Windows 7 is a PC OS. That is what it is designed for, that is what it does well
You realize that there are a lot of services and features hwich you would neither need nor want on a handheld device that start during W7 startup, right? None of those would be needed.
The reality is, MS could probably put the NT substructure on top of the "instant on" ability of their CE platform if they wanted to. Might be a bit difficult, but I see no reason why they couldn't. And in the end, what it comes down to is the UI, which would be fairly straight forward to reduce for smaller screens (they almost already did that with W7; they'd just have to continue down the same line of thought they used for the start bar redesign).
I don't think you realize this, but turning an iPad "on" and "off" isn't usually doing so - it's pulling it from a deep suspend state that x86 hardware is not capable of (and most/all ARM hardware is). That's significant as it relates to W7 and it's ability to power itself on immediately. A W7 machine isn't "designed" like that because it loads many more drivers and subsystems: it's got to load drivers for PCI, as well as all the controllers on that bus. Then it's got to initiate the drivers, and so on. An iPad has none of this (it has a single SoC which is recognized immediately). Additionally: how long does it start to power up an iPad or similar on a "cold boot" or after a crash? Quite a bit longer than "instantly" I'd imagine.
One problem with Windows 7, "it isnt a tablet OS" were Android and Apple iOS 4 are.
Is Linux a tablet OS, or is it a mainframe OS? A desktop x86 OS? An embedded network device OS?
The answer is "yes". What's to prevent Microsoft from cutting down the systems in W7 and releasing it for small, embedded systems? As I understand things, it's probably better suited to porting to a different architecture than BSD is (which is why Apple didn't do that, they put the BSD interface on top of something they wrote themselves) and other purely monolithic designs (linux) are.
OMG, I'd love playing as a 'citizen' against the Combine in the Half-Life world. IF they did it right,
Personally, I've been waiting anxiously for a MMOFPS set in a post-apocalyptic/urban riot/or zombie world: basically something akin to Fallout 3, but MMORPG and focused on team/squad type tactics, while retaining significant RPG characteristics/customizations that would make each character 'unique' but not necessarily better.
That's because of the things which make a movie good, that is the easiest to deliver on. It's the most formalistic and predictable.
Likewise, the 'defining' characteristic of action films is explosions and special effects, and those are typically the most popular/biggest grossing at the box office. Even Titanic, which could be argued to not be a special effects/action film (shocking, I know) got most people to go to it because it was "revolutionary" in that regard. (Now it's shockingly commonplace, and it's considered a shit movie by almost everyone.)
Good movies stay the test of time, because they do well despite the lack of special effects (or maybe even in spite of them). For instance, many of John Wayne's later westerns were incredibly good films, and they probably had a negligible budget for much of anything.
I guess that might be why Hollywood is pushing DRM so much: they want your old recordings to be useless, forcing you to pay out again for the quality products if you want to use them again.
How did we, the people of slashdot, get onto the topic of sex quality to such an indepth fashion? In a thread about perceived quality of video output resolution, streaming, and encoding, of all things? JFC.
Thank you, you just ruined my weekend. I'll likely be sucked into playing that w/ a friend...
Likewise, there's Warzone 2100, which I thought was quite a bit like TA (with acknowledge for the fact that I maybe spent 20 minutes playing the original, 5 years after it came out, and got my ass swiftly handed to me by the computer.) I've sunk many an hour into this one.
There so many enjoyable, well-one multiplayer games for Linux (and open source in general) I've not had the desire to pay for a game in some time/with any significant frequency. (Note, I fall in the 5-hours-or-fewer per week demographic by quite a bit.)
That said, Glest kinda sucks. It's boring and slow paced, even when you speed up the game speed. The gameplay does not feel fluid, either, even when run on a higher end system. It's like the Warcraft (original) of Open Source RTS: the sides are (For all intents and purposes) identical, and the gameplay is painfully simple.
