Thats right, the.biz domains are 99% spam sites, so that does help things..edu is pretty pure,.gov is pretty pure, but they like.com like everybody else does..org is fairly worthless, and if it were an important identifier people would use it more, but.com is what everybody except a slashdotter things is a web address. What about.info or.name? Or.museum?
TLDs _may_ be a useful identifier, but pretty much everybody has to buy most all of the others or sue people to protect their internet name.
As I have said for a very long time, lets do away with TLDs. The only exception might be to make all internet sites, including those in the US (gasp), to use the two letter country identifier to assist in commerce and whatnot. I find it very annoying to look to buy something online and go to a.com address and then find out that it is not in the US (my country).
The guy is in the business of developing the biggest/fastest/floppiest computers he can.
Yes, notice that you did not mention software in that sentence.
The HPC market is tough if not next to impossible for software to make money in. Unless MS is going to pull an X-box like thing (and loose money), I don't see where any of the people in the HPC market want a Microsoft style system.
HPC people want source code. They do stuff like modify the TCP/IP stack, modify the scheduler, modify the kernel, and so on. That is why Linux is all over the place on the top500 list. Its the freedom in terms of cost and the ability to make it do what needs to be done. No two supercomputers are the same, and I don't see that changing in the near future. Scientists and engineers like the power of the commandline. They like being able to do secure remote computing, and I simply don't know what Microsoft has to offer these people. Oh, and Microsoft's products aren't that portable either across the CPUs that are used for HPC system. I assume that they know much more than I do about their ideas and plans, but unless they do something like a complete turn-key AND working system that is faster and cheaper than what is being done today, they are wasting their time.
Uh, don't think so. If gas is $6/gallon, people won't commute anymore. Neighborhoods will become more dense, community size will shrink. Freeways will open up, and neighborhood grocery will reappear.
Does anybody realize that there are other vehicles on the road besides people going to work and picking up their kids from school?
The last gas price hike experiment was a failure because it hurt businesses, especially small businesses that provide local goods and services.
So, with a $6/gallon gas price, not only would it cost an arm and a leg for you to go to work and do your normal things, it will make everything increase in price. Food, clothing, beer, just about everything that is not intrinsically tied to the commercial market. The only things that will not rise in price are staples like illegal or non-mainstream goods and services like prostitution, good drugs, tattoos, art, and some entertainment.
I'm in no way supporting the silly SUV mindset or the lack of public transportation in our country, but a 200-300% hike in fuel costs would hurt everybody. The ones that will be hurt the most are probably those that don't already have SUVs and those that already use public transportation.
This is what I use to put the keys in the proper place.
Works wonders.
BTW, what the hell is the CAPS LOCK KEY FOR? I CAN TYPE ALL OF THIS WHILE HOLDING THE SHIFT KEY AND TYPE, I HAVE NEVER NEEDED TO TYPE THIS MUCH CAPS EVER.
But I just can type more bullshit in order to escape the lameness filter because I was yelling for a reason, you silly rabbit.
Also, am I the only one who gets these 400 errors for "Bad Request"? Its very annoying.
FWIW, the//c was my first computer. I got it in 1984 and used it until 1994 when I got a 486dx266. I guess this may only be correlation, but my grades were much better when I had the//c vs the 486. Anyway, I would not call it a "laptop". It was a compact (hence the c) version of the Apple 2 series (mostly), and had portable capabilities as an option, but it was not really a laptop.
I remember it was cool when I saw 2010 with the//c on the beach with the batterypack and the LCD screen. It took me 10 years to come back to Apple, but I believe that those 10 years were a weird time for them, and they have the bomb laptops, desktops, displays, iPods (I don't like them, but a few others do), their Xserves are pretty cool, and so are their RAID arrays.
Yes, I'm typing this on my PowerBook. When I first got it, I said that it was the nicest personal computer that I have ever owned. I have an iMac G5 that is much faster, and pretty cool, but I still believe that my PowerBook is the nicest machine that I've ever owned. The number of expansion capabilities, the autoadjusting backlight in the LCD, the backlit keyboard, the feel of the keyboard, its size, its looks. It was a bit expensive, $2500, but I can't explain how much of a great machine it is.
I've seen a lot of people with touchpad only laptops always carry around real mice because the touchpad just isn't suitable for anything more than a few seconds of use, but that really hurts the portability of the laptop. Then you need to carry the mouse with you and hope that you have a flat surface to use it on.
Nipple, snipple. I guess your a little offtopic because PowerBooks don't and never had nipples, but rather touchpads.
I'm typing this on a PowerBook right now. I'm lying on my couch on my back with the PowerBook on my groin area insulated by a blanky (plus its a little cold in my house). I'm using the touchpad now and well over 99% of the time that I use my PowerBook at home. The reason, portability. At work, I take my power cord, my computer, and my 3 button schroolwheel mouse and plug them all in.
I thought I would never say this, but I have gotten used to the one button thing on Macs. Why? Because there are so many click modifiers (shift, control, Command/Apple/or Meta if you prefer), that a second button (usually control) is only one of those, and hitting the control button is no different than hitting a second mouse button. I was helping a friend with a "PC" laptop with two buttons the other day on his touchpad, and I found it difficult to use. I guess I have been successfully brainwashed, but maybe my brain needed washing.
