Contracts for Microsoft's.Net Framework require that licensees ask Microsoft for permission before publishing benchmark testing results for the framework. Since this information could be key to effectively comparing Microsoft products with those of its competition, and the license provision could be used to prevent such comparison, the plaintiffs asked Microsoft to change it. Microsoft agreed to modify it to require only prior notice from licensees of their intent to publish, so that it can attempt to reproduce the results itself. "Microsoft does not object to benchmarking of non-Microsoft software against the.Net Framework," it said in the report.
That sounds like Microsoft caved a little bit on something. This is fairly significant, too. If Microsoft blocks "licensees" from publishing results, that can mean magazines and other sources as well. It could potentially mean that a.Net customer could not come out in an interview and say, "We used to write our apps in C# but it was too slow." If the plaintiffs have really managed to successfully fight Microsoft on this point, it's a good thing.
I've never understood what makes 3D environments better than 2D for applications and input devices made for 2D displays. In my opinion, the new spatial dimension you can move through is what makes it bad since it takes longer time to accomplish tasks.
YES! This is one part of William Gibson's cyberpunk future that I never understood, and the same reason I instantly roll my eyes every time I hear some dot-com company talking about building "cyberspace." I do not want cyber space. And neither do you.
If I remember correctly, the thing that made the Internet -- and the Web in particular -- so miraculous and revelatory was the degree to which it reduced the distance between you and information. No longer would you have to travel to some other city to visit a library to find a given book (or report or whatever) -- and yes, kids, we really used to do things like that. Instead, it can all (potentially) appear instantly on your screen.
Email, also -- I recently started up real-paper correspondence with a penpal in Sweden. I bet a lot of you have forgotten how odd it can be to communicate when there's a time difference of a minimum of 5 days between every exchange. (And 5 days is in the good new days. In the good old days, it might have taken a couple of weeks just to transport the letter).
So who wants "cyberspace"? What's the point of it? We've successfully eliminated these spatial barriers that used to exist, and yet I keep coming across people who seem to think there's actually a market to rebuild the barriers in simulation. Truly, I do not get it.
One has been able to play the Settlers of Catan (a fun board game, albeit one that seems to fall by the wayside for many 'serious gamers' when they move to other German-style games) online for a while.
OK, I'll bite. What's a "German-style" game?
Sheer verbosity and the need for an editor
on
Ask Neal Stephenson
·
· Score: 1
It's come up several times here on Slashdot when your books are discussed, so I assume you've heard the comment too: That you've gotten overly wordy to the point that you seem to be just rambling to fill the pages and amuse yourself. You've sort of made a reputation for yourself as being a clever or intellectual sort of writer -- could not brevity contribute somewhat to the overall impression of wit?
In addition, many people have commented on errors (spelling and otherwise) in your recent works. It seems to many of us that you desperately need an editor. How would you answer that charge? No offense intended, I'm sure you'll continue to do what you like to do... I'm just curious.
Re:Flaws in both Languages
on
Java 1.5 vs C#
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Short answer is that portability is not the purpose of the virtual machine for C# (and for many people, it's not the purpose of using the Java virtual machine).
The bitstream itself is encoded as Ogg. So to decode it and turn it into music, any "client" device would need to understand both the Ogg container format and the MP3 audio format. Pretty much nothing out there does that (particularly standalone/hardware players). You could write some software with both components, no doubt, and that would be a "valid" use of Ogg -- but probably not a legal one, if you haven't licensed the Fraunhofer patents. Sort of the whole point of Ogg/Vorbis is to avoid that mess; that's why nobody's done any work with Ogg and MP3 (since there are plenty of other container formats -- MPEG4 provides one, for example, which was derived from QuickTime).
Ehhh?? So, if none of IndyMedia's reporting has ever legitimized it -- that is, none of its reporting has ever been recognized as legitimate -- then being busted by the feds is going to "legitimize" it in the sense that it will be perceived as being legitimately.... uh.... help me out here?
Ahh, if it's Linux source you want, then I believe the project you're looking for is Ogg, an open source container format along the lines of QuickTime. You may have heard of it.
But we live in the real world, so the codec and the intellectual property laws and assertions that surround it are inseparable. A theoretical codec that's prohibitive to actually implement is valueless.
Actually, I once saw a show on PBS where some scientists did a clever test. They took a whole bunch of photographs of people's faces and morphed them together, to create a picture of a composite human face. Most people who saw the face and were asked whether it was an attractive person agreed that it was.
The idea here is that what the scientists did was create a completely average face -- that is, mathematically average. Faces with big noses, or big chins, or buggy eyes, were cancelled out by the majority of faces that didn't share those features. In the end, what you got was a face every feature of which was the "norm" for the human race at large.
So the conclusion you could draw from this study is that the people we find the most attractive are the ones with the least apparent variation. A particularly exaggerated feature on a face might be viewed as a sign that some radical genetic divergence has taken place in that person's development -- and we don't care much for that, as a species. While diversity might be good for evolution, we like the norm (and this has nothing to do with skin color or the facial features of any particular ethnicity; so far as I know the scientists used a whole cross-section of people).
