Why isn't there a moderation category "-1, unbelievebly stupid"?
No, it should be "+1, unbelievably stupid". Seriously.
No, really, it'd get modded up so high EVERYONE would get to see it and have a good laugh. It's been a long time since something I read on slashdot caused me to burst out laughing like that.
Oh, come now, you KNOW that is asking too much. That's why Windows is still on top. People are happy with what's comfortable to them, whether or not it's the better solution.
My post was aimed that those marginally intelligent. Even you yourself qualify.
Uncle Sam and most other people pin me as better than "marginally intelligent"... my problem is that it doesn't show as well in an online forum. I have a harder time getting my points organized in this setting.
The simple fact that I was trying to point out is, that ATA133 is NOT designed for geeks, it is designed for the average (Windows) user. You are not the average user. The average user has ZERO need for fibre channel, and probably not much need for raid 5. Did you know I still have hard drives in service that are over 10 years old? Not a single bad sector on them. I admit this might be extraordinary, but the fact is, 90% of the market, which ATA133 is aimed for, is made up of people who don't want something like fibre channel. It's not necessary, it's not backwards compatible.
Backwards compatibility IS important. Why do you think it's taken so long for M$ to remove support for DOS programs from Windows? If it wasn't strategic and earning them money, it wouldn't have been there.
You missed the point of the entire concept of ATA133... it's not meant for geeks or servers. It's meant for the rest of the world. This is why ATA133 will succeed, and fibre channel will be relegated to the background of the PC world even worse than SCSI. At least SCSI has some big backers like Apple.
Do normal users need "Connectivity over several kilometers" or more "flexible topologies" than a few drives daisy-chained together?
The simple fact is, fibre channel is only practical for high-end machines. If you run a small server or a desktop system, you'd be "braindead" to switch your system to a totally incompatible storage architecture, abandoning the compatibility and ease of IDE for the average user.
You also have to take into account that the cables for fibre channel are much more fragile than IDE ribbons, though not subject to RF reception in the medium itself.
For the record, I've never had a problem with IDE on any of my systems. It's cheaper to upgrade than my SCSI systems, and the drives are getting bigger and faster all the time, and not really going up in price.
Firewire hard drives, now THAT looks promising for desktop use...
Of course, this time of year, if you live in the Willamette Valley of Oregon (Portland, Salem, Eugene, etc.), you know to expect clouds and rain for this weekend.
The upside is, you can drive to Central/Eastern Oregon and probably have clear weather, and less light pollution.
There's a very technical and valid reason why the TI-89 does that.
I've written a couple of language interpreters, and I can say for certain that processing into RPN is a very easy way to handle expressions. My technique (I only dabble in this stuff) was to write a recursive-descent parser, push the ops onto a stack, and do the math that way.
This has the advantage, if you are writing a compiler, to do various optimizations, like constant folding and such. For example:
a = 2 + 2 should NEVER be evaluated run-time in a compiled language... it should be evaluated during optimization... it's really easy with an RPN construct... that changes to 2 2 +... start at the beginning, and do each operation that has a pair of constants as an input.
What I'm getting at, is that all this is done for speed and simplicity of computation.
In high school, someone had a 48SX, then a friend of mine got a GX... the IR port, expansion port and stuff was way cool... always thought the LCD could be just a bit better.
I also speak Forth (no pun intended, or is it "Forth speak"?) so that part of the calc was easy. The equation editor was really cool, if a bit slow, but all in all, these calcs were pretty damn nice... it's sad to see them go.
At the time, all I could afford was a TI-85, and it fit my needs.
But, to be honest, a friend gave me a TI-89 a year ago, and I'd totally forgotten about the HP calcs until today. The TI-89 definitely was my ideal calc. (And let's be honest, RPN isn't good for everything:)
Wonder if a 48 emulator could be written for the TI-89?
From the passport TOS: You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your password and account information. Furthermore, you are responsible for all activities that occur in your account and you agree to notify Microsoft immediately of any unauthorized use of your account. Microsoft is not responsible for any loss that you may incur as a result of any unauthorized person using your account or your password.
There it is, in the last sentence.
