The good thing is that if this system we're using now, which works when universities and the like want distinctive domains at the appropriate place in the namespace, fails because of losers who don't understand how to play well with others, we'll have to replace it with a better one.
And doing better than the system we've got now wouldn't be hard. At least, with respect to the currect domain name problems. We've got fucking morons running the system who can't do ANYTHING right. (I will stand by this in court!) We've got morons using the system who don't understand the rules, and we've got assholes who try to exploit the rules.
We need a system more like telephone numbers where the actual number isn't thrilling, it's just a unique ID string. Then the finding and searching for sites can be done with white/yellow page systems, where you search by category or name, and if multiple companies have the same name, you go by location and business type.
Until we move to a sensible system like this, we're destined to have problems like this. And the annoying thing is that our laws almost guarantee these problems. You have to protect your trademarks, so if the lawyer says attack, you have to. So we either need to change the laws (yeah, right) or the situations the laws apply to.
And we need to do this before the current system gets so entrenched that it never changes.
Your allegation about the "sacred sperm" is obviously taken directly from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (great skit, great song.)
Yes. And I suggested it, like they did, because it's an example of the silly views that some people actually hold.
A sperm has NO potential to become a human being. The sperm MUST be combined with an egg to form anything resembling a human being. Likewise, the ordinary human cell CANNOT become a human being on its own without genetic engineering.
Ok, a sperm cell is just discardable bio matter. As is an egg. But, combine the two, let them sit for a few hours, and you've got a human that can't ethically be terminated?
At what point does a fetus become sentient? Is it some magical point in time when the baby sticks it's head out? That, sir, is crazy. Sentience logically must begin at some point withen the womb. Can you tell me when that occurs? NO! I can't either. But until you can, then even by your logic, killing the unborn is taking a chance of killing a sentient being.
No, I can't point to the instant a fetus becomes sentient. (There's a well-known version of this. Take a pile of sand. Now, remove it one grain at a time. At some point it won't be a pile anymore, but it seems that a pile - 1 grain should always be a pile...)
My solution to this is to point to an arbitrary spot where we can be sure the fetus isn't sentient, and draw the line there. My side of the argument is that sperm isn't sacred, sperm + egg doesn't automatically equal a sentient being, and that termination of a non sentient being is okay. So all I have to do to be consistent is find a spot where the fetus is obviously non sentient. 1st trimester sounds like a good line to me, but I'd be willing to hear arguments either way.
Murder is murder. Whether it is for the sake of convenience or racial purification they are the same.
Yes, murder is murder. To kill someone because of their skin color, or religion is the same (ethically) as to kill someone because they are in front of you in a line.
But, that's not the issue. The issue is that abortion != murder.
You say you would not let me near children?
Because you can't tell the difference between abortion and murder. If you're that screwed up, who can tell what other weird ideas you might have?
Why? Because I esteemed them as human beings before they were born? Because I cared more for them while they were in the womb then you did?
Because you would be would advocate people having children they can't take care of. Because you would rather a severely retarded and crippled child be kept on life support until they died of old age or complications rather than give them a merciful death. That doesn't sound like you really care about anyone.
How does that make me a sociopath? Do you understand the definition of the term?
Yes.
"One who suffers from a mental disorder that causes a lack of moral restraint or responsibility toward fellow members of society."
I think the dictionary term is a bit limited. The mental disorder thing limits it. Really, anyone displaying the lack of concern for fellow members of society IMHO is a sociopath, diagnosable illness or not.
You fit this description because you don't honestly understand the difference between murder and abortion. You don't understand why people are people. It's not because a few cells combine. It's not because of our shape. It's because of our minds. You don't get this, and therefore shouldn't be trusted around other people. You may not be, probably aren't, likely to hurt others, but you're still not all there.
I agree that the mayor should not be saying what art to keep. He should either put the purchase of every piece up for vote (by changing the mandate of the institution) or stay the hell out. His views are no more valid than anyone else's and either nobody gets a say, or we all should.
But, I think public art galleries are a bad idea. And for this very reason. Nobody can agree on what art *is*, let alone what good art is. So to force the public to fund art they probably don't like is stupid.
In the first, 'right' would be adjective. "You are something..." In the second, 'right' is a noun. "Your bicycle..."
"You're right to denounce Singer" would be a proper sentence, and is expressing approval of the denouncing. "You're right to denounce Singer is perfectly fine" doesn't parse. Thus, the only way to read this is the way it was written, which is expresses support for the ability/right to do the denouncing, but says nothing about the view on the specific dencouncement.
(Dunno if I invented a few words there myself, but I go by the HD rule that says all nouns can be verbed, and all verbs and be nouned.:)
Personally, I weep when I hear of the plight of the unborn children just as I do when I hear retellings of the extermination of the jews in Nazi Germany.
Then you are a fool.
If you can honestly equate the killing of a sentient being with the prevention of one, you are honeslty sociopathic. I wouldn't let you near children. You are a freak. And even though millions of others are similarly brainwashed by religion and share your views, you are no less dangerous.
If you can believe that every sperm is sacred, and you *must* as the logical extention of your argument, or *must* admit that early enough (no matter where you draw the line) abortion is not killing, then you are insane.
And you *must* believe that either 1) At some point, a fetus is not yet a person and abortion is not murder or 2) any pre-human is as good as human, and terminating it is murder. There is *no* rational middle ground.
So, if you believe that abortion is murder because it kills a human that could have been, you must think that menstrating women are murderers, because they allow their body to destroy a pre-human, instead of getting pregnant.
And of course, masturbation (for men) is murder. As is *not* having sex to use those sperm (they are recycled (killed!!!) if you don't use them.)
Your views are obviously not thought out. No rational being could have the beliefs you do unless they were taught them by rote, but then, that doesn't imply much thought on your part.
