it's a geek you're dating then? It wasn't clear if it was a geek or not. I don't think you mentioned enough that it was a geek. But it's definitely a geek right? Geek.
Someone did. It masquerades around the web and is known as "Google":)
http://www.google.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww. ny times.com%2F2004%2F02%2F08%2Fmagazine%2F08WORMS.ht ml&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf- 8&oe=utf-8
"In the same issue, there's also an interview with Darl McBride where he admits that the company was failing and the Linux-related lawsuits were a last-ditch effort to prevent bankruptcy."
Way to make it sound very sordid. The company was falling towards bankruptcy, yes. It was a last ditch effort, yes. But.....oh.....
And this is XP's fault b/c...?? You said IE wasn't the default browser and chose another. You then removed that selected default browser. Now you're going to complain that it doesn't know which browser to load?
>> I don't even see Mozilla as an option to set it >>as default
I believe it's up to the browser to set itself up so Windows knows it's a browser. Otherwise...how do you expect it to know?
>> Is this delibrate, or not, you decide
It's not. I have Netscape on my work machine here as a possible default. If they deliberately excluded Mozilla, they would have done so to Netscape too.
Although I like to be the first to play the devil's advocate when it comes to MS hypocricy here I don't think that statement was necessarily hypocritcal. Mainly b/c nobody cried foul.
We know this is timothy and he likes to put in his little quips in on every story and generally likes to be very anti-MS. In this case I'm wiling to give him benefit of the doubt though that he was just raising a valid point about a lack of big names in the dial-up market.
I can totally see where you would think it was him being a zealot again though;)
Well car engine management system performance is a pretty small fraction of all software written don't you think?
In a lot of cases time to market is more important than time to write 10000 bytes to a file. One extra second, no big deal. One extra month to hit that market and there goes some profit margin.
If it's not available, it generally won't have a price now will it? Sure they can estimate a price but they're better off not to in case they determine they have to charge more. Then it doesn't reflect poorly.
"But will it play a Divx CD (and if not, why the hell not?)? Will it play SVCD (from the media)?"
The general consumer doesn't give a rat's *** about whether it can do these things. If it plays DVDs then they are ready. Sure it can be argued that such a product is "obviously geared towards techies" but I don't think that's entirely the case here. Either way...if it can play divx streamed from the pc, why would it not be able to from a "divx cd"? As long as the data sent is in the proper format when it leaves the pc it should be able to handle it.
"The press release is damn poor, leaving such obvious points unaddressed, does not reflect well on the product."
The press release is just as it said. A release to the press. It gets word out on what they're up to and gets consumers eager to buy it so that when it does come out the consumer has been waiting an opportune amount of time (as judged by marketing department) and will jump at the chance to finally get it.
Maybe people get hung up on it b/c file selection is used all the time and the old one was an eyesore. Sorry, it was. This one is much improved though it still has a 1980's feel to it.
>> Now that the fileselector is improved, what >> will you bitch about now?
Well, since bitching about it has gotten it improved a bit, maybe people will still bitch about it and get it improved more. If nobody said anything it would have stayed as it was.
Reminds me of an old joke:
A new couple just had their first child, a baby boy, and were extremely excited to go through all the parenting ordeals. Diaper changes, late night feedings aside, these things would lead to wonderful moments like the first time he crawled. The first time he walked. The first time he spoke. The days went on and as the baby aged he went through all the usual stages of baby-hood. He crawled like no other and once he started walking it was all they could do to keep up with him. A year passed and he hadn't said a word. The parents asked the doctor and he said it was normal for some children not to begin speaking until they were 1 1/2 and possibly 2. The terrible 2's hit with not even a whimper. The doctor continued to reassure them that there was nothing wrong with their child but they grew worried. The years rolled on and still not a peep. Then on his sixth birthday he looked down at his chocolate cake and said "I don't like chocolate cake. I prefer vanilla". The parents were flabbergasted. "Why haven't you spoken before?!?!", they asked. "Everything was fine up until now", he replied.
Work on developing your own spam filter. Make it so false positives are around 1 per 1,000,000 or so. Better yet, make it foolproof. Then, complain about how stopping spam is easy. It's easy for humans to recognize spam. Not as easy to tell a computer what exactly spam is.
