I do these things because I don't want my own environment to be a dump. I don't want the air in my valley to be smog-ridden. It's that simple.
Same here. I'm about the least liberal person you'll meet, and about as far away from "tree hugger" as it's possible to be, but I was raised with the principle of "waste not, want not." I hate throwing useful things away, or using non-reusable items when reusables are just as much (if not more) convenient. For example, a lot of times I'll decline having my groceries put in a bag at all if there are only a few items and I can carry them easily. Why put a two-liter of soda in a bag that I'm just going to throw away or run through a recycler as soon as I get home? I use rechargeable batteries whenever possible because they're cheaper in the long run than disposables, and because they're more convenient as I never run out of batteries. I use CFLs because it cuts down noticeably on my electricity bill and makes my air conditioner run less. I use a programmable thermostat because I don't care if my house warms up to 78F on summer days while I'm not at home or cools down to 62F in the winter. I drive a 12-year-old used car for the same reasons you mentioned; it doesn't get good gas mileage, but I don't drive it many miles and it's reliable and it's paid for.
I don't consider any of those to be "hippieish" in the slightest. I just hate the idea of wasting resources (and in turn, money) on things unnecessarily. Every battery or light bulb I don't have to buy, every kilowatt I don't use for cooling, every car payment I don't have to make for the sole privilege of driving something new and shiny is money in my pocket. I believe it's your right to drive an SUV if you want to, but it's my right to think that you're a freaking idiot for wasting all that money and gasoline to get so very little in return.
The Zune's only a laughing stock to people that have never used it
...or to everyone walking past the Zune display to get to the iPods and Sansas. I don't think anyone's ever said that the Zune is a bad device, but it was almost criminally mismanaged into being a laughing stock. When iPods come in pink, blue, green, silver, etc., the first Zunes came in black, white, and turd brown. What jackass thought "it's gotta be brown! The kids will love it!"
Except for losing out to the Wii, having a... what is it? 55% failure rate?
Look, I'm trying hard to think of MS products that aren't widely ridiculed. That's kind of a short list, and I'll thank you to work with me on this difficult project.
I'm hardly a Ballmer fan, but what could he have done substantially differently? In my opinion, he inherited a pig with no obvious roadmap to future gains. He managed over the Kin debacle, sure, but he also managed the Xbox and that worked out pretty well.
I've read a thousand perfectly valid criticisms of Microsoft over the years, but I'm not sure that many of them can be traced back to Ballmer. For example, what changes could he have made to the Windows or Office lines to gain new growth instead of settling for trying to get current users to upgrade?
If anything, I think investors are expecting too much of Microsoft. Yes, it's somewhat stagnant. Of course it is! It already has something like 90% of the slow-growing PC market and roughly 100% of the "non-gratis office suite that runs on Windows" market. There's just not any growth left in MS's core competencies, and at least they're trying new stuff, even if the results are pretty embarrassing most of the time.
That's an excellent point, too. I've evolved the same system for over a decade by upgrading a bit here, a bit there... It was only in the last few months that I replaced the case, which had been the only remaining original part.
in many other places if you pay rent you get free electricity.
Electricity in an apartment is free in exactly the same way as food on a buffet is free: you've already been charged for it, whether or not you actually consume it.
This system is not useful as a desktop if it doesn't include a monitor, keyboard and mouse.
Do you typically replace old systems (so that you can reuse their peripherals), or do you just keep adding to your basement desktop cluster over the decades? I wouldn't normally ask, but this is Slashdot.
I'd pay an extra $110 to build a server system that would be many times faster and use far less electricity. The latter alone would make the return on investment worthwhile.
One of C's great advantages is not only that it is simple and very fast
You misspelled slow.
Yeah, you read that right.
