United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
is different to:
Great Britain
which itself is composed of:
England, Scotland and Wales
then there are a vast number of ways to go wrong.
Unfortunately, most foreigners get them all confused all the time (especially annoying when they confuse the UK for the others - does "United Kingdom" not suggest something, in the same way that "United States" is made up on lots of states?). Every time they do this, I refer to Texas as a country and Seattle as a state. If they don't realise their error from there, walk away.
Not being funny but surely you already had to have turned on the Xbox and inserted the DVD and pushed it back into the drive in order for things like "Play DVD" to work? That would involve either physical contact or a remote control of some kind first, no?
In which case, wouldn't a play button on the front have actually been infinitely more useful? Fair enough, for navigation, and other uses but "Play DVD" seems to be the voice-recognition equivalent of "Eject Disc". Really useful, but you're going to need to go to where a button would ordinarily be anyway to get the damn disc out.
All those people that were berating others for supporting (or even just not caring about) the GoDaddy debacle, come out in force and NOW follow your own advice.
You should now throw away anything you wear that has Adidas or Nike on it, cut your Comcast connections, stop listening to country music (okay, no great loss there), take all the Estee Lauder gear back that you bought your girlfriend for Christmas, sell any Ford you might have, start returning your photocopiers, etc.
No? Or is it actually not that important compared to moving a couple of domains around? Boycotts like that were stupid for one reason - you didn't know WHO supported it because many companies have kept absolutely silent about their stance and almost every company would have an opinion on it. Surprise, surprise a profit-making business supports the option that makes the most profit for them.
As I said back then: You have zero idea what political agenda any company is secretly supporting or not.
If you want to boycott, then you can't selectively boycott. And then you will realise that virtually all profit-making companies would support something that you would want to boycott (unless you were a shareholder).
The first "they" is a generic term referring to the fact that ALL students do work experience. The rest is really just pedantic - there's nothing "wrong" there and you want to try and make a point that doesn't exist, or even matter.
It also applies as a plural because I've had other children do *exactly* the same, with the same kinds of questions, even if I only state a particular example in this case.
You're not educating anyone, just coming across as a pompous arse (correct UK English spelling).
Most kids, especially boys, when given something like a programmable game that they can play will spend hours doing things like changing it so they get a million points, or changing it so their character looks like a penis, or changing it so that there are a million things on screen, etc.
It's actually *not* a bad way for them to learn at all. See, understand, experiment, see results of experiment, tinker more. It's how I got into programming at first - sure there was a lot of typing in listings, etc. but the coolest bit was to be able to tweak the QBASIC Gorillas game and things like that.
In my early teenage, I was ripping the graphics resources out of games like Castle of the Winds and trying to create my own version, and cracking the CD protection on Desert Strike for myself so I didn't need to keep swapping the fecking disks (I did that using MSDOS debug and a copy of Ralf Brown's Interrupt List).
But the greatest initial impetus, that hooked my entire maths class on silly graphical-calculator games I was writing, was for them to see the code, tweak it and start to understand how it worked.
I spent hours with a teenager who was working under me for his work experience (two weeks in a "real" job while they are still at school) explaining how to program and the most interesting thing was that they couldn't see how, e.g., 3D, sound, joysticks, etc. could be thought of in the same way as the numbers they manipulated in a basic dice game. Once they realised that everything from networking to 3D to AI to physics was just a matter of manipulating numbers, the "magic trick" of their console games was revealed and they wanted to replicate them.
Had never heard of it (despite using a lot of Labs stuff). Nobody I asked had ever heard of it. Wouldn't use it if I had. Nobody I asked would have used if it they had. Nothing that can't be replicated elsewhere, by the look of it.
You can bias the summary as much as you like and call it a myopic decision but I'd much rather they spent the money on something I'm likely to use or see being used at least.
If an ENTIRE Google service can pass myself, and others just as technical, by until its closure then it's quite obvious that it wasn't as good as you thought it was.
Suggesting that I tie in data-recording bracelets and god-knows-what into Google as a business model is just stupid before you even start, too, and its potential as diagnostician is about as good as Wii Fit, I imagine (and if it isn't, probably leads into all sorts of legal implications).
If you want your raw scientific data, then gather it scientifically, not letting Google get spammed with it and then expecting them to pay. Do your research, collect your own fecking data (it's not like you couldn't) and set up a similar and better service if you think it's so useful. Personally, without looking, I think either a) 200 such things already exist and are never used or b) you'd be the first and still it'd never be used.
P.S. Never heard of Microsoft Health Vault either but as far as I'm concerned they can piss all their money away on whatever gimmicks they like - that's what they've always done.
Because if they continue to provide a service, who really cares who hosts your domain?
I mean, seriously, a site with "terabytes" of traffic - who cares who their domain is with? I've certainly never bothered to look up companies / website that I use and work out who hosts their domain. It's just not worth the effort and is a pretty useless fact.
And if GD are still providing the technical service you want, then there's no business reason to stop using them. There might be a moral reason (and although I think SOPA is stupid, it isn't my country doing it, it's a purely political thing, GD are a business that supports a political motive that's to their advantage - so what? - and I'm incredibly unlikely to be affected by it, so who cares?) but in terms of hosting a domain they probably do quite well (I don't know - I don't use them). So long as their customer support and nameservers stay up, why would I care about "boycotts" that will have virtually zero effect anyway (think they changed their mind because of the "boycott" alone that's probably cost them 1% of their domains?). I'll either use them or not, but I wouldn't go to the hassle of transferring out unless they did something incredibly wrong.
At the end of the day, you've paid them too. They had to spec out nameservers and infrastructure to host your domain and you paid them to do it. Did you get a refund when you moved away from GD? If not, why not? If not, then you should have stayed with them just to cost them more money (some fraction of a minutiae of a percent, most probably). So long as the domain stays up, they did everything you wanted as per the contract you agreed to. Complaining about their external activities unrelated to the contract is like complaining that a coffee shop doesn't use FairTrade coffee - a good idea but are you REALLY going to check every cup of coffee you ever drink for it and boycott them if not?
I have an SSL cert from GoDaddy. They were the cheapest by far and they don't need to do anything for me to keep that - about the only thing they need is not to stop the OSCP server going down or repeat DigiNotar's mistakes.
