Exactly. This is how it should work...ISP takes down material NO MATTER WHAT (thus immediately preventing possible further infringements). It's then up to the site owner to prove they own the right to post the material.
This removes the ISP from the role of judge or jury. They are merely the executioner, doing what the law says in either direction. And in turn, they're playing fair with both the content owner and the so-called infringer. What's not to like?
But you do understand that this problem isn't going away just because we know it exists. If your company needs drivers for some obscure device -- say, a jet boat engine -- and the hardware company will only provide Windows drivers, you don't have much choice. You use Windows.
Windows update is automatic and has been for years. Training everybody in the company how to do it, from the secretary up to the owner, took about 45 seconds.
Again, the only people who spend a lot of time managing Windows are control freaks.
I'm fucking married, AC. And I wouldn't have GOT married to anybody who was so insecure with her own body that I couldn't look at a picture of another girl without upsetting her sense of self.
Fidelity is one thing...but any girl who expects you to close your eyes to beauty is a succubus to be abandoned as soon as possible.
Exactly. It's my opinion that CG will never look perfect until artists and designers stop trying to make it look perfect.
Huh? Here's what I mean. Institute an algorithm that will take all of your bones and randomly lengthen or shorten them, logarithmically, by up a centimeter. Set up your color generator to offset skin colour a few degrees in random blob shaped areas. Oh, and lips should never be uniformly shiny, but have the occasional area where the index of refraction is higher or lower.
A few strands of hair should always be in the wrong place. Hands should always be a little bit in front or behind where they should be (reflecting the character's self assurance). And for god's sake, put some body fat on them! The characters in FF looked TERRIBLE because only mannequins are that svelte. Put a little love handle above the hiphugger jeans with a white bit of tan line and your character is instantly mor realistic...and thus, sexier.
Eh, I don't feel so bad. Apparently the girl is so mentally imbalanced that she gets upset over a fake picture of a non-existant girl in a bikini. You're probably better off without a girl like that.
OK. So your claim is that he's not a real mathematician because, though he proves things, he does so in an unusual manner? And that he will be forgotten because of his eccentricity?
I'm sorry, but if you had to make a brief list of mathematicians...just off the top of your head...I'm willing to bet real cash that most of them have "eccentricities" of their own. Are you claiming Newton wasn't a moody asshole? Or that Fermat wasn't a bit nutty? That Rene Descartes was some kind of boring pencil pusher with no ponderance on philosophy and life?
What about DaVinci? What about Nash? And I hear that Galileo and Kepler were rogues as well.
I mean, come on! Insanity and flair make a mathematician's career more than any actual acheivment. I mean, look at your post. As much as you claim to hate de Branges, you know everything about him. And you don't even know the NAMES of the Russian students who rewrote his hypothesis.
Well, the security of poorly administrated Windows systems is dubious. But none of the 25 Windows 2000 machines in this office has ever gotten a virus in the past three years...basically, since I took over as administrator.
Why? First thing I did was install a firewall. Second thing I did was disable unneccessary services. Third thing I did was patch them regularly.
And that's it. I am the only admin for the company and I spend maybe two hours a month working on Windows (most of which is spent convincing the Exchange server to run a little bit longer). Why is Windows security so bad? Because most Windows administrators are lazy and would prefer to let things go for a few weeks than test the effects of the patch themselves.
And as for Windows systems NOT being state-of-the-art...would you like a list of hardware that had Windows support YEARS before Linux got it? You probably don't, it's quite long and includes such obscure technologies as "USB." Not dissing on Linux overall (and I realize support for new tech has gotten MUCH better), but if you're a company that needs support for cutting edge technology and you don't want to write your own drivers, sometimes Windows is the only option. All that bloat? Yeah, some of it is Minesweeper and that retarded dog, but some of it is also features.
I've used iChat over my wireless lan to my boys in Cinci who ALSO use wireless lan. Not only was there no lag at all, the clarity was better than any phone I've used.
This guy is an all around class act. I've always found mathematicians to be kind of standoffish, and while this guy is obviously at the top of his field, he's also on top of the rhetorical game, the very structure of this "Apology" shows that he's having a great deal of fun with his chosen profession.
My favorite selection:
The solution of a celebrated problem creates a disturbance in the otherwise quiet flow of mathematical events. The solution escapes the planning of committees. Colleagues are unprepared because the possibility of a solution has not been included in their research proposals. Students have avoided related thesis topics because of the risk that the work will not be welcome to a prospective employer. Friends are discouraged from research activity by the demands of the situation created by the solution. The manuscript, which is necessarily written at the highest research level, is readable only to a limited audience. An introduction is therefore needed which makes available the opportunities created by the solution. This is done by supplying motivation for the argument in a chronological order which also gives an account of how the solution was obtained.
