When the battery dies for good prematurely, as has been know to be the case, will you have actually even utilized all 60GB?
Ah, I misread. That's a good question. I'm hoping the battery in my 15GB doesn't go out prematurely. But if it does, it's covered by warranty. If it goes out after my warranty expires (and I bought Apple's extended warranty, which I usually don't do), a third-party replacement is only $30 anyway. By that time I'll have had the thing for three years, so I doubt I'll cry over it.
But I don't plan on having it that long, really. I'm holding to the theory that in a year or two, I'll sell this iPod for way more than it's worth (Apple resale values are stupid like that), eat a small loss, and upgrade to the nearly latest and greatest.
Others have answered your first question pretty reasonably, I think. As to your second:
Will you ever be able to play the full 60GB of tune before you need a new iPod due to it's notoriously sub par proprietary battery?
Who cares? How often do you listen to your entire music collection straight through? Once you get past several hours' worth of music, the extra storage is for variety and availability, not longevity.
I will be boycotting (all by myself, I imagine) the US release of the new Harry Potter movie because of the night vision goggles in Britain. However, I won't be doing so because of an anti-surveillance ideology. I'll be doing it to discourage bringing that kind of crap over here, where I live.
Sitting in the dark, unable to see anything other than the few people around me and the screen, I do not want a handful of kids watching me with night vision goggles. That's just fucking creepy, and that's all there is to it. The first time that happens to me at a theater, that theater will hear about it when I demand a refund. The second time, I won't be going to movie theaters again at all until I hear that the practice has stopped.
Why integrate a cell phone with all these add on features that aren't nearly as good as things devoted specifically to the task?
Like what? What device, specifically, will perform the task these guys are describing? Are you going to build a completely new device with a camera, mouse buttons, and wireless connectivity for people to carry around so they can use these interactive installations?
Doesn't it make more sense just to install some software, which is practically free, on a device which already has all the necessary hardware?
Doesn't it make sense, if there are a lot of applications which require the same hardware, to just build one damn device and use it for all of them? If you really need a better implementation of one specific application than this convergence device can provide, carry a specialized device when you need it, as well. That still beats carrying a bag full of devices around all the time, when on any given day at least half of them are expensive and complete overkill.
I think you missed the point of the article. The on-phone software "locks onto" those circular "barcodes" with the phone's camera, and can detect phone movement relative to them. If you have a GUI interface with a spotcode on a slider, for instance, you can "grab" the spotcode with your phone and, by moving your phone around, drag the slider.
This is not cuecat, and it's not Salling Clicker-- Salling Clicker does none of the motion detection or image processing stuff.
2) - 4) You can't justify torture, but you can point out hypocrisy and put said torture in perspective.
What hypocrisy? The person to whom I was responding was arguing with a hypothetical "radical leftist", a straw man of his own invention. He's inventing hypocrisy to point out.
I also reject the idea that this "perspective" is useful, and that was my entire point. Judging one horrible act relative to another horrible act is only useful when legislating punishment in the abstract, and nobody who's espoused the perspective you mention has been discussing punishment. It's been trotted out implicitly to excuse or mitigate the wrongness of the Abu Ghraib torture, and that's simply a moral non sequitur.
5) You miss the main point about the torture. It isn't the acts themselves, but A) whether the torture was official policy and B) what are the consequences for the people responsible for said torture.
No, I get that. But that was not the point under discussion. If your meaning is "what are the consequences, compared to the consequences Berg's killers will face", I can only say that I hope the punishment fits the crime and the needs of society in each case. I do not see a need to adjust the judgment or punishment of either crime in light of the other's commission.
There are certainly cases where the torture of others has saved countless lives. The US and every other country in the world have tortured to gain intellegence and will continue to do so - forever. This is not my opinion, this is history.
Even if you could name such a case, historian, that is beside the point.
The moral error in reasoning from in the ticking bomb scenario arises from weighing the harm to the guilty terrorist against the harm to the prospective innocent victims. Instead,
the harm to innocent terrorist victims should be weighed against the breakdown of key social institutions and the state-sponsored torture of many innocents. Stated most starkly, the damaging social consequences of a program of torture interrogation evolve from institutional dynamics that are independent of the original moral rationale.
The 'torture' at Abu Grab is completely insignificant compared to the greater horrors in the world right now. What about the full scale genocide occuring *right now* in the Sudan? Where is the outcry from the 'progressives' of the world on this issue?