People like you - the idiots who like pushing shit through the back door and apparently like "quirkiness and the riskiness" of immature, poorly maintained, undocumented projects. Seriously: fuck you.
You are the reason that Open Source has taken such a long time to adapt. I know of several IT contracting firms which will not touch Linux or Open Source in general because they have seen entirely too many instances of people like you and their work: technologically headstrong geek installs an Open Source product/project in an esoteric, convoluted fashion and didn't document the process (potentially only so he could fix it). He does his best to put as much customization and inter-dependence into the system(s) as possible. Then he moves on to do something else, and the customer is left holding the bag.
I suspect you and my predecessor would get along just fine. He enjoyed fucking people over, too.
Guess what? Most people would much rather be "bored" at work than have to fuck with something that broke because it was poorly conceived, and face the wrath of managers and users. THat's what the Linux Foundation (and those PFYs that fall in love with their recommendations/solid products) does for us: lets us sleep at night.
There is a time and a place for "tinkering" and non-turnkey solutions - and it's called a lab. If you don't have one, you need one. It will save you time and money in the long run - it's the first step towards standardization and reduction of costs. It is very unprofessional (and foolish) to roll an untested product out to production without thorough initial testing - anyone who calls themselves an IT administrator or engineer and does otherwise is a fool.
Any administrator worth his salt hates sketchy nonsense. This is why we don't run early release software and other such nonsense.
It's different if you're in an "IT company" making something new, but yeah, as a general rule, sketch is bad.
The "peace and prosperity" of the 1990s was not the result of anything Clinton did. In fact, the assertions are actually false.
It wasn't unprecedentedly peaceful. During Clinton's term (not even the full 1990s), there were more military actions than there were from 2000-2010. If you're going by number of sanctioned actions, the 1930s were the most peaceful (only three - related - actions, in China).
From the start of Clinton's presidency in 1993 - right off the fucking bat - he starts throwing stones at the Balkans (making matters worse, as UN actions usually do). That's a collossal fuck-up, yet nobody even talks about it or acknowledges it as one - despite the troubles still going on today. Then there's Sudan, Liberia, repeated bombings in Iraq, Somolia actions (fail!), air strikes in Afghanistan, and of course repeat Balkan bombings. And of course there were the heightened War on Drugs efforts, and the "unprecedented" use of federal police for domestic military action against US citizens (Waco, Ruby Ridge).
This, despite the cease of conflict between Soviet states/interests and the West - ie, the Cold War being over. Granted, most of these were punitive actions so he could "look tough" and had little actual impact (aside from the Balkans). If there was peace, it was because threats were being ignored (such as, oh, Osama's buddy trying to assassinate Clinton in the Philipines). Calling it "unprecedented peace" is a pile of shit so deep you could call it a hill.
The economic prosperity, on the other hand, really did happen, but it was akin to not paying your power bill to buy a new TV. He did some things with regard to employment, but he was incredibly fortunate to arrive on the scene when he did: before the 2nd wave of substantial off-shoring occurred, and at the cusp of the so-called Information Revolution. Between opening up the national oil reserves (cheap oil/gas), increased off-shoring, and the explosion of the tech industry, he'd have had to try pretty hard to make things not grow like wild fire. (Likewise, the 1997-2000 bubble, and it's ultimate collapse around 2002, can be safely attributed to the same dotcom bubble).
I should note I'm not justifying any of the crap since or before Clinton, but calling Clinton a saint of a President is a bit shortsighted (to say the least!).
I don't know how every single incumbent is voting. I'm sure there are principled, effective congresspeople; voting all of them out would seem overly drastic.
"Overly drastic"? What would you consider a 'measured response' then?
We've done the "just get the bag ones out" for some time. That's been failing, because it's the system that has been corrupted not the individuals, per se.
Hardly seems "overly drastic" when the alternatives (national collapse, revolution, and even deeper recession/depression) are oh so much worse.
Why must it be incompetence? An action can be malefic even if the intent of malice isn't there - it's just ignorant hostility, then. People do a lot of things in their lives which hurt others, unbeknown to the actor.