I bought a 5-year cert, because at the price they were charging - hell, why not? And if their service disappoints I can name three more SSL providers that will exchange it for one of theirs free of charge for the remainder of the validity period. Until they do something drastically wrong, why would I bother to change? And I'm infinitely more likely to change because they fail to keep up their service rather than what political agenda they support.
You have zero idea what political agenda any company is secretly supporting or not. Thus it's a bit silly, unless they are doing something like whipping slaves, or beating up employees, to pretend that GD are any different to other companies following a political path for their own profit. So long as your domain stays up, do you REALLY care? If so, did you check that the company you moved to has put out a public statement that it *DOESN'T* support SOPA etc.?
You can resell it, you have to marked it as returned, and basically the seller has to take the loss of whatever they get returned. It works on the basis that returns are such a small percentage of items, of little value to someone wishing to scam them, and represent such a small fraction of their costs, and *STILL* can be resold for even the same price so long as they are clearly marked that it's not an issue.
There's nothing stopping media acceleration and OS's coexisting - they have forever. That's the best bit that I've seen of Windows 7: video driver crashes - no problem, reinitialise the hardware and start it again as if nothing had happened. That's *proper* isolation of userland code (we don't care what the hardware's doing, this is what we have on screen) from hardware (bugger, the videocard has crashed, okay, bung it back into VESA mode, reinitialise it, and when it's ready again I'll ask the software to redraw themselves). That's the whole point of an OS. What burdens the hardware takes off you are entirely inconsequential - if the OS has to rebuild the GL state, that's what it does, if it has to reupload the textures, that's what it does, if it has to do anything it ALL goes through the OS at some point and can be controlled and restarted at will, accelerated or not.
The OS is there to remove hardware from software. The software doesn't need to access the hardware directly in order to get its job done (and shouldn't be, either, hence why DirectX, OpenGL, device drivers, etc. exist as intermediate layers) and hasn't needed to since the DOS days (and even they were decades behind the Unixes of the day in that respect) and the OS doesn't need to bug out if there's a problem with a single item of non-critical hardware.
No userland code, no matter what it pokes, documented or not, when run as an ordinary user should cause the OS to stop working. It's not only stupid (that's WHY OS's were invented!) but dangerous (there's no telling what state you could get the OS into, what the side effects of that crash are, and whether it can be used to bypass the OS security).
The absolute worst is that the OS decides to terminate a program because it's being silly or things spin out of control because it gets into an infinite loop. EVEN THEN, the OS has control and can kill whatever the user needs to.
No userland program, ever, in the world, should be able to cause a kernel panic or BSOD when run as an ordinary user on a clean station. If it does, it's a poor / broken OS.
Missing the point. Point is that userland code (and the example uses Safari but what should it matter *what* program activates it - it shouldn't be possible and can probably be easily activated by any sort of direct code) creates a BSOD in Windows.
That shouldn't happen - that's the whole point of an OS.
Because it trivialises other rights, and would mean that your ability to get on the Internet trumps your ability to, say, earn money (which *isn't* a right), or have a house, or be given food when you have no money - and a million and one other things that *aren't* rights and are vastly more important than being given a connection to the Internet.
Rights are the top of the pyramid. To put things like "Internet access" up there just trivialises everything below it and there are still a million problems below it that people *should* be given before they start demanding that their ISP's *can't* cut them off even if they pirate movies.
I'd much rather see much more important things such as "the right to be fed, no matter what", "the right to free healthcare", etc. up there.
I'm a scientist in mind, if not in profession, but really... come on and put some effort into it.
I click the link.
I see the hyperbole in the first few paragraphs. Start to ignore the rhetoric and go for the linked "facts". Hit a site, linked to prominently under the heading "Informative Websites" (alongside other prominent links such as "Mind Control 101", "State Use of Schizophrenia", "Human Race Being Nonconsensually Brain-Linked", "US Army Intelligence Officer: Gang Stalking Phenomenon is Precursor to Coming Holocaust", etc.).
Whoop, whoop, amber alert, plough on.
Anyway, the link I click is centre-page, top of the fold, with the name "AIDS Controversy" (and they don't capitalise AIDS properly half the time) on the domain biblebelievers.org.au
Whoop, whoop, red alert, plough on anyway.
Read the first name on the list. Apparently a Nobel prize-winning biochemist is top of the list. Look him up on Wikipedia. Read the first two paragraphs about him which contain the following:
"Since winning the Nobel Prize, Mullis has been criticized in The New York Times for promoting ideas in areas in which he has no expertise. He has promoted AIDS denialism, climate change denial and his belief in astrology."
Right up until the last line I was prepared to give the guy a chance, at least, but I don't believe he's been misquoted at all based on the links there.
I tried to get further down the list but either the people listed were non-notable, outside their field of expertise (a mathematician... really?), misquoted, not discoverable via some quick searches or just plain loopy. There probably are a couple of sensible people in there but even being ASSOCIATED with those organisations, websites, etc. and not clearly stating their personal position somewhere I can find it is pretty damning evidence that they just don't care who quotes them or what they are associated with.
I terminated my investigation there. Please note that I've seen people claim man didn't walk on the Moon and their "evidence" got several stages further than this just by the presentation (but obviously fall down on facts later on).
If you want to quote random crap at me, at least make sure it's *feasible* random crap, not linked to complete timewasters, attention-seekers and tinfoil-hat-nutters. Any form of argument, whether religious, scientific or otherwise, needs to be able to stand alongside who it cites and quotes with pride, and to be taken seriously when doing so. Otherwise, we will just file it in the bit-bucket within literally SECONDS of checking facts.
I don't know what country you live in, but in mine you can't sign away rights. Especially employment rights. This is why HGV drivers *can't* drive for more than X amount of hours no matter what they sign, or why employers can't force you to lose membership of your union if you work for them, or why you're not just given a "Health and Safety Exemption Disclaimer" on your first day at work, etc. It is illegal for a corporation to try to take away the option to use an assigned right. They can say it, they can make you sign every bit of paper in the world, it means nothing in court.
If you have a right, it's unassignable, even if you sign it away. The signing away means nothing in itself because you *can't* forgo a right, which is why a lot of contracts remind you that your "statutory rights" are still applicable. They don't even need to say it, like saying something is "copyright" - they automatically are anyway. If someone sells you something that blows up in your face when you open it, you can still sue them under a million and one laws and rights given to you EVEN IF you agreed to the EULA that said it will maim you when you open it.
