they mentioned that this thing uses dual processors. Could these possibly be the long waited for cells? You would think they would have mentioned this in the article if that was the case. A side note: To me, the dual screen thing does make sense. Someone must have realized that you can't increase the screen size on a portable past what is is without making the form factor unreasonable and realized that a bottom part on a folded portable has more screen real estate. Personally I'm a little disapointed they didn't just increase the resolution, I was looking forward to playing certain snes games that need high res to look nice (Chrono Trigger) on future GB hardware.
Common people, why are you modding up all these unhelpful, crackpot responses? There are a couple helpful ones up top, but down below there are only a couple of classes of comments, all more bent on criticizing the kid who wrote in than actually being helpful. I would like to quickly respond to each class of comments here:
1. Get a job you stupid kid! Scholarships are the easy way out. Why when I went to Bedrock U, blah blah blah... Aside to being off topic, most posters in this vein are dating themselves. It is simply no longer possible to pay ones way though a 4 or more year institution in this country. Even at a state school, books, tuition, and room and board come to 15,000-20,000 a year. Know of any part time minimum wage jobs that pay that much? Now, what if the student is applying to a top notch university like MIT?
2. Change majors or intended professions because CS is hard and/or Indians are going to take all our jobs. Again, off topic and unhelpful. If someone wants to work with computers, it might be because they actually have some kind of interest in the subject matter. People who are really passionate and really good at something (and in CS at last passion usually leads to skill) will always be able to find a job in that field.
I would also like to point out that in general there is way too much wining on Slashdot lately about how India/China where ever is taking all the IT jobs away. At one point all of the worlds high tech engineering and support needs were being supplied by a small number of industrialized countries, primarily the US and Japan. That plus the all the money being invested into Dot Coms allowed just about anyone who could code/test/fix hardware to get a high paying job in computer science. A lot of people who weren't that bright and many more who weren't even that passionate about computers (yes, that is the more important requirement) had jobs in IT. Now they don't. The people who survived for the most part are getting paid the *same* or *more* than before.
3. Tech makes you work too hard for your paycheck. Get something less stressful.
Any job that pays as well as IT does is going to be stressful. Just be glad we don't have it bad as doctors.
911: Hello, this is 911. How would you like your emergency today? Me: Yeah, uhm... this is the only number my phone can dial. Could you relay a message? Please call Mark Portsworth at 343-982-8452 and tell him...
You know what, I'll just go ahead and say what I've been wanting to say for AGES about manned air flight. It's fucking dangerous. It's one of the most dangerous operations that any human can be involved with besides war, driving a car, working in the world trade center, blahblahblah. No amount of investigation, upgrading, efficiency, or what not is going to change that basic nature of the equation. The energy involved at certain critical points (takeoff, landing) is of such a high order that it simply isn't feasibly to introduce life-saving components. When something occurs at such critical points (which of course, is when it is most likely that something WILL go wrong), everyone is going to die. Period.
The Russian and US aerospace programs have known this for ages, but the US public just doesn't want to accept the fact that their are serious risks involved with putting human beings in flight and getting them home safely. The complexity of the systems required to do such is of such an order of magnitude that it's just impossible to create any aircraft that is completely failsafe.
This isn't, by any account, to say that NASA shouldn't attempt to figure out what happened and prevent it from happening in the future. Of course they should, that's their job. But to expect that accidents will never occur is naive beyond reason.
We need to either accept the inherent risks or quit putting people in orbit.... But seriously, this was probably preventable. The shuttle fleet in use is pretty archaic and poorly maintained. Plans to replace the existing shuttles were axed to help fund the pres' first round of tax cuts back in 2000. No, I can't prove that the Columbia would still be here if NASA had better equipment, however I do think it's a fair assumption or at least a good guess. NASA runs on a shoe string budget, these are the kinds of things I would expect to happen under those conditions.
Note: The first part of my article was satire, but Floody had a good point. Even if NASA had the budget properly maintained their stuff, people would get killed occasionally. I just don't agree that space travel is one of the most dangerous things a human can do. There have been over a hundred shuttle launches and this is only the second accident. Maybe more dangerous than you're car, less dangerous than major surgery and etc.
P.S. NASA uses windows alot right? There's another (ok, deffinitly less likely) culprit. A very slashdot angle...
who noticed the first (0wnz0r3d) book sucked? Just think about the premise for a second: suddenly it's possible to completely manipulate human phsysiology on every level, not because of some miracle scientific advancement but simply because programmers with little to no medical knowledge get a crack at it? Oh No! better watch out or those 1337 h4x0rs will hack into your DNA and turn you into a flying monkey!
Maybe someone should sit these people down and explain to them that one of the reasons anime is so popular among geeks is because it is *fscking animated.* Maybe WB could instead release and, for once, properly advertise some translated anime movie for half the cost, twice the profit, and four times less suck ass. Jesus on a fricken' pogo stick!
Some are focussing on issues with the MPAA in this article but I've found little on usability.
I managed to sign up for one of their accounts in about 10 seconds but am having trouble actually watching a movie. It has to imbed the viewer in my browser to watch and my understanding is that only the windows version of realplayer will do that. I'm currently running mozilla under mac osx and am wondering what I should do to be able to watch one of these. Does mozilla even have a realplayer plugin? Should I try a different browser? Should I try compiling the "community" version of realplayer under the my xserver instead of using the mac version?
I'd appreaciate advice from anyone who has gotten movie88 to work under any non-windows platform *cough* linux *cough*.