And if you don't believe that, then you *must* believe that at some point along the line, a fetus is not the same as a functional human. And if a fetus can be aborted for defects, why can't a baby (born without most of a brain for instance) with the same capacity for experiencing life as a defective fetus, be euthanized?
So, either come out and admit that abortion/euthanization aren't murder in some circumstances, or admit that you're a sociopath with no more regard for a human being than a sperm cell! There is no alternative.
Well, I'm going to go download pornography and commit mass murder.:P
"But, the taxpayers foot the bill!" isn't censorship.
Free speech allows you to say what you wish. It doesn't require me to listen. Therefore it doesn't require me to PAY to listen.
Censorship involves me saying what you can't say, or that you can't say it on public property. Not the same as saying that you shouldn't be provided with a publicly funded place to say it.
So, you have the right to do whatever art you like, and show it to anyone who will look. But if you come onto my property to show it, or into an art gallery I own and demand space, I can send you away and it's not censorship.
The public art gallery is a touchy issue, but it's not censorship. The art gallery exists to give the people a place to view art. The people have a say in the art they want to see. The touchy part comes in listening to the fanatics instead of the masses.
What is censorship is when people try to stop a type of speech, or anything a certain person says.
Arguing with, or ignoring, or insulting Singer for his views isn't censorhip. Denying him the right to express those views to people who wish to hear him *is* censorship.
The art gallery case is simply where a politician tries to get elected by pandering to a special interest group, but because they're not saying the art is illegal to display, it's not censorship.
I personally think public art galleries are useless. If a museum has famous pieces, or pieces which illustrate a historic subject, fine, but a publicly funded gallery containing just art is bad idea. If this was an opt-in system (or even allowed opting out) it would be okay. Catholics would simply opt out of supporting that gallery and its focus audience would change. But, they do have a right to scream when their money is either wasted, or spent ridiculing them (as much as I think they deserve ridicule.)
USB was a connector for low-bandwidth devices. It should have remained this way.
And firewire and USB2.0 *are* competitors. Two similar products in one market are competing...
I just worry that they've ruined the usefullness of USB by trying to compete instead of being happy with the niche they were in.
Why do I say ruined? Because USB devices that are satisfied by the current standard must start to become USB2.0 or they will ruin the effectiveness of a USB2.0 system. And who wants to have their mouse, or scanner, or keyboard, get bad reviews in a magazine "Nice product, but it'll lag your whole USB setup because it's using the slower spec." So, $20 mice which are perfectly suited by the simpler logic and slower components in the current spec will become more expensive mice with completely wasted faster components.
Why will a scanner, using 5mb/s significantly lag a connect providing 480mbit? Because the scanner, if it used the connect 50% of the time, because it's using a 10mbit maximum speed, will block a potential 240mbits of data that could have been sent during that time. So look at replacing that USB scanner before you ever consider a USB2.0 external HD, or cable modem, etc. (This is the reason you don't put your cheap CD drive on the same IDE connector as your new 7200 rpm 8ms HD...)
So they're forcing people to either make products that defeat the purpose of the new system, or spend vastly more money making products that don't need the speed.
It would make MUCH more sense to simply have USB and Firewire. Then our keyboards and mice of today will still function on computers 15 years down the road without hurting system performance. (This isn't unreasonable. My keyboard has an AT/XT switch on it, and was bought in 86, but it still works fine. A keyboard from now should similarly work on systems in 2012.)
I called Pizza 222 (222-2222 all across Canada, maybe across the states?) at least eight years ago and they asked if all of my info was the same, then they sent a receipt with the driver and I signed it. They could have treated it like mailorder and not needed a signature even.
So yes. This 'new invention' has been around longer than the company which just patented it.
And no, there's nothing revolutionary about doing it on the internet.
The whole problem with these patents is that the already broken patent office is staffed by technophobes and whenever a patent has 'internet' in it, they automatically thing it's brand new.
Damn it. Patents are for NEW inventions. Not VERY OLD ones used in a different place.
I mean, it'd be like a flower company patenting no-question sales *as used to sell flowers*, claiming it was different than selling pizzas.
Cookies and other technologies are available for identifying users. This is the use of these.
Interface design tends to streamline processes. This means, remembering unchanging information and getting rid of useless dialog boxes.
So yes, it is obvious that there should be a way to click a 'purchase' button and order a product.
Why do you think cookies and cgi were invented? This whole area was forseen. If not exactly "Hey, let's have an online bookstore where you can buy books and have them fed-ex'd to you with one mouse click" then generally "hey, let's try to get rid of as many hurdles to online purchasing as possible, then it'll be really easy to buy O'Reilly books on the net!"
Things that aren't trivially obvious: Internal Combustion Engines, CRTs, Transistors.
Things that are: Selling data over a network, One-click sales.
Those last two are silly. Selling data over a network would be like trying to patent selling things from a car. And 1-"click" sales are already being used by pizza places and other stores that use your Caller-ID info to lookup your stored info.
Just another mindless patent to sue the competition out of business. The mark of a pathetic company scared it won't be in business soon.
The Quake3 benchmarks were a bit 'weird' but not broken.
The numbers were as close between runs as could be expected, texture caching and multitasking variables notwithstanding.
The numbers were also as would be expected when compared from one computer to another. A P2-300 and a P2-500 scored only a bit closer together than they would in Q2 benchmarks, etc.
The 'flaw' in the benchmarking was that the demos weren't using the final product, and Q3Test's performance changed significantly from 1.05 to 1.08, let alone to the final, with regard to one 3d card compared to another.
This problem where a TNT might be more handicapped than a Voodoo created a situation where you could compare Q3 TNT number with Q3 Voodoo. But the numbers weren't meaningless. No more than any other benchmark is. You just needed to understand the fundamental point, the only benchmark that accurately indicates performance in your application of choice is that application.