This thread isn't about the Sudan. What is your point, that a crime should be overlooked because a greater crime is occurring elsewhere? That people who put forth the argument that perhaps the torture at Abu Ghraib was a pretty objectively bad thing are "bad progressives" with no credibility, because what about the Sudan? Come on.
Which is, of course, crap. It is not only possible but also moral to make value judgments. It's not only possible but moral to say that killing a hostage brutally and cruelly on videotape is worse than putting a bag over a prisoner's head for three days.
I keep hearing this. I guess you're the thousandth person to have said it or something, because you're the lucky winner of my response.
Bags over the prisoners' heads was the least of it. Prisoners at Abu Ghraib were attacked by dogs, isolated for long periods of time, and tortured to death. So let's not pretend the torture at Abu Ghraib was some minor infraction of niggling rules.
You cannot justify, excuse, or mitigate the torture of prisoners by pointing out the barbaric acts of an unrelated group of people.
You cannot justify, excuse, or mitigate the torture of prisoners with events that happened after the torture occurred.
You cannot justify, excuse, or mitigate torture.
Judging the unquestionably barbaric actions of one group relative to the unquestionably barbaric acts of another is a really shitty way to go about morality.
Name a popular band and I'll name the one they are trying to rip off...
That's ok, I can do it.
Here's a partial list for your boys, Led Zeppelin:
Howlin' Wolf
Robert Johnson
Willie Dixon (they flat out stole his song, in toto)
Leadbelly
Bo Diddley
Mississippi Fred McDowell
Sonny Boy Williamson
Don't get me wrong, I love Led Zeppelin. But this old-geezer crap about music these kids listen to today sucking is the same old-geezer crap that's been spouted by old geezers since at least the 30s. Do you think maybe it's just a matter of perspective?
What I find disconcerting is that so many people don't even realize that the library is not just a big stack of books, it's a service. Libraries have trained staff-- many of them degreed in library & information science-- who spend all day finding information for people.
Who cares if you don't know where to look for a piece of information? The reference librarian does. In larger libraries, there are usually librarians who specialize in particular fields of research. My university's library, for instance, has at least one research librarian assigned to each college or school within the university-- all degreed, and many dual-degreed in library science and their respective specialty fields. And they don't care in the least who is asking them for help-- it's not like the CS librarian will only talk to CS students.
Google is convenient, and fast for most searches, but there's a lot of information that just isn't available to it. Libraries buy access to that information, both in print and in databases, and they hire people to help you find the stuff you need.
The most important library skill, and the one that is most often overlooked, is recognizing the reference desk and asking for help.
He didn't count the time it took for him to leave his office and drive to the library. So add another 20 minutes to all of the library times.
Yeah, or you could just call the reference desk. A good reference librarian will probably find your answers faster than you would anyway. They tend to have degrees in finding information.
Of course, if someone wasn't a CS graduate they'd have picked that one up one chapter into an O'Reilly algorithm book. It's not like it's a very hard or complicated concept to grasp.
The relevant programming skills taught in CS are readily available in much more palatable form, so if you're only interested in learning programming it's not what you should be studying.
I never argued that you need a formal, institutional education in CS to understand the difference between a hash table and a linked list, or the algorithms that operate on them. All I said was that as a CS graduate, the parent poster has such an education and should have that knowledge.
Sure, he could pick it up elsewhere on his own, but "picking it up elsewhere" (even in an O'Reilly book) is "studying CS", so I don't see that we're in disagreement.
Once I got out in the real world, especially with languages like Java, even the CS theory/practice (this is a hash table, now write one), I found that most of the data structures/algorithmic stuff had been written and I just filled in pieces.
Yes, but you have to remember that those libraries and APIs only save you the trouble of writing the data structure code. You, as a CS graduate, know why you want to use a linked list or a hash table, given the circumstances. You know this because you know how that library must be operating on the structures they provide, and you understand their costs and benefits.
At least, you do if you paid attention in theory class. I know a lot of people who didn't, and who end up using entirely the wrong (provably wrong, mind you) library-provided data structures for their problem, simply because they only understand arrays or grabbed the first collection class that allowed them to grab an element by index.
I've just graduated with a BS in Comp Sci, and I'll tell you, I scraped by in a lot of my math classes. Hated most of them, dreaded the tests, nearly developed ulcers waiting for the final grades. But I've got some work experience, so I never doubted their usefulness, unlike many of the students around me.
Nearly every CS problem I've seen is some sort of combinatorics problem: You've got all these *things*, see, and you want to know how many ways they can relate to each other and furthermore how long, computationally, it will take to find out. A lot of this is graph theory, and if you think you're going to get away with not knowing at least some basic graph theory and graph-based algorithms, you're in the wrong field.
