To paraphrase Churchill, Google is the worst system devised by the wit of man, except for all the others. Where else would you go? Yahoo? Hey, how about AltaVista?
The problems faced by Google in their battle against the scumbags who would game the system are faced by every other search engine. Google, IMHO, handles them better.
You're not a physicist, are you? That's just not true. Einstein resisted the ideas behind quantum mechanics for a long time; he couldn't accept that "God plays dice with the Universe". I'm not sure that he ever really accepted it.
Einstein's Nobel prize was awarded to him, in the words of the Nobel committee, "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect." In other words, he won his prize for his role in the creation of quantum physics.
The reason they don't want you to be able to run other operating systems on their hardware is that they depend entirely on licensing fees from software sales to make their money. If you buy an XBox, mod it, and run Linux on it, they very likely have lost on the order of $10.
Actually, in most cultures, and at most times in human history, having and raising children was precisely a business matter. Children were, and still are, valued in terms of their economic potential. Hence, the dowery.
Your notion is very contemporary, and rather provincial.
When I have a child, I'm going to raise a bassist.:)
Page 5 of today's NY Post (one of three major tabloids) featured as lovely a plug as Palm could hope for, leading me to wonder what may be the financial relationship between the Post and Palm.
It is in no sense "news" that Palm is releasing a new OS, and the fluff piece that they printed wouldn't be news under any circumstances.
Even in my company, which uses eXtreme programming, we sometimes find ourselves engaged in solitary hacking. The code we write is an expression of the way our very thoughts are organized. It's difficult to get two people aligned in the way they decompose a problem. Even relatively well-defined and small subtasks can be approached from radically different angles.
So it's no wonder that most projects have few developers. It takes like minds, or people who have extraordinary capacity for fruitful disagreement, to build software.
Also, most programmers take pleasure in re-inventing wheels (I am not among them). It's the solving, and not the solution, that thrills them. That means that you'll see multiple solutions to the same problems, each sponsored by a small number of people.
Not every great idea can be best exploited by its progenitor.
Napster was, at worst, a means for the long-standing fact of exploitation of artists by record labels to become common knowledge. Even teeny-boppers are familiar with the concepts of mechanical royalties, publishing contracts, and "recoupment".
At work I use a Win32 box, and I use Opera exclusively. It has been stable, well-featured, and fast-fast-fast for years. I pray that they'll put enough work into their experimental OSX port to make it usable.
I haven't quite understood the mania over Mozilla, which still doesn't begin to compete with Opera for stability and speed. Mozilla is unusably sluggish on every platform I have tried (Win32, OS X, OS 9).
I find it disheartening that it's impossible to maintain a business with integrity and vision in the face of greed. The Hewlett family are not exactly soft, left-wing hippies; they just wanted to protect the strength of their brand.
Prepare to see the quality of HP products plummet. Prepare to see a slow death of niche imaging products.
Prepare to see layoffs of otherwise securely employed folks. Rah rah, share value.
Good! Internet Explorer is by far the best browser available on Mac OS X. I hope they do add tabs, which is the one feature I sorely miss from using Opera on Win32 (Opera is not usable on OS X).
The article addresses the difficulty of duplicating consumer DVDs, and mentions as a deterrent the fact that you'd have to redo the menus.
The menus on all but maybe one of the 20 or so DVDs that I own are HORRIBLE, EVIL MESSES, and I sincerely wish that the people who designed and implemented them would DIE SOON. Have any of you ever tried to find a specific feature on "The Abyss" DVD, such as the documentary, or production notes? How about the industry standard use of a menu with two items, with no way of knowing which color means "this item selected"? How about having to wait for 12 seconds while you are forced to watch some kewl grafix before you can PLAY THE FREAKING MOVIE?
So, for me, it's worth the couple of hours it would take to blow away the existing menu structure on a commercial DVD, and to make one that says
1) Play the movie.
2) Play the useless "featurette".
3) Play the long documentary.
4) Show those stupid production stills.
The Oblig*a*tory Grammar/Spelling Correction
on
Be Throws in the Towel
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I think, grammatically, "Have Been" would be a better fit, though "Has Been" has a certain ring, too.
The utility and research value of manned space exploration has been a significant canard, perpetrated by Nasa on the American public and its leaders for far too long. For the people who do research on the dynamics and geography of solar system bodies, for cosmologists who rely on unmanned launches of super-atmospheric instruments, and even for Earth-based telescopists and radio telescopists, I'll wager this is a time of tentative optimism.
On the other hand, it's a (typically American) shame that the idea of nuclear materials on rockets is even admissible in polite speech, let alone given consideration as a budget line item.
I read Chris Hecker's tutorials, and several others, and made these toys.
I also hacked his excellent 2D demo program to use the cross-platform SDL for rendering. But I could not locate him to see if he wanted it back for distribution. Anybody have any idea as to where he is?
I have read the source material (Christoph's resignation, his email exchanges with other folks).
He responds with overt hostility and sarcasm to every attempt at sincere communication. He gives away his software and then blames the world for taking it. He goes out of his way to display self-righteous fury in response to clueless lusers who would benefit from an auto-responder pointing them to a FAQ.
Larry Wall is a leader. Richard Stallman, in his own infuriating and dogmatic way, is a leader. Christoph Pfister, in spite of his gifts as a programmer, is no leader.
Slashdot Mirror
In response to the various snarky comments above, it is indeed innovative to apply a known user interface paradigm to a novel data source.
I, for one, welcome our new 3-pane semantic browser overlords.
The problems faced by Google in their battle against the scumbags who would game the system are faced by every other search engine. Google, IMHO, handles them better.
