Check the newer designs. They've been in use for several years now, but because of the way the Treasury decided to do it they haven't made their way into the smaller bills yet. So far $20 bills and higher have been converted; $10 is due in 2000 (with $5 in 2001, and finally $1 in 2002). Security threads, watermarks, moire-inducing patterns, and my personal favorite, the color-shifting ink. This, along with the red and blue fibers, hidden pictures (like the spider on the current $1 bill), the paper itself (yes, the paper itself is considered a security feature; many counterfieters have been caught when cashiers realized that the paper didn't feel right), and the other stuff from the current bills.
I don't like the look of the new bills as much (except for the aforementioned color-shifting ink, which is simply too damn cool for words). But they should work a lot better for this sort of thing.
Yeah, the US bills were certainly due for an update (no changes at all since the mid-70's, and no major changes since the 1920's). But they're getting it, finally. I think it would have been cooler to print the whole bill with the color-shifting ink, though.
You can't completely get rid of the mouse in X, no matter how hard you try. You can use keys for most functions, but some things will always bite you and force you to use the mouse.
Therefore, I wouldn't focus of getting rid of the mouse, but replacing it with something else. Some people have mentioned using the keypad; this works but I wouldn't recommend it (a keyboard isn't anywhere near as responsive, nor can it be; it wasn't designed to control a mouse pointer).
I would personally recommend a trackball. They use less disk space and the motion seems more natural to me. I use a Kensington Turbo Mouse (that's "Expert Mouse" to those of you in the PC world), and it works great in MacOS and LinuxPPC both (though I have yet to figure out how to make the fourth button do anything on the Linux side; I'd like to map it to a double-click if that's at all possible).
Touchpads also work. Tracksticks work well once you get used to them, but good luck finding one on anything that isn't a laptop. Then there's that funky brainwave headband (I don't know if it supports Linux yet though).
If all else fails, you could go totally wacko, plug a MIDI keyboard into your machine, and write a driver to control the mouse pointer by playing it. It'd be almost impossible to use, but you've got to admit that once you had it working it'd be seriously cool. Of course, it'd be hard enough to use that it defeats the whole point of the mouse in the first place. But who's counting?
As for ergonomic keyboards, try some out before you take the plunge. Like trackballs, you either love them or you despise them. Best not to get stuck with a keyboard you like even less than your current one.
The site is Slashdotted heavily, but I downloaded the OS itself from the mirror some nice person posted above.
Note to the Mac users out there: yes, it does work in Virtual PC (though I needed to use a real PC to install the thing, it booted in VPC as well). I'd imagine it'll work with Bochs or MESS as well.
It's very pretty as command-lines go (though Darwin has the prettiest command-line I've ever seen, as if that matters at all). I don't see much use for it, but since I couldn't get into the site I could be missing something. It would have been nice if they had provided a PCX file on their demo disk to go with their PCX viewer, though. As it is I'm not sure how I'm supposed to put one on a V2-formatted disk so I can run the viewer.
If you have MacOS, try http://www.lightsoft.co.uk/Fantasm/fan t.html. They've got a good assembler, and it comes with great tutorial documentation (it'll teach you 68K assembly too, if you want).
If you don't have MacOS, I'm not sure where to look. Motorola's and IBM's Websites are probably good places to start, though.
That's exactly what it is. Plain and simple. Yet another step towards Big Brother. You know the Australian government seems to have been taking a lot of them recently; even the US government doesn't have the audacity to proceed at this pace.
Frankly, this solidified my decision: I won't ever move to Australia. I'll grant, I don't like the US government. But at least they pay lip service to the rights of the citizens (and occasionally respect them); this law simply stomps all over Australians' rights without even a shred of subterfuge. Same with all the censorship laws there, many of which go into effect in less than a month. And then there's the other Net-related fiascos going on there...
By the way, earlier in this thread someone noticed that ASIO's Website had a "test page." This poster feared that ASIO was using it as a tool in their Big Brother scheme. I read it a bit differently (seeing as there was nothing in the page source that indicated the possibility of sending data).