Also, I know this sounds crazy but I'm trying to do all of this under a dailup connection *sigh*, does anyone know if realplayer will automatically try to send me a more heavily compressed stream or just try to smash the 100kbs version down my pipe. If this is the case, is there any way around their system that keeps me from downloading the file? I'd be totally willing to let it download overnight.
The only reason I'm interested in this is because of their sizable anime selection. I've found that the only way to get the anime I want is to order it online, which is kind of expensive. I doubt any of the other movies in that service will catch on, as going to a movie theater or renting isn't all that expensive. But anime *is* all that expensive and at 50 cents (for example) for battle angle its worth my looking into, even on a 56k connection with the crappy realplayer format.
I presume everyone remembers when aol was mailing out all of those millions of cds...
Imagine AOL 8.0! Includes AOL Linux (may cause incompatibilities with old software, we suggest you "upgrade" photoshop to gimp etc)
Seriously, if they did that. And packaged it with a nice win32 installer... How many aol users would just switch over without putting any serious thought into it?
Also, if they start pushing a linux distro does anyone think they will do so on multiple architectures? It would be nice to be able to get some good use out of my old mac box that wont run osx so I can do something useful with it and still be able to run AOL... Er... I mean still let my uh... grandma run AOL... um yeah.
I am a mac user and have been for a long time. Its hard for people who aren't mac users to understand why we like the mac. Most people on slashdot can understand our aversion to windows but few know exactly why we like the platform.
Let me take some time to explain. I'm going to use os 9 for my explanation even though I use osx because the intereface design for osx is still pretty new and unrefined. One reply to the article referred negatively to the macs "flowery" interface. Although I think the interface is rather pleasing to the eye, at least on the default platinum theme, the primary force behind its design was functionality.
There is consistent well thought out design present in the interface. It is responsive and every feature present in the system software is easily accessible. The system software rarely crashes unless there is some conflict with the extensions (well os9 crashes a lot more than linux but to be fair os9 and linux were never competing on any front. osx on the other hand can hold its own ground.). Since the os vender is also the OEM all of the new hardware that runs the mac os will run it well (after a brief stint with clones apple decided that they were a bad idea for a company that makes most of its money from hardware sales).
I don't know if that made anything clear to anyone. I'm not trying to get any linux users to go buy a mac but I dislike how some linux users seem to not understand how any intelligent person could ever prefer the mac os. I mean its not like were windows users and just use it because it came with the box (although it did) and runs the latest games.
I like that someone (besides microsoft) is trying to write a be all end all language. I keep hearing about how java is the right tool for this job and c++ is the right tool for that job and objective-c is the right tool for that one (objC is my favorite tool by the way, to be fair though I don't know java or c++). I realize that these statements are true but it seems to me that they shouldn't be that way.
I think C is an example of a really well designed language that can perform a variety of functions, I mean its a language that is used for both kernels, word processors, games, whatever. Now that C is getting kind of old and is missing a lot of feature we want a bunch of language like c++, java, C#, and objective C have come up. Those languages are all object oriented to a certain extent and all offer features that make them very useful in some situations and useless in others. I only can code in one of the listed languages so I wont list the pros and cons as I would get some wrong and inspire flames from programmers who use those languages.
My point is that a language (maybe not D) that could implement all the features that a programmer would need for any kind of serious large scale program is needed. Further more that language needs to have compilers for both machine language and bytecode. Lastly the machine code, at least when compiled, needs to be almost as fast as C (which was designed to be almost as fast as assembler). I could list a million things that I think the language would need but you get the idea.
We need a language that is general purpose yet can be used for any specific problem. A language which is featuresk yet very simple. We need a language that is all these impossible things the way C is.
I don't think D is all of the things we need, not yet anyway, but it is a good expression of what as a community programmers need, a common language.
Although I think it is totally ethical to fix security holes in people software without there knowledge... ok not totally ethical, but of all the unethical things someone does in a day it's probably the least unethical.
As I was saying. Although I don't think it is too unethical to send out some kind of program to close security holes I don't see why we would do it. Viri that attack correctable security problems primarily go after Windows computers because they represent a large homogenous population. That is they have a similar problem that the human species has, a shallow gene pool. Humans do not have much genetic variation from person to person. We all have the same strengths and weaknesses which means if we are attacked by something either almost all of us will survive (except those that die by chance) or almost all of us will die (except those of us that survive by chance). Windows boxes are the same, their only variation is represented by their version and a couple of service packs. Windows boxes all have the same bugs and security holes for a virus to go after.
Anyhow at this point you are wondering why I made that stupid analogy between human genetic variation and code base variation between windows machines. Well as long as these computers exist the only real defense they have is intelligent sys admins. If smart slash dot readers fix their security problems for them every time some minor upset like this code red virus happens they will never learn to protect their machines, and if that happens we will all be in a real jam when a virus that does have a chance of bringing the flow of information on the net to a grinding halt comes around. Remember it does matter if we are all running a secure box if there are a couple million windows users DDOSing us.
Why,oh why do some people keep killing the os X "window manager" in os x from the terminal? If the Finder in os x is giving you trouble/ has frozen up the first thing NOT to do is to open up the terminal and kill its process because, like you mentioned, you will have a hard time getting the finder to start back up again.
So what do you do? Force quit. *But oh no* I can't force quit from the finder *it doesn't work*. Well duh, the finder is frozen you can't ask an app that refuses to do anything to execute a command for you. That is why the dock is in a separate process than the finder. Keep a light weight application in the dock that will open quickly (like, oh say, the terminal) and when the finder freezes up launch it and use the force quit command from the apple menu to restart the finder. If the finder quits but doesn't start back up again all you have to do is click finder's icon in the *dock* (which would probably have worked too if you had killed its process from the terminal) and it will bounce in the dock while it is launching as if it were a normal application (which it is).