My biggest beef with a touchpad, is not general mousing around, its doing things like DND or selecting text or anything that is working with graphics like painting or drawing.
However, for general use like surfing the web, and doing general point and click things, a touchpad is fine. If I need more control, or am going to be using the mouse extensively, its very worthwhile to grab the mouse out of my bag and use it. Like I said, I rarely use it at home. I have only used it when working with X, because the 3 buttons come in handy there and for playing some silly flash game that was controlled with the mouse.
it's a remarkably good compiler by itself, very fast, produces stable and well optimized code AND it is available for every platform you could dream of developing on.
Yes, gcc is a great compiler, but it is not as good as a commercial compiler like Intel's, or PathScale's, or the Portland groups' or another compiler that is designed for a specific platorm.
I use it by default on my Itanium, Alpha, x86, and SPARC systems, but when performance matters, I go for one that is better optimized.
The most grateful aspect of gcc to the world is that Linux would be impossible without it. And that in itself is enough. I learned C from using gcc, and like I said, I use it daily, but it is not the best performing compiler on the block. It is not uncommon to get up to 100% speedup using an optimized compiler for the platform over gcc, but for portability and familiarity of the compiler across platforms (which is its purpose), it is damn good. Especially when many vendors do not provide a C/C++ compiler for their OS without extra charge.
We're paying a low-to-mid-level salary, so I don't expect to hire a UNIX guru. But these people are failing even the most basic tests. One claimed "Senior UNIX systems administrator" on his resume, but when asked to SSH into a server from a Linux workstation, typed "telnet [server] 25".
Maybe he just wants to send a quick mail before using ssh?
Some of the questions we ask in an interview: "Why would you use SSH instead of telnet?" "What is port 25?" "How do you reset the root password on a server when you don't know the current root password?" These are really basic questions, and yet the majority of candidates have no clue how to answer them.
I can't believe that in Silicon Valley that this is all that you have to pick from. Is it worthwhile for me to move out there? I like the weather, but the insane rat race and cost of living makes it difficult to consider. Also, how did these people get that far in the interview process if they don't know these basic questions?
I'm kinda bored with my job, and thinking of moving and getting a new one in a year or so after I finish the two projects I'm working on. Are sysadmins in that high in demand?
Everyone knows you don't make money on the pipe...it's the stuff you put into it that provides the real cash. Cell phones and razors have been using this model for a while now.
Razors don't count. How much material and technology is there in a stick to hold a blade? How much marketing goes into the stick? I hear them talk about the number of blades, the goo strip on the blades, maybe the stick will allow the blade to pivot.
If you have ever tried like me to save money on razorblades and buy the generics, you know that there is a difference between the real thing and the generic. There is engineering and quality materials that go into the blades. Oh, and I've never noticed a generic handle to take name brand blades. Being that I have bought maybe 1/2 a dozen handles in my life, and I go through a blade about once a week, I would guess anyone could figure out where the money is in that.
Cell phones are marketed as though they are sold at a loss. It costs you some money up front and a 12 month or more contract AND a cancelation fee if you break the contract that is probably the real cost of the phone. I don't pay for my cell service, but I bought my phone. The phone was $140. Most people I know pay at least $50 a month for cell service. I've paid about $150 to break my cell contract before. I don't see these as they are really sold at a loss. People like paying for free things. Its a fact.
Crazy, all of my cell phones have been sold to me at a loss so that I would buy the service.
1st, how do you know? Also, you paid X for the phone, and agreed to pay Y for the next 12 to 24 months with the option to pay Z if you break the contract. I would guess that X + Z is >> the price of a phone.
Now with MS loosing $126 per box. If that is true, then it does not at all immediately seem to me that they intend to make a profit at all in the Xbox division for years to come.
An average game retails for $50, so the wholesale cost is about $25. Lets give them a benefit of a doubt and say that the wholesale cost is $40, and that 1/2 of that wholesale price is in licensing the game for the Xbox which would be $20.
It would take 6 games for MS to almost break even on the sale of one Xbox.
Either something does not add up, or this is some kind of long term monopolistic goal to beat out all other consoles in the years to come.
If my numbers are way wrong, or if I've missed something let me know, but to me none of this adds up for anything like a near term objective.
Why would it make any more sense to enforce gender average behavior then to enforce gender average clothing sizes? "You have a 30 inch inseam? That's unnatural! Eveyone knows that the average inseem for a man is 36 inches."
As you said, there are differences, and I believe that those differences are natural. I think it would be very unnatural for men and women to be exactly the same, but I guess I'm in the minority with that belief at this time.
I would believe it to be unnatural for a male lion to shave its mane and to give up its harem of female lions and then go out and be the main hunter for the pride. Well, lets just get rid of the pride as well while we are at it.
I also believe that it would be unnatural for a company to have 5,000 CEOs and 1 worker. I also believe that that company would not do to well because of it.
I also got the idea of their being natural differences between males and females from a feminist who was arguing against abortion because she believed that having an abortion was a masculine, "executive decision" kind of thing vs the nurturing and child rearing qualities of a female.