So if this theory is true, then no, human standards of beauty are not actually as relative as romantics might assume.
I used to listen to Stern when I was younger, but what really turned me off was the weeks on end that he'd spend hawking his latest book, or the "Private Parts" movie, or whatever. So what if Sirius is commercial free? Tune in to Stern and you'll get three hours worth of commercials for whatever he feels like selling you. I don't doubt that he'll spend the last month of his current contract telling his fans to sign up for Sirius.
This bug was a security bug in part because Firefox 1.0 changed the default download directory so that downloadable files were saved directly to the desktop.
Microsoft is always criticized for having bad defaults. In this case, having the default download directory be the desktop was a bad default.
I'm sorry -- can you elaborate? Maybe I'm too Mac OS X-centric to see the point, but how is ~/Desktop any different from any other directory? I personally find it real handy to have all those installers and disk images appear on my desktop so I can click on 'em.
I have 171 emails with the exact same subject line right now (running a promotion)
Speaking of which, Chris, I've been trying to reach you about those penis pills I ordered...
Wrong Wired.
on
The Long Tail
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually, that wasn't Chris Anderson's Wired back in 1996. A few years after Conde-Nast (publishers of Cosmopolitan, among other things) bought Wired in 1998, they brought in Chris as the new editor-in-chief, with the provision that he could hire his own staff and redesign the magazine. So the Wired you know and loathe today is Chris's baby -- not the one you might still have some nostalgic memories for, back during the bubble.
That's being pretty generous -- The power supply of that 'average gamer system' would have to be running at peak capacity 100% of the time to use that kind of power.
Yeah, well for a while I was running my computer all the time as a way to host my personal Web page and networked et ceteras, on a DSL line with DynDNS etc. This was a Mac G4 with the monitor switched off most of the time, not doing much of anything except fielding HTTP requests from viruses. And while it didn't increase my power bill by $37, it did increase it by something like $10/month, it seemed to me -- pretty much in keeping with your maths. Not really much money in the grand scheme of things -- but certainly enough to justify going out and getting some cheapie hosting at $8.95/month or whatever, and not have to hear my Mac's fan running all night while I was trying to sleep.
Ah. I see what you mean now. Yeah, I once had the "pleasure" of attending a training class at some company's corporate headquarters to learn how to use their e-commerce package. At the beginning of one day's training session they were touting all their awesome, easy-to-use Java-based modeling tools that would allow you to visually design product hierarchies in no time at all. That day, the other guy from my team and I were the first ones to complete all the training exercises. The instructor, impressed with how fast we caught on, came over and asked us what steps we took. "It was easy," I said. "We quit out of that garbage applet, reverse-engineered the format for the config files and edited them in Notepad. It's a lot faster."
No troll; the honest truth. Still, as a counter-example, Azureus works pretty well for me.
IBM DB2 is banned in many companies we deal with. Etc etc
And the relationship of DB2 to Java is what, now? If I remember correctly, the first company to embed a JVM into a relational database and encourage writing stored procedures in Java was Oracle, not IBM.
Where would lawyers be without clients? People sue because they feel they have been wronged and want it righted.
Yes, and because society gives them the option to seek redress in this particular way. Say a cup of McDonald's coffee burned me and I wanted McDonald's to pay for my medical bills. All of a sudden, the court hands me a huge punitive judgment. (Full details elsewhere this story.) It's how it's done! If I want to go to court over something, my lawyer isn't going to sit and listen and agree to get me the ten thousand dollars I think I'm owed. He's going to pull out a stack of books and figure out all the ways he might be able to turn that ten thousand into ten million. What am I going to do? Say no? "Geez, but what will the lasting effects on society be?" Of course not. In some ways, the legal system is like public transit. Unless you're a lawyer, you don't own a car. You have to get on the train where it lets you get on and get off when it stops, and all the mechanics are run by people you barely even see.
As for medical malpractice, here's a better reform: Get doctors to screw up less. No screw ups = no malpractice. What a fucking concept.
See, now you're just sounding like an idiot. Who do you think gets to decide the definition of "screwing up," in our society? That's right: the lawyers. These days, everything counts as a screw-up. Did the doctor give you pills? He should have listened more carefully, he medicated you unnecessarily, he didn't do a follow up visit to make sure the pills weren't too big for you to swallow comfortably. What's that? He didn't give you pills? Negligence! He refused to treat you! Was it racism? And on and on...
Slashdot Mirror
And Ogg FLAC, actually.
If I remember correctly, the thing that made the Internet -- and the Web in particular -- so miraculous and revelatory was the degree to which it reduced the distance between you and information. No longer would you have to travel to some other city to visit a library to find a given book (or report or whatever) -- and yes, kids, we really used to do things like that. Instead, it can all (potentially) appear instantly on your screen.