3. Profit!
Yes; in fact, you are.
Congratulations! You are uniquely dour!
Einstein's Nobel prize was awarded to him, in the words of the Nobel committee, "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect." In other words, he won his prize for his role in the creation of quantum physics.
How is it that "rocket scientists" became the epitome of intelligence?
Any high-school nerd could tell you that *anything* moving 500 mph could put a hole in you.
I'm not sure how PVRs can become commodities, given that they require regular connections to a server in order to know what's on and when.
The reason they don't want you to be able to run other operating systems on their hardware is that they depend entirely on licensing fees from software sales to make their money. If you buy an XBox, mod it, and run Linux on it, they very likely have lost on the order of $10.
The XBox is probably in trouble as it is.
Actually, in most cultures, and at most times in human history, having and raising children was precisely a business matter. Children were, and still are, valued in terms of their economic potential. Hence, the dowery.
:)
Your notion is very contemporary, and rather provincial.
When I have a child, I'm going to raise a bassist.
> A made-up name if ever I heard one!
On the contrary; I went to Brown University with him.
Page 5 of today's NY Post (one of three major tabloids) featured as lovely a plug as Palm could hope for, leading me to wonder what may be the financial relationship between the Post and Palm.
It is in no sense "news" that Palm is releasing a new OS, and the fluff piece that they printed wouldn't be news under any circumstances.
Even in my company, which uses eXtreme programming, we sometimes find ourselves engaged in solitary hacking. The code we write is an expression of the way our very thoughts are organized. It's difficult to get two people aligned in the way they decompose a problem. Even relatively well-defined and small subtasks can be approached from radically different angles.
So it's no wonder that most projects have few developers. It takes like minds, or people who have extraordinary capacity for fruitful disagreement, to build software.
Also, most programmers take pleasure in re-inventing wheels (I am not among them). It's the solving, and not the solution, that thrills them. That means that you'll see multiple solutions to the same problems, each sponsored by a small number of people.
Not every good hacker is a good business person.
Not every great idea can be best exploited by its progenitor.
Napster was, at worst, a means for the long-standing fact of exploitation of artists by record labels to become common knowledge. Even teeny-boppers are familiar with the concepts of mechanical royalties, publishing contracts, and "recoupment".
Napster is dead; long live Napster.
At work I use a Win32 box, and I use Opera exclusively. It has been stable, well-featured, and fast-fast-fast for years. I pray that they'll put enough work into their experimental OSX port to make it usable.
I haven't quite understood the mania over Mozilla, which still doesn't begin to compete with Opera for stability and speed. Mozilla is unusably sluggish on every platform I have tried (Win32, OS X, OS 9).
I find it disheartening that it's impossible to maintain a business with integrity and vision in the face of greed. The Hewlett family are not exactly soft, left-wing hippies; they just wanted to protect the strength of their brand.
Prepare to see the quality of HP products plummet. Prepare to see a slow death of niche imaging products.
Prepare to see layoffs of otherwise securely employed folks. Rah rah, share value.
Their network printers were so nice...
Autonomous, robotic, self-hiding matzoh for Passover.
Good! Internet Explorer is by far the best browser available on Mac OS X. I hope they do add tabs, which is the one feature I sorely miss from using Opera on Win32 (Opera is not usable on OS X).
The article addresses the difficulty of duplicating consumer DVDs, and mentions as a deterrent the fact that you'd have to redo the menus.
The menus on all but maybe one of the 20 or so DVDs that I own are HORRIBLE, EVIL MESSES, and I sincerely wish that the people who designed and implemented them would DIE SOON. Have any of you ever tried to find a specific feature on "The Abyss" DVD, such as the documentary, or production notes? How about the industry standard use of a menu with two items, with no way of knowing which color means "this item selected"? How about having to wait for 12 seconds while you are forced to watch some kewl grafix before you can PLAY THE FREAKING MOVIE?
So, for me, it's worth the couple of hours it would take to blow away the existing menu structure on a commercial DVD, and to make one that says
1) Play the movie.
2) Play the useless "featurette".
3) Play the long documentary.
4) Show those stupid production stills.
I think, grammatically, "Have Been" would be a better fit, though "Has Been" has a certain ring, too.
Napster "didn't rule out the possibility that the two sides would work out a settlement that allows the company to launch its legal service. "
They're perfectly willing to settle with the recording industry, which means they're perfectly willing to fuck the artists.
You'll note that nothing in my post, which provoked your troll, even touches on the safety or efficacy of nuclear power.
The utility and research value of manned space exploration has been a significant canard, perpetrated by Nasa on the American public and its leaders for far too long. For the people who do research on the dynamics and geography of solar system bodies, for cosmologists who rely on unmanned launches of super-atmospheric instruments, and even for Earth-based telescopists and radio telescopists, I'll wager this is a time of tentative optimism.
On the other hand, it's a (typically American) shame that the idea of nuclear materials on rockets is even admissible in polite speech, let alone given consideration as a budget line item.
I read Chris Hecker's tutorials, and several others, and made these toys.
I also hacked his excellent 2D demo program to use the cross-platform SDL for rendering. But I could not locate him to see if he wanted it back for distribution. Anybody have any idea as to where he is?
I have read the source material (Christoph's resignation, his email exchanges with other folks).
He responds with overt hostility and sarcasm to every attempt at sincere communication. He gives away his software and then blames the world for taking it. He goes out of his way to display self-righteous fury in response to clueless lusers who would benefit from an auto-responder pointing them to a FAQ.
Larry Wall is a leader. Richard Stallman, in his own infuriating and dogmatic way, is a leader. Christoph Pfister, in spite of his gifts as a programmer, is no leader.