You think that's targeted? The other day I received an e-mail from a pharmaceutical company offering to discuss options for enlarging my very small penis. They asked me if I was tired of being unable to satisfy women, and whether I had tried the other pills without results. I mean, seriously... how can spammers find out stuff like this?? I'm switching to Firefox.
Nah. I think they just need to put a decent writer on him. Marvel should approach some post-cyberpunk sci-fi author with the idea of revamping the character. Somebody who actually knows something about technology. Iron Man is a technological hero, yet he's been saddled with 20 years worth of "ZOMG teh mega-circuits is set us up teh virus!!11 Use mah repulsa rays to reverse da polariteez!"
There's room for at least a couple years' worth of stories where Iron Man is actually more savvy and his business more modern than that of the dad in My Three Sons. He should retire from Stark International for personal reasons and found a start-up. He should work on alternative energy -- then find out that AIM is doing the same thing (why?). He should find out that Life Model Decoys are replacing normal people and they're not controlled by SHIELD (who could master the technology?) They should revamp the Mandarin as a Chinese industrialist, so he'd actually have a worthy rival for a change, instead of a racist Fu Manchu ripoff.
Skim any two William Gibson books and they could get better ideas than this whole "Tony Stark is a heroic amalgam of J. Edgar Hoover and Dick Cheney" angle.
In the comics recently, Iron Man has contradicted some of your statements somewhat.
Marvel recently had a big crossover plot line called "Civil War," in which it was decided that superheroes were too dangerous to have running around without government oversight. They were all required to register with the Federal government. If they failed to do so, they were subject to imprisonment in one of SHIELD's top-security prisons designed for supervillains.
Who was the main man responsible for hunting down his fellow heroes and former comrades? Tony Stark, the invincible Iron Man.
In fact, Tony went on to become the head of SHIELD, the government's most ultra-secret spy organization (think more oversight than the FBI, more freedom than the CIA). In most respects, they've taken the "Tony is a billionaire industrialist" angle and spun it into "Tony is an arch-conservative storm trooper of the old guard of manufacturing wealth, using the power of the government to enforce a neo-facist agenda that goes contrary to 50 years of Marvel Comics philosophy."
It's interesting that they are portraying the latest villain as an "open source" one... because Tony has very much become Microsoft. In fact, I can't read comics where Iron Man appears anymore, because every time the character opens his mouth I can't understand why they are still calling him a hero, when he seems to really have become little more than a smarter, more modernized version of Doctor Doom.
Microsoft has offered a product called Windows XP Embedded for a long time. It lets hardware vendors basically roll their own version of XP to suit the requirements of their device. They can take out this or that, assume a smaller screen resolution, or what-have-you. A tool that ships with the product cooks up an install image to their specifications, et voila!
I don't see anything particularly revolutionary about Microsoft helping Asus out with a customized version of Windows for the Eee PC when they routinely do the same for ATM manufacturers, for example.
Quite impressive that in 150 years we can do with less than a gram of silicon what they tried to do with tons of gears and cranks. Makes you wonder what they're gonna be doing in 150 years from now.
Same thing they're doing right now, I expect: Decomposing.
As far as I can tell, Red Hat has a very good reputation and is widely appreciated.
I think part of the problem here is that when many vocal Slashdotters talk about Red Hat, they really mean either Fedora or CentOS. What engagement they have with Red Hat is limited to installation media, not the part of the company that really matters. That's my take, anyway.
I prefer Ubuntu as a desktop OS because... I prefer it. Simple. If I were in charge of setting up a bunch of Linux servers for a midsized business, however, I doubt I'd seriously consider Ubuntu's Server flavor for that. I'd be looking at Red Hat first, Novell second, and not primarily in terms of what comes on the discs.
I can't speak for the GP, but I live and work in San Francisco. I don't own a car, and pretty much anywhere in the City is within 40 minutes from my front door.
...it seems to me that any major commercial software company would be insane not to follow open source closely.
When most people start talking about open source, they quickly turn into armchair intellectual property lawyers and the discussion veers toward talk of business models, patents, copyrights, licenses, and so on. It's easy to forget that the primary product of the open source movement is a lot of really interesting code.
What's more, while this code may be copyrighted and licensed, it's generally patent-unencumbered. This means that Microsoft is free to take pretty much any interesting and novel idea that might come out of open source and rip it off -- rewrite the basic algorithm in C# and slap it into a commercial, closed-source product.
