Have you ever looked into the architecture of some of the non-8-bit machines? They're always hideously weird with seemingly arbitrary byte, word, register, and pointer sizes.
Just look at the CDC Cyber for example. Georgia Tech used to use one of these monstrosities for their registration system. They were once innovative and powerful designs, but I can't image how horrible programming for the things must've been.
Apparently 6-bit or 9-bit bytes and 36-bit words were common in the early days of computing because it was close the the minimum number of bits (35) needed to represent a number out to 10 significant digits (for scientific computing).
I'm glad that the nice, logical progression of powers of 2 won out.
Obesity is a warning sign, as is diabetes, that this person is not fit for breeding(this is not PC at all, lol).
It's also grossly incorrect. Obesity and diabetes the result of a system optimized for conservation of rare resources being presented with an overabundance of resources not found in nature (or indeed for most of mankind's time as a civilized species). The majority of human evolution was spent more worrying about starvation than overeating. Man was not meant to have large amount of sugar free from fibers and exercise spent pursuing it. That's not evolution telling people they aren't" fit to breed" as you put it but our finely-tuned happily sucking up all available resources for a lean winter that never comes.
There's a reason vegetarian's are 90% less likely to develop any type of cancer than non-vegetarians.
There's no evidence for a 90% gain. The best I've ever seen from reputable sources is about 10-30% for bowel cancer s, and about 5-10% for others due to better fiber intake, no red meat intake, and higher intake of anti-oxidants. Gains for heart disease are pretty good, though.
Two words: Chou Aniki (1992). Actually, practically anything that the Japanese do that crosses sexual themes with games makes me want to put my head under a pillow and cry myself to sleep.
You're right, this is a terrible non-story. I only recognize 4 out of the list, but I'm a pretty casual Mac user these days and not the flaming fanatic I was back in the mid-90s.
If these people are really movers and shakers, I'd love to know why they matter.
Fair enough, but that's a semantic line of division that wasn't readily apparent in the original post. However, even given that definition of "included," the distinction only matters is you sell copies of the product for profit:
Reproduction and Distribution. You may reproduce and distribute an unlimited number of copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT; provided that each copy shall be a true and complete copy, including all copyright and trademark notices, and shall be accompanied by a copy of this EULA. Copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT may not be distributed for profit either on a standalone basis or included as part of your own product.
I can understand that, but it's a one-time hit to keep your browsing history private. Google Browser Sync is best meant for using multiple comupters at different locations and it overkill and too much of a privacy compromise for syncing data on the same machine or on the same subnet in my opinion.
Then again, I guess it's all what you consider your highest priority. Privacy's up there for me.
I don't think that having a large amount of unengage, "idle" brain usage to waste on such things is worth bragging about. That's what cable television's for, after all.
But I guess this technology switch directions as well, switching the roles and using human brain as co-processors in surveillance and security applications. Any volunteers for this?
Gives a shuddersome new meaning to human resources.
I don't know about you, but I don't get paid for my personal projects at home. If that's different for you, then I am intrigued by your job and would like to subscribe to your resume site.
Polishing up your own rsync scripts - $0 Not having all your browser history and cookies handed over to a company's who's entire revenue steam is targetted advertising - priceless
Walk into any Wal-Mart and ask, "what if these people could provide healthcare?" Your next operation could cost $299 instead of $50k.
Having been to Wal-Mart before, I'd have to instead ask, "What would be my chances of survival if these people performed $50k surgery for $299?" and "Do I get anethesia at that price?" I mean, I wouldn't hold up the paragon of cheap (in quality as well as price) goods that don't last thanks to suppliers being forced to cut corners to keep price competitive as the future provider of healthcare.
There is an artificial scarcity of supply for medical services, thereby causing it to be expensive. Expensive is bad.
Show me proof that there is a natural supply of qualified health professionals that the AMA is preventing from becoming doctors. What percentage of medical school graduates fail to get AMA certified and have to pursue other careers? (Hint, it's far less than 1%.) In this day and age, AMA certification helps keep the unqualified from calling themselves doctors and nothing more.