I'm not saying that any of this is good or bad, its just the way it is, and to go against what is simply there as a natural state and going against that is like trying to "be a man" and jump real high to escape gravity.
I believe that women's roles are becoming more like men's, and the consequences are things like marriages failing at a higher rate than when women were behaving more like traditional women. Women work now, which is relatively new. Women initiate more divorces now than men, even those with children, and then become more like men by being both the mother and the father by taking care of themselves and the child. However, I have _never_ heard a woman say something about work or providing for others in a phrase like "I have X number of children and a husband, and I have to do XXX". So the transformation is not complete yet. A friend of mine came and fixed my heater and I was talking about him working so late, it was like 7pm and he had one more stop to do before going home, and he said, "Well, I've got two kids and a wife". I probably should have put a stop payment on the check, and told his wife to get a job, but I respected what he said instead. And I have no problem with him or his wife.
Perhaps you could share with us your incredibly accurate estimation technique?
The best one I've heard was for the manager to take from the developers how much time it would take to complete the project, then double that, then take it to the next unit of measure.
Developer: 1 day Manager: OK, that means 2 weeks.
Developer: 1 month Manager: 2 years
Seems reasonable to me. At the least, its very conservative:)
Try jumping off a tall building and believing you can fly by flapping your arms if you doubt it.
Not being familiar with the knowledge of the past 100 years of flight, I would believe that I could fly by flapping my arms beyond a shadow of a doubt over using 10 tons of steel and some hot air.
The reason the term "serial killer" exists is because there are serial killers. There are serial killer detective specialists.
We imitate killing since we are kids. We gauge history by wars. We play video games with lots of killing. We watch movies, tv shows, and read books about it.
It seems like its something we like to do. Like my cats like to kill stuff.
Because man is also gender neutral. English lacks a separate gender neutral noun, and most christian priests are men. I dare you to call Kali Sir....
Yep. That's because male dominated society has become dominant through force of arms. What's your point?
That was/is my point.
What is yours?
Are women secretly plotting to take over the world with devious and harder to deal with _____?
I love these discussions.
Many men and women are more powerful than I am or will ever be.
But the minute you state facts like women are on average physically weaker and slower than men, women are less powerful than men (only because of the male dominated society, right?), or other commonly known facts, people revert back to the myth that everybody is created equal.
Show me one single piece of evidence for that myth.
All in all I have no problem with women or men. I don't like men that act like women any more than I like a woman that acts like a man. I have noticed in my behavior and that of many other males, that we are being less like men, and that is simply unnatural.
Females are prettier than males in humans. The opposite is true for birds. But I think it would be pretty fucked up for a female bird to brighten its colors to look like a male bird. Or are they both created equal?
I think it's fair to assume that you as a human have more intelligence / sentience / moral structure (delete appropriate) than your cat.
Its not an assumption. Its a fact.
My cat can only kill with its claws and teeth. I have an arsenal of weapons to kill morally or otherwise at my sentient discretion.
do you really want to be controlled by a bunch of impulses that arose out of necessity through our evolution and haven't yet died out despite the fact that they aren't nearly as important to our survival as they once were
Do I have a choice? I think sneezing is stupid. I sometimes think my life would be completely more simple if I no longer had a sex drive. I think violence and killing are basically the end all be all. Can you think of a more powerful agent than that?
saying that a lot of people like sports is a bit different to saying that we are violent animals
Yeah. What kind of verbs do we use in sports? Kill, demolished, wiped out, etc. If we want to get rid of the violence, then sports, video games, and all of that needs to go.
I surely don't see it happening in the next 1,000 years.
We have the choice to be violent, but I don't think that makes us a violent species.
Bullshit. We have no more choice than my cats. If being violent is a choice, and perceived as a bad one, why do people do it on a continual basis? Why do we find it interesting to watch murder mysteries instead of slug or cucumber mysteries? Why do we play with guns when we are kids? Why are violent video games more popular than tickle me elmo games? Violence is a fact. In many respects, its intermingled with sex. We use sex terms and violent terms interchangeably. "I'm going to fuck you", can mean two entirely different things.
Unfortunately you simply didn't understand the OP's point. Many DRMed CDs include the original audio tracks as standard redbook audio, AND highly-compressed audio files in a separate session visible only to CDROM drives (not CD audio drives) at the end (outside) of the disc.
It wasn't the point I didn't understand, it was the facts.
Wow. I didn't realize things have gotten that bad for listening to music.
You, my friend, have apparently never encountered more than one woman at a time.
In bed, no. Not yet at least.
Women are _way_ more competitive than men are in regards to their social pecking order.
I don't agree. Men and women are basically equally competitive within their sex, because they want the good mate.
I would say that historically, men are more competitive over both men and women when looking at the big picture.
For the most part:
We call humans "man". We call God "him". We default to the male gender when ambiguous. Its much more likely when we can't immediately tell the sex of an animal to ask what "his" name is, and that is so, because it is forgivable if the animal is a female, but embarrassing if the animal is a male. Men are in more power positions. The only exception is that men are basically passive about sex. To my knowledge, a man cannot do anything to a woman without her implicit or explicit permission. That may be different in other cultures.
