Yeah, it's funny when the media gets all the facts wrong as usual. "OSS != GPL for the 432489304 time."
If all reporters were engineers, I think news would be less slanted and more factually-based. But, most people are ignorant about the world around them, so there's no need to have the facts right.
Oh, and where's the WMD in Iraq? I guess Bush should have made sold the point that getting rid of Saddam is more important than (root cause) of WMDs, but his hired "Yes"-men didn't see that one. Intelligence and government are mutex.
OGG is a damn good codec. Like mp3, it takes advantage of psychoacoustics of human hearing to gain huge compression ratios. OGG is superior to mp3 in pretty much every respect. I doubt FLAC can better than 60% similar to other LL codecs. What about patent encumbrances? Audiophiles are just as smart as they are spend-thrift.
All you have are zero-or-more "+", one-or-more "*", conditional "? or sometimes "[ ]", scan-sets "[a-zA-Z]", grouping "()" or "{}", non-CFG count range {}2,3, sentintel chars ^ $ etc., place-holders for replacement, dont match "~" or "!", match any single char ".", and maybe a few more odds-ends. It's these bozos that think "regexp" sounds cool, but doesn't want to learn what they are. In general, these generalized extended regular expressions are easily implemenatable w/ efficient DFA and NFA->DFA conversion (i hate that algorithm!!!). If you need a 500 page book on regexps, you might want to have a look at a good compiler book (red dragon, etc.) first. Full non-CFG languages are so much more powerful than any regexp could ever dream of being, and more importantly they can have state.
I checked out VeriTest's config file for the PCs. Conclusion: they cheat! Someone needs to get this PC hardware, rerun the tests using some better opts, and debunk those fools. They make the Intel PCs use some GCC switch called -fbranch-probabilities that causes disk accesses and bogs down the program w/ debugging type crap, because it keeps a histogram/count of the result of every conditional jmp and branch and writes it to a file. The Mac conf file doesn't do that! They also use slower, smaller hard-drives (no brand given), but they use a fast sATA drive on the mac. See pp. 23,24. Talk about invalid, unfair, and biased benchmarks.
London commuters now have to pay to drive in London during the week... Maybe Seattle would benefit from investment in mass transportation that makes it economical for commuters to get to work. Well, the traffic problems should subside when M$FT outsources all its coders to India when it finishes its $100M+ "research" complex there and does bid'ness process outsourcn'.;)
... into the future where only rich l337 people have their own private tree-lined, traffic-free highways to/from home. The rest of the people idle in a virtual parking lot, looking at the weeds and garbage (thanks VTA and CalTrans!!!). Just get rid of these stupid carpool lanes.. because you know that getting Americans to use mass-transportation is alot like trying to get us to give up McDonalds (Look how fat we americans are!). The gov't big ideas either give unfair advantages to a small, minority of rich people and screw us all (pay to play); make the problems worse (carpool lanes); or does nothing at all but waste money (VTA Lightrail (san jose), VTA Paratrans). Try something like getting rid of all highways and replace them w/ speedy trains like in japan. Japan is so small relatively, that they couldn't build anymore highways/parking structures/airports etc. so it's faster to ride a train/shuttle/lightrail for most commuting. American towns/cities are wasting money on a polutting, inefficient, uneconomical means of transportation. It would be alot cheaper to have electric trains ran from hydrogen generated by the from fusion reactor. Note that hydrogen is not a primary power source, but a fuel and a good energy transmission carrier medium (for both the fusion reactor and fuel-cells, nuclear vs. chemical). We gotta invest gigabucks in making fusion a reality ASAP!!! These goddamn Bush/Cheney oilmongers want to keep us sucking on the petroleum teats perpetually.
No... our government is corporate owned. Anyone who tells you different is a polly-anna or oblivious. The politicans want their campaign contributions and soft-money, so they are going to protect them. That's why the MPAA, RIAA, BSA, etc. NGOs have such power, because our/their gov't has sold us out. The founders would probably say we're going about this all wrong. You know there was an equivalent stink to all this P2P/software stuff in the 19th century about the replication/resale of sheet music and royalty collection.
The more they say it's "bad"... the more kids will do it. But I mean, come on! "Piracy" or "Sharing" as some call it has been the staple of civilization since its inception. Not that I codone theft, but the excuse that prices are high because of theft/piracy/sharing and the rationalization that sharing/piracy/theft is okay because prices are high creates a circular argument/feedback loop. If prices were lower for individuals, say 75% less than now, I imagine that most people would probably buy more than 4x as much software.
