I'd love to use Thunderbird instead of OE (for NG reading mainly, email is rather trivial for me), but a few things keep holding me back. Mainly, it's the whole message-threading model of TB that bothers me. Maybe I'm just use to Outlook Express, but I *really* like the ability to collapse sub-threads. If I'm reading an interesting NG topic, but this one sub-thread starts going *way* off-topic, in OE I can just click on the little collapse button that's on every message with children. With TB, only the top-most message has a collapse button, so I just have to scroll past the potentially hundreds of message until I get out of the sub-thread and back on topic.
Also, if I have "Hide read messages" or "Only show unread messages" enabled, OE will at least wait for a refresh/reload to hide those messages I've already read. In TB, if I read a message, collapse the thread, then try to get back to that message.. it's too late. I'd have to change my view to all messages to see it again. Agaion, just a little PitA for the way I read.
It's the little things like that that keep me on OE. I've never had any of these *rampant* viruses or trojan problems that everyone bashes it for. And there's probably little hope in getting TB fixed, as it's more of a personal preference than a true bug, so *shrug*. OTOH, I *AM* a rabid Firebird fanboy. I love this damn browser like I've loved no other piece of software not written by me. *hugs his monitor*
And I might get some arguments here, but I think a bit of that can be contributed to the fact that optimizing a screen refresh algorithm may not be *cool* to an open source programmer, but writing some nifty transparency-laden eye-candy is. Who wants to write boring, optimized, no-credit, non-visible code? Few people. Unless they *have* to. And who *has* to? People whose bosses demand it and whose paychecks depend on it.
I think perhaps with the growing popularity of Linux, we are getting more "Rock star" programmers who would like to say, "Hey! You know that nifty GL-accelerated, Rotating Sphere login screen in the new 4.6 KDE? I *wrote* that! In, like, 10 minutes!" As opposed to, "Hey! You notice that 2% performance increase in the latest release? Well, I spend 5 months analyzing that code and re-writing it from scatch to implement a double-buffering scheme to provide that."
I may be missing the whole open source mentality, but personally, *I* don't have enough self-discipline to make myself devote a lot of time to a boring, bug-ridden problem, when there's more *sexy* coding that needs to be done. But maybe that's just me.
You know, that's actually a good post and you made a lot of great points. And it is true that I fall right into the "typical"/. user profile (although 'mid' twenties might be a stretch;)
But the truth is, at least for me, I'll never be able to equate being gay with being born of a different race. I'm sorry, but one of these is closer to a 'choice' or maybe a 'disease' than the other. I don't want to get into here, but that's just the way I see it.
Now as far as words are concerned, I don't think we have anyone lobbying for the ban of the words 'drunk' or 'drunkard,' even though some people are alcoholics. Shouldn't we embrace alcoholism as a lifestyle that should be protected against persecution? Are 'dry' cites/counties constitutionally illegal? I mean, we alcoholics are being denied by the goverment the ability to live our lifestyles! We just want to gain social-acceptance!
So from now on, don't ever use the word 'drunk', as it may offend us alcoholics. Don't say 'nerd', as we mentally-superior, but socially-challenged people find it hurtful. Also, 'politically-incorrect' bother me as well. Stop using it. I also don't want anything to ever be called ugly, boring, weird, insensitive, smelly, slow, weak, goofy, or shy, as all these words might offend me. At one point, I or someone else who fit one or more of these descriptions has been discriminated against. Maybe even violently. Where's the push to ban these words from our day-to-day vocabulary? There's not one. Why is that?
XP installs and runs just fine on them all. I did recently up the memory on the 300MHz machine to 256, which has made the desktop a little faster to use, but it wasn't exactly intolerable before. I also dual-boot that machine with Mandrake 9, and I did decide to go with IceWM, as both KDE and Gnome were sluggish, even moreso than XP. I may have been able to tweak them some, but for as little I actually use that machine..
