For the smaller, cheaper you have the MR-100. For those who want a device with all the multimedia bells and whistles, you have the MR-500i.
Hey, I am sick as every at seeing an 'iPod killer' posted on slashdot every second day, but these looks pretty nice so don't write them off based on a misunderstanding.
XMLEncoder will never be useful for example for taking an existing XML schema and writing code to read/write to it. C#'s XML serialization/deserialization on the other hand is.
I'm also not referring to XPath - also nice but very limited as soon as you want to handle heirarchical data.
No, he probably means like C#'s XML serialization / de-serialization, which is a hell of a lot nicer for most situations than either JAXP/JAXB (I've used all these technologies and I found JAXB so awful (and JAXP is just too much work for most situations) that I wrote my own utility for Java which works very similarly to C#'s XML serialization).
I won't even get into the speed of Java's XML parsers.
There are of course better solutions than JAXP/JAXB for Java (some similar to C#'s), they're just not standard and not quite as nice (in particular, because Java didn't have anything comparable to C#'s attributes until 1.5, and the attributes are quite useful in controlling XML serialization).
Why are environmentalist opposed to a scientific solution?
Is that a question or a statement? What makes you assume that environmentalists are opposed to scientific solutions per se?
Do you not think that developing greener cars or greener ways of creating energy are 'scientific' solutions? Or using technology to reduce the CO2 emissions from existing power plants / factories? Or using more efficient light bulbs etc etc? Environmentalists seem to generally support these things, in addition to other methods. If they're against any 'scientific' solution (i.e. say nuclear energy or this idea of yours) its not due to it being scientific, rather (possibly overblown) concerns about side-effects it may have (i.e. nuclear waste).
Also, the fact that there are unavoidable causes of CO2 doesn't mean we shouldn't avoid the avoidable - the earth exists in a balance (i.e. of CO2 sinks and sources), and its the very avoidable increases over the past few hundred years in our increase in CO2 that appear to be tipping the balance, not the occasional forest fire etc which have always occasionally happened.
Not so sure about rather having an A64 vs Centrino. Depends on how much you value speed vs power-consumption (and Centrinos aren't that slow). In fact I think Cetrinos are the one thing Intel still has going for them at the moment. Give me a dual-Centrino desktop over any P4 desktop anytime (if only such a thing existed....).
No, what we should be wishing is that governments stopped making it so cheap. In a capitalistic society, the only thing that will reduce consumption is to increase the price.
The reason energy/fuel is expensive in Europe is mainly taxes. The only way to reduce the American consumers' usage is to increase the cost to them through a similar mechanism. Simply factoring in to some degree the cost to the environment and the military/political costs in safeguarding the supply of oil should do the job - at the moment oil is effectively being subsidised in the US if anything. Unfortunately the oil lobby there manages to prevent any such change happening to any useful degree (and its also in no-ones electoral interests to deny American's their 'right' to cheap oil - thats one area where the American voter can be somewhat faulted).
What is really sad however is how much many Asian economies subsidise (in some cases massively) the cost of petrol. Lets encourage people to pollute the environment, increase our dependence on foreign oil, and increase congestion why don't we? While their economies probably couldn't handle the somewhat crippling taxes on fuel that the European countries have, they could at least stop subsidising the damn stuff! As I recently read, with the recent oil price increases, in some Asian countries over a third of their government deficits are purely due to these subsidies!
I think we're more or less in agreement that some of the new additions to Java 5.0 are flawed. Like you I also don't buy the backward compatibility argument for crippling generics, given that as you say there is no way to compile code with generics to work under older JVMs. Maybe the point is that it makes it easier for old code to run within the new JVM?
Unfortunately Java has a history of introducting - and then getting stuck with - not-quite-perfect implementations of good ideas - swing + awt for example. Nevertheless, I would still rather have generics as they have been implemented than none.