C is slow, and getting slower by the hardware generation. In C, you have to spell out every trivial detail and can't just say "do this however it works out the fastest". Contrast with a language like Lisp, or more recently Erlang, where you can write code like "do this operation to every value in this set" and let the compiler (or virtual machine) figure out how to best implement that on the hardware (or cluster of hardware) that the program's running on. If you write a C snippet like:
for(i = 0; i < 1000000000; i++) { dosomething(i); }
then a compiler 10 years from now will spit out basically the same code as a compiler today, except that it might do some tricky things to the implementation of dosomething(). It has no way of knowing whether each of those calls has to be in sequence or if they can be executed in parallel and so it has to emit opcodes that are basically machine language equivalents to each line you've written.
Write the same code against the equivalent of MapReduce, and maybe in 10 years your loop will farm out the billion subprocesses to a cloud so that they run in parallel and finish in the same amount of time it takes for a single call to dosomething() to complete - all without recompiling.
Yes, C is slow, and that's not likely to go away. You can do multithreaded or multiprocessing code in C, of course! But I'd much rather spend my time getting dosomething() written and letting the language runtime figure out how best to execute it on the resources I have available.
Oh, and your argument against its complexity is just bizarre. By those standards, assembler is much simpler than C - each opcode only does one tiny, well-defined thing! I won't be writing a web browser in ASM any time soon though, even if I have the experience to do so if I had to.
Gentoo runs just fine under FreeBSD. In the past, I've created a jail with nothing in it but an unpacked stage1 tarball and bootstrapped it into a fully-working Gentoo installation.
The problem that 99designs solves is that most clients don't need a $20,000 design and don't have $20,000 to spend.
You are so correct here. I've bought some services from Fiverr, like a personalized voicemail message. Major corporations might pay huge prices to get just. the. perfect. result, but I'm not a major corporation. I'll gladly pay $5 for something that isn't absolutely perfect but that is a lot better than I could do myself.
There seems to be a growing group who would prefer that the sum total role of government would be to issue all newborns with a bible and a gun, then vanish for all eternity.
Similarly, there seems to be a growing group who would prefer to enlist kids in government-run daycare as soon as they can babble, teach them the True Path to socialized utopia where government services are plentiful (and don't have to be funded), then offer them guaranteed lifetime employment when they graduate from high school - which is good as they'll be unable to read because the teachers' union thought it would be too much work and some of its members aren't up to it.
I caricature, of course. Not all democrats are this far gone. Unfortunately, It's getting hard to find any vocal examples who are not.
Unfortunately, it seems like both sides are reacting to the caricatures of the other party, which in turn pushes them toward becoming the bogeymen that the other party is warning about.
I hope there's a special place in hell reserved for people who put mandatory ads into DVDs and other things.
I hope there's a special place in hell for people who crap up the viewing experience, then say they wish they could sue you for ripping your own DVDs so you can watch them more comfortably.
I said I don't see an advantage for my uses. Sure, there are plenty of niche uses where a dedicated unit makes a lot of sense, but for me (and I suspect the wide majority of other potential users) a phone app is cheaper and more appropriate.
Whenever I've dealt with a Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Apple, HTC or LG rep I've never seen them use anything but their own phones and I'd be concerned about the statement they are making if they did.
A rep, sure, but I'd like to think that rank-and-file employees wouldn't be discouraged from using competitive products. How else are you going to know what the competition is doing? Something like "Hey, boss, have you seen how the iPhone handles ${whatever}? That's pretty slick and I think it works better than the way we're doing it." should be considered valuable feedback.
I'd say that it is free. You would have bought the phone anyway, and there's (effectively) zero marginal cost to add the extra navigation features.
Side note: I was looking at cheap geocaching GPSes and was stunned to see what Garmin charges for GPS updates. Holy crap! It's like the razor-and-blade business model, except that the razor is also ludicrously priced. I can't think of a single reason why I would buy a dedicated GPS unit instead of putting those few hundred dollars towards a smartphone and having all the extra features they offer.
Sure, drugs can affect my performance, but in that case they can fire me for not producing what I should; does it matter to know why?