You can do all this and guess what? All of your applications will still be, if you were online you will still be online. You can even still use all of your open apps *while the finder is off*. You can launch more apps in terminal if you want using the open command and never ever use the finder again. There are even other graphical applications that sometimes serve as replacements for the Finder.
So to summarize:
In os X the finder is just another app, treat it like one.
Opening up a shell in the terminal is not always the best way to handle every situation.
The Dock was not made a separate process so that you can kill it without losing the Finder, it was made a separate process so you can freeze up the Finder without losing the Dock (which is best thought of as a secondary method of browsing through your files).
I live in western washington and I have noticed several busy intersections where cameras have been placed on top of the horizontal poles that hold the traffic light. I assumed that it must be common practice to tape intersections but never bothered to check up on it. If it's supposed to only happen in Denver does that mean the cameras I've seen are just webcams (there's sure a lot of them for that, they're on almost every block in many areas) or have police departments in lots of areas started to do this without getting the OK first?
Gattaca was about prejudice and the responses to genetic engineering. If we start altering people genetic makeup anytime soon it will probably be through selecting which chromosomes they inherit (the method they seemed to use in Gattaca) which we will do based off of our limited knowledge of the effects of specific genes within those chromosomes. This is knowledge we gained through studies of families that had those genes, not knowledge we gained because we actually understand the machine language or even the princeples it relies on (I doubt evolution would have produced object oriented code in our genes).
The end result is that we will have a bunch of people who are *probably* better off due to genetic engineering, which is what happened in Gattaca. The consequence of these improvements will be a massive loss in genetic variability, something essential to our survival of which our species already has little.
I assume, since this is slashdot, that others have already brought up the issue of copyright. As bad as software and music companies are about copyright biotech companies are infinitely worse. The MPAA isn't actually responsible for anyones death but the biotech companies most certainly are. Most know that the biotech companies have jacking up the prices of medicines (aids treatments being the most infamous) everywhere and lobbying for more copyright protection to insure that foreign countries don't produce cheap versions of their products. There have also been disquieting reports that these companies have been testing dangerous drugs on large populations in other countries and fixing trials of new drugs for the FDA in this one.
These are going to be the distributers of the new treatments that are going to come from genetic engineering. We already know they are only willing to sell to the rich, that they are unscrupulous to the extreme. Sure genetic engineering has a certain potential to benefit human kind, and maybe someday it will, but not until we actually understand genetics, and not until the bulk of these technologies are in the public domain.
First off Russian built stuff isn't that bad, their rocket technology rocks (yea I know its a capsule not a rocket). Second it's a *space capsule*, looks alot like the ones John Glenn and all the American astronaughts flew in, yes its useless but didn't you ever want to have a space capsule as a kid? If I had that kind of money it would be on my top 10 list of things to get (after all the computer equipment.
As a mac user I've enjoyed reading slashdot for a while now, even though it seems to be a heavily linux oriented site. Slashdot (and posters to threads) provides me with lots of info on a variety of stuff I'm interested in, even a mac article once in a while. It was this site that convinced my to install Darwin (the BSD that os x uses) and linuxppc on my mac system. Sometimes though it seems like the primarily linux x86 users don't *get* it...
Don't be offended because thats not my intent. The post I'm replying to and the posts that reply to it repeatedly talk about "macintosh and windows" as if they were the same os. I'm not sure how windows is even related to what were discussing. yes they are both os's with a higher user to devoper ratio than *nix os's. I'm not just emphasizing the difference between windows and macintosh because I'm one of those windows hating mac evangelists (although I am), I'm saying this becuase anyone who has used both os's and gotten to know them would never use the phase "windows and macintosh."
Mac is not "difficult to use." Yes I know shells are cool but do you know that there are alternatives? Do you realize that it is possible to use a gui input/output as much if not more than with pure text? A gui, properly configured, can use graphics to display a huge amount of data and use the keyboard to input data. Mac os (even mac os 9) is properly configured out of the box. If you know any powerusers watch them operate a mac and see how many times they reach for that mouse. Ever wondered why standard mac mouses only have one butten? Now you know.
There is scripting in mac os, its tied directly into the gui, or into the speach software (no not speach to text or any silliness like that, and ya the speach software works great... now).
OK, that I'm done arguing for os 9, lets talk about os x (now I'll admit that I am glad we are getting all that unix shell coolness). First off, *any* feature that you liked about *nix will exist on os x. you can even run your fav xwindows window manager (which will run your fav xwindow apps) and apples aqua windows *simultaineously*, check it out on sourceforge xonx project. No that involves no form of emulation, it works because under that ultra cool aqua gui is a full distro of apple's special blend of *nix called darwin (comming soon to x86, get your bleeding edge alpha today). Plus stuff you may never see working well on linux. Can you say java? Apples saying that os x has the best java support ever, of course you may be disinclined to believe praise a company says about its own products, but from what I understand java apps will be indistinguishable (from the users perspective) from other apps written in c/c++/objective-c/whatever.
Anyway I would encourage people to find out about os x/os x server (no, it still uses apache not a proprietary webserver. Yes you can also use apache on plain os x). The frontpage of the os x section of apple.com is mostly movies of the ui and other such fluff but if you dig deeper into their site and get to some of their docs (I recommend Inside Mac OS X, they also have the *only* good book on objective c for download in pdf format), you can even sign up for the apple developer connection and recieve a few free issues of mactech and you don't even have to own a mac, of most interest to linux users is www.darwinfo.org which will show you just how *nixy os x is.