Where I can't see eye to eye with you is on the for loop comparison. Would you at least agree that C#'s syntax
foreach(int i in myList) {.... }
is easier to read and clearer than the old for loops? I think you really need to step back from your years of C/C++/Java programming and ask what is easier to understand and use for someone without years of experience in writing/reading for(int i=0; ilist.size(); i++) - an extremely unintuitive syntax when you think about it, and a hell to write when you start adding iterators into the equation.
Also note that the foreach / new_java_for will have speed advantages (something you seem to find very important).
Regarding me being a fan of Microsoft products, I will admit that I quite like C#, and am really looking forward to.NET 2 which will address a lot of major shortcomings.
Generics: They couldn't make it worse here..... Java generics are just compiler sugar for automatically generating casts.
Generics haven't been implemented in the best possible way (thus hurting performance and giving the reflection anomaly), but they are nevertheless much better than no generics, and provide much more than 'syntactic sugar', rather provide compiler-time type checking where none was before, and make the code significantly more descriptive. Anyone with experience using C++ who has had to use Java knows that they were sorely needed, and now they're finally here and I for one am not complaining.
Autoboxing: this feature removes clarity from the language.
On the contrary. Autoboxing - like generics and the new for loop - removes the need in many places for casts while simplifying the code, thus _improving_ clarity.
The only vaguely plausible argument against the way Tiger has implemented generics and the use of autoboxing is performance issues, yet in terms of performance they don't really make things worse, rather fail to make things better. And from a clarity standpoint theres no doubt they improve things.
New for: This simply makes the code harder to read.
I take it you are the kind of person who prefers reading assembler?
Sorry, but when you make this claim you lose _all_ credibility in my eyes. How can
int total = 0; for(int i: mySet) {
total += i; }
be harder to read than
for(Iterator it = set.iterator(); it.hasNext();)
Integer integer = (Integer) it.next();
int i = integer.toInt();
total += i; }
Not only is the new for loop easier to read and far more succinct and thus quicker to type, but its type-safe, and leaves far less room for error i.e. the common errors of mixing the loop variables etc are gone, for example the error causing the following infinite loop would not occur with the new for loop:
Annotations: I really don't see the point of this. It's just more complexity.
Just because _you_ don't see the point of something doesn't mean anything in my book sorry. A lot of people much cleverer than you _do_ see a point to them. Personally, I tend to be rather sceptical of such things, but having used attributes in C# can see how they bring real value in certain situations (such as when fields in a class map to a DB or XML, and attributes can be used to describe this mapping in cases where for example the field names differ).
Regarding enums, the point you raise is cause for some concern, but again they are something badly needed and having them, even if slightly flawed, is on balance better than having none and having individual coders make their own far poorer implementations of the concept when they need enums themselves.
Well the articles that the main poster linked to states that it is in a different class, and my point was simply that he misrepresented them.
Whether it actually is in a different class.... well you yourself state that the Athlon64 is targeted to a different market. And the Opteron's sales figures pale in comparison with Intel's Xeon's which are what the Opteron is really competing with, which brings me to the point that the main post was comparing apples with oranges.
No ones denying that the Itanium has not been as successful as planned, but that shouldn't lead one to the conclusion that the Athlon64 is the main cause/beneficiary as the main post implied.
The main post links to two articles and then totally misrepresents them. I'm not going to argue with you on the facts of the situation, as its complex, but what I stated is nothing more than what the articles that the main poster linked to stated, and I was just trying to point out that he completely misrepresented what the articles said.
The main post is horribly misleading - it compares the sales for Intel Itaniums with AMD64 chips which are in a totally different class. The Intel Itanium 2 is in fact overtaking its real competitors - the processors used in Hewlett-Packard PA-RISC servers and IBM Power-series servers, and those used in Sun Microsystems Sparc servers.
HP also dropped Intel's Itaniums because customers preferred _Intel_ x64 Xeons, not for any AMD chip, in contrast to what the deliberatly misleading post implies.
In related news, Apple has sold more IPods in the last week than Microsoft sold copies of Visual Studio.NET on Friday, causing lots of/. readers to gloat about the death of Microsoft.