I don't even think they have a proper Website. All that page was missing was that inane yellow diamond with the animated digging man inside it and it would have exactly mirrored the perpetually in-progress page of a typical technologically-illiterate person. I honestly think they're that clueless about technology; even more so than the US government (which is itself pretty damn bad). They fear it, fear it with such intensity that they'd do anything to crush it.
Oh, one last point: isn't this getting dangerously close to becoming a human rights violation? The situation there seems to be getting out of control; someone needs to bring them back into line and remind them who really runs the show.
In an Open-Source paradigm, even if the "official" release is delayed, you can still get something to work with. Proof that they're not dragging their feet, yes, but you can also start to work with the program. You see them fulfilling the promises they made.
In proprietary paradigms, you get nothing at all. That's the difference. More often than not, Microsoft and other companies make lots of promises and don't deliver. At least in Open-Source situations they deliver something, even when they say it's not yet completely ready.
Just get it done and get it out there. As long as you can make it reasonably fast and bug-free, I'll be more than happy. Take as long as you need; I know you're not dragging your feet 'cause I can see your source.
That said, I'd be mad if Netscape released their current M12 builds as Netscape 5.0. It's still not particularly stable (though it's improved vastly in that regard), keyboard accelerators only work maybe a tenth of the time (on the Mac anyway; I can't seen to get a LinuxPPC build working), and the launch time is still too slow.
I do, however, like the progress that's being made. The Mac installer is great, the rendering engine is fast, and at least the skins are configurable (though I wish someone would put up the old purple skin). Perhaps when M12 is finalized Netscape should start basing Alpha builds off of it. But let the software mature to the point where it's actually ready to be released before you go and release it.
If it works, more power to him. But I don't recall ever hearing about any real-world trials of anything like this before; is this a new thing?
Also, I thought Stevie Wonder was born blind. Considering his age, being able to see is probably going to take a LOT of getting used to (who knows; after so many years of being blind, suddenly gaining sight could very well drive a person insane through the relative sensory overload). I wish him the best of luck, though.
Come to think of it, the only way we'll ever really be able to know if this works as well as "normal" human vision is to try it on someone who wasn't born blind, so that person can compare. It'll certainly be interesting to see (pardon the pun) how such an experiment would turn out.
Wait, one last thing. Where exactly do they plan to put this chip? Putting it physically inside the eye would probably not be a Good Thing. Unless you put it on the optic disk it'd block part of the retina, and the chip complete with neural interfaces would probably be too big to fit over the disk.
Re:I think this incident speaks for itself...
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It is? He really ought to document it, then, you know? If it truly is a feature, then it's one of the coolest damn features he's coded into this yet.
I think this incident speaks for itself...
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Rob, you really need to do source snapshots much more often. Preferably, starting right now. Perhaps CVS access would be the best way to go. We've talked about this for ages now; Open-Source leads to security. I didn't think Slashdot was going to get burned, but it seems someone managed it.
This is an honest suggestion, Rob. I'm not condoning what these punks did, but at least it might prove the necessity of truly Open-Sourcing Slash.
Yes, there are quite a few problems with cookies. The major two have to deal, of course, with encryption. The encrypted storage is depressingly easy for a browser company to fix; I can only wonder why Netscape, Mozilla, or even IE hasn't at least done a weak scheme (at this stage, with the RSA patents set to expire in less than a year unless I'm mistaken, Mozilla will probably be the first to do it).
The problem of sending cookies in cleartext is harder. The solution is of course encrypted communication. For anyone with Apache this shouldn'e be too difficult (SSL should be sufficient)... except for the whole certificate problem. I'll be glad when encryption is built into the protocol.
Come to think of it, the only way this credit-card number could have actively been stolen would be if the sessions hadn't been encrypted. Does this mean that one of the "great" computer executives was actually stupid enough to give his credit card number to an insecure site? I find that hard to believe, though if he's trying to hawk his own wares I suppose it could be some kind of play.
More likely he simply fell victim to a credit card number generator (which exist all over the place) and blamed cookies since he could use that as an advertisement.
There's a problem with the WTO's particular implementation of it. It has no respect for the workers or the environment at all. It has no requirements for its member nations to fulfill that make those nations respect the worker by giving decent wages and working conditions. And let's not even go into the whole environmental issue; suffice to say the WTO doesn't care about that either.