If someone was offended by my mac zealotry, become a mac user for a few years and see how you start acting.
I don't actually know this language but as a mac user I've been hearing alot about objective-c (which apple bases their cocoa API in) as a dynamic alternative to c++. I heard it went out of use a long time ago because it used runtime linking which slowed things down but that apple had figured out someway to to use their hardware to speed the process up... again I don't actually *know* the language, if you want to find out more go to comp.lang.objective-c. Maybe it would be a good language to write the sims II in;)
>How would a company enforcing a IP aggrement that was sigined voluntaraily be a violation of civil rights?
>Now, if a company implements a IP policy unilateraly, thats something different. But this was a voluntary matter.
This really isn't a question of whether the document was signed voluntarily. It comes down to whether anyone has the right to ask you to give up your rights? There are some things you are prohibited to sell (drugs, especially dangerous weapons) because allowing them to be sold would damage society as a whole and such matters are transcendant to the internal logic of an agreement (property may be 9 10th of the law but there is still that 1 10th left over). There are also some rights that no one or at least no private individual or company can ask you to give up. We all know that phrase the police use when they arrest someone "you have the right to remain silent (5th ammendment) if you choose to wave that right (by speaking) everything you say etc." The police and other governemnt institutions (for better or for worse) can and do define situations in which you give up your rights either explicitly, as above, or implicitly, as when you commit a crime and you are imprisoned thus "giving up" your right to travel (yes that is a right) your right to property (they confiscate most of the money you earn from work you do there which is why prisoners get payed only a few cents an hour).
Private institutions and individuals do not have the right to ask you to give up many of the rights mentioned above, although they often do. As an example a private company can not give you a contract to sign in which you agree to work below the minimum wage and in most situations cannot do the others things that I've mentioned government institutions can do. There are some notable exceptions to this such as confidentiality agreements which seem to be generally upheld without question, of course those often are in place to protect "intellectual property" which arguably is a right (since the last work is property it *must* be a right, mustn't it?) although there are cases in which confidentiality agreements are used to do something not protected by the constitution (ever see "the insider").
I hope you found this comment valuable.
Better today then when? Better then during the plague? Better then after the plague when low population among the working class brought the wage up? Or after that when a population explosion sent wages plummiting again? How much of that had to do with technology?
We didn't steal money from developing countries? What do the countries closest to us look like? Columbia with wars caused by the American narcotics market? Mexico with those who can afford to slipping over the border into a more prosperous country?
Sorry I turned a few question marks into a theme...
The wandering vagrants are poor no matter their location and there is deffinitely *not* enough charity to keep millions of homeless Americans fed and under a roof 365 nights a year.
Bill Gates does owe the community money if the community says he owes them money. That is what taxes are. Taxes are made by elected officials who Bill Gates has more effect over than any other individual in this country so I'd say that his situation is entirely fair, maybe more than fair...
No, socialism has never been sustained for a very long time. But neither has capitalism, so called laize faire (is that spelled right?) policies are doomed to booms and busts i.e the great depression, that is why many governments, including the US use hybrid economic policies. Yes thats right we do implement certain socialist policies, lots of them in fact. Considering the amound of effort we've put into making socialism look like a bad idea (and like I said, it is) we don't say where these ideas come from, just that they are smart.
F.Y.I. It used to be in most countries tax brackets went the opposite way they do now, the very rich were almost exempt from taxation while skilled workers and serfs payed the government's dues.
Hunting and gathering was certainly not an easy way of life but don't make the mistake that the switch over to agriculture improved people's lives. Even in the modern world with machines that do that do the bulk of farmwork it is still a grueling task. Imagine the first few groups of humans which didn't even have draft animals to plow the fields with? It takes a large amount of farmland to support a single human. Life for early farmers was short and brutal, the work nearly killed them. Why then did we switch over? For stability and the ability to have larger families. Everything has it's cost, progress is never free.
Innovation in the real world is done out of neccesity, this is partially why extreme forms of *capitalism* don't have good technological progression. Notice I say "good" progression, when the wealthy consummers want something developed (from Athlon gigahertz chips to viagra, I can't think of anything beginning with Z) it will be developed, whereas when a great number of people with no buying power want something like food, affordable medicine, and *any* computer whatsoever their demand are not met. Lets not even get into lack of funding for hard science... Progress does happen but it is not the kind of progress that civilization depends on, it does not help our species survive and thus it is a perversion.
And to your last point about rich and poor being relitive: Rich can arguably be relative, I would be considered rich in somecountries and barely middleclass in others, but "poor" is universal, poor is the subsitance level, the bare minimum necesary to eat, stay out of the cold and nothing left over. Many many people are in the "poor" category, not just in far off countries but probably in your local urban center. The poor who have jobs almost always produce enough through their work to live in luxury if they were in better circumstances but they aren't because they aren't fairly compensated based on what they produce. Why? lets not get into that whole marxist means of production thing... But lets get into another socialist topic: redistributing the wealth. We *can* make the poor poor no longer by making the rich less rich. How? By doing what we've been doing to a greater extent, heavily taxing the top brackets and investing some of that money in wellfare and social security, not to mention raising the minimum wage. Give workers enough cash so they can miss a paycheck when they need to strike and pretty soon they will have negotiated better saleries, formed unions, and ended the zero sum game.
Slashdot Mirror
they mentioned that this thing uses dual processors. Could these possibly be the long waited for cells? You would think they would have mentioned this in the article if that was the case.