Some people, it seems, think that because something looks legal and binding that it somehow is, or that signing that you agreed to it means a court can't just say "No, sorry, doesn't work like that". Otherwise, you would have no rights AT ALL. Just because I sign a contract saying that my employer can whip me if I don't perform well enough at my job (because otherwise they wouldn't let me HAVE the job), doesn't mean it would actually be LEGAL for them to do so or that it's not ILLEGAL to have that clause in there in the first place. And just because a prostitute signs a bit of paper with her pimp that says she has to has sex with him for the next 20 years doesn't mean it's at all binding - the contract in itself is invalid and illegal whether it exists or was signed consensually or not.
That's how the law system works - there are hierarchies of the law and, sensibly, at the top are fundamental rights (and this is why it's STUPID to talk of things like Internet access becoming a "right", even in the modern age). Of course it's a money-spinner, but only if you're stupid and don't understand the law yourself. Even countries have to abide by the laws and rights they agree to - ask the UK about their opinion of the EU Court of Human Rights that overrides just about every "contract"/idea they come up with to screw the public sector, taxpayer, etc. for example.
My own country banned prisoners being able to vote and because it infringed on a fundamental right given to them, it was overruled. You can make all the laws you want, but it doesn't infringe on your rights. It'll be hassle, cost money, maybe cost you vast portions of your life to fight it, but it's still a right.
Sony will almost certainly lose if they don't forfeit early. Some things you just cannot sign away so easily, and some things you *can* sign away but only in certain ways (i.e. a blanket "can not sue" on a consumer product is a bit ridiculous, legally, but might apply if they were to narrow the terms and negotiate a business deal with a corporation, for example). The problem is, because people are just that stupid to think that it was in any way legally binding, the lawyers will be very rich before they do
Why should Google provide *ANYTHING* to *ANYONE*? You seem to be under the impression that a Google account is somehow a right, no matter what ToS you disagree with or what age you are.
You have picked up the exact opposite of my meaning. The people who should be getting *THE SAME* rates as everyone else are those that can't afford to have huge bills or expensive computers or Internet connections in order to manage their electricity (they may even have pre-pay meters, for example).
And what about blind users? Braille statements cost a fortune. What about deaf phone users? Textphone services cost a fortune too. What about users who can only communicate by letter or via a third party?
The people who COST the most to support are precisely those who should be getting the same rates and not penalised for not using the Internet. It doesn't happen but there's no reason to discriminate and either remove facilities for them or make them pay more just because they can't use the Internet. In some countries that's even considered illegal because of Disability Discrimination.
The elderly, the infirm, those with mental illness, those requiring carers, those with disabilities of one type or another are precisely the people who can't / won't use the Internet, require specialist investment by large utility companies AND should be getting the same rates as us or (in some cases) cheaper.
Those on genuine benefits because of low income CANNOT afford a computer and Internet connection unless it's subsidised by the government, and that's rare, and that means they CAN'T take advantage of "Internet-only" rates. Which is why they need the same rates as everyone else offered to them by phone or by post.
The people who demand more aren't just the strong-willed. There's a cost to dealing with people who are outside the norm and those who are outside the norm often struggle with everyday utilities.
Maybe, and I'm just guessing here, they just didn't WANT to access the net. And they almost certainly didn't want to be REQUIRED to access the net to get some services, for example. Personally speaking, we're only the FIRST generation to grow up with the Internet. There's one generation below us now that are the second. Everyone else has either had to learn very quickly or accept that they are past the stage where learning computers is easy for them (30 years ago, it was the exclusive domain of the nerd - and not everyone's a nerd).
Maybe, just maybe, they don't give a shit about the Internet especially when it's being shoved down their throats in preference to a) talking to human beings at good companies, b) doing your own homework instead of relying on an "independent" price comparison site and c) spending hundreds of pounds on something they'll never learn to use.
The best utility deals should not be only online, for a start. The cost of online vs paper statement is literally pence, no matter what the industry. And I won't use any internet-only business myself because it means I *can't* ring them up or send them a letter and get my problem sorted (my personal success rate of problem resolution by phone is about 90%, in person about 99%, by email about 10%). And if an older person phones up a utility company, they should still be given a fecking good deal whether or not they signed up online or not. In my country, the law is clamping down on things like that for precisely those reasons - the people most likely to not be able to take advantage of Internet deals are *EXACTLY* the kind of people who should be getting those rates.
Those at the poorest end of society are the ones worrying over 50p in the electricity meter, not which £1000 laptop they'll buy or whether their £20/month internet connection can save them £1.99 on statement delivery from their bank. But it's not about those people, it's about people who don't WANT to use the Internet for everything.
Personally, I *do* have Internet access to absolutely everything I need, and even did all but one present of my Christmas shopping online this year, but there are some things where I *refuse* to have a good service that serves a purpose replaced with a faceless corporate website.
My bank still want me to change to completely paperless (no thanks, I like to keep paper evidence and it'll cost me the same to print out my statements as it will them to print and post them to me - even though I check them online all the time), and don't want me to talk to humans in a branch (because they give me what I want/need most of the time). My car insurers need to have a phone line anyway so I can report accidents. My girlfriend will be getting a present bought *IN PERSON* because you can't buy jewellery over the Internet and know what you're getting (I would argue the same for clothing). In work, we still fax official orders because it has more legal weight. I used to fill my tax return in on the official forms and only ever submitted online once (for the final return I had to send when I stopped being self-employed, and even that I did on paper first to check their calculations).
Not everything works over the Internet, most importantly when things go wrong. When things go wrong, the website of the company in question is absolutely 100% useless, even if they are an ISP or hosting company (in some cases, even more so if you can't get online!). Give me the phone number of some middle-manager, though, and I'll have the problem sorted in minutes. The Internet is nothing more than a convenient shield from your customers and some customers won't accept that.
And some people, because of the way they work, just don't want to use / trust the Internet. In time, they will be obsoleted and everyone will start to use it from a young age, but until that time you have to accept that giving people *access* to the Internet is wonderful but you can't FORCE them to use it for everything. And, in fact, you'll learn that as you deal with more and more companies, it's the ones that provide a personal, human service that give you the most return on your custom, not the faceless corporate entities that hid behind a contact form and a privacy policy.
I think you miss the subtext that some of us have. If you HAVE to enable PGO in order to get a decent speed out of your binary in the first place (and that's the ONLY way you think you get that increase), then your code isn't that great in the first place (i.e. you are using lots of inefficient methods on the most-used paths of your code).