Hilarious stuff. He apologizes to the people who will now feel the need to go over his proof with a fine toother comb, looking for mistakes...and also explains (three pages in) why he's chosen to start his proof with a history of the golden age of mathematics, stretching back to Newton. Basically, he's saying "oh hey, thanks for joining me. I was just explaining ALL OF MATHEMATICS for those playing at home. Bear with me, this one's worth it, and I promise you can get back to your euclidian algorithms and Ving diagrams in short time."
Ever read "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy?" It's an amazing book from the 18th century, which attempts to tell a simple narrative but due to the extremely schizophrenic style of the narrator, it keeps breaking down into tangential pockets of narrative self awareness. Basically, the author wrote from the perception of a disturbed dandy who couldn't keep his mind on the task at hand, an author who keeps apologizing to his readers for the inconvenience of his own poor editing.
This mathematical proof reminds me a lot of this book...the text of the proof doesn't act as though the proof isn't something interesting or ground breaking, nor does it make a big deal of this. It just ambles on in all directions until the Riemann hypothesis is well and truly proven, but with no real hurry to illustrate the proof until the outlines have been inked. Not that I know for sure that Riemann is proven or isn't...my brain was full when I got to differentials. But if it is, this paper will stand out not only as a great work of mathematics, but a great work of WRITING about mathematics.
I'm going to read it again. Maybe I'll understand it this time!
It's a nice laptop, to be sure...but it's got a smaller hard drive, an underpowered graphics card, no dvd burner, no built in bluetooth (meaning you have to tie up the pcmica card slot AND have a protuding antenna) and no backlit keyboard. All this, and it's $600 more than what I paid.
But it *IS* a nice laptop. The size and weight are perfect. And you know, a black magnesium shell is pretty sexy. If only it could be made to run OS X (which is worth its weight in magnesium shells).
I wouldn't call Linux a stress free relationship. Linux *MIGHT* screw you, if you're nice to her and willing to put up with her shit and all of the things she just can't do, or that she does in a slipshod manner. You won't have to buy her dinner, but you also will have to work your ass off to please her before you can expect to see your friends.
And the sad irony of it all is that these "nifty features" of which you speak are the reason for the browser's popularity in the first place.
The internet users of 1998 wanted fast rendering, an easier scripting object model, fault tolerant markup, access to plugins, etc. We got it, and for about three years it was fantastic.
Now it's starting to seem antiquated and crap compared to Firefox...but which of the two is in active development? Which of the two had the benefit of analyzing previous systems during its development? And which of the two is used by several hundred million people who don't understand the difference between a program and the internet in the first place?
Yes, IE was designed poorly. Yes, it needs an overhaul. But nobody at Microsoft wants to do so, because it's a waste of development resources to perform such an overhaul on a program with no revenue just to appease a class of users, many of whom won't be buying the next Microsoft OS, anyway.
They aren't...I mean, I know slashdot wants you to BELIEVE that Microsoft was actively trying to crush Netscape through the unfair practice of "not charging for their software," but in fact they were just trying to offer a high quality web browser that would entice people to buy their web server software. Microsoft never showed any intention of selling IE, and they continue to give away the newest version which works just fine on their older operating systems. However, they've made a ton of cash selling the IIS enabled "server" versions of their operating systems. It's a common practice no different from Sony taking a loss on the PS2 and making it up in software...or Adobe and Macromedia giving away the reader/player software generated by their expensive creative suites.
Sure, Microsoft integrated the browser into their OS, but that's not such a bad idea, either...file browsing and web browsing are two very similar tasks and it did make sense in an ivory tower sort of way to do both of them with the same code. Many of my favorite features in Windows Explorer are results of this integration...things like Favorites.
I mean, what proof -- heck, what vague hypothesis do you have that, since the "death" of Netscape, Microsoft has stood in the way of any of the dozens of alternative browsers out there? Opera's still around. Mozilla's still kicking. OmniWave, Konqueror and Safari are still working great (I am posting this FROM Safari, in fact). In fact, all of these are more copiously updated than Microsoft's web browser.
It is my opinion that Microsoft wants to get rid of IE, or at the very least, stop improving it. It has cost them a lot of money and doesn't offer a whole lot in return. It makes good business sense to halt new development in IE, and let somebody else become top dog.