I like how you call speech recognition 'simply' trying to identify the words, vs voice recognition which has to identify the individual by their voice.
Voice recognition is in fact a _lot_ simpler than speech recognition. I worked on a research project about 5 years back which involved voice recognition - it was based on a relatively simple mathematical model, required very little training, and was quite accurate. I wanted to combine it with a speech recognition system (so while someone was using the speech recognition, it would continuosly check that they were the correct person), but never got very far with that idea.
We also had a typing recognition system which would learn someone's typing 'style' and then throw up a logon dialog if it detected anyone else typing (and the logon dialog not only checked that the password matched, but also that it was typed in the write 'style' - kind of like a signature). This also worked surprisingly well, however never made it out of the lab as far as I know, although I have seen some surprisingly bad performing (given how reasonably simple the problem is) commercial products that attempt do some of this.
They also make money by constantly improving the features. Digital cameras are improving at an insanely fast rate in fact at the moment. If there was market demand for internal storage, you can be sure someone would add it.
However personally I wouldn't want it - I'd rather just have a memory-card slot and then buy whatever size/speed memory I prefer, than have to work with some inbuild thing coming with the camera. Sure the camera can have both, but thats just needlessly adding to its size+cost.
Re. optical zoom, the companies work have worked hard on this over the last few decades. Unless you're buying real low end cameras (where all the consumers tend to care about are 'megapixels' etc), the companies pay real care to improving everything.
However, note that increasing the zoom is never a win-win situation - to increase the optical zoom, you either have to increase the size+cost of a camera or decrease the image quality (either by decreasing the sensor size - losing resolution or adding noise - or increasing image distortion) or both.
Thats why even SLR lenses are typically no higher zoom-range that your typical compact cameras, and most SLR owners buy multiple lenses (i.e. a tele-lense plus a wide-range lens plus a macro lense etc rather than some 'super-zoom one-size-fits-all'). If you really need high zoom, you have to sacrifice in terms of money/size/quality, and for the market the optimum zoom size is around 3-4x, however the market also supplies 10x and 12x optical zoom cameras for those who really need them (or for those that think the bigger the zoom number the better, and don't realise that a 6mp DSLR with a 3x zoom will take far better pictures in most situations than an 8mp 8x zoom 'prosumer' camera with lots of other fancy features and which actually costs virtually the same as a far-superior DSLR).
Sure the megapixel numbers and digital zoom numbers are are stupid as the megapixel myth, but thats no reason for you to fall for them.
Everybody who works for MS has to shoulder the blame/credit for everything MS does. They all help whether directly or indirectly. You don't get a pass just because you are nice guy, your salary is what it is because your company is an asshole and the people who run your company are immoral bastards.
No. Everyone in the company who takes part in making any decisions has to take any blame/credit for those decisions.
However the bottom-of-the-rang programmers are not to 'blame' if someone higher up makes some immoral decision. The programmers are simply doing their job, and most likely what they're doing has nothing to do with any 'evil' going on (one _could_ try and argue that if they were ordered to say write some code to do something immoral that they would share responsibility for this, however even that is not a clear-cut argument, and that is not the case here anyway).
The worker may have chosen the job for salary reasons, just as everyone has a right to consider salary in looking for jobs. This however doesn't make them bear any moral responsibility for receiving this salary, just like some Enron engineer doesn't bear any responsibility for some top Enron manager choosing to rip America off of a few billions.
As another analogy, I also don't consider every American 'guilty' for the fact that they're American, even if all Americans might be to some degree benefiting from some very immoral government policies worldwide (there go my karma points.... but take the CIA overthrowing the government in Guatemala to defend US business interests). Sure, the benefit to the average American is in such cases very tenuous, but so is the benefit of Microsofts 'evil' ways to the average Microsoft employee, so the analogy holds I would say.
You mention that FreeBSD is currently on a ports freeze...
I am running a Java-based website on a FreeBSD server. I recently converted the code to Java 1.5, and then realised that no Java 1.5 port is yet available for FreeBSD.
