Why is it that all the really good article submissions are rejected ... while there are so many duplicates and so many rubbish articles?
Because the Moderation system is broken. Moderators can moderate only comments. Article acceptances/rejections are many times more important.
Editors whose choices are consistently modded down (or never modded up) should be given the boot.
Re:Why do you think Bush gave them tax cuts?
on
Tech Rich Get Richer
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· Score: 1
dividends, which are now taxed at only 15 percent no matter how high the income of their recipient
You're conveniently overlooking that in the USA, corporate profits of ordinary corporations are taxed twice, once as corporation income tax, and once as income of the recipient. So if the corporation is making serious profits and paying (say) 40% tax, the effective tax rate to stockholders is 40 + (15% * 60) = 49%. Not 15%.
The only way to avoid this is by forming a "subchapter S corporation", (small privately-held companies usually are S corporations) where all corporate profits ar taxed as ordinary income of the corporation's owners.
Energy conversion rates are 'way more than 50 percent'.
This is a misquote of the original article, which says:
'The cells... will have a "way more than 50 percent" energy conversion rate.'
And even that is obviously hot air from a marketing droid. I'll believe a conversion rate above 25% when a reliable person reports having measured it, not before.
The point is that the whois database exposes email addresses. Not only does this ensure that every spammer has these addresses, it also defeats the point of having the addresses in the database to start with - because these addresses get spammed so heavily that they are unusable, and therefore not used any more. Chances are very high that if you want to communicate with the owner of a domain, you'll find that mail sent to an address in the whois database is no longer read.
He's leaving Sun because he can see no future for Sun. People talk about Linux hurting Microsoft, and in the long run they may be right, but in the short to medium term, the company that is most likely to lose customers to Linux is Sun.
Linux is more or less comparable to Solaris - but it runs on cheaper hardware. Sun still has a niche at the high end (machines with many CPUs) but that niche is shrinking all the time. I can't see a good strategy for Sun to deal with this, and presumably he couldn't, either.
If any components of your computer are held in place with Pozidriv screws (superficially similar to Phillips head screws,
Why do there have to be 10 different possible screw types/sizes in the approximate size range of computer-case screws? There is no valid technical reason for this.
They not only haven't read the memo, they can't have done any market research. A PDA that isn't also a mobile phone is dead before it ships, in today's marketplace. How can a company and its investors be so dumb?
There are a lot of ways to generate sequences of numbers which have a truly random element. For example, a warm resistor generates a small amount of random electrical noise which can be amplified and digitized. Maybe the method in the article is better in some way, but the article sure doesn't explain why.
I went through the toolkit selection process a few months ago. To pick a toolkit, you have to do much more than this guy did. You have to use the toolkits - or at least try to.
If you do this you will soon discover much more important criteria than this review discusses:
Is the documentation accurate, complete and up-to-date?
Is the package buggy?
How easy is it to make mistakes in the use of the package, and how hard is it to find them?
Personally, I want to spend my time on my code, not fixing bugs in the package, or figuring out what the docs ought to say. YMMV of course. Anyway, these criteria ruled out Fox and FLTK. In the end I went with wxWindows. Things might have changed since I did my evaluation, but those criteria are the ones that matter. The review was just worthless fluff.
The article compares SCO to a toad. This is irresponsible, yellow journalism.
It's true that many species of toad are poisonous and cause hundreds of deaths in the USA every year. But compared with SCO, they are harmless, benign creatures which have an unfairly bad image.
Comparing toads with SCO will worsen the already-negative image which people have of toads. Let's not forget that some toad species are endangered. They don't need the hostility by association which this irresponsible article will provoke.
and not everyone is driving his car on that road, but the gov payed for it. and not everyone is going to the public library, but the gov payed for it
Sorry to nitpick, but "the gov" doesn't pay for anything. You and I and a bunch of other taxpayers paid for those things. "The gov" just spends the funds in whatever way politicians and bureaucrats think will best meet their goals. (I don't mean to be completely cynical - pols' goals include getting re-elected.)
Yes, as opposed to other (non-commercially produced I guess) software where the support is non-existent
Yet another pile of crap about there being no support for free software. Why did this drivel get modded up to 5?
There are plenty of small companies which sell support services for free software. Moreover, they're motivated to do a good job because their livelihood depends on it - they don't have monopoly rents coming in. Moreover, you have a choice - there is competition in this marketplace.