What does this mean for businesses? It means that it's most profitable to move all their jobs overseas. It's the nature of business to seek as much profit as it can get away with, so this is what's going to happen.
In other words, the WTO is in theory good, but in practice is little more than "Let's Screw America." Or the 95+ percent of American people that don't own businesses, at any rate.
If the WTO actually made sure its members enforced fair business practices, that would be one thing. In fact, it would do a much better job by this than it does now, because it would truly reduce world suffering (note that I didn't say eliminate; no treaty can really do that). As it is now, all it does is give more people overseas sweatshop jobs that don't even deserve to be called crappy (so bad, in fact, that their suffering isn't ended or even reduced, only changed in form), and creates more employment for Americans. The net effect: an increase in world suffering. Mostly centered on America (where most of the new suffering would be created), but in other places too, and reducing suffering nowhere except perhaps the homes of the insanely rich.
OK, I get the feeling this is another post I'd have to rate "What the..."
You could have put it in reply to the absurd post you were talking about, though. I'm guessing it's the one about turning JonKatz to stone.
Either way, we really need to have a mod category for "wierd." Either that, or an archive (that would actually be pretty cool; a "Slashdot Hall of Fame," perhaps?)
I don't like shopping at Barnes & Noble, because they use very Microsoft-like tactics in the bookseller industry (though they keep it in the "real" world, at least).
At the same time, this dispute just cost me the last of my respect for Amazon. I don't intend to shop there again until they decide to stop this silly abuse of a patent system that could really use a total overhaul anyway.
Where am I supposed to get books online now? Granted, there are more than a few very nice bookstores in my area (including a very nice Border's) but what do I do when I can't find what I need there? This is an honest question; if anyone knows of other good online booksellers I'd love to hear about them.
I'd be careful calling it that. Someone proposed the idea that it's mutation fodder (that is, a safe place for mutations to occur). That's a possibility.
But there've also been posts talking about a lot of redundancy and such. It's possible that all this "junk" DNA still has uses that we haven't seen yet. I guess we won't know until we've mapped out the whole thing.
Who knows... maybe someday we'll all have something like a mini-RAID coded into our DNA.
I heard somewhere that the sequence "GATTACA" actually appears at least once in every single human gene (this being why they chose it for the movie title). Furthermore, it's the only sequence that does that.
I'm no genetic researcher, and neither is the person who told me this, but I suppose it's possible.
I don't get it. You flame my cheap PC prices, but then go on to boast how an iMac does not have to cost list.
I didn't intend to boast. You claimed that it wasn't possible to get a new Mac for less than $1000. I told you of one possible way to do just that. That's all.
1) It's not feasible to truly give proper credit in an Easter egg for an operating system. The text of the credits along would bloat the OS by a nontrivial amount (up to several megs). Individual teams are pretty small (usuallt about six people) but you have lots of teams.
2) Easter eggs reduce stability. Why? Because engineers have an annoying tendency to put them in before everything's stable yet.
3) Easter eggs violate specification documents. In other words, technically they're bugs.
Note that I'm not agreeing with Jobs entirely. I do agree about that first reason; you can't give truly proper credit to everyone, therefore it's not fair to give credit to only a few. Even so, though, it's a shame to see the Easter eggs going away. I've always liked them. I hope they'll be snuck into the OS in the future.
If someone wants to prove that first point wrong, be my guest: put an Easter egg into the kernel which lists everyone who's worked on it (and then we'll see if Linus lets it in).
You just said that you can't measure performance accurately. Therefore, the only real way to go is price/performance.
How, though, do you get price/performance if you can't accurately measure performance?
Given the fact that I can get a damn good PC for less then $300, but have to shell out $1000+ for a Mac, I think I know what I would pick. (Plus, there are too many Windows-only games, so for me personally, I would go PC so I can still boot into Windows to play games.)
A "damn good" PC for $300? Don't make me laugh. Yes, you can get a PC for that much. But a damn good one? Mediocre, perhaps. But not damn good by any means.
And I can get my hands on an iMac for about half the price you quoted.