I assume the the majority of differences lie in what users perceive as "slow."
gay adj. gayer, gayest 1) Showing or characterized by cheerfulness and lighthearted excitement; merry. 2) Bright or lively, especially in color: a gay, sunny room.
Whether or not this was the meaning the original poster intended, it seems to describe the 0.9 theme quite well.
I think the only thing worse than insensitive people are you over-sensitive, paranoid bastards. Lighten up!
I didn't try to get through the flash-soaked link, but my sig has my latest (April) journal entry for my dream desktop PC. It's a Dual Opteron, 1 GB ram, 9800 Pro, RAID-ed, 3-flat panel monitor setup for under $6K.
Now, it's about time to update it again, since the next generation of video cards are out, and 2GB RAM might actually make a noticeable difference. These things will add a few hundered dollors to the price, but you still have to keep in mind that this also includes $2K worth of monitors.
So basically, I can't build a *reasonably* uber-PC that costs more than $4000 w/o monitor. I suppose I could add some extra like neon lighting and LCD readouts, etc, but even those would only add a few bucks to the total price. Maybe these guys offer one *heck* of a warranty to back up their product.
No kidding. I wish I could find some of these people. I keep a running list on several different models of PC's I build for friends/relatives. Unfortunately, everyone wants the el-cheapo, minimum RAM, 15" Monitor, pirated Windows, free-labor, $500 special, and NO ONE wants the nice, 1GB RAM, 19" Flat Panel, RAID-ed, $2000+ models, where I could at least make a few buck off them. *sigh* Maybe I should advertise or something.
AWESOM-O: Um...okay, Adam Sandler is in love with this girl...and she's like, a golden retriever...or something. Studio Executive #1: That's brilliant! Studio Executive #2: We can call it "Puppy love."
Bah, anecdotal evidence to the contrary is easy to find. Take me, for example. I love computers. I love programming and I love building PC systems. I have a degree in Computer Science. I work as a software engineer, and I build, repair, and sell PC systems for friends and family. And I love it all. I do it full time, and in my spare, "leisure" time, I still do it. I also consider myself rather "balanced," as I have the whole "wife and kids" thing going on. Now, granted, I'm only 27, so maybe I haven't *burned-out* yet, but I don't see it happening in the immediate future, either.
I agree with the Office + Email = ??? equation, but I have to point out that Email + Calendar actually makes good sense. At least in an office setting, where meeting announcements are sent via email. Being able to simply "accept" the meeting invitation and have it automatically scheduled into your calendar is very handy. Probably more handy for some, than others, of course.
But it must impress some people, as evident by that fact that companies still purchase the Lotus Notes suite. =P As far as I can tell, that's about the *only* useful feature in this crap software that was forced upon us.
That's about the only thing in your post I agree with. However, I have added you to my friends list based solely on your perseverance and ability to hold discussion (however misguided) at length in a reasonable tone and with some semblance of an attempt at reason. Perhaps we shall both be afforded the opportunity to expand upon our argumentative abilities in future discussions.
Check out that "Load Temperature" chart. What's that? Intel's at the top and the Athlon's are at the bottom? Even at idle temps, the Athlon64 comes in under or even with the P4s.
That is an awfully narrow view of the business world. Yes, both companies exist to make a profit, but companies can differ in how they go about trying to make a profit both in the products they make and in how they sell them. Call it marketing, brand positioning, whatever, it exists.
Yes, it is narrow, but it served my argument. The post I was replying to was suggesting that nVidia actually "cared" about gamers, while ATI did not. I was merely pointing out that both companies are going to do whatever it takes to encourage their products to be bought by as many people as possible. The parent post made it sound as if nVidia developers have an attitude of "I don't care how many units we sell, we just want gamers to be happy," while ATI's just sat around figuring out how to engineer their products to cause cancer in gamers.