If Q3Test was what you wanted to play, and with it being out for (as we knew at the time) at least one month and probably closer to six, many people probably did buy a 3d card for Q3Test.
And, benchmarks using Q3test can also show you where cards have problems. Even if the TNT worked at half the speed of a V3 due to driver problems, you could get a pretty good indication of where the TNT was limited. Did it have a polygon problem, or was it fill limited, etc.
So Brian Hook was partially in the wrong when he slammed Tom. And he slammed Tom partly because of Tom's use of the Q3IHV (which was pirated) in benchmarks.
Then they started flaming each other and they both came out looking like idiots.
So, to summarize. Broken benchmarks can still be of value if you take a minute to understand them and how they are 'broken'. As long as the numbers aren't derived with a call to random(), they have some meaning.
If you rely on a right to be granted, that right can be taken away. If the only claim you have to copyright on your own messages is/.'s saying that you own them, then they can supercede that with a message.
But, that doesn't matter. Not one bit.
Quoting someone is fair use. You can copyright your message that I'm replying to, but I can quote you from it for purposes or illustrating a point. And it's legal.
You can't change that. Doesn't matter how you feel about it. I could even legally quote you saying "And don't you dare quote this, I own it!"
Yes, they are. They don't have to pay for the right to quote you. After all, to the extent that a person owns copyright on their speach, quotes are almost always covered under fair use.
They're doing it because they can afford to be 'fair'. After all, if they're not running the one article, and are getting a good article in its place, they can afford to pay the people who wrote it. Especially because having 100k+ geeks on your side is a lot better than the alternative. Especially after they've helped you write an article on cyberwar.:)
But yes, it is nice of them. We see so many article, on/. and in regular news, about companies going the other way, and ripping people off at all oportunities. It's nice to see that not everyone is like that.
You may own the copyright on your posts, but quoting someone's statement of opinion is almost always considered fair use. Especially if people are told before hand that all posts in a specific area are going to be used for such a thing.
In fact, your posting in such a forum is implicit agreement to the this.
And in the case that there might be two conflicting notices, such as, if/. said "We're using this one discussion verbatim in print, to illustrate... post if you agree to these terms." and the bottom of the page said "you own your own message." the first, largest, and most prominent message would take precedence, especially because you only see it BEFORE seeing the secondary message.
I don't understand though how you can equate copyright violation with privacy violation.
You may *feel* violated in an undefined way if you feel that someone stole something from you, but if nobody knowns anything about you, it's unlikely that your privacy was violated.
Your privacy might be violated if/. posted your ip and usage logs. But, I don't a contract with/. that forbid them to do this.
Bottom line. I understand you could be feeling violated, and this feeling I can understand. But, you aren't going to get sympathy by stating this in an impercise manner. We're geeks, and we're anal. We expect that if you say something, you should know what it means.
But, people of the future don't NEED the ability to select all the files on the computer and drag them into the trash. And very few would want that.
What needs to happen, on a typical user's PC, is that they run in user space. And if they try to delete everything on the HD, everything goes, except the system and needed programs.
This could even be the recommended way for newbies to clean their system. ("Back data files up onto a disk or another computer, then select all the files on the HD and hit the delete key. Answer yes. Now run the installation programs for just the software you want to have.")
Important tasks could be suid to admin. If the user needs to format the HD, then they run the specific format program which does it. If they managed to install a virus, it would be unable to format the drive.
Sounds like a good idea to me.
And you don't tell the users that there's a super-user account that they don't get access to, you just tell them that it's got 'protection' against viruses and accidental deletions.
I'm sure people with disabilities can lead worthwhile lives.
If you believe that abortion is killing, then it's probably a bit overboard to kill someone because they may have a rough go of it.
But, if you don't believe abortion is killing, and see it more like putting an animal to sleep, then it makes sense to euthanize a fetus who is probably going to have a very rough life and try again to have one without any handicaps.
Life is tough enough already, why make your kid suffer more just because you're not willing to abort a fetus?
Why should 3COM be willing to write something, and then let a closed-source project use it?
If they use the GPL, then they can see who uses their code (assuming the other companies aren't violating the license.) and if anyone writes something based on their code, it'll go back to the user community, who will think good things about 3COM instead of perhaps being used in a competitor's closed-source project.
>[snip] back in the days of 8bit cpu's and 16k ram >one could easily disassemble code to see how for >example a parallax scrolling routine was >implemented in a game...not anymore I'm afraid:P > Well, yes and no.
You just need to be reasonable about what you look for.
Trying to look at an ASM dump of Quake.exe for instance, and figure out that it uses BSP trees to store 3D surfaces would be next to impossible. Especially if you didn't know what a BSP tree was, or how it could be used like this.
But, looking at the same ASM dump of Quake.exe, looking at the texture-mapping routines, trying to see how they got such good speed, wouldn't be a waste.
In the second case, you already know how the task works, and exactly where to look, so you're just looking at their refinements.
In this case, perhaps, trying to see how Carmack got his 'free floating-point divides'.
This is all assuming that you don't want to just go and buy M. Abrash's book _The Graphics Programming Black Book_ where he tells you all the secrets he and Carmack used.:)
For the curious... The texture mapping used fixed-point math, which is just integer numbers that you pretend and real numbers (ie, the CPU treats them like integers) which was a tradeoff for speed, but sacrificed accuracy. This was nothing new, people had been doing this for a long time. The innovation was using some floating-point math, which was slow but accurate, at the same time to correct the results.
For instance, imagine doing a long string of calculations and rounding off to one decimal place after each one. Your answer will be fairly impercise, less early on, and very far off later.