Oh, and the standard disclaimer: IN NO EVENT SHALL MICROSOFT AND/OR ITS SUPPLIERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, PUNITIVE, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, ARISING OUT OF OR IN ANY WAY CONNECTED WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THE PASSPORT SERVICES...
Sounds really intelligent there! The company's going to fail, so sell off all your stock so it'll fail sooner! Self-serving people make me sick.
What?! If I put money into a company, it's on the supposition that I will receive dividends from that company, eventually totalling more than the initial investment in the company, or it is on the supposition that the company's stock will be in so much demand that the paper value of my investment will increase.
When neither one of those is happening, and it is clear that the company's future is in question, I have the right to take my investment back. When I buy stock, I do not give that money to the company, I loan the money to it. Since it is MY fscking money in the first place, invested on the faith that it will give me an income, I can take it back whenever I feel that my interests are not being met. (Read: interest.)
So, if it's so self-serving to invest money wisely only in successful companies, on the basis of earning a living and planning for my retirement in the future, well, I suppose I'll continue to make you sick, because you can bet your bleeding heart that I'm not going to ride stock into the ground and lose ALL of my investment. Why do this when I can sell it off?
Actually, it's because I did get up on the wrong side of the bed today, and felt like being pissed off about something. That comment struck me as a something.
I am aware the open source development model isn't perfect, but I am also aware that neither is any commercial development model-- portraying as such (either expressed or implied) is a lie, and that is what I was responding to, not the trolling aspect.
Though you can fault me for a little flamebait, you cannot fault me for anything else. I didn't try to portray the open source development model as perfect, I merely pointed out that commercial devlopment processes have the same flaws.
I'd like to bring up a small example that the SAME thing can happen in your happy little closed-source world, too. I can sum it up like this: Windows - OS/2. Windows happened to be the one that succeeded.
Furthermore, when one authority is in the position to determine where progress goes, people tend to lose their jobs or otherwise be eliminated from the project for having a different philosophy. Rather than having two parts of the effort working on two projects, therefore being 100% productive, you have part of the effort working on one project, therefore not being 100% productive.
But, my real question for YOU is, did you just get up on the wrong side of the bed today? Your lover refuse to have sex with you? Or are you paid by Microsoft/Oracle/whatever to bash the open source development model every chance you get? Away with you, FUD!
This one is simple enough to answer: the "philosophy" of the VM from BSD could be taken, but the code? Not really. Though the license may let the code be used (though there are debates on the compatibility between BSD-licensed code and GPL-licensed code), the BSD and Linux kernels are completely different. You can't just simply take the BSD code and adapt it to Linux, or even use it as a starting point. The VM is a core component of the kernel-- in fact, it's one of the major functions of the kernel along with I/O abstraction. It's really much easier to write a VM system for a kernel from scratch, as opposed to porting one from a completely different system.
There is also the argument, made by some, that the BSD VM system isn't particularly good a low-memory situations, either.
An azimuth is merely a direction or bearing. For 2D navigation, an azimuth is simply the same as degrees on a compass (if your compass reads in degrees), as in, the azimuth to the north pole is 0 degrees. (or 0 mils if you are in the artillery)
For 3D navigation you have to give two 2D azimuths to point in one 3D direction... if you have a 0;0 reference point... say you measure it in degrees, than you can reference any direction with two 2D azimuths in degrees. (Like Star Trek... bearing 245 mark 16)
Hard to describe. I'm sure someone could explain this a lot better.
Look at all the features... long file names, abbreviated file names, many allocation sizes, and backwards compatibility all the way to 1981 if you want!
What, it doesn't support any kind of access control, you say? You don't need it anyway. After all, it's always nice when anyone at your computer can remove any file they want, like some random libraries from the system folder.
With the backing of an "innovative" industry giant like Microsoft, VFAT is surely the filesystem choice of the future!
All I can say for the military GPS signal is that it's already pretty damn accurate, and I think the civilian signal is fairly accurate as well.
When I was in the Army, we had a Magellan GPS receiver, a PLGR (military GPS), and the system our surveyors use for position and azimuth, (not sure if it's classified, so won't say much about it,) and all three of them were giving the same grid location. Of course, the Magellan GPS had to be put in Average mode with a couple minutes of sampling, but it got the same grid location.
