It's been phantom, "in development" software for years. Who wants to bet that Longhorn was never really going to exist in the first place, but was simply an experimental platform which they were using to slow down the migration to other platforms?
I can't see the appeal in this, at all. It'll be slow and fairly useless, IMO. I also suspect they'll charge for it.
I'd like it if they'd optimize it so that the save dialog actually works instead of being a UI nightmare. It feels like it's about 10 years of negative progress.
I would finger the decline of Barbie being more the fault of increased feminism and females rejecting the "feminine" image for their daughters, and less a case of poor marketing.
Though, I suppose that if they'd simply change barbie from a balloon-headed bimbo with disproportionate body parts to something a bit more "GI Joe"-like (the large 12" models), which are proper human proportions (albeit a bit more muscular), then they might be able to change things. But then, they'd not be barbie.
The scale of linux development has drastically, drastically changed over the last several years. I think this is a telling sign that the actual development of the kernel should be more modularized.
Look at the debian project as an example. It's the best comparision I can think of, as it too supports a very wide range of hardware and software: from x86 or PPC laptops, big iron servers, to RISC handhelds.
Not really knowing much about the kernels innards, I can't comment on how they might do this. I can only imagine the following scenario:
- have a "hardened" base set of code which contains all the machine instructions, etc. for each arch - have a volume of code for all the various kernel hooks for other things to use - have arch specific driver "sets" which can be worked - and should be worked on - without touching the actual "kernel". If there's something preventing the driver from being written properly due to a kernel bug, fix the bug after the appropriate channels are traversed.
Maybe have a different group of people for each group, and don't allow them to traverse the groups and work on the other groups code. I don't know. Just throwing ideas out...
Now, I'm not saying abandon the monolithic kernel model; I'm just saying restructure the code itself and how its managed, not what the code does. Would something like this work?
Zero violent crime rate? Not hardly. It's roughly 1/6th that of the US, which is (IIRC), roughly that of Britian.
The US has an uncharacteristically high violent crime rate, but the actual rate of violent crimes committed with guns is lower than quite a few other countries (and not all. There's another flip side: some countries have a higher murder rate, but most of the murders are committed by means other than firearms, despite the ready availability of firearms (even more available than they are in the US, sold by street vendors, etc.).
My point being: studies have shown that there's little correlation between a country's crime rate and the weapons available legally (or illigally, for that matter). Murder and violence are much more a cultural aspect, just as sex is. Our cultural achievements will obviously reflect the mentality and values of the culture.
Sorry I couldn't be more specific concerning country names; I've got to head out the door in a couple minutes and I don't remember many specifics from the research I read.
Here is one of the sites which I found such information on, as I was curious about the safety of owning a firearm (there's been a rash of killings, break-ins, and other loonies in the area, and I'd like to protect my family). There were others, but that was the only one I bookmarked as it was the best documented one of the bunch....
(Sorry if this is a bit off topic... oops, I'm late!)
I don't think democracy is one of the strengths of the EU right now. Maybe in the future.
This is incredibly, incredibly ignorant of you.
Name one time in the history of the world where the government in power of a country has willingly relinquished any authority to a lower body in a situation where they were able to dictate things from the top efficiently. You will not find one.
The nature of power (and thus government) is that people always want more. You will not get your democratic freedoms simply by sitting there: history has shown us that democracy does not come from anything other than the direct application of physical force.
I think you can expect to see less "democracy" in Europe (and the world as whole, really). The current Western situation is quite the fluke of history - the US in the 1950's being the most outstanding example of that fluke, where societal equal standing was at its height.
Since that time, we've only really seen a decline here in the US. There is now decline in such footing in Europe as well, as there has been for many years.
Expect to see things degrade. Your rulers will be elected by the people in name only, having been hand picked beforehand by the current leaders in power. These 'elected' rulers will have agreed to follow the "party line". Living conditions might be good for you. They might also be bad. But you won't have democracy, and you won't have freedom. Chances are the state will get progressively fascist, and the power of the state will be the police.
The EC has always been partial to corporations, establishing fascist government control, and things of that order.
