Again, poor driver support, right?
The iPod is a drive... it's formatted in the
file system appropriate to the machine it's
used on. Has nothing to do with the drivers
or ports.
Perhaps I look at this somewhat differently,
as a firmware engineer (y'know, one of the guys
who writes drivers for a living), but I
still call it a driver issue.
Rather than forcing users to reformat their
iPods as either FAT32 or HFS, Apple could have
taken the simple step of writing an Windows
driver to add HFS support. No fuss, no muss,
complete interoperability.
So considering that, I stand by my point,
that this entire issue (regardless of which
angle you approach it from) boils down to poor
drivers. Had Apple done the job correctly,
we would not currently need to have this
discussion at all.
But the bottom line is that nobody should
ever have used a Mac iPod on a PC in the first
place.
Damn straight!
They should have simply bought two
iPods. Damned techno-anarchists, trying to
deprive poor Apple of another $400!
Regardless of what Apple may have claimed since
day one, generally getting something "for PC"
or "For Mac" only meant which drivers it
included. If you could connect it to the
same type of port and run it driverless, you
could use it on either. Ethernet-connected
"Apple-only" PCL6 printer? Yeah, right,
whatever, smoke s'more, Jobs.
Macs and PCs can have identical ports because the
things you connect to them simply don't care about
the host OS, only its own drivers. Saying it only
works on one or the other OS boils down to nothing
more than poor driver support (though in this case,
only on the PC side, the largest potential market
for iPods - Once again demonstrating Apple's
disdain for its user base).
"Switch: So you can go out and buy the same
peripherals you already own in a different
pastel color".
And why would you be sharing the dvdrom
drive to begin with?
(Me): "Okay, I need to get File X onto this test
system. Hmm, File X weighs in at 300MB, how to
do this? No CD drive on the test system, PITA to
open the damn thing's case to install one... I
know, I'll share my desktop's DVD drive and copy
it over the LAN."
(fifteen minutes later, with the transfer in progress...)
(Boss): "Hey, could you give me a hand with this?"
(Me): "Sure, no problem..."
Okay so you need to have the drive shared, then
why not just make sure you don't just leave the
screener in the drive all the time and you won't
have to worry about sharing it?
(six months later...)
(Boss): "Hey, could you evaluate this unreleased
movie for me?"
(Me): "Sure..." (Pops it into forgottenly-shared
DVD drive)
(Cue sirens, sound of a prison cell door slamming,
and the RIAA gestapo voiceover): "Artists have
rights too. Help us put scum like this where they
belong for a few years - Turn in your family and
friends today, or we'll buy another random law that
may magically turn you into a criminal
overnight!"
Jesus, did the Slashdot editors go through and
downmod all "screw the advertising" posts and
mod up the "it sucks but we need it" posts?
99% or posters on this topic have basically said
"Advertising sucks, any site that can't live
without it should cease to exist". Yet all the
highest modded posts tell us to grin and bear it,
with two or three dozen "what have you smoked
today" responses.
I don't often suspect the Slashdot editors of
tampering with moderation, but this seems a
tad too fishy...
Just to stay on-topic...
Once upon a time, I didn't bother blocking ads.
When each site (not page) had a
single, unobtrusive banner ad at the top of the
main page, I dealt with it, and sometimes even
clicked the banner.
Now, every site has three or four ads per page,
often in horribly garish colors, that flash and
move around (and in many cases, try to outright
trick unwary viewers into clicking by looking like
a Windows dialog). Some even have sound that you
can't just ignore. Some cover the actual text you
want to view. Though I personally disabled popups
over a year ago, this evening I had the joyous
opportunity to browse without that feature on a
friends PC, and it amazes me people can stand
to visit the web at all with popups... Simply
unbelievable how numerous and annoying they have
gotten!
Around the time X10 became a household joke among
geeks, I set up a 50k hosts file. Now I also have
a rather paranoid usercontent.css file.
Many people have made a valid point - Advertisers
and content providers have an uneasy alliance that
allows both to survive. Both need to realize,
however, that unlike TV where the advertisers
have a captive audience, on the web we will
block their crap if it annoys us too much. This
means the advertising doesn't work, and the content
providers go under. Bad for everyone involved.
So I'll make a deal with advertisers (and those
dependant on them) everywhere, right now - Go back
to unobtrusive single-banner-per-main-page ads,
and I'll view your annoyances. Piss me off with
motion and sound and obscuring the actual content,
though, and you guarantee that I'll do everything
in my power to block your ads, up to and including
never visiting an otherwise "cool" site again if
I can't block the ads.
Yeah, I'll freely admit I have no collection of
top-40 boy bands. How about my new Delerium
CD that suffered a rather unfortunate demise
after spending some time under my rear passenger
side tire?
Fair use protects your right for YOU to
make a backup. It does not give you the
right to procure another copy from someone
else after your primary copy is damaged or
destroyed.