Now, what if you rounded off your answers for speed, but had a friend give you a value every sixteen numbers which corrected your answer. This way you could do the problems really quickly, but you would only drift a little, and the answer would be corrected, drift a little, be corrected, etc.
In this case, you would be doing the texture mapping, doing 'fuzzy' calculations to texture those sixteen pixels very quickly, and your friend would be doing one very accurate calculation in the background (the floating-point pipeline) to put you back on track after those sixteen pixels.
(This whole correction thing is needed because when you look at a wall from the side it doesn't look rectangular anymore. The farther from rectangular, the more your line is likely to drift if you use fuzzy calculations. But fuzzy calculations are sometimes hundreds of times faster than accurate ones... You do the math.)
As the last poster said, NOP is short for "No Operation".
This is an instruction that's just ignored. It used to be, back on non-pipelined, single execution unit CPUs that a NOP took n (usually 1 or 2) cycles, and could thus be used in timing loops where you couldn't read from the clock chip.
Nowadays the NOP instruction gets thrown out in the early stages of the pipeline so the execution units never see it, and it usually takes zero cycles to execute.
So what is it used for now? Taking up space. Why? Either so that you can put in a bunch of NOP instructions where you want to have a subroutine call later, or to put a bunch of NOP instructions over a subroutine call. (Similar to commenting out a few lines in a higher-level language.)
The removal of a subroutine call is what's usually don't in cracking, remove the part where it would call the 'bad registration key' subroutine by putting NOP instructions over the other instruction, and no matter what key you enter, you're fine. (This is the easy part, the hard part is finding the right place to put the NOPs.)
This has many legitimate uses as well, such as writing an infinite lives cheat for a game, or patching a program that tries to jump to a subroutine that crashes on your hardware, etc.
Time spent on the install isn't a good indicator of the actuall difficulty. I once installed Win3.1 in under 30 seconds (off of a ram disk on a fast 486) and have spent three hours fiddling with Redhat (picking packages, etc) install.
The install also isn't over when the OS boots. With Linux the install for the OS installs all the standard services, compilers, shells, etc. All you need to do is change a few configuration options. With Win95 the install is 'easier' but you don't get as much installed.
There will always be this complexity != ease factor... A linux install (currently) expects you to know what Apache is. And in the future will at least expect you to know what a web server is. Until we start treating people like idiots and having default installs that don't install 'complex' stuff, the installs will be harder.
Part of the problem, like someone else on here said already, is that Windows comes installed, but very rarely do people get Linux installed. (And of the geeks here, who wouldn't reinstall it themselves, just because...:) Until Linux comes preinstalled, it will be harder. If for no other reason than that you'll need to find the CD.
But, is this really a problem? Only if we're trying to compete directly with Windows in the desktop market. I don't think we're ready. Many office machines could be replaced transparently by Linux, but the user's machines are the last to go.
Who cares? As long as Linux is there for the high-end and the very low-end (where OS costs double the machine costs) then we can work at slowly narrowing the size of that middle ground. We don't *have to* do it all overnight.
But, to win that middle ground, we need to have trivial installs that focus on security over flexibility (does that desktop user want a web server and if so, is this the install for them?) and that brings the user straight into X with a nice WM and a decent GUI config editor (along the lines of Win9x's control panel).
So, yes. Windows is probably easier for everyone except Slashdot readers and tech writers to install. But, it's getting easier quickly enough that we don't need to fret, especially because it doesn't need to be easy right yet.
This isn't quite enough. Having a phone smart enough to store all your phone numbers (and preferably, smart enough to import/export via email for backup purposes) just lets you get by without post-it notes for yourself.
When everyone has such a phone, then we'll be able to do without paper notes altogether, using an email-like IM client in the phone to record small text or voice messages for the other person.
Well, he was right to a degree. Post-it notes make sense when you wish to communicate with a large, but unspecified group of people.
For instance, putting a post-it note on one elevator telling people that it's broken. You don't know everyone who will want to use that elevator, and they might not check email until after they use it, so email doesn't work. A post-it note is perfect for that sort of thing, and probably always will be. (Well, until everything is covered in a thin LCD coating and you can just scribble the note onto the elevator...:)
You're right though, in that post-it notes are used in many roles that will become obsolete, such as storing phone numbers. When the PDA is the phone, and folds out into an electronic book, etc we won't have any need to write down this sort of info, and if these devices are as common as cell phones are among tech-types today, we should be able to just wirelessly network these notes to each other.
One sentence from one of your 'test users' was interesting.
"If it doesn't come right out at me, I'm going to give up on it."
It makes me think of them as a dinosaur, unable to cope in the real world, without people distilling everything down into boss-words, with special fonts on all the big words.
If I ever had an employee tell me that they didn't bother to read something because it wasn't pretty enough, and didn't "come right out at them" I'd tell them to get a new job.
Some of the writing tips of the page make sense, like the use of objective rather than promotional text (When people read a paragraph that starts "Nebraska is filled with internationally recognized attractions," their first reaction is no, it's not, and this thought slows them down and distracts them from using the site.) are handy and make sense. Others are simply tips on how to cope with illiterate people.
These tips are handy, in some circumstances. Like with resumes where you're dealing with someone who probably doesn't know the job you're applying for, and will judge you only on the quality of the paper you printed the resume on, or when applying for a grant. In other cimcumstance, you can't (well, at least *I* can't) help but want to slap people for their arrogance in insisting that you spend more time making stuff beautiful just so they don't waste a few seconds actually having to read.
Slashdot Mirror
The good thing is that if this system we're using now, which works when universities and the like want distinctive domains at the appropriate place in the namespace, fails because of losers who don't understand how to play well with others, we'll have to replace it with a better one.
And doing better than the system we've got now wouldn't be hard. At least, with respect to the currect domain name problems. We've got fucking morons running the system who can't do ANYTHING right. (I will stand by this in court!) We've got morons using the system who don't understand the rules, and we've got assholes who try to exploit the rules.