An understanding of probability is critical both for optimization and for defect avoidance. If you adjust your systems biases (and all systems have biases) toward a certain set of inputs or states, you'd better have a pretty good idea that those are the most common.
Statistics are useful for a lot of things-- statistical analysis (using probability) is central to most self-optimizing algorithms. More importantly, though, an understanding of statistics will help you with your development processes and quality. Is your testing methodology really reducing defects? What happens if you switch to this new-fangled development process, or drop a couple of steps from your current process, or add another person to the team? How long is this project going to take?
As a programmer, you might be able to get away with not knowing any of this stuff. As a software engineer, you'd better have at least the basics down, or your product is going to be crap and it's going to be expensive and you're not going to know why or how to fix it.
A lot of us who copied albums to tape did it to preserve the album or to get a good copy before the disk got dirty/scratched/etc - which was a real possibility, unlike the "I want to back up the CD in case it gets scratched" excuses some people like to use today.
I have a binder of burned CDs that are direct copies of "original" discs that I bought. I use these discs in the car, in my discman, and on the odd occasion that I want to use a CD at home. I don't even bother to put these in a case in the car... my glovebox is full of them. Several are scratched, and I don't care. Why should I have to?
I wish I had started doing it sooner, as I have several originals which are ruined by a single scratch and which I have not gotten around to replacing. I take pretty good care of my originals, and did so even before I started ripping them to mp3/ogg/aac and burning copies for daily use. But it's not like CDs are invulnerable, and shit still happens just like it did in the heyday of the LP.
All this to say: Don't presume that the idea of making "backup" copies of CDs is bullshit. You've got it backwards, of course-- the originals are the backup-- but it is done, and for good reason.
Completely fascinating.... So how do I use a mouse? Also, I wish to use 3.5" disk in my 5.25" floppy drive.. is this possible?
I've spent five minutes trying to determine not only your point, but what possible relevance these comments can have to the text you quoted. So I thought maybe I should just ask: What in the hell are you talking about?
Not having direct access to system calls doesn't hurt J2EE or other Java applications in the least, for two reasons: 1) they're almost never needed, because the JRE provides abstracted access to the same functionality, and 2) if you really desperately need direct access, you can use JNI.
The effects of this "choice" do not "remain to be seen"-- we're seeing them right now, and it's a non-issue.
It's not meant to eliminate bias, it's meant to display bias and make it obvious. The idea is that you can see at a glance the relative popularity of a given story, and that you can see the most popular (presumably the most important) stories most easily.
If you read the application, you'll see that Apple is not claiming patent on "scroll wheels on music players" as many posters are saying, nor are they claiming anything else nearly so broad.
Their application describes in mind-numbing detail the hierarchical menus and interfaces used on the iPod, and mentions that the scroll wheel and buttons exemplify a means of navigating them.
If they get this patent, you can still use a scroll wheel, and you can still make a player that's remarkably similar to the iPod. You just can't up and clone their menu tree. Big hairy deal.
if it's been in orbit since 1996, why has it only just been found? I'm quite curious
Take all of your socks out of their drawer. Put one sock from each pair back in the drawer. Now close your eyes, spin around, and fling the other ones 7,000,000 km in random directions. Spin around some more and open your eyes.
The right to travel is a part of the `liberty' of which the
citizen cannot be deprived without due process of law
under the Fifth Amendment. . . . Freedom of movement across
frontiers in either direction, and inside frontiers as well,
was a part of our heritage. Travel abroad, like
travel within the country, . . . may be as close to the heart
of the individual as the choice of what he eats, or wears, or
reads. Freedom of movement is basic in our scheme of values.
I spend more than my fair share of time at a local Joe Muggs, drinking passable coffee and reading through stacks of magazines from all over the store.
The only gaming magazine I've found that's worth a damn is Polygon. All the others look like-- and more importantly are, in my experience-- juvenile crap. Their substance of badly written, uninteresting articles is all but drowned out by the flashy crapfest that Kyle partially describes.
So, my question is: What gaming magazines out there are actually good? Which ones are well-written enough, or at least well-designed enough, that they would be at least a little bit interesting to someone who hasn't been 15 in a good long time, or who doesn't have a completely unbalanced interest in games? I've read that 1UP is good-- are there any other worthwhile gaming zines?