Take the economic perspective: say there was zero illegitimate copies of software... pricing & demand would be at it's natural equilibrium. Then say demand drops by 8% and piracy is 10% and price increases by some percentage, say 4% because unit costs (which are effectively $0 for software anyhow) increase slightly. But, on trying to reach zero piracy again requires either lowering the price, or some technical means (like TurboTax), which again reduces real and real+pirated demand. Also, there are some people who would never pay/buy software ever, and would just have to use something else (say, GNU/Linux); which is why demand is always less than real use (demand + piracy).
Shrink-wrap licenses + technical means of "piracy prevention" (dongles, errored-media key-discs, etc.) are simply going to drive black-box, software companies into the realm of unprofitability. Alienate your legit customers, they will go elsewhere.
delete this;//:-) C++ *is* evil!! C++.getPolymorphism().isBroke() == TRUE. java.use();
Thx... it's fun to bash America and also be American. But, it also seems that Americans are held in ill repute around the world, since tourists and gov't are usually lame. American tourists are seen as snooty, arrogant, and disrespectful... so please, please.. if you're going to another country, be kind--rewind... i mean, dont litter... err, just be nice to each other.;)
I'm currently building a water submerged computer to go into a real, operating fish tank. It will be quiet, O/Ced, and have nice little fishies. Anybody want to donate a used, fresh-water aquarium setup w/ pumps? (San Jose or Castro Valley areas);)
... down the slippery-slope of censorship. Weee! [==== CENSORED FOR YOUR PROTECTION ====] Can you believe it? [==== CENSORED FOR YOUR PROTECTION ====] Just don't try to get any info on bXXXXX cancer or contraception... and the pr0no spammers will always find a way around the filters. Maybe they should just have text terminals in libraries? This is the future of America, technological regression and thought police. That's it, I'm moving to Costa Rica!
"A 22-year old college student was fatally shot by a police officer mistaking the student's cell phone for a gun. The student was apparently playing the Real-Life (TM) DOOM (TM) game that is the rage on college campuses world-wide."
The amateur rocketry scene is in danger because of idiots like Ashcroft and Sen Hatch. read this They think somehow that amateur rocketry clubs are breeding grounds for terrorists to make homemade SAMs and man-pads. The only problem w/ that ass-umption is that amateur rocketry societies and rules *exists* to make rocketry safer. If you want terrorist training in making rockets from metal, etc... you're probably going to go to Hamas, Al-qaida, etc.: you're not going to go to an amateur rocketry club meeting in podunk, ohio. Our nimrods at the doj, atf, etc. just want to outlaw a hobby because of the remote possibility that some lonely crazy is going to build rockets for some artillery strike or something. Let's outlaw guns, gasoline and matches while we're at it then. Shit, you can't even get rocket motors via UPS anymore, and you need a license to do anything. It sounds like raising the bar in an erosive way like 2nd ammendment, prohibition, abortion rights, etc. I wonder if any of the X-Prize peeps had the ATFE breathing down their necks.
Seriously, English is the language of business because of the inherent imprecision, abiguity, nebulousness, duplicity and confusing meanings of words and the langugage; marketing-types exploit the virtues of the language for this utility. The main goal of business language is to sell the "consumer" or "client" a fantastical idea of one thing, and provide something that meets the specifications to the literal letter of the agreement, while providing none of the actual value promised. Take packaging, you'd think by the fancy graphics on boxes that some product does everything but give you a blow-job, and it turns out to be some cheap, plastic PoS made in Korea that ends up in the RTV (Return to Vendor) bin at Fry's. High-Speed, Full-Speed, Some-Speed, More-Speed, Fast-Speed: How much speed are we talking about? I think if engineers ruled the world, we'd be speaking German, from what I hear is a very deterministic language.
USB sucks anyhow, always has, always will. sata, firewire, and i2c/smbus are much better anyhow. i'll make it a point not to buy anything usb ever again. in addition, usb uses polling of interrupts and is very inefficient in design because it is marketed to be as low-cost and cheaply done as possible. I mean look at the connectors, bent pieces of sheet-metal encased in some crappy plastic w/ 4 little ghetto wires (gnd data+ data- +5V). Usb is good in that it is a serial bus w/ an embedded clock, eliminating parallel clock skew; but, it lacks grant and request lines that would make for a truely efficient bus. The other limitation is that usb hub support sucks ass, the drivers have to poll every device on a hub, and currently, nothing works when attached to my USB real 2.0 4-port hub in linux (kernel 2.4.20 gentoo rc5) A better protocol, such as firewire has switch products available, and can be shared simultaneously between computers. in fact, winxp and linux support IP over firewire, for 480Mbps networking OTTB!!!! usb just plain sux.