We need a system more like telephone numbers where the actual number isn't thrilling, it's just a unique ID string. Then the finding and searching for sites can be done with white/yellow page systems, where you search by category or name, and if multiple companies have the same name, you go by location and business type.
Until we move to a sensible system like this, we're destined to have problems like this. And the annoying thing is that our laws almost guarantee these problems. You have to protect your trademarks, so if the lawyer says attack, you have to. So we either need to change the laws (yeah, right) or the situations the laws apply to.
And we need to do this before the current system gets so entrenched that it never changes.
I agree. Especially in a topic about trademarks.
Get it right or get corrected.
Yes. And I suggested it, like they did, because it's an example of the silly views that some people actually hold.
A sperm has NO potential to become a human being. The sperm MUST be combined with an egg to form anything resembling a human being. Likewise, the ordinary human cell CANNOT become a human being on its own without genetic engineering.
Ok, a sperm cell is just discardable bio matter. As is an egg. But, combine the two, let them sit for a few hours, and you've got a human that can't ethically be terminated?
At what point does a fetus become sentient? Is it some magical point in time when the baby sticks it's head out? That, sir, is crazy. Sentience logically must begin at some point withen the womb. Can you tell me when that occurs? NO! I can't either. But until you can, then even by your logic, killing the unborn is taking a chance of killing a sentient being.
No, I can't point to the instant a fetus becomes sentient. (There's a well-known version of this. Take a pile of sand. Now, remove it one grain at a time. At some point it won't be a pile anymore, but it seems that a pile - 1 grain should always be a pile...)
My solution to this is to point to an arbitrary spot where we can be sure the fetus isn't sentient, and draw the line there. My side of the argument is that sperm isn't sacred, sperm + egg doesn't automatically equal a sentient being, and that termination of a non sentient being is okay. So all I have to do to be consistent is find a spot where the fetus is obviously non sentient. 1st trimester sounds like a good line to me, but I'd be willing to hear arguments either way.
Murder is murder. Whether it is for the sake of convenience or racial purification they are the same.
Yes, murder is murder. To kill someone because of their skin color, or religion is the same (ethically) as to kill someone because they are in front of you in a line.
But, that's not the issue. The issue is that abortion != murder.
You say you would not let me near children?
Because you can't tell the difference between abortion and murder. If you're that screwed up, who can tell what other weird ideas you might have?
Why? Because I esteemed them as human beings before they were born? Because I cared more for them while they were in the womb then you did?
Because you would be would advocate people having children they can't take care of. Because you would rather a severely retarded and crippled child be kept on life support until they died of old age or complications rather than give them a merciful death. That doesn't sound like you really care about anyone.
How does that make me a sociopath? Do you understand the definition of the term?
Yes.
"One who suffers from a mental disorder that causes a lack of moral restraint or responsibility toward fellow members of society."
I think the dictionary term is a bit limited. The mental disorder thing limits it. Really, anyone displaying the lack of concern for fellow members of society IMHO is a sociopath, diagnosable illness or not.
You fit this description because you don't honestly understand the difference between murder and abortion. You don't understand why people are people. It's not because a few cells combine. It's not because of our shape. It's because of our minds. You don't get this, and therefore shouldn't be trusted around other people. You may not be, probably aren't, likely to hurt others, but you're still not all there.
I agree that the mayor should not be saying what art to keep. He should either put the purchase of every piece up for vote (by changing the mandate of the institution) or stay the hell out. His views are no more valid than anyone else's and either nobody gets a say, or we all should.
But, I think public art galleries are a bad idea. And for this very reason. Nobody can agree on what art *is*, let alone what good art is. So to force the public to fund art they probably don't like is stupid.
Nope.
..."
:)
He wasn't trying to say
"You are correct to
He was saying
"Your ability/right/free to..."
In the first, 'right' would be adjective. "You are something..." In the second, 'right' is a noun. "Your bicycle..."
"You're right to denounce Singer" would be a proper sentence, and is expressing approval of the denouncing. "You're right to denounce Singer is perfectly fine" doesn't parse. Thus, the only way to read this is the way it was written, which is expresses support for the ability/right to do the denouncing, but says nothing about the view on the specific dencouncement.
(Dunno if I invented a few words there myself, but I go by the HD rule that says all nouns can be verbed, and all verbs and be nouned.
Personally, I weep when I hear of the plight of the unborn children just as I do when I hear retellings of the extermination of the jews in Nazi Germany.
:P
Then you are a fool.
If you can honestly equate the killing of a sentient being with the prevention of one, you are honeslty sociopathic. I wouldn't let you near children. You are a freak. And even though millions of others are similarly brainwashed by religion and share your views, you are no less dangerous.
If you can believe that every sperm is sacred, and you *must* as the logical extention of your argument, or *must* admit that early enough (no matter where you draw the line) abortion is not killing, then you are insane.
And you *must* believe that either 1) At some point, a fetus is not yet a person and abortion is not murder or 2) any pre-human is as good as human, and terminating it is murder. There is *no* rational middle ground.
So, if you believe that abortion is murder because it kills a human that could have been, you must think that menstrating women are murderers, because they allow their body to destroy a pre-human, instead of getting pregnant.
And of course, masturbation (for men) is murder. As is *not* having sex to use those sperm (they are recycled (killed!!!) if you don't use them.)
Your views are obviously not thought out. No rational being could have the beliefs you do unless they were taught them by rote, but then, that doesn't imply much thought on your part.
And if you don't believe that, then you *must* believe that at some point along the line, a fetus is not the same as a functional human. And if a fetus can be aborted for defects, why can't a baby (born without most of a brain for instance) with the same capacity for experiencing life as a defective fetus, be euthanized?
