The problem with drugging in sport is that the teams with the most money hire the pharmacists and doctors (like Fuentes and Ferrari) who develop cutting edge drug regimes which are beyond the current limits of drug testing. Drug testing inevitably develops behind the science of doping - testing for some new substance can only be initiated once it becomes known that that substance is being used for doping, and inevitably there is a lag time during which a reliable and safe test is developed.
Consequently the drug tests cannot be the 'gold standard' for evaluating whether or not someone has doped. Witness testimony is what we rely on in far more serious cases, like murder for example, and it seems perfectly reasonable to assert that if enough credible people are prepared to testify on oath that they personally witnessed Armstrong doping, then he was doping, whatever the drug tests say.
There's circumstantial evidence, too. One thing which had me convinced Armstrong was doping back as early as 2004 were his rages - he was aggressive and prone to anger far outside the normal range of human behaviour. But since then we've seen so many of his team mates and ex-team mates implicated - Tyler Hamilton, Floyd Landis and several others have been convicted, while George Hincapie agreed to give evidence against Armstrong in return for not being prosecuted. It simply isn't credible that everyone on the team was doping except the strongest, fastest man in the team.
Of course you can argue, and some people have, that if you can't reliably test for dope then the sensible thing to do is to allow all athletes to take whatever drugs they want, because if they're all doping then that's fair. But many of these drugs are dangerous - there were a rash of deaths from heart attacks of very young cyclists in Holland and Belgium in the early 2000s associated with apparent use of EPO, for example - and many athletes are young and under great pressure to succeed. We do have to clean up cycling (and other sports, too, of course, but I'm no expert on other sports) or else we will see a lot more kids with great potential killed to no purpose. I believe that we are succeeding.
I switched to Mint on my laptop last year, tried it for three months, switched back to Ubuntu. Mint just had too many annoyances - a triumph of branding over content (changing the KDE start menu icon seemed to me just insulting). I still run Debian on my servers and have no intention of changing. It's rock solid, which is what a server needs to be.
You clearly never worked on either the Xerox Star workstations, or the Xerox AI workstations with which they shared hardware. These had (inter alia)
Drag and drop file manipulation
Drop down menus
Multiple views of the file system (e.g. icon vs. list)
OS* support for drawing into partially obscured windows
Direct editing of file names
Copying data in multiple formats to the clipboard
Automatic updating of windows when rearranged
Not only did Xerox have prior art on all these things, it is a matter of historical record that Steve Jobs saw that prior art, so there is no possible way he could claim independent invention.
* For some value of. The Dandelion/Dandetiger/Dorado/Daybreak machines didn't really have an OS; InterLISP ran very close to bare metal.
You're in the US, aren't you? Quick reality check: most smart-phone users are not in the US. Ride any train in any major world city, and you'll see something different.
I think microsoft should beat the shit of nokia and burn them alive. enough with the crap. getting angry for waiting a decent windows phone available on all countries.
The thing is, it's not Nokia's fault that Windows phone hasn't taken off. Nokia has been making very good hardware for twenty years, and all the people I know who use them say that the Lumias are good phones. The problem is firstly that Microsoft now have such a reputation for user hostile and generally unreliable software that they are in effect a negative brand, and secondly that the market doesn't really have room for a third smartphone operating system.
If anyone should be beating anyone up, it's Nokia's stakeholders who should be beating Elop up - he is the person who has committed corporate hara-kiri on Nokia, and the real crime in all this is, having sacrificed Nokia on the altar of Microsoft's ambition he will probably walk away with a fat golden parachute (and his Microsoft stock-holding intact).
I feel his pain. I'm currently dealing with over 5,000 badly written, undocumented Java classes. Just because it's object oriented doesn't mean it isn't spaghetti.
Does anyone use these tiny mouses? I don't know A SINGLE person who actually uses these mini-mouses, and ultraportable tiny mouses, etc.