That's what you have a large body with a lot of power that was not elected by the populace: abuse. Particularly when the people involved are incompetent politicians that were given the post so as to "get rid of them" by their political friends.
It's sickening how they and overreach their boundries and dictate to people that don't want their say. It's doubly sickening how their word is the final word in the EU. Bloody pathetic how so many people had their (albeit limited) democracies ripped away from them.
Many people work to find fulfillment. For some, work does the trick. For others, its relationships, spending time outdoors, hanging with friends, creating new things, reading or self-improvement - you name it.
I seriously doubt that games offer many people fulfillment for any significant period of time, though.:P
That said, most of the things I find in the least bit fulfilling are directly related to social significance: having a good job, being respected, having a good debate, and things of that order. None of that would be possible in this "utopian" society you speak of, because without work most of the structure of society becomes not only less significant but useless and outmoded (social security, taxes, etc.). If it ever were to happen, I suspect we'd have a large number of people reverting to agrarian communes or something to that respect: hard work has a significant degree of satisfaction associated iwth it.
Yes, you're right. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that Japan is a major "westernized" country with large trade agreements with the US and other western countries, or that China is the largest economy of people in the world (3rd largest after EU and US in terms of economic power, I think?) now could it? Absolutely not.
By the way - learning proper grammar structure would help. What you're to say is obscured by your illiteracy (s/can fit/people/, s/americans/Americans/).
it'll probably be put in a low-risk interest bearing account. the pot maintainer will keep the return, and give the winner the original invested amount...
anyone know if the X series of thinkpad IBM laptops will suspend properly now? mine doesn't return from sleep, and won't even begin to suspend to disk properly. (thinkpad x30)
then again, X goofs up for me with the bios 'hybernation' feature too. though I think that's independent, as it still "works" - just with screen garbage on resume.
What troubles with blackboard are you talking about?
Aside from it being a steaming pile of shit, that is. And the fact that it costs an arm and a leg, and has a slew of easily-exploitable vulns... Was there something specific recently which I missed?
It's a method that parents can use to "enforce" what their children can spend the parents' money on.
South Dakota State uses these cards (I don't recall the company), and they are accepted by a couple area merchants - food service, mainly. There's essentially two ballances on them: one for cafeteria food, and one for "flex", which covers those merchants, the campus snack shop, vending machines, etc.
These cards are also your campus ID, and are used at the bookstore as well (not sure for what reason that would be; Big Brother tracking, probably).
The benefit to the school is a large lump of float money which they can use at their disposal. Aside from the money they've got sitting around for most of a semester for lunch money/mandatory cafeteria "fines" (as it's required that all SDSU students, either sophmore or freshmen, live in dorms - which has a mandatory cafeteria account. bloody fascists.) They can use this considerable sum for investment and what have you to increase their wealth at the cost of poor students and tax payers.
Consider: A campus with a mere 9,000 students, with your average student having a carry balance of about $20 for most of the semester. (I think that's what I heard as the running statistic at SDSU). This gives the school about 4 months to use $180,000 as they see fit. At SDSU, it wasn't uncommon for students to have several hundred dollars of "float" money left over at the end of the semester which they'd then blow at the snack shop, etc. over a period of the last couple weeks, and people commonly put as much as $800 in their cards at the begging of the year.
And finally, they -are- convenient for the students. I was at SDSU for about two semesters and I frequently ran into situations where I would want a soda, snack, etc. and didn't have any cash on me - I was bloody poor. But I did have the "you must give us your money" ammount from living in the dorms the first semester still well into the 2nd semester (it carried over), so I was able to get a soda and a bag of chips here or there when "needed".
Not only that, but it would be trivial for a thief to take the card's data and put it on a similar credit card (maybe one with "their" name on it) and use it in a store like a valid credit card. Being as all scanners these days are digital, and people -never- check to see if the numbers check the physical impression on the card (but only compare ID to card, if even that), it'd be a "safe way to use the stolen information.
Since it's such an obvious method, I don't doubt it's already done, though.