Ron Paul's argument is a little facetious. First, he argues that the whole reason for campaign donations is that the government is given too much power and shouldn't be that big anyway. However, his solution is not to deal with this reality but to simply say that the person with the most money should be allowed to spend it to have the most say. That's hardly an explanation of how campaign finance reform causes problems. It's instead an argument that the real problem lies deeper and that we just shouldn't have campaign finance reform under the ridiculous argument (unfortunately backed by the Supreme Court in a fit of madness) that money == political speech.
Lew Rockwell's arguments are even more farsical. They consist of nothing but a list of tautological assertions. Big business is always good and accountable. Big government is always bad and unaccountable. It is just and the will of the people when an anti-tax lobbyist gets a Congressman to propose tax cuts. It is corrupt and anti-democratic when a pro-tax lobbyist gets a Congressman to propose tax hikes. His argument essentially comes down to openly admitting that money spent on anything he likes is just and money spent on anything he doesn't like is corrupt in his mind. He merely wants to open the floodgates of donations from the wealthy so that their voices (which will always be in favor of the rich over the poor) will be able to shout louder and louder for tax and regulation cuts until the needs of the people for protection from predation and for basic needs are inaudible in the language of money.
Your chosen essays reveal nothing about why campaign reform is bad. It just states that it is -- with no real back up. Essentially, both people just want Congress to be as buyable as possible with the blanket assertion that this will lead to smaller and more just government (in spite of the rampant corporate welfare and out-of-control government spending of the current anti-regulation, anti-tax, anti-public welfare governing party). True campaign finance reform makes sure that the voices of the people are equal and that governing philosophies must compete in the marketplace of ideas instead of being oligarchically controlled by an elite class.
As for doctors, the AMA restricts the supply of charlatans, crazies, the unqualified, and the unethical. You get better quality healthcare as a result. Go back and read about the late 19th century's medical practices if you want to see the kind of ridiculous (and often dangerous) nonsense that passed for healthcare at the time. Chiropracty (as a cure-all), homeopathy, and herbalism were just as common as allopathy, and a sucker was born every minute. I'd rather not see a return to those times.
You don't think people should be able to see some kind of doctor when they are sick when they can not afford one covered by YOUR preferred level of licensing? In the meantime, the rest of us can choose to use only doctors who opted in to some kind of voluntary licensing and history reporting system.
You have to be crazy if you think that AMA licensing is a significant portion of any physician's business expenses or even of the expenses (including education) to get to be a doctor in the first place. In exchange for it, we get a nation mostly free of snake oil peddlers, quacks, frauds and unethical experimenters like we had back in the 19th century before medical licensing. Read your history. It's amazing how so many people who are trying to drag us back into the Guilded Age are so ignorant of what life was like back then before the people demanded the government step in and "interfere" in their lives.
It has happened in every industry that has any form of federal regulation: oil refinery, content distribution, medical licensing, campaign finance rules, even the stock market is cartelized now moreso than every before.
You're going to have to explain how medical licensing and campaign finance rules have led to more harm than good, especially when the alternative you present is their absence.
When you don't have to individually pay for everything you download, thus letting you try out new stuff without being hideously disappointed with buyer's remorse if it turns out to stink.
My DVD & CD shelf is a testament against buying wihtout finding out whether something's good or not first. After the good old days of Napster when you could try out an album before buying it, I just haven't bought hardly anything because I have a 50% failure rate for finding good CDs.
As for movies, unlike music, I generally only care to see a movie about 1-4 times. This means that either I've seen something that I like before and don't care to own it, or I take a chance on a movie and find out that it wasn't worth owning about 75% of the time.
A subscription would leave me much happier if the price was right, and the files didn't expire. I'd pay a max of $15/month for that. If the files expire, then any price over $3/month is too much.
That requirement only matters if you distribute the software. I don't think North Korea would like the distribution method that we'd be most likely to employ.
In addition, alternative lanuages and tools tend to be stifled in so-called "open" (read group) environments, because the rest of the group immediately pushes to have the alternative tool or environment removed, unless the group agrees that it is a good idea.