24hours*60min/hour*60sec/min = 86400sec in one day. So I think 80,000 is a decent round off value so they didn't have to say 8640 messages a day. 8,000 is just a nice rounded number. And if they had rounded up it would look like spammers could send more mail per day;)
If anything, it's typical and not classic but that' besides the point.
"have the capacity to extrapolate what would happen if we did that"
And what would happen? Sure we can come up with a bunch of nice statistical models but nature is an animal in itself and will constantly adapt and that's something we can't fully model. We can again give estimates based on our observations but as I'm sure you're well aware of, observing itself messes up the system you're trying to observe and well....we're humans. We're *not* that smart and we've proven it time and time again.
Like I said, species have been going extinct since the start of time and we tend to get all panicky when some go extinct during our lifecycle. Artifical replication is not the answer. It's a patch. Bring about more deer, hunting quotas go up.
Now, I'm not saying we haven't possibly contributed to more species extinction than previous species. We just may have. However, as species grow they tend to become more dominant for the simple idea that in nature, only the strong tend to survive. So each time a new species survives, it grows that much stronger. Humans are the strongest right now it would appear but it won't be forever. We're not an overall strong enough species to sustain ourselves for long enough. As you stated: "if we chose to act like a mindless predator". Yes, that's one of our big problems. Not enough of us think globally and we tend to overuse our resources. When we overuse them enough, we will die off and something else will take our place. It may be a single-celled organism again, it may be some new form of ape. Who's to say?
My point, if I haven't rambled enough already:S, is that us artificially trying to keep a species around after another subset of us almost killed it off (don't forget about natural predators and disease that they face, it's not all on us) is just a patch on a tire. Nowhere near as good as the original.
"From the "above nature" comment, I'm guessing you're speaking from a religious standpoint"
Sorry, nope. No religous standpoint on my end here. Just my own thoughts which may or may not tie in to certain religions and may or may not be entirely crazy.
"but the people working on this sort of thing are smart, and have probably modeled everything as best as possible."
But are they smart enough? And by smart enough I mean can they present every single possible consequence and determine that there is no way for this to fail within a probability of 99.999999%? I doubt it. And that's why we shouldn't do it.
Well the whole "repopulate" argument is just another way to justify what they are doing. Helping nature repopulate itself is the next logical step for humans as we tend to think we are above nature.
Maybe if we started to realize that in nature, species die off. It happens all the time and hasn't been just recently b/c of humans. Yes, we've caused our share of destruction but has it ever been analyzed against prior species domination?
I'm sure the sabre-toothed tiger never sat back and thought "Shit, i'm killing off these wooly mammoths like crazy! I better think of a way to encourage repopulation before they're extinct!". It just thought "Hey look! It's my next meal to ensure my survival".
Who's to say closed source can't/doesn't do this? In a company, there may be many projects on the go and many other developers to pull knowledge from. Once a project is nearing completion (and even throughout it's entire lifecycle), the code can be looked over by other people at the company either at formal code reviews or informal "hey, take a look at this and let me know what you think" reviews. It may not gain the scale the open source peer reviews *could* generate but it still is effective nonetheless.
Remember, there are lots of forms of closed source software and they aren't all evil.
Well, I suppose it is representative of the open source programming ideal.
In the context of the original post that I responded to, the poster was saying that since the IE pseudo-patch had a lot of bugs in a small code base, that MS patches for IE must be 6 times worse based on an ill-conceived "Rule of 6 times" for open vs closed source. I felt it was misleading to label that software as open source quality (not to say all open source is good) and especially more misleading to simply assume that closed source patches were even worse than that.
That's where my response was coming from though I guess I may have worded it improperly.
That open source patch was quite shoddily and hastily written. It wasn't even a patch really. Using it as representative of open source is not fair in any way whatsoever to other successful open source products.
"Now apply the 'Rule of 6 times' to Microsoft's closed source IE patches..."
There is no 'Rule of 6 times'. An analysis concluded that MySQL had a very limited number of defects in their code base. Kudos to them. This doesn't define a rule to be used in the open source vs. closed source holy war.