The answer is: whenever you plug in the multibutton mouse of your choice.
It's only recently such a simple answer. This wasn't a cheap nor easy thing to do when Macs had just ADB ports. There weren't many multibutton ADB pointing devices out there, and they weren't cheap, either. (Then again, most Mac peripherals aren't cheap.)
I did find a cool driver that'd let you plug in a PC mouse into one of the serial ports (with appropriate adapter) and use that it.
You left out us theistic evolutionists. The basic premise being that the chance of this universe springing into existence via some random quantum fluctuations is infinitesimally small, and 99.9999% of mutations are fatal or disadvantageus to the organism. For this level of evolution to have happened in the given (scientific) age of the Earth, it must have had help.
The real bottom line is, the theory of evolution is sound, but unprovable. The theory of creation is also unprovable. Theistic evolution is also unprovable.
Oh yeah? When I was the IT department for a small business, we had a problem with Windows NT... seems that there was a memory leak in a Microsoft driver... one that, when heavily used, would cause slowdown and eventual freeze of the server in question.
This machine did a lot of things for us... providing local web services, e-mail, and caller-id for our multiline phone system. The other thing it did was maintain our large (20,000+ record) customer/contact database. When this machine was down, our business couldn't function.
When I located the module that was causing the problem, I called Microsoft. Now, after finally describing the problem to the person at the other end they said "this is referenced in knowledge base article number..." whaterver it was. At any rate, I looked at the article and sure enough, it described the problem, and said "this is a known issue with Windows NT 4.0 and all service packs" and as far as I know, they have NEVER fixed the problem. Another service pack came out, and it was STILL there.
As near as I can tell, they don't plan on fixing it because it's not an issue for 95+% of their customers, and besides, NT is obsoleted by Win2K. But, it pisses me off. They knew about the problem, and did nothing to fix it.
Oh, and we were billed for the service call. So, it seems I can nullify one of your arguments.
Furthermore, open source has a huge advantage if a company employs a coder or two. (but not a humble one, I seem to have developed a distaste for those just now.) If a bug is discovered, there is a chance that it can be fixed in-house, because you have the source. When was the last time you heard of a customer patching a bug deep in the bowels of a giant piece of software like Windows NT or Oracle?
Open source may not be a magic bullet, but it's a bullet nonetheless.
The obvious reason is, that one with a small amount of skill can doctor a digital picture in photoshop. The resolution of a digital camera is low enough that it could go undetected, whereas it would take a great amount of skill to doctor a polaroid.
Did they fix the "Probable hardware bug...
on
Linux Kernel 2.4.10
·
· Score: 1
Sep 23 18:49:45 omnium kernel: probable hardware bug: clock timer configuration
lost - probably a VIA686a motherboard.
Sep 23 18:49:45 omnium kernel: probable hardware bug: restoring chip configuration
I have an ALi Alladin V chipset, not a VIA686a.
I remember seeing on Linux-kernel that the algorithm used to detect this may be incorrect, and in any case, the printk is uneccessary. Or, it could be a one-line message instead of two, so that the syslogd can say "last message repeated x times" instead.
'Course, I could remove the printk myself, but I think the issue at hand should be taken care of by the kernel developers.
No, but I give up the FACT that nobody has a good enough reason to look at/scan my social security card every time I buy a beer in the store. I'd be giving up the FACT that nobody's recording my purchases, or every little thing I do where someone can justify the need to present a picture ID.
It's bad enough there's a barcode on my driver's license that gets scanned every time I do an "age-restricted purchase."
Slashdot Mirror
Why isn't there a moderation category "-1, unbelievebly stupid"?
No, it should be "+1, unbelievably stupid". Seriously.
No, really, it'd get modded up so high EVERYONE would get to see it and have a good laugh. It's been a long time since something I read on slashdot caused me to burst out laughing like that.
Lord forbid I suggest AOL Joe to evolve.
Oh, come now, you KNOW that is asking too much. That's why Windows is still on top. People are happy with what's comfortable to them, whether or not it's the better solution.