How on Earth is this different from working for a company on a closed-source project? In fact, such a decision to stifle an alternative tool is frequently made by non-programmers in a closed source environment or by higher-ranking programmers in an entirely undemocratic fashion.
In open source, you're always free to fork the code and leave to pursue the solutions you think are best. This isn't true in a closed source environment.
It seems that a lot of the open source push has been a reaction to the fact that many of the development tools we use are not at a high enough level of abstraction. If you abstract away from code and languages where you are doing your own memory management, one would think that you would experience fewer memory-related programming issues.
What, do you think some sort of Open Source Illuminati is using bribery, blackmail, and beatings to force all Open Source projects into languages you don't like? People use low-level languages in Open Source projects because it's what they know and what they like. Unlike working for a company, you are perfectly free to choose a higher level language if you want for your project.
Did he leave the BadAnalogyPager at home? ...Miss the BadAnalogySignal? ...Get the zipper stuck on the BadAnalogySuit? ...Lose the BadAnalogyMobile in a New Jersey back alley?
If I were to put together a high-end machine right now I would certainly throw in at least 2 hard drives. A very small 10RPM drive for the OS, programs, and a much larger (but probably slower) drive for storing all my files.
Personally, I'd only do this for a SFF machine. Otherwise, I'd put a minimum of three drives in a single RAID 5 configuration now that RAID 5 is a relatively common motherboard feature.
As long as it really IS cheaper to be wasteful, then that's exactly what people will continue to do! And that also illustrates the fact that things aren't nearly as "dire" as some of the environmentalists and promoters of "less technology/simpler lifestyle" want you to believe.
No, it doesn't. All it illustrates is that, from the perspective of the human race, individual consumers act as greedy algorithms. We look for the maximal local benefit, and fail to see the path to the greatest overall benefit.
Take fossil fuels, for example. In the short-term, the cheapest thing is to just burn everything for fuel as fast as possible and dump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In the long run, we'll eventually need to ration oil for use in fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, and plastics, and the temperature will be so hot that we'll be burning even more energy just to stay cool. The net expense of goods and day-to-day life will be higher than if we had more rationally allocated resources and looked beyond prices to the total costs of our actions on humanity and the world around us.
Proper long-term planning and management of resources will give us the best result on a 100 year timeline, but we only look to today to make our decisions.
Personally, when everything goes to hell in handbasket over the next 100 years, I hope that this time period is remembered as a history lesson for the rest of humanity's time in this universe for why short-term, local-maximum obsessed thinking is a foolish way to go about things. That is, assuming civilization survives the conflict and mass migrations after the sea levels rise and the old glacier-fed rivers dry up.
It was Islam who organized crusades specifically to convert or terminate members of all other religions.
How, exactly, do you think Islam spread as far and wide as it did in the first 500 years it existed? You need to read more Middle Eastern, North African, and Central Asian history if you think that Islam didn't ruthlessly conquer its way across the globe and put unbelievers to the sword.
There's no need to single out and smear Christianity. Both Islam and Christianity have had a lot of awful things done in their names that their core teachings reject. Practically any world religion that is practiced by more than 5% of the world's population has had awful things done in its name. Even Zen Buddhism was used by militarists in pre-WWII Japan, and Hinduism, frequently seen in the west as the religion of Gandhi, was the rallying cry of massacres by Hindu nationalists against Muslims.
You see, the most execrable person of modern times, Hitler, deemed himself a Christian. Yet no one blames Christianity for what he and his minions did.
Actually, a lot of people do, but I'd like to note that while Hitler and his cronies were fond of using religion to manipulate the masses, Hitler himself was not fond of Christianity in private. If anything, he was an agnositic with mystic tendencies and a fondness for the occult. Here's a good article with links to other good articles taking the issue on. The Wikipedia also has a good article.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad to see that I'm not the only who thought that surviving the autoclave would be a much bigger challenge.
Have you ever looked into the architecture of some of the non-8-bit machines? They're always hideously weird with seemingly arbitrary byte, word, register, and pointer sizes.
Just look at the CDC Cyber for example. Georgia Tech used to use one of these monstrosities for their registration system. They were once innovative and powerful designs, but I can't image how horrible programming for the things must've been.