I think there's a java-based flash plugin from macromed... it should be more controllable if you added some ACL / fine-grained SecurityManager to the applet/jvm. like disable taking over the whole fricking screen, or ask before writing stupid flash ads over the page.
1,$s/Emacs/vi/g D sorry... it's just that emacs/vi religion is even more silly. whatever happened to plain o' knotepad or rhide;) maybe i dare mention MSVC++ 8-O it's like saying 'republican' in california. then there's all those silly labels, "neocon," "paleocon," "tree-hugging hippie," "wind-chime liberal," "luddite," "anarchist," etc.
The OS Sucks-o-Metter sez that windows really sucks, and linux sucks almost as much, but not as much proportionally. Then again, how slanted are metrics they are using? LOL!! Amiga doesnt suck at all? And MacOs: sucks = blows.
Re:Linux Zealot goes to the Mac store
on
Platform Evangelism
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Is it me.. or are people generally lazy? I should develop the LazyAssOS that does everything for you... you just watch as it does your work for you, like a matrix screen-saver. I *know* the Automated Homework Generator is on the cusp of reality.
Re:mac vs linux vs windows vs etc.
on
Platform Evangelism
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The main prob i have w/ windoze is that M$FT holds all the cards, and the "std" is not a standard at all, and they change APIs all the time. *cough*.doc word "format" *cough* DDE/DDX, OLE, OLE2, ActiveX, ATL, COM, COM+, DCOM, etc etc etc (i think i missed some).
Next stop... AOL develops it's own os, after M$ gives it a swift kick in the ass for taking too many MSN losers. Oh wait, they've got Solaris. Maybe they'll include more netscape and gator spyware and make it really suck.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it's funny when the media gets all the facts wrong as usual. "OSS != GPL for the 432489304 time."
If all reporters were engineers, I think news would be less slanted and more factually-based. But, most people are ignorant about the world around them, so there's no need to have the facts right.
Oh, and where's the WMD in Iraq? I guess Bush should have made sold the point that getting rid of Saddam is more important than (root cause) of WMDs, but his hired "Yes"-men didn't see that one. Intelligence and government are mutex.
What, like the Matrix? Or, is it some big secret? Geez... you're starting to sound like a Scientologist. ;)
Enough said. theRegister: RTFM!! Must be a slow news day.
OGG is a damn good codec. Like mp3, it takes advantage of psychoacoustics of human hearing to gain huge compression ratios. OGG is superior to mp3 in pretty much every respect. I doubt FLAC can better than 60% similar to other LL codecs. What about patent encumbrances? Audiophiles are just as smart as they are spend-thrift.
All you have are zero-or-more "+", one-or-more "*", conditional "? or sometimes "[ ]", scan-sets "[a-zA-Z]", grouping "()" or "{}", non-CFG count range {}2,3, sentintel chars ^ $ etc., place-holders for replacement, dont match "~" or "!", match any single char ".", and maybe a few more odds-ends. It's these bozos that think "regexp" sounds cool, but doesn't want to learn what they are. In general, these generalized extended regular expressions are easily implemenatable w/ efficient DFA and NFA->DFA conversion (i hate that algorithm!!!). If you need a 500 page book on regexps, you might want to have a look at a good compiler book (red dragon, etc.) first. Full non-CFG languages are so much more powerful than any regexp could ever dream of being, and more importantly they can have state.
I checked out VeriTest's config file for the PCs. Conclusion: they cheat! Someone needs to get this PC hardware, rerun the tests using some better opts, and debunk those fools. They make the Intel PCs use some GCC switch called -fbranch-probabilities that causes disk accesses and bogs down the program w/ debugging type crap, because it keeps a histogram/count of the result of every conditional jmp and branch and writes it to a file. The Mac conf file doesn't do that! They also use slower, smaller hard-drives (no brand given), but they use a fast sATA drive on the mac. See pp. 23,24. Talk about invalid, unfair, and biased benchmarks.