Humans are no more violent than hawks, or bears, or rhinoceroses, or elephants, or even dolphins.
Hawks about equal I guess, maybe we have an edge.
Bears, I would give an edge.
Rhinoceroses, I would definitely give an edge.
Elephants, maybe equal, maybe a slight edge for people.
Dolphins, we will kick their ass and put them in a tunafish salad.
What is different about humans, apparently, is our sense of shame about our violence. Humans seem to be alone among all creatures in believing they are out of place in the evolved order. Humans alone seem to regret doing what all other animals do instinctively, without remorse.
To a degree. This is covered fairly well in Genesis when we ate from the tree of knowledge and our new knowledge gave us things like shame and self awareness.
Other animals have regret and remorse. My cats don't, but I've had dogs that did.
Humans are special in that they are so good at killing stuff, that measly animals are not that tough, so to be a real hu"man" we need to kill other humans. Plus we are over populated to some degree. And we have religions that tell us to be nice to one another, but if yours tells you to be nice for a different reason, then I'm just going to kill you for that.
Besides the cool structures and things that we build, humans are not that interesting of an animal. We are slow to develop, not that bright on average, we smell bad, we are physically weak and slow, etc. Without toys, we wouldn't be much.
Before I jump to conclusions, could you please further elaborate on your meaning with this statement?
Women and men are different. I know that is not a popular opinion, but the boobies and the having kids thing kinda comes to mind.
Maybe I'm just traditional or old fashioned, but I see women/females as being more nurturing, emotional, and less competitive and authoritarian than men.
Western society is getting more like the emotional and nurturing side. Like the "high self esteem" plan vs doing something to feel good about yourself. Look at divorce laws and statistics and tell me they are not female slanted (in the US at least).
I'm glad you didn't jump to conclusions. In fact, many of us "nerds" are more on the female side of things in that we want everybody to win, and root for the runt of the litter. In many ways I am that way too.
Sometimes I wish I were more "manly" and had more aggressive tendencies that I despise, but I don't.
Name any society that has survived more than 4000 years ever.
Name a modern society that has survived more than 4-500 years.
The ancient world was a little different. Things were a little more stable because people didn't move or communicate on a wide scale. It wasn't until the 1400's that we were traveling around the whole world. It wasn't until the very recently that we could communicate in close to real time with people across an ocean. Its a little harder to get pissed off at someone halfway across the world when you have conversations like "Oh yeah?" 2 months pas. "Yeah!" 2 months pass "What are you going to do about it?" 2 months pass "Why are we pissed now?" 2 months pass "Because it takes too long to have an argument over this distance!"
Even as recently as the 1860's here in the US, the Civil War went on for weeks or months after it was "over" because people didn't know it was over.
No politician has the balls to take any kind of stand, but I would like one to address where the US is going. I don't think we can economically keep depending on population growth, running up credit cards, and bombing people for an economic plan. It seems unlikely that we or anybody else in this world can be the world leader indefinitely. We are not very popular in other places in the world with the exception for those whose current economic interests are allied with us. I was shocked to see the poll at the beginning of the current chapter of the Iraq war where the majority of Europeans voted the US as the largest threat to world peace. Above Iraq and Korea.
In the end, I'd much rather that companies don't take a stand. Not about evolution, not about politics, not about anything else. The fewer companies that throw their weight around for whatever reason, good or bad, the more our country moves towards something representative of the desires of the human beings who live here.
I disagree using your own logic.
Human beings that have desires, have a stand or a position for what they desire. Companies are always made up of human beings. You get where I'm going here.
I believe that everybody including companies should make a stand. Western society is getting so feminized that its more acceptable to do things like not make a stand anymore, but I don't think that is a sign of progress.
he believes that violence in videogames is solely responsible for violence in America
This is a little offtopic, but not too far.
Humans are violent animals that are more often than not rewarded for being violent, even if it is against their own species. What evidence (if you believe in evolution to some extent) is there that we lost that hunter drive?
We get together in by the thousands to over a hundred thousand people to watch modern hunting games like soccer, football, basketball, etc.
We also get off on killing animals for "sport", even though we have other ways of obtaining food.
Its not that bad, my cats still have it too.
They have no need to hunt or kill. I give them a free flowing container of food, but they still kill rabbits, mice, and birds. And they bring them to me as a present too!
Is killing wrong? Not necessarily. But it does not come free of consequences either.
I love the religious saying, "Kill 'em all and let God sort them out". I can't put it any better than that.
Slashdot Mirror
The TLD is an important piece of the identifier, IMHO.
.biz domains are 99% spam sites, so that does help things. .edu is pretty pure, .gov is pretty pure, but they like .com like everybody else does. .org is fairly worthless, and if it were an important identifier people would use it more, but .com is what everybody except a slashdotter things is a web address. What about .info or .name? Or .museum?
.com address and then find out that it is not in the US (my country).
Identifier for what?
slashdot.com
microsoft.net
usps.gov
http://www.army.gov/
http://www.army.com/
Thats right, the
TLDs _may_ be a useful identifier, but pretty much everybody has to buy most all of the others or sue people to protect their internet name.