Re:Free speech is one thing, treason is another
on
Linking Dangerously
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· Score: 3, Insightful
He claimed to be an anarchist, but advocated replacing the United States government with one that would be much more oppressive and totalitarian.
Advocating political change is what freedom of speech is all about. If you haven't got that, then your current government is not worth preserving.
TransactSQL and PL/SQL have very different implementations of the same "standard"
Wrong. Neither TransactSQL nor PL/SQL are implementations of SQL. Sybase and Oracle both implement SQL in fairly close compliance with the standard. In addition to providing SQL, they provide the procedural languages TransactSQL and PL/SQL, respectively.
Of course if you just want to be a "Sybase programmer" instead of a developer who understands databases, then go ahead and just study "the platform you will be using".
Re:How to make a TV programme (dummies edition)...
on
Blakes Seven To Return
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Of course you're right that there are no obstacles to making a new Blake's 7 series.
But as for making a worthy successor to one of the best science-fiction series ever... heck, one of the best series ever, in any genre... that's more difficult.
I think it was the writers, especially Terry Nation, who made Blake's 7. (Terry Nation also wrote some of the best Dr Who episodes). The actors were OK, but nothing outstanding. The special effects ranged from pathetic to dire. The scenario, band of rebels against a despotic government, is hardly original.
But Terry Nation is dead, and writers with such talent - and perhaps as important, producers who can recognise that talent - are rare. And without great writers, you can't make a great series.
the US, which by definition has the highest living standards/costs in the planet.
Depends on how you define "planet", I suppose. Lots of places on Earth have higher living costs than the USA, and a few (Luxembourg, probably others) have higher living standards by most measures.
Yes it can, and to that extent it's good news, because it means that companies which make a living out of supporting Linux now have a ground on which to sue SCO.
Oh, and don't worry about the fat on meats, as mentioned above, fat doesn't make you fat in most cases
Somebody else wrote something similar, probably influenced by a fad diet site that says "if a dieter begins eating zero grams of fat per day then the body will react by holding on to as much of its fat tissue..."
This is complete BS. It's impossible to eliminate fat from the diet except by eating completely artificial food (and nobody should need telling that that's a bad idea): for example, 7% of the dry weight of a lettuce leaf is fat. It's true that what really matters is your total calorie intake vs total calorie expenditure. But if you do eat more calories than you burn, your body can turn animal fat into human fat much more easily than it can convert any other food component into fat. So in that important sense, eating animal fat does make you fat. Trim that fat off your meat, don't eat it.
How to lose weight? Simple. Just eat less, and get some exercise, like walking a mile every day. You will not hear this advice much, because nobody will make any money out of it.
The maximum write time is a problem with random-access disks because every time you READ a file the Linux fs updates the filesystem to indicate the access time! Do that 1000 times and your +RW disk is wasted.
Holy shit! Can somebody confirm this? Is there a workaround? An archive medium that stops working after you read a file N times is something we don't need.
the orbiter then ignights its rockets and because it it already high in the atmosphere, it can use half the fuel of bullistic launch.
Actually this saves very little fuel.
The reasons are: (1) The 747 can only get to an altitude of 10km or so; even low earth orbit is about 150km,
(2) More important - the energy needed by an orbiter is mostly not used in getting it to the right altitude, it's giving it orbital velocity. This is in excess of Mach 20. A 747 (even when it's not towing something) can't even get to Mach 1. And remember that the energy needed is proportional to the square of the speed. So you need 400 times as much energy to get to Mach 20 as you do to get to Mach 1. You'd therefore need, not "half the fuel", but about 99.7% of the fuel.
All of this goes away if you download and install binary packages. You may as well just hang your Linux box out on the net with 500 open ports and no firewalls....The only way you can be completely sure is to read the source.
You haven't read the entire source of the GNU/Linux system you're running, so you have no business telling us that we ought to do it!
Why am I so confident you haven't read the source? Because it's not possible. Even a relatively basic Linux install will correspond to over 2GB of source code. That would be about 800,000 pages of a typical book (2500 to 2800 characters per page). Source code is typically much less dense in terms of characters per page, so it would be millions of pages. It would take you several years to read it, by which time the bits you'd read first would be long obsolete.