It would make a hell of a lot of sense to require the pin to be checked against the bank's authentication servers instead of storing it on the card.
I'd always thought that's how it was done - check against the bank's database. The more I think about it, the more I doubt that it's the actual PIN on the card (maybe a card ID instead? IE, "card 1 for the account, card 2 for the account, etc.). Otherwise you'd not be able to change your PIN, which is currently a fairly trivial thing to do by calling your bank up.
Does it drive anyone else crazy that credit cards do not follow the "somthing you have and something you know" security measure? Even something as simple as a 4-digit code would be sufficient to provide an exponential amount of physical (and digital, if done properly) security.
There's a difference between communicating and talking a lot. You can say something - simply and plainly - without dozens of overtones and undertones to confuse the issue. That's what I do. I take words for their value, and when there's intonation thrown in, I take that into consideration. If I'm going to tell someone something, I'm not going to take 3x the time it would take me to simply tell them and explain the extenuating circumstances.
If women are such great communicators, why are there not more famous women speakers? Why have there not been many inspirational, well-spoken, profound, or "quoteable" women in our modern society? Granted, this is a correlatory point, but I've yet to hear a single woman in the public eye that had anything profound, etc. to say.
(Not to say such women don't exist: my wife doesn't waste breath by using superfluous words, and she understands the value of using words to get things done instead of simply talking. There are others, too, but they're unfortunately rare.)
If you'd read more carefully, you'd notice I made "unjustified generalization" about the entire human race. One has to generalize sometimes in order to convey a point if they don't want to go on indefinately and eventually lose the point they were trying to make due to over-verbosity.
I've got an acquantance who, for the longest time, had a recording of his own voice as his ring tone saying, "Ring, Ring!" It was the most god-aweful, obnoxious thing, and I swear I pondered on where I would hide his body if I heard it just one more time. Thankfully, his phone died mysteriously with the only copy of the "tone". On that note...
Cell phones do not need ring tones. Cell phones are, with marginal variation, kept on a person: in a pocket, on a belt, or in decreasing number, in a purse. Only in the last case would a ring be necessary.
Not only that, but ringtones are inherrently rude. They're a social distraction, for one, and interfere with any social interaction which you're partaking in at the time when it rings. In some situations this might not be a problem (a large gathering of friends - playing cards, for instance - where everyone is talking back and forth and no discussions, etc. are going on).
Anywhere else, it should be socially acceptable to rebuke the person for a ringing phone and the person with the phone most definately should appoligize for not turning off the ringer. Doubly so if they're using a trendy, music-industry-sponsored tone that is difficult enough to escape when going about your daily life (via the radio).
Even when a cell phone is not in your pocket, it is likely on a table or other flat (and hard) surface. A vibrating phone will create a rattle/vibration which the human ear is more than capable of discerning.
Ring tones are, quite simply, an obnoxious over-extension of trendy "individuality". "You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake." There will undoubtably be one out of the roughly 80 billion people that use cell phones in this country (USA) that have the same ring tone. Trying to be an "individual" through such methods is self-defeating in our consumerist society. Try being truly individual and unique and forge your own views and personality. It'll get you further in life than a 16 bit mono downsampling of music which was shitty to begin with.
The main function of (and problem with) a ringtone - to know when it is ringing and to be able to distinguish it from others' phones - is both solved and defeated by putting the damn thing in your pocket and using the "vibrate" mode. But then there's the luggage problem at the airports. You know. Nine times out of ten it's an electric razor, but every once in a while... Well, at least they didn't have the latest Britney Spears ditty. Thank God for that. Thank God.
*appoligizes profusely for the Fight Club quote abuse - but it's applicable!*
Slashdot Mirror
Backporting it from what, might I ask?
It's been phantom, "in development" software for years. Who wants to bet that Longhorn was never really going to exist in the first place, but was simply an experimental platform which they were using to slow down the migration to other platforms?
I can't see the appeal in this, at all. It'll be slow and fairly useless, IMO. I also suspect they'll charge for it.
I'd like it if they'd optimize it so that the save dialog actually works instead of being a UI nightmare. It feels like it's about 10 years of negative progress.
