The big thing that pisses me off about most critics is that they hardly ever like anything they review. They will grasp at straws to avoid giving something the good review it deserves. But this review was written by an ordinary human who liked these books enough to write a review for Slashdot. Plus, it's nice to have links to somewhere--preferably somewhere familiar, like amazon.com--where you can buy the books.
The best at staying on top. This is usually based on a combination of quality and marketing. Quality can make good word-of-mouth marketing, though. Never underestimate the power of quality. Same goes for marketing, sadly.
It was a nice joke for windows 1.0-ME, but I don't think it applies to NT, W2K, or XP. I think they are phasing out faster but less reliable win95-based OSes for crawlingly slow but more reliable NT-based ones.
Want to take issue with the "crawlingly slow" part? It is very slow if you run them on comparable hardware. I have Linux with KDE running on a 266 mhz. K6 box and W2K running on a 500 mhz. K6-2, and the linux one is much snappier.
Perhaps this guy is using Linux because he likes it. I know I do, and I'm a capitalist type. Still, I do think that there are more important things than money, like happiness.
You were misrepresenting capitalist and Linux users at the same time, though. Nice troll, but that's all your comment was worth.
In order for this to be genetically spread through the general population (and I'm not talking about just the people who use handheld devices) there would have to be some benefit conferred by it that would raise the chances of people with a mutation to this effect of creating many children. Then it would be a mutation. Unfortunately schools' coverage of evolution is typically quite poor. Even in schools with reasonable coverage, people have trouble understanding the theory. I heard a statistic of about 40% of Americans being creationists, although I would guess that that includes some ID people. ID is getting in the news now, and it is sounding like what a lot of people have been quietly waiting for. I just hope that evolution is still taught in an unwatered-down form in years to come. Otherwise people still won't understand it.
I don't think that this is like a mutation. It's probably not able to be passed on to another generation unless Lamarck was right all along. Anyway, it's good that thumbs are getting more mobile. Still, I would doubt the scientific validity of a news release that calls this a "mutation".
The people you asked sound like idiots. They could simply find some documentation (and yes, it's out there in abundance) and read it, rather than doing some completely idiotic "FTP to Windows box" thing just to copy and paste.
They are already doing this with the ASCI White supercomputer at Sandia labs. Personally I would prefer to do away with the things entirely and use the money and computer power for something constructive.
And this will be going to scince, which I think means tht it won't be monopolized by military shit. I do hope that they try some cool stuff on this thing. One project using this grid is the Supernova Cosmology Project from someplace. They are sending a bunch of data for image processing. It is wonderful that there will be a giant supercomputer for this stuff.
An interesting next step might be to have a "Science Grid@home" program that people can run as a screen saver on their PCs, or something. Not for all projects, but a little extra programming might be justified for all those unused CPU cycles.
Remember those little check boxes on some pages that say "E-Mail me with news about foo" that are checked by default? Some people never get around to unchecking them. This is them constued as an "opt-in".
But I do think that the list would be big enough to fill a piece of paper, with microdot reduction.
You have a point. I think that making involuntary pornography of anybody, particularly if force is used, is bad and should be against the law. However, distribution of the ill-begotten stuff ought to be legal, or else there is potential for abuse, like this. If distribution is legal, it might make it a bit easier to trace, and then you might catch a few perverts who actually violated someone's rights. But simulated child porno--that's just insane! How does it harm anybody?
For more arguments that pornography shouldn't be illegal or anything like that, check out this rant from Mike Wong.
All right, you have a point. I didn't have as much time as I would have liked to make the last part of my comment very good, and yes, you do throw away all of your modifications. But sometimes the vanilla factory car is better than your existing one. Consider, for example, an original Volkswagen Beetle that runs just like new that you've added some neat stuff to, and one of these new cool hybrid gas/electric cars. Ultimately ditching your Beetle and getting the new car may save you money on gas, especially if gas prices continue to go up.
Rewiting is not alwys feasible, or even desirable. But it can be good sometimes.
If you won't make an inane beowulf comment, I will.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
It's easy to imagine, since that is basically what DNA computers are: clusters of DNA molecules.
They can put a lot of DNA molecules together and have them compute in parallel, which is why this has so much potential.
This is an important breakthrough. They have shown that DNA can solve their test problem, and that is a big and necessary step on the way to creating DNA computers more powerful than comventional computers for some special problems.
I look forward to when this will find a practical use. It is certainly possible. Hopefully this experiment generates some interest, not to mention good ideas for future DNA computers.