The problem isn't DIRECTLY related to the size/quality of the codebase but the fact that they don't even CONSIDER turning off PGO because of the performance drop means they have no idea how to tune the underlying code without using PGO (and PGO-optimised code will NOT necessarily result in the best possible code for any particular user at all!)
Then I find that more worrying than anything. The firefox code is literally so bad that not only do they have to do profile-guided optimisation but must have an optimal compiler with all the options turned up in order to get it to run like the stunned sloth that it does on my systems?
It just reeks of horrendous code. Makes me wonder what the hell all those other large open-source projects are doing that's so much better than the Firefox code that they can outperform it using "only" the sub-optimal gcc.
What, exactly, would be wrong with just using gcc for all platforms, like an awful lot of projects do? What's VC++ doing for Firefox that can't be done any other way?
1) What the hell are you doing with your code to be that large? 2) What the fuck is your linker doing to do that? 3) Why the hell didn't you see this coming and prune LONG before you hit the 3Gb limit if you already hit the 2Gb limit once already? 4) What's the problem with compiling on 64-bit computers only, so long as you're still building and distributing a 32-bit version? Nobody's ever claimed that everyone who runs the programs should be able to compile it on the same hardware. 5) Although I'm sure there are many projects that honestly need that amount of RAM to compile, closed or open-source, I can't believe that Firefox is really one of those. I wouldn't expect Windows to build on a 4Gb machine, for instance, but I would expect to be able to build 99% of it on such a machine and have it dynamically load the parts as needed (so the program is actually built up of many small, independent modules distributed as, say, DLL's and a small executable that loads them - each could easily compile on 2Gb systems).
You're honestly telling me that Firefox is more complicated and needs more memory to compile than, say, LibreOffice? The Linux kernel? Ghostscript? KDE? I call bullshit. Crappy code modularisation, or crappy compiler/linker. In this case, it looks like both.
So I should just leave all that spam on the page, redirecting the user to god-knows-what via those domain-hunters that grab expired domains, exposing every Wikipedia user who views the link to any sort of monstrosity until someone can recreate that external site, or find equivalent content?
Rather than a one line, commented, edit that can be reverted in a second if I'm wrong?
What about the nothing-but-spam links?
It's "article management" like that that's making WP the mess it is.
So? They could upload their entire catalogue to an open website, it doesn't mean that you have *permission* to copy it, view it, burn it to a DVD - that's not how copyright licensing works.
I can request an install disk of a site-licensed piece of software from a company - it doesn't mean they have "given" me a license to use it on my entire site. The license and content are entirely separate and without the license, the content cannot be legally used. Similarly, I can read a book and even own a copy, it doesn't mean I have permission to broadcast it across Times Square.
Also, we don't know that they uploaded anything. And if they did, we don't know that it was more than the same block over and over again and not a usable copy of the work. And if they did give everyone on the swarm a complete copy, it still doesn't mean they are licensed to view it, especially if the nature of the protocol requires that to check on infringement of their own work.
It's their work. They can upload it to YouTube if they want and hide it in a private account. It does *NOT* mean that even YouTube itself would get rights to view or distribute it unless contracts that were agreed to said so. With YouTube you have an EULA concerning uploads. With torrents you don't. No licence agreement does not mean "public domain" or even "for your personal use only". It still means "no unauthorised use" by default under copyright law.
I've never struggled with markup and the editor wasn't a problem. Lowering the barrier to entry just means there'll be more vandalised entries and badly formatted text.
But the real reason nobody contributes is because of the perceived hierarchy and complete lack of human input at times. If I upload a photo, I get 10 or 20 robots written by random people crawl all over it demanding copyright tags etc. and spamming my personal page with their demands.
Every time someone writes a bot that believes my previous tags to be inadequate, I get spammed again and I get my images forcibly removed. There's no human control over it, and the bots are basically allowed to run riot, so even if it was perfectly acceptable when it was first uploaded, and you commented on the exact origins / rights assignment in order to prevent future problems, the next bot that doesn't spot newly-introduced-tag-X on it will just spam you and delete it.
Every time you edit an article, someone who thinks they own the article will just stomp all over it, even if your changes are minor and cosmetic and doing things like removing broken links, changing incorrect spelling, etc. God forbid you add to an article that was all but void of content with some personal knowledge and don't back it up. Surely *something* without citations in an article that's already been created and allowed to remain and even linked to is better than a page that has zero information at all, the citations can come later when people flesh out the article.
And, just occasionally, you'll write an article that will be wiped out as "non-notable", even if it's about a TV program, or a book that's selling millions of copies, or a computer game from the 80's where all its peers are already have their own articles (and the publishing house was famous and their article still sits with a broken link because it mentions that game and there's no article for it).
The problem of Wikipedia is *not* the interface. You *want* people to actually have a deal of experience with editing before they start changing prominent articles. The problem with Wikipedia is that people are allowed to discourage other contributors FAR TOO EASILY, even if their "corrections" are rolled back later.
What's needed is the same kind of system as the Project Gutenberg proofreading site has. Everyone has a login. You have to proofread the text. As you are doing so, your changes are also double-proofread by someone else in another round (there's usually 3-4 rounds). As you gain experience and your edits are "confirmed" (or at least not changed) by other people, you rise through the ranks and it's HARD to get to the point where you have prominent control over the article in question. There are no bots. There are no humans with zero experience of the wiki changing your perfectly-spelled text to junk in the process. There are no vandals that go unpunished. And it works on the same mass scale.
Wikipedia was a brilliant idea and I put a lot of work into contributing. A year later, every careful change I had made was deleted or removed, and that information never found its way back on - those articles are just empty shells now and some were deleted for not having any content after some rogue editor's culling! I haven't contributed since. Show me that the system works and people's hard work is wiped out by a bot written by a schoolkid, and I'll come back. Until then, fancy text editors mean nothing.
"There's always an Alien Battle Cruiser...or a Korlian Death Ray, or...an intergalactic plague about to wipe out life on this planet, and the only thing that lets people get on with their hopeful little lives is that they don't know about it."
I wouldn't be worried about vacuum instability as a cause of death, I'd be more interested in it as an energy source, personally. But then we're still talking huge amounts of pie-in-the-sky concepts here.
Slashdot Mirror
If you cannot understand that the:
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
is different to:
Great Britain
which itself is composed of:
England, Scotland and Wales
then there are a vast number of ways to go wrong.