Furthermore, your points about ATI providing code samples, driver updates, etc., and references to acquantainces who are big independent ATI developers has nothing to do with your preceding argument
Actually, it had everything to do with my preceding argument. Once again, I was responding to the grandparent's argument of:
nVidia seems to cater to gamers by working with developers to make sure games USE all those fancy new functionalities of the GPU. Ie; nVidia's "The Way it was Meant to be Played" program. ATI plays lip service to it with it's "Get in the Game" program, but they don't provide the same support (like sample codes for killer shader effects, etc) [emphasis mine]
See? He was talking about developers as well. Please, try to keep up.
Please don't kid yourself. Corporations and such are in the business to make profits. Period. Yes, they may do things that may seem selfless, but rest assured, there are dollar amounts associated with every action. They don't generally believe in karma, but rather stock value. Do you think Saturn started its business just because it felt sorry for car buyers? Or do you think they saw an opportunity to make $$ by indicating that they feel so and trying to service those unmet needs? I'm not saying it's wrong, just that people shouldn't begin to think that businesses have "feelings."
Anyway, uh.. thanks for your reply, even though it appears you didn't exactly follow the thread of conversation here.
The fanboy following video cards is endlessly annoying... Followed by endless rants about how ATi sucks and nVidia rocks and will "slowly strangle the competition."
Please. There are NO differences between the companies as far as "caring about gamers" is concerned. Both exist to make a profit. Period. Several people I know are big independent ATI developers. ATI provides them with code samples, driver updates, etc.. gratis. Anything you say that generalizes one or the other of the companies makes you a "fanboy." Its no different than Ford vs Chevy. Each has some advantages and some disadvantages. And the both have some rabid fan-base that will make it thier sole priority to bash the other. *yawn*
Also, I don't get the whole "hooray for leapfrogging nVidia in phony-baloney do-nothing benchmarks" when every single review I read included all the current DX9 games with commentary on stability and visual quality, as well as performance. I don't even think Anandtech showd a 3DMark03 score. If so, I didn't pay attention to it. I agree, games are all that matter. Fortunately, that's what was tested.
Ok, I admit I jumped on you for this one post and your low ID. I looked at a few more of yours and saw that you weren't a complete moron. Moving on:
Racial profiling is a really old trick of the establishment to scare certain races away from the polls, because they would most certainly vote out the corporation-friendly candidates. It's pretty standard first-year university curriculum, actually. Maybe you should look into it. That's why, in Canada, we have laws against that kind of thing.
Guess what, we have laws against that sort of thing here, too! While not perfect yet, racial tensions have eased quite a bit here in the US. I live in the *deep* south, and even I have a hard time believing that any person who wished to vote would be afraid to do so because the polling place was in a police station. Maybe if the person was wanted for a crime and had his picture all over the station, but other than that, no.
No. I don't believe in browser intersitials; I run Mozilla with popups surpressed. What I meant was that candidates could post relevant information about their platform to a central site. It's fair, no?
Like I said before, what is currently holding back politicians and candidate from using the web? Are you talking about a controlled, central repository for all candidates to submit advertisments? Something like: www.2004.CandidateAdvertisments.com/CandidateA ? If so, why? What more would that accomplish than the current method of www.OfficialCandidateAWebsite.org, www.VoteForCandidateBForChange.net, etc?
Okay since I have to connect *all* the dots for you: Because it's hard to justify spending $5mil campaigning when your rivals spend nothing, because they don't have to if the online voting system was designed correctly. Each party tries to bankrupt the other party and everyone loses a vast sum of money when that happens. The current elections system is archaic and full of dishonesty. Let's pry that money back and put it to good use.
Ok, are you thinking that everyone who runs for office will agree to do absolutely no campaigning, other than on this central website? Do you plan on making that a law or something? What happens when one candidate goes out to dinner at a restaurant and shakes a few hands? Is he campaigning? If not, you are just going to get each candidate going out a little more and more to meet with potential voters, until you are right back where we are now. (spending $$$ to travel and meet with people to gain support)
I'm also going to have to disagree with this whole "allow anyone who wants to run, do so via the internet." What happens when the 2008 elections has 250 million candidates? I'll tell you what, nothing. The media will "tell" us the top 5-6 candidates (these will be the only ones they focus on) and things will progress as normal, ending with a final vote count of something like CandidateA: 54%, CandidateB: 47%, and 100 million canddiates with 0.0000000001% of the votes. I don't see how this will be "more fair."