Slashdot Mirror
It's really not clear at this point what the impact of the voting is (there were several amendments). And this comment:
Google's translation engine does a decent job with the German.
is laughable. With complicated legalistic language like this, precision is everything. The Google translation tells you nothing.
Why is it that all the really good article submissions are rejected
... while there are so many duplicates and so many rubbish articles?
Because the Moderation system is broken. Moderators can moderate only comments. Article acceptances/rejections are many times more important.
Editors whose choices are consistently modded down (or never modded up) should be given the boot.
dividends, which are now taxed at only 15 percent no matter how high the income of their recipient
You're conveniently overlooking that in the USA, corporate profits of ordinary corporations are taxed twice, once as corporation income tax, and once as income of the recipient. So if the corporation is making serious profits and paying (say) 40% tax, the effective tax rate to stockholders is 40 + (15% * 60) = 49%. Not 15%.
The only way to avoid this is by forming a "subchapter S corporation", (small privately-held companies usually are S corporations) where all corporate profits ar taxed as ordinary income of the corporation's owners.
In a world of really cheap DVDs, what is the point of delivering entertainment by a broadcast medium like cable?
Energy conversion rates are 'way more than 50 percent'.
... will have a "way more than 50 percent" energy conversion rate.'
This is a misquote of the original article, which says:
'The cells
And even that is obviously hot air from a marketing droid. I'll believe
a conversion rate above 25% when a reliable person reports having
measured it, not before.
You don't get it.
The point is that the whois database exposes email addresses. Not only does this ensure that every spammer has these addresses, it also defeats the point of having the addresses in the database to start with - because these addresses get spammed so heavily that they are unusable, and therefore not used any more. Chances are very high that if you want to communicate with the owner of a domain, you'll find that mail sent to an address in the whois database is no longer read.
He's leaving Sun because he can see no future for Sun. People talk about Linux hurting Microsoft, and in the long run they may be right, but in the short to medium term, the company that is most likely to lose customers to Linux is Sun.
Linux is more or less comparable to Solaris - but it runs on cheaper hardware. Sun still has a niche at the high end (machines with many CPUs) but that niche is shrinking all the time. I can't see a good strategy for Sun to deal with this, and presumably he couldn't, either.
From the article ...
If any components of your computer are held in place with Pozidriv screws (superficially similar to Phillips head screws,
Why do there have to be 10 different possible screw types/sizes in the approximate size range of computer-case screws? There is no valid technical reason for this.
"virii" is a *slang* term spottily popular among youthful script kiddies
Spottily popular among the spotty, you mean?
They not only haven't read the memo, they can't have done any market research. A PDA that isn't also a mobile phone is dead before it ships, in today's marketplace. How can a company and its investors be so dumb?
There are a lot of ways to generate sequences of numbers which have a truly random element. For example, a warm resistor generates a small amount of random electrical noise which can be amplified and digitized. Maybe the method in the article is better in some way, but the article sure doesn't explain why.
If you do this you will soon discover much more important criteria than this review discusses:
Personally, I want to spend my time on my code, not fixing bugs in the package, or figuring out what the docs ought to say. YMMV of course. Anyway, these criteria ruled out Fox and FLTK. In the end I went with wxWindows. Things might have changed since I did my evaluation, but those criteria are the ones that matter. The review was just worthless fluff.
The article compares SCO to a toad. This is irresponsible, yellow journalism.
It's true that many species of toad are poisonous and cause hundreds of deaths in the USA every year. But compared with SCO, they are harmless, benign creatures which have an unfairly bad image.
Comparing toads with SCO will worsen the already-negative image which people have of toads. Let's not forget that some toad species are endangered. They don't need the hostility by association which this irresponsible article will provoke.
The heading says "classic games". Not classic arcade games, not classic computer games.
...
/. ?
To me, "classic games" without any other adjective means games like Chess and Go; maybe Bridge, Reversi,
Am I too old to read
and not everyone is driving his car on that road, but the gov payed for it. and not everyone is going to the public library, but the gov payed for it
Sorry to nitpick, but "the gov" doesn't pay for anything. You and I and a bunch of other taxpayers paid for those things. "The gov" just spends the funds in whatever way politicians and bureaucrats think will best meet their goals. (I don't mean to be completely cynical - pols' goals include getting re-elected.)
Yes, as opposed to other (non-commercially produced I guess) software where the support is non-existent
Yet another pile of crap about there being no support for free software. Why did this drivel get modded up to 5?