Unfortunately, most foreigners get them all confused all the time (especially annoying when they confuse the UK for the others - does "United Kingdom" not suggest something, in the same way that "United States" is made up on lots of states?). Every time they do this, I refer to Texas as a country and Seattle as a state. If they don't realise their error from there, walk away.
Don't even get me started on counties, either....
Not being funny but surely you already had to have turned on the Xbox and inserted the DVD and pushed it back into the drive in order for things like "Play DVD" to work? That would involve either physical contact or a remote control of some kind first, no?
In which case, wouldn't a play button on the front have actually been infinitely more useful? Fair enough, for navigation, and other uses but "Play DVD" seems to be the voice-recognition equivalent of "Eject Disc". Really useful, but you're going to need to go to where a button would ordinarily be anyway to get the damn disc out.
All those people that were berating others for supporting (or even just not caring about) the GoDaddy debacle, come out in force and NOW follow your own advice.
You should now throw away anything you wear that has Adidas or Nike on it, cut your Comcast connections, stop listening to country music (okay, no great loss there), take all the Estee Lauder gear back that you bought your girlfriend for Christmas, sell any Ford you might have, start returning your photocopiers, etc.
No? Or is it actually not that important compared to moving a couple of domains around? Boycotts like that were stupid for one reason - you didn't know WHO supported it because many companies have kept absolutely silent about their stance and almost every company would have an opinion on it. Surprise, surprise a profit-making business supports the option that makes the most profit for them.
As I said back then: You have zero idea what political agenda any company is secretly supporting or not.
If you want to boycott, then you can't selectively boycott. And then you will realise that virtually all profit-making companies would support something that you would want to boycott (unless you were a shareholder).
The first "they" is a generic term referring to the fact that ALL students do work experience. The rest is really just pedantic - there's nothing "wrong" there and you want to try and make a point that doesn't exist, or even matter.
It also applies as a plural because I've had other children do *exactly* the same, with the same kinds of questions, even if I only state a particular example in this case.
You're not educating anyone, just coming across as a pompous arse (correct UK English spelling).
Most kids, especially boys, when given something like a programmable game that they can play will spend hours doing things like changing it so they get a million points, or changing it so their character looks like a penis, or changing it so that there are a million things on screen, etc.
It's actually *not* a bad way for them to learn at all. See, understand, experiment, see results of experiment, tinker more. It's how I got into programming at first - sure there was a lot of typing in listings, etc. but the coolest bit was to be able to tweak the QBASIC Gorillas game and things like that.
In my early teenage, I was ripping the graphics resources out of games like Castle of the Winds and trying to create my own version, and cracking the CD protection on Desert Strike for myself so I didn't need to keep swapping the fecking disks (I did that using MSDOS debug and a copy of Ralf Brown's Interrupt List).
But the greatest initial impetus, that hooked my entire maths class on silly graphical-calculator games I was writing, was for them to see the code, tweak it and start to understand how it worked.
I spent hours with a teenager who was working under me for his work experience (two weeks in a "real" job while they are still at school) explaining how to program and the most interesting thing was that they couldn't see how, e.g., 3D, sound, joysticks, etc. could be thought of in the same way as the numbers they manipulated in a basic dice game. Once they realised that everything from networking to 3D to AI to physics was just a matter of manipulating numbers, the "magic trick" of their console games was revealed and they wanted to replicate them.
Had never heard of it (despite using a lot of Labs stuff).
Nobody I asked had ever heard of it.
Wouldn't use it if I had.
Nobody I asked would have used if it they had.
Nothing that can't be replicated elsewhere, by the look of it.
You can bias the summary as much as you like and call it a myopic decision but I'd much rather they spent the money on something I'm likely to use or see being used at least.
If an ENTIRE Google service can pass myself, and others just as technical, by until its closure then it's quite obvious that it wasn't as good as you thought it was.
Suggesting that I tie in data-recording bracelets and god-knows-what into Google as a business model is just stupid before you even start, too, and its potential as diagnostician is about as good as Wii Fit, I imagine (and if it isn't, probably leads into all sorts of legal implications).
If you want your raw scientific data, then gather it scientifically, not letting Google get spammed with it and then expecting them to pay. Do your research, collect your own fecking data (it's not like you couldn't) and set up a similar and better service if you think it's so useful. Personally, without looking, I think either a) 200 such things already exist and are never used or b) you'd be the first and still it'd never be used.
P.S. Never heard of Microsoft Health Vault either but as far as I'm concerned they can piss all their money away on whatever gimmicks they like - that's what they've always done.
Because if they continue to provide a service, who really cares who hosts your domain?
I mean, seriously, a site with "terabytes" of traffic - who cares who their domain is with? I've certainly never bothered to look up companies / website that I use and work out who hosts their domain. It's just not worth the effort and is a pretty useless fact.
And if GD are still providing the technical service you want, then there's no business reason to stop using them. There might be a moral reason (and although I think SOPA is stupid, it isn't my country doing it, it's a purely political thing, GD are a business that supports a political motive that's to their advantage - so what? - and I'm incredibly unlikely to be affected by it, so who cares?) but in terms of hosting a domain they probably do quite well (I don't know - I don't use them). So long as their customer support and nameservers stay up, why would I care about "boycotts" that will have virtually zero effect anyway (think they changed their mind because of the "boycott" alone that's probably cost them 1% of their domains?). I'll either use them or not, but I wouldn't go to the hassle of transferring out unless they did something incredibly wrong.
At the end of the day, you've paid them too. They had to spec out nameservers and infrastructure to host your domain and you paid them to do it. Did you get a refund when you moved away from GD? If not, why not? If not, then you should have stayed with them just to cost them more money (some fraction of a minutiae of a percent, most probably). So long as the domain stays up, they did everything you wanted as per the contract you agreed to. Complaining about their external activities unrelated to the contract is like complaining that a coffee shop doesn't use FairTrade coffee - a good idea but are you REALLY going to check every cup of coffee you ever drink for it and boycott them if not?
I have an SSL cert from GoDaddy. They were the cheapest by far and they don't need to do anything for me to keep that - about the only thing they need is not to stop the OSCP server going down or repeat DigiNotar's mistakes.