It truly annoys me that we can spend so much money on nuclear weapons, soldiers, stealth airplanes, and such, and yet NASA and the schools have budget problems. Space exploration has brought us a lot of great stuff and taught us many things. I still think that if we want to fight terrorism we should seek a truly permanent solution, rather than just killing a bunch of people.
The permanent solution I'm talking about is worldwide education and prosperity. Once people are happy and well educated, most of them won't feel like running planes into buildings. Space exploration is a long term investment, just like education. But it seems that few people care about potential to solve problems forever, they just think what the media and politicians and the people next door have told them to think. If people in the middle ages had thought for themselves, they wouldn't have let the Church rule over them and torture heretics. Now I don't think we'll have a repeat performance.
Why can't we look for answers to our problems, instead of just throwing bombs at them?
I'm starting to get interested. I don't care if I never see a big Voltron-style robot again, but some of that other stuff could be pretty good.
As for the editing, I have an idealistic rant on that topic:
Why do we need editing at all for these things? What is wrong with seeing someone naked, or drinking alcohol, or swearing? As Bennett Haselton pointed out, cuss words are just syllables. Bodies are just bodies. This insanity pervades society, and I'm sick of it! It isn't just just religious right wackos who sold their brains to God and think that the rest of us have sold our souls to the devil, it's common among just about everyone you walk up to, at least where I live. Kids in school will curse copiously at each other and call each other "gaywad!" and "jewish!", and it is overlooked. If one of them curses in front of an adult with a word like fuck, however, they'll be scolded in a burning fuse tone of voice. Why the hipocrisy?
Nudity is natural. A little artful nudity can add an excellent touch to something that would stand without it, as a rule. So why is it so near ubiquitously percieved in America as "harmful to children"? Why do films containing suggestive scenes like the one in Zorro actually carry warning labels?
I wish someone would come along and end our society's insanity. But most likely these things will be washed away by time. I await the future.
Don't you mean that in 1996, PNG was not a viable alternative to GIF? JPG is nice for photographs, and not under restrictive licensing AFAIK. GIF, however, was designed to do the sort of things PNG does, but then they demanded royalties. So people invented PNG and began burning all gifs.
PNG really is better technically, and its use is becoming widespread. I wish it lick.
Administering the Gom Jabbar (some variation would be necessary, as we don't have a pain box) would be unpleasant, and I don't think it would ever become widespread.
What we could use is a reliable test to seperate civilized human types from animal types. The Gom Jabbar probably wouldn't work; it would just select for people who can tolerate pain. Perhaps some test could be devised. I wouldn't know where to start.:=)
You're right. A lot of "concerned parents" are getting themselves worked up about practically nothing. It is easy to get angry at the computer if it does some blatantly idiotic thing, but it looks much easier for paranoid blame-shifters to get angry that someone isn't doing something to keep these "dangerous and depraved" games from "innocent impressionable children".
The difference that comes immediately to mind is that people attending the MS party can get free stuff, and if they don't want it they can resell it at cheap prices, plus it may be fun. But people taking lessons in this repackaged creationism crap don't get any benefits from it. They just have to pay tuition to have a stupid theory without any basis in fact taught to them.
Actually believing what these people are selling is different. That's harmful in both cases.
I think the reason for this is that you don't have marketing types saying, "Release this! Now!" at open source developers. So when you get to high version numbers like 20.1 (from emacs), you know it's very stable. (usability of emacs 20.1 is debatable however. I use it.)
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The big thing that pisses me off about most critics is that they hardly ever like anything they review. They will grasp at straws to avoid giving something the good review it deserves. But this review was written by an ordinary human who liked these books enough to write a review for Slashdot. Plus, it's nice to have links to somewhere--preferably somewhere familiar, like amazon.com--where you can buy the books.
The best at staying on top. This is usually based on a combination of quality and marketing. Quality can make good word-of-mouth marketing, though. Never underestimate the power of quality. Same goes for marketing, sadly.
Want to take issue with the "crawlingly slow" part? It is very slow if you run them on comparable hardware. I have Linux with KDE running on a 266 mhz. K6 box and W2K running on a 500 mhz. K6-2, and the linux one is much snappier.
Programs that genrate malformed packets don't kill servers, skr1pt k1dd13s kill servers.
You were misrepresenting capitalist and Linux users at the same time, though. Nice troll, but that's all your comment was worth.