I do agree that things could be a *lot* better when it comes to our election system, but you've yet to convince me how this "online voting" could be some sort of cure-all that will remove corruption, mistakes, unfairness, etc.
Wow. Apparenty this is *no* link between a user's slashdot ID and his or her ability to post a relevant or on-topic comment. =P
Black people are afraid to vote because some polling booths are located in police stations? WTF? Letting anyone/everyone run for office via the internet will clean up politics? WTF?
As far as I know, any candidate is already able to advertise and campaign via the internet for relatively little cost. I fail to see how "online voting" makes this any more accessible. Are you suggesting that online voting web-sites should support pop-ups with candidate ads? And how exactly does "online voting" reduce the need of policy makers to "spend $5mil travelling all over the freaking world, riding in limos and soaking up the cash with big expensive dinners and giant wardrobes"? That was perhaps one of the most confusing and irrelevant posts I've ever read here.
Exactly. Having a well-designed, idiot-proof, touch-screen system is necessary to minimize some of the crap we had in Florida. Having this system produce easily-to-count, easy-to-audit, paper ballots is necessary to minimize the corruption and/or mistakes that are bound to happen.
Who cares about networking the machines or having some sort of quick, automated way to use the booths to tally the votes. I don't think that's an issue anyone really cares about. I have no problem waiting several hours or even days to know the results of an election. Why do we need to know immediately?
Or you could just use Trillian (windows only) and use all of the "big three." Trillian is simply the best IM client for windows, and *not* just because it supports multiple protocols. My only complaint would be the memory usage -- Trillian can be a hog for an IM client!
You may laugh at this, but if you forward some of that spam to at least 10 friends, Bill Gates will send you a check for $284 dollars. I know, a friend of mine (who is a doctor!) recently received a check for $890,642! And he also knows this prince in Nigeria who is going to help him get some more...
*sigh*
I feel bad for kill-filtering my mom, but.. what can you do?:-P
Uhhh, how is this biased? They ran both cards on the same top-of-the-line architectures. At high resolutions the 9800XT stalls while the 6800 remains about the same. The conclusion is that the CPU/MB is choking the Radeon, but not the GeForce. Therefore, the card is the bottleneck for the Radeon system, while the CPU is the bottleneck for the GeForce one. Ergo, the 6800 Ultra is the faster Video Card.
I must admit, after looking at the benchmarks from Tom's and Anand's earlier this morning, I am *very* impressed by the results of this chipset. I still have concerns about the cooling and power requirements, as well as the image quality, but that may be partly related to my newfound ATI fanboy-dom.;-)
Speaking of which, I can't wait to see what the boys from Canada have coming next week. 16 pipelines? Mmmm....
So, how does waiting longer to release the patch change that situation at all?
Good question. I never really did see the answer to that, and now the article is/.'d. Perhaps because more people are likely to apply a large patch that "fixes 37 known security issues" than they are to apply 37 individual patches over a 3-6 month span.
But that's part of the problem (according to the article.) When a software company releases a patch, it's not just the customers who receive it, but all the virus/worm writers. If they can reverse-engineer the patch and come up with an exploit faster than it takes for *all* the customers to apply the patch, they win. And trust me, they will *always* beat the masses, as long as there are people out there who seldom/never patch their systems.