I couldn't agree more. If I'm being unproductive, whether because I got stoned before coming to work or because I stayed up all night playing WoW, get rid of me. If I'm being productive, even if I got stoned before coming to work or stayed up all night playing WoW, keep me. I don't do either of those, but I'm grateful to work for a boss who is much more interested in whether I'm good at my job than what I do when I go home and I wish every company saw it that way.
We should be honest about this. Legalized pot will result in more people using, more people abusing, and all the problems that implies.
So what? If an adult wants to do something they enjoy in the short term but which may be detrimental in the long run, more power to 'em. There are plenty of (much more) dangerous leisure activities that are perfectly legal. People die while snowskiing, but we keep letting people tie sticks to their feet and fall down mountains. People die while bungie jumping, but you can still buy the cord and leap off a bridge. People die while driving, riding motorcycles, parachuting, river rafting, snowboarding, bicycling, drinking beer, skateboarding, jumping on trampolines, playing football, and doing pretty much any other fun activity you can imagine - but we still let them.
It's not my job or anyone else's to tell a rational adult that they're not allowed to enjoy their preferred form of recreation because it may hurt them. I may think that they and their hobby are stupid and a reckless waste, but it's legal to be be stupid and reckless.
BTW, I agree with your general point. It's just that I thoroughly disagree with the very premise that an activity's potential risk to the people engaging in it is a reason to consider banning the activity. People do risky stuff all the time, and it's your inherent right to do dumb things.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately part of the Terms of Service of the Facebook API prevents storage of data received through the API on a remote source.
I give a rat's ass about what their ToS says I can or can't do with copies of the information I personally uploaded to their site?
I do these things because I don't want my own environment to be a dump. I don't want the air in my valley to be smog-ridden. It's that simple.
Same here. I'm about the least liberal person you'll meet, and about as far away from "tree hugger" as it's possible to be, but I was raised with the principle of "waste not, want not." I hate throwing useful things away, or using non-reusable items when reusables are just as much (if not more) convenient. For example, a lot of times I'll decline having my groceries put in a bag at all if there are only a few items and I can carry them easily. Why put a two-liter of soda in a bag that I'm just going to throw away or run through a recycler as soon as I get home? I use rechargeable batteries whenever possible because they're cheaper in the long run than disposables, and because they're more convenient as I never run out of batteries. I use CFLs because it cuts down noticeably on my electricity bill and makes my air conditioner run less. I use a programmable thermostat because I don't care if my house warms up to 78F on summer days while I'm not at home or cools down to 62F in the winter. I drive a 12-year-old used car for the same reasons you mentioned; it doesn't get good gas mileage, but I don't drive it many miles and it's reliable and it's paid for.
I don't consider any of those to be "hippieish" in the slightest. I just hate the idea of wasting resources (and in turn, money) on things unnecessarily. Every battery or light bulb I don't have to buy, every kilowatt I don't use for cooling, every car payment I don't have to make for the sole privilege of driving something new and shiny is money in my pocket. I believe it's your right to drive an SUV if you want to, but it's my right to think that you're a freaking idiot for wasting all that money and gasoline to get so very little in return.
Better than releasing the Gnome equivalent of KDE4.
...unless it ends up as the Gnome equivalent of Vista - late and not what anyone wants.
I can say that I'm in charge of maintaining the software that terminates all HTTP traffic for Google.
Nuclear bomb firmware? EMP device simulations? /dev/null? IE 6? Inquiring minds want to know!
I actually read an article about issues like this
Move along.
The Zune's only a laughing stock to people that have never used it
...or to everyone walking past the Zune display to get to the iPods and Sansas. I don't think anyone's ever said that the Zune is a bad device, but it was almost criminally mismanaged into being a laughing stock. When iPods come in pink, blue, green, silver, etc., the first Zunes came in black, white, and turd brown. What jackass thought "it's gotta be brown! The kids will love it!"