However, I was hoping that as soon as the stable version of Java 1.5 is released (expected at the end of this month - currently a release candidate is available for Windows, Linux etc), then a FreeBSD port would shortly follow. However from what you say, should I expect to be waiting a while?
Yes, just like every other new technology around the world which makes old technologies redundant gets given the cold shoulder. Thats why we're still cooking over fire stoves (after the wood industry prevented any electrical ovens ever being developed), still riding horses (after the horse industry quashed those people trying to invent the automobile), using Windows (after Microsoft quashed Linux and the Mac OS) etc.... although hold on, that one might turn out to be true....
Anyway, lets just judge the science on its merits, not on conspiracy theories. If it has merit, you can be pretty sure theres lots of investors are going to start seeing the potential for a lot of zeroes after those $$$ signs and jump on it, and that probably the first companies to jump on the bandwagen will be the energy companies you claim are holding it up.
*sigh*..... seems like every month Slashdot posts the new 'ipod slayer' or 'ipod killer'.
What the slashdot crowd seems to fail to realise is that releasing a device with a bigger hard drive or longer battery life or some other fancy technical specification doesn't make it an 'ipod killer'. The ipod excels in many other areas - design, ease-of-use, reputation etc.
Making it worse, these 'ipod killers' are often a joke. They'll have say one technical aspect thats better than the ipod, but on pretty much everything else will fail (i.e. a bigger hard drive but crappy user interface and too big and ugly design etc). Sony's 'ipod killer' is the worst example - release a device crippled with DRM and requiring transcoding to Sony's dead ATRAC format with the resulting awful sound quality and post on slashdot about it killing the ipod. Which is of course a pity because Sony's engineers - if they weren't handcuffed by their music division - could very likely produce a superior product.
The ipod will of course not remain dominant forever, but it'll take more than a device with just a big hard drive or battery - and with only 500 available - to remove it from the throne.
Do any of you guys have a clue how shares actually work? That the price, whether its $95 or $.50 is irrelevant when viewed alone. The only relevant thing is the price * number of shares, i.e. the market capitalisation.
Now you can argue whether or not the expected capitalisation of $24 billion is too high or too low. Then you're just saying you know more than the exports that have guessed this figure (and its _not_ set by google - its just an expectation). And since the actually share price will be determined by what the market is prepared to pay, it is by definition the 'right' price.
Further, insiders - as in the people with friends in the right places that are thus guaranteed shares at the IPO - would get rich if the price started too _low_ and then bumped up in the first days to the 'real' market price, not the other way around. By doing a dutch style auction, google is trying to prevent exactly this from happening.
RTA. Or better, read a non-trolling article. These aren't critical security flaws by any stretch, and in any case Microsoft already released a patch for one.
I think that about summarizes what I've read of these flaws. If anything, the 'exploits' are simply disagreements with the philosophy regarding how the changes should have been implemented - i.e. at what level.
Microsoft has added protection to some things, but not others, so its a 'flaw' that the protection only protects these certain things. But it most likely a design decision - you have the security stopping the dumb user from accidentally opening something in explorer without realising what it is, without handicapping advanced users using cmd or having say security pop-ups every time a program internally invokes another etc.
Because green is one of the three primary colours of _light_, whereas yellow is one of the primary colours for like surfaces, which is a different proposition altogether. With light, yellow is gotten by combining two of the three primaries RGB (like red and green - I'm not 100% sure there), whereas green is a generally used as a primary colour thus nothing 'combines' to it.
You're thinking about combining paints (we all know from school art that blue + yellow = green). However they work in the opposite direction (the one is additive and the other subtractive). Thats why combining lots of paint colours gets brownish/black, while combining different coloured lights on the other hand moves towards white.
Slashdot Mirror
For the smaller, cheaper you have the MR-100. For those who want a device with all the multimedia bells and whistles, you have the MR-500i.
Hey, I am sick as every at seeing an 'iPod killer' posted on slashdot every second day, but these looks pretty nice so don't write them off based on a misunderstanding.