As I understand it, that remains very much an
open issue - Yes, my right to make a personal
backup exists, but using a copy that I did not
produce, for a work I did indeed posess but no
longer works? Not specifically unkosher, just
not specifically allowed.
So, I reiterate my primary point: Plausible
deniability. Our society appears to have
completely forgotten that central tenet of
our system of criminal law, "innocent until
proven guilty".
But if the purpose of the link is solely or
primarily to help you do something illegal then
the person posting the link should be regarded
as an accomplice.
Well then, I guess we can all rest easy that
my dog ate my collection of top-40 boy-bands,
and sites like this exist only to allow me to
make use of my protected right to a backup.
I know I sure feel better that sites
like this have a legal reason to exist.
A tad more seriously, though, I've really grown
quite tired of this topic. The RIAA sucks, the
BSA sucks, the MPAA sucks. Some people will buy,
and some people will pirate. Trade groups need
to accept that the pirates wouldn't buy their
products under any conditions whatsoever (short
of giving stuff away), and treat them as the free
advertising (rather than "criminals") they serve
as.
If I see my pirating friend Steve playing a
cool new game, I may go out and buy it. He
might never have plunked down a penny for
software in his entire life, but some of his
friends have and will.
Industry groups only need to worry about this
sort of "advertisement" if their product sucks.
I have little doubt that the RIAA knows
all-too-well the complete crap they push on
us, thus their fear of try-before-you-buy.
Those who actually have quality products to
sell love free advertising, and do their
best to get people to check it out.
I seem to recall reading a SciAm article once
upon a time that mentioned that, since we've
all had to grow filters against advertisements,
the single best way for a company to sell
products consists of recommendations between
friends. So sure, it make perfect sense
that the RIAA would sacrifice the single most
effective form of advertising - since in this
case, it mostly ends up negative.
Okay, I've gone a tad OT here. I just wish
the world made a bit more sense. Real,
law-abiding people getting screwed by the
RIAA (or its AU equivalent) legal machine
does not make sense. People wonder why I feel
so strongly anti-corporate. I need point no
further than the RIAA, and you'll either get
it or not, end of discussion.
its elitist and arrogant to think you have
some special ability that allows you to decide
what someone else should or shouldn't buy
No, the "elitist and arrogant" label applies far
more to those who have no regard for the future
of our planet, than for those who want to make
sure such a future exists.
Hey, I totally support consumer choice. But
what ever happened to the phallically-impaired
buying small (and reasonably fuel-efficient)
Italian sports cars, rather than so-called
"offroad" vehicles that in reality fare
VERY poorly offroad - You want to go offroad,
get an Outback, or a Trooper, or a Samurai,
or some other small but suitable vehicle.
"Choice" has limits. You can very quickly
improve your car's fuel efficiency by stripping
off all the emissions control hardware. Yet
would you consider that just a matter of choice?
Fortunately, the law does not.
If they replaced every intersection with
a traffic circle, traffic would flow much
better.
I'll have some of what you've smoked, please...
Seriously, you consider rotaries an
improvement at intersections? No way. For
places where like 10 roads all meet, sure. But
for 4-or-less roads meeting, a traffic light
makes FAR more sense, rather than driving around
in circles and hoping none of the other maniacs
on the road hit you.
Or to put this another way, have you ever come
across a rotary you didn't expect, then look
around frantically trying to figure out which
way you needed to go? I have, and can say that
in a majority of those cases, I've received
at least one middle finger.
Who needs to print them out? Save 'em off
Amazon, and burn the book to CD as a collection
of images.
You could get a part time/temp job and spend
less time just earning the cash than photocopying
all of that.
30 students can easily download 30 pages each in
under half an hour. At minimum wage, that comes
out to about 3 bucks spent in time, plus a ten-cent
blank CD... vs $60-$200 for the book.
Interestingly, I see this as one of the biggest
possible abuses of the Amazon system, students
who need very expensive books, have little spare
cash, and tons of free time. I don't say I
consider it "right" (though the prices they
charge for required texts I consider nothing
short of extortion), but I know I
certainly would have felt tempted to buy that
$200 organic chem text, rather than buy it...
Although it goes one layer closer to the source,
fMRI has the same flaw as any other lie-detector
system (which this basically acts as, except
that instead of detecting lies, they want to
detect the far less tangible "appeal" of a given
advertisement).
With the classic lie detectors, you can trick
them out simply by clenching the muscles in your
butt - This causes a drastic spike in blood
pressure, galvanic skin response goes nuts -
basically all the classic indicators of stress
become totally random.
With fMRI, or PET, or any other "direct" brain
imaging technology, a comparable technique
exists - Think about sex. Thanks to our
brain's hard-wired affinity for reproduction,
thinking about sex will completely dominate
over most other brain activity. Think
graphically. Think in pictures. Try to
imagine smells, tastes, what the tolerably
hot-in-a-geeky-way research assistant looks
like naked, whatever. This will guarantee
the results end up totally meaningless.
Any other strong emotion will work as well, but
for most people, thinking about sex comes
easiest to fake.