Assuming any ill effect is from incompetence and malice is short sighted, ignorant of history, and generally ignorant of human nature. Not to invoke Godwin, but most of the totalitarian dictators in the world's history - the really "evil" ones - weren't trying to do harm; they were trying to do good, as they saw it. Pol Pot (wanted to improve Cambodia), Hitler (wanted to bring Germany to the world forefront), Stalin (ideological purist trying to enforce his views), and so on. They were just very bad at what they were doing.
Just remember: the intelligent sociopaths are the ones who are good politicians. There aren't many of those, because intelligent sociopaths are smart enough and not invested emotionally enough to stay away from the whole mess. The end result is a bunch of dumb, power hungry sociopaths running the show.
And that's our current lot, led by career politicians who've been doing their thing for over two decades in many cases. They don't give a damn about their "elected office" and they've made it clear at this point they're in it for themselves. In self interest, the Junior Senators and Representatives from the parties tow the party line for hopes of getting put on a comittee or some such thing, resulting in a defacto dictatorship for the populace as a whole - a bureaucratic dictatorship, but one none the less. This is true for both parties and has been for as long as I've been able to read (I just didn't realize it until I was both old enough to vote and realize what that meant).
Clearly, there were lots of racists who called themselves Democrats, but over the past several decades, with the ascent of people of color in the Democratic Party, those racists would have become more and more uncomfortable as Democrats. Today, a black man is the head of the Democratic Party. By definition, any serious racist would obviously not remain a member of a party that is led by a black man.
And what if that person happens to be black and hate whites? Or be white and hate blacks?
Or is it not possible to be racist against whites, jews, and other ethnic/cultural groups?
Kinda small minded to think of things that way, isn't it?
I don't care if he's left-center, center-right, center-center, under the table, a Polynesian Jew, a Muslim Imam, reincarnated Jimmy Hendrix, or a monkey in a suit.
He's an incompetent tit and he's fucking everything up. I'm not so much as saying that he's doing it intentionally, but his failure rate (of accomplishing anything positive, never mind what he said he was going for) is close to 100%.
The ONLY thing he has managed to do successfully is spend, as near as I can see. And even that isn't helping. All signs point to it making things worse.
Oh, you mean us, the visitors? Yeah, about that... I see a catch 22.
Some time ago ( a very long time ago) slashdot did have a positive-only vote system. There was no vote total cap, and a user's karma was expressed as an integer. Then they introduced meta moderation and it went downhill from there (I'm sure you could find an early podcast where they talk about this new feature, somewhere; I think it was from around 1999).
Aside from the "vote or moderate, not both" change, I see nothing good from the newer/current system.
I was wondering what brought the relative swing in lean on digg in the past year or so, so apparently this is it.
Wasn't that long ago that you couldn't go to digg without getting burned by a self-immolating hippie. I'm guessing the kids who were hitting "bury" on the conservative links got overwhelmed by organized so-called conservatives, or the infants who were clicking 'bury' thought this whole Ron Paul thing was neat, and became so-called libertarians... not bothering to realize that being an infant precludes them from such things as "liberty", at the existential level.
It's actually closer to $550 or so unless you're an idiot. By "idiot" I mean "someone who does not factor in 5-15% or more of the overall purchase cost".
Who ever said that ID and evolution had to be mutually exclusive?
The most plausible scenario is that both be involved. Designing your creation to evolve - ie, behave "intelligently" and adapt - would be the more intelligent way to design things, after all.
The only concern I have about this is that it might be a general purpose AI instead of a specifically purposed one. If it's general purpose, it seems tenable that we very well might see autonomous AI robots within not too long. That's somewhat disturbing, given the potential social and (significantly) military applications.
Yeah. Why teach the applications practical to 95% of white collar jobs instead of programming, which most kids won't be interested in, fewer will 'get' and hardly any will ever do professionally?