Perhaps all software patches should be about 1GB in size, mostly consisting of random crap, with the little patch embedded deep inside.;)
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to use Thunderbird instead of OE (for NG reading mainly, email is rather trivial for me), but a few things keep holding me back. Mainly, it's the whole message-threading model of TB that bothers me. Maybe I'm just use to Outlook Express, but I *really* like the ability to collapse sub-threads. If I'm reading an interesting NG topic, but this one sub-thread starts going *way* off-topic, in OE I can just click on the little collapse button that's on every message with children. With TB, only the top-most message has a collapse button, so I just have to scroll past the potentially hundreds of message until I get out of the sub-thread and back on topic.
Also, if I have "Hide read messages" or "Only show unread messages" enabled, OE will at least wait for a refresh/reload to hide those messages I've already read. In TB, if I read a message, collapse the thread, then try to get back to that message.. it's too late. I'd have to change my view to all messages to see it again. Agaion, just a little PitA for the way I read.
It's the little things like that that keep me on OE. I've never had any of these *rampant* viruses or trojan problems that everyone bashes it for. And there's probably little hope in getting TB fixed, as it's more of a personal preference than a true bug, so *shrug*. OTOH, I *AM* a rabid Firebird fanboy. I love this damn browser like I've loved no other piece of software not written by me. *hugs his monitor*
And I might get some arguments here, but I think a bit of that can be contributed to the fact that optimizing a screen refresh algorithm may not be *cool* to an open source programmer, but writing some nifty transparency-laden eye-candy is. Who wants to write boring, optimized, no-credit, non-visible code? Few people. Unless they *have* to. And who *has* to? People whose bosses demand it and whose paychecks depend on it.
I think perhaps with the growing popularity of Linux, we are getting more "Rock star" programmers who would like to say, "Hey! You know that nifty GL-accelerated, Rotating Sphere login screen in the new 4.6 KDE? I *wrote* that! In, like, 10 minutes!" As opposed to, "Hey! You notice that 2% performance increase in the latest release? Well, I spend 5 months analyzing that code and re-writing it from scatch to implement a double-buffering scheme to provide that."
I may be missing the whole open source mentality, but personally, *I* don't have enough self-discipline to make myself devote a lot of time to a boring, bug-ridden problem, when there's more *sexy* coding that needs to be done. But maybe that's just me.
You know, that's actually a good post and you made a lot of great points. And it is true that I fall right into the "typical"
But the truth is, at least for me, I'll never be able to equate being gay with being born of a different race. I'm sorry, but one of these is closer to a 'choice' or maybe a 'disease' than the other. I don't want to get into here, but that's just the way I see it.
Now as far as words are concerned, I don't think we have anyone lobbying for the ban of the words 'drunk' or 'drunkard,' even though some people are alcoholics. Shouldn't we embrace alcoholism as a lifestyle that should be protected against persecution? Are 'dry' cites/counties constitutionally illegal? I mean, we alcoholics are being denied by the goverment the ability to live our lifestyles! We just want to gain social-acceptance!
So from now on, don't ever use the word 'drunk', as it may offend us alcoholics. Don't say 'nerd', as we mentally-superior, but socially-challenged people find it hurtful. Also, 'politically-incorrect' bother me as well. Stop using it. I also don't want anything to ever be called ugly, boring, weird, insensitive, smelly, slow, weak, goofy, or shy, as all these words might offend me. At one point, I or someone else who fit one or more of these descriptions has been discriminated against. Maybe even violently. Where's the push to ban these words from our day-to-day vocabulary? There's not one. Why is that?
Not to get in a pissing match here, but I run XP Pro on all 3 of my Home machines:
: Athlon 2400+ (512MB DDR)
: Athlon 1700+ (256MB DDR)
: Celeron 300a (128MB PC-100)
XP installs and runs just fine on them all. I did recently up the memory on the 300MHz machine to 256, which has made the desktop a little faster to use, but it wasn't exactly intolerable before. I also dual-boot that machine with Mandrake 9, and I did decide to go with IceWM, as both KDE and Gnome were sluggish, even moreso than XP. I may have been able to tweak them some, but for as little I actually use that machine..