So, either come out and admit that abortion/euthanization aren't murder in some circumstances, or admit that you're a sociopath with no more regard for a human being than a sperm cell! There is no alternative.
Well, I'm going to go download pornography and commit mass murder.
"But, the taxpayers foot the bill!" isn't censorship.
Free speech allows you to say what you wish. It doesn't require me to listen. Therefore it doesn't require me to PAY to listen.
Censorship involves me saying what you can't say, or that you can't say it on public property. Not the same as saying that you shouldn't be provided with a publicly funded place to say it.
So, you have the right to do whatever art you like, and show it to anyone who will look. But if you come onto my property to show it, or into an art gallery I own and demand space, I can send you away and it's not censorship.
The public art gallery is a touchy issue, but it's not censorship. The art gallery exists to give the people a place to view art. The people have a say in the art they want to see. The touchy part comes in listening to the fanatics instead of the masses.
What is censorship is when people try to stop a type of speech, or anything a certain person says.
Arguing with, or ignoring, or insulting Singer for his views isn't censorhip. Denying him the right to express those views to people who wish to hear him *is* censorship.
The art gallery case is simply where a politician tries to get elected by pandering to a special interest group, but because they're not saying the art is illegal to display, it's not censorship.
I personally think public art galleries are useless. If a museum has famous pieces, or pieces which illustrate a historic subject, fine, but a publicly funded gallery containing just art is bad idea. If this was an opt-in system (or even allowed opting out) it would be okay. Catholics would simply opt out of supporting that gallery and its focus audience would change. But, they do have a right to scream when their money is either wasted, or spent ridiculing them (as much as I think they deserve ridicule.)
Agreed.
USB was a connector for low-bandwidth devices. It should have remained this way.
And firewire and USB2.0 *are* competitors. Two similar products in one market are competing...
I just worry that they've ruined the usefullness of USB by trying to compete instead of being happy with the niche they were in.
Why do I say ruined? Because USB devices that are satisfied by the current standard must start to become USB2.0 or they will ruin the effectiveness of a USB2.0 system. And who wants to have their mouse, or scanner, or keyboard, get bad reviews in a magazine "Nice product, but it'll lag your whole USB setup because it's using the slower spec." So, $20 mice which are perfectly suited by the simpler logic and slower components in the current spec will become more expensive mice with completely wasted faster components.
Why will a scanner, using 5mb/s significantly lag a connect providing 480mbit? Because the scanner, if it used the connect 50% of the time, because it's using a 10mbit maximum speed, will block a potential 240mbits of data that could have been sent during that time. So look at replacing that USB scanner before you ever consider a USB2.0 external HD, or cable modem, etc. (This is the reason you don't put your cheap CD drive on the same IDE connector as your new 7200 rpm 8ms HD...)
So they're forcing people to either make products that defeat the purpose of the new system, or spend vastly more money making products that don't need the speed.
It would make MUCH more sense to simply have USB and Firewire. Then our keyboards and mice of today will still function on computers 15 years down the road without hurting system performance. (This isn't unreasonable. My keyboard has an AT/XT switch on it, and was bought in 86, but it still works fine. A keyboard from now should similarly work on systems in 2012.)
Normally I don't flame people, because they're just a bit misguided.
But dude, you're a freaking retard!
The point of partents isn't so that every small change to something can be patented.
Maybe I can't site a case of someone picking his nose quite like you do, but that doesn't mean you should be granted a patent on doing so.
Hey wait... You own Amazon stock, don't you?
Yes.
I called Pizza 222 (222-2222 all across Canada, maybe across the states?) at least eight years ago and they asked if all of my info was the same, then they sent a receipt with the driver and I signed it. They could have treated it like mailorder and not needed a signature even.
So yes. This 'new invention' has been around longer than the company which just patented it.
And no, there's nothing revolutionary about doing it on the internet.
The whole problem with these patents is that the already broken patent office is staffed by technophobes and whenever a patent has 'internet' in it, they automatically thing it's brand new.
Damn it. Patents are for NEW inventions. Not VERY OLD ones used in a different place.
I mean, it'd be like a flower company patenting no-question sales *as used to sell flowers*, claiming it was different than selling pizzas.
It *is* obvious.
Cookies and other technologies are available for identifying users. This is the use of these.
Interface design tends to streamline processes. This means, remembering unchanging information and getting rid of useless dialog boxes.
So yes, it is obvious that there should be a way to click a 'purchase' button and order a product.
Why do you think cookies and cgi were invented? This whole area was forseen. If not exactly "Hey, let's have an online bookstore where you can buy books and have them fed-ex'd to you with one mouse click" then generally "hey, let's try to get rid of as many hurdles to online purchasing as possible, then it'll be really easy to buy O'Reilly books on the net!"
Things that aren't trivially obvious: Internal Combustion Engines, CRTs, Transistors.
Things that are: Selling data over a network, One-click sales.
Those last two are silly. Selling data over a network would be like trying to patent selling things from a car. And 1-"click" sales are already being used by pizza places and other stores that use your Caller-ID info to lookup your stored info.
Just another mindless patent to sue the competition out of business. The mark of a pathetic company scared it won't be in business soon.
The Quake3 benchmarks were a bit 'weird' but not broken.
The numbers were as close between runs as could be expected, texture caching and multitasking variables notwithstanding.
The numbers were also as would be expected when compared from one computer to another. A P2-300 and a P2-500 scored only a bit closer together than they would in Q2 benchmarks, etc.
The 'flaw' in the benchmarking was that the demos weren't using the final product, and Q3Test's performance changed significantly from 1.05 to 1.08, let alone to the final, with regard to one 3d card compared to another.