I guess you missed the recent slashdot post + discussion about having to smack the Rio Karma hard on a table every now and again to keep it going?
In a word - no.
XMLEncoder will never be useful for example for taking an existing XML schema and writing code to read/write to it. C#'s XML serialization/deserialization on the other hand is.
I'm also not referring to XPath - also nice but very limited as soon as you want to handle heirarchical data.
No, he probably means like C#'s XML serialization / de-serialization, which is a hell of a lot nicer for most situations than either JAXP/JAXB (I've used all these technologies and I found JAXB so awful (and JAXP is just too much work for most situations) that I wrote my own utility for Java which works very similarly to C#'s XML serialization).
I won't even get into the speed of Java's XML parsers.
There are of course better solutions than JAXP/JAXB for Java (some similar to C#'s), they're just not standard and not quite as nice (in particular, because Java didn't have anything comparable to C#'s attributes until 1.5, and the attributes are quite useful in controlling XML serialization).
Why are environmentalist opposed to a scientific solution?
Is that a question or a statement? What makes you assume that environmentalists are opposed to scientific solutions per se?
Do you not think that developing greener cars or greener ways of creating energy are 'scientific' solutions? Or using technology to reduce the CO2 emissions from existing power plants / factories? Or using more efficient light bulbs etc etc? Environmentalists seem to generally support these things, in addition to other methods. If they're against any 'scientific' solution (i.e. say nuclear energy or this idea of yours) its not due to it being scientific, rather (possibly overblown) concerns about side-effects it may have (i.e. nuclear waste).
Also, the fact that there are unavoidable causes of CO2 doesn't mean we shouldn't avoid the avoidable - the earth exists in a balance (i.e. of CO2 sinks and sources), and its the very avoidable increases over the past few hundred years in our increase in CO2 that appear to be tipping the balance, not the occasional forest fire etc which have always occasionally happened.
Not so sure about rather having an A64 vs Centrino. Depends on how much you value speed vs power-consumption (and Centrinos aren't that slow). In fact I think Cetrinos are the one thing Intel still has going for them at the moment. Give me a dual-Centrino desktop over any P4 desktop anytime (if only such a thing existed ....).
No, what we should be wishing is that governments stopped making it so cheap. In a capitalistic society, the only thing that will reduce consumption is to increase the price.
The reason energy/fuel is expensive in Europe is mainly taxes. The only way to reduce the American consumers' usage is to increase the cost to them through a similar mechanism. Simply factoring in to some degree the cost to the environment and the military/political costs in safeguarding the supply of oil should do the job - at the moment oil is effectively being subsidised in the US if anything. Unfortunately the oil lobby there manages to prevent any such change happening to any useful degree (and its also in no-ones electoral interests to deny American's their 'right' to cheap oil - thats one area where the American voter can be somewhat faulted).
What is really sad however is how much many Asian economies subsidise (in some cases massively) the cost of petrol. Lets encourage people to pollute the environment, increase our dependence on foreign oil, and increase congestion why don't we? While their economies probably couldn't handle the somewhat crippling taxes on fuel that the European countries have, they could at least stop subsidising the damn stuff! As I recently read, with the recent oil price increases, in some Asian countries over a third of their government deficits are purely due to these subsidies!
I think we're more or less in agreement that some of the new additions to Java 5.0 are flawed. Like you I also don't buy the backward compatibility argument for crippling generics, given that as you say there is no way to compile code with generics to work under older JVMs. Maybe the point is that it makes it easier for old code to run within the new JVM?
....
.NET 2 which will address a lot of major shortcomings.
Unfortunately Java has a history of introducting - and then getting stuck with - not-quite-perfect implementations of good ideas - swing + awt for example. Nevertheless, I would still rather have generics as they have been implemented than none.
Where I can't see eye to eye with you is on the for loop comparison. Would you at least agree that C#'s syntax
foreach(int i in myList) {
}
is easier to read and clearer than the old for loops? I think you really need to step back from your years of C/C++/Java programming and ask what is easier to understand and use for someone without years of experience in writing/reading
for(int i=0; ilist.size(); i++) - an extremely unintuitive syntax when you think about it, and a hell to write when you start adding iterators into the equation.