Even the Windows save dialog is better.
I would finger the decline of Barbie being more the fault of increased feminism and females rejecting the "feminine" image for their daughters, and less a case of poor marketing.
Though, I suppose that if they'd simply change barbie from a balloon-headed bimbo with disproportionate body parts to something a bit more "GI Joe"-like (the large 12" models), which are proper human proportions (albeit a bit more muscular), then they might be able to change things. But then, they'd not be barbie.
And that somehow makes it more morally acceptable?
It certainly doesn't mean anything to the people that lost their jobs.
Windows-based, web-enabled (does this mean on a public network?) ATMs.
Dear God. The shit has hit the fan. Head for the hills!
The scale of linux development has drastically, drastically changed over the last several years. I think this is a telling sign that the actual development of the kernel should be more modularized.
Look at the debian project as an example. It's the best comparision I can think of, as it too supports a very wide range of hardware and software: from x86 or PPC laptops, big iron servers, to RISC handhelds.
Not really knowing much about the kernels innards, I can't comment on how they might do this. I can only imagine the following scenario:
- have a "hardened" base set of code which contains all the machine instructions, etc. for each arch
- have a volume of code for all the various kernel hooks for other things to use
- have arch specific driver "sets" which can be worked - and should be worked on - without touching the actual "kernel". If there's something preventing the driver from being written properly due to a kernel bug, fix the bug after the appropriate channels are traversed.
Maybe have a different group of people for each group, and don't allow them to traverse the groups and work on the other groups code. I don't know. Just throwing ideas out...
Now, I'm not saying abandon the monolithic kernel model; I'm just saying restructure the code itself and how its managed, not what the code does. Would something like this work?
It's not only that. You touched upon the main difference yourself: Japanese people play less violent games than Americans.
That's a large cultural difference which indicates a mentality that preceeds any actual activity, whether it be owning a gun or committing murder.
Zero violent crime rate? Not hardly. It's roughly 1/6th that of the US, which is (IIRC), roughly that of Britian.
The US has an uncharacteristically high violent crime rate, but the actual rate of violent crimes committed with guns is lower than quite a few other countries (and not all. There's another flip side: some countries have a higher murder rate, but most of the murders are committed by means other than firearms, despite the ready availability of firearms (even more available than they are in the US, sold by street vendors, etc.).
My point being: studies have shown that there's little correlation between a country's crime rate and the weapons available legally (or illigally, for that matter). Murder and violence are much more a cultural aspect, just as sex is. Our cultural achievements will obviously reflect the mentality and values of the culture.
Sorry I couldn't be more specific concerning country names; I've got to head out the door in a couple minutes and I don't remember many specifics from the research I read.
Here is one of the sites which I found such information on, as I was curious about the safety of owning a firearm (there's been a rash of killings, break-ins, and other loonies in the area, and I'd like to protect my family). There were others, but that was the only one I bookmarked as it was the best documented one of the bunch....
(Sorry if this is a bit off topic... oops, I'm late!)
Life immitating fiction immitating life perpetrating fantasy.
I take it you've had to sign a NDA? If not, we'll be expecting as non-biased a review of it as you can provide. :)
I don't think democracy is one of the strengths of the EU right now. Maybe in the future.
This is incredibly, incredibly ignorant of you.
Name one time in the history of the world where the government in power of a country has willingly relinquished any authority to a lower body in a situation where they were able to dictate things from the top efficiently. You will not find one.
The nature of power (and thus government) is that people always want more. You will not get your democratic freedoms simply by sitting there: history has shown us that democracy does not come from anything other than the direct application of physical force.
I think you can expect to see less "democracy" in Europe (and the world as whole, really). The current Western situation is quite the fluke of history - the US in the 1950's being the most outstanding example of that fluke, where societal equal standing was at its height.
Since that time, we've only really seen a decline here in the US. There is now decline in such footing in Europe as well, as there has been for many years.