See, I don't think that Apple's designs are even a marketing thing. Marketing tends to be about finding a design that will appeal to the most people. Apple's design seems to be about finding a design that will astonish people...some of whom might buy it even if they don't like. Certainly I wouldn't have chosen snow white as the ideal color for a laptop...but I must admit, it made my iBook stand out.
The aluminum PowerBook really is a thing of beauty, to the point that I've started carrying a chamois with me to remove grubby fingerprints from the case;)
Oh, and I am a firm bellieve in functionality, but there's no reason the functional can't also be very nice looking. I mean, I drive a friggin' Beetle -- and my favorite dinnerware comes from a restaurant supply company...it's just plain aluminum with no shine and no patterns. Placed on our simple vinyl placemats, it really lets the food do the talking, ahhh.
Then maybe you want to buy the new dasmegabyte XELEXONIUM 4500+ processor. It may look like a ram chip I pulled out of an old TI calculator, but trust me: with two Xs in the name and a plus after the 4500, it MUST be fast.
Also, those drinking straws glued to the top are longer pipelines.
Actually, RISC instructions are easy to emulate -- there are analogues to each RISC microinstruction on a CISC machine that execute very quickly. The problem is that modern PCs have been heavily optimized to run their complex instructions...so much so that the instruction that, say, loads two numbers from memory into registers and then multiplies them, dumping the result into the first register and then pushing it back to memory, runs much faster than if each of these instructions were executed back to back as they would be in a RISC processor.
Think of it like a pair of gates...one is very wide, to accomodate buses, and takes a long time to swing open. The other is very small, to accomodate pedestrians. Each has to swing open completely before each unit --buses or pedestrians -- can get through. They're about equally efficient over time...but if you switch it up, and send pedestrians through the big, slow door, you bog it down until it's unusable. Sending the bus through the small door is of course impossible...but as it turns out, getting all of the passengers off the bus is a relatively simple procedure that leads to a somewhat snappy execution time.
Yeah. With all these pretty cool products coming out BEFORE WWDC...Steve must really have some awesome shit to show off, not just some more evolutionary enhancements. In the past month, we've seen speed bumps in the Powerbook line, a DVD burner added to the iBook line, new iTunes, new Airport Express, and now water cooled G5s. All released kind of how's-your-father.
I'm kind of hoping the earth will quake at Steve's announcement at WWDC.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. This is how it should work...ISP takes down material NO MATTER WHAT (thus immediately preventing possible further infringements). It's then up to the site owner to prove they own the right to post the material.
This removes the ISP from the role of judge or jury. They are merely the executioner, doing what the law says in either direction. And in turn, they're playing fair with both the content owner and the so-called infringer. What's not to like?
But you do understand that this problem isn't going away just because we know it exists. If your company needs drivers for some obscure device -- say, a jet boat engine -- and the hardware company will only provide Windows drivers, you don't have much choice. You use Windows.
Why is this obligatory?
Windows update is automatic and has been for years. Training everybody in the company how to do it, from the secretary up to the owner, took about 45 seconds.
Again, the only people who spend a lot of time managing Windows are control freaks.
I'm fucking married, AC. And I wouldn't have GOT married to anybody who was so insecure with her own body that I couldn't look at a picture of another girl without upsetting her sense of self.
Fidelity is one thing...but any girl who expects you to close your eyes to beauty is a succubus to be abandoned as soon as possible.
Exactly. It's my opinion that CG will never look perfect until artists and designers stop trying to make it look perfect.
Huh? Here's what I mean. Institute an algorithm that will take all of your bones and randomly lengthen or shorten them, logarithmically, by up a centimeter. Set up your color generator to offset skin colour a few degrees in random blob shaped areas. Oh, and lips should never be uniformly shiny, but have the occasional area where the index of refraction is higher or lower.
A few strands of hair should always be in the wrong place. Hands should always be a little bit in front or behind where they should be (reflecting the character's self assurance). And for god's sake, put some body fat on them! The characters in FF looked TERRIBLE because only mannequins are that svelte. Put a little love handle above the hiphugger jeans with a white bit of tan line and your character is instantly mor realistic...and thus, sexier.
You insensitive clod. All women over the age of 12 have at least two personalities. Vis a vis Merideth Brooks' career.
Eh, I don't feel so bad. Apparently the girl is so mentally imbalanced that she gets upset over a fake picture of a non-existant girl in a bikini. You're probably better off without a girl like that.
OK. So your claim is that he's not a real mathematician because, though he proves things, he does so in an unusual manner? And that he will be forgotten because of his eccentricity?