As a matter of fact, I own a Logitech Performance MX, which is quite huge actually, and don't have any issue carrying it around. Especially since the laptop is the actual bulky thing. I've also noticed most people that try it seem to prefer to actually have something large and comfortable, since it's only ~150g vs the ~2kg that a laptop can weight.
What's the point of saving space and weight in a mouse, when you can't even save 10% of what the laptop weight. Not to mention the charger. Especially since the price you pay (in comfort) by using a small mouse is really really high.
Yes, I do. I currently use a Dell bluetooth travel mouse, as my main mouse. I do also have a full-size Logitech cordless mouse (similar to yours) but it's on a computer I use less often. The 'travel mouse' isn't 'for a laptop', it's just a mouse I really like. I find it comfortable and easy to use. Small mice also mean more desk space to fill with clutter.
As an aside, I started using mice on Xerox workstations back in 1985, and they were pretty small by modern standards. The original Mac mouse was also quite small.
Microsoft should reinvent themselves as a hardware house. A lot of their hardware is very good; I've never regretted any of the Microsoft mice I've bought.
It's a shame their software is (generally) so rubbish.
Microsoft has something called on{X} for Android that allows you to use Javascript for scripting. It's not clear how extensive it is, but it might allow you to do some of the things you're thinking of.
Second this. I'm not at all a Microsoft fanboi, but this is actually interesting and good...
I have only one complaint. Back in may I set up a task to wake me half an hour early on any workday morning when
Minimum daytime temperature was predicted to be over 10 Celsius
Maximum windspeed was predicted to be less than 10Km/h
Propability of rain was predicted to be less than 10%
so that I could get up early and cycle into work (40Km). This alarm has never worked...
Unfortunately, this is not due to a bug in the software.
Well, the actual price would be about 15,- euro per 1GB if you can believe their reseller at http://www.europe-satellite.com/EMS/webshop/online_tooken01.htm. But Avanti is not the first, Tooway has been providing a similar service for several years now.
Full disclosure: I useTooway. I use it because I'm off-grid, so land-line based solutions are impossible, and it's a lot cheaper than a terrestrial microwave relay. And actually, I think for anyone in a remote rural area who needs decent bandwidth, it's a good solution even if they do have a landline. But ping times are long so you aren't going to play multiplayer games, and I find that skype audio (but interestingly not video) is unacceptably poor. It's also more expensive that people in cities pay for bandwidth, but that's part of what you choose when you decide to go off-grid.
. Without him, Linux would turn in to PHP. Look what happened to that. PHP is plain awful now. It started off with a good idea, then all the amateurs took control and ruined it. You don't want that now, do you?
I used PHP back when it was Rasmus Lerdorf's neat hack to maintain his Personal Home Page. It was a very neat hack. It was always a very neat hack, and it continues to be a very neat hack. It wasn't ever meant to be an elegant and well engineered language, although it did get a bit full of itself around PHP3. But the difference in software engineering terms between PHP and Linux is (it's car analogy time, folks) the difference between a child's home made soap box cart and a Lotus Elise.
Slackware is great for what it is. I remember working with it in the early 90s. I think Arch is also excellent. But none of these fill the same niche as RHEL.
I too used Slackware in the early nineties - after SLS on its fifty-mumble floppy disks, Then I used Red Hat, Mandrake, and even Caldera before I found Debian in about 1996. Once you've used Debian, and the Debian package manager, you're never going to want to use anything else.
That is nonsense, their services all have high quality open APIs, mostly very well documented, and mostly for the benefit of open source integration. They don't give you all their code, duh, but they do go out of their way to allow you to integrate with it. If you can already integrate with it, it can't possibly be "problematic."
You're obviously not even a developer if you're spewing that drivel. Now get off my lawn before I turn the hose on you!
Don't be cruel to Kommander Liz. 'She' only joined Slashdot this morning, and has since then posted one submission, 'Getting by without Google' and two articles, both of which are in this thread. How could you possibly accuse 'her' of being an anti-Google troll?