Except for losing out to the Wii, having a... what is it? 55% failure rate?
Look, I'm trying hard to think of MS products that aren't widely ridiculed. That's kind of a short list, and I'll thank you to work with me on this difficult project.
I'm hardly a Ballmer fan, but what could he have done substantially differently? In my opinion, he inherited a pig with no obvious roadmap to future gains. He managed over the Kin debacle, sure, but he also managed the Xbox and that worked out pretty well.
I've read a thousand perfectly valid criticisms of Microsoft over the years, but I'm not sure that many of them can be traced back to Ballmer. For example, what changes could he have made to the Windows or Office lines to gain new growth instead of settling for trying to get current users to upgrade?
If anything, I think investors are expecting too much of Microsoft. Yes, it's somewhat stagnant. Of course it is! It already has something like 90% of the slow-growing PC market and roughly 100% of the "non-gratis office suite that runs on Windows" market. There's just not any growth left in MS's core competencies, and at least they're trying new stuff, even if the results are pretty embarrassing most of the time.
Call me an Atheist Christian if you wish.
I think the proper term is "Unitarian".
That's an excellent point, too. I've evolved the same system for over a decade by upgrading a bit here, a bit there... It was only in the last few months that I replaced the case, which had been the only remaining original part.
in many other places if you pay rent you get free electricity.
Electricity in an apartment is free in exactly the same way as food on a buffet is free: you've already been charged for it, whether or not you actually consume it.
This system is not useful as a desktop if it doesn't include a monitor, keyboard and mouse.
Do you typically replace old systems (so that you can reuse their peripherals), or do you just keep adding to your basement desktop cluster over the decades? I wouldn't normally ask, but this is Slashdot.
I'd pay an extra $110 to build a server system that would be many times faster and use far less electricity. The latter alone would make the return on investment worthwhile.
One of C's great advantages is not only that it is simple and very fast
You misspelled slow.
Yeah, you read that right.
C is slow, and getting slower by the hardware generation. In C, you have to spell out every trivial detail and can't just say "do this however it works out the fastest". Contrast with a language like Lisp, or more recently Erlang, where you can write code like "do this operation to every value in this set" and let the compiler (or virtual machine) figure out how to best implement that on the hardware (or cluster of hardware) that the program's running on. If you write a C snippet like:
then a compiler 10 years from now will spit out basically the same code as a compiler today, except that it might do some tricky things to the implementation of dosomething(). It has no way of knowing whether each of those calls has to be in sequence or if they can be executed in parallel and so it has to emit opcodes that are basically machine language equivalents to each line you've written.
Write the same code against the equivalent of MapReduce, and maybe in 10 years your loop will farm out the billion subprocesses to a cloud so that they run in parallel and finish in the same amount of time it takes for a single call to dosomething() to complete - all without recompiling.
Yes, C is slow, and that's not likely to go away. You can do multithreaded or multiprocessing code in C, of course! But I'd much rather spend my time getting dosomething() written and letting the language runtime figure out how best to execute it on the resources I have available.
Oh, and your argument against its complexity is just bizarre. By those standards, assembler is much simpler than C - each opcode only does one tiny, well-defined thing! I won't be writing a web browser in ASM any time soon though, even if I have the experience to do so if I had to.
Good luck with the FreeBSD kernel on Gentoo.
Gentoo runs just fine under FreeBSD. In the past, I've created a jail with nothing in it but an unpacked stage1 tarball and bootstrapped it into a fully-working Gentoo installation.
The problem that 99designs solves is that most clients don't need a $20,000 design and don't have $20,000 to spend.
You are so correct here. I've bought some services from Fiverr, like a personalized voicemail message. Major corporations might pay huge prices to get just. the. perfect. result, but I'm not a major corporation. I'll gladly pay $5 for something that isn't absolutely perfect but that is a lot better than I could do myself.
There seems to be a growing group who would prefer that the sum total role of government would be to issue all newborns with a bible and a gun, then vanish for all eternity.