A side note:
To me, the dual screen thing does make sense. Someone must have realized that you can't increase the screen size on a portable past what is is without making the form factor unreasonable and realized that a bottom part on a folded portable has more screen real estate. Personally I'm a little disapointed they didn't just increase the resolution, I was looking forward to playing certain snes games that need high res to look nice (Chrono Trigger) on future GB hardware.
Common people, why are you modding up all these unhelpful, crackpot responses? There are a couple helpful ones up top, but down below there are only a couple of classes of comments, all more bent on criticizing the kid who wrote in than actually being helpful. I would like to quickly respond to each class of comments here:
1. Get a job you stupid kid! Scholarships are the easy way out. Why when I went to Bedrock U, blah blah blah...
Aside to being off topic, most posters in this vein are dating themselves. It is simply no longer possible to pay ones way though a 4 or more year institution in this country. Even at a state school, books, tuition, and room and board come to 15,000-20,000 a year. Know of any part time minimum wage jobs that pay that much? Now, what if the student is applying to a top notch university like MIT?
2. Change majors or intended professions because CS is hard and/or Indians are going to take all our jobs.
Again, off topic and unhelpful. If someone wants to work with computers, it might be because they actually have some kind of interest in the subject matter. People who are really passionate and really good at something (and in CS at last passion usually leads to skill) will always be able to find a job in that field.
I would also like to point out that in general there is way too much wining on Slashdot lately about how India/China where ever is taking all the IT jobs away. At one point all of the worlds high tech engineering and support needs were being supplied by a small number of industrialized countries, primarily the US and Japan. That plus the all the money being invested into Dot Coms allowed just about anyone who could code/test/fix hardware to get a high paying job in computer science. A lot of people who weren't that bright and many more who weren't even that passionate about computers (yes, that is the more important requirement) had jobs in IT. Now they don't. The people who survived for the most part are getting paid the *same* or *more* than before.
3. Tech makes you work too hard for your paycheck. Get something less stressful.
Any job that pays as well as IT does is going to be stressful. Just be glad we don't have it bad as doctors.
911: Hello, this is 911. How would you like your emergency today?
Me: Yeah, uhm... this is the only number my phone can dial. Could you relay a message? Please call Mark Portsworth at 343-982-8452 and tell him...
You know what, I'll just go ahead and say what I've been wanting to say for AGES about manned air flight. It's fucking dangerous. It's one of the most dangerous operations that any human can be involved with besides war, driving a car, working in the world trade center, blahblahblah. No amount of investigation, upgrading, efficiency, or what not is going to change that basic nature of the equation. The energy involved at certain critical points (takeoff, landing) is of such a high order that it simply isn't feasibly to introduce life-saving components. When something occurs at such critical points (which of course, is when it is most likely that something WILL go wrong), everyone is going to die. Period.
...
The Russian and US aerospace programs have known this for ages, but the US public just doesn't want to accept the fact that their are serious risks involved with putting human beings in flight and getting them home safely. The complexity of the systems required to do such is of such an order of magnitude that it's just impossible to create any aircraft that is completely failsafe.
This isn't, by any account, to say that NASA shouldn't attempt to figure out what happened and prevent it from happening in the future. Of course they should, that's their job. But to expect that accidents will never occur is naive beyond reason.
We need to either accept the inherent risks or quit putting people in orbit.
But seriously, this was probably preventable. The shuttle fleet in use is pretty archaic and poorly maintained. Plans to replace the existing shuttles were axed to help fund the pres' first round of tax cuts back in 2000. No, I can't prove that the Columbia would still be here if NASA had better equipment, however I do think it's a fair assumption or at least a good guess. NASA runs on a shoe string budget, these are the kinds of things I would expect to happen under those conditions.
Note: The first part of my article was satire, but Floody had a good point. Even if NASA had the budget properly maintained their stuff, people would get killed occasionally. I just don't agree that space travel is one of the most dangerous things a human can do. There have been over a hundred shuttle launches and this is only the second accident. Maybe more dangerous than you're car, less dangerous than major surgery and etc.
P.S. NASA uses windows alot right? There's another (ok, deffinitly less likely) culprit. A very slashdot angle...
who noticed the first (0wnz0r3d) book sucked? Just think about the premise for a second: suddenly it's possible to completely manipulate human phsysiology on every level, not because of some miracle scientific advancement but simply because programmers with little to no medical knowledge get a crack at it?
Oh No! better watch out or those 1337 h4x0rs will hack into your DNA and turn you into a flying monkey!
Maybe someone should sit these people down and explain to them that one of the reasons anime is so popular among geeks is because it is *fscking animated.*
Maybe WB could instead release and, for once, properly advertise some translated anime movie for half the cost, twice the profit, and four times less suck ass. Jesus on a fricken' pogo stick!
Some are focussing on issues with the MPAA in this article but I've found little on usability.
I managed to sign up for one of their accounts in about 10 seconds but am having trouble actually watching a movie. It has to imbed the viewer in my browser to watch and my understanding is that only the windows version of realplayer will do that. I'm currently running mozilla under mac osx and am wondering what I should do to be able to watch one of these. Does mozilla even have a realplayer plugin? Should I try a different browser? Should I try compiling the "community" version of realplayer under the my xserver instead of using the mac version?
I'd appreaciate advice from anyone who has gotten movie88 to work under any non-windows platform *cough* linux *cough*.