Also note that the foreach / new_java_for will have speed advantages (something you seem to find very important).
Regarding me being a fan of Microsoft products, I will admit that I quite like C#, and am really looking forward to
Generics: They couldn't make it worse here. .... Java generics are just compiler sugar for automatically generating casts.
...
.... how much did Microsoft pay you again?
Generics haven't been implemented in the best possible way (thus hurting performance and giving the reflection anomaly), but they are nevertheless much better than no generics, and provide much more than 'syntactic sugar', rather provide compiler-time type checking where none was before, and make the code significantly more descriptive. Anyone with experience using C++ who has had to use Java knows that they were sorely needed, and now they're finally here and I for one am not complaining.
Autoboxing: this feature removes clarity from the language.
On the contrary. Autoboxing - like generics and the new for loop - removes the need in many places for casts while simplifying the code, thus _improving_ clarity.
The only vaguely plausible argument against the way Tiger has implemented generics and the use of autoboxing is performance issues, yet in terms of performance they don't really make things worse, rather fail to make things better. And from a clarity standpoint theres no doubt they improve things.
New for: This simply makes the code harder to read.
I take it you are the kind of person who prefers reading assembler?
Sorry, but when you make this claim you lose _all_ credibility in my eyes. How can
int total = 0;
for(int i: mySet) {
total += i;
}
be harder to read than
for(Iterator it = set.iterator(); it.hasNext();)
Integer integer = (Integer) it.next();
int i = integer.toInt();
total += i;
}
Not only is the new for loop easier to read and far more succinct and thus quicker to type, but its type-safe, and leaves far less room for error i.e. the common errors of mixing the loop variables etc are gone, for example the error causing the following infinite loop would not occur with the new for loop:
for(int i=0; i<list.size(); i++) {
List list2 = (List) list.get(i);
for(int j=0; i<list2.size(); j++) {
}
}
Annotations: I really don't see the point of this. It's just more complexity.
Just because _you_ don't see the point of something doesn't mean anything in my book sorry. A lot of people much cleverer than you _do_ see a point to them. Personally, I tend to be rather sceptical of such things, but having used attributes in C# can see how they bring real value in certain situations (such as when fields in a class map to a DB or XML, and attributes can be used to describe this mapping in cases where for example the field names differ).
Regarding enums, the point you raise is cause for some concern, but again they are something badly needed and having them, even if slightly flawed, is on balance better than having none and having individual coders make their own far poorer implementations of the concept when they need enums themselves.
So
Well the articles that the main poster linked to states that it is in a different class, and my point was simply that he misrepresented them.
.... well you yourself state that the Athlon64 is targeted to a different market. And the Opteron's sales figures pale in comparison with Intel's Xeon's which are what the Opteron is really competing with, which brings me to the point that the main post was comparing apples with oranges.
Whether it actually is in a different class
No ones denying that the Itanium has not been as successful as planned, but that shouldn't lead one to the conclusion that the Athlon64 is the main cause/beneficiary as the main post implied.
All I can say is RTFA.
The main post links to two articles and then totally misrepresents them. I'm not going to argue with you on the facts of the situation, as its complex, but what I stated is nothing more than what the articles that the main poster linked to stated, and I was just trying to point out that he completely misrepresented what the articles said.
The main post is horribly misleading - it compares the sales for Intel Itaniums with AMD64 chips which are in a totally different class. The Intel Itanium 2 is in fact overtaking its real competitors - the processors used in Hewlett-Packard PA-RISC servers and IBM Power-series servers, and those used in Sun Microsystems Sparc servers.
.NET on Friday, causing lots of /. readers to gloat about the death of Microsoft.
HP also dropped Intel's Itaniums because customers preferred _Intel_ x64 Xeons, not for any AMD chip, in contrast to what the deliberatly misleading post implies.