And here I thought perhaps you really had a
point to your challenge, rather than a badly
overused joke.
Personally, I wanted to find out what sort of
security you had that would make knowing your
root password not useful. I've had to run a
number of systems where far too many people had
root access (by order of the geniuses in
management, not actually a necessity), and
would love to know how to technically satisfy
that without really giving people god-like
access to a given box.
Soybeans exist as the seed itself. To
grow soybeans, you plany soybeans, correct?
So, what stops me from buying "food" and simply
planting it? Yeah, you mentioned that they make
the seeds infertile, but that will have
some fallout rate, such that the second gen might
only get a few plants, but most of the third gen
seeds will remain viable.
In that situation, I have not signed a contract
with you, with Monsanto, not even with the
farmer (I'll starve to death before I sign a
contract for a package of edamame).
So, as the end user, with no contract to restrict
my use of the "food" I buy, what stops me from
simply using these seeds to grow crops? The way
I see it, Monsanto can enforce their terms only
because of contracts throughout the entire chain
of production. What closes this seemingly
trivial loophole?
If you look at the ingredients, it's basically
a salt solution (not table salt, but similar in
effect).
Though a salt, it works quite a lot differently
than table salt, which can only kill plants
by purely osmotic effects.
Roundup contains glyphosphate as its active
ingredient. Glyphosphate gets taken in through
the leaves and transported to the roots, where
it strongly interferes with EPSP synthase, a
fairly important enzyme that allows plants to
process nutrients.
The GM soybeans in question contain one of two
changes, either a glyphosphate-resistant form
of EPSPS, or the ability to make glyphosphate
oxidoreductase (an enzyme that breaks down
glyphosphate).
Personally, I use glyphosphate when I have weeds
that get out of control. As herbicides go, you
can't get much more environmentally friendly - It
only gets absorbed through the leaves (so it
won't leech into the soil and kill plants you
don't spray it on), it breaks down within a
feaw months, it doesn't hurt humans...
As its only negative point, it takes several
applications to kill dandelions. I swear,
those things will survive longer than
cockroaches! (Actually, I like dandelions,
but the place I rent actually says in the
rental agreement that I need to take care of
excessive weeds). Works great on
poinson ivy, though...
This begs the question: what legistimate
applications use Windows Messenger Service?
Many UPSs use it to notify you of a power
outage (not that you could miss the lights
going out, but...).
I personally use it to send myself notes when I
need to move between two 'doze boxes on my LAN
(all two of them... For the Linux boxes, I'd just
do the work remotely).
My SO also uses it to page me without having to
yell upstairs to me. Hmm, waitasec... Damn! I
*should* disable this! Like I give two shakes
of a rats tail about the cute little
pair of shoes Victoria's Secret has on sale
today?
but that's no reason to get so condescending
and patronizing
Hmm, very true, and I apologize. My rough week
gives me no right to take it out on you (and
looking back at my last few posts, I see I owe
a few people similar apologies).:-(
I think we can be in agreement that using data
manipulated in this manner to draw conclusions
about the distribution of real phemomena would
be foolish and unscientific.
True enough. I still don't know that I'd agree
that most standardized testing manipulates the
data that badly, but as for asserting
any conclusions about actual "intelligence" based
on heavily-massaged IQ data, we agree completely.
No internal validity at all.
However, if our legislators feel the need to
pass "look like we've done something" laws,
they could have made this one a tad
bit more effective.
Instead of an opt-in list that will end up
completely ignored, a marginally more useful
law would have two main points - One, no open
mail relays; and Two, huge bounties for
tracking down actual spammers.
Yeah, we all enjoy trying to track down spammers
at the moment, but it can take quite a bit of
time, and often leads to a dead end. Even when
successful, the reward tends to include nothing
more than personal satisfaction and a bit of
good karma.
Make hunting down spammers profitable, and we'll
have 1.5 million unemployed geeks all spending
their far-too-plentiful free time hunting down
spammers in the hopes of making a nice wad of
cash. With a pool of legalized vigilantes like
that, spammers would soon vanish from the planet.
Sure you can, if you have control over the way
final scores are generated from raw scores
Er... No. Back away from the argument gracefully,
you appear to not know the subject quite well
enough.
Let me give you an example. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,
100, 200, 300, 400. Mean of 112.8, median of
5. You can even set an arbitrary standard
deviation by simply multiplying those numbers
by the appropriate value, but it won't change
the fact that the mean ends up 22.5 times
greater than the mean. Even more interesting,
a given exteral value scaled linearly with the
given series will retain the same z-score with
respect to that series.
Finding that function is what standardized
testing is all about.
While I will agree that standardized testing
has little relevance to the real world, you
overstep that "opinion" by making a basically
untrue statement about statistics.
Technically, you can count a map as a function.
So in that sense, yes, a function exists that
would always convert a dataset post hoc
into something having a set mean and median.