Apparently 6-bit or 9-bit bytes and 36-bit words were common in the early days of computing because it was close the the minimum number of bits (35) needed to represent a number out to 10 significant digits (for scientific computing).
I'm glad that the nice, logical progression of powers of 2 won out.
Obesity is a warning sign, as is diabetes, that this person is not fit for breeding(this is not PC at all, lol).
It's also grossly incorrect. Obesity and diabetes the result of a system optimized for conservation of rare resources being presented with an overabundance of resources not found in nature (or indeed for most of mankind's time as a civilized species). The majority of human evolution was spent more worrying about starvation than overeating. Man was not meant to have large amount of sugar free from fibers and exercise spent pursuing it. That's not evolution telling people they aren't" fit to breed" as you put it but our finely-tuned happily sucking up all available resources for a lean winter that never comes.
There's a reason vegetarian's are 90% less likely to develop any type of cancer than non-vegetarians.
There's no evidence for a 90% gain. The best I've ever seen from reputable sources is about 10-30% for bowel cancer s, and about 5-10% for others due to better fiber intake, no red meat intake, and higher intake of anti-oxidants. Gains for heart disease are pretty good, though.
Two words: Chou Aniki (1992).
Actually, practically anything that the Japanese do that crosses sexual themes with games makes me want to put my head under a pillow and cry myself to sleep.
Also: Boong-Ga Boong-Ga. Enjoy your new view of humanity.
You're right, this is a terrible non-story. I only recognize 4 out of the list, but I'm a pretty casual Mac user these days and not the flaming fanatic I was back in the mid-90s.
If these people are really movers and shakers, I'd love to know why they matter.
Fair enough, but that's a semantic line of division that wasn't readily apparent in the original post. However, even given that definition of "included," the distinction only matters is you sell copies of the product for profit:
From the Core Fonts SourceForge website.
I don't believe that ReactOS sells copies so far, so the point is moot unless they're planning on selling copies later down the road.
I can understand that, but it's a one-time hit to keep your browsing history private. Google Browser Sync is best meant for using multiple comupters at different locations and it overkill and too much of a privacy compromise for syncing data on the same machine or on the same subnet in my opinion.
Then again, I guess it's all what you consider your highest priority. Privacy's up there for me.
Uhm, because Microsoft's fonts have a restrictive license that prohibits them from being included in a Free OS.
Huh. Really? I wonder what I just emerged last month?
I don't think that having a large amount of unengage, "idle" brain usage to waste on such things is worth bragging about. That's what cable television's for, after all.
But I guess this technology switch directions as well, switching the roles and using human brain as co-processors in surveillance and security applications. Any volunteers for this?
Gives a shuddersome new meaning to human resources.
I don't know about you, but I don't get paid for my personal projects at home.
If that's different for you, then I am intrigued by your job and would like to subscribe to your resume site.
Google Browser Sync - $0
Polishing up your own rsync scripts - $0
Not having all your browser history and cookies handed over to a company's who's entire revenue steam is targetted advertising - priceless
Filk is a long-standing Hackish tradition, and Nerdcore is merely its latest incarnation.
Wow. I never thought the day would come where I'd miss folk music.
Walk into any Wal-Mart and ask, "what if these people could provide healthcare?" Your next operation could cost $299 instead of $50k.
Having been to Wal-Mart before, I'd have to instead ask, "What would be my chances of survival if these people performed $50k surgery for $299?" and "Do I get anethesia at that price?" I mean, I wouldn't hold up the paragon of cheap (in quality as well as price) goods that don't last thanks to suppliers being forced to cut corners to keep price competitive as the future provider of healthcare.
There is an artificial scarcity of supply for medical services, thereby causing it to be expensive. Expensive is bad.
Show me proof that there is a natural supply of qualified health professionals that the AMA is preventing from becoming doctors. What percentage of medical school graduates fail to get AMA certified and have to pursue other careers? (Hint, it's far less than 1%.) In this day and age, AMA certification helps keep the unqualified from calling themselves doctors and nothing more.