Email, also -- I recently started up real-paper correspondence with a penpal in Sweden. I bet a lot of you have forgotten how odd it can be to communicate when there's a time difference of a minimum of 5 days between every exchange. (And 5 days is in the good new days. In the good old days, it might have taken a couple of weeks just to transport the letter).
So who wants "cyberspace"? What's the point of it? We've successfully eliminated these spatial barriers that used to exist, and yet I keep coming across people who seem to think there's actually a market to rebuild the barriers in simulation. Truly, I do not get it.
It's come up several times here on Slashdot when your books are discussed, so I assume you've heard the comment too: That you've gotten overly wordy to the point that you seem to be just rambling to fill the pages and amuse yourself. You've sort of made a reputation for yourself as being a clever or intellectual sort of writer -- could not brevity contribute somewhat to the overall impression of wit?
... I'm just curious.
In addition, many people have commented on errors (spelling and otherwise) in your recent works. It seems to many of us that you desperately need an editor. How would you answer that charge? No offense intended, I'm sure you'll continue to do what you like to do
Short answer is that portability is not the purpose of the virtual machine for C# (and for many people, it's not the purpose of using the Java virtual machine).
The bitstream itself is encoded as Ogg. So to decode it and turn it into music, any "client" device would need to understand both the Ogg container format and the MP3 audio format. Pretty much nothing out there does that (particularly standalone/hardware players). You could write some software with both components, no doubt, and that would be a "valid" use of Ogg -- but probably not a legal one, if you haven't licensed the Fraunhofer patents. Sort of the whole point of Ogg/Vorbis is to avoid that mess; that's why nobody's done any work with Ogg and MP3 (since there are plenty of other container formats -- MPEG4 provides one, for example, which was derived from QuickTime).
Ehhh?? So, if none of IndyMedia's reporting has ever legitimized it -- that is, none of its reporting has ever been recognized as legitimate -- then being busted by the feds is going to "legitimize" it in the sense that it will be perceived as being legitimately .... uh .... help me out here?
Ahh, if it's Linux source you want, then I believe the project you're looking for is Ogg, an open source container format along the lines of QuickTime. You may have heard of it.
But we live in the real world, so the codec and the intellectual property laws and assertions that surround it are inseparable. A theoretical codec that's prohibitive to actually implement is valueless.
Actually, I once saw a show on PBS where some scientists did a clever test. They took a whole bunch of photographs of people's faces and morphed them together, to create a picture of a composite human face. Most people who saw the face and were asked whether it was an attractive person agreed that it was.
The idea here is that what the scientists did was create a completely average face -- that is, mathematically average. Faces with big noses, or big chins, or buggy eyes, were cancelled out by the majority of faces that didn't share those features. In the end, what you got was a face every feature of which was the "norm" for the human race at large.
So the conclusion you could draw from this study is that the people we find the most attractive are the ones with the least apparent variation. A particularly exaggerated feature on a face might be viewed as a sign that some radical genetic divergence has taken place in that person's development -- and we don't care much for that, as a species. While diversity might be good for evolution, we like the norm (and this has nothing to do with skin color or the facial features of any particular ethnicity; so far as I know the scientists used a whole cross-section of people).
So if this theory is true, then no, human standards of beauty are not actually as relative as romantics might assume.
I used to listen to Stern when I was younger, but what really turned me off was the weeks on end that he'd spend hawking his latest book, or the "Private Parts" movie, or whatever. So what if Sirius is commercial free? Tune in to Stern and you'll get three hours worth of commercials for whatever he feels like selling you. I don't doubt that he'll spend the last month of his current contract telling his fans to sign up for Sirius.
Actually, that wasn't Chris Anderson's Wired back in 1996. A few years after Conde-Nast (publishers of Cosmopolitan, among other things) bought Wired in 1998, they brought in Chris as the new editor-in-chief, with the provision that he could hire his own staff and redesign the magazine. So the Wired you know and loathe today is Chris's baby -- not the one you might still have some nostalgic memories for, back during the bubble.
Errr ... in my market (San Francisco), they were running "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" at the local Loews tyrannoplex -- on the IMAX screen, even.
That's nothing. If anyone comes down to my local and orders a Red Bull and vodka, *I* ask them to leave.
Yes, but those Palm OS threads are limited to specific applications, like audio and notifications. You can't play a game while you're calculating Pi.
Despite his trollish past, he seems to be serious. I've never heard of Bindows.
Ah. I see what you mean now. Yeah, I once had the "pleasure" of attending a training class at some company's corporate headquarters to learn how to use their e-commerce package. At the beginning of one day's training session they were touting all their awesome, easy-to-use Java-based modeling tools that would allow you to visually design product hierarchies in no time at all. That day, the other guy from my team and I were the first ones to complete all the training exercises. The instructor, impressed with how fast we caught on, came over and asked us what steps we took. "It was easy," I said. "We quit out of that garbage applet, reverse-engineered the format for the config files and edited them in Notepad. It's a lot faster."
No troll; the honest truth. Still, as a counter-example, Azureus works pretty well for me.