I'm sorry, but if you had to make a brief list of mathematicians...just off the top of your head...I'm willing to bet real cash that most of them have "eccentricities" of their own. Are you claiming Newton wasn't a moody asshole? Or that Fermat wasn't a bit nutty? That Rene Descartes was some kind of boring pencil pusher with no ponderance on philosophy and life?
What about DaVinci? What about Nash? And I hear that Galileo and Kepler were rogues as well.
I mean, come on! Insanity and flair make a mathematician's career more than any actual acheivment. I mean, look at your post. As much as you claim to hate de Branges, you know everything about him. And you don't even know the NAMES of the Russian students who rewrote his hypothesis.
Well, the security of poorly administrated Windows systems is dubious. But none of the 25 Windows 2000 machines in this office has ever gotten a virus in the past three years...basically, since I took over as administrator.
Why? First thing I did was install a firewall. Second thing I did was disable unneccessary services. Third thing I did was patch them regularly.
And that's it. I am the only admin for the company and I spend maybe two hours a month working on Windows (most of which is spent convincing the Exchange server to run a little bit longer). Why is Windows security so bad? Because most Windows administrators are lazy and would prefer to let things go for a few weeks than test the effects of the patch themselves.
And as for Windows systems NOT being state-of-the-art...would you like a list of hardware that had Windows support YEARS before Linux got it? You probably don't, it's quite long and includes such obscure technologies as "USB." Not dissing on Linux overall (and I realize support for new tech has gotten MUCH better), but if you're a company that needs support for cutting edge technology and you don't want to write your own drivers, sometimes Windows is the only option. All that bloat? Yeah, some of it is Minesweeper and that retarded dog, but some of it is also features.
I've used iChat over my wireless lan to my boys in Cinci who ALSO use wireless lan. Not only was there no lag at all, the clarity was better than any phone I've used.
Duke Nukem Forever has a release date. It's also the most popular day for starting diets.
Tomorrow.
My favorite selection:
Hilarious stuff. He apologizes to the people who will now feel the need to go over his proof with a fine toother comb, looking for mistakes...and also explains (three pages in) why he's chosen to start his proof with a history of the golden age of mathematics, stretching back to Newton. Basically, he's saying "oh hey, thanks for joining me. I was just explaining ALL OF MATHEMATICS for those playing at home. Bear with me, this one's worth it, and I promise you can get back to your euclidian algorithms and Ving diagrams in short time."
Ever read "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy?" It's an amazing book from the 18th century, which attempts to tell a simple narrative but due to the extremely schizophrenic style of the narrator, it keeps breaking down into tangential pockets of narrative self awareness. Basically, the author wrote from the perception of a disturbed dandy who couldn't keep his mind on the task at hand, an author who keeps apologizing to his readers for the inconvenience of his own poor editing.
This mathematical proof reminds me a lot of this book...the text of the proof doesn't act as though the proof isn't something interesting or ground breaking, nor does it make a big deal of this. It just ambles on in all directions until the Riemann hypothesis is well and truly proven, but with no real hurry to illustrate the proof until the outlines have been inked. Not that I know for sure that Riemann is proven or isn't...my brain was full when I got to differentials. But if it is, this paper will stand out not only as a great work of mathematics, but a great work of WRITING about mathematics.
I'm going to read it again. Maybe I'll understand it this time!
It's a nice laptop, to be sure...but it's got a smaller hard drive, an underpowered graphics card, no dvd burner, no built in bluetooth (meaning you have to tie up the pcmica card slot AND have a protuding antenna) and no backlit keyboard. All this, and it's $600 more than what I paid.
But it *IS* a nice laptop. The size and weight are perfect. And you know, a black magnesium shell is pretty sexy. If only it could be made to run OS X (which is worth its weight in magnesium shells).
I wouldn't call Linux a stress free relationship. Linux *MIGHT* screw you, if you're nice to her and willing to put up with her shit and all of the things she just can't do, or that she does in a slipshod manner. You won't have to buy her dinner, but you also will have to work your ass off to please her before you can expect to see your friends.
For a stress free relationship...get a Mac.
And the sad irony of it all is that these "nifty features" of which you speak are the reason for the browser's popularity in the first place.
The internet users of 1998 wanted fast rendering, an easier scripting object model, fault tolerant markup, access to plugins, etc. We got it, and for about three years it was fantastic.
Now it's starting to seem antiquated and crap compared to Firefox...but which of the two is in active development? Which of the two had the benefit of analyzing previous systems during its development? And which of the two is used by several hundred million people who don't understand the difference between a program and the internet in the first place?
