Knowing Slashdot it would probably have read "flown" though.
Nope, flowed is a past tense of flow, flown is a past tense of fly.
Which is why I long ago gave up correcting non-native speakers of English, and have discovered that sometimes garbled English is actually far more expressive and accurate than 'proper' English.
Some of the best puns I've heard are grammatically incorrect, but completely on-point in context.
And don't forget all the libertarians who think that making companies label something as GMO is TYRANNY!
Which is ironic, because you'd think that consumers being able to choose the products they want based on their own set of criteria would be one of their core values.
But apparently the free market only means companies are free to sell us what they want, not for consumers to decide what we want.
And yet, once this information is in the hands of a private entity or even a government entity, the DHS can demand it under the Patriot Act and not tell anybody.
At this point, you pretty much have to assume that anything ever collected about you can end up in the hands of government if they decide they want it.
Imagine a world in which children have all of their biometric data collected and cataloged before they can even spell biometric -- because it seems to be happening.
I sincerely hope there are some pretty harsh legal penalties for this, and that the companies are ordered to destroy the data. A school board has no business doing this kind of thing without parental consent. This is just blatant stupidity and over-reaching.
Worse, he applied RoundUp to unlicensed plants, and they survived. Instant patent violation.
Except these unlicensed plants are from a lab strain which was never released, and which Monsanto was supposed to have destroyed the plants after their tests.
If anything, Monsanto has some 'splaining to do, and all of their claims that it couldn't possibly cross-contaminate other crops needs to be looked at much more closely.
Because if these plants got there on their own, this essentially means that all of those people worrying their fields could get pollenated without them doing anything have been right all along, and the people poo-pooing that have probably been lying.
If so many other countries are banning GMO foods, why aren't we in the US seriously considering this? If nothing else, why don't we at least label foods as GMO, so the consumer can decide?
Honest answer? I'd say the lobbyists who represent this industry have successfully convinced people not to, and a prevailing tendency to favor corporate profits over risks unless there is absolute proof of them (as in "it hasn't been proven dangerous, so we'll assume it isn't"). Kinda like agent orange or thalidomide.
The companies who make GMOs don't want labeling for that, and have so far fought to prevent it being mandatory.
The companies have far more clout with lawmakers, and have fought this kind of thing tooth and nail.
Now their wheat is growing in the wild. Is Monsanto going to sue the County it is growing in too, or just the farmer on whose land it is found?
In this case, it's genuine contamination since it's a version they never released. So Monsanto did a field test, after which they were supposed to destroy all of the plants. Now a bunch of years they find that version out in the wild. I'm pretty sure in this case Monsanto couldn't sue.
If this doesn't point to the fact that this stuff is going to contaminate everything, I don't know what will. I'm of the opinion that unless you grow this stuff under a friggin' dome, it's going to cross-contaminate stuff, simply because wind and insects have been pollinating plants for millions of years and are quite good at it.
And then there's the whole using this shit as food aid and expecting starving farmers in Africa to not keep seeds for next year because of the license agreement they know nothing about.
Are there even proper rules in English to pluralize these kinds of things with made up words? It's not like you can just decide to apply the Latin rules and be done with it.
How can I be grammatically correct when referring to more than one doofus?
You are speaking as a developer, not someone who has come through the support ranks.
I've been a developer, a system admin, a designer, a consultant, the system architect, chief cook and bottle washer, and I've done customer facing support with angry customers (never front-line help desk stuff, more like escalations).
Part of the problem I see with a lot of people in the industry is the attitude of "stupid end users" and "we're IT, we know everything" -- and a lot of people tend to forget we're usually there to support the people who actually do the company business, unless your business is actually creating software. Some days it's like Mordac the Preventer from Dilbert.
And when you get some smarmy little wanker with a year or so out of college who thinks he knows more than anybody else, it has the effect of just annoying people.
I realize the limitations on support people because they're usually quite junior and only have the script to follow, but if you've ever encountered a business user who has a major deadline looming with many millions on the line, usually the suggestion to just reboot the machine and see what happens is enough to make them want to kill you.
It basically says "I have no idea how to fix your problem, but if you reboot and it goes away for a couple of days, someone else will take the next call". When this is the 5th time you've called about the same issue, it gets tedious. That guy who needs to prep documents for the board meeting? He wants results, not just someone telling him the standard set of troubleshooting steps.