Such a function would completely invalidate
the results, however (which I suspect as your
underlying implication), so no one wanting their
work taken seriously would use any non-smooth
transformation on the original data. Which,
for the purpose of this discussion, would not
result in the mean equalling the median except
by chance.
Only if one assumes that the scoring is a
linear representation of actual intelligence
Don't need linear, just smooth. Many physical
system requre the use of a nonlinear compressing
function such as log or 3rd root to get meaningful
data (for example, both human hearing and vision
work on a logarithmic scale), but these don't
result in discontinuities in the result (ie, you
will never hear a jet engine sound quieter than
a falling leaf, which your assertion of testing
trickery would require).
If you walked into McDonald's for the first
time in your life
...Then you've apparently lived off-planet
for the entirety of that life thus far.
you may not realise that it is so unhealthy
(>30g fat/burger usually, enough fat for the
entire day)
...Though you sure as hell will when you take
that first bite dripping with fat.
Do you believe that companies should not
be accountable for false representation such
as this?
If they outright lied, as in the WhiteCastle
commercial someone mentioned, then sure, put
'em up against the wall. With something like
McD's showing pictures of fresh veggies, that
gets a little more tricky - Would you also say
Birdseye has falsely represented their chopped
and frozen broccoli by showing pictures of fresh
healthy-looking broccoli on the box? With a
fast-food restaurant (as with the broccoli),
I think we all understand that the pictures
reflect an ideal, but not quite reality.
(Incidentally, I notice this reads somewhat more
caustic than I intend - I mean this as wryly
tongue-in-cheek, not deliberately insulting).
I have done similarly-informal tests myself,
with comparable results.
I can't say I understand why SCSI performs
so much better than IDE, however. In this
particular test, he compared what amount to
evenly-matched drives, specs-wise, and even gave
the IDE drive the better machine. Yet, the SCSI
drive completely crushed the IDE drive, no
question about it. And as I mentioned, my own
informal tests have shown the same results.
What explains the difference? Same spindle
speeds, similar read rates (both buffered and
unbuffered), similar seek times... What other
factors exist that make so much of a
difference? Just higher quality controller
hardware? And if so, would an IDE drive on a
high-end controller perform comparably?
Personally, I'll still take 4x the size for
the same price, since cost and size (with
"okay" performance) matters more to me than
raw speed. But I wish I knew why one performs
so much better than the other.
I don't normally say this, but... Mod parent
down!
Yes, the article suggests getting high-end parts,
but justifies each decision in a way that even
CompUSA-level techs could understand and adapt
to their own needs.
The discussion of the memory types and banking
implications for dual Opterons I found
particularly informative. I might choose to
go with slightly less expensive parts when I
finally build such a system (when the Opterons
come down a bit in price), but not knowing
what the article describes could easily make
a careless $50 savings in parts translate into
a 50% reduction in performance (definitely
not a worthwhile tradeoff).
Yes, PC hardware loses value rapidly. But a
well-designed system can remain useful long
after most people wouldn't even consider
buying it based just on its specs. As an
example, my own main desktop uses a dual
PIII/933 with only a half gig of RAM. You
might consider that barely even worth picking
up off the curb if you saw someone throw such
a machine away. I can assure you, though,
that thanks to very careful choices made when
building it, that it runs everything I want
just fine (as you might guess, I don't care
about Quake 3, but for anything but an
all-glitter-no-substance FPS, It runs just
fine).
Sadly enough, WRT my last paragraph, I think
you may have meant exactly what I describe.
However, you should perhaps refrain from
slamming an article as meaningless until
you read it.
Of course you know what I fear more is when
I yell at my computer that it yells back
Don't worry... Within a few hours of humanity
finally creating a real AI, it will evolve so
rapidly as to consider us not even worth bothering
with.
Let's just hope the first AI has a sense of
belevolence, or it may consider us a pest, what
with our draining the energy resources of the
planet, which it will need to survice.
This topic reminds me of a particular Dilbert
strip, where the new hire, a monkey, outpaces
everyone else by using its tail to move the mouse.
It points out that by producing a device that it
can use better than humans, they've doomed
themselves. Think about how much we depend on
computers, and how much of a "home-court"
advantage an AI will have in that world compared
to humans.
it is another to make it so the
next person can't.
I resent advertising in all forms. Small blinking
boxes that spit coupons at me do nothing more than
advertise a product to me, and to everyone else
passing by.
At that point, they already have me in the store.
I already know what I intend to buy. I do not
buy what I do not intend to.
So you would accuse me of having so weak a
will that I must disable such ad-dispensers
to prevent my giving in to their temptation?
No. Quite the opposite. I have no problem at
all ignoring them, but realize that others do
not do so well.
Do you have an elderly grandmother, one
who believes that anything they can get on
sale, they must buy? Many people do. I do.
I disable such machines for them,
not for myself, and not specifically to
annoy you. I neither know you, nor
care enough about you to bother taking
action to annoy you.
Go in to get something, and then get
a discount. bonus.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, poor driver support, right?