I assume the the majority of differences lie in what users perceive as "slow."
Hmm..
gay
adj. gayer, gayest
1) Showing or characterized by cheerfulness and lighthearted excitement; merry.
2) Bright or lively, especially in color: a gay, sunny room.
Whether or not this was the meaning the original poster intended, it seems to describe the 0.9 theme quite well.
I think the only thing worse than insensitive people are you over-sensitive, paranoid bastards. Lighten up!
I didn't try to get through the flash-soaked link, but my sig has my latest (April) journal entry for my dream desktop PC. It's a Dual Opteron, 1 GB ram, 9800 Pro, RAID-ed, 3-flat panel monitor setup for under $6K.
Now, it's about time to update it again, since the next generation of video cards are out, and 2GB RAM might actually make a noticeable difference. These things will add a few hundered dollors to the price, but you still have to keep in mind that this also includes $2K worth of monitors.
So basically, I can't build a *reasonably* uber-PC that costs more than $4000 w/o monitor. I suppose I could add some extra like neon lighting and LCD readouts, etc, but even those would only add a few bucks to the total price. Maybe these guys offer one *heck* of a warranty to back up their product.
No kidding. I wish I could find some of these people. I keep a running list on several different models of PC's I build for friends/relatives. Unfortunately, everyone wants the el-cheapo, minimum RAM, 15" Monitor, pirated Windows, free-labor, $500 special, and NO ONE wants the nice, 1GB RAM, 19" Flat Panel, RAID-ed, $2000+ models, where I could at least make a few buck off them. *sigh* Maybe I should advertise or something.
AWESOM-O: Um...okay, Adam Sandler is in love with this girl...and she's like, a golden retriever...or something.
Studio Executive #1: That's brilliant!
Studio Executive #2: We can call it "Puppy love."
Bah, anecdotal evidence to the contrary is easy to find. Take me, for example. I love computers. I love programming and I love building PC systems. I have a degree in Computer Science. I work as a software engineer, and I build, repair, and sell PC systems for friends and family. And I love it all. I do it full time, and in my spare, "leisure" time, I still do it. I also consider myself rather "balanced," as I have the whole "wife and kids" thing going on. Now, granted, I'm only 27, so maybe I haven't *burned-out* yet, but I don't see it happening in the immediate future, either.
To each their own..
I agree with the Office + Email = ??? equation, but I have to point out that Email + Calendar actually makes good sense. At least in an office setting, where meeting announcements are sent via email. Being able to simply "accept" the meeting invitation and have it automatically scheduled into your calendar is very handy. Probably more handy for some, than others, of course.
But it must impress some people, as evident by that fact that companies still purchase the Lotus Notes suite. =P As far as I can tell, that's about the *only* useful feature in this crap software that was forced upon us.
This thread is dead,
That's about the only thing in your post I agree with. However, I have added you to my friends list based solely on your perseverance and ability to hold discussion (however misguided) at length in a reasonable tone and with some semblance of an attempt at reason. Perhaps we shall both be afforded the opportunity to expand upon our argumentative abilities in future discussions.
Heat comparison
Check out that "Load Temperature" chart. What's that? Intel's at the top and the Athlon's are at the bottom? Even at idle temps, the Athlon64 comes in under or even with the P4s.
That is an awfully narrow view of the business world. Yes, both companies exist to make a profit, but companies can differ in how they go about trying to make a profit both in the products they make and in how they sell them. Call it marketing, brand positioning, whatever, it exists.
Yes, it is narrow, but it served my argument. The post I was replying to was suggesting that nVidia actually "cared" about gamers, while ATI did not. I was merely pointing out that both companies are going to do whatever it takes to encourage their products to be bought by as many people as possible. The parent post made it sound as if nVidia developers have an attitude of "I don't care how many units we sell, we just want gamers to be happy," while ATI's just sat around figuring out how to engineer their products to cause cancer in gamers.