Well, my apologies for not reading that as a joke. There was no wink or smile so how was I to know for sure that it was a joke? I thought maybe you just didn't realize this new release was big news. I have no prior knowledge of your linux experience and what not now do I;)
All these quotes apparently came from Mr. Morton himself.
"...the part of 2.6 that communicates with memory is less efficient, imposing a practical limit of 24GB of memory to the 32GB that 2.4 could handle. However, he believes that programmers will address the problem."
Is this reduced limit useful? Why should it be up to programmers to code around? Did I miss something?
"The new kernel also monitors for new events more frequently--1,000 times per second instead of 100--a fact that slows down the system about 1 percent..."
I assume it's to try and respond to events faster but increasing it tenfold, isn't that overkill? I mean, it slows the system down by 1% which isn't horrible and if a real-time app has a problem with it, you can always modify the kernel yourself but couldn't they have upped the polling to 250 which is a decent increase but not a 10x one.
"In addition, 2.6 requires somewhat more memory to run and shows worse performance when it has to use hard drives as extra memory under heavy loads... "
That seems reasonable that it needs a bit more memory but why should it see adverse effects under heavy loads as compared to the 2.4 kernel? Shouldn't they degrade at around the same level or are there some new file system issues that cause this?
Slashdot Mirror
it's a geek you're dating then? It wasn't clear if it was a geek or not. I don't think you mentioned enough that it was a geek. But it's definitely a geek right? Geek.
Take the url for the second page, search it in google, click the link and so on ad naeseum since it looks to be one hella long article.
Well I'm used to using tools which take care of that for you so sometimes I don't think about it.
;)
Besides, it's safer to copy and paste........
Someone did. It masquerades around the web and is known as "Google" :)
. ny times.com%2F2004%2F02%2F08%2Fmagazine%2F08WORMS.ht ml&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf- 8&oe=utf-8
http://www.google.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww
Now click the url it instructs you to.
"In the same issue, there's also an interview with Darl McBride where he admits that the company was failing and the Linux-related lawsuits were a last-ditch effort to prevent bankruptcy."
Way to make it sound very sordid. The company was falling towards bankruptcy, yes. It was a last ditch effort, yes. But.....oh.....
>> it reeks of civil rights violations
o'er the land of the free....
>> I now own a copy of every CD they've released.
;)
Now that's a defense against P2P if I've ever heard one
Umm..it's hungry not Hungary.
At least that's what I got out of it. I thnk it's just a group of programmers not necessarily of the same racial background.
>> WinXP does not which browser to load anymore
And this is XP's fault b/c...?? You said IE wasn't the default browser and chose another. You then removed that selected default browser. Now you're going to complain that it doesn't know which browser to load?
>> I don't even see Mozilla as an option to set it
>>as default
I believe it's up to the browser to set itself up so Windows knows it's a browser. Otherwise...how do you expect it to know?
>> Is this delibrate, or not, you decide
It's not. I have Netscape on my work machine here as a possible default. If they deliberately excluded Mozilla, they would have done so to Netscape too.
I'm not sure what your definition of "unprecedented" is but....http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=un precedented&r=67
:S
It has nothing to do with whether it was predicted to happen
Although I like to be the first to play the devil's advocate when it comes to MS hypocricy here I don't think that statement was necessarily hypocritcal. Mainly b/c nobody cried foul.
;)
We know this is timothy and he likes to put in his little quips in on every story and generally likes to be very anti-MS. In this case I'm wiling to give him benefit of the doubt though that he was just raising a valid point about a lack of big names in the dial-up market.
I can totally see where you would think it was him being a zealot again though
Well car engine management system performance is a pretty small fraction of all software written don't you think?
In a lot of cases time to market is more important than time to write 10000 bytes to a file. One extra second, no big deal. One extra month to hit that market and there goes some profit margin.
If it's not available, it generally won't have a price now will it? Sure they can estimate a price but they're better off not to in case they determine they have to charge more. Then it doesn't reflect poorly.
"But will it play a Divx CD (and if not, why the hell not?)? Will it play SVCD (from the media)?"
The general consumer doesn't give a rat's *** about whether it can do these things. If it plays DVDs then they are ready. Sure it can be argued that such a product is "obviously geared towards techies" but I don't think that's entirely the case here. Either way...if it can play divx streamed from the pc, why would it not be able to from a "divx cd"? As long as the data sent is in the proper format when it leaves the pc it should be able to handle it.