Yes, IE was designed poorly. Yes, it needs an overhaul. But nobody at Microsoft wants to do so, because it's a waste of development resources to perform such an overhaul on a program with no revenue just to appease a class of users, many of whom won't be buying the next Microsoft OS, anyway.
They aren't...I mean, I know slashdot wants you to BELIEVE that Microsoft was actively trying to crush Netscape through the unfair practice of "not charging for their software," but in fact they were just trying to offer a high quality web browser that would entice people to buy their web server software. Microsoft never showed any intention of selling IE, and they continue to give away the newest version which works just fine on their older operating systems. However, they've made a ton of cash selling the IIS enabled "server" versions of their operating systems. It's a common practice no different from Sony taking a loss on the PS2 and making it up in software...or Adobe and Macromedia giving away the reader/player software generated by their expensive creative suites.
Sure, Microsoft integrated the browser into their OS, but that's not such a bad idea, either...file browsing and web browsing are two very similar tasks and it did make sense in an ivory tower sort of way to do both of them with the same code. Many of my favorite features in Windows Explorer are results of this integration...things like Favorites.
I mean, what proof -- heck, what vague hypothesis do you have that, since the "death" of Netscape, Microsoft has stood in the way of any of the dozens of alternative browsers out there? Opera's still around. Mozilla's still kicking. OmniWave, Konqueror and Safari are still working great (I am posting this FROM Safari, in fact). In fact, all of these are more copiously updated than Microsoft's web browser.
It is my opinion that Microsoft wants to get rid of IE, or at the very least, stop improving it. It has cost them a lot of money and doesn't offer a whole lot in return. It makes good business sense to halt new development in IE, and let somebody else become top dog.
See, I don't think that Apple's designs are even a marketing thing. Marketing tends to be about finding a design that will appeal to the most people. Apple's design seems to be about finding a design that will astonish people...some of whom might buy it even if they don't like. Certainly I wouldn't have chosen snow white as the ideal color for a laptop...but I must admit, it made my iBook stand out.
;)
The aluminum PowerBook really is a thing of beauty, to the point that I've started carrying a chamois with me to remove grubby fingerprints from the case
Oh, and I am a firm bellieve in functionality, but there's no reason the functional can't also be very nice looking. I mean, I drive a friggin' Beetle -- and my favorite dinnerware comes from a restaurant supply company...it's just plain aluminum with no shine and no patterns. Placed on our simple vinyl placemats, it really lets the food do the talking, ahhh.
See, this is why I stay away from malicious web pages in the first place. You just can't trust those things!
Soooo...Buy One MIP, Get One MIP Half Off?
I hope it's fast enough for you. I hear the webserver, like most of the rest of the company, got farmed to India.
Then maybe you want to buy the new dasmegabyte XELEXONIUM 4500+ processor. It may look like a ram chip I pulled out of an old TI calculator, but trust me: with two Xs in the name and a plus after the 4500, it MUST be fast.
Also, those drinking straws glued to the top are longer pipelines.
And this is yet another benchmark Apple chips do poorly in. My
G4 doesn't even have a fan on it, and yet it can barely warm a piece of bread!
Actually, RISC instructions are easy to emulate -- there are analogues to each RISC microinstruction on a CISC machine that execute very quickly. The problem is that modern PCs have been heavily optimized to run their complex instructions...so much so that the instruction that, say, loads two numbers from memory into registers and then multiplies them, dumping the result into the first register and then pushing it back to memory, runs much faster than if each of these instructions were executed back to back as they would be in a RISC processor.
Think of it like a pair of gates...one is very wide, to accomodate buses, and takes a long time to swing open. The other is very small, to accomodate pedestrians. Each has to swing open completely before each unit --buses or pedestrians -- can get through. They're about equally efficient over time...but if you switch it up, and send pedestrians through the big, slow door, you bog it down until it's unusable. Sending the bus through the small door is of course impossible...but as it turns out, getting all of the passengers off the bus is a relatively simple procedure that leads to a somewhat snappy execution time.
In case you wanted to know, here's why.
Yeah. With all these pretty cool products coming out BEFORE WWDC...Steve must really have some awesome shit to show off, not just some more evolutionary enhancements. In the past month, we've seen speed bumps in the Powerbook line, a DVD burner added to the iBook line, new iTunes, new Airport Express, and now water cooled G5s. All released kind of how's-your-father.
I'm kind of hoping the earth will quake at Steve's announcement at WWDC.