Furthermore, your points about ATI providing code samples, driver updates, etc., and references to acquantainces who are big independent ATI developers has nothing to do with your preceding argument
Actually, it had everything to do with my preceding argument. Once again, I was responding to the grandparent's argument of:
nVidia seems to cater to gamers by working with developers to make sure games USE all those fancy new functionalities of the GPU. Ie; nVidia's "The Way it was Meant to be Played" program. ATI plays lip service to it with it's "Get in the Game" program, but they don't provide the same support (like sample codes for killer shader effects, etc) [emphasis mine]
See? He was talking about developers as well. Please, try to keep up.
Please don't kid yourself. Corporations and such are in the business to make profits. Period. Yes, they may do things that may seem selfless, but rest assured, there are dollar amounts associated with every action. They don't generally believe in karma, but rather stock value. Do you think Saturn started its business just because it felt sorry for car buyers? Or do you think they saw an opportunity to make $$ by indicating that they feel so and trying to service those unmet needs? I'm not saying it's wrong, just that people shouldn't begin to think that businesses have "feelings."
Anyway, uh.. thanks for your reply, even though it appears you didn't exactly follow the thread of conversation here.
The fanboy following video cards is endlessly annoying.
Please. There are NO differences between the companies as far as "caring about gamers" is concerned. Both exist to make a profit. Period. Several people I know are big independent ATI developers. ATI provides them with code samples, driver updates, etc.. gratis. Anything you say that generalizes one or the other of the companies makes you a "fanboy." Its no different than Ford vs Chevy. Each has some advantages and some disadvantages. And the both have some rabid fan-base that will make it thier sole priority to bash the other. *yawn*
Also, I don't get the whole "hooray for leapfrogging nVidia in phony-baloney do-nothing benchmarks" when every single review I read included all the current DX9 games with commentary on stability and visual quality, as well as performance. I don't even think Anandtech showd a 3DMark03 score. If so, I didn't pay attention to it. I agree, games are all that matter. Fortunately, that's what was tested.
Personally, I like the YYYY/MM/DD format. Makes for easy sorting when viewed as a 8-digit number.
1) Tomorrow + Tomorrow + Tomorrow + Tomorrow + Tomorrow + Tomorrow = 6 days.
2) Longhorn + DNF!
(Score: +1, Obvious)
Ok, I admit I jumped on you for this one post and your low ID. I looked at a few more of yours and saw that you weren't a complete moron. Moving on:
Racial profiling is a really old trick of the establishment to scare certain races away from the polls, because they would most certainly vote out the corporation-friendly candidates. It's pretty standard first-year university curriculum, actually. Maybe you should look into it. That's why, in Canada, we have laws against that kind of thing.
Guess what, we have laws against that sort of thing here, too! While not perfect yet, racial tensions have eased quite a bit here in the US. I live in the *deep* south, and even I have a hard time believing that any person who wished to vote would be afraid to do so because the polling place was in a police station. Maybe if the person was wanted for a crime and had his picture all over the station, but other than that, no.
No. I don't believe in browser intersitials; I run Mozilla with popups surpressed. What I meant was that candidates could post relevant information about their platform to a central site. It's fair, no?
Like I said before, what is currently holding back politicians and candidate from using the web? Are you talking about a controlled, central repository for all candidates to submit advertisments? Something like: www.2004.CandidateAdvertisments.com/CandidateA ? If so, why? What more would that accomplish than the current method of www.OfficialCandidateAWebsite.org, www.VoteForCandidateBForChange.net, etc?
Okay since I have to connect *all* the dots for you: Because it's hard to justify spending $5mil campaigning when your rivals spend nothing, because they don't have to if the online voting system was designed correctly. Each party tries to bankrupt the other party and everyone loses a vast sum of money when that happens. The current elections system is archaic and full of dishonesty. Let's pry that money back and put it to good use.