As I have said for a very long time, lets do away with TLDs. The only exception might be to make all internet sites, including those in the US (gasp), to use the two letter country identifier to assist in commerce and whatnot. I find it very annoying to look to buy something online and go to a
Good riddance to TLDs. The sooner the better.
The guy is in the business of developing the biggest/fastest/floppiest computers he can.
Yes, notice that you did not mention software in that sentence.
The HPC market is tough if not next to impossible for software to make money in. Unless MS is going to pull an X-box like thing (and loose money), I don't see where any of the people in the HPC market want a Microsoft style system.
HPC people want source code. They do stuff like modify the TCP/IP stack, modify the scheduler, modify the kernel, and so on. That is why Linux is all over the place on the top500 list. Its the freedom in terms of cost and the ability to make it do what needs to be done. No two supercomputers are the same, and I don't see that changing in the near future. Scientists and engineers like the power of the commandline. They like being able to do secure remote computing, and I simply don't know what Microsoft has to offer these people. Oh, and Microsoft's products aren't that portable either across the CPUs that are used for HPC system. I assume that they know much more than I do about their ideas and plans, but unless they do something like a complete turn-key AND working system that is faster and cheaper than what is being done today, they are wasting their time.
Uh, don't think so. If gas is $6/gallon, people won't commute anymore. Neighborhoods will become more dense, community size will shrink. Freeways will open up, and neighborhood grocery will reappear.
Does anybody realize that there are other vehicles on the road besides people going to work and picking up their kids from school?
The last gas price hike experiment was a failure because it hurt businesses, especially small businesses that provide local goods and services.
So, with a $6/gallon gas price, not only would it cost an arm and a leg for you to go to work and do your normal things, it will make everything increase in price. Food, clothing, beer, just about everything that is not intrinsically tied to the commercial market. The only things that will not rise in price are staples like illegal or non-mainstream goods and services like prostitution, good drugs, tattoos, art, and some entertainment.
I'm in no way supporting the silly SUV mindset or the lack of public transportation in our country, but a 200-300% hike in fuel costs would hurt everybody. The ones that will be hurt the most are probably those that don't already have SUVs and those that already use public transportation.
This is what I use to put the keys in the proper place.
Works wonders.
BTW, what the hell is the CAPS LOCK KEY FOR? I CAN TYPE ALL OF THIS WHILE HOLDING THE SHIFT KEY AND TYPE, I HAVE NEVER NEEDED TO TYPE THIS MUCH CAPS EVER.
But I just can type more bullshit in order to escape the lameness filter because I was yelling for a reason, you silly rabbit.
Also, am I the only one who gets these 400 errors for "Bad Request"? Its very annoying.
But it was the first Apple "laptop."
//c was my first computer. I got it in 1984 and used it until 1994 when I got a 486dx266. I guess this may only be correlation, but my grades were much better when I had the //c vs the 486. Anyway, I would not call it a "laptop". It was a compact (hence the c) version of the Apple 2 series (mostly), and had portable capabilities as an option, but it was not really a laptop.
//c on the beach with the batterypack and the LCD screen. It took me 10 years to come back to Apple, but I believe that those 10 years were a weird time for them, and they have the bomb laptops, desktops, displays, iPods (I don't like them, but a few others do), their Xserves are pretty cool, and so are their RAID arrays.
FWIW, the
I remember it was cool when I saw 2010 with the
Yes, I'm typing this on my PowerBook. When I first got it, I said that it was the nicest personal computer that I have ever owned. I have an iMac G5 that is much faster, and pretty cool, but I still believe that my PowerBook is the nicest machine that I've ever owned. The number of expansion capabilities, the autoadjusting backlight in the LCD, the backlit keyboard, the feel of the keyboard, its size, its looks. It was a bit expensive, $2500, but I can't explain how much of a great machine it is.
I've seen a lot of people with touchpad only laptops always carry around real mice because the touchpad just isn't suitable for anything more than a few seconds of use, but that really hurts the portability of the laptop. Then you need to carry the mouse with you and hope that you have a flat surface to use it on.
Nipple, snipple. I guess your a little offtopic because PowerBooks don't and never had nipples, but rather touchpads.
I'm typing this on a PowerBook right now. I'm lying on my couch on my back with the PowerBook on my groin area insulated by a blanky (plus its a little cold in my house). I'm using the touchpad now and well over 99% of the time that I use my PowerBook at home. The reason, portability. At work, I take my power cord, my computer, and my 3 button schroolwheel mouse and plug them all in.
I thought I would never say this, but I have gotten used to the one button thing on Macs. Why? Because there are so many click modifiers (shift, control, Command/Apple/or Meta if you prefer), that a second button (usually control) is only one of those, and hitting the control button is no different than hitting a second mouse button. I was helping a friend with a "PC" laptop with two buttons the other day on his touchpad, and I found it difficult to use. I guess I have been successfully brainwashed, but maybe my brain needed washing.
My biggest beef with a touchpad, is not general mousing around, its doing things like DND or selecting text or anything that is working with graphics like painting or drawing.