In related news, Apple has sold more IPods in the last week than Microsoft sold copies of Visual Studio
I like how you call speech recognition 'simply' trying to identify the words, vs voice recognition which has to identify the individual by their voice.
Voice recognition is in fact a _lot_ simpler than speech recognition. I worked on a research project about 5 years back which involved voice recognition - it was based on a relatively simple mathematical model, required very little training, and was quite accurate. I wanted to combine it with a speech recognition system (so while someone was using the speech recognition, it would continuosly check that they were the correct person), but never got very far with that idea.
We also had a typing recognition system which would learn someone's typing 'style' and then throw up a logon dialog if it detected anyone else typing (and the logon dialog not only checked that the password matched, but also that it was typed in the write 'style' - kind of like a signature). This also worked surprisingly well, however never made it out of the lab as far as I know, although I have seen some surprisingly bad performing (given how reasonably simple the problem is) commercial products that attempt do some of this.
They also make money by constantly improving the features. Digital cameras are improving at an insanely fast rate in fact at the moment. If there was market demand for internal storage, you can be sure someone would add it.
However personally I wouldn't want it - I'd rather just have a memory-card slot and then buy whatever size/speed memory I prefer, than have to work with some inbuild thing coming with the camera. Sure the camera can have both, but thats just needlessly adding to its size+cost.
Re. optical zoom, the companies work have worked hard on this over the last few decades. Unless you're buying real low end cameras (where all the consumers tend to care about are 'megapixels' etc), the companies pay real care to improving everything.
However, note that increasing the zoom is never a win-win situation - to increase the optical zoom, you either have to increase the size+cost of a camera or decrease the image quality (either by decreasing the sensor size - losing resolution or adding noise - or increasing image distortion) or both.
Thats why even SLR lenses are typically no higher zoom-range that your typical compact cameras, and most SLR owners buy multiple lenses (i.e. a tele-lense plus a wide-range lens plus a macro lense etc rather than some 'super-zoom one-size-fits-all'). If you really need high zoom, you have to sacrifice in terms of money/size/quality, and for the market the optimum zoom size is around 3-4x, however the market also supplies 10x and 12x optical zoom cameras for those who really need them (or for those that think the bigger the zoom number the better, and don't realise that a 6mp DSLR with a 3x zoom will take far better pictures in most situations than an 8mp 8x zoom 'prosumer' camera with lots of other fancy features and which actually costs virtually the same as a far-superior DSLR).
Sure the megapixel numbers and digital zoom numbers are are stupid as the megapixel myth, but thats no reason for you to fall for them.
Everybody who works for MS has to shoulder the blame/credit for everything MS does. They all help whether directly or indirectly. You don't get a pass just because you are nice guy, your salary is what it is because your company is an asshole and the people who run your company are immoral bastards.
.... but take the CIA overthrowing the government in Guatemala to defend US business interests). Sure, the benefit to the average American is in such cases very tenuous, but so is the benefit of Microsofts 'evil' ways to the average Microsoft employee, so the analogy holds I would say.
No. Everyone in the company who takes part in making any decisions has to take any blame/credit for those decisions.
However the bottom-of-the-rang programmers are not to 'blame' if someone higher up makes some immoral decision. The programmers are simply doing their job, and most likely what they're doing has nothing to do with any 'evil' going on (one _could_ try and argue that if they were ordered to say write some code to do something immoral that they would share responsibility for this, however even that is not a clear-cut argument, and that is not the case here anyway).
The worker may have chosen the job for salary reasons, just as everyone has a right to consider salary in looking for jobs. This however doesn't make them bear any moral responsibility for receiving this salary, just like some Enron engineer doesn't bear any responsibility for some top Enron manager choosing to rip America off of a few billions.
As another analogy, I also don't consider every American 'guilty' for the fact that they're American, even if all Americans might be to some degree benefiting from some very immoral government policies worldwide (there go my karma points
You mention that FreeBSD is currently on a ports freeze ...
I am running a Java-based website on a FreeBSD server. I recently converted the code to Java 1.5, and then realised that no Java 1.5 port is yet available for FreeBSD.