Because it's horizon-broadening and helps them understand the concepts (mathematics, for starters) behind a spreadsheet better than a spreadsheet user typically has the chance to understand?
Isn't the point here to educate, not push them towards a white collar desk job? Why would anyone want to electively pick something like that when you can make something in home economics, shop, ceramics, photography, etc. or do something in gym, orchestra, etc.? Nobody you'd want to work for you, I imagine.
If you only learn to spell, as opposed to learning speech, reading and literature, you aren't actually doing anything productive.
People who just know how to word process and spreadsheet usually can't do those things worth re-using their output. They're not terribly productive, either: ever see one of these people slave over something for a week which would take a common geek (or even someone smart) an hour or two to do, max?
Besides, I know programming is hardly a glamourous, high paying job, but it sure as hell pays a lot better than being a school teacher.
As a sysadmin who has to program from time to time: yes, spreadsheets and word processors are completely unimportant in many regards. They're different, the skills migrate pretty easily, and the likelihood of having to use the same spreadsheet in 3-5 years is negligible.
Basic spreadsheet computations, or Access stuff? Sure, I suppose. Just please don't use a horrible Microsoft Press book: crammed full of "click here" goodness bullshit, they're mind numbing. They're worse than New Math.
Basic programming is, for a beginner, very satisfying - whether it's shell, perl, or VB. "Look what I made" is very horizon opening, regardless of whether it's a crayon drawing, an ash try, a clock, or a highly advanced artificial intelligence.:)
The problem there is that any AI written by a high schooler is likely to be several hundred iterations more complex than the average school teacher, "computer" teachers included.
Why would you write a book with inline code samples using Microsoft Word? What benefit might that provide? In fact, I'd see it as a disadvantage/frustration, due to how it handles different characters and substitution (?, `, ', ") for non-ASCII types.
The fact that they realized all those years ago that soft is more comfortable than hard, slippery is faster than sticky and light is less work than heavy is amazing!
Well, it is pretty amazing if your Egyptology worldview accepts things like:
* geometrically perfect granite sarcophagi, which modern machinery tools would be hard pressed (if even able) to replicate, were made by slaves - who used basalt chisels. * The pyramids, which have no scientific or explicable cultural explanation as to their function were constructed by slaves using pulleys, and crude tools - despite their geometric perfection, astronomical and astrological representation, and demonstration of very advanced science all around.
* The same people who built these things - the supposed Egyptians of not that long ago - went into decline inexplicably, and some of the most powerful kings were buried in caves, not the pyramids. * The same people who built these things (and kept slaves, used primitive tools, and had bad teeth) were capable of complex hieroglyphic communication which we do not fully understand today. * The Sphinx, which is obviously water stained and eroded by anyone who has ever viewed the spillway of a dam, is eroded by sand.
Honestly, the "Ancient Egyptian gods were really Go'ould" explanations are more reasonable than the nonsense espoused by contemporary Egyptology.
So really, these chariots aren't surprising. What's surprising is that Egyptologists stick with what they think they know instead of accepting the facts of the world around them.
Zones ~= BSD jails or Linux jail environment, but better in many ways (security/compartmentalization, independence, implementation, configuration, adaptability). Security can be much more tightly defined as to what the zone can or can not do (more like a host level ACL) as can be in Linux.
Containers ~= virtual machines. It's a zone with the ability to do true VM type stuff. Except better, in that it's able to run pretty much anything (try vbox under a container, for instance). Except unlike VMWare, Xen, XenServer, or the like, it's actually pretty easy to change a bunch of settings like bandwidth, memory allocation, nice, etc. of a container instance, and has been possible for some time - unlike the "real soon now" for many VM implementations.
And surely you're trolling about ZFS. ZFS FUSE is even worse than the FreeBSD implementation in terms of performance and stability.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows 7 is a PC OS. That is what it is designed for, that is what it does well
You realize that there are a lot of services and features hwich you would neither need nor want on a handheld device that start during W7 startup, right? None of those would be needed.