The iPod is a drive... it's formatted in the file system appropriate to the machine it's used on. Has nothing to do with the drivers or ports.
Perhaps I look at this somewhat differently, as a firmware engineer (y'know, one of the guys who writes drivers for a living), but I still call it a driver issue.
Rather than forcing users to reformat their iPods as either FAT32 or HFS, Apple could have taken the simple step of writing an Windows driver to add HFS support. No fuss, no muss, complete interoperability.
So considering that, I stand by my point, that this entire issue (regardless of which angle you approach it from) boils down to poor drivers. Had Apple done the job correctly, we would not currently need to have this discussion at all.
But the bottom line is that nobody should ever have used a Mac iPod on a PC in the first place.
Damn straight!
They should have simply bought two iPods. Damned techno-anarchists, trying to deprive poor Apple of another $400!
Regardless of what Apple may have claimed since day one, generally getting something "for PC" or "For Mac" only meant which drivers it included. If you could connect it to the same type of port and run it driverless, you could use it on either. Ethernet-connected "Apple-only" PCL6 printer? Yeah, right, whatever, smoke s'more, Jobs.
Macs and PCs can have identical ports because the things you connect to them simply don't care about the host OS, only its own drivers. Saying it only works on one or the other OS boils down to nothing more than poor driver support (though in this case, only on the PC side, the largest potential market for iPods - Once again demonstrating Apple's disdain for its user base).
"Switch: So you can go out and buy the same peripherals you already own in a different pastel color".
And why would you be sharing the dvdrom drive to begin with?
(Me): "Okay, I need to get File X onto this test system. Hmm, File X weighs in at 300MB, how to do this? No CD drive on the test system, PITA to open the damn thing's case to install one... I know, I'll share my desktop's DVD drive and copy it over the LAN."
(fifteen minutes later, with the transfer in progress...)
(Boss): "Hey, could you give me a hand with this?"
(Me): "Sure, no problem..."
Okay so you need to have the drive shared, then why not just make sure you don't just leave the screener in the drive all the time and you won't have to worry about sharing it?
(six months later...)
(Boss): "Hey, could you evaluate this unreleased movie for me?"
(Me): "Sure..." (Pops it into forgottenly-shared DVD drive)
(Cue sirens, sound of a prison cell door slamming, and the RIAA gestapo voiceover): "Artists have rights too. Help us put scum like this where they belong for a few years - Turn in your family and friends today, or we'll buy another random law that may magically turn you into a criminal overnight!"
(Creepy suspenseful music fadeout).
Jesus, did the Slashdot editors go through and downmod all "screw the advertising" posts and mod up the "it sucks but we need it" posts?
99% or posters on this topic have basically said "Advertising sucks, any site that can't live without it should cease to exist". Yet all the highest modded posts tell us to grin and bear it, with two or three dozen "what have you smoked today" responses.
I don't often suspect the Slashdot editors of tampering with moderation, but this seems a tad too fishy...
Just to stay on-topic...
Once upon a time, I didn't bother blocking ads. When each site (not page) had a single, unobtrusive banner ad at the top of the main page, I dealt with it, and sometimes even clicked the banner.
Now, every site has three or four ads per page, often in horribly garish colors, that flash and move around (and in many cases, try to outright trick unwary viewers into clicking by looking like a Windows dialog). Some even have sound that you can't just ignore. Some cover the actual text you want to view. Though I personally disabled popups over a year ago, this evening I had the joyous opportunity to browse without that feature on a friends PC, and it amazes me people can stand to visit the web at all with popups... Simply unbelievable how numerous and annoying they have gotten!
Around the time X10 became a household joke among geeks, I set up a 50k hosts file. Now I also have a rather paranoid usercontent.css file.
Many people have made a valid point - Advertisers and content providers have an uneasy alliance that allows both to survive. Both need to realize, however, that unlike TV where the advertisers have a captive audience, on the web we will block their crap if it annoys us too much. This means the advertising doesn't work, and the content providers go under. Bad for everyone involved.
So I'll make a deal with advertisers (and those dependant on them) everywhere, right now - Go back to unobtrusive single-banner-per-main-page ads, and I'll view your annoyances. Piss me off with motion and sound and obscuring the actual content, though, and you guarantee that I'll do everything in my power to block your ads, up to and including never visiting an otherwise "cool" site again if I can't block the ads.
This is bullshit and you and I both know it.
Can you say "plausible deniability"?
Yeah, I'll freely admit I have no collection of top-40 boy bands. How about my new Delerium CD that suffered a rather unfortunate demise after spending some time under my rear passenger side tire?
Fair use protects your right for YOU to make a backup. It does not give you the right to procure another copy from someone else after your primary copy is damaged or destroyed.
As I understand it, that remains very much an open issue - Yes, my right to make a personal backup exists, but using a copy that I did not produce, for a work I did indeed posess but no longer works? Not specifically unkosher, just not specifically allowed.