I'm working in 3d, and as near photo-realistic as I can get, rather than 2d cute cartoony stuff. You can get a long way with tools like MakeHuman, but there isn't (yet) and equivalent MakeCamel project, and my game needs camels... Given that what I want to do is fairly photo-realistic, I would have thought that the assets I want are also wanted by makers of lots of other games (OK, maybe not the camels) and that what's needed is a sort of Creative Commons directory of game assets.
Mind you, this competition is a great start and worthy of support.
COBOL was obsolete before I first started programming, but is still alive and widely used. C has only been obsolete for twenty years or so, so there will probably be dinosaurs^Wpeople still using it in thirty years time.
You're forgetting the days of the "Blue Screen of Death." That was pretty consistent.
Hey, you speak like that was in the past. This weekend I installed a (legal, purchased, licensed) copy of Windows 7 Home Premium onto my new machine so I could run games. I installed six games. None of them would run, and of those three failed with blue screens of death: Oblivion, Settlers IV, and Alpha Centauri. What makes that a particularly sour experience is that Oblivion, at least (haven't tried the other two), runs pretty well under WINE (some minor graphics problems, but it's playable).
Apart from that, Windows 7 cannot access the Internet, although Linux running on the same machine can, and although in Windows it can access the rest of my local network and the rest of my local network can access it. Because it can't access the Internet, my newer games won't run. Microsoft's support pages say the most likely reason is that my router is too old to support the modern wizz-bang networking of Windows 7, and they provide an online tool to test your router... but guess what, it only works with Internet Explorer, so if you need it you definitely can't use it, and if you can use it you definitely don't need it.
That's the level of thoughtfulness and quality I've come to expect from Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with drugging in sport is that the teams with the most money hire the pharmacists and doctors (like Fuentes and Ferrari) who develop cutting edge drug regimes which are beyond the current limits of drug testing. Drug testing inevitably develops behind the science of doping - testing for some new substance can only be initiated once it becomes known that that substance is being used for doping, and inevitably there is a lag time during which a reliable and safe test is developed.
Consequently the drug tests cannot be the 'gold standard' for evaluating whether or not someone has doped. Witness testimony is what we rely on in far more serious cases, like murder for example, and it seems perfectly reasonable to assert that if enough credible people are prepared to testify on oath that they personally witnessed Armstrong doping, then he was doping, whatever the drug tests say.
There's circumstantial evidence, too. One thing which had me convinced Armstrong was doping back as early as 2004 were his rages - he was aggressive and prone to anger far outside the normal range of human behaviour. But since then we've seen so many of his team mates and ex-team mates implicated - Tyler Hamilton, Floyd Landis and several others have been convicted, while George Hincapie agreed to give evidence against Armstrong in return for not being prosecuted. It simply isn't credible that everyone on the team was doping except the strongest, fastest man in the team.
There's some good news in all this. This years leading riders were about 4% down on power output - Lance Armstrong in 2005 was outputting 6.8 watts per kilogram, whereas Bradley Wiggins, this year's winner, was capable of just 6.57. Of course, the fact that power is down - across the whole peloton, not just the leaders - doesn't prove that today's riders are not doping, but clearly something has changed, and dope is one thing that may have changed.
Of course you can argue, and some people have, that if you can't reliably test for dope then the sensible thing to do is to allow all athletes to take whatever drugs they want, because if they're all doping then that's fair. But many of these drugs are dangerous - there were a rash of deaths from heart attacks of very young cyclists in Holland and Belgium in the early 2000s associated with apparent use of EPO, for example - and many athletes are young and under great pressure to succeed. We do have to clean up cycling (and other sports, too, of course, but I'm no expert on other sports) or else we will see a lot more kids with great potential killed to no purpose. I believe that we are succeeding.
I switched to Mint on my laptop last year, tried it for three months, switched back to Ubuntu. Mint just had too many annoyances - a triumph of branding over content (changing the KDE start menu icon seemed to me just insulting). I still run Debian on my servers and have no intention of changing. It's rock solid, which is what a server needs to be.