However, for general use like surfing the web, and doing general point and click things, a touchpad is fine. If I need more control, or am going to be using the mouse extensively, its very worthwhile to grab the mouse out of my bag and use it. Like I said, I rarely use it at home. I have only used it when working with X, because the 3 buttons come in handy there and for playing some silly flash game that was controlled with the mouse.
it's a remarkably good compiler by itself, very fast, produces stable and well optimized code AND it is available for every platform you could dream of developing on.
Yes, gcc is a great compiler, but it is not as good as a commercial compiler like Intel's, or PathScale's, or the Portland groups' or another compiler that is designed for a specific platorm.
I use it by default on my Itanium, Alpha, x86, and SPARC systems, but when performance matters, I go for one that is better optimized.
The most grateful aspect of gcc to the world is that Linux would be impossible without it. And that in itself is enough. I learned C from using gcc, and like I said, I use it daily, but it is not the best performing compiler on the block. It is not uncommon to get up to 100% speedup using an optimized compiler for the platform over gcc, but for portability and familiarity of the compiler across platforms (which is its purpose), it is damn good. Especially when many vendors do not provide a C/C++ compiler for their OS without extra charge.
Thank you GNU and the gcc people.
We're paying a low-to-mid-level salary, so I don't expect to hire a UNIX guru. But these people are failing even the most basic tests. One claimed "Senior UNIX systems administrator" on his resume, but when asked to SSH into a server from a Linux workstation, typed "telnet [server] 25".
Maybe he just wants to send a quick mail before using ssh?
Some of the questions we ask in an interview: "Why would you use SSH instead of telnet?" "What is port 25?" "How do you reset the root password on a server when you don't know the current root password?" These are really basic questions, and yet the majority of candidates have no clue how to answer them.
I can't believe that in Silicon Valley that this is all that you have to pick from. Is it worthwhile for me to move out there? I like the weather, but the insane rat race and cost of living makes it difficult to consider. Also, how did these people get that far in the interview process if they don't know these basic questions?
I'm kinda bored with my job, and thinking of moving and getting a new one in a year or so after I finish the two projects I'm working on. Are sysadmins in that high in demand?
Everyone knows you don't make money on the pipe...it's the stuff you put into it that provides the real cash. Cell phones and razors have been using this model for a while now.
Razors don't count. How much material and technology is there in a stick to hold a blade? How much marketing goes into the stick? I hear them talk about the number of blades, the goo strip on the blades, maybe the stick will allow the blade to pivot.
If you have ever tried like me to save money on razorblades and buy the generics, you know that there is a difference between the real thing and the generic. There is engineering and quality materials that go into the blades. Oh, and I've never noticed a generic handle to take name brand blades. Being that I have bought maybe 1/2 a dozen handles in my life, and I go through a blade about once a week, I would guess anyone could figure out where the money is in that.
Cell phones are marketed as though they are sold at a loss. It costs you some money up front and a 12 month or more contract AND a cancelation fee if you break the contract that is probably the real cost of the phone. I don't pay for my cell service, but I bought my phone. The phone was $140. Most people I know pay at least $50 a month for cell service. I've paid about $150 to break my cell contract before. I don't see these as they are really sold at a loss. People like paying for free things. Its a fact.
Crazy, all of my cell phones have been sold to me at a loss so that I would buy the service.
1st, how do you know? Also, you paid X for the phone, and agreed to pay Y for the next 12 to 24 months with the option to pay Z if you break the contract. I would guess that X + Z is >> the price of a phone.
Now with MS loosing $126 per box. If that is true, then it does not at all immediately seem to me that they intend to make a profit at all in the Xbox division for years to come.
An average game retails for $50, so the wholesale cost is about $25. Lets give them a benefit of a doubt and say that the wholesale cost is $40, and that 1/2 of that wholesale price is in licensing the game for the Xbox which would be $20.
It would take 6 games for MS to almost break even on the sale of one Xbox.
Either something does not add up, or this is some kind of long term monopolistic goal to beat out all other consoles in the years to come.
If my numbers are way wrong, or if I've missed something let me know, but to me none of this adds up for anything like a near term objective.
Why would it make any more sense to enforce gender average behavior then to enforce gender average clothing sizes? "You have a 30 inch inseam? That's unnatural! Eveyone knows that the average inseem for a man is 36 inches."
As you said, there are differences, and I believe that those differences are natural. I think it would be very unnatural for men and women to be exactly the same, but I guess I'm in the minority with that belief at this time.
I would believe it to be unnatural for a male lion to shave its mane and to give up its harem of female lions and then go out and be the main hunter for the pride. Well, lets just get rid of the pride as well while we are at it.
I also believe that it would be unnatural for a company to have 5,000 CEOs and 1 worker. I also believe that that company would not do to well because of it.
I also got the idea of their being natural differences between males and females from a feminist who was arguing against abortion because she believed that having an abortion was a masculine, "executive decision" kind of thing vs the nurturing and child rearing qualities of a female.
I'm not saying that any of this is good or bad, its just the way it is, and to go against what is simply there as a natural state and going against that is like trying to "be a man" and jump real high to escape gravity.