The reality is, MS could probably put the NT substructure on top of the "instant on" ability of their CE platform if they wanted to. Might be a bit difficult, but I see no reason why they couldn't. And in the end, what it comes down to is the UI, which would be fairly straight forward to reduce for smaller screens (they almost already did that with W7; they'd just have to continue down the same line of thought they used for the start bar redesign).
I don't think you realize this, but turning an iPad "on" and "off" isn't usually doing so - it's pulling it from a deep suspend state that x86 hardware is not capable of (and most/all ARM hardware is). That's significant as it relates to W7 and it's ability to power itself on immediately. A W7 machine isn't "designed" like that because it loads many more drivers and subsystems: it's got to load drivers for PCI, as well as all the controllers on that bus. Then it's got to initiate the drivers, and so on. An iPad has none of this (it has a single SoC which is recognized immediately). Additionally: how long does it start to power up an iPad or similar on a "cold boot" or after a crash? Quite a bit longer than "instantly" I'd imagine.
One problem with Windows 7, "it isnt a tablet OS" were Android and Apple iOS 4 are.
Is Linux a tablet OS, or is it a mainframe OS? A desktop x86 OS? An embedded network device OS?
The answer is "yes". What's to prevent Microsoft from cutting down the systems in W7 and releasing it for small, embedded systems? As I understand things, it's probably better suited to porting to a different architecture than BSD is (which is why Apple didn't do that, they put the BSD interface on top of something they wrote themselves) and other purely monolithic designs (linux) are.
OMG, I'd love playing as a 'citizen' against the Combine in the Half-Life world. IF they did it right,
Personally, I've been waiting anxiously for a MMOFPS set in a post-apocalyptic/urban riot/or zombie world: basically something akin to Fallout 3, but MMORPG and focused on team/squad type tactics, while retaining significant RPG characteristics/customizations that would make each character 'unique' but not necessarily better.
That's because of the things which make a movie good, that is the easiest to deliver on. It's the most formalistic and predictable.
Likewise, the 'defining' characteristic of action films is explosions and special effects, and those are typically the most popular/biggest grossing at the box office. Even Titanic, which could be argued to not be a special effects/action film (shocking, I know) got most people to go to it because it was "revolutionary" in that regard. (Now it's shockingly commonplace, and it's considered a shit movie by almost everyone.)
Good movies stay the test of time, because they do well despite the lack of special effects (or maybe even in spite of them). For instance, many of John Wayne's later westerns were incredibly good films, and they probably had a negligible budget for much of anything.
I guess that might be why Hollywood is pushing DRM so much: they want your old recordings to be useless, forcing you to pay out again for the quality products if you want to use them again.
How did we, the people of slashdot, get onto the topic of sex quality to such an indepth fashion? In a thread about perceived quality of video output resolution, streaming, and encoding, of all things? JFC.
What is wrong with you people?!
Thank you, you just ruined my weekend. I'll likely be sucked into playing that w/ a friend...
Likewise, there's Warzone 2100, which I thought was quite a bit like TA (with acknowledge for the fact that I maybe spent 20 minutes playing the original, 5 years after it came out, and got my ass swiftly handed to me by the computer.) I've sunk many an hour into this one.
There so many enjoyable, well-one multiplayer games for Linux (and open source in general) I've not had the desire to pay for a game in some time/with any significant frequency. (Note, I fall in the 5-hours-or-fewer per week demographic by quite a bit.)
That said, Glest kinda sucks. It's boring and slow paced, even when you speed up the game speed. The gameplay does not feel fluid, either, even when run on a higher end system. It's like the Warcraft (original) of Open Source RTS: the sides are (For all intents and purposes) identical, and the gameplay is painfully simple.
Limits are not made, they are?
People like you - the idiots who like pushing shit through the back door and apparently like "quirkiness and the riskiness" of immature, poorly maintained, undocumented projects. Seriously: fuck you.