This problem where a TNT might be more handicapped than a Voodoo created a situation where you could compare Q3 TNT number with Q3 Voodoo. But the numbers weren't meaningless. No more than any other benchmark is. You just needed to understand the fundamental point, the only benchmark that accurately indicates performance in your application of choice is that application.
If Q3Test was what you wanted to play, and with it being out for (as we knew at the time) at least one month and probably closer to six, many people probably did buy a 3d card for Q3Test.
And, benchmarks using Q3test can also show you where cards have problems. Even if the TNT worked at half the speed of a V3 due to driver problems, you could get a pretty good indication of where the TNT was limited. Did it have a polygon problem, or was it fill limited, etc.
So Brian Hook was partially in the wrong when he slammed Tom. And he slammed Tom partly because of Tom's use of the Q3IHV (which was pirated) in benchmarks.
Then they started flaming each other and they both came out looking like idiots.
So, to summarize. Broken benchmarks can still be of value if you take a minute to understand them and how they are 'broken'. As long as the numbers aren't derived with a call to random(), they have some meaning.
I can understand you, but you are wrong.
/.'s saying that you own them, then they can supercede that with a message.
If you rely on a right to be granted, that right can be taken away. If the only claim you have to copyright on your own messages is
But, that doesn't matter. Not one bit.
Quoting someone is fair use. You can copyright your message that I'm replying to, but I can quote you from it for purposes or illustrating a point. And it's legal.
You can't change that. Doesn't matter how you feel about it. I could even legally quote you saying "And don't you dare quote this, I own it!"
Yes, they are. They don't have to pay for the right to quote you. After all, to the extent that a person owns copyright on their speach, quotes are almost always covered under fair use.
:)
/. and in regular news, about companies going the other way, and ripping people off at all oportunities. It's nice to see that not everyone is like that.
They're doing it because they can afford to be 'fair'. After all, if they're not running the one article, and are getting a good article in its place, they can afford to pay the people who wrote it. Especially because having 100k+ geeks on your side is a lot better than the alternative. Especially after they've helped you write an article on cyberwar.
But yes, it is nice of them. We see so many article, on
You may own the copyright on your posts, but quoting someone's statement of opinion is almost always considered fair use. Especially if people are told before hand that all posts in a specific area are going to be used for such a thing.
/. said "We're using this one discussion verbatim in print, to illustrate ... post if you agree to these terms." and the bottom of the page said "you own your own message." the first, largest, and most prominent message would take precedence, especially because you only see it BEFORE seeing the secondary message.
/. posted your ip and usage logs. But, I don't a contract with /. that forbid them to do this.
In fact, your posting in such a forum is implicit agreement to the this.
And in the case that there might be two conflicting notices, such as, if
I don't understand though how you can equate copyright violation with privacy violation.
You may *feel* violated in an undefined way if you feel that someone stole something from you, but if nobody knowns anything about you, it's unlikely that your privacy was violated.
Your privacy might be violated if
Bottom line. I understand you could be feeling violated, and this feeling I can understand. But, you aren't going to get sympathy by stating this in an impercise manner. We're geeks, and we're anal. We expect that if you say something, you should know what it means.
Quite right actually.
Well, maybe not about it being intentional...
But, people of the future don't NEED the ability to select all the files on the computer and drag them into the trash. And very few would want that.
What needs to happen, on a typical user's PC, is that they run in user space. And if they try to delete everything on the HD, everything goes, except the system and needed programs.
This could even be the recommended way for newbies to clean their system. ("Back data files up onto a disk or another computer, then select all the files on the HD and hit the delete key. Answer yes. Now run the installation programs for just the software you want to have.")
Important tasks could be suid to admin. If the user needs to format the HD, then they run the specific format program which does it. If they managed to install a virus, it would be unable to format the drive.
Sounds like a good idea to me.
And you don't tell the users that there's a super-user account that they don't get access to, you just tell them that it's got 'protection' against viruses and accidental deletions.
For my money, exactly right.
Use verifiable (or, as verifiable as software EVER gets) micro OSes for the important stuff.
Use WinNT, etc, boxes for generating non-critical reports based on the output from the real systems.
I'm sure people with disabilities can lead worthwhile lives.
If you believe that abortion is killing, then it's probably a bit overboard to kill someone because they may have a rough go of it.
But, if you don't believe abortion is killing, and see it more like putting an animal to sleep, then it makes sense to euthanize a fetus who is probably going to have a very rough life and try again to have one without any handicaps.
Life is tough enough already, why make your kid suffer more just because you're not willing to abort a fetus?
Why should 3COM be willing to write something, and then let a closed-source project use it?
If they use the GPL, then they can see who uses their code (assuming the other companies aren't violating the license.) and if anyone writes something based on their code, it'll go back to the user community, who will think good things about 3COM instead of perhaps being used in a competitor's closed-source project.
>[snip] back in the days of 8bit cpu's and 16k ram :P
:)
>one could easily disassemble code to see how for
>example a parallax scrolling routine was
>implemented in a game...not anymore I'm afraid
>
Well, yes and no.
You just need to be reasonable about what you look for.
Trying to look at an ASM dump of Quake.exe for instance, and figure out that it uses BSP trees to store 3D surfaces would be next to impossible. Especially if you didn't know what a BSP tree was, or how it could be used like this.
But, looking at the same ASM dump of Quake.exe, looking at the texture-mapping routines, trying to see how they got such good speed, wouldn't be a waste.
In the second case, you already know how the task works, and exactly where to look, so you're just looking at their refinements.
In this case, perhaps, trying to see how Carmack got his 'free floating-point divides'.
This is all assuming that you don't want to just go and buy M. Abrash's book _The Graphics Programming Black Book_ where he tells you all the secrets he and Carmack used.