I agree with you wholeheartedly on the menubar issue, though. People forget that the principal interface of any GUI app is its menubar, and the average person can only work in one app at a time (note: that person's computer can run many apps once, but I'd like to see anyone here type up a term paper while playing Quake at the exact same time). The computer itself has no use for menubars, so displaying more than one at a time is pointless (the user can only use the obe belonging to the active app, and the computer doesn't need them anyway). That leaves the question of where to put it, and the top of the screen is a logical place.
Or is this an off-the-wall PR stunt by Microsoft, in an attempt to show how easy their stuff is to use? My guess is that it's the latter.
Come to think of it, how many child labor laws does this violate? I admit that I don't know the child labor laws in India, but this has to break something.
What deepened the great depression? Are you an economist or an economics genius? NO!
Are you? We have no way of knowing this, since you chose to go AC. I'm not; although I've taken a couple of courses on economics I don't claim to be a genius.
You have to realize that tariffs and trade barriers increase world suffering.
Agreed, to a point. But the lack thereof can be just as bad, and have exactly the same effects, only in different regions. Sad as the truth may be, you cannot completely eliminate world suffering. The best you can do is minimize it, try not to cause any more of it, and try help those who are suffering from it.
Japan would have NEVER attacked US in WWII if the US didn't bring about the Holly Smoot tariff which effectively cut Japan off.
That's "Hawley-Smoot." And it cut everyone off, so why didn't everyone attack? For that matter, how are you so certain that was the reason Japan attacked at all (remember, they're historically very protectionist also)? Again, these are honest questions.
So in fact what you are protesting for is the collective suffering of everyone and a greater disparity between land renters and land owners rather than just rich or poor.
Wrong again. The fact is, he's got a point. People tend to see the US, because of its affluence, as a nation of rich people. This is hardly the case. While we do have a lot of rich people, and those people are very rich indeed, they're still an extremely small minority of the population. I would say that no more than five thousand, maybe ten thousand Americans are in a position really benefit at all from WTO. That leaves over three hundred million others in a position to suffer, and suffer greatly, as their jobs go where labor is cheaper.
I should point out that when jobs go overseas, suffering for those tho get the jobs rarely ends. It's not like they get paid nearly as much as their US counterparts (for if they did, then what would the point of moving the jobs be?) Most don't even get a twentieth of what a US worker makes, and the working conditions are awful. That's what's known as a "sweatshop" and it's what happens to most jobs when they go overseas. That's not stopping suffering, merely transmuting it to a different form (now, instead of suffering from having no money, they suffer under abominable labor conditions for obscene hours and still don't have much more money than they did before). So now, you don't just have an American who's suffering from unemployment, you also have someone overseas who got the job but is still suffering (which the American would not have been had he or she kept the job). People forget that businesses are ruthless whenever they can get away for it, and why not? Businesses exist for one reason alone: to make money. They'll do this by any means they can get away with; that's the nature of comeptition. Laws can be enacted to make sure business act honorably, but those are useless if they can't reach somewhere that the business can.
This is the problem with the WTO. Its theory is great. The problem is, it's not executed very well. It does nothing to level the playing field across nations (which was its original purpose; it just doesn't do anything which will do that).
A trade organization which ensured fair wages and working conditions in its member nations would be one thing. But WTO doesn't do that. All it does is drop barriers to trade, without a thought as to what lies on both sides of those barriers.
Still, it's the standard pattern for this bunch. They set the precedent with Christians, which you don't care about anyway. Now surprised they've turned these same tactics against you? Shouldn't be.
Huh? I don't understand. I don't know of any attacks the Clinton Administration has done on Christians (and since I am one I'd think I would know about it if it were going on). Perhaps you could enlighten us as to what attacks have been going on?
And this is an honest question, by the way, not a flame.
Question is, do you make it a positive or negative mod? Either way, that's what I'd have to mod this. It's definitely the strangest post I've seen on Slashdot yet. It'd be a shame to mod it down, but it kind of deserves it (it's offtopic, after all).