My post was aimed that those marginally intelligent. Even you yourself qualify.
Uncle Sam and most other people pin me as better than "marginally intelligent"... my problem is that it doesn't show as well in an online forum. I have a harder time getting my points organized in this setting.
It's a very elegant solution.
On that, at least, we agree. :)
The simple fact that I was trying to point out is, that ATA133 is NOT designed for geeks, it is designed for the average (Windows) user. You are not the average user. The average user has ZERO need for fibre channel, and probably not much need for raid 5. Did you know I still have hard drives in service that are over 10 years old? Not a single bad sector on them. I admit this might be extraordinary, but the fact is, 90% of the market, which ATA133 is aimed for, is made up of people who don't want something like fibre channel. It's not necessary, it's not backwards compatible.
Backwards compatibility IS important. Why do you think it's taken so long for M$ to remove support for DOS programs from Windows? If it wasn't strategic and earning them money, it wouldn't have been there.
You missed the point of the entire concept of ATA133... it's not meant for geeks or servers. It's meant for the rest of the world. This is why ATA133 will succeed, and fibre channel will be relegated to the background of the PC world even worse than SCSI. At least SCSI has some big backers like Apple.
And what, pray tell, does an average consumer (WinXP user) need with fibre channel? Or more than one drive, for that matter?
Have YOU installed fibre channel on your system?
Should my 70-year old grandma put fibre channel in her computer?
You really should read up a bit on fibre channel before you go saying it is an acceptable replacement for cheap IDE.
Do normal users need "Connectivity over several kilometers" or more "flexible topologies" than a few drives daisy-chained together?
The simple fact is, fibre channel is only practical for high-end machines. If you run a small server or a desktop system, you'd be "braindead" to switch your system to a totally incompatible storage architecture, abandoning the compatibility and ease of IDE for the average user.
You also have to take into account that the cables for fibre channel are much more fragile than IDE ribbons, though not subject to RF reception in the medium itself.
For the record, I've never had a problem with IDE on any of my systems. It's cheaper to upgrade than my SCSI systems, and the drives are getting bigger and faster all the time, and not really going up in price.
Firewire hard drives, now THAT looks promising for desktop use...
It looks nifty, but the site had so many frames on it I got tired of looking at it rather quickly.
I might just have to download a copy, though. It'd be nice to be able to change people's minds rather easily. Normally I just show them my machine.
Of course, this time of year, if you live in the Willamette Valley of Oregon (Portland, Salem, Eugene, etc.), you know to expect clouds and rain for this weekend.
The upside is, you can drive to Central/Eastern Oregon and probably have clear weather, and less light pollution.
There's a very technical and valid reason why the TI-89 does that.
I've written a couple of language interpreters, and I can say for certain that processing into RPN is a very easy way to handle expressions. My technique (I only dabble in this stuff) was to write a recursive-descent parser, push the ops onto a stack, and do the math that way.
This has the advantage, if you are writing a compiler, to do various optimizations, like constant folding and such. For example:
a = 2 + 2 should NEVER be evaluated run-time in a compiled language... it should be evaluated during optimization... it's really easy with an RPN construct... that changes to 2 2 +... start at the beginning, and do each operation that has a pair of constants as an input.
What I'm getting at, is that all this is done for speed and simplicity of computation.
In high school, someone had a 48SX, then a friend of mine got a GX... the IR port, expansion port and stuff was way cool... always thought the LCD could be just a bit better.
I also speak Forth (no pun intended, or is it "Forth speak"?) so that part of the calc was easy. The equation editor was really cool, if a bit slow, but all in all, these calcs were pretty damn nice... it's sad to see them go.
At the time, all I could afford was a TI-85, and it fit my needs.
But, to be honest, a friend gave me a TI-89 a year ago, and I'd totally forgotten about the HP calcs until today. The TI-89 definitely was my ideal calc. (And let's be honest, RPN isn't good for everything :)
Wonder if a 48 emulator could be written for the TI-89?
True that, but it does give them somewhat taller leg to stand on by including that in the TOS/EULA.