You are the reason that Open Source has taken such a long time to adapt. I know of several IT contracting firms which will not touch Linux or Open Source in general because they have seen entirely too many instances of people like you and their work: technologically headstrong geek installs an Open Source product/project in an esoteric, convoluted fashion and didn't document the process (potentially only so he could fix it). He does his best to put as much customization and inter-dependence into the system(s) as possible. Then he moves on to do something else, and the customer is left holding the bag.
I suspect you and my predecessor would get along just fine. He enjoyed fucking people over, too.
Guess what? Most people would much rather be "bored" at work than have to fuck with something that broke because it was poorly conceived, and face the wrath of managers and users. THat's what the Linux Foundation (and those PFYs that fall in love with their recommendations/solid products) does for us: lets us sleep at night.
There is a time and a place for "tinkering" and non-turnkey solutions - and it's called a lab. If you don't have one, you need one. It will save you time and money in the long run - it's the first step towards standardization and reduction of costs. It is very unprofessional (and foolish) to roll an untested product out to production without thorough initial testing - anyone who calls themselves an IT administrator or engineer and does otherwise is a fool.
Any administrator worth his salt hates sketchy nonsense. This is why we don't run early release software and other such nonsense.
It's different if you're in an "IT company" making something new, but yeah, as a general rule, sketch is bad.
The "peace and prosperity" of the 1990s was not the result of anything Clinton did. In fact, the assertions are actually false.
It wasn't unprecedentedly peaceful. During Clinton's term (not even the full 1990s), there were more military actions than there were from 2000-2010. If you're going by number of sanctioned actions, the 1930s were the most peaceful (only three - related - actions, in China).
From the start of Clinton's presidency in 1993 - right off the fucking bat - he starts throwing stones at the Balkans (making matters worse, as UN actions usually do). That's a collossal fuck-up, yet nobody even talks about it or acknowledges it as one - despite the troubles still going on today. Then there's Sudan, Liberia, repeated bombings in Iraq, Somolia actions (fail!), air strikes in Afghanistan, and of course repeat Balkan bombings. And of course there were the heightened War on Drugs efforts, and the "unprecedented" use of federal police for domestic military action against US citizens (Waco, Ruby Ridge).
This, despite the cease of conflict between Soviet states/interests and the West - ie, the Cold War being over. Granted, most of these were punitive actions so he could "look tough" and had little actual impact (aside from the Balkans). If there was peace, it was because threats were being ignored (such as, oh, Osama's buddy trying to assassinate Clinton in the Philipines). Calling it "unprecedented peace" is a pile of shit so deep you could call it a hill.
The economic prosperity, on the other hand, really did happen, but it was akin to not paying your power bill to buy a new TV. He did some things with regard to employment, but he was incredibly fortunate to arrive on the scene when he did: before the 2nd wave of substantial off-shoring occurred, and at the cusp of the so-called Information Revolution. Between opening up the national oil reserves (cheap oil/gas), increased off-shoring, and the explosion of the tech industry, he'd have had to try pretty hard to make things not grow like wild fire. (Likewise, the 1997-2000 bubble, and it's ultimate collapse around 2002, can be safely attributed to the same dotcom bubble).
I should note I'm not justifying any of the crap since or before Clinton, but calling Clinton a saint of a President is a bit shortsighted (to say the least!).
I don't know how every single incumbent is voting. I'm sure there are principled, effective congresspeople; voting all of them out would seem overly drastic.
"Overly drastic"? What would you consider a 'measured response' then?
We've done the "just get the bag ones out" for some time. That's been failing, because it's the system that has been corrupted not the individuals, per se.
Hardly seems "overly drastic" when the alternatives (national collapse, revolution, and even deeper recession/depression) are oh so much worse.
Incompetent?
Why must it be incompetence? An action can be malefic even if the intent of malice isn't there - it's just ignorant hostility, then. People do a lot of things in their lives which hurt others, unbeknown to the actor.