Also, I know this sounds crazy but I'm trying to do all of this under a dailup connection *sigh*, does anyone know if realplayer will automatically try to send me a more heavily compressed stream or just try to smash the 100kbs version down my pipe. If this is the case, is there any way around their system that keeps me from downloading the file? I'd be totally willing to let it download overnight.
The only reason I'm interested in this is because of their sizable anime selection. I've found that the only way to get the anime I want is to order it online, which is kind of expensive. I doubt any of the other movies in that service will catch on, as going to a movie theater or renting isn't all that expensive. But anime *is* all that expensive and at 50 cents (for example) for battle angle its worth my looking into, even on a 56k connection with the crappy realplayer format.
I presume everyone remembers when aol was mailing out all of those millions of cds...
Imagine AOL 8.0! Includes AOL Linux (may cause incompatibilities with old software, we suggest you "upgrade" photoshop to gimp etc)
Seriously, if they did that. And packaged it with a nice win32 installer... How many aol users would just switch over without putting any serious thought into it?
Also, if they start pushing a linux distro does anyone think they will do so on multiple architectures? It would be nice to be able to get some good use out of my old mac box that wont run osx so I can do something useful with it and still be able to run AOL... Er... I mean still let my uh... grandma run AOL... um yeah.
I am a mac user and have been for a long time. Its hard for people who aren't mac users to understand why we like the mac. Most people on slashdot can understand our aversion to windows but few know exactly why we like the platform.
Let me take some time to explain. I'm going to use os 9 for my explanation even though I use osx because the intereface design for osx is still pretty new and unrefined. One reply to the article referred negatively to the macs "flowery" interface. Although I think the interface is rather pleasing to the eye, at least on the default platinum theme, the primary force behind its design was functionality.
There is consistent well thought out design present in the interface. It is responsive and every feature present in the system software is easily accessible. The system software rarely crashes unless there is some conflict with the extensions (well os9 crashes a lot more than linux but to be fair os9 and linux were never competing on any front. osx on the other hand can hold its own ground.). Since the os vender is also the OEM all of the new hardware that runs the mac os will run it well (after a brief stint with clones apple decided that they were a bad idea for a company that makes most of its money from hardware sales).
I don't know if that made anything clear to anyone. I'm not trying to get any linux users to go buy a mac but I dislike how some linux users seem to not understand how any intelligent person could ever prefer the mac os. I mean its not like were windows users and just use it because it came with the box (although it did) and runs the latest games.
I like that someone (besides microsoft) is trying to write a be all end all language. I keep hearing about how java is the right tool for this job and c++ is the right tool for that job and objective-c is the right tool for that one (objC is my favorite tool by the way, to be fair though I don't know java or c++). I realize that these statements are true but it seems to me that they shouldn't be that way.
I think C is an example of a really well designed language that can perform a variety of functions, I mean its a language that is used for both kernels, word processors, games, whatever. Now that C is getting kind of old and is missing a lot of feature we want a bunch of language like c++, java, C#, and objective C have come up. Those languages are all object oriented to a certain extent and all offer features that make them very useful in some situations and useless in others. I only can code in one of the listed languages so I wont list the pros and cons as I would get some wrong and inspire flames from programmers who use those languages.
My point is that a language (maybe not D) that could implement all the features that a programmer would need for any kind of serious large scale program is needed. Further more that language needs to have compilers for both machine language and bytecode. Lastly the machine code, at least when compiled, needs to be almost as fast as C (which was designed to be almost as fast as assembler). I could list a million things that I think the language would need but you get the idea.
We need a language that is general purpose yet can be used for any specific problem. A language which is featuresk yet very simple. We need a language that is all these impossible things the way C is.
I don't think D is all of the things we need, not yet anyway, but it is a good expression of what as a community programmers need, a common language.
Although I think it is totally ethical to fix security holes in people software without there knowledge... ok not totally ethical, but of all the unethical things someone does in a day it's probably the least unethical.
As I was saying. Although I don't think it is too unethical to send out some kind of program to close security holes I don't see why we would do it. Viri that attack correctable security problems primarily go after Windows computers because they represent a large homogenous population. That is they have a similar problem that the human species has, a shallow gene pool. Humans do not have much genetic variation from person to person. We all have the same strengths and weaknesses which means if we are attacked by something either almost all of us will survive (except those that die by chance) or almost all of us will die (except those of us that survive by chance). Windows boxes are the same, their only variation is represented by their version and a couple of service packs. Windows boxes all have the same bugs and security holes for a virus to go after.
Anyhow at this point you are wondering why I made that stupid analogy between human genetic variation and code base variation between windows machines. Well as long as these computers exist the only real defense they have is intelligent sys admins. If smart slash dot readers fix their security problems for them every time some minor upset like this code red virus happens they will never learn to protect their machines, and if that happens we will all be in a real jam when a virus that does have a chance of bringing the flow of information on the net to a grinding halt comes around. Remember it does matter if we are all running a secure box if there are a couple million windows users DDOSing us.