When this same advice is given to people who have been in the industry for 20+ years who want to find a root-cause instead of some temporary (and time wasting) fix, the usual response is to give up on the support people altogether. If you can't open a ticket with the vendor, or escalate to someone who can, you're just an impediment.
I've actually watched a service desk guy trying to tell one of the web admins how to change a setting in IE -- a setting he'd already changed, and knew far more about than the service desk guys. Support tends to fall apart when they're responding to the people who keep your IT infrastructure going.
The problem is that the start menu has been replaced with the metro interface, so when you hit the windows key it fires up the metro interface and if all you want is say the calculator, then yes, it takes up the full screen, which is obviously stupid, because who the fuck ever wanted a 24" full screen 1080p simple calculator rather than the classic calc in a simple window?
Wow... just wow. Then I definitely will not be looking at Windows 8, because it sounds like marketing got involved and caused development to really shit the bed on this release.
Spoken like a true moron -- I'm the freakin' admin, and I spent 15+ years as a developer. If I have it open, it's because I use it constantly.
This is the stuff I use to do my job, and rebooting because someone has no idea of what's going on but thinks a reboot will make the problem go away has always been a stupid idea.
Usually it's some idiot doing tech support who knows far less than I do who is suggesting it. Just because some half-wit at the service desk has that as the first item on his checklist doesn't make it the right choice.
Well, quite frankly, it does take too long... and the "Windows Patch" (reboot and hope for the best) has always been a lousy response. It doesn't solve anything, just makes the problem go away for a while (if at all).
Some of us expect our machines to stay up longer, and depending on what you run, starting everything from scratch would take forever.
My 'normal' set of stuff on my personal desktop is 3 different web browsers (with multiple tabs in each), VMWare with two VMs, iTunes, the software to sync my phone, and sometimes the software to sync my Tom Tom. That's what's open every single day, all day long. My work computer is similarly running with a whole bunch of stuff that I use several times/hour and if I had to open and close them every time I used them, it would waste half my friggin' day.
For those of us who are used to machines with uptimes in the hundreds of days range, the suggestion to reboot is the sign of a lazy and incompetent admin, or shitty software.
Metro apps can be run on multiple monitors simultaneously. On any single monitor, more than two applications can be run simultaneously. Instead of Windows 8's fixed split, where one application gets 320 pixels and the other application gets the rest, the division between apps will be variable. It'll also be possible to have multiple windows from a single app so that, for example, two browser windows can be opened side-by-side.
I haven't seen Windows 8 yet, but if this is what they've built, I'm not surprised people have been avoiding it.
Wow, more than two applications running on any single monitor, welcome to X Windows from 30 years ago.
Was the interface really that broken?? This doesn't even sound like it's a usable environment.
I really like this idea. Basically all they're saying is that a website should tell you if you're entitled to use something like Greasemonkey to replace their javascript with your own clean version
Well, from a certain perspective, I don't actually care what a website believes I'm entitled to do.
Since I'm running no-script, I'm probably not running their scripts anyway except for a very small set of sites. I'm under no obligation to run their scripts, see their ads, or pretty much anything. I will decide what my machine does and doesn't run.
All those sites who think I shouldn't have a back button or a context menu? Tough, not my problem you wrote a shitty web site.
which is the FSF's raison d'etre
No, the FSF exists to assert users should be given the source code to any piece of software they encounter -- and not everyone agrees with the FSF on everything. I think likening them to PETA is a fair comparison in that it's a rabid, ideological position.
Logo at computer camp when I was 11, followed by basic on a TRS-80 color computer, then eventually basic on a 8088 machine, Pascal, PDP-11 assembly and C in university, and some interesting chances to do some bare-metal programming along the way.
I still don't meet a lot of people who have done interrupt-level programming and accessing hardware directly via registers and writing your own interrupt handlers.
although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years
He didn't say forever, he didn't say always. The fact that it's largely held as true since then is a bonus, but it certainly doesn't make this a 'law'.
This was a 10 year prediction, and the word 'law' doesn't appear in the entire article. Not even Moore would claim this is a law.
I'm generally a fan of The Great Moore's Law Compensator/Wirth's Law which says that "software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster".;-)
Moore's law has never been a 'law', it's a historical observation.
It has never claimed that this will be true going forward, merely that at the time it was observed that was the case, and it's largely held up since then.
The fact that it's held true this long is staggering, but the fact that it might be running out is hardly surprising. Moore never claimed this would continue forever.
Slashdot Mirror
Patent doesn't apply, just copyright. ;-)
Nope, flowed is a past tense of flow, flown is a past tense of fly.
