought patterns of millions went a different way as a result; would all of these alternate, future inhabitants, many centuries or millenia down the line be as well off as their forefathers hoped? Would there still be crime? Would there still be famine, war, etc.? Would there be one way of thought, with non-standard deviations leading to imprisonment, or multiple ways of thought, leading to exploration? Would everyone be content with the way things are, or would there be a number who would like to see whether the grass truly is 'greener on the other side'? A paradise utopia, or a perfect dystopia, one in which even the thought of discontent is shocked out of your head? Would we have a "I have no mouth, but I must scream" scenario?
Would we end up in a 'special' hell, so to speak, where the human race is doomed by way of one action or another? Time enough to look back, for a solution, to change things?
As someone who follows the genetic sciences when I can find the time, I did find it rather startling that our race, through too few progenitors and too many wars, is now just barely treading water, in terms of genetic health. It's...fascinating, to see how eugenics was not only wrong, but completely an utterly wrong; I studied eugenics like most people who stumble onto the subject through one means or another, but could never find a solid, scientific argument against the whole 'master race' or 'perfect race' set of ideas; sure there was the whole inbreeding thing, which could be scene with some of the royals / yokels; but an argument would be had that existing populations of various 'races' were large enough that so long as you did not breed with your first cousin (or closer), you were in the clear, so to speak; I found it so...enlightening, that our race is one the brink of extinction, that the number of diagnoses of genetic illnesses that seem on the rise might be right, because of our inability to prevent wars, and our penchant for committing genocide. Just one more World War, and our entire species is doomed; the survivors will see genetic illnesses multiplying uncontrollably with each new generation, until newborns can no longer exist. We have, it seems, to make a choice: at the very least, to keep things together long enough that we can breed and train up a few tens of thousands of genetic scientists / doctors to fix this unhappy situation, or to go out with a bang.
And yes, this problem is more real than a nuclear war or global warming. We're going to need as much living genetic material as possible to reverse this decay; I say living, as I do not trust that the cure will come easily, and we're going to need a fair amount of redundancy here. I do not think I am alone in having read the 'right journals / studies' to know that this is a problem, unless a number of other scientists have fallen asleep at the wheel / digressed into petty bickering over trivial matters.
Where the fuck were you when the internet had been up and running for several years? It was more than newsgroups, it was content without the BS of needing to be compensated for it. People devoted their time and own damn money for websites long before advertizing got on the scene, and it was much better then.
What has advertizing brought, but a plague? Pay-walls, SEOs, multiple fucking flash advertizements all playing the instant the page loads up. I'd rather the web without advertizements than all the freemium content I could ever want.
Having pulled down some over the air episodes with advertizements snipped out, I've realized where all of my time has gone: to bullshit products I will NEVER buy. What used to be 12 hours of "meh" entertainment has dropped to 4 hours of non-stop awesome; removing that crap has also done wonders for my temperament: I never realized how angry I got when ads would jump in right at the climax of a show. I would actually lose track of plot lines because of 5 minutes here, 5 minutes there. The show comes back on, and I have to think for a moment: who are these people? What was I watching? What was this week's episode about?
Unbundle cable / satellite channels, get rid of ads, and live a good life. I'm out.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, just give up. The crazies have taken over, and they're running things.
That will go well with my continuous baster. I've found that basting a duck every 15 minutes is labor intensive, and am working on a solution to the problem.
It's sad but true: there are some people out there who have gone their entire lives eating dry meat. They've never had a properly basted fowl or roast, and even think that adding gravy afterwards somehow fixes things. Mes amis, you must baste the meat before it is fully cooked, or all flavor leaves it!
But the compressed files have been specially mastered so that doesn't matter! What are you saying, that you're playing them on something that isn't an iPod? Tssh, you would, as a member of the 1%!
I took a screenshot for the rest of you to enjoy: http://imgur.com/nriJ3
Agreed. I have a copy of Keynes's treatise on probability, that has been so badly OCR'ed, that I can't make heads or tails of it.
Then there are a few Pratchett eBooks where the type-setting is on par with something from a second grader's attempt at using Word, the least of which is that Death, in a few sections, does not speak in small caps. If you are a fan, then you know what an atrocity that is. Actually, I think they italicized him once or twice.
Arguably, this is not what HP should be focusing its attention on at the moment. It won't make the company any money worth pursuing; if anything, it'll cost HP, forcing them to divert resources away from its core, at a time when it can ill afford to.
I favor it being company paranoia. See, from HP's view, they've been hemorrhaging money for a long period of time; they seem to be getting the worst of every deal, and all of their ventures seem to be ending in failure; after a while of this, the mind enters a dark phase, when it begins entertaining unnatural thoughts; Why? Because it's trying to learn, adapt, cope, understand why it is continually failing; and one of the things you learn from school, is that sometimes there are people, acting in unison, against you; doing so quietly, and you are the last to know; as such, minor things become 'hints' of bigger things lurking under the surface; so, HP thinks that GM has actually been working to steal HP's employees for months, possibly years; and perhaps that is why HP hasn't been able to negotiate as much from GM as it could have (it had been working to undermine HP); again, this is money potentially lost, and in HP's mind, it's a clear case that GM has been thieving its goods (remember how paranoid HP is about money right now).