I believe that women's roles are becoming more like men's, and the consequences are things like marriages failing at a higher rate than when women were behaving more like traditional women. Women work now, which is relatively new. Women initiate more divorces now than men, even those with children, and then become more like men by being both the mother and the father by taking care of themselves and the child. However, I have _never_ heard a woman say something about work or providing for others in a phrase like "I have X number of children and a husband, and I have to do XXX". So the transformation is not complete yet. A friend of mine came and fixed my heater and I was talking about him working so late, it was like 7pm and he had one more stop to do before going home, and he said, "Well, I've got two kids and a wife". I probably should have put a stop payment on the check, and told his wife to get a job, but I respected what he said instead. And I have no problem with him or his wife.
Perhaps you could share with us your incredibly accurate estimation technique?
:)
The best one I've heard was for the manager to take from the developers how much time it would take to complete the project, then double that, then take it to the next unit of measure.
Developer: 1 day
Manager: OK, that means 2 weeks.
Developer: 1 month
Manager: 2 years
Seems reasonable to me. At the least, its very conservative
Try jumping off a tall building and believing you can fly by flapping your arms if you doubt it.
Not being familiar with the knowledge of the past 100 years of flight, I would believe that I could fly by flapping my arms beyond a shadow of a doubt over using 10 tons of steel and some hot air.
Reality by definition is objective, not subjective.
Problem is that there is no objective, only group consciousness, which is based on individual consciousness which is based on perception.
It used to be a fact that nothing but birds and other flying animals could fly in a heavier than air body.
Our perception has changed, and so have the facts.
Are you now a serial killer?
At this time I'm not going to answer.
The reason the term "serial killer" exists is because there are serial killers. There are serial killer detective specialists.
We imitate killing since we are kids. We gauge history by wars. We play video games with lots of killing. We watch movies, tv shows, and read books about it.
It seems like its something we like to do. Like my cats like to kill stuff.
Or they don't have a choice.
Because man is also gender neutral. English lacks a separate gender neutral noun, and most christian priests are men. I dare you to call Kali Sir. ...
Yep. That's because male dominated society has become dominant through force of arms. What's your point?
That was/is my point.
What is yours?
Are women secretly plotting to take over the world with devious and harder to deal with _____?
I love these discussions.
Many men and women are more powerful than I am or will ever be.
But the minute you state facts like women are on average physically weaker and slower than men, women are less powerful than men (only because of the male dominated society, right?), or other commonly known facts, people revert back to the myth that everybody is created equal.
Show me one single piece of evidence for that myth.
All in all I have no problem with women or men. I don't like men that act like women any more than I like a woman that acts like a man. I have noticed in my behavior and that of many other males, that we are being less like men, and that is simply unnatural.
Females are prettier than males in humans. The opposite is true for birds. But I think it would be pretty fucked up for a female bird to brighten its colors to look like a male bird. Or are they both created equal?
I think it's fair to assume that you as a human have more intelligence / sentience / moral structure (delete appropriate) than your cat.
Its not an assumption. Its a fact.
My cat can only kill with its claws and teeth. I have an arsenal of weapons to kill morally or otherwise at my sentient discretion.
do you really want to be controlled by a bunch of impulses that arose out of necessity through our evolution and haven't yet died out despite the fact that they aren't nearly as important to our survival as they once were
Do I have a choice? I think sneezing is stupid. I sometimes think my life would be completely more simple if I no longer had a sex drive. I think violence and killing are basically the end all be all. Can you think of a more powerful agent than that?
saying that a lot of people like sports is a bit different to saying that we are violent animals
Yeah. What kind of verbs do we use in sports? Kill, demolished, wiped out, etc. If we want to get rid of the violence, then sports, video games, and all of that needs to go.
I surely don't see it happening in the next 1,000 years.
We have the choice to be violent, but I don't think that makes us a violent species.
Bullshit. We have no more choice than my cats. If being violent is a choice, and perceived as a bad one, why do people do it on a continual basis? Why do we find it interesting to watch murder mysteries instead of slug or cucumber mysteries? Why do we play with guns when we are kids? Why are violent video games more popular than tickle me elmo games? Violence is a fact. In many respects, its intermingled with sex. We use sex terms and violent terms interchangeably. "I'm going to fuck you", can mean two entirely different things.
Unfortunately you simply didn't understand the OP's point. Many DRMed CDs include the original audio tracks as standard redbook audio, AND highly-compressed audio files in a separate session visible only to CDROM drives (not CD audio drives) at the end (outside) of the disc.
It wasn't the point I didn't understand, it was the facts.
Wow. I didn't realize things have gotten that bad for listening to music.
You, my friend, have apparently never encountered more than one woman at a time.
In bed, no. Not yet at least.
Women are _way_ more competitive than men are in regards to their social pecking order.
I don't agree. Men and women are basically equally competitive within their sex, because they want the good mate.
I would say that historically, men are more competitive over both men and women when looking at the big picture.