London commuters now have to pay to drive in London during the week... Maybe Seattle would benefit from investment in mass transportation that makes it economical for commuters to get to work. Well, the traffic problems should subside when M$FT outsources all its coders to India when it finishes its $100M+ "research" complex there and does bid'ness process outsourcn'. ;)
... into the future where only rich l337 people have their own private tree-lined, traffic-free highways to/from home. The rest of the people idle in a virtual parking lot, looking at the weeds and garbage (thanks VTA and CalTrans!!!). Just get rid of these stupid carpool lanes.. because you know that getting Americans to use mass-transportation is alot like trying to get us to give up McDonalds (Look how fat we americans are!). The gov't big ideas either give unfair advantages to a small, minority of rich people and screw us all (pay to play); make the problems worse (carpool lanes); or does nothing at all but waste money (VTA Lightrail (san jose), VTA Paratrans). Try something like getting rid of all highways and replace them w/ speedy trains like in japan. Japan is so small relatively, that they couldn't build anymore highways/parking structures/airports etc. so it's faster to ride a train/shuttle/lightrail for most commuting. American towns/cities are wasting money on a polutting, inefficient, uneconomical means of transportation. It would be alot cheaper to have electric trains ran from hydrogen generated by the from fusion reactor. Note that hydrogen is not a primary power source, but a fuel and a good energy transmission carrier medium (for both the fusion reactor and fuel-cells, nuclear vs. chemical). We gotta invest gigabucks in making fusion a reality ASAP!!! These goddamn Bush/Cheney oilmongers want to keep us sucking on the petroleum teats perpetually.
No... our government is corporate owned. Anyone who tells you different is a polly-anna or oblivious. The politicans want their campaign contributions and soft-money, so they are going to protect them. That's why the MPAA, RIAA, BSA, etc. NGOs have such power, because our/their gov't has sold us out. The founders would probably say we're going about this all wrong. You know there was an equivalent stink to all this P2P/software stuff in the 19th century about the replication/resale of sheet music and royalty collection.
The more they say it's "bad" ... the more kids will do it. But I mean, come on! "Piracy" or "Sharing" as some call it has been the staple of civilization since its inception. Not that I codone theft, but the excuse that prices are high because of theft/piracy/sharing and the rationalization that sharing/piracy/theft is okay because prices are high creates a circular argument/feedback loop. If prices were lower for individuals, say 75% less than now, I imagine that most people would probably buy more than 4x as much software.
// :-) C++ *is* evil!! C++.getPolymorphism().isBroke() == TRUE. java.use();
Take the economic perspective: say there was zero illegitimate copies of software... pricing & demand would be at it's natural equilibrium. Then say demand drops by 8% and piracy is 10% and price increases by some percentage, say 4% because unit costs (which are effectively $0 for software anyhow) increase slightly. But, on trying to reach zero piracy again requires either lowering the price, or some technical means (like TurboTax), which again reduces real and real+pirated demand. Also, there are some people who would never pay/buy software ever, and would just have to use something else (say, GNU/Linux); which is why demand is always less than real use (demand + piracy).
Shrink-wrap licenses + technical means of "piracy prevention" (dongles, errored-media key-discs, etc.) are simply going to drive black-box, software companies into the realm of unprofitability. Alienate your legit customers, they will go elsewhere.
delete this;
Thx... it's fun to bash America and also be American. But, it also seems that Americans are held in ill repute around the world, since tourists and gov't are usually lame. American tourists are seen as snooty, arrogant, and disrespectful... so please, please.. if you're going to another country, be kind--rewind... i mean, dont litter... err, just be nice to each other. ;)
I'm currently building a water submerged computer to go into a real, operating fish tank. It will be quiet, O/Ced, and have nice little fishies. Anybody want to donate a used, fresh-water aquarium setup w/ pumps? (San Jose or Castro Valley areas) ;)
I guess Bill Gate'$ patents on 1s and 0s is invalid due to prior art. ;)
... down the slippery-slope of censorship. Weee! [==== CENSORED FOR YOUR PROTECTION ====] Can you believe it? [==== CENSORED FOR YOUR PROTECTION ====] Just don't try to get any info on bXXXXX cancer or contraception... and the pr0no spammers will always find a way around the filters. Maybe they should just have text terminals in libraries? This is the future of America, technological regression and thought police. That's it, I'm moving to Costa Rica!