Assuming any ill effect is from incompetence and malice is short sighted, ignorant of history, and generally ignorant of human nature. Not to invoke Godwin, but most of the totalitarian dictators in the world's history - the really "evil" ones - weren't trying to do harm; they were trying to do good, as they saw it. Pol Pot (wanted to improve Cambodia), Hitler (wanted to bring Germany to the world forefront), Stalin (ideological purist trying to enforce his views), and so on. They were just very bad at what they were doing.
Just remember: the intelligent sociopaths are the ones who are good politicians. There aren't many of those, because intelligent sociopaths are smart enough and not invested emotionally enough to stay away from the whole mess. The end result is a bunch of dumb, power hungry sociopaths running the show.
And that's our current lot, led by career politicians who've been doing their thing for over two decades in many cases. They don't give a damn about their "elected office" and they've made it clear at this point they're in it for themselves. In self interest, the Junior Senators and Representatives from the parties tow the party line for hopes of getting put on a comittee or some such thing, resulting in a defacto dictatorship for the populace as a whole - a bureaucratic dictatorship, but one none the less. This is true for both parties and has been for as long as I've been able to read (I just didn't realize it until I was both old enough to vote and realize what that meant).
Clearly, there were lots of racists who called themselves Democrats, but over the past several decades, with the ascent of people of color in the Democratic Party, those racists would have become more and more uncomfortable as Democrats. Today, a black man is the head of the Democratic Party. By definition, any serious racist would obviously not remain a member of a party that is led by a black man.
And what if that person happens to be black and hate whites? Or be white and hate blacks?
Or is it not possible to be racist against whites, jews, and other ethnic/cultural groups?
Kinda small minded to think of things that way, isn't it?
I don't care if he's left-center, center-right, center-center, under the table, a Polynesian Jew, a Muslim Imam, reincarnated Jimmy Hendrix, or a monkey in a suit.
He's an incompetent tit and he's fucking everything up. I'm not so much as saying that he's doing it intentionally, but his failure rate (of accomplishing anything positive, never mind what he said he was going for) is close to 100%.
The ONLY thing he has managed to do successfully is spend, as near as I can see. And even that isn't helping. All signs point to it making things worse.
Who are these "site moderators" you mention?
Oh, you mean us, the visitors? Yeah, about that... I see a catch 22.
Some time ago ( a very long time ago) slashdot did have a positive-only vote system. There was no vote total cap, and a user's karma was expressed as an integer. Then they introduced meta moderation and it went downhill from there (I'm sure you could find an early podcast where they talk about this new feature, somewhere; I think it was from around 1999).
Aside from the "vote or moderate, not both" change, I see nothing good from the newer/current system.
I was wondering what brought the relative swing in lean on digg in the past year or so, so apparently this is it.
Wasn't that long ago that you couldn't go to digg without getting burned by a self-immolating hippie. I'm guessing the kids who were hitting "bury" on the conservative links got overwhelmed by organized so-called conservatives, or the infants who were clicking 'bury' thought this whole Ron Paul thing was neat, and became so-called libertarians... not bothering to realize that being an infant precludes them from such things as "liberty", at the existential level.
Seriously?
It's actually closer to $550 or so unless you're an idiot. By "idiot" I mean "someone who does not factor in 5-15% or more of the overall purchase cost".
Who ever said that ID and evolution had to be mutually exclusive?
The most plausible scenario is that both be involved. Designing your creation to evolve - ie, behave "intelligently" and adapt - would be the more intelligent way to design things, after all.
Yep.
The only concern I have about this is that it might be a general purpose AI instead of a specifically purposed one. If it's general purpose, it seems tenable that we very well might see autonomous AI robots within not too long. That's somewhat disturbing, given the potential social and (significantly) military applications.
Nonsense. Nothing can really push a person to learn how a computer works better than a leaky race condition on a slow system. :)
Yeah. Why teach the applications practical to 95% of white collar jobs instead of programming, which most kids won't be interested in, fewer will 'get' and hardly any will ever do professionally?