For the curious... The texture mapping used fixed-point math, which is just integer numbers that you pretend and real numbers (ie, the CPU treats them like integers) which was a tradeoff for speed, but sacrificed accuracy. This was nothing new, people had been doing this for a long time. The innovation was using some floating-point math, which was slow but accurate, at the same time to correct the results.
For instance, imagine doing a long string of calculations and rounding off to one decimal place after each one. Your answer will be fairly impercise, less early on, and very far off later.
Now, what if you rounded off your answers for speed, but had a friend give you a value every sixteen numbers which corrected your answer. This way you could do the problems really quickly, but you would only drift a little, and the answer would be corrected, drift a little, be corrected, etc.
In this case, you would be doing the texture mapping, doing 'fuzzy' calculations to texture those sixteen pixels very quickly, and your friend would be doing one very accurate calculation in the background (the floating-point pipeline) to put you back on track after those sixteen pixels.
(This whole correction thing is needed because when you look at a wall from the side it doesn't look rectangular anymore. The farther from rectangular, the more your line is likely to drift if you use fuzzy calculations. But fuzzy calculations are sometimes hundreds of times faster than accurate ones... You do the math.)
As the last poster said, NOP is short for "No Operation".
This is an instruction that's just ignored. It used to be, back on non-pipelined, single execution unit CPUs that a NOP took n (usually 1 or 2) cycles, and could thus be used in timing loops where you couldn't read from the clock chip.
Nowadays the NOP instruction gets thrown out in the early stages of the pipeline so the execution units never see it, and it usually takes zero cycles to execute.
So what is it used for now? Taking up space. Why? Either so that you can put in a bunch of NOP instructions where you want to have a subroutine call later, or to put a bunch of NOP instructions over a subroutine call. (Similar to commenting out a few lines in a higher-level language.)
The removal of a subroutine call is what's usually don't in cracking, remove the part where it would call the 'bad registration key' subroutine by putting NOP instructions over the other instruction, and no matter what key you enter, you're fine. (This is the easy part, the hard part is finding the right place to put the NOPs.)
This has many legitimate uses as well, such as writing an infinite lives cheat for a game, or patching a program that tries to jump to a subroutine that crashes on your hardware, etc.
Time spent on the install isn't a good indicator of the actuall difficulty. I once installed Win3.1 in under 30 seconds (off of a ram disk on a fast 486) and have spent three hours fiddling with Redhat (picking packages, etc) install.
The install also isn't over when the OS boots. With Linux the install for the OS installs all the standard services, compilers, shells, etc. All you need to do is change a few configuration options. With Win95 the install is 'easier' but you don't get as much installed.
There will always be this complexity != ease factor... A linux install (currently) expects you to know what Apache is. And in the future will at least expect you to know what a web server is. Until we start treating people like idiots and having default installs that don't install 'complex' stuff, the installs will be harder.
Part of the problem, like someone else on here said already, is that Windows comes installed, but very rarely do people get Linux installed. (And of the geeks here, who wouldn't reinstall it themselves, just because...
But, is this really a problem? Only if we're trying to compete directly with Windows in the desktop market. I don't think we're ready. Many office machines could be replaced transparently by Linux, but the user's machines are the last to go.
Who cares? As long as Linux is there for the high-end and the very low-end (where OS costs double the machine costs) then we can work at slowly narrowing the size of that middle ground. We don't *have to* do it all overnight.
But, to win that middle ground, we need to have trivial installs that focus on security over flexibility (does that desktop user want a web server and if so, is this the install for them?) and that brings the user straight into X with a nice WM and a decent GUI config editor (along the lines of Win9x's control panel).
So, yes. Windows is probably easier for everyone except Slashdot readers and tech writers to install. But, it's getting easier quickly enough that we don't need to fret, especially because it doesn't need to be easy right yet.
This isn't quite enough. Having a phone smart enough to store all your phone numbers (and preferably, smart enough to import/export via email for backup purposes) just lets you get by without post-it notes for yourself.
When everyone has such a phone, then we'll be able to do without paper notes altogether, using an email-like IM client in the phone to record small text or voice messages for the other person.
Well, he was right to a degree. Post-it notes make sense when you wish to communicate with a large, but unspecified group of people.
:)
For instance, putting a post-it note on one elevator telling people that it's broken. You don't know everyone who will want to use that elevator, and they might not check email until after they use it, so email doesn't work. A post-it note is perfect for that sort of thing, and probably always will be. (Well, until everything is covered in a thin LCD coating and you can just scribble the note onto the elevator...
You're right though, in that post-it notes are used in many roles that will become obsolete, such as storing phone numbers. When the PDA is the phone, and folds out into an electronic book, etc we won't have any need to write down this sort of info, and if these devices are as common as cell phones are among tech-types today, we should be able to just wirelessly network these notes to each other.
One sentence from one of your 'test users' was interesting.
"If it doesn't come right out at me, I'm going to give up on it."
It makes me think of them as a dinosaur, unable to cope in the real world, without people distilling everything down into boss-words, with special fonts on all the big words.
If I ever had an employee tell me that they didn't bother to read something because it wasn't pretty enough, and didn't "come right out at them" I'd tell them to get a new job.
Some of the writing tips of the page make sense, like the use of objective rather than promotional text (When people read a paragraph that starts "Nebraska is filled with internationally recognized attractions," their first reaction is no, it's not, and this thought slows them down and distracts them from using the site.) are handy and make sense. Others are simply tips on how to cope with illiterate people.
These tips are handy, in some circumstances. Like with resumes where you're dealing with someone who probably doesn't know the job you're applying for, and will judge you only on the quality of the paper you printed the resume on, or when applying for a grant. In other cimcumstance, you can't (well, at least *I* can't) help but want to slap people for their arrogance in insisting that you spend more time making stuff beautiful just so they don't waste a few seconds actually having to read.