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, I misread. That's a good question. I'm hoping the battery in my 15GB doesn't go out prematurely. But if it does, it's covered by warranty. If it goes out after my warranty expires (and I bought Apple's extended warranty, which I usually don't do), a third-party replacement is only $30 anyway. By that time I'll have had the thing for three years, so I doubt I'll cry over it.
But I don't plan on having it that long, really. I'm holding to the theory that in a year or two, I'll sell this iPod for way more than it's worth (Apple resale values are stupid like that), eat a small loss, and upgrade to the nearly latest and greatest.
Will you ever be able to play the full 60GB of tune before you need a new iPod due to it's notoriously sub par proprietary battery?
Who cares? How often do you listen to your entire music collection straight through? Once you get past several hours' worth of music, the extra storage is for variety and availability, not longevity.
Sitting in the dark, unable to see anything other than the few people around me and the screen, I do not want a handful of kids watching me with night vision goggles. That's just fucking creepy, and that's all there is to it. The first time that happens to me at a theater, that theater will hear about it when I demand a refund. The second time, I won't be going to movie theaters again at all until I hear that the practice has stopped.
Like what? What device, specifically, will perform the task these guys are describing? Are you going to build a completely new device with a camera, mouse buttons, and wireless connectivity for people to carry around so they can use these interactive installations?
Doesn't it make more sense just to install some software, which is practically free, on a device which already has all the necessary hardware?
Doesn't it make sense, if there are a lot of applications which require the same hardware, to just build one damn device and use it for all of them? If you really need a better implementation of one specific application than this convergence device can provide, carry a specialized device when you need it, as well. That still beats carrying a bag full of devices around all the time, when on any given day at least half of them are expensive and complete overkill.
This is not cuecat, and it's not Salling Clicker-- Salling Clicker does none of the motion detection or image processing stuff.
Please see my post here for my response to that argument.
What hypocrisy? The person to whom I was responding was arguing with a hypothetical "radical leftist", a straw man of his own invention. He's inventing hypocrisy to point out.
I also reject the idea that this "perspective" is useful, and that was my entire point. Judging one horrible act relative to another horrible act is only useful when legislating punishment in the abstract, and nobody who's espoused the perspective you mention has been discussing punishment. It's been trotted out implicitly to excuse or mitigate the wrongness of the Abu Ghraib torture, and that's simply a moral non sequitur.
5) You miss the main point about the torture. It isn't the acts themselves, but A) whether the torture was official policy and B) what are the consequences for the people responsible for said torture.
No, I get that. But that was not the point under discussion. If your meaning is "what are the consequences, compared to the consequences Berg's killers will face", I can only say that I hope the punishment fits the crime and the needs of society in each case. I do not see a need to adjust the judgment or punishment of either crime in light of the other's commission.
Even if you could name such a case, historian, that is beside the point.
(source -- emphasis is mine)The 'torture' at Abu Grab is completely insignificant compared to the greater horrors in the world right now. What about the full scale genocide occuring *right now* in the Sudan? Where is the outcry from the 'progressives' of the world on this issue?
This thread isn't about the Sudan. What is your point, that a crime should be overlooked because a greater crime is occurring elsewhere? That people who put forth the argument that perhaps the torture at Abu Ghraib was a pretty objectively bad thing are "bad progressives" with no credibility, because what about the Sudan? Come on.
I keep hearing this. I guess you're the thousandth person to have said it or something, because you're the lucky winner of my response.
Call me a "radical leftist", I guess.
That's ok, I can do it.
Here's a partial list for your boys, Led Zeppelin:
Don't get me wrong, I love Led Zeppelin. But this old-geezer crap about music these kids listen to today sucking is the same old-geezer crap that's been spouted by old geezers since at least the 30s. Do you think maybe it's just a matter of perspective?
Who cares if you don't know where to look for a piece of information? The reference librarian does. In larger libraries, there are usually librarians who specialize in particular fields of research. My university's library, for instance, has at least one research librarian assigned to each college or school within the university-- all degreed, and many dual-degreed in library science and their respective specialty fields. And they don't care in the least who is asking them for help-- it's not like the CS librarian will only talk to CS students.
Google is convenient, and fast for most searches, but there's a lot of information that just isn't available to it. Libraries buy access to that information, both in print and in databases, and they hire people to help you find the stuff you need.
The most important library skill, and the one that is most often overlooked, is recognizing the reference desk and asking for help.
Yeah, or you could just call the reference desk. A good reference librarian will probably find your answers faster than you would anyway. They tend to have degrees in finding information.