I bought a 5-year cert, because at the price they were charging - hell, why not? And if their service disappoints I can name three more SSL providers that will exchange it for one of theirs free of charge for the remainder of the validity period. Until they do something drastically wrong, why would I bother to change? And I'm infinitely more likely to change because they fail to keep up their service rather than what political agenda they support.
You have zero idea what political agenda any company is secretly supporting or not. Thus it's a bit silly, unless they are doing something like whipping slaves, or beating up employees, to pretend that GD are any different to other companies following a political path for their own profit. So long as your domain stays up, do you REALLY care? If so, did you check that the company you moved to has put out a public statement that it *DOESN'T* support SOPA etc.?
Same in the UK.
You can resell it, you have to marked it as returned, and basically the seller has to take the loss of whatever they get returned. It works on the basis that returns are such a small percentage of items, of little value to someone wishing to scam them, and represent such a small fraction of their costs, and *STILL* can be resold for even the same price so long as they are clearly marked that it's not an issue.
Go read any EU trading law. It's all in there.
There's nothing stopping media acceleration and OS's coexisting - they have forever. That's the best bit that I've seen of Windows 7: video driver crashes - no problem, reinitialise the hardware and start it again as if nothing had happened. That's *proper* isolation of userland code (we don't care what the hardware's doing, this is what we have on screen) from hardware (bugger, the videocard has crashed, okay, bung it back into VESA mode, reinitialise it, and when it's ready again I'll ask the software to redraw themselves). That's the whole point of an OS. What burdens the hardware takes off you are entirely inconsequential - if the OS has to rebuild the GL state, that's what it does, if it has to reupload the textures, that's what it does, if it has to do anything it ALL goes through the OS at some point and can be controlled and restarted at will, accelerated or not.
The OS is there to remove hardware from software. The software doesn't need to access the hardware directly in order to get its job done (and shouldn't be, either, hence why DirectX, OpenGL, device drivers, etc. exist as intermediate layers) and hasn't needed to since the DOS days (and even they were decades behind the Unixes of the day in that respect) and the OS doesn't need to bug out if there's a problem with a single item of non-critical hardware.
No userland code, no matter what it pokes, documented or not, when run as an ordinary user should cause the OS to stop working. It's not only stupid (that's WHY OS's were invented!) but dangerous (there's no telling what state you could get the OS into, what the side effects of that crash are, and whether it can be used to bypass the OS security).
The absolute worst is that the OS decides to terminate a program because it's being silly or things spin out of control because it gets into an infinite loop. EVEN THEN, the OS has control and can kill whatever the user needs to.
No userland program, ever, in the world, should be able to cause a kernel panic or BSOD when run as an ordinary user on a clean station. If it does, it's a poor / broken OS.
Missing the point. Point is that userland code (and the example uses Safari but what should it matter *what* program activates it - it shouldn't be possible and can probably be easily activated by any sort of direct code) creates a BSOD in Windows.
That shouldn't happen - that's the whole point of an OS.
Because it trivialises other rights, and would mean that your ability to get on the Internet trumps your ability to, say, earn money (which *isn't* a right), or have a house, or be given food when you have no money - and a million and one other things that *aren't* rights and are vastly more important than being given a connection to the Internet.
Rights are the top of the pyramid. To put things like "Internet access" up there just trivialises everything below it and there are still a million problems below it that people *should* be given before they start demanding that their ISP's *can't* cut them off even if they pirate movies.
I'd much rather see much more important things such as "the right to be fed, no matter what", "the right to free healthcare", etc. up there.
I'm a scientist in mind, if not in profession, but really... come on and put some effort into it.
I click the link.
I see the hyperbole in the first few paragraphs. Start to ignore the rhetoric and go for the linked "facts". Hit a site, linked to prominently under the heading "Informative Websites" (alongside other prominent links such as "Mind Control 101", "State Use of Schizophrenia", "Human Race Being Nonconsensually Brain-Linked", "US Army Intelligence Officer: Gang Stalking Phenomenon is Precursor to Coming Holocaust", etc.).
Whoop, whoop, amber alert, plough on.
Anyway, the link I click is centre-page, top of the fold, with the name "AIDS Controversy" (and they don't capitalise AIDS properly half the time) on the domain biblebelievers.org.au
Whoop, whoop, red alert, plough on anyway.
Read the first name on the list. Apparently a Nobel prize-winning biochemist is top of the list. Look him up on Wikipedia. Read the first two paragraphs about him which contain the following:
"Since winning the Nobel Prize, Mullis has been criticized in The New York Times for promoting ideas in areas in which he has no expertise. He has promoted AIDS denialism, climate change denial and his belief in astrology."
Right up until the last line I was prepared to give the guy a chance, at least, but I don't believe he's been misquoted at all based on the links there.
I tried to get further down the list but either the people listed were non-notable, outside their field of expertise (a mathematician... really?), misquoted, not discoverable via some quick searches or just plain loopy. There probably are a couple of sensible people in there but even being ASSOCIATED with those organisations, websites, etc. and not clearly stating their personal position somewhere I can find it is pretty damning evidence that they just don't care who quotes them or what they are associated with.
I terminated my investigation there. Please note that I've seen people claim man didn't walk on the Moon and their "evidence" got several stages further than this just by the presentation (but obviously fall down on facts later on).
If you want to quote random crap at me, at least make sure it's *feasible* random crap, not linked to complete timewasters, attention-seekers and tinfoil-hat-nutters. Any form of argument, whether religious, scientific or otherwise, needs to be able to stand alongside who it cites and quotes with pride, and to be taken seriously when doing so. Otherwise, we will just file it in the bit-bucket within literally SECONDS of checking facts.
I don't know what country you live in, but in mine you can't sign away rights. Especially employment rights. This is why HGV drivers *can't* drive for more than X amount of hours no matter what they sign, or why employers can't force you to lose membership of your union if you work for them, or why you're not just given a "Health and Safety Exemption Disclaimer" on your first day at work, etc. It is illegal for a corporation to try to take away the option to use an assigned right. They can say it, they can make you sign every bit of paper in the world, it means nothing in court.
If you have a right, it's unassignable, even if you sign it away. The signing away means nothing in itself because you *can't* forgo a right, which is why a lot of contracts remind you that your "statutory rights" are still applicable. They don't even need to say it, like saying something is "copyright" - they automatically are anyway. If someone sells you something that blows up in your face when you open it, you can still sue them under a million and one laws and rights given to you EVEN IF you agreed to the EULA that said it will maim you when you open it.