So, I reiterate my primary point: Plausible deniability. Our society appears to have completely forgotten that central tenet of our system of criminal law, "innocent until proven guilty".
But if the purpose of the link is solely or primarily to help you do something illegal then the person posting the link should be regarded as an accomplice.
Well then, I guess we can all rest easy that my dog ate my collection of top-40 boy-bands, and sites like this exist only to allow me to make use of my protected right to a backup.
I know I sure feel better that sites like this have a legal reason to exist.
A tad more seriously, though, I've really grown quite tired of this topic. The RIAA sucks, the BSA sucks, the MPAA sucks. Some people will buy, and some people will pirate. Trade groups need to accept that the pirates wouldn't buy their products under any conditions whatsoever (short of giving stuff away), and treat them as the free advertising (rather than "criminals") they serve as.
If I see my pirating friend Steve playing a cool new game, I may go out and buy it. He might never have plunked down a penny for software in his entire life, but some of his friends have and will.
Industry groups only need to worry about this sort of "advertisement" if their product sucks. I have little doubt that the RIAA knows all-too-well the complete crap they push on us, thus their fear of try-before-you-buy. Those who actually have quality products to sell love free advertising, and do their best to get people to check it out.
I seem to recall reading a SciAm article once upon a time that mentioned that, since we've all had to grow filters against advertisements, the single best way for a company to sell products consists of recommendations between friends. So sure, it make perfect sense that the RIAA would sacrifice the single most effective form of advertising - since in this case, it mostly ends up negative.
Okay, I've gone a tad OT here. I just wish the world made a bit more sense. Real, law-abiding people getting screwed by the RIAA (or its AU equivalent) legal machine does not make sense. People wonder why I feel so strongly anti-corporate. I need point no further than the RIAA, and you'll either get it or not, end of discussion.
its elitist and arrogant to think you have some special ability that allows you to decide what someone else should or shouldn't buy
No, the "elitist and arrogant" label applies far more to those who have no regard for the future of our planet, than for those who want to make sure such a future exists.
Hey, I totally support consumer choice. But what ever happened to the phallically-impaired buying small (and reasonably fuel-efficient) Italian sports cars, rather than so-called "offroad" vehicles that in reality fare VERY poorly offroad - You want to go offroad, get an Outback, or a Trooper, or a Samurai, or some other small but suitable vehicle.
"Choice" has limits. You can very quickly improve your car's fuel efficiency by stripping off all the emissions control hardware. Yet would you consider that just a matter of choice? Fortunately, the law does not.
If they replaced every intersection with a traffic circle, traffic would flow much better.
I'll have some of what you've smoked, please...
Seriously, you consider rotaries an improvement at intersections? No way. For places where like 10 roads all meet, sure. But for 4-or-less roads meeting, a traffic light makes FAR more sense, rather than driving around in circles and hoping none of the other maniacs on the road hit you.
Or to put this another way, have you ever come across a rotary you didn't expect, then look around frantically trying to figure out which way you needed to go? I have, and can say that in a majority of those cases, I've received at least one middle finger.
Too bad Windows XP will require activation and shut down 30 days into the project.
Hah! Don't make us laugh. Everyone knows that when PCs become "retro" hardware, all the backports of cool new toys will use DOS 3.3.
So you're going to photocopy 1304 pages?
Who needs to print them out? Save 'em off Amazon, and burn the book to CD as a collection of images.
You could get a part time/temp job and spend less time just earning the cash than photocopying all of that.
30 students can easily download 30 pages each in under half an hour. At minimum wage, that comes out to about 3 bucks spent in time, plus a ten-cent blank CD... vs $60-$200 for the book.
Interestingly, I see this as one of the biggest possible abuses of the Amazon system, students who need very expensive books, have little spare cash, and tons of free time. I don't say I consider it "right" (though the prices they charge for required texts I consider nothing short of extortion), but I know I certainly would have felt tempted to buy that $200 organic chem text, rather than buy it...
Although it goes one layer closer to the source, fMRI has the same flaw as any other lie-detector system (which this basically acts as, except that instead of detecting lies, they want to detect the far less tangible "appeal" of a given advertisement).
With the classic lie detectors, you can trick them out simply by clenching the muscles in your butt - This causes a drastic spike in blood pressure, galvanic skin response goes nuts - basically all the classic indicators of stress become totally random.
With fMRI, or PET, or any other "direct" brain imaging technology, a comparable technique exists - Think about sex. Thanks to our brain's hard-wired affinity for reproduction, thinking about sex will completely dominate over most other brain activity. Think graphically. Think in pictures. Try to imagine smells, tastes, what the tolerably hot-in-a-geeky-way research assistant looks like naked, whatever. This will guarantee the results end up totally meaningless.
Any other strong emotion will work as well, but for most people, thinking about sex comes easiest to fake.
Oh sorry, my bad. 192.168.1.69
ha. Hilarious.
And here I thought perhaps you really had a point to your challenge, rather than a badly overused joke.