The best case the open source community could come up with is to say that Microsoft's code was a derivative work of their own, copyrighted code -- but that would require A.) money, for B.) lawyers, who C.) gain access to Microsoft's code in discovery, and D.) luck out, in that Microsoft failed so miserably to write code that didn't resemble the open source original that they left an obvious smoking gun.
What are the chances? It's not like there aren't any good programmers at Microsoft.
In other words, in an age where most corporations are trimming R&D to enhance their bottom lines, Microsoft (and every other software company) has an amazing R&D resource in the work of the open source community. And hell, if anything really amazing comes along, it wouldn't be too difficult to wave a bunch of money under the developer's nose and get their efforts working for you, full-time.
You positively do not have to be understand very much about Norse mythology to realize that's it's a silly belief system.
Agreed. And yet, if you did understand very much about it, you might realize that it's not all that silly. What's more, it probably agrees more with typical/. belief systems than Christianity does -- it does not encourage the building of churches or other edifices of religious wealth and power, for example, and it does not recognize a "professional" priesthood. But in other respects you are absolutely correct -- ignorance really is bliss.
RTD is offically "writer and executive producer". Similar to a US "showrunner".
A little more than that, methinks. Who among us, when we imagined that the BBC might someday bring back Doctor Who, guessed that it would arrive from BBC Wales? Davies has been far more instrumental in the series's revival than many U.S. TV executives.
I'm an american and typically only chat across the pond on the internet, but so far the brits I've met are like red and blue states on this side... they either are highly pro or highly anti new-Who/Torchwood.
I don't see the two as a pair at all. I'm American/Canadian/British and grew up on Doctor Who beginning in the 1970s. I very much enjoy the new series (except, ironically, those episodes written by Russell T. Davies). But Torchwood? Ugh. I just watched the finale of Series 2 and I can safely say that it is, was, and apparently plans to remain for the foreseeable future, utter dreck. Occasionally enjoyable dreck, but garbage just the same.
If you happen to build the next killer app on Google's system, Google has the right to use all of your data and trademarks for advertising and publicity. With no compensation to you.
Relax. It means that if IBM uses Google App Engine, Google can make an ad saying "IBM uses Google App Engine" and include the IBM logo. "Distinctive brand features" does not mean "your data."
It could also be that the changes required to end up with an immune system like that are incredibly complex and may involve steps along the way that are not evolutionarily advantageous in most species, so the necessary sequence of evolutionary steps was not completed in most species.
The alligator does not seem to be entirely unique in this.
In my Emerging Infectious Diseases class, we learned that the tiny ticks that spread the Lyme disease bacterium are known to bite and feed on the blood of the western fence lizard. An interesting side effect of this behavior is that the blood of the lizard apparently clears the ticks' guts of Lyme bacteria. So this immune adaptation is apparently present in a number of lizard species.
Think, also, of the Komodo dragon, which walks around with a poisonous soup of microbes in its mouth at all times -- in fact, it actually uses this disease cocktail as an offensive weapon.
I saw the world-premiere screening of "House of the Dead" here in San Francisco. It was before the movie even had a national distribution deal.
Of course, at that time nobody knew how bad Uwe's movies could be, because this was his first major feature. But we figured, "Hell... it's a zombie movie based on a videogame. How good could it be?" So we bought a pint of Jim Beam before the flick to sneak into the theater.
On the way in... uh-oh. There's a guy at the entryway to the theater, and he's frisking everybody in line. People are being asked to open their bags and the whole bit.
We don't have much choice at this point, so my friend dutifully submits to the pat down and: "What's THIS? What's in your back pocket??!" He: "Uh..." and he sheepishly removes the bottle from his pocket and shows it to the guy. The man inspects it and says, in a funny accent, "Ah, BOOZE! Booze iss fine, ve chust want no cameras." And with that, we were in.
It wasn't until the Q&A session after the screening that we realized that the man who patted us down was Uwe Boll.
So for that alone, I say I WILL NOT sign this petition. (But, having seen "Alone in the Dark," I can tell you there's precious few other reasons not to.)
That, and his film adaptation of "Postal" is supposed to be so bizarre, creatively deranged and twisted that it's a genuine gem.
Something that confuses me a little bit: Surely the optical-scanner machines are also "electronic"? Surely they also tabulate votes in some automated way? So what are we talking about here? Diebold et al are pushing for an upgrade... why, exactly?