Which is why I long ago gave up correcting non-native speakers of English, and have discovered that sometimes garbled English is actually far more expressive and accurate than 'proper' English.
Some of the best puns I've heard are grammatically incorrect, but completely on-point in context.
Does this tell us water flowed, or merely a liquid?
It says a stream bed, but could this have been liquid CO2 or something else at some point?
I'm sure the chemistry tells them a lot, and I trust the NASA guys to know much more than I do, just curious if this specifically confirms 'water'.
One in which marketing wants to convince us this is a good idea.
I for one have no intention of using either of these proposed methods, and Motorolla can go pound sand.
No, I got the inherent sarcasm, but figured it had to be said. But do feel free to use it, it's under a BSD license. ;-)
Which is ironic, because you'd think that consumers being able to choose the products they want based on their own set of criteria would be one of their core values.
But apparently the free market only means companies are free to sell us what they want, not for consumers to decide what we want.
And yet, once this information is in the hands of a private entity or even a government entity, the DHS can demand it under the Patriot Act and not tell anybody.
At this point, you pretty much have to assume that anything ever collected about you can end up in the hands of government if they decide they want it.
Imagine a world in which children have all of their biometric data collected and cataloged before they can even spell biometric -- because it seems to be happening.
I sincerely hope there are some pretty harsh legal penalties for this, and that the companies are ordered to destroy the data. A school board has no business doing this kind of thing without parental consent. This is just blatant stupidity and over-reaching.
Only in the same way that gun-shot victims are 'bullet pirates'.
As in, it's the total opposite.
Except these unlicensed plants are from a lab strain which was never released, and which Monsanto was supposed to have destroyed the plants after their tests.
If anything, Monsanto has some 'splaining to do, and all of their claims that it couldn't possibly cross-contaminate other crops needs to be looked at much more closely.
Because if these plants got there on their own, this essentially means that all of those people worrying their fields could get pollenated without them doing anything have been right all along, and the people poo-pooing that have probably been lying.
Honest answer? I'd say the lobbyists who represent this industry have successfully convinced people not to, and a prevailing tendency to favor corporate profits over risks unless there is absolute proof of them (as in "it hasn't been proven dangerous, so we'll assume it isn't"). Kinda like agent orange or thalidomide.
The companies who make GMOs don't want labeling for that, and have so far fought to prevent it being mandatory.
The companies have far more clout with lawmakers, and have fought this kind of thing tooth and nail.
In this case, it's genuine contamination since it's a version they never released. So Monsanto did a field test, after which they were supposed to destroy all of the plants. Now a bunch of years they find that version out in the wild. I'm pretty sure in this case Monsanto couldn't sue.
If this doesn't point to the fact that this stuff is going to contaminate everything, I don't know what will. I'm of the opinion that unless you grow this stuff under a friggin' dome, it's going to cross-contaminate stuff, simply because wind and insects have been pollinating plants for millions of years and are quite good at it.
And then there's the whole using this shit as food aid and expecting starving farmers in Africa to not keep seeds for next year because of the license agreement they know nothing about.
Hubris and "what could possibly go wrong".
GP had already suggested that, and that's just back to the Latin rules, which, as I said, may or may not apply.
Doofum? Doofem? Doofuses? Doofen? Dooferati? Dooflings? Doofers?
Are there even proper rules in English to pluralize these kinds of things with made up words? It's not like you can just decide to apply the Latin rules and be done with it.
How can I be grammatically correct when referring to more than one doofus?
I've been a developer, a system admin, a designer, a consultant, the system architect, chief cook and bottle washer, and I've done customer facing support with angry customers (never front-line help desk stuff, more like escalations).
Part of the problem I see with a lot of people in the industry is the attitude of "stupid end users" and "we're IT, we know everything" -- and a lot of people tend to forget we're usually there to support the people who actually do the company business, unless your business is actually creating software. Some days it's like Mordac the Preventer from Dilbert.
And when you get some smarmy little wanker with a year or so out of college who thinks he knows more than anybody else, it has the effect of just annoying people.
I realize the limitations on support people because they're usually quite junior and only have the script to follow, but if you've ever encountered a business user who has a major deadline looming with many millions on the line, usually the suggestion to just reboot the machine and see what happens is enough to make them want to kill you.
It basically says "I have no idea how to fix your problem, but if you reboot and it goes away for a couple of days, someone else will take the next call". When this is the 5th time you've called about the same issue, it gets tedious. That guy who needs to prep documents for the board meeting? He wants results, not just someone telling him the standard set of troubleshooting steps.