In order for this to be genetically spread through the general population (and I'm not talking about just the people who use handheld devices) there would have to be some benefit conferred by it that would raise the chances of people with a mutation to this effect of creating many children. Then it would be a mutation. Unfortunately schools' coverage of evolution is typically quite poor. Even in schools with reasonable coverage, people have trouble understanding the theory. I heard a statistic of about 40% of Americans being creationists, although I would guess that that includes some ID people. ID is getting in the news now, and it is sounding like what a lot of people have been quietly waiting for. I just hope that evolution is still taught in an unwatered-down form in years to come. Otherwise people still won't understand it.
I don't think that this is like a mutation. It's probably not able to be passed on to another generation unless Lamarck was right all along. Anyway, it's good that thumbs are getting more mobile. Still, I would doubt the scientific validity of a news release that calls this a "mutation".
The people you asked sound like idiots. They could simply find some documentation (and yes, it's out there in abundance) and read it, rather than doing some completely idiotic "FTP to Windows box" thing just to copy and paste.
They are already doing this with the ASCI White supercomputer at Sandia labs. Personally I would prefer to do away with the things entirely and use the money and computer power for something constructive.
An interesting next step might be to have a "Science Grid@home" program that people can run as a screen saver on their PCs, or something. Not for all projects, but a little extra programming might be justified for all those unused CPU cycles.
But I do think that the list would be big enough to fill a piece of paper, with microdot reduction.
For more arguments that pornography shouldn't be illegal or anything like that, check out this rant from Mike Wong.
Rewiting is not alwys feasible, or even desirable. But it can be good sometimes.
Refactoring means that when ou ind a more efficient engine, carburator, spark plug, whatever, you install it in your car and go.
Ground up rewriting means that you chuck out your old inefficient car and get a new better one.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
It's easy to imagine, since that is basically what DNA computers are: clusters of DNA molecules.
They can put a lot of DNA molecules together and have them compute in parallel, which is why this has so much potential.
I look forward to when this will find a practical use. It is certainly possible. Hopefully this experiment generates some interest, not to mention good ideas for future DNA computers.
The permanent solution I'm talking about is worldwide education and prosperity. Once people are happy and well educated, most of them won't feel like running planes into buildings. Space exploration is a long term investment, just like education. But it seems that few people care about potential to solve problems forever, they just think what the media and politicians and the people next door have told them to think. If people in the middle ages had thought for themselves, they wouldn't have let the Church rule over them and torture heretics. Now I don't think we'll have a repeat performance.
Why can't we look for answers to our problems, instead of just throwing bombs at them?
Right now, I wish that some black monoliths would come along and give us one of those spheres...
That would be cheating. I think it's a nice challenge that Googlewhacks get eliminated when they're posted.
As for the editing, I have an idealistic rant on that topic:
Why do we need editing at all for these things? What is wrong with seeing someone naked, or drinking alcohol, or swearing? As Bennett Haselton pointed out, cuss words are just syllables. Bodies are just bodies. This insanity pervades society, and I'm sick of it! It isn't just just religious right wackos who sold their brains to God and think that the rest of us have sold our souls to the devil, it's common among just about everyone you walk up to, at least where I live. Kids in school will curse copiously at each other and call each other "gaywad!" and "jewish!", and it is overlooked. If one of them curses in front of an adult with a word like fuck, however, they'll be scolded in a burning fuse tone of voice. Why the hipocrisy?
Nudity is natural. A little artful nudity can add an excellent touch to something that would stand without it, as a rule. So why is it so near ubiquitously percieved in America as "harmful to children"? Why do films containing suggestive scenes like the one in Zorro actually carry warning labels?
I wish someone would come along and end our society's insanity. But most likely these things will be washed away by time. I await the future.
PNG really is better technically, and its use is becoming widespread. I wish it lick.
Administering the Gom Jabbar (some variation would be necessary, as we don't have a pain box) would be unpleasant, and I don't think it would ever become widespread. What we could use is a reliable test to seperate civilized human types from animal types. The Gom Jabbar probably wouldn't work; it would just select for people who can tolerate pain. Perhaps some test could be devised. I wouldn't know where to start. :=)
You're right. A lot of "concerned parents" are getting themselves worked up about practically nothing. It is easy to get angry at the computer if it does some blatantly idiotic thing, but it looks much easier for paranoid blame-shifters to get angry that someone isn't doing something to keep these "dangerous and depraved" games from "innocent impressionable children".
Actually believing what these people are selling is different. That's harmful in both cases.
I think the reason for this is that you don't have marketing types saying, "Release this! Now!" at open source developers. So when you get to high version numbers like 20.1 (from emacs), you know it's very stable. (usability of emacs 20.1 is debatable however. I use it.)