Similarly, there seems to be a growing group who would prefer to enlist kids in government-run daycare as soon as they can babble, teach them the True Path to socialized utopia where government services are plentiful (and don't have to be funded), then offer them guaranteed lifetime employment when they graduate from high school - which is good as they'll be unable to read because the teachers' union thought it would be too much work and some of its members aren't up to it.
I caricature, of course. Not all democrats are this far gone. Unfortunately, It's getting hard to find any vocal examples who are not.
Unfortunately, it seems like both sides are reacting to the caricatures of the other party, which in turn pushes them toward becoming the bogeymen that the other party is warning about.
I hope there's a special place in hell reserved for people who put mandatory ads into DVDs and other things.
I hope there's a special place in hell for people who crap up the viewing experience, then say they wish they could sue you for ripping your own DVDs so you can watch them more comfortably.
Newsflash: this moral panic was brought to you by social conservatives. You know, people who almost always vote Republican.
LOL! How soon we forget.
Don't ever be quick to blame censorship on the other guy. Both major American political groups are pretty quick to "protect the children".
I said I don't see an advantage for my uses. Sure, there are plenty of niche uses where a dedicated unit makes a lot of sense, but for me (and I suspect the wide majority of other potential users) a phone app is cheaper and more appropriate.
Their stupid ad offered a free cappuccino if you bought their overpriced reader
Yeah, but the difference is that people actually want nooks.
Whenever I've dealt with a Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Apple, HTC or LG rep I've never seen them use anything but their own phones and I'd be concerned about the statement they are making if they did.
A rep, sure, but I'd like to think that rank-and-file employees wouldn't be discouraged from using competitive products. How else are you going to know what the competition is doing? Something like "Hey, boss, have you seen how the iPhone handles ${whatever}? That's pretty slick and I think it works better than the way we're doing it." should be considered valuable feedback.
I'd say that it is free. You would have bought the phone anyway, and there's (effectively) zero marginal cost to add the extra navigation features.
Side note: I was looking at cheap geocaching GPSes and was stunned to see what Garmin charges for GPS updates. Holy crap! It's like the razor-and-blade business model, except that the razor is also ludicrously priced. I can't think of a single reason why I would buy a dedicated GPS unit instead of putting those few hundred dollars towards a smartphone and having all the extra features they offer.
Sure, drugs can affect my performance, but in that case they can fire me for not producing what I should; does it matter to know why?
I couldn't agree more. If I'm being unproductive, whether because I got stoned before coming to work or because I stayed up all night playing WoW, get rid of me. If I'm being productive, even if I got stoned before coming to work or stayed up all night playing WoW, keep me. I don't do either of those, but I'm grateful to work for a boss who is much more interested in whether I'm good at my job than what I do when I go home and I wish every company saw it that way.
We should be honest about this. Legalized pot will result in more people using, more people abusing, and all the problems that implies.
So what? If an adult wants to do something they enjoy in the short term but which may be detrimental in the long run, more power to 'em. There are plenty of (much more) dangerous leisure activities that are perfectly legal. People die while snowskiing, but we keep letting people tie sticks to their feet and fall down mountains. People die while bungie jumping, but you can still buy the cord and leap off a bridge. People die while driving, riding motorcycles, parachuting, river rafting, snowboarding, bicycling, drinking beer, skateboarding, jumping on trampolines, playing football, and doing pretty much any other fun activity you can imagine - but we still let them.
It's not my job or anyone else's to tell a rational adult that they're not allowed to enjoy their preferred form of recreation because it may hurt them. I may think that they and their hobby are stupid and a reckless waste, but it's legal to be be stupid and reckless.
BTW, I agree with your general point. It's just that I thoroughly disagree with the very premise that an activity's potential risk to the people engaging in it is a reason to consider banning the activity. People do risky stuff all the time, and it's your inherent right to do dumb things.