Think of it being like a police department that is particularly bad at its job; so when they finally catch someone in the act of a crime, they punish them brutally, thinking that it will serve as a deterrent to others; in reality, it just shows them losing their grip.
If HP wants to save itself, it needs to find the willpower to do a powerful sanity check, and oust the people who have been ailing it (from the inside). Anyone who isn't focused on creating new products, or keeping track of the accounts, or helping HP keep itself out of hot water (legally or from a business standpoint), and doing so with some level of aggression, needs to go. HP needs to R&D itself out of this hole, and that won't happen if R&D isn't being run by technology people; HP does not need flash in the pan, this is the current trend but won't be in six months technology; it needs something stable, something that it can build future products on, something that isn't an also-ran product that has to compete purely on price with the competition. That means features that can't be easily copied. And those take engineers, scientists, and so on to build; they also take time. HP should trim its sails, and prepare to re-enter the market in five years.
Indeed. The whole razor-blade model with the printer ink business...I hope no one thought that would actually last long term.
The market is always changing. It does that because it's made up of living beings. As such, it's best to always prepare for a potential siege.
Indeed. Were I chairman of MS, HP, or AMD, I'd be looking at the summary executions of the CxOs who ran my companies. I mean, we're making business history here with the sheer number of large companies seemingly capsizing through ineptitude.
Well, the thinking goes, if you sue the talent for leaving, then in the future, the talent will be too afraid to leave; thus, you retain the talent, through the use of fear, and don't spend any extra money (the other way of retaining talent), which is a good thing, because that talent is overpriced anyway...they need to get with the real world, and realize that the days of paying high five-figures or even six-figures jobs are over, especially when the mid-level manager over them (who has a MBA, and spends his weekends networking with the right people) isn't earning that much more. I mean, we need to preserve the company hierarchy, with managers getting paid more than the talent, no matter how badly we need that talent (who spent several years in college, studying & working on problems we can't begin to understand, sacrificing their nights and weekends for a better life at some point in the future), otherwise we'll have anarchy! That's what all the best performing companies out there have, a clear, delineated company structure! I read about that in the books from the management section of Barnes & Noble (like the Secret! Who knew that if you pictured yourself wanting it, it would just come to you?), as well as the trade mags that seem to appear in my mail after way too much drinking with the vendor's sales staff (they're so nice too, and it's important to remember that we're all in this together! One hand washes the other, I always say; I don't understand what the techs are complaining about this ten-one-hundred stuff being last year; who's the manager? I am! That's why I am paid the big bucks, to do the thinking, and they're paid whatever commoners get paid these days (which is always too much), to be my personal servants or whatever.).
RIP, HP. You had a great legacy, and many were proud to work for you; but the people up top apparently have no understanding how to actually grow a business, and do so profitably.
That's under the assumption that that's all the machine will do for the next two hours. Installing updates in the background, etc., etc. and you'll definitely want a faster hard drive.
Get the team to praise a section of the code he's harping about. It should force him to revisit his conclusions.
Dear God, this is the worst version (or a contender for it) of how things are supposed to work with the internet.
It seriously ranks up there with people who repeatedly stream the same YouTube clip or NetFlix movie over and over again. You're supposed to download things locally, then use them; not stream / tether them to a server. Why? Because it's the equivalent of driving your car to the super market to buy a single can of coke, driving back home, drinking it, then driving back to the store again...and so on, a few dozen times. As bad as it is for the environment for you to be driving your car as such, so it is bad for traffic on the internet.
Do you know why the people behind VOIP and other fun techologies want to regulate the internet (aside from the control / money angle)? It's because these idiots are creating so much traffic with their tethered apps; so much traffic, that (and this is the head trip), rather than inform the customers / providers that this shit needs to stop (use a cache you morons, and a big one), they're going to give them priority over other, non-latency specific traffic (like you downloading a regular file). Anyone who has studied networking should be facepalming at the thought of this design.
But no, the content providers like it, because it keeps people tethered, and their *precious* (said in Golum's voice) safe from thieves.
For the longest period of time, I couldn't understand why MS / Sony shipped their consoles with such tiny HDs. It now makes sense.
Just install more lights.
Forgetting IronPython, F#, and whatever else we can run off the CLR.
Agreed. The idea that someone would run a major website on the consumer OS, as opposed to the server OS, is a bit of a red flag here.
Indeed. C# is a rapid prototype language; as such, if you need more performance than C# provides (which uses a pretty greased JIT), you'd write the components that needed it in C/C++/ASM, and just call them from higher-level functions.