Slashdot Mirror
Check the newer designs. They've been in use for several years now, but because of the way the Treasury decided to do it they haven't made their way into the smaller bills yet. So far $20 bills and higher have been converted; $10 is due in 2000 (with $5 in 2001, and finally $1 in 2002). Security threads, watermarks, moire-inducing patterns, and my personal favorite, the color-shifting ink. This, along with the red and blue fibers, hidden pictures (like the spider on the current $1 bill), the paper itself (yes, the paper itself is considered a security feature; many counterfieters have been caught when cashiers realized that the paper didn't feel right), and the other stuff from the current bills.
I don't like the look of the new bills as much (except for the aforementioned color-shifting ink, which is simply too damn cool for words). But they should work a lot better for this sort of thing.
Yeah, the US bills were certainly due for an update (no changes at all since the mid-70's, and no major changes since the 1920's). But they're getting it, finally. I think it would have been cooler to print the whole bill with the color-shifting ink, though.
You can't completely get rid of the mouse in X, no matter how hard you try. You can use keys for most functions, but some things will always bite you and force you to use the mouse.
Therefore, I wouldn't focus of getting rid of the mouse, but replacing it with something else. Some people have mentioned using the keypad; this works but I wouldn't recommend it (a keyboard isn't anywhere near as responsive, nor can it be; it wasn't designed to control a mouse pointer).
I would personally recommend a trackball. They use less disk space and the motion seems more natural to me. I use a Kensington Turbo Mouse (that's "Expert Mouse" to those of you in the PC world), and it works great in MacOS and LinuxPPC both (though I have yet to figure out how to make the fourth button do anything on the Linux side; I'd like to map it to a double-click if that's at all possible).
Touchpads also work. Tracksticks work well once you get used to them, but good luck finding one on anything that isn't a laptop. Then there's that funky brainwave headband (I don't know if it supports Linux yet though).
If all else fails, you could go totally wacko, plug a MIDI keyboard into your machine, and write a driver to control the mouse pointer by playing it. It'd be almost impossible to use, but you've got to admit that once you had it working it'd be seriously cool. Of course, it'd be hard enough to use that it defeats the whole point of the mouse in the first place. But who's counting?
As for ergonomic keyboards, try some out before you take the plunge. Like trackballs, you either love them or you despise them. Best not to get stuck with a keyboard you like even less than your current one.
The site is Slashdotted heavily, but I downloaded the OS itself from the mirror some nice person posted above.
Note to the Mac users out there: yes, it does work in Virtual PC (though I needed to use a real PC to install the thing, it booted in VPC as well). I'd imagine it'll work with Bochs or MESS as well.
It's very pretty as command-lines go (though Darwin has the prettiest command-line I've ever seen, as if that matters at all). I don't see much use for it, but since I couldn't get into the site I could be missing something. It would have been nice if they had provided a PCX file on their demo disk to go with their PCX viewer, though. As it is I'm not sure how I'm supposed to put one on a V2-formatted disk so I can run the viewer.
If you have MacOS, try http://www.lightsoft.co.uk/Fantasm/fan t.html. They've got a good assembler, and it comes with great tutorial documentation (it'll teach you 68K assembly too, if you want).
If you don't have MacOS, I'm not sure where to look. Motorola's and IBM's Websites are probably good places to start, though.
That's exactly what it is. Plain and simple. Yet another step towards Big Brother. You know the Australian government seems to have been taking a lot of them recently; even the US government doesn't have the audacity to proceed at this pace.
Frankly, this solidified my decision: I won't ever move to Australia. I'll grant, I don't like the US government. But at least they pay lip service to the rights of the citizens (and occasionally respect them); this law simply stomps all over Australians' rights without even a shred of subterfuge. Same with all the censorship laws there, many of which go into effect in less than a month. And then there's the other Net-related fiascos going on there...
By the way, earlier in this thread someone noticed that ASIO's Website had a "test page." This poster feared that ASIO was using it as a tool in their Big Brother scheme. I read it a bit differently (seeing as there was nothing in the page source that indicated the possibility of sending data).
I don't even think they have a proper Website. All that page was missing was that inane yellow diamond with the animated digging man inside it and it would have exactly mirrored the perpetually in-progress page of a typical technologically-illiterate person. I honestly think they're that clueless about technology; even more so than the US government (which is itself pretty damn bad). They fear it, fear it with such intensity that they'd do anything to crush it.