However, I was hoping that as soon as the stable version of Java 1.5 is released (expected at the end of this month - currently a release candidate is available for Windows, Linux etc), then a FreeBSD port would shortly follow. However from what you say, should I expect to be waiting a while?
Yes, just like every other new technology around the world which makes old technologies redundant gets given the cold shoulder. Thats why we're still cooking over fire stoves (after the wood industry prevented any electrical ovens ever being developed), still riding horses (after the horse industry quashed those people trying to invent the automobile), using Windows (after Microsoft quashed Linux and the Mac OS) etc .... although hold on, that one might turn out to be true ....
Anyway, lets just judge the science on its merits, not on conspiracy theories. If it has merit, you can be pretty sure theres lots of investors are going to start seeing the potential for a lot of zeroes after those $$$ signs and jump on it, and that probably the first companies to jump on the bandwagen will be the energy companies you claim are holding it up.
*sigh* ..... seems like every month Slashdot posts the new 'ipod slayer' or 'ipod killer'.
What the slashdot crowd seems to fail to realise is that releasing a device with a bigger hard drive or longer battery life or some other fancy technical specification doesn't make it an 'ipod killer'. The ipod excels in many other areas - design, ease-of-use, reputation etc.
Making it worse, these 'ipod killers' are often a joke. They'll have say one technical aspect thats better than the ipod, but on pretty much everything else will fail (i.e. a bigger hard drive but crappy user interface and too big and ugly design etc). Sony's 'ipod killer' is the worst example - release a device crippled with DRM and requiring transcoding to Sony's dead ATRAC format with the resulting awful sound quality and post on slashdot about it killing the ipod. Which is of course a pity because Sony's engineers - if they weren't handcuffed by their music division - could very likely produce a superior product.
The ipod will of course not remain dominant forever, but it'll take more than a device with just a big hard drive or battery - and with only 500 available - to remove it from the throne.
So this slashdot article - http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/0 7/22/0138244&tid=106 - is just wrong then?
Do any of you guys have a clue how shares actually work? That the price, whether its $95 or $.50 is irrelevant when viewed alone. The only relevant thing is the price * number of shares, i.e. the market capitalisation.
Now you can argue whether or not the expected capitalisation of $24 billion is too high or too low. Then you're just saying you know more than the exports that have guessed this figure (and its _not_ set by google - its just an expectation). And since the actually share price will be determined by what the market is prepared to pay, it is by definition the 'right' price.
Further, insiders - as in the people with friends in the right places that are thus guaranteed shares at the IPO - would get rich if the price started too _low_ and then bumped up in the first days to the 'real' market price, not the other way around. By doing a dutch style auction, google is trying to prevent exactly this from happening.
RTA. Or better, read a non-trolling article. These aren't critical security flaws by any stretch, and in any case Microsoft already released a patch for one.
Hell, even Linus doesn't claim the 2.6.x series is stable or even intended to be :).
I think that about summarizes what I've read of these flaws. If anything, the 'exploits' are simply disagreements with the philosophy regarding how the changes should have been implemented - i.e. at what level.
Microsoft has added protection to some things, but not others, so its a 'flaw' that the protection only protects these certain things. But it most likely a design decision - you have the security stopping the dumb user from accidentally opening something in explorer without realising what it is, without handicapping advanced users using cmd or having say security pop-ups every time a program internally invokes another etc.
Because green is one of the three primary colours of _light_, whereas yellow is one of the primary colours for like surfaces, which is a different proposition altogether. With light, yellow is gotten by combining two of the three primaries RGB (like red and green - I'm not 100% sure there), whereas green is a generally used as a primary colour thus nothing 'combines' to it.
You're thinking about combining paints (we all know from school art that blue + yellow = green). However they work in the opposite direction (the one is additive and the other subtractive). Thats why combining lots of paint colours gets brownish/black, while combining different coloured lights on the other hand moves towards white.
This may come as a surprise to you, but the cause of global warming is not such heat generation.