There are plenty of small companies which sell support services for free software. Moreover, they're motivated to do a good job because their livelihood depends on it - they don't have monopoly rents coming in. Moreover, you have a choice - there is competition in this marketplace.
He claimed to be an anarchist, but advocated replacing the United States government with one that would be much more oppressive and totalitarian.
Advocating political change is what freedom of speech is all about. If you haven't got that, then your current government is not worth preserving.
TransactSQL and PL/SQL have very different implementations of the same "standard"
Wrong. Neither TransactSQL nor PL/SQL are implementations of SQL. Sybase and Oracle both implement SQL in fairly close compliance with the standard. In addition to providing SQL, they provide the procedural languages TransactSQL and PL/SQL, respectively.
Of course if you just want to be a "Sybase programmer" instead of a developer who understands databases, then go ahead and just study "the platform you will be using".
Of course you're right that there are no obstacles to making a new Blake's 7 series.
... heck, one of the best series ever, in any genre ... that's more difficult.
But as for making a worthy successor to one of the best science-fiction series ever
I think it was the writers, especially Terry Nation, who made Blake's 7. (Terry Nation also wrote some of the best Dr Who episodes). The actors were OK, but nothing outstanding. The special effects ranged from pathetic to dire. The scenario, band of rebels against a despotic government, is hardly original.
But Terry Nation is dead, and writers with such talent - and perhaps as important, producers who can recognise that talent - are rare. And without great writers, you can't make a great series.
the US, which by definition has the highest living standards/costs in the planet.
Depends on how you define "planet", I suppose. Lots of places on Earth have higher living costs than the USA, and a few (Luxembourg, probably others) have higher living standards by most measures.
Can this be used as evidence in counter-suits ...?
Yes it can, and to that extent it's good news, because it means that companies which make a living out of supporting Linux now have a ground on which to sue SCO.
Oh, and don't worry about the fat on meats, as mentioned above, fat doesn't make you fat in most cases
Somebody else wrote something similar, probably influenced by a fad diet site that says "if a dieter begins eating zero grams of fat per day then the body will react by holding on to as much of its fat tissue..."
This is complete BS. It's impossible to eliminate fat from the diet except by eating completely artificial food (and nobody should need telling that that's a bad idea): for example, 7% of the dry weight of a lettuce leaf is fat.
It's true that what really matters is your total calorie intake vs total calorie expenditure. But if you do eat more calories than you burn, your body can turn animal fat into human fat much more easily than it can convert any other food component into fat. So in that important sense, eating animal fat does make you fat. Trim that fat off your meat, don't eat it.
How to lose weight? Simple. Just eat less, and get some exercise, like walking a mile every day. You will not hear this advice much, because nobody will make any money out of it.
The maximum write time is a problem with random-access disks because every time you READ a file the Linux fs updates the filesystem to indicate the access time! Do that 1000 times and your +RW disk is wasted.
Holy shit! Can somebody confirm this? Is there a workaround? An archive medium that stops working after you read a file N times is something we don't need.
the orbiter then ignights its rockets and because it it already high in the atmosphere, it can use half the fuel of bullistic launch.
Actually this saves very little fuel.
The reasons are: (1) The 747 can only get to an altitude of 10km or so; even low earth orbit is about 150km,
(2) More important - the energy needed by an orbiter is mostly not used in getting it to the right altitude, it's giving it orbital velocity. This is in excess of Mach 20. A 747 (even when it's not towing something) can't even get to Mach 1. And remember that the energy needed is proportional to the square of the speed. So you need 400 times as much energy to get to Mach 20 as you do to get to Mach 1. You'd therefore need, not "half the fuel", but about 99.7% of the fuel.
All of this goes away if you download and install binary packages. You may as well just hang your Linux box out on the net with 500 open ports and no firewalls....The only way you can be completely sure is to read the source.
You haven't read the entire source of the GNU/Linux system you're running, so you have no business telling us that we ought to do it!
Why am I so confident you haven't read the source? Because it's not possible. Even a relatively basic Linux install will correspond to over 2GB of source code. That would be about 800,000 pages of a typical book (2500 to 2800 characters per page). Source code is typically much less dense in terms of characters per page, so it would be millions of pages. It would take you several years to read it, by which time the bits you'd read first would be long obsolete.