Oh, one last point: isn't this getting dangerously close to becoming a human rights violation? The situation there seems to be getting out of control; someone needs to bring them back into line and remind them who really runs the show.
In an Open-Source paradigm, even if the "official" release is delayed, you can still get something to work with. Proof that they're not dragging their feet, yes, but you can also start to work with the program. You see them fulfilling the promises they made.
In proprietary paradigms, you get nothing at all. That's the difference. More often than not, Microsoft and other companies make lots of promises and don't deliver. At least in Open-Source situations they deliver something, even when they say it's not yet completely ready.
Just get it done and get it out there. As long as you can make it reasonably fast and bug-free, I'll be more than happy. Take as long as you need; I know you're not dragging your feet 'cause I can see your source.
That said, I'd be mad if Netscape released their current M12 builds as Netscape 5.0. It's still not particularly stable (though it's improved vastly in that regard), keyboard accelerators only work maybe a tenth of the time (on the Mac anyway; I can't seen to get a LinuxPPC build working), and the launch time is still too slow.
I do, however, like the progress that's being made. The Mac installer is great, the rendering engine is fast, and at least the skins are configurable (though I wish someone would put up the old purple skin). Perhaps when M12 is finalized Netscape should start basing Alpha builds off of it. But let the software mature to the point where it's actually ready to be released before you go and release it.
If it works, more power to him. But I don't recall ever hearing about any real-world trials of anything like this before; is this a new thing?
Also, I thought Stevie Wonder was born blind. Considering his age, being able to see is probably going to take a LOT of getting used to (who knows; after so many years of being blind, suddenly gaining sight could very well drive a person insane through the relative sensory overload). I wish him the best of luck, though.
Come to think of it, the only way we'll ever really be able to know if this works as well as "normal" human vision is to try it on someone who wasn't born blind, so that person can compare. It'll certainly be interesting to see (pardon the pun) how such an experiment would turn out.
Wait, one last thing. Where exactly do they plan to put this chip? Putting it physically inside the eye would probably not be a Good Thing. Unless you put it on the optic disk it'd block part of the retina, and the chip complete with neural interfaces would probably be too big to fit over the disk.
It is? He really ought to document it, then, you know? If it truly is a feature, then it's one of the coolest damn features he's coded into this yet.
Rob, you really need to do source snapshots much more often. Preferably, starting right now. Perhaps CVS access would be the best way to go. We've talked about this for ages now; Open-Source leads to security. I didn't think Slashdot was going to get burned, but it seems someone managed it.
This is an honest suggestion, Rob. I'm not condoning what these punks did, but at least it might prove the necessity of truly Open-Sourcing Slash.
Yes, there are quite a few problems with cookies. The major two have to deal, of course, with encryption. The encrypted storage is depressingly easy for a browser company to fix; I can only wonder why Netscape, Mozilla, or even IE hasn't at least done a weak scheme (at this stage, with the RSA patents set to expire in less than a year unless I'm mistaken, Mozilla will probably be the first to do it).
The problem of sending cookies in cleartext is harder. The solution is of course encrypted communication. For anyone with Apache this shouldn'e be too difficult (SSL should be sufficient)... except for the whole certificate problem. I'll be glad when encryption is built into the protocol.
Come to think of it, the only way this credit-card number could have actively been stolen would be if the sessions hadn't been encrypted. Does this mean that one of the "great" computer executives was actually stupid enough to give his credit card number to an insecure site? I find that hard to believe, though if he's trying to hawk his own wares I suppose it could be some kind of play.
More likely he simply fell victim to a credit card number generator (which exist all over the place) and blamed cookies since he could use that as an advertisement.
There's a problem with the WTO's particular implementation of it. It has no respect for the workers or the environment at all. It has no requirements for its member nations to fulfill that make those nations respect the worker by giving decent wages and working conditions. And let's not even go into the whole environmental issue; suffice to say the WTO doesn't care about that either.
What does this mean for businesses? It means that it's most profitable to move all their jobs overseas. It's the nature of business to seek as much profit as it can get away with, so this is what's going to happen.
In other words, the WTO is in theory good, but in practice is little more than "Let's Screw America." Or the 95+ percent of American people that don't own businesses, at any rate.