I never argued that you need a formal, institutional education in CS to understand the difference between a hash table and a linked list, or the algorithms that operate on them. All I said was that as a CS graduate, the parent poster has such an education and should have that knowledge.
Sure, he could pick it up elsewhere on his own, but "picking it up elsewhere" (even in an O'Reilly book) is "studying CS", so I don't see that we're in disagreement.
Yes, but you have to remember that those libraries and APIs only save you the trouble of writing the data structure code. You, as a CS graduate, know why you want to use a linked list or a hash table, given the circumstances. You know this because you know how that library must be operating on the structures they provide, and you understand their costs and benefits.
At least, you do if you paid attention in theory class. I know a lot of people who didn't, and who end up using entirely the wrong (provably wrong, mind you) library-provided data structures for their problem, simply because they only understand arrays or grabbed the first collection class that allowed them to grab an element by index.
Nearly every CS problem I've seen is some sort of combinatorics problem: You've got all these *things*, see, and you want to know how many ways they can relate to each other and furthermore how long, computationally, it will take to find out. A lot of this is graph theory, and if you think you're going to get away with not knowing at least some basic graph theory and graph-based algorithms, you're in the wrong field.
An understanding of probability is critical both for optimization and for defect avoidance. If you adjust your systems biases (and all systems have biases) toward a certain set of inputs or states, you'd better have a pretty good idea that those are the most common.
Statistics are useful for a lot of things-- statistical analysis (using probability) is central to most self-optimizing algorithms. More importantly, though, an understanding of statistics will help you with your development processes and quality. Is your testing methodology really reducing defects? What happens if you switch to this new-fangled development process, or drop a couple of steps from your current process, or add another person to the team? How long is this project going to take?
As a programmer, you might be able to get away with not knowing any of this stuff. As a software engineer, you'd better have at least the basics down, or your product is going to be crap and it's going to be expensive and you're not going to know why or how to fix it.
There's supposed to be an earth-shattering Kaboom!
I have a binder of burned CDs that are direct copies of "original" discs that I bought. I use these discs in the car, in my discman, and on the odd occasion that I want to use a CD at home. I don't even bother to put these in a case in the car... my glovebox is full of them. Several are scratched, and I don't care. Why should I have to?
I wish I had started doing it sooner, as I have several originals which are ruined by a single scratch and which I have not gotten around to replacing. I take pretty good care of my originals, and did so even before I started ripping them to mp3/ogg/aac and burning copies for daily use. But it's not like CDs are invulnerable, and shit still happens just like it did in the heyday of the LP.
All this to say: Don't presume that the idea of making "backup" copies of CDs is bullshit. You've got it backwards, of course-- the originals are the backup-- but it is done, and for good reason.
I've spent five minutes trying to determine not only your point, but what possible relevance these comments can have to the text you quoted. So I thought maybe I should just ask: What in the hell are you talking about?
Not having direct access to system calls doesn't hurt J2EE or other Java applications in the least, for two reasons: 1) they're almost never needed, because the JRE provides abstracted access to the same functionality, and 2) if you really desperately need direct access, you can use JNI.
The effects of this "choice" do not "remain to be seen"-- we're seeing them right now, and it's a non-issue.
It's not meant to eliminate bias, it's meant to display bias and make it obvious. The idea is that you can see at a glance the relative popularity of a given story, and that you can see the most popular (presumably the most important) stories most easily.
Their application describes in mind-numbing detail the hierarchical menus and interfaces used on the iPod, and mentions that the scroll wheel and buttons exemplify a means of navigating them.
If they get this patent, you can still use a scroll wheel, and you can still make a player that's remarkably similar to the iPod. You just can't up and clone their menu tree. Big hairy deal.
Take all of your socks out of their drawer. Put one sock from each pair back in the drawer. Now close your eyes, spin around, and fling the other ones 7,000,000 km in random directions. Spin around some more and open your eyes.
Good luck finding matching socks.
I think that after a couple thousand years you can stop worrying about spoilers.
The only gaming magazine I've found that's worth a damn is Polygon. All the others look like-- and more importantly are, in my experience-- juvenile crap. Their substance of badly written, uninteresting articles is all but drowned out by the flashy crapfest that Kyle partially describes.
So, my question is: What gaming magazines out there are actually good? Which ones are well-written enough, or at least well-designed enough, that they would be at least a little bit interesting to someone who hasn't been 15 in a good long time, or who doesn't have a completely unbalanced interest in games? I've read that 1UP is good-- are there any other worthwhile gaming zines?