You clearly never worked on either the Xerox Star workstations, or the Xerox AI workstations with which they shared hardware. These had (inter alia)
Not only did Xerox have prior art on all these things, it is a matter of historical record that Steve Jobs saw that prior art, so there is no possible way he could claim independent invention.
* For some value of. The Dandelion/Dandetiger/Dorado/Daybreak machines didn't really have an OS; InterLISP ran very close to bare metal.
G+, a vastly superior platform.... ....except that there's nobody on it, which is what makes a social platform superior.
Actually the vastly superior platform is Diaspora... which no-one is using either.
You're in the US, aren't you? Quick reality check: most smart-phone users are not in the US. Ride any train in any major world city, and you'll see something different.
Don't feed trolls.
Elop is the problem here, not Nokia.
Amen, brother.
I think microsoft should beat the shit of nokia and burn them alive. enough with the crap. getting angry for waiting a decent windows phone available on all countries.
The thing is, it's not Nokia's fault that Windows phone hasn't taken off. Nokia has been making very good hardware for twenty years, and all the people I know who use them say that the Lumias are good phones. The problem is firstly that Microsoft now have such a reputation for user hostile and generally unreliable software that they are in effect a negative brand, and secondly that the market doesn't really have room for a third smartphone operating system.
If anyone should be beating anyone up, it's Nokia's stakeholders who should be beating Elop up - he is the person who has committed corporate hara-kiri on Nokia, and the real crime in all this is, having sacrificed Nokia on the altar of Microsoft's ambition he will probably walk away with a fat golden parachute (and his Microsoft stock-holding intact).
I feel his pain. I'm currently dealing with over 5,000 badly written, undocumented Java classes. Just because it's object oriented doesn't mean it isn't spaghetti.
Does anyone use these tiny mouses?
I don't know A SINGLE person who actually uses these mini-mouses, and ultraportable tiny mouses, etc.
As a matter of fact, I own a Logitech Performance MX, which is quite huge actually, and don't have any issue carrying it around. Especially since the laptop is the actual bulky thing. I've also noticed most people that try it seem to prefer to actually have something large and comfortable, since it's only ~150g vs the ~2kg that a laptop can weight.
What's the point of saving space and weight in a mouse, when you can't even save 10% of what the laptop weight. Not to mention the charger. Especially since the price you pay (in comfort) by using a small mouse is really really high.
Yes, I do. I currently use a Dell bluetooth travel mouse, as my main mouse. I do also have a full-size Logitech cordless mouse (similar to yours) but it's on a computer I use less often. The 'travel mouse' isn't 'for a laptop', it's just a mouse I really like. I find it comfortable and easy to use. Small mice also mean more desk space to fill with clutter.
As an aside, I started using mice on Xerox workstations back in 1985, and they were pretty small by modern standards. The original Mac mouse was also quite small.
Microsoft should reinvent themselves as a hardware house. A lot of their hardware is very good; I've never regretted any of the Microsoft mice I've bought.
It's a shame their software is (generally) so rubbish.
Nobody much loves Unity, but Ubuntu 12.04 with either Gnome or KDE is pretty slick and easy to use.
Microsoft has something called on{X} for Android that allows you to use Javascript for scripting. It's not clear how extensive it is, but it might allow you to do some of the things you're thinking of.
Second this. I'm not at all a Microsoft fanboi, but this is actually interesting and good...
I have only one complaint. Back in may I set up a task to wake me half an hour early on any workday morning when
so that I could get up early and cycle into work (40Km). This alarm has never worked...
Unfortunately, this is not due to a bug in the software.
Well, the actual price would be about 15,- euro per 1GB if you can believe their reseller at http://www.europe-satellite.com/EMS/webshop/online_tooken01.htm. But Avanti is not the first, Tooway has been providing a similar service for several years now.