For the most part:
We call humans "man". We call God "him". We default to the male gender when ambiguous. Its much more likely when we can't immediately tell the sex of an animal to ask what "his" name is, and that is so, because it is forgivable if the animal is a female, but embarrassing if the animal is a male. Men are in more power positions. The only exception is that men are basically passive about sex. To my knowledge, a man cannot do anything to a woman without her implicit or explicit permission. That may be different in other cultures.
I'm still tired.
Which brings me back to the CxO's paying out-of-pocket. If I'm a widget-twirler at Cogs, Inc. why should my company be voicing my concerns?
You have not learned the golden rule yet.
Those that have the gold, make the rules.
Now shut up and twirl your widgets quietly or you will be replaced by a more compliant widget-twirler.
Humans are no more violent than hawks, or bears, or rhinoceroses, or elephants, or even dolphins.
Hawks about equal I guess, maybe we have an edge.
Bears, I would give an edge.
Rhinoceroses, I would definitely give an edge.
Elephants, maybe equal, maybe a slight edge for people.
Dolphins, we will kick their ass and put them in a tunafish salad.
What is different about humans, apparently, is our sense of shame about our violence. Humans seem to be alone among all creatures in believing they are out of place in the evolved order. Humans alone seem to regret doing what all other animals do instinctively, without remorse.
To a degree. This is covered fairly well in Genesis when we ate from the tree of knowledge and our new knowledge gave us things like shame and self awareness.
Other animals have regret and remorse. My cats don't, but I've had dogs that did.
Humans are special in that they are so good at killing stuff, that measly animals are not that tough, so to be a real hu"man" we need to kill other humans. Plus we are over populated to some degree. And we have religions that tell us to be nice to one another, but if yours tells you to be nice for a different reason, then I'm just going to kill you for that.
Besides the cool structures and things that we build, humans are not that interesting of an animal. We are slow to develop, not that bright on average, we smell bad, we are physically weak and slow, etc. Without toys, we wouldn't be much.
"Western society is getting so feminized"
Before I jump to conclusions, could you please further
elaborate on your meaning with this statement?
Women and men are different. I know that is not a popular opinion, but the boobies and the having kids thing kinda comes to mind.
Maybe I'm just traditional or old fashioned, but I see women/females as being more nurturing, emotional, and less competitive and authoritarian than men.
Western society is getting more like the emotional and nurturing side. Like the "high self esteem" plan vs doing something to feel good about yourself. Look at divorce laws and statistics and tell me they are not female slanted (in the US at least).
I'm glad you didn't jump to conclusions. In fact, many of us "nerds" are more on the female side of things in that we want everybody to win, and root for the runt of the litter. In many ways I am that way too.
Sometimes I wish I were more "manly" and had more aggressive tendencies that I despise, but I don't.
Name any society that has survived more than 4000 years ever.
Name a modern society that has survived more than 4-500 years.
The ancient world was a little different. Things were a little more stable because people didn't move or communicate on a wide scale. It wasn't until the 1400's that we were traveling around the whole world. It wasn't until the very recently that we could communicate in close to real time with people across an ocean. Its a little harder to get pissed off at someone halfway across the world when you have conversations like "Oh yeah?" 2 months pas. "Yeah!" 2 months pass "What are you going to do about it?" 2 months pass "Why are we pissed now?" 2 months pass "Because it takes too long to have an argument over this distance!"
Even as recently as the 1860's here in the US, the Civil War went on for weeks or months after it was "over" because people didn't know it was over.
No politician has the balls to take any kind of stand, but I would like one to address where the US is going. I don't think we can economically keep depending on population growth, running up credit cards, and bombing people for an economic plan. It seems unlikely that we or anybody else in this world can be the world leader indefinitely. We are not very popular in other places in the world with the exception for those whose current economic interests are allied with us. I was shocked to see the poll at the beginning of the current chapter of the Iraq war where the majority of Europeans voted the US as the largest threat to world peace. Above Iraq and Korea.
All I wanted was to sleep last night.
In the end, I'd much rather that companies don't take a stand. Not about evolution, not about politics, not about anything else. The fewer companies that throw their weight around for whatever reason, good or bad, the more our country moves towards something representative of the desires of the human beings who live here.
I disagree using your own logic.
Human beings that have desires, have a stand or a position for what they desire. Companies are always made up of human beings. You get where I'm going here.
I believe that everybody including companies should make a stand. Western society is getting so feminized that its more acceptable to do things like not make a stand anymore, but I don't think that is a sign of progress.
he believes that violence in videogames is solely responsible for violence in America
This is a little offtopic, but not too far.
Humans are violent animals that are more often than not rewarded for being violent, even if it is against their own species. What evidence (if you believe in evolution to some extent) is there that we lost that hunter drive?
We get together in by the thousands to over a hundred thousand people to watch modern hunting games like soccer, football, basketball, etc.
We also get off on killing animals for "sport", even though we have other ways of obtaining food.
Its not that bad, my cats still have it too.
They have no need to hunt or kill. I give them a free flowing container of food, but they still kill rabbits, mice, and birds. And they bring them to me as a present too!
Is killing wrong? Not necessarily. But it does not come free of consequences either.
I love the religious saying, "Kill 'em all and let God sort them out". I can't put it any better than that.