What media pundits seem to be missing out on is that the American consumer is more and more interested in what's happening in his own county/town/neighborhood and less and less interested in what is happening in The Big City or on the other side of the planet.
If true, this seems to me a lazy, complacent attitude. Personally, I pay the most attention to world news. I'm much more interested in finding out what might be coming than what happened yesterday.
As near as I can tell, the argument is this: The media is biased, say the believers, but it doesn't admit it. This is proof that media companies are either dupes or willing participants in The Great Media Conspiracy, whose aim is to keep the People ignorant. Therefore what the People need to do is to seek out media with a clear and obvious bias -- because that media is at least honest.
In other words, the media is biased, therefore to fix the problem we need to seek out the most biased media we can find. Huh?? Seriously -- why would a Wookiee want to live on Endor, anyway?
You say people are going online "to get better news." But what you really mean is more biased news -- because I have never heard of a blog, or aggregator, or so-called alternative news source whose mission statement is to correct the problem of bias in the media. If you can point to one, please do. But the vast majority that I've ever heard of strive instead to add more bias to the news -- either to the left or the right.
People are attracted to the bias they agree with most. Therefore what you end up with is a self-selecting media, where people only expose themselves to the stories told in the manner that they feel comfortable with. This is a Very Bad Thing.
You mention a documentary, Spin. This is an example of media with a bias. Its bias is that the media is biased. Meanwhile the bias of every reporter and journalist that I've ever met is that their profession strives in every way to be as unbiased and objective as possible. You've chosen which bias you choose to believe.
I, on the other hand, choose to believe the journalists. They strive, at least, to be objective and unbiased. Admittedly they may not always succeed. But I for one would much prefer to read a news source that at least tries to be objective, rather than one that has made a conscious decision to chuck objectivity out the window.
Actually, no matter how fast your PC is, PCs and mainframes are engineered for different things. Many mainframe-class machines specialize in transaction processing and are designed for total I/O speed, rather than chip clock speed. People also pay the big bucks for mainframes not because they are fast but because they never, ever crash nor require downtime. Don't let Apple calling a G4 Mac a "supercomputer" confuse you -- a mainframe is still highly specialized equipment, and I doubt there's any application that you personally might need to run that would require one. On the other hand, no matter how fast desktop chips get, it seems unlikely to me that major Wall Street banks would ever switch from mainframes to PC-class hardware for financial transaction processing.
Slashdot Mirror
You think that's targeted? The other day I received an e-mail from a pharmaceutical company offering to discuss options for enlarging my very small penis. They asked me if I was tired of being unable to satisfy women, and whether I had tried the other pills without results. I mean, seriously ... how can spammers find out stuff like this?? I'm switching to Firefox.
Nah. I think they just need to put a decent writer on him. Marvel should approach some post-cyberpunk sci-fi author with the idea of revamping the character. Somebody who actually knows something about technology. Iron Man is a technological hero, yet he's been saddled with 20 years worth of "ZOMG teh mega-circuits is set us up teh virus!!11 Use mah repulsa rays to reverse da polariteez!"
There's room for at least a couple years' worth of stories where Iron Man is actually more savvy and his business more modern than that of the dad in My Three Sons. He should retire from Stark International for personal reasons and found a start-up. He should work on alternative energy -- then find out that AIM is doing the same thing (why?). He should find out that Life Model Decoys are replacing normal people and they're not controlled by SHIELD (who could master the technology?) They should revamp the Mandarin as a Chinese industrialist, so he'd actually have a worthy rival for a change, instead of a racist Fu Manchu ripoff.
Skim any two William Gibson books and they could get better ideas than this whole "Tony Stark is a heroic amalgam of J. Edgar Hoover and Dick Cheney" angle.
In the comics recently, Iron Man has contradicted some of your statements somewhat.
... because Tony has very much become Microsoft. In fact, I can't read comics where Iron Man appears anymore, because every time the character opens his mouth I can't understand why they are still calling him a hero, when he seems to really have become little more than a smarter, more modernized version of Doctor Doom.
Marvel recently had a big crossover plot line called "Civil War," in which it was decided that superheroes were too dangerous to have running around without government oversight. They were all required to register with the Federal government. If they failed to do so, they were subject to imprisonment in one of SHIELD's top-security prisons designed for supervillains.
Who was the main man responsible for hunting down his fellow heroes and former comrades? Tony Stark, the invincible Iron Man.