From the passport TOS: You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your password and account information. Furthermore, you are responsible for all activities that occur in your account and you agree to notify Microsoft immediately of any unauthorized use of your account. Microsoft is not responsible for any loss that you may incur as a result of any unauthorized person using your account or your password.
There it is, in the last sentence.
Oh, and the standard disclaimer: IN NO EVENT SHALL MICROSOFT AND/OR ITS SUPPLIERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, PUNITIVE, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, ARISING OUT OF OR IN ANY WAY CONNECTED WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THE PASSPORT SERVICES...
The fine print looks like M$ isn't responsible.
Yeah, that didn't come out quite right, did it?... but I think I got my point across.
That's what I get for letting someone piss me off right after work. :)
Sounds really intelligent there! The company's going to fail, so sell off all your stock so it'll fail sooner! Self-serving people make me sick.
What?! If I put money into a company, it's on the supposition that I will receive dividends from that company, eventually totalling more than the initial investment in the company, or it is on the supposition that the company's stock will be in so much demand that the paper value of my investment will increase.
When neither one of those is happening, and it is clear that the company's future is in question, I have the right to take my investment back. When I buy stock, I do not give that money to the company, I loan the money to it. Since it is MY fscking money in the first place, invested on the faith that it will give me an income, I can take it back whenever I feel that my interests are not being met. (Read: interest.)
So, if it's so self-serving to invest money wisely only in successful companies, on the basis of earning a living and planning for my retirement in the future, well, I suppose I'll continue to make you sick, because you can bet your bleeding heart that I'm not going to ride stock into the ground and lose ALL of my investment. Why do this when I can sell it off?
Actually, it's because I did get up on the wrong side of the bed today, and felt like being pissed off about something. That comment struck me as a something.
I am aware the open source development model isn't perfect, but I am also aware that neither is any commercial development model-- portraying as such (either expressed or implied) is a lie, and that is what I was responding to, not the trolling aspect.
Though you can fault me for a little flamebait, you cannot fault me for anything else. I didn't try to portray the open source development model as perfect, I merely pointed out that commercial devlopment processes have the same flaws.
I'd like to bring up a small example that the SAME thing can happen in your happy little closed-source world, too. I can sum it up like this: Windows - OS/2. Windows happened to be the one that succeeded.
Furthermore, when one authority is in the position to determine where progress goes, people tend to lose their jobs or otherwise be eliminated from the project for having a different philosophy. Rather than having two parts of the effort working on two projects, therefore being 100% productive, you have part of the effort working on one project, therefore not being 100% productive.
But, my real question for YOU is, did you just get up on the wrong side of the bed today? Your lover refuse to have sex with you? Or are you paid by Microsoft/Oracle/whatever to bash the open source development model every chance you get? Away with you, FUD!
This one is simple enough to answer: the "philosophy" of the VM from BSD could be taken, but the code? Not really. Though the license may let the code be used (though there are debates on the compatibility between BSD-licensed code and GPL-licensed code), the BSD and Linux kernels are completely different. You can't just simply take the BSD code and adapt it to Linux, or even use it as a starting point. The VM is a core component of the kernel-- in fact, it's one of the major functions of the kernel along with I/O abstraction. It's really much easier to write a VM system for a kernel from scratch, as opposed to porting one from a completely different system.
There is also the argument, made by some, that the BSD VM system isn't particularly good a low-memory situations, either.
An azimuth is merely a direction or bearing. For 2D navigation, an azimuth is simply the same as degrees on a compass (if your compass reads in degrees), as in, the azimuth to the north pole is 0 degrees. (or 0 mils if you are in the artillery)
For 3D navigation you have to give two 2D azimuths to point in one 3D direction... if you have a 0;0 reference point... say you measure it in degrees, than you can reference any direction with two 2D azimuths in degrees. (Like Star Trek... bearing 245 mark 16)
Hard to describe. I'm sure someone could explain this a lot better.
How can 70%+ of the world be wrong?
Look at all the features... long file names, abbreviated file names, many allocation sizes, and backwards compatibility all the way to 1981 if you want!
What, it doesn't support any kind of access control, you say? You don't need it anyway. After all, it's always nice when anyone at your computer can remove any file they want, like some random libraries from the system folder.