The point was to speed up development; what would take an eternity in C/C++, with mind-boggling errors, is now easy to debug and get running in a few hours / weeks. With DllImport and other fun things, it's easy to link to C/C++ dlls, which is where you would throw the code, once again, that needs that extra 10% performance boost. If you were doing a video transcode app, you'd write the majority of the UI / backend in C#, and link to the actual C/C++ dlls for the encoding.
Let's be honest, UIs are painful for most programmers. C# makes them a hell of a lot easier to build, almost a joy to use. C#, however, is not limited to UIs; it's exceedingly useful everywhere else. Switch statements which support strings, and strings which are not insane!
Actually, you can apparently get C# to compile down to machine instructions (no JIT) with the right compiler.
If you mean a proprietary language that is a standard under ISO, then yes, it is a proprietary language.
And if install Mono on other platforms, you can even get C# code to run on it.
Perhaps someone thought the populace was becoming too intelligent via the interweb, and put into play a plan to stop that.
Perhaps they're trying to rebuild lost people from the past, you know, once you get that whole immortality thing working correctly. Bringing back George Washington and other fan favorites to give lectures or whatever on what they did during their lives.
Or they could be looking for something they missed: sometimes people miss out on new inventions, etc. and up in trapped in a similar way of thought; by slightly altering some values (your dad had a beard, your mom had blond hair, etc.), perhaps they are attempting to create alternate histories with hopefully new inventions / ways of thought, which can then be added to their 'collection.'
Imagine a future where the Allies lost WWII, and the language constructs / thought patterns of millions went a different way as a result; would all of these alternate, future inhabitants, many centuries or millenia down the line be as well off as their forefathers hoped? Would there still be crime? Would there still be famine, war, etc.? Would there be one way of thought, with non-standard deviations leading to imprisonment, or multiple ways of thought, leading to exploration? Would everyone be content with the way things are, or would there be a number who would like to see whether the grass truly is 'greener on the other side'? A paradise utopia, or a perfect dystopia, one in which even the thought of discontent is shocked out of your head? Would we have a "I have no mouth, but I must scream" scenario?
Would we end up in a 'special' hell, so to speak, where the human race is doomed by way of one action or another? Time enough to look back, for a solution, to change things?
As someone who follows the genetic sciences when I can find the time, I did find it rather startling that our race, through too few progenitors and too many wars, is now just barely treading water, in terms of genetic health. It's...fascinating, to see how eugenics was not only wrong, but completely an utterly wrong; I studied eugenics like most people who stumble onto the subject through one means or another, but could never find a solid, scientific argument against the whole 'master race' or 'perfect race' set of ideas; sure there was the whole inbreeding thing, which could be scene with some of the royals / yokels; but an argument would be had that existing populations of various 'races' were large enough that so long as you did not breed with your first cousin (or closer), you were in the clear, so to speak; I found it so...enlightening, that our race is one the brink of extinction, that the number of diagnoses of genetic illnesses that seem on the rise might be right, because of our inability to prevent wars, and our penchant for committing genocide. Just one more World War, and our entire species is doomed; the survivors will see genetic illnesses multiplying uncontrollably with each new generation, until newborns can no longer exist. We have, it seems, to make a choice: at the very least, to keep things together long enough that we can breed and train up a few tens of thousands of genetic scientists / doctors to fix this unhappy situation, or to go out with a bang.
And yes, this problem is more real than a nuclear war or global warming. We're going to need as much living genetic material as possible to reverse this decay; I say living, as I do not trust that the cure will come easily, and we're going to need a fair amount of redundancy here. I do not think I am alone in having read the 'right journals / studies' to know that this is a problem, unless a number of other scientists have fallen asleep at the wheel / digressed into petty bickering over trivial matters.
Indeed. Nothing like seeing security forces have a spaz attack over an electric toothbrush to make me feel safe.
Where the fuck were you when the internet had been up and running for several years? It was more than newsgroups, it was content without the BS of needing to be compensated for it. People devoted their time and own damn money for websites long before advertizing got on the scene, and it was much better then.
What has advertizing brought, but a plague? Pay-walls, SEOs, multiple fucking flash advertizements all playing the instant the page loads up. I'd rather the web without advertizements than all the freemium content I could ever want.
Having pulled down some over the air episodes with advertizements snipped out, I've realized where all of my time has gone: to bullshit products I will NEVER buy. What used to be 12 hours of "meh" entertainment has dropped to 4 hours of non-stop awesome; removing that crap has also done wonders for my temperament: I never realized how angry I got when ads would jump in right at the climax of a show. I would actually lose track of plot lines because of 5 minutes here, 5 minutes there. The show comes back on, and I have to think for a moment: who are these people? What was I watching? What was this week's episode about?
Unbundle cable / satellite channels, get rid of ads, and live a good life. I'm out.
*shrugs* I built until my entire map was filled with Launch Arcologies.
But they're making money hand over fist, right? Right?