Some people, it seems, think that because something looks legal and binding that it somehow is, or that signing that you agreed to it means a court can't just say "No, sorry, doesn't work like that". Otherwise, you would have no rights AT ALL. Just because I sign a contract saying that my employer can whip me if I don't perform well enough at my job (because otherwise they wouldn't let me HAVE the job), doesn't mean it would actually be LEGAL for them to do so or that it's not ILLEGAL to have that clause in there in the first place. And just because a prostitute signs a bit of paper with her pimp that says she has to has sex with him for the next 20 years doesn't mean it's at all binding - the contract in itself is invalid and illegal whether it exists or was signed consensually or not.
That's how the law system works - there are hierarchies of the law and, sensibly, at the top are fundamental rights (and this is why it's STUPID to talk of things like Internet access becoming a "right", even in the modern age). Of course it's a money-spinner, but only if you're stupid and don't understand the law yourself. Even countries have to abide by the laws and rights they agree to - ask the UK about their opinion of the EU Court of Human Rights that overrides just about every "contract"/idea they come up with to screw the public sector, taxpayer, etc. for example.
My own country banned prisoners being able to vote and because it infringed on a fundamental right given to them, it was overruled. You can make all the laws you want, but it doesn't infringe on your rights. It'll be hassle, cost money, maybe cost you vast portions of your life to fight it, but it's still a right.
Sony will almost certainly lose if they don't forfeit early. Some things you just cannot sign away so easily, and some things you *can* sign away but only in certain ways (i.e. a blanket "can not sue" on a consumer product is a bit ridiculous, legally, but might apply if they were to narrow the terms and negotiate a business deal with a corporation, for example). The problem is, because people are just that stupid to think that it was in any way legally binding, the lawyers will be very rich before they do
Why should Google provide *ANYTHING* to *ANYONE*? You seem to be under the impression that a Google account is somehow a right, no matter what ToS you disagree with or what age you are.
+1 for Red Dwarf reference.
-1 for spelling the wrong word for "they're"
You have picked up the exact opposite of my meaning. The people who should be getting *THE SAME* rates as everyone else are those that can't afford to have huge bills or expensive computers or Internet connections in order to manage their electricity (they may even have pre-pay meters, for example).
And what about blind users? Braille statements cost a fortune. What about deaf phone users? Textphone services cost a fortune too. What about users who can only communicate by letter or via a third party?
The people who COST the most to support are precisely those who should be getting the same rates and not penalised for not using the Internet. It doesn't happen but there's no reason to discriminate and either remove facilities for them or make them pay more just because they can't use the Internet. In some countries that's even considered illegal because of Disability Discrimination.
The elderly, the infirm, those with mental illness, those requiring carers, those with disabilities of one type or another are precisely the people who can't / won't use the Internet, require specialist investment by large utility companies AND should be getting the same rates as us or (in some cases) cheaper.
Those on genuine benefits because of low income CANNOT afford a computer and Internet connection unless it's subsidised by the government, and that's rare, and that means they CAN'T take advantage of "Internet-only" rates. Which is why they need the same rates as everyone else offered to them by phone or by post.
The people who demand more aren't just the strong-willed. There's a cost to dealing with people who are outside the norm and those who are outside the norm often struggle with everyday utilities.
Maybe, and I'm just guessing here, they just didn't WANT to access the net. And they almost certainly didn't want to be REQUIRED to access the net to get some services, for example. Personally speaking, we're only the FIRST generation to grow up with the Internet. There's one generation below us now that are the second. Everyone else has either had to learn very quickly or accept that they are past the stage where learning computers is easy for them (30 years ago, it was the exclusive domain of the nerd - and not everyone's a nerd).
Maybe, just maybe, they don't give a shit about the Internet especially when it's being shoved down their throats in preference to a) talking to human beings at good companies, b) doing your own homework instead of relying on an "independent" price comparison site and c) spending hundreds of pounds on something they'll never learn to use.
The best utility deals should not be only online, for a start. The cost of online vs paper statement is literally pence, no matter what the industry. And I won't use any internet-only business myself because it means I *can't* ring them up or send them a letter and get my problem sorted (my personal success rate of problem resolution by phone is about 90%, in person about 99%, by email about 10%). And if an older person phones up a utility company, they should still be given a fecking good deal whether or not they signed up online or not. In my country, the law is clamping down on things like that for precisely those reasons - the people most likely to not be able to take advantage of Internet deals are *EXACTLY* the kind of people who should be getting those rates.
Those at the poorest end of society are the ones worrying over 50p in the electricity meter, not which £1000 laptop they'll buy or whether their £20/month internet connection can save them £1.99 on statement delivery from their bank. But it's not about those people, it's about people who don't WANT to use the Internet for everything.
Personally, I *do* have Internet access to absolutely everything I need, and even did all but one present of my Christmas shopping online this year, but there are some things where I *refuse* to have a good service that serves a purpose replaced with a faceless corporate website.
My bank still want me to change to completely paperless (no thanks, I like to keep paper evidence and it'll cost me the same to print out my statements as it will them to print and post them to me - even though I check them online all the time), and don't want me to talk to humans in a branch (because they give me what I want/need most of the time). My car insurers need to have a phone line anyway so I can report accidents. My girlfriend will be getting a present bought *IN PERSON* because you can't buy jewellery over the Internet and know what you're getting (I would argue the same for clothing). In work, we still fax official orders because it has more legal weight. I used to fill my tax return in on the official forms and only ever submitted online once (for the final return I had to send when I stopped being self-employed, and even that I did on paper first to check their calculations).
Not everything works over the Internet, most importantly when things go wrong. When things go wrong, the website of the company in question is absolutely 100% useless, even if they are an ISP or hosting company (in some cases, even more so if you can't get online!). Give me the phone number of some middle-manager, though, and I'll have the problem sorted in minutes. The Internet is nothing more than a convenient shield from your customers and some customers won't accept that.
And some people, because of the way they work, just don't want to use / trust the Internet. In time, they will be obsoleted and everyone will start to use it from a young age, but until that time you have to accept that giving people *access* to the Internet is wonderful but you can't FORCE them to use it for everything. And, in fact, you'll learn that as you deal with more and more companies, it's the ones that provide a personal, human service that give you the most return on your custom, not the faceless corporate entities that hid behind a contact form and a privacy policy.