With the backing of an "innovative" industry giant like Microsoft, VFAT is surely the filesystem choice of the future!
All I can say for the military GPS signal is that it's already pretty damn accurate, and I think the civilian signal is fairly accurate as well.
When I was in the Army, we had a Magellan GPS receiver, a PLGR (military GPS), and the system our surveyors use for position and azimuth, (not sure if it's classified, so won't say much about it,) and all three of them were giving the same grid location. Of course, the Magellan GPS had to be put in Average mode with a couple minutes of sampling, but it got the same grid location.
The answer is: whenever you plug in the multibutton mouse of your choice.
It's only recently such a simple answer. This wasn't a cheap nor easy thing to do when Macs had just ADB ports. There weren't many multibutton ADB pointing devices out there, and they weren't cheap, either. (Then again, most Mac peripherals aren't cheap.)
I did find a cool driver that'd let you plug in a PC mouse into one of the serial ports (with appropriate adapter) and use that it.
You left out us theistic evolutionists. The basic premise being that the chance of this universe springing into existence via some random quantum fluctuations is infinitesimally small, and 99.9999% of mutations are fatal or disadvantageus to the organism. For this level of evolution to have happened in the given (scientific) age of the Earth, it must have had help.
The real bottom line is, the theory of evolution is sound, but unprovable. The theory of creation is also unprovable. Theistic evolution is also unprovable.
Some things will always remain theories.
who knew the tv would send back an "i am here" through s-video...
It doesn't. The board detects current draw from the S-video output once the electrical connection is made.
Oh yeah? When I was the IT department for a small business, we had a problem with Windows NT... seems that there was a memory leak in a Microsoft driver... one that, when heavily used, would cause slowdown and eventual freeze of the server in question.
This machine did a lot of things for us... providing local web services, e-mail, and caller-id for our multiline phone system. The other thing it did was maintain our large (20,000+ record) customer/contact database. When this machine was down, our business couldn't function.
When I located the module that was causing the problem, I called Microsoft. Now, after finally describing the problem to the person at the other end they said "this is referenced in knowledge base article number..." whaterver it was. At any rate, I looked at the article and sure enough, it described the problem, and said "this is a known issue with Windows NT 4.0 and all service packs" and as far as I know, they have NEVER fixed the problem. Another service pack came out, and it was STILL there.
As near as I can tell, they don't plan on fixing it because it's not an issue for 95+% of their customers, and besides, NT is obsoleted by Win2K. But, it pisses me off. They knew about the problem, and did nothing to fix it.
Oh, and we were billed for the service call. So, it seems I can nullify one of your arguments.
Furthermore, open source has a huge advantage if a company employs a coder or two. (but not a humble one, I seem to have developed a distaste for those just now.) If a bug is discovered, there is a chance that it can be fixed in-house, because you have the source. When was the last time you heard of a customer patching a bug deep in the bowels of a giant piece of software like Windows NT or Oracle?
Open source may not be a magic bullet, but it's a bullet nonetheless.
The obvious reason is, that one with a small amount of skill can doctor a digital picture in photoshop. The resolution of a digital camera is low enough that it could go undetected, whereas it would take a great amount of skill to doctor a polaroid.
Sep 23 18:49:45 omnium kernel: probable hardware bug: clock timer configuration lost - probably a VIA686a motherboard.
Sep 23 18:49:45 omnium kernel: probable hardware bug: restoring chip configuration
I have an ALi Alladin V chipset, not a VIA686a.
I remember seeing on Linux-kernel that the algorithm used to detect this may be incorrect, and in any case, the printk is uneccessary. Or, it could be a one-line message instead of two, so that the syslogd can say "last message repeated x times" instead.
'Course, I could remove the printk myself, but I think the issue at hand should be taken care of by the kernel developers.
No, but I give up the FACT that nobody has a good enough reason to look at/scan my social security card every time I buy a beer in the store. I'd be giving up the FACT that nobody's recording my purchases, or every little thing I do where someone can justify the need to present a picture ID.
It's bad enough there's a barcode on my driver's license that gets scanned every time I do an "age-restricted purchase."
I don't need Big Brother.