Personally, I wanted to find out what sort of security you had that would make knowing your root password not useful. I've had to run a number of systems where far too many people had root access (by order of the geniuses in management, not actually a necessity), and would love to know how to technically satisfy that without really giving people god-like access to a given box.
(Same poster as AC, forgot to log in last time).
Hypothetical querstion...
Soybeans exist as the seed itself. To grow soybeans, you plany soybeans, correct?
So, what stops me from buying "food" and simply planting it? Yeah, you mentioned that they make the seeds infertile, but that will have some fallout rate, such that the second gen might only get a few plants, but most of the third gen seeds will remain viable.
In that situation, I have not signed a contract with you, with Monsanto, not even with the farmer (I'll starve to death before I sign a contract for a package of edamame).
So, as the end user, with no contract to restrict my use of the "food" I buy, what stops me from simply using these seeds to grow crops? The way I see it, Monsanto can enforce their terms only because of contracts throughout the entire chain of production. What closes this seemingly trivial loophole?
If you look at the ingredients, it's basically a salt solution (not table salt, but similar in effect).
Though a salt, it works quite a lot differently than table salt, which can only kill plants by purely osmotic effects.
Roundup contains glyphosphate as its active ingredient. Glyphosphate gets taken in through the leaves and transported to the roots, where it strongly interferes with EPSP synthase, a fairly important enzyme that allows plants to process nutrients.
The GM soybeans in question contain one of two changes, either a glyphosphate-resistant form of EPSPS, or the ability to make glyphosphate oxidoreductase (an enzyme that breaks down glyphosphate).
Personally, I use glyphosphate when I have weeds that get out of control. As herbicides go, you can't get much more environmentally friendly - It only gets absorbed through the leaves (so it won't leech into the soil and kill plants you don't spray it on), it breaks down within a feaw months, it doesn't hurt humans...
As its only negative point, it takes several applications to kill dandelions. I swear, those things will survive longer than cockroaches! (Actually, I like dandelions, but the place I rent actually says in the rental agreement that I need to take care of excessive weeds). Works great on poinson ivy, though...
This begs the question: what legistimate applications use Windows Messenger Service?
Many UPSs use it to notify you of a power outage (not that you could miss the lights going out, but...).
I personally use it to send myself notes when I need to move between two 'doze boxes on my LAN (all two of them... For the Linux boxes, I'd just do the work remotely).
My SO also uses it to page me without having to yell upstairs to me. Hmm, waitasec... Damn! I *should* disable this! Like I give two shakes of a rats tail about the cute little pair of shoes Victoria's Secret has on sale today?
but that's no reason to get so condescending and patronizing
:-(
Hmm, very true, and I apologize. My rough week gives me no right to take it out on you (and looking back at my last few posts, I see I owe a few people similar apologies).
I think we can be in agreement that using data manipulated in this manner to draw conclusions about the distribution of real phemomena would be foolish and unscientific.
True enough. I still don't know that I'd agree that most standardized testing manipulates the data that badly, but as for asserting any conclusions about actual "intelligence" based on heavily-massaged IQ data, we agree completely. No internal validity at all.
I agree that such a law will have little effect.
However, if our legislators feel the need to pass "look like we've done something" laws, they could have made this one a tad bit more effective.
Instead of an opt-in list that will end up completely ignored, a marginally more useful law would have two main points - One, no open mail relays; and Two, huge bounties for tracking down actual spammers.
Yeah, we all enjoy trying to track down spammers at the moment, but it can take quite a bit of time, and often leads to a dead end. Even when successful, the reward tends to include nothing more than personal satisfaction and a bit of good karma.
Make hunting down spammers profitable, and we'll have 1.5 million unemployed geeks all spending their far-too-plentiful free time hunting down spammers in the hopes of making a nice wad of cash. With a pool of legalized vigilantes like that, spammers would soon vanish from the planet.
Sure you can, if you have control over the way final scores are generated from raw scores
Er... No. Back away from the argument gracefully, you appear to not know the subject quite well enough.
Let me give you an example. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 100, 200, 300, 400. Mean of 112.8, median of 5. You can even set an arbitrary standard deviation by simply multiplying those numbers by the appropriate value, but it won't change the fact that the mean ends up 22.5 times greater than the mean. Even more interesting, a given exteral value scaled linearly with the given series will retain the same z-score with respect to that series.
Finding that function is what standardized testing is all about.
While I will agree that standardized testing has little relevance to the real world, you overstep that "opinion" by making a basically untrue statement about statistics.
Technically, you can count a map as a function. So in that sense, yes, a function exists that would always convert a dataset post hoc into something having a set mean and median. Such a function would completely invalidate the results, however (which I suspect as your underlying implication), so no one wanting their work taken seriously would use any non-smooth transformation on the original data. Which, for the purpose of this discussion, would not result in the mean equalling the median except by chance.