Full disclosure: I useTooway. I use it because I'm off-grid, so land-line based solutions are impossible, and it's a lot cheaper than a terrestrial microwave relay. And actually, I think for anyone in a remote rural area who needs decent bandwidth, it's a good solution even if they do have a landline. But ping times are long so you aren't going to play multiplayer games, and I find that skype audio (but interestingly not video) is unacceptably poor. It's also more expensive that people in cities pay for bandwidth, but that's part of what you choose when you decide to go off-grid.
.
Without him, Linux would turn in to PHP. Look what happened to that. PHP is plain awful now. It started off with a good idea, then all the amateurs took control and ruined it. You don't want that now, do you?
I used PHP back when it was Rasmus Lerdorf's neat hack to maintain his Personal Home Page. It was a very neat hack. It was always a very neat hack, and it continues to be a very neat hack. It wasn't ever meant to be an elegant and well engineered language, although it did get a bit full of itself around PHP3. But the difference in software engineering terms between PHP and Linux is (it's car analogy time, folks) the difference between a child's home made soap box cart and a Lotus Elise.
Slackware is great for what it is. I remember working with it in the early 90s. I think Arch is also excellent. But none of these fill the same niche as RHEL.
I too used Slackware in the early nineties - after SLS on its fifty-mumble floppy disks, Then I used Red Hat, Mandrake, and even Caldera before I found Debian in about 1996. Once you've used Debian, and the Debian package manager, you're never going to want to use anything else.
He's dead, It's Saint Jobs now.
+1 Informative.
The real problem with C++ for kernel modules is: the language just sucks.
-- Linus Torvalds
I might just have to steal your signature.
Here's probably the funniest discussion thread on injection attacks, ever.
That is indeed funny, in a most terrifying way!
That is nonsense, their services all have high quality open APIs, mostly very well documented, and mostly for the benefit of open source integration. They don't give you all their code, duh, but they do go out of their way to allow you to integrate with it. If you can already integrate with it, it can't possibly be "problematic."
You're obviously not even a developer if you're spewing that drivel. Now get off my lawn before I turn the hose on you!
Don't be cruel to Kommander Liz. 'She' only joined Slashdot this morning, and has since then posted one submission, 'Getting by without Google' and two articles, both of which are in this thread. How could you possibly accuse 'her' of being an anti-Google troll?
And browsing the links from tha original article, it looks like Open Game Art is just what I want!
I'm working in 3d, and as near photo-realistic as I can get, rather than 2d cute cartoony stuff. You can get a long way with tools like MakeHuman, but there isn't (yet) and equivalent MakeCamel project, and my game needs camels... Given that what I want to do is fairly photo-realistic, I would have thought that the assets I want are also wanted by makers of lots of other games (OK, maybe not the camels) and that what's needed is a sort of Creative Commons directory of game assets.
Mind you, this competition is a great start and worthy of support.
As JaredofEuropa pointed out above, once you have 3D printers mass production is obsolete. And 3d printing is already being used to build concrete structures
COBOL was obsolete before I first started programming, but is still alive and widely used. C has only been obsolete for twenty years or so, so there will probably be dinosaurs^Wpeople still using it in thirty years time.
You're forgetting the days of the "Blue Screen of Death." That was pretty consistent.
Hey, you speak like that was in the past. This weekend I installed a (legal, purchased, licensed) copy of Windows 7 Home Premium onto my new machine so I could run games. I installed six games. None of them would run, and of those three failed with blue screens of death: Oblivion, Settlers IV, and Alpha Centauri. What makes that a particularly sour experience is that Oblivion, at least (haven't tried the other two), runs pretty well under WINE (some minor graphics problems, but it's playable).
Apart from that, Windows 7 cannot access the Internet, although Linux running on the same machine can, and although in Windows it can access the rest of my local network and the rest of my local network can access it. Because it can't access the Internet, my newer games won't run. Microsoft's support pages say the most likely reason is that my router is too old to support the modern wizz-bang networking of Windows 7, and they provide an online tool to test your router... but guess what, it only works with Internet Explorer, so if you need it you definitely can't use it, and if you can use it you definitely don't need it.
That's the level of thoughtfulness and quality I've come to expect from Microsoft.