Why,oh why do some people keep killing the os X "window manager" in os x from the terminal? If the Finder in os x is giving you trouble/ has frozen up the first thing NOT to do is to open up the terminal and kill its process because, like you mentioned, you will have a hard time getting the finder to start back up again. So what do you do? Force quit. *But oh no* I can't force quit from the finder *it doesn't work*. Well duh, the finder is frozen you can't ask an app that refuses to do anything to execute a command for you. That is why the dock is in a separate process than the finder. Keep a light weight application in the dock that will open quickly (like, oh say, the terminal) and when the finder freezes up launch it and use the force quit command from the apple menu to restart the finder. If the finder quits but doesn't start back up again all you have to do is click finder's icon in the *dock* (which would probably have worked too if you had killed its process from the terminal) and it will bounce in the dock while it is launching as if it were a normal application (which it is). You can do all this and guess what? All of your applications will still be, if you were online you will still be online. You can even still use all of your open apps *while the finder is off*. You can launch more apps in terminal if you want using the open command and never ever use the finder again. There are even other graphical applications that sometimes serve as replacements for the Finder. So to summarize: In os X the finder is just another app, treat it like one. Opening up a shell in the terminal is not always the best way to handle every situation. The Dock was not made a separate process so that you can kill it without losing the Finder, it was made a separate process so you can freeze up the Finder without losing the Dock (which is best thought of as a secondary method of browsing through your files).
I live in western washington and I have noticed several busy intersections where cameras have been placed on top of the horizontal poles that hold the traffic light. I assumed that it must be common practice to tape intersections but never bothered to check up on it. If it's supposed to only happen in Denver does that mean the cameras I've seen are just webcams (there's sure a lot of them for that, they're on almost every block in many areas) or have police departments in lots of areas started to do this without getting the OK first?
Gattaca was about prejudice and the responses to genetic engineering. If we start altering people genetic makeup anytime soon it will probably be through selecting which chromosomes they inherit (the method they seemed to use in Gattaca) which we will do based off of our limited knowledge of the effects of specific genes within those chromosomes. This is knowledge we gained through studies of families that had those genes, not knowledge we gained because we actually understand the machine language or even the princeples it relies on (I doubt evolution would have produced object oriented code in our genes). The end result is that we will have a bunch of people who are *probably* better off due to genetic engineering, which is what happened in Gattaca. The consequence of these improvements will be a massive loss in genetic variability, something essential to our survival of which our species already has little. I assume, since this is slashdot, that others have already brought up the issue of copyright. As bad as software and music companies are about copyright biotech companies are infinitely worse. The MPAA isn't actually responsible for anyones death but the biotech companies most certainly are. Most know that the biotech companies have jacking up the prices of medicines (aids treatments being the most infamous) everywhere and lobbying for more copyright protection to insure that foreign countries don't produce cheap versions of their products. There have also been disquieting reports that these companies have been testing dangerous drugs on large populations in other countries and fixing trials of new drugs for the FDA in this one. These are going to be the distributers of the new treatments that are going to come from genetic engineering. We already know they are only willing to sell to the rich, that they are unscrupulous to the extreme. Sure genetic engineering has a certain potential to benefit human kind, and maybe someday it will, but not until we actually understand genetics, and not until the bulk of these technologies are in the public domain.
First off Russian built stuff isn't that bad, their rocket technology rocks (yea I know its a capsule not a rocket). Second it's a *space capsule*, looks alot like the ones John Glenn and all the American astronaughts flew in, yes its useless but didn't you ever want to have a space capsule as a kid? If I had that kind of money it would be on my top 10 list of things to get (after all the computer equipment.
They should be required to only distribute it it source form so that they can't hide something in the compiler. I've heard thats been done before.
As a mac user I've enjoyed reading slashdot for a while now, even though it seems to be a heavily linux oriented site. Slashdot (and posters to threads) provides me with lots of info on a variety of stuff I'm interested in, even a mac article once in a while. It was this site that convinced my to install Darwin (the BSD that os x uses) and linuxppc on my mac system. Sometimes though it seems like the primarily linux x86 users don't *get* it...
Don't be offended because thats not my intent. The post I'm replying to and the posts that reply to it repeatedly talk about "macintosh and windows" as if they were the same os. I'm not sure how windows is even related to what were discussing. yes they are both os's with a higher user to devoper ratio than *nix os's. I'm not just emphasizing the difference between windows and macintosh because I'm one of those windows hating mac evangelists (although I am), I'm saying this becuase anyone who has used both os's and gotten to know them would never use the phase "windows and macintosh."
Mac is not "difficult to use." Yes I know shells are cool but do you know that there are alternatives? Do you realize that it is possible to use a gui input/output as much if not more than with pure text? A gui, properly configured, can use graphics to display a huge amount of data and use the keyboard to input data. Mac os (even mac os 9) is properly configured out of the box. If you know any powerusers watch them operate a mac and see how many times they reach for that mouse. Ever wondered why standard mac mouses only have one butten? Now you know.
There is scripting in mac os, its tied directly into the gui, or into the speach software (no not speach to text or any silliness like that, and ya the speach software works great... now).
OK, that I'm done arguing for os 9, lets talk about os x (now I'll admit that I am glad we are getting all that unix shell coolness). First off, *any* feature that you liked about *nix will exist on os x. you can even run your fav xwindows window manager (which will run your fav xwindow apps) and apples aqua windows *simultaineously*, check it out on sourceforge xonx project. No that involves no form of emulation, it works because under that ultra cool aqua gui is a full distro of apple's special blend of *nix called darwin (comming soon to x86, get your bleeding edge alpha today). Plus stuff you may never see working well on linux. Can you say java? Apples saying that os x has the best java support ever, of course you may be disinclined to believe praise a company says about its own products, but from what I understand java apps will be indistinguishable (from the users perspective) from other apps written in c/c++/objective-c/whatever.
Anyway I would encourage people to find out about os x/os x server (no, it still uses apache not a proprietary webserver. Yes you can also use apache on plain os x). The frontpage of the os x section of apple.com is mostly movies of the ui and other such fluff but if you dig deeper into their site and get to some of their docs (I recommend Inside Mac OS X, they also have the *only* good book on objective c for download in pdf format), you can even sign up for the apple developer connection and recieve a few free issues of mactech and you don't even have to own a mac, of most interest to linux users is www.darwinfo.org which will show you just how *nixy os x is.