If the WTO actually made sure its members enforced fair business practices, that would be one thing. In fact, it would do a much better job by this than it does now, because it would truly reduce world suffering (note that I didn't say eliminate; no treaty can really do that). As it is now, all it does is give more people overseas sweatshop jobs that don't even deserve to be called crappy (so bad, in fact, that their suffering isn't ended or even reduced, only changed in form), and creates more employment for Americans. The net effect: an increase in world suffering. Mostly centered on America (where most of the new suffering would be created), but in other places too, and reducing suffering nowhere except perhaps the homes of the insanely rich.
If Katz missed the point, then I appear to have missed it too, because I liked this article.
So do us all a favor and enlighten us, O Wise One: what is the point?
OK, I get the feeling this is another post I'd have to rate "What the..."
You could have put it in reply to the absurd post you were talking about, though. I'm guessing it's the one about turning JonKatz to stone.
Either way, we really need to have a mod category for "wierd." Either that, or an archive (that would actually be pretty cool; a "Slashdot Hall of Fame," perhaps?)
I don't like shopping at Barnes & Noble, because they use very Microsoft-like tactics in the bookseller industry (though they keep it in the "real" world, at least).
At the same time, this dispute just cost me the last of my respect for Amazon. I don't intend to shop there again until they decide to stop this silly abuse of a patent system that could really use a total overhaul anyway.
Where am I supposed to get books online now? Granted, there are more than a few very nice bookstores in my area (including a very nice Border's) but what do I do when I can't find what I need there? This is an honest question; if anyone knows of other good online booksellers I'd love to hear about them.
I'd be careful calling it that. Someone proposed the idea that it's mutation fodder (that is, a safe place for mutations to occur). That's a possibility.
But there've also been posts talking about a lot of redundancy and such. It's possible that all this "junk" DNA still has uses that we haven't seen yet. I guess we won't know until we've mapped out the whole thing.
Who knows... maybe someday we'll all have something like a mini-RAID coded into our DNA.
I heard somewhere that the sequence "GATTACA" actually appears at least once in every single human gene (this being why they chose it for the movie title). Furthermore, it's the only sequence that does that.
I'm no genetic researcher, and neither is the person who told me this, but I suppose it's possible.
I don't get it. You flame my cheap PC prices, but then go on to boast how an iMac does not have to cost list.
I didn't intend to boast. You claimed that it wasn't possible to get a new Mac for less than $1000. I told you of one possible way to do just that. That's all.
Jobs does have a few valid points, I suppose...
1) It's not feasible to truly give proper credit in an Easter egg for an operating system. The text of the credits along would bloat the OS by a nontrivial amount (up to several megs). Individual teams are pretty small (usuallt about six people) but you have lots of teams.
2) Easter eggs reduce stability. Why? Because engineers have an annoying tendency to put them in before everything's stable yet.
3) Easter eggs violate specification documents. In other words, technically they're bugs.
Note that I'm not agreeing with Jobs entirely. I do agree about that first reason; you can't give truly proper credit to everyone, therefore it's not fair to give credit to only a few. Even so, though, it's a shame to see the Easter eggs going away. I've always liked them. I hope they'll be snuck into the OS in the future.
If someone wants to prove that first point wrong, be my guest: put an Easter egg into the kernel which lists everyone who's worked on it (and then we'll see if Linus lets it in).
You just said that you can't measure performance accurately. Therefore, the only real way to go is price/performance.
How, though, do you get price/performance if you can't accurately measure performance?
Given the fact that I can get a damn good PC for less then $300, but have to shell out $1000+ for a Mac, I think I know what I would pick. (Plus, there are too many Windows-only games, so for me personally, I would go PC so I can still boot into Windows to play games.)
A "damn good" PC for $300? Don't make me laugh. Yes, you can get a PC for that much. But a damn good one? Mediocre, perhaps. But not damn good by any means.
And I can get my hands on an iMac for about half the price you quoted.