Ron Paul's argument is a little facetious. First, he argues that the whole reason for campaign donations is that the government is given too much power and shouldn't be that big anyway. However, his solution is not to deal with this reality but to simply say that the person with the most money should be allowed to spend it to have the most say. That's hardly an explanation of how campaign finance reform causes problems. It's instead an argument that the real problem lies deeper and that we just shouldn't have campaign finance reform under the ridiculous argument (unfortunately backed by the Supreme Court in a fit of madness) that money == political speech.
Lew Rockwell's arguments are even more farsical. They consist of nothing but a list of tautological assertions. Big business is always good and accountable. Big government is always bad and unaccountable. It is just and the will of the people when an anti-tax lobbyist gets a Congressman to propose tax cuts. It is corrupt and anti-democratic when a pro-tax lobbyist gets a Congressman to propose tax hikes. His argument essentially comes down to openly admitting that money spent on anything he likes is just and money spent on anything he doesn't like is corrupt in his mind. He merely wants to open the floodgates of donations from the wealthy so that their voices (which will always be in favor of the rich over the poor) will be able to shout louder and louder for tax and regulation cuts until the needs of the people for protection from predation and for basic needs are inaudible in the language of money.
Your chosen essays reveal nothing about why campaign reform is bad. It just states that it is -- with no real back up. Essentially, both people just want Congress to be as buyable as possible with the blanket assertion that this will lead to smaller and more just government (in spite of the rampant corporate welfare and out-of-control government spending of the current anti-regulation, anti-tax, anti-public welfare governing party). True campaign finance reform makes sure that the voices of the people are equal and that governing philosophies must compete in the marketplace of ideas instead of being oligarchically controlled by an elite class.
As for doctors, the AMA restricts the supply of charlatans, crazies, the unqualified, and the unethical. You get better quality healthcare as a result. Go back and read about the late 19th century's medical practices if you want to see the kind of ridiculous (and often dangerous) nonsense that passed for healthcare at the time. Chiropracty (as a cure-all), homeopathy, and herbalism were just as common as allopathy, and a sucker was born every minute. I'd rather not see a return to those times.
You don't think people should be able to see some kind of doctor when they are sick when they can not afford one covered by YOUR preferred level of licensing? In the meantime, the rest of us can choose to use only doctors who opted in to some kind of voluntary licensing and history reporting system.
You have to be crazy if you think that AMA licensing is a significant portion of any physician's business expenses or even of the expenses (including education) to get to be a doctor in the first place. In exchange for it, we get a nation mostly free of snake oil peddlers, quacks, frauds and unethical experimenters like we had back in the 19th century before medical licensing. Read your history. It's amazing how so many people who are trying to drag us back into the Guilded Age are so ignorant of what life was like back then before the people demanded the government step in and "interfere" in their lives.
It has happened in every industry that has any form of federal regulation: oil refinery, content distribution, medical licensing, campaign finance rules, even the stock market is cartelized now moreso than every before.
You're going to have to explain how medical licensing and campaign finance rules have led to more harm than good, especially when the alternative you present is their absence.
When you don't have to individually pay for everything you download, thus letting you try out new stuff without being hideously disappointed with buyer's remorse if it turns out to stink.
My DVD & CD shelf is a testament against buying wihtout finding out whether something's good or not first. After the good old days of Napster when you could try out an album before buying it, I just haven't bought hardly anything because I have a 50% failure rate for finding good CDs.
As for movies, unlike music, I generally only care to see a movie about 1-4 times. This means that either I've seen something that I like before and don't care to own it, or I take a chance on a movie and find out that it wasn't worth owning about 75% of the time.
A subscription would leave me much happier if the price was right, and the files didn't expire. I'd pay a max of $15/month for that. If the files expire, then any price over $3/month is too much.
That requirement only matters if you distribute the software. I don't think North Korea would like the distribution method that we'd be most likely to employ.
In addition, alternative lanuages and tools tend to be stifled in so-called "open" (read group) environments, because the rest of the group immediately pushes to have the alternative tool or environment removed, unless the group agrees that it is a good idea.