If someone was offended by my mac zealotry, become a mac user for a few years and see how you start acting.
I don't actually know this language but as a mac user I've been hearing alot about objective-c (which apple bases their cocoa API in) as a dynamic alternative to c++. I heard it went out of use a long time ago because it used runtime linking which slowed things down but that apple had figured out someway to to use their hardware to speed the process up... again I don't actually *know* the language, if you want to find out more go to comp.lang.objective-c. Maybe it would be a good language to write the sims II in ;)
>How would a company enforcing a IP aggrement that was sigined voluntaraily be a violation of civil rights?
>Now, if a company implements a IP policy unilateraly, thats something different. But this was a voluntary matter.
This really isn't a question of whether the document was signed voluntarily. It comes down to whether anyone has the right to ask you to give up your rights? There are some things you are prohibited to sell (drugs, especially dangerous weapons) because allowing them to be sold would damage society as a whole and such matters are transcendant to the internal logic of an agreement (property may be 9 10th of the law but there is still that 1 10th left over). There are also some rights that no one or at least no private individual or company can ask you to give up. We all know that phrase the police use when they arrest someone "you have the right to remain silent (5th ammendment) if you choose to wave that right (by speaking) everything you say etc." The police and other governemnt institutions (for better or for worse) can and do define situations in which you give up your rights either explicitly, as above, or implicitly, as when you commit a crime and you are imprisoned thus "giving up" your right to travel (yes that is a right) your right to property (they confiscate most of the money you earn from work you do there which is why prisoners get payed only a few cents an hour).
Private institutions and individuals do not have the right to ask you to give up many of the rights mentioned above, although they often do. As an example a private company can not give you a contract to sign in which you agree to work below the minimum wage and in most situations cannot do the others things that I've mentioned government institutions can do. There are some notable exceptions to this such as confidentiality agreements which seem to be generally upheld without question, of course those often are in place to protect "intellectual property" which arguably is a right (since the last work is property it *must* be a right, mustn't it?) although there are cases in which confidentiality agreements are used to do something not protected by the constitution (ever see "the insider").
I hope you found this comment valuable.
Better today then when? Better then during the plague? Better then after the plague when low population among the working class brought the wage up? Or after that when a population explosion sent wages plummiting again? How much of that had to do with technology?
We didn't steal money from developing countries? What do the countries closest to us look like? Columbia with wars caused by the American narcotics market? Mexico with those who can afford to slipping over the border into a more prosperous country?
Sorry I turned a few question marks into a theme...
The wandering vagrants are poor no matter their location and there is deffinitely *not* enough charity to keep millions of homeless Americans fed and under a roof 365 nights a year.
Bill Gates does owe the community money if the community says he owes them money. That is what taxes are. Taxes are made by elected officials who Bill Gates has more effect over than any other individual in this country so I'd say that his situation is entirely fair, maybe more than fair...
No, socialism has never been sustained for a very long time. But neither has capitalism, so called laize faire (is that spelled right?) policies are doomed to booms and busts i.e the great depression, that is why many governments, including the US use hybrid economic policies. Yes thats right we do implement certain socialist policies, lots of them in fact. Considering the amound of effort we've put into making socialism look like a bad idea (and like I said, it is) we don't say where these ideas come from, just that they are smart.
F.Y.I. It used to be in most countries tax brackets went the opposite way they do now, the very rich were almost exempt from taxation while skilled workers and serfs payed the government's dues.
Nobody is cutting anybody's throat for anything?
Hunting and gathering was certainly not an easy way of life but don't make the mistake that the switch over to agriculture improved people's lives. Even in the modern world with machines that do that do the bulk of farmwork it is still a grueling task. Imagine the first few groups of humans which didn't even have draft animals to plow the fields with? It takes a large amount of farmland to support a single human. Life for early farmers was short and brutal, the work nearly killed them. Why then did we switch over? For stability and the ability to have larger families. Everything has it's cost, progress is never free.
Innovation in the real world is done out of neccesity, this is partially why extreme forms of *capitalism* don't have good technological progression. Notice I say "good" progression, when the wealthy consummers want something developed (from Athlon gigahertz chips to viagra, I can't think of anything beginning with Z) it will be developed, whereas when a great number of people with no buying power want something like food, affordable medicine, and *any* computer whatsoever their demand are not met. Lets not even get into lack of funding for hard science... Progress does happen but it is not the kind of progress that civilization depends on, it does not help our species survive and thus it is a perversion.
And to your last point about rich and poor being relitive: Rich can arguably be relative, I would be considered rich in somecountries and barely middleclass in others, but "poor" is universal, poor is the subsitance level, the bare minimum necesary to eat, stay out of the cold and nothing left over. Many many people are in the "poor" category, not just in far off countries but probably in your local urban center. The poor who have jobs almost always produce enough through their work to live in luxury if they were in better circumstances but they aren't because they aren't fairly compensated based on what they produce. Why? lets not get into that whole marxist means of production thing... But lets get into another socialist topic: redistributing the wealth. We *can* make the poor poor no longer by making the rich less rich. How? By doing what we've been doing to a greater extent, heavily taxing the top brackets and investing some of that money in wellfare and social security, not to mention raising the minimum wage. Give workers enough cash so they can miss a paycheck when they need to strike and pretty soon they will have negotiated better saleries, formed unions, and ended the zero sum game.