I agree with you wholeheartedly on the menubar issue, though. People forget that the principal interface of any GUI app is its menubar, and the average person can only work in one app at a time (note: that person's computer can run many apps once, but I'd like to see anyone here type up a term paper while playing Quake at the exact same time). The computer itself has no use for menubars, so displaying more than one at a time is pointless (the user can only use the obe belonging to the active app, and the computer doesn't need them anyway). That leaves the question of where to put it, and the top of the screen is a logical place.
Oh, great. Now you've got me started...
"Jupiter Netscape Crash!"
"Mars Pentium Processor Ignite!"
"Venus Beowulf Chain Encircle!"
"Mercury Microsoft Blast!"
And of course my favorite...
"Moon Kernel Compilation!"
Sorry about the dub attacks; they seemed more appropriate somehow.
What does he do?
Or is this an off-the-wall PR stunt by Microsoft, in an attempt to show how easy their stuff is to use? My guess is that it's the latter.
Come to think of it, how many child labor laws does this violate? I admit that I don't know the child labor laws in India, but this has to break something.
What deepened the great depression? Are you an economist or an economics genius? NO!
Are you? We have no way of knowing this, since you chose to go AC. I'm not; although I've taken a couple of courses on economics I don't claim to be a genius.
You have to realize that tariffs and trade barriers increase world suffering.
Agreed, to a point. But the lack thereof can be just as bad, and have exactly the same effects, only in different regions. Sad as the truth may be, you cannot completely eliminate world suffering. The best you can do is minimize it, try not to cause any more of it, and try help those who are suffering from it.
Japan would have NEVER attacked US in WWII if the US didn't bring about the Holly Smoot tariff which effectively cut Japan off.
That's "Hawley-Smoot." And it cut everyone off, so why didn't everyone attack? For that matter, how are you so certain that was the reason Japan attacked at all (remember, they're historically very protectionist also)? Again, these are honest questions.
So in fact what you are protesting for is the collective suffering of everyone and a greater disparity between land renters and land owners rather than just rich or poor.
Wrong again. The fact is, he's got a point. People tend to see the US, because of its affluence, as a nation of rich people. This is hardly the case. While we do have a lot of rich people, and those people are very rich indeed, they're still an extremely small minority of the population. I would say that no more than five thousand, maybe ten thousand Americans are in a position really benefit at all from WTO. That leaves over three hundred million others in a position to suffer, and suffer greatly, as their jobs go where labor is cheaper.
I should point out that when jobs go overseas, suffering for those tho get the jobs rarely ends. It's not like they get paid nearly as much as their US counterparts (for if they did, then what would the point of moving the jobs be?) Most don't even get a twentieth of what a US worker makes, and the working conditions are awful. That's what's known as a "sweatshop" and it's what happens to most jobs when they go overseas. That's not stopping suffering, merely transmuting it to a different form (now, instead of suffering from having no money, they suffer under abominable labor conditions for obscene hours and still don't have much more money than they did before). So now, you don't just have an American who's suffering from unemployment, you also have someone overseas who got the job but is still suffering (which the American would not have been had he or she kept the job). People forget that businesses are ruthless whenever they can get away for it, and why not? Businesses exist for one reason alone: to make money. They'll do this by any means they can get away with; that's the nature of comeptition. Laws can be enacted to make sure business act honorably, but those are useless if they can't reach somewhere that the business can.
This is the problem with the WTO. Its theory is great. The problem is, it's not executed very well. It does nothing to level the playing field across nations (which was its original purpose; it just doesn't do anything which will do that).
A trade organization which ensured fair wages and working conditions in its member nations would be one thing. But WTO doesn't do that. All it does is drop barriers to trade, without a thought as to what lies on both sides of those barriers.
Still, it's the standard pattern for this bunch. They set the precedent with Christians, which you don't care about anyway. Now surprised they've turned these same tactics against you? Shouldn't be.
Huh? I don't understand. I don't know of any attacks the Clinton Administration has done on Christians (and since I am one I'd think I would know about it if it were going on). Perhaps you could enlighten us as to what attacks have been going on?
And this is an honest question, by the way, not a flame.
I propose a new modding category:
"What the..."
Question is, do you make it a positive or negative mod? Either way, that's what I'd have to mod this. It's definitely the strangest post I've seen on Slashdot yet. It'd be a shame to mod it down, but it kind of deserves it (it's offtopic, after all).