I think you miss the subtext that some of us have. If you HAVE to enable PGO in order to get a decent speed out of your binary in the first place (and that's the ONLY way you think you get that increase), then your code isn't that great in the first place (i.e. you are using lots of inefficient methods on the most-used paths of your code).
The problem isn't DIRECTLY related to the size/quality of the codebase but the fact that they don't even CONSIDER turning off PGO because of the performance drop means they have no idea how to tune the underlying code without using PGO (and PGO-optimised code will NOT necessarily result in the best possible code for any particular user at all!)
Then I find that more worrying than anything. The firefox code is literally so bad that not only do they have to do profile-guided optimisation but must have an optimal compiler with all the options turned up in order to get it to run like the stunned sloth that it does on my systems?
It just reeks of horrendous code. Makes me wonder what the hell all those other large open-source projects are doing that's so much better than the Firefox code that they can outperform it using "only" the sub-optimal gcc.
What, exactly, would be wrong with just using gcc for all platforms, like an awful lot of projects do? What's VC++ doing for Firefox that can't be done any other way?
1) What the hell are you doing with your code to be that large?
2) What the fuck is your linker doing to do that?
3) Why the hell didn't you see this coming and prune LONG before you hit the 3Gb limit if you already hit the 2Gb limit once already?
4) What's the problem with compiling on 64-bit computers only, so long as you're still building and distributing a 32-bit version? Nobody's ever claimed that everyone who runs the programs should be able to compile it on the same hardware.
5) Although I'm sure there are many projects that honestly need that amount of RAM to compile, closed or open-source, I can't believe that Firefox is really one of those. I wouldn't expect Windows to build on a 4Gb machine, for instance, but I would expect to be able to build 99% of it on such a machine and have it dynamically load the parts as needed (so the program is actually built up of many small, independent modules distributed as, say, DLL's and a small executable that loads them - each could easily compile on 2Gb systems).
You're honestly telling me that Firefox is more complicated and needs more memory to compile than, say, LibreOffice? The Linux kernel? Ghostscript? KDE? I call bullshit. Crappy code modularisation, or crappy compiler/linker. In this case, it looks like both.
So I should just leave all that spam on the page, redirecting the user to god-knows-what via those domain-hunters that grab expired domains, exposing every Wikipedia user who views the link to any sort of monstrosity until someone can recreate that external site, or find equivalent content?
Rather than a one line, commented, edit that can be reverted in a second if I'm wrong?
What about the nothing-but-spam links?
It's "article management" like that that's making WP the mess it is.
So? They could upload their entire catalogue to an open website, it doesn't mean that you have *permission* to copy it, view it, burn it to a DVD - that's not how copyright licensing works.
I can request an install disk of a site-licensed piece of software from a company - it doesn't mean they have "given" me a license to use it on my entire site. The license and content are entirely separate and without the license, the content cannot be legally used. Similarly, I can read a book and even own a copy, it doesn't mean I have permission to broadcast it across Times Square.
Also, we don't know that they uploaded anything. And if they did, we don't know that it was more than the same block over and over again and not a usable copy of the work. And if they did give everyone on the swarm a complete copy, it still doesn't mean they are licensed to view it, especially if the nature of the protocol requires that to check on infringement of their own work.
It's their work. They can upload it to YouTube if they want and hide it in a private account. It does *NOT* mean that even YouTube itself would get rights to view or distribute it unless contracts that were agreed to said so. With YouTube you have an EULA concerning uploads. With torrents you don't. No licence agreement does not mean "public domain" or even "for your personal use only". It still means "no unauthorised use" by default under copyright law.
I've never struggled with markup and the editor wasn't a problem. Lowering the barrier to entry just means there'll be more vandalised entries and badly formatted text.
But the real reason nobody contributes is because of the perceived hierarchy and complete lack of human input at times. If I upload a photo, I get 10 or 20 robots written by random people crawl all over it demanding copyright tags etc. and spamming my personal page with their demands.
Every time someone writes a bot that believes my previous tags to be inadequate, I get spammed again and I get my images forcibly removed. There's no human control over it, and the bots are basically allowed to run riot, so even if it was perfectly acceptable when it was first uploaded, and you commented on the exact origins / rights assignment in order to prevent future problems, the next bot that doesn't spot newly-introduced-tag-X on it will just spam you and delete it.
Every time you edit an article, someone who thinks they own the article will just stomp all over it, even if your changes are minor and cosmetic and doing things like removing broken links, changing incorrect spelling, etc. God forbid you add to an article that was all but void of content with some personal knowledge and don't back it up. Surely *something* without citations in an article that's already been created and allowed to remain and even linked to is better than a page that has zero information at all, the citations can come later when people flesh out the article.
And, just occasionally, you'll write an article that will be wiped out as "non-notable", even if it's about a TV program, or a book that's selling millions of copies, or a computer game from the 80's where all its peers are already have their own articles (and the publishing house was famous and their article still sits with a broken link because it mentions that game and there's no article for it).
The problem of Wikipedia is *not* the interface. You *want* people to actually have a deal of experience with editing before they start changing prominent articles. The problem with Wikipedia is that people are allowed to discourage other contributors FAR TOO EASILY, even if their "corrections" are rolled back later.
What's needed is the same kind of system as the Project Gutenberg proofreading site has. Everyone has a login. You have to proofread the text. As you are doing so, your changes are also double-proofread by someone else in another round (there's usually 3-4 rounds). As you gain experience and your edits are "confirmed" (or at least not changed) by other people, you rise through the ranks and it's HARD to get to the point where you have prominent control over the article in question. There are no bots. There are no humans with zero experience of the wiki changing your perfectly-spelled text to junk in the process. There are no vandals that go unpunished. And it works on the same mass scale.
Wikipedia was a brilliant idea and I put a lot of work into contributing. A year later, every careful change I had made was deleted or removed, and that information never found its way back on - those articles are just empty shells now and some were deleted for not having any content after some rogue editor's culling! I haven't contributed since. Show me that the system works and people's hard work is wiped out by a bot written by a schoolkid, and I'll come back. Until then, fancy text editors mean nothing.
"There's always an Alien Battle Cruiser...or a Korlian Death Ray, or...an intergalactic plague about to wipe out life on this planet, and the only thing that lets people get on with their hopeful little lives is that they don't know about it."
I wouldn't be worried about vacuum instability as a cause of death, I'd be more interested in it as an energy source, personally. But then we're still talking huge amounts of pie-in-the-sky concepts here.