Ok, are you thinking that everyone who runs for office will agree to do absolutely no campaigning, other than on this central website? Do you plan on making that a law or something? What happens when one candidate goes out to dinner at a restaurant and shakes a few hands? Is he campaigning? If not, you are just going to get each candidate going out a little more and more to meet with potential voters, until you are right back where we are now. (spending $$$ to travel and meet with people to gain support)
I'm also going to have to disagree with this whole "allow anyone who wants to run, do so via the internet." What happens when the 2008 elections has 250 million candidates? I'll tell you what, nothing. The media will "tell" us the top 5-6 candidates (these will be the only ones they focus on) and things will progress as normal, ending with a final vote count of something like CandidateA: 54%, CandidateB: 47%, and 100 million canddiates with 0.0000000001% of the votes. I don't see how this will be "more fair."
I do agree that things could be a *lot* better when it comes to our election system, but you've yet to convince me how this "online voting" could be some sort of cure-all that will remove corruption, mistakes, unfairness, etc.
Wow. Apparenty this is *no* link between a user's slashdot ID and his or her ability to post a relevant or on-topic comment. =P
Black people are afraid to vote because some polling booths are located in police stations? WTF?
Letting anyone/everyone run for office via the internet will clean up politics? WTF?
As far as I know, any candidate is already able to advertise and campaign via the internet for relatively little cost. I fail to see how "online voting" makes this any more accessible. Are you suggesting that online voting web-sites should support pop-ups with candidate ads? And how exactly does "online voting" reduce the need of policy makers to "spend $5mil travelling all over the freaking world, riding in limos and soaking up the cash with big expensive dinners and giant wardrobes"? That was perhaps one of the most confusing and irrelevant posts I've ever read here.
Exactly. Having a well-designed, idiot-proof, touch-screen system is necessary to minimize some of the crap we had in Florida. Having this system produce easily-to-count, easy-to-audit, paper ballots is necessary to minimize the corruption and/or mistakes that are bound to happen.
Who cares about networking the machines or having some sort of quick, automated way to use the booths to tally the votes. I don't think that's an issue anyone really cares about. I have no problem waiting several hours or even days to know the results of an election. Why do we need to know immediately?
Or you could just use Trillian (windows only) and use all of the "big three." Trillian is simply the best IM client for windows, and *not* just because it supports multiple protocols. My only complaint would be the memory usage -- Trillian can be a hog for an IM client!
You may laugh at this, but if you forward some of that spam to at least 10 friends, Bill Gates will send you a check for $284 dollars. I know, a friend of mine (who is a doctor!) recently received a check for $890,642! And he also knows this prince in Nigeria who is going to help him get some more...
*sigh*
I feel bad for kill-filtering my mom, but.. what can you do?
Uhhh, how is this biased? They ran both cards on the same top-of-the-line architectures. At high resolutions the 9800XT stalls while the 6800 remains about the same. The conclusion is that the CPU/MB is choking the Radeon, but not the GeForce. Therefore, the card is the bottleneck for the Radeon system, while the CPU is the bottleneck for the GeForce one. Ergo, the 6800 Ultra is the faster Video Card.
Am I missing something?
I must admit, after looking at the benchmarks from Tom's and Anand's earlier this morning, I am *very* impressed by the results of this chipset. I still have concerns about the cooling and power requirements, as well as the image quality, but that may be partly related to my newfound ATI fanboy-dom.
Speaking of which, I can't wait to see what the boys from Canada have coming next week. 16 pipelines? Mmmm....
So, how does waiting longer to release the patch change that situation at all?
Good question. I never really did see the answer to that, and now the article is
But that's part of the problem (according to the article.) When a software company releases a patch, it's not just the customers who receive it, but all the virus/worm writers. If they can reverse-engineer the patch and come up with an exploit faster than it takes for *all* the customers to apply the patch, they win. And trust me, they will *always* beat the masses, as long as there are people out there who seldom/never patch their systems.
Perhaps all software patches should be about 1GB in size, mostly consisting of random crap, with the little patch embedded deep inside.