"A 22-year old college student was fatally shot by a police officer mistaking the student's cell phone for a gun. The student was apparently playing the Real-Life (TM) DOOM (TM) game that is the rage on college campuses world-wide."
The amateur rocketry scene is in danger because of idiots like Ashcroft and Sen Hatch. read this They think somehow that amateur rocketry clubs are breeding grounds for terrorists to make homemade SAMs and man-pads. The only problem w/ that ass-umption is that amateur rocketry societies and rules *exists* to make rocketry safer. If you want terrorist training in making rockets from metal, etc... you're probably going to go to Hamas, Al-qaida, etc.: you're not going to go to an amateur rocketry club meeting in podunk, ohio. Our nimrods at the doj, atf, etc. just want to outlaw a hobby because of the remote possibility that some lonely crazy is going to build rockets for some artillery strike or something. Let's outlaw guns, gasoline and matches while we're at it then. Shit, you can't even get rocket motors via UPS anymore, and you need a license to do anything. It sounds like raising the bar in an erosive way like 2nd ammendment, prohibition, abortion rights, etc. I wonder if any of the X-Prize peeps had the ATFE breathing down their necks.
Seriously, English is the language of business because of the inherent imprecision, abiguity, nebulousness, duplicity and confusing meanings of words and the langugage; marketing-types exploit the virtues of the language for this utility. The main goal of business language is to sell the "consumer" or "client" a fantastical idea of one thing, and provide something that meets the specifications to the literal letter of the agreement, while providing none of the actual value promised. Take packaging, you'd think by the fancy graphics on boxes that some product does everything but give you a blow-job, and it turns out to be some cheap, plastic PoS made in Korea that ends up in the RTV (Return to Vendor) bin at Fry's. High-Speed, Full-Speed, Some-Speed, More-Speed, Fast-Speed: How much speed are we talking about? I think if engineers ruled the world, we'd be speaking German, from what I hear is a very deterministic language.
USB sucks anyhow, always has, always will. sata, firewire, and i2c/smbus are much better anyhow. i'll make it a point not to buy anything usb ever again. in addition, usb uses polling of interrupts and is very inefficient in design because it is marketed to be as low-cost and cheaply done as possible. I mean look at the connectors, bent pieces of sheet-metal encased in some crappy plastic w/ 4 little ghetto wires (gnd data+ data- +5V). Usb is good in that it is a serial bus w/ an embedded clock, eliminating parallel clock skew; but, it lacks grant and request lines that would make for a truely efficient bus. The other limitation is that usb hub support sucks ass, the drivers have to poll every device on a hub, and currently, nothing works when attached to my USB real 2.0 4-port hub in linux (kernel 2.4.20 gentoo rc5) A better protocol, such as firewire has switch products available, and can be shared simultaneously between computers. in fact, winxp and linux support IP over firewire, for 480Mbps networking OTTB!!!! usb just plain sux.
I think there's a java-based flash plugin from macromed... it should be more controllable if you added some ACL / fine-grained SecurityManager to the applet/jvm. like disable taking over the whole fricking screen, or ask before writing stupid flash ads over the page.
1,$s/Emacs/vi/g D sorry... it's just that emacs/vi religion is even more silly. whatever happened to plain o' knotepad or rhide ;) maybe i dare mention MSVC++ 8-O it's like saying 'republican' in california. then there's all those silly labels, "neocon," "paleocon," "tree-hugging hippie," "wind-chime liberal," "luddite," "anarchist," etc.
The OS Sucks-o-Metter sez that windows really sucks, and linux sucks almost as much, but not as much proportionally. Then again, how slanted are metrics they are using? LOL!! Amiga doesnt suck at all? And MacOs: sucks = blows.
Is it me.. or are people generally lazy? I should develop the LazyAssOS that does everything for you... you just watch as it does your work for you, like a matrix screen-saver. I *know* the Automated Homework Generator is on the cusp of reality.
The main prob i have w/ windoze is that M$FT holds all the cards, and the "std" is not a standard at all, and they change APIs all the time. *cough* .doc word "format" *cough* DDE/DDX, OLE, OLE2, ActiveX, ATL, COM, COM+, DCOM, etc etc etc (i think i missed some).
it's official... people are dumb and willing to prove it. That's the essence of evangelism. That, or they're obsessed.
Next stop... AOL develops it's own os, after M$ gives it a swift kick in the ass for taking too many MSN losers. Oh wait, they've got Solaris. Maybe they'll include more netscape and gator spyware and make it really suck.