Expect to see things degrade. Your rulers will be elected by the people in name only, having been hand picked beforehand by the current leaders in power. These 'elected' rulers will have agreed to follow the "party line". Living conditions might be good for you. They might also be bad. But you won't have democracy, and you won't have freedom. Chances are the state will get progressively fascist, and the power of the state will be the police.
The EC has always been partial to corporations, establishing fascist government control, and things of that order.
That's what you have a large body with a lot of power that was not elected by the populace: abuse. Particularly when the people involved are incompetent politicians that were given the post so as to "get rid of them" by their political friends.
It's sickening how they and overreach their boundries and dictate to people that don't want their say. It's doubly sickening how their word is the final word in the EU. Bloody pathetic how so many people had their (albeit limited) democracies ripped away from them.
Politeness norms? What politeness!
If you want a physically secure company, move to New York or Jersey. You'll never have to deal with pesky politeness again.
Many people work to find fulfillment. For some, work does the trick. For others, its relationships, spending time outdoors, hanging with friends, creating new things, reading or self-improvement - you name it.
:P
I seriously doubt that games offer many people fulfillment for any significant period of time, though.
That said, most of the things I find in the least bit fulfilling are directly related to social significance: having a good job, being respected, having a good debate, and things of that order. None of that would be possible in this "utopian" society you speak of, because without work most of the structure of society becomes not only less significant but useless and outmoded (social security, taxes, etc.). If it ever were to happen, I suspect we'd have a large number of people reverting to agrarian communes or something to that respect: hard work has a significant degree of satisfaction associated iwth it.
Yes, you're right. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that Japan is a major "westernized" country with large trade agreements with the US and other western countries, or that China is the largest economy of people in the world (3rd largest after EU and US in terms of economic power, I think?) now could it? Absolutely not.
By the way - learning proper grammar structure would help. What you're to say is obscured by your illiteracy (s/can fit/people/, s/americans/Americans/).
it'll probably be put in a low-risk interest bearing account. the pot maintainer will keep the return, and give the winner the original invested amount...
anyone know if the X series of thinkpad IBM laptops will suspend properly now? mine doesn't return from sleep, and won't even begin to suspend to disk properly. (thinkpad x30)
then again, X goofs up for me with the bios 'hybernation' feature too. though I think that's independent, as it still "works" - just with screen garbage on resume.
What troubles with blackboard are you talking about?
Aside from it being a steaming pile of shit, that is. And the fact that it costs an arm and a leg, and has a slew of easily-exploitable vulns... Was there something specific recently which I missed?
Well, look at it this way.
It's a method that parents can use to "enforce" what their children can spend the parents' money on.
South Dakota State uses these cards (I don't recall the company), and they are accepted by a couple area merchants - food service, mainly. There's essentially two ballances on them: one for cafeteria food, and one for "flex", which covers those merchants, the campus snack shop, vending machines, etc.
These cards are also your campus ID, and are used at the bookstore as well (not sure for what reason that would be; Big Brother tracking, probably).
The benefit to the school is a large lump of float money which they can use at their disposal. Aside from the money they've got sitting around for most of a semester for lunch money/mandatory cafeteria "fines" (as it's required that all SDSU students, either sophmore or freshmen, live in dorms - which has a mandatory cafeteria account. bloody fascists.) They can use this considerable sum for investment and what have you to increase their wealth at the cost of poor students and tax payers.
Consider: A campus with a mere 9,000 students, with your average student having a carry balance of about $20 for most of the semester. (I think that's what I heard as the running statistic at SDSU). This gives the school about 4 months to use $180,000 as they see fit. At SDSU, it wasn't uncommon for students to have several hundred dollars of "float" money left over at the end of the semester which they'd then blow at the snack shop, etc. over a period of the last couple weeks, and people commonly put as much as $800 in their cards at the begging of the year.
And finally, they -are- convenient for the students. I was at SDSU for about two semesters and I frequently ran into situations where I would want a soda, snack, etc. and didn't have any cash on me - I was bloody poor. But I did have the "you must give us your money" ammount from living in the dorms the first semester still well into the 2nd semester (it carried over), so I was able to get a soda and a bag of chips here or there when "needed".