How on Earth is this different from working for a company on a closed-source project? In fact, such a decision to stifle an alternative tool is frequently made by non-programmers in a closed source environment or by higher-ranking programmers in an entirely undemocratic fashion.
In open source, you're always free to fork the code and leave to pursue the solutions you think are best. This isn't true in a closed source environment.
It seems that a lot of the open source push has been a reaction to the fact that many of the development tools we use are not at a high enough level of abstraction. If you abstract away from code and languages where you are doing your own memory management, one would think that you would experience fewer memory-related programming issues.
What, do you think some sort of Open Source Illuminati is using bribery, blackmail, and beatings to force all Open Source projects into languages you don't like? People use low-level languages in Open Source projects because it's what they know and what they like. Unlike working for a company, you are perfectly free to choose a higher level language if you want for your project.
Did he leave the BadAnalogyPager at home?
...Miss the BadAnalogySignal?
...Get the zipper stuck on the BadAnalogySuit?
...Lose the BadAnalogyMobile in a New Jersey back alley?
If I were to put together a high-end machine right now I would certainly throw in at least 2 hard drives. A very small 10RPM drive for the OS, programs, and a much larger (but probably slower) drive for storing all my files.
Personally, I'd only do this for a SFF machine. Otherwise, I'd put a minimum of three drives in a single RAID 5 configuration now that RAID 5 is a relatively common motherboard feature.
Your Mileage May Vary.
Wearout is a myth with modern flash filesystem software.
How much of a myth is it when you use least common denominator, portable file systems like FAT?
Until proper flash file systems go cross-platform (or just to the Windows platform), it's not necessarily a myth.
As long as it really IS cheaper to be wasteful, then that's exactly what people will continue to do! And that also illustrates the fact that things aren't nearly as "dire" as some of the environmentalists and promoters of "less technology/simpler lifestyle" want you to believe.
No, it doesn't. All it illustrates is that, from the perspective of the human race, individual consumers act as greedy algorithms. We look for the maximal local benefit, and fail to see the path to the greatest overall benefit.
Take fossil fuels, for example. In the short-term, the cheapest thing is to just burn everything for fuel as fast as possible and dump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In the long run, we'll eventually need to ration oil for use in fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, and plastics, and the temperature will be so hot that we'll be burning even more energy just to stay cool. The net expense of goods and day-to-day life will be higher than if we had more rationally allocated resources and looked beyond prices to the total costs of our actions on humanity and the world around us.
Proper long-term planning and management of resources will give us the best result on a 100 year timeline, but we only look to today to make our decisions.
Personally, when everything goes to hell in handbasket over the next 100 years, I hope that this time period is remembered as a history lesson for the rest of humanity's time in this universe for why short-term, local-maximum obsessed thinking is a foolish way to go about things. That is, assuming civilization survives the conflict and mass migrations after the sea levels rise and the old glacier-fed rivers dry up.
It was Islam who organized crusades specifically to convert or terminate members of all other religions.
How, exactly, do you think Islam spread as far and wide as it did in the first 500 years it existed? You need to read more Middle Eastern, North African, and Central Asian history if you think that Islam didn't ruthlessly conquer its way across the globe and put unbelievers to the sword.
Start with the conquest of the Middle East. Continue to the conquest of the Indian subcontinent.
There's no need to single out and smear Christianity. Both Islam and Christianity have had a lot of awful things done in their names that their core teachings reject. Practically any world religion that is practiced by more than 5% of the world's population has had awful things done in its name. Even Zen Buddhism was used by militarists in pre-WWII Japan, and Hinduism, frequently seen in the west as the religion of Gandhi, was the rallying cry of massacres by Hindu nationalists against Muslims.
You see, the most execrable person of modern times, Hitler, deemed himself a Christian. Yet no one blames Christianity for what he and his minions did.
Actually, a lot of people do, but I'd like to note that while Hitler and his cronies were fond of using religion to manipulate the masses, Hitler himself was not fond of Christianity in private. If anything, he was an agnositic with mystic tendencies and a fondness for the occult. Here's a good article with links to other good articles taking the issue on. The Wikipedia also has a good article.