When this same advice is given to people who have been in the industry for 20+ years who want to find a root-cause instead of some temporary (and time wasting) fix, the usual response is to give up on the support people altogether. If you can't open a ticket with the vendor, or escalate to someone who can, you're just an impediment.
I've actually watched a service desk guy trying to tell one of the web admins how to change a setting in IE -- a setting he'd already changed, and knew far more about than the service desk guys. Support tends to fall apart when they're responding to the people who keep your IT infrastructure going.
Why, for profit of course.
If we let any old schmuck access it, that could undermine the ability to patent research paid for by someone else and/or be first to market.
And not charging for the access would put the publishers out of business, and we can't lose their valuable contributions to science.
Don't you know the role of publicly financed research is to enrich corporations? Why do you hate America?
Wow ... just wow. Then I definitely will not be looking at Windows 8, because it sounds like marketing got involved and caused development to really shit the bed on this release.
This sounds like a giant leap backwards.
Spoken like a true moron -- I'm the freakin' admin, and I spent 15+ years as a developer. If I have it open, it's because I use it constantly.
This is the stuff I use to do my job, and rebooting because someone has no idea of what's going on but thinks a reboot will make the problem go away has always been a stupid idea.
Usually it's some idiot doing tech support who knows far less than I do who is suggesting it. Just because some half-wit at the service desk has that as the first item on his checklist doesn't make it the right choice.
Well, quite frankly, it does take too long ... and the "Windows Patch" (reboot and hope for the best) has always been a lousy response. It doesn't solve anything, just makes the problem go away for a while (if at all).
Some of us expect our machines to stay up longer, and depending on what you run, starting everything from scratch would take forever.
My 'normal' set of stuff on my personal desktop is 3 different web browsers (with multiple tabs in each), VMWare with two VMs, iTunes, the software to sync my phone, and sometimes the software to sync my Tom Tom. That's what's open every single day, all day long. My work computer is similarly running with a whole bunch of stuff that I use several times/hour and if I had to open and close them every time I used them, it would waste half my friggin' day.
For those of us who are used to machines with uptimes in the hundreds of days range, the suggestion to reboot is the sign of a lazy and incompetent admin, or shitty software.
Yeah, sounds like it. The last thing I want is for my 23" monitor to be acting like it's laying out for a tiny screen.
320 pixels is about the left 4 inches of my screen.
I haven't seen Windows 8 yet, but if this is what they've built, I'm not surprised people have been avoiding it.
Wow, more than two applications running on any single monitor, welcome to X Windows from 30 years ago.
Was the interface really that broken?? This doesn't even sound like it's a usable environment.
Well, from a certain perspective, I don't actually care what a website believes I'm entitled to do.
Since I'm running no-script, I'm probably not running their scripts anyway except for a very small set of sites. I'm under no obligation to run their scripts, see their ads, or pretty much anything. I will decide what my machine does and doesn't run.
All those sites who think I shouldn't have a back button or a context menu? Tough, not my problem you wrote a shitty web site.
No, the FSF exists to assert users should be given the source code to any piece of software they encounter -- and not everyone agrees with the FSF on everything. I think likening them to PETA is a fair comparison in that it's a rabid, ideological position.
Logo at computer camp when I was 11, followed by basic on a TRS-80 color computer, then eventually basic on a 8088 machine, Pascal, PDP-11 assembly and C in university, and some interesting chances to do some bare-metal programming along the way.
I still don't meet a lot of people who have done interrupt-level programming and accessing hardware directly via registers and writing your own interrupt handlers.
Good times.
He didn't say forever, he didn't say always. The fact that it's largely held as true since then is a bonus, but it certainly doesn't make this a 'law'.
This was a 10 year prediction, and the word 'law' doesn't appear in the entire article. Not even Moore would claim this is a law.
I'm generally a fan of The Great Moore's Law Compensator/Wirth's Law which says that "software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster". ;-)
Except this 'law' isn't predictive like, say, gravity, which says that the next time you drop something, it will also fall to the ground.
Moore's law never has been, and never was intended to be a 'law' in that sense.
Moore's law has never been a 'law', it's a historical observation.
It has never claimed that this will be true going forward, merely that at the time it was observed that was the case, and it's largely held up since then.
The fact that it's held true this long is staggering, but the fact that it might be running out is hardly surprising. Moore never claimed this would continue forever.