Because it's horizon-broadening and helps them understand the concepts (mathematics, for starters) behind a spreadsheet better than a spreadsheet user typically has the chance to understand?
Isn't the point here to educate, not push them towards a white collar desk job? Why would anyone want to electively pick something like that when you can make something in home economics, shop, ceramics, photography, etc. or do something in gym, orchestra, etc.? Nobody you'd want to work for you, I imagine.
If you only learn to spell, as opposed to learning speech, reading and literature, you aren't actually doing anything productive.
People who just know how to word process and spreadsheet usually can't do those things worth re-using their output. They're not terribly productive, either: ever see one of these people slave over something for a week which would take a common geek (or even someone smart) an hour or two to do, max?
Besides, I know programming is hardly a glamourous, high paying job, but it sure as hell pays a lot better than being a school teacher.
Not in this market, it doesn't.
As a sysadmin who has to program from time to time: yes, spreadsheets and word processors are completely unimportant in many regards. They're different, the skills migrate pretty easily, and the likelihood of having to use the same spreadsheet in 3-5 years is negligible.
Basic spreadsheet computations, or Access stuff? Sure, I suppose. Just please don't use a horrible Microsoft Press book: crammed full of "click here" goodness bullshit, they're mind numbing. They're worse than New Math.
Basic programming is, for a beginner, very satisfying - whether it's shell, perl, or VB. "Look what I made" is very horizon opening, regardless of whether it's a crayon drawing, an ash try, a clock, or a highly advanced artificial intelligence. :)
The problem there is that any AI written by a high schooler is likely to be several hundred iterations more complex than the average school teacher, "computer" teachers included.
No, you completely misunderstood what I was saying. It was a somewhat hyperbolic statement, but yeah... *whoosh*
Why would you write a book with inline code samples using Microsoft Word? What benefit might that provide? In fact, I'd see it as a disadvantage/frustration, due to how it handles different characters and substitution (?, `, ', ") for non-ASCII types.
The fact that they realized all those years ago that soft is more comfortable than hard, slippery is faster than sticky and light is less work than heavy is amazing!
Well, it is pretty amazing if your Egyptology worldview accepts things like:
* geometrically perfect granite sarcophagi, which modern machinery tools would be hard pressed (if even able) to replicate, were made by slaves - who used basalt chisels.
* The pyramids, which have no scientific or explicable cultural explanation as to their function were constructed by slaves using pulleys, and crude tools - despite their geometric perfection, astronomical and astrological representation, and demonstration of very advanced science all around.
* The same people who built these things - the supposed Egyptians of not that long ago - went into decline inexplicably, and some of the most powerful kings were buried in caves, not the pyramids.
* The same people who built these things (and kept slaves, used primitive tools, and had bad teeth) were capable of complex hieroglyphic communication which we do not fully understand today.
* The Sphinx, which is obviously water stained and eroded by anyone who has ever viewed the spillway of a dam, is eroded by sand.
Honestly, the "Ancient Egyptian gods were really Go'ould" explanations are more reasonable than the nonsense espoused by contemporary Egyptology.
So really, these chariots aren't surprising. What's surprising is that Egyptologists stick with what they think they know instead of accepting the facts of the world around them.
As others have said, you're clearly confused.
Zones ~= BSD jails or Linux jail environment, but better in many ways (security/compartmentalization, independence, implementation, configuration, adaptability). Security can be much more tightly defined as to what the zone can or can not do (more like a host level ACL) as can be in Linux.
Containers ~= virtual machines. It's a zone with the ability to do true VM type stuff. Except better, in that it's able to run pretty much anything (try vbox under a container, for instance). Except unlike VMWare, Xen, XenServer, or the like, it's actually pretty easy to change a bunch of settings like bandwidth, memory allocation, nice, etc. of a container instance, and has been possible for some time - unlike the "real soon now" for many VM implementations.
And surely you're trolling about ZFS. ZFS FUSE is even worse than the FreeBSD implementation in terms of performance and stability.