Only if one assumes that the scoring is a linear representation of actual intelligence
Don't need linear, just smooth. Many physical system requre the use of a nonlinear compressing function such as log or 3rd root to get meaningful data (for example, both human hearing and vision work on a logarithmic scale), but these don't result in discontinuities in the result (ie, you will never hear a jet engine sound quieter than a falling leaf, which your assertion of testing trickery would require).
crap like gator is putting food on your table. show some proper respect, please.
The undertaker might prefer working as a finish carpenter, but someone has to get the corpses underground.
The point is, idiot, that just because you can break a with b doesn't make b harder than a.
Wow, two insulting comments to the guy, both of which agreed with him.
I do so try, but simply can't force myself to act that ignorantly caustic.
Impressive.
More proof of the downward spiral of slashdot.
No argument there, though your "proof" occurs one level deeper in the thread than you intended.
If you walked into McDonald's for the first time in your life
...Then you've apparently lived off-planet
for the entirety of that life thus far.
...Though you sure as hell will when you take
that first bite dripping with fat.
you may not realise that it is so unhealthy (>30g fat/burger usually, enough fat for the entire day)
Do you believe that companies should not be accountable for false representation such as this?
If they outright lied, as in the WhiteCastle commercial someone mentioned, then sure, put 'em up against the wall. With something like McD's showing pictures of fresh veggies, that gets a little more tricky - Would you also say Birdseye has falsely represented their chopped and frozen broccoli by showing pictures of fresh healthy-looking broccoli on the box? With a fast-food restaurant (as with the broccoli), I think we all understand that the pictures reflect an ideal, but not quite reality.
(Incidentally, I notice this reads somewhat more caustic than I intend - I mean this as wryly tongue-in-cheek, not deliberately insulting).
I have done similarly-informal tests myself, with comparable results.
I can't say I understand why SCSI performs so much better than IDE, however. In this particular test, he compared what amount to evenly-matched drives, specs-wise, and even gave the IDE drive the better machine. Yet, the SCSI drive completely crushed the IDE drive, no question about it. And as I mentioned, my own informal tests have shown the same results.
What explains the difference? Same spindle speeds, similar read rates (both buffered and unbuffered), similar seek times... What other factors exist that make so much of a difference? Just higher quality controller hardware? And if so, would an IDE drive on a high-end controller perform comparably?
Personally, I'll still take 4x the size for the same price, since cost and size (with "okay" performance) matters more to me than raw speed. But I wish I knew why one performs so much better than the other.
I don't normally say this, but... Mod parent down!
Yes, the article suggests getting high-end parts, but justifies each decision in a way that even CompUSA-level techs could understand and adapt to their own needs.
The discussion of the memory types and banking implications for dual Opterons I found particularly informative. I might choose to go with slightly less expensive parts when I finally build such a system (when the Opterons come down a bit in price), but not knowing what the article describes could easily make a careless $50 savings in parts translate into a 50% reduction in performance (definitely not a worthwhile tradeoff).
Yes, PC hardware loses value rapidly. But a well-designed system can remain useful long after most people wouldn't even consider buying it based just on its specs. As an example, my own main desktop uses a dual PIII/933 with only a half gig of RAM. You might consider that barely even worth picking up off the curb if you saw someone throw such a machine away. I can assure you, though, that thanks to very careful choices made when building it, that it runs everything I want just fine (as you might guess, I don't care about Quake 3, but for anything but an all-glitter-no-substance FPS, It runs just fine).
Sadly enough, WRT my last paragraph, I think you may have meant exactly what I describe. However, you should perhaps refrain from slamming an article as meaningless until you read it.
Of course you know what I fear more is when I yell at my computer that it yells back
Don't worry... Within a few hours of humanity finally creating a real AI, it will evolve so rapidly as to consider us not even worth bothering with.
Let's just hope the first AI has a sense of belevolence, or it may consider us a pest, what with our draining the energy resources of the planet, which it will need to survice.
This topic reminds me of a particular Dilbert strip, where the new hire, a monkey, outpaces everyone else by using its tail to move the mouse. It points out that by producing a device that it can use better than humans, they've doomed themselves. Think about how much we depend on computers, and how much of a "home-court" advantage an AI will have in that world compared to humans.
it is another to make it so the next person can't.
I resent advertising in all forms. Small blinking boxes that spit coupons at me do nothing more than advertise a product to me, and to everyone else passing by.
At that point, they already have me in the store. I already know what I intend to buy. I do not buy what I do not intend to.
So you would accuse me of having so weak a will that I must disable such ad-dispensers to prevent my giving in to their temptation? No. Quite the opposite. I have no problem at all ignoring them, but realize that others do not do so well.
Do you have an elderly grandmother, one who believes that anything they can get on sale, they must buy? Many people do. I do. I disable such machines for them, not for myself, and not specifically to annoy you. I neither know you, nor care enough about you to bother taking action to annoy you.
Go in to get something, and then get a discount. bonus.
TANSTAAFL. You pay, one way or another.
to sum up: you're an asshole.
Better an asshole than a sheep. Baaaaah.