Not only that, but it would be trivial for a thief to take the card's data and put it on a similar credit card (maybe one with "their" name on it) and use it in a store like a valid credit card. Being as all scanners these days are digital, and people -never- check to see if the numbers check the physical impression on the card (but only compare ID to card, if even that), it'd be a "safe way to use the stolen information.
Since it's such an obvious method, I don't doubt it's already done, though.
It would make a hell of a lot of sense to require the pin to be checked against the bank's authentication servers instead of storing it on the card.
I'd always thought that's how it was done - check against the bank's database. The more I think about it, the more I doubt that it's the actual PIN on the card (maybe a card ID instead? IE, "card 1 for the account, card 2 for the account, etc.). Otherwise you'd not be able to change your PIN, which is currently a fairly trivial thing to do by calling your bank up.
Slightly off topic, but:
Does it drive anyone else crazy that credit cards do not follow the "somthing you have and something you know" security measure? Even something as simple as a 4-digit code would be sufficient to provide an exponential amount of physical (and digital, if done properly) security.
There's a difference between communicating and talking a lot. You can say something - simply and plainly - without dozens of overtones and undertones to confuse the issue. That's what I do. I take words for their value, and when there's intonation thrown in, I take that into consideration. If I'm going to tell someone something, I'm not going to take 3x the time it would take me to simply tell them and explain the extenuating circumstances.
If women are such great communicators, why are there not more famous women speakers? Why have there not been many inspirational, well-spoken, profound, or "quoteable" women in our modern society? Granted, this is a correlatory point, but I've yet to hear a single woman in the public eye that had anything profound, etc. to say.
(Not to say such women don't exist: my wife doesn't waste breath by using superfluous words, and she understands the value of using words to get things done instead of simply talking. There are others, too, but they're unfortunately rare.)
If you'd read more carefully, you'd notice I made "unjustified generalization" about the entire human race. One has to generalize sometimes in order to convey a point if they don't want to go on indefinately and eventually lose the point they were trying to make due to over-verbosity.
I've got an acquantance who, for the longest time, had a recording of his own voice as his ring tone saying, "Ring, Ring!" It was the most god-aweful, obnoxious thing, and I swear I pondered on where I would hide his body if I heard it just one more time. Thankfully, his phone died mysteriously with the only copy of the "tone". On that note...
Cell phones do not need ring tones. Cell phones are, with marginal variation, kept on a person: in a pocket, on a belt, or in decreasing number, in a purse. Only in the last case would a ring be necessary.
Not only that, but ringtones are inherrently rude. They're a social distraction, for one, and interfere with any social interaction which you're partaking in at the time when it rings. In some situations this might not be a problem (a large gathering of friends - playing cards, for instance - where everyone is talking back and forth and no discussions, etc. are going on).
Anywhere else, it should be socially acceptable to rebuke the person for a ringing phone and the person with the phone most definately should appoligize for not turning off the ringer. Doubly so if they're using a trendy, music-industry-sponsored tone that is difficult enough to escape when going about your daily life (via the radio).
Even when a cell phone is not in your pocket, it is likely on a table or other flat (and hard) surface. A vibrating phone will create a rattle/vibration which the human ear is more than capable of discerning.
Ring tones are, quite simply, an obnoxious over-extension of trendy "individuality". "You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake." There will undoubtably be one out of the roughly 80 billion people that use cell phones in this country (USA) that have the same ring tone. Trying to be an "individual" through such methods is self-defeating in our consumerist society. Try being truly individual and unique and forge your own views and personality. It'll get you further in life than a 16 bit mono downsampling of music which was shitty to begin with.
The main function of (and problem with) a ringtone - to know when it is ringing and to be able to distinguish it from others' phones - is both solved and defeated by putting the damn thing in your pocket and using the "vibrate" mode. But then there's the luggage problem at the airports. You know. Nine times out of ten it's an electric razor, but every once in a while... Well, at least they didn't have the latest Britney Spears ditty. Thank God for that. Thank God.
*appoligizes profusely for the Fight Club quote abuse - but it's applicable!*