In fact, Tony went on to become the head of SHIELD, the government's most ultra-secret spy organization (think more oversight than the FBI, more freedom than the CIA). In most respects, they've taken the "Tony is a billionaire industrialist" angle and spun it into "Tony is an arch-conservative storm trooper of the old guard of manufacturing wealth, using the power of the government to enforce a neo-facist agenda that goes contrary to 50 years of Marvel Comics philosophy."
It's interesting that they are portraying the latest villain as an "open source" one
Microsoft has offered a product called Windows XP Embedded for a long time. It lets hardware vendors basically roll their own version of XP to suit the requirements of their device. They can take out this or that, assume a smaller screen resolution, or what-have-you. A tool that ships with the product cooks up an install image to their specifications, et voila!
I don't see anything particularly revolutionary about Microsoft helping Asus out with a customized version of Windows for the Eee PC when they routinely do the same for ATM manufacturers, for example.
Same thing they're doing right now, I expect: Decomposing.
I think part of the problem here is that when many vocal Slashdotters talk about Red Hat, they really mean either Fedora or CentOS. What engagement they have with Red Hat is limited to installation media, not the part of the company that really matters. That's my take, anyway.
I prefer Ubuntu as a desktop OS because ... I prefer it. Simple. If I were in charge of setting up a bunch of Linux servers for a midsized business, however, I doubt I'd seriously consider Ubuntu's Server flavor for that. I'd be looking at Red Hat first, Novell second, and not primarily in terms of what comes on the discs.
I can't speak for the GP, but I live and work in San Francisco. I don't own a car, and pretty much anywhere in the City is within 40 minutes from my front door.
I guess you should have waited, then.
...it seems to me that any major commercial software company would be insane not to follow open source closely.
When most people start talking about open source, they quickly turn into armchair intellectual property lawyers and the discussion veers toward talk of business models, patents, copyrights, licenses, and so on. It's easy to forget that the primary product of the open source movement is a lot of really interesting code.
What's more, while this code may be copyrighted and licensed, it's generally patent-unencumbered. This means that Microsoft is free to take pretty much any interesting and novel idea that might come out of open source and rip it off -- rewrite the basic algorithm in C# and slap it into a commercial, closed-source product.
The best case the open source community could come up with is to say that Microsoft's code was a derivative work of their own, copyrighted code -- but that would require A.) money, for B.) lawyers, who C.) gain access to Microsoft's code in discovery, and D.) luck out, in that Microsoft failed so miserably to write code that didn't resemble the open source original that they left an obvious smoking gun.
What are the chances? It's not like there aren't any good programmers at Microsoft.
In other words, in an age where most corporations are trimming R&D to enhance their bottom lines, Microsoft (and every other software company) has an amazing R&D resource in the work of the open source community. And hell, if anything really amazing comes along, it wouldn't be too difficult to wave a bunch of money under the developer's nose and get their efforts working for you, full-time.
What's not to like?
And why would it change then? It works. (For Microsoft.)
Agreed. And yet, if you did understand very much about it, you might realize that it's not all that silly. What's more, it probably agrees more with typical /. belief systems than Christianity does -- it does not encourage the building of churches or other edifices of religious wealth and power, for example, and it does not recognize a "professional" priesthood. But in other respects you are absolutely correct -- ignorance really is bliss.
A little more than that, methinks. Who among us, when we imagined that the BBC might someday bring back Doctor Who, guessed that it would arrive from BBC Wales? Davies has been far more instrumental in the series's revival than many U.S. TV executives.
I don't see the two as a pair at all. I'm American/Canadian/British and grew up on Doctor Who beginning in the 1970s. I very much enjoy the new series (except, ironically, those episodes written by Russell T. Davies). But Torchwood? Ugh. I just watched the finale of Series 2 and I can safely say that it is, was, and apparently plans to remain for the foreseeable future, utter dreck. Occasionally enjoyable dreck, but garbage just the same.
The alligator does not seem to be entirely unique in this.
In my Emerging Infectious Diseases class, we learned that the tiny ticks that spread the Lyme disease bacterium are known to bite and feed on the blood of the western fence lizard. An interesting side effect of this behavior is that the blood of the lizard apparently clears the ticks' guts of Lyme bacteria. So this immune adaptation is apparently present in a number of lizard species.
Think, also, of the Komodo dragon, which walks around with a poisonous soup of microbes in its mouth at all times -- in fact, it actually uses this disease cocktail as an offensive weapon.
I saw the world-premiere screening of "House of the Dead" here in San Francisco. It was before the movie even had a national distribution deal.
... it's a zombie movie based on a videogame. How good could it be?" So we bought a pint of Jim Beam before the flick to sneak into the theater.
... uh-oh. There's a guy at the entryway to the theater, and he's frisking everybody in line. People are being asked to open their bags and the whole bit.
Of course, at that time nobody knew how bad Uwe's movies could be, because this was his first major feature. But we figured, "Hell
On the way in
We don't have much choice at this point, so my friend dutifully submits to the pat down and: "What's THIS? What's in your back pocket??!" He: "Uh..." and he sheepishly removes the bottle from his pocket and shows it to the guy. The man inspects it and says, in a funny accent, "Ah, BOOZE! Booze iss fine, ve chust want no cameras." And with that, we were in.
It wasn't until the Q&A session after the screening that we realized that the man who patted us down was Uwe Boll.
So for that alone, I say I WILL NOT sign this petition. (But, having seen "Alone in the Dark," I can tell you there's precious few other reasons not to.)
That, and his film adaptation of "Postal" is supposed to be so bizarre, creatively deranged and twisted that it's a genuine gem.
Obviously not. Why do you suppose Diet Coke has "zero calories"? Aspartame gets broken down to a minor degree in the digestive system, then excreted.
Something that confuses me a little bit: Surely the optical-scanner machines are also "electronic"? Surely they also tabulate votes in some automated way? So what are we talking about here? Diebold et al are pushing for an upgrade ... why, exactly?
...does this mean that Apple finally plans to rewrite the Finder in Cocoa?
With a name like Perl, this man is well-suited to discuss the link between coding and terror.
Also, if you read TFA, he goes on to state that "laziness, impatience, and hubris" are the three virtues of a good terrorist.
P.S. Christ, what has happened to Slashdot's page layout today?? The goggles do nothing!
If true, this seems to me a lazy, complacent attitude. Personally, I pay the most attention to world news. I'm much more interested in finding out what might be coming than what happened yesterday.
...I just don't understand it.
As near as I can tell, the argument is this: The media is biased, say the believers, but it doesn't admit it. This is proof that media companies are either dupes or willing participants in The Great Media Conspiracy, whose aim is to keep the People ignorant. Therefore what the People need to do is to seek out media with a clear and obvious bias -- because that media is at least honest.
In other words, the media is biased, therefore to fix the problem we need to seek out the most biased media we can find. Huh?? Seriously -- why would a Wookiee want to live on Endor, anyway?
You say people are going online "to get better news." But what you really mean is more biased news -- because I have never heard of a blog, or aggregator, or so-called alternative news source whose mission statement is to correct the problem of bias in the media. If you can point to one, please do. But the vast majority that I've ever heard of strive instead to add more bias to the news -- either to the left or the right.
People are attracted to the bias they agree with most. Therefore what you end up with is a self-selecting media, where people only expose themselves to the stories told in the manner that they feel comfortable with. This is a Very Bad Thing.
You mention a documentary, Spin. This is an example of media with a bias. Its bias is that the media is biased. Meanwhile the bias of every reporter and journalist that I've ever met is that their profession strives in every way to be as unbiased and objective as possible. You've chosen which bias you choose to believe.
I, on the other hand, choose to believe the journalists. They strive, at least, to be objective and unbiased. Admittedly they may not always succeed. But I for one would much prefer to read a news source that at least tries to be objective, rather than one that has made a conscious decision to chuck objectivity out the window.
Actually, no matter how fast your PC is, PCs and mainframes are engineered for different things. Many mainframe-class machines specialize in transaction processing and are designed for total I/O speed, rather than chip clock speed. People also pay the big bucks for mainframes not because they are fast but because they never, ever crash nor require downtime. Don't let Apple calling a G4 Mac a "supercomputer" confuse you -- a mainframe is still highly specialized equipment, and I doubt there's any application that you personally might need to run that would require one. On the other hand, no matter how fast desktop chips get, it seems unlikely to me that major Wall Street banks would ever switch from mainframes to PC-class hardware for financial transaction processing.
Sorry, man; no mod points.
Last time around, I had this to say about it. Hellloooo! 2006 just called, it wants its +5 Informative back.