"The press release is damn poor, leaving such obvious points unaddressed, does not reflect well on the product."
The press release is just as it said. A release to the press. It gets word out on what they're up to and gets consumers eager to buy it so that when it does come out the consumer has been waiting an opportune amount of time (as judged by marketing department) and will jump at the chance to finally get it.
Maybe people get hung up on it b/c file selection is used all the time and the old one was an eyesore. Sorry, it was. This one is much improved though it still has a 1980's feel to it.
>> Now that the fileselector is improved, what
>> will you bitch about now?
Well, since bitching about it has gotten it improved a bit, maybe people will still bitch about it and get it improved more. If nobody said anything it would have stayed as it was.
Reminds me of an old joke:
A new couple just had their first child, a baby boy, and were extremely excited to go through all the parenting ordeals. Diaper changes, late night feedings aside, these things would lead to wonderful moments like the first time he crawled. The first time he walked. The first time he spoke. The days went on and as the baby aged he went through all the usual stages of baby-hood. He crawled like no other and once he started walking it was all they could do to keep up with him. A year passed and he hadn't said a word. The parents asked the doctor and he said it was normal for some children not to begin speaking until they were 1 1/2 and possibly 2. The terrible 2's hit with not even a whimper. The doctor continued to reassure them that there was nothing wrong with their child but they grew worried. The years rolled on and still not a peep. Then on his sixth birthday he looked down at his chocolate cake and said "I don't like chocolate cake. I prefer vanilla". The parents were flabbergasted. "Why haven't you spoken before?!?!", they asked. "Everything was fine up until now", he replied.
Couple lines from the article:
It means the spammer's machine is slowed down, but legitimate e-mailers do not notice any delays.
All this clever puzzle-solving is done without the recipient of the e-mail being affected.
Work on developing your own spam filter. Make it so false positives are around 1 per 1,000,000 or so. Better yet, make it foolproof. Then, complain about how stopping spam is easy. It's easy for humans to recognize spam. Not as easy to tell a computer what exactly spam is.
24hours*60min/hour*60sec/min = 86400sec in one day. So I think 80,000 is a decent round off value so they didn't have to say 8640 messages a day. 8,000 is just a nice rounded number. And if they had rounded up it would look like spammers could send more mail per day ;)
"Classic example of a bad analogy"
:S, is that us artificially trying to keep a species around after another subset of us almost killed it off (don't forget about natural predators and disease that they face, it's not all on us) is just a patch on a tire. Nowhere near as good as the original.
If anything, it's typical and not classic but that' besides the point.
"have the capacity to extrapolate what would happen if we did that"
And what would happen? Sure we can come up with a bunch of nice statistical models but nature is an animal in itself and will constantly adapt and that's something we can't fully model. We can again give estimates based on our observations but as I'm sure you're well aware of, observing itself messes up the system you're trying to observe and well....we're humans. We're *not* that smart and we've proven it time and time again.
Like I said, species have been going extinct since the start of time and we tend to get all panicky when some go extinct during our lifecycle. Artifical replication is not the answer. It's a patch. Bring about more deer, hunting quotas go up.
Now, I'm not saying we haven't possibly contributed to more species extinction than previous species. We just may have. However, as species grow they tend to become more dominant for the simple idea that in nature, only the strong tend to survive. So each time a new species survives, it grows that much stronger. Humans are the strongest right now it would appear but it won't be forever. We're not an overall strong enough species to sustain ourselves for long enough. As you stated: "if we chose to act like a mindless predator". Yes, that's one of our big problems. Not enough of us think globally and we tend to overuse our resources. When we overuse them enough, we will die off and something else will take our place. It may be a single-celled organism again, it may be some new form of ape. Who's to say?
My point, if I haven't rambled enough already
"From the "above nature" comment, I'm guessing you're speaking from a religious standpoint"
Sorry, nope. No religous standpoint on my end here. Just my own thoughts which may or may not tie in to certain religions and may or may not be entirely crazy.
"but the people working on this sort of thing are smart, and have probably modeled everything as best as possible."
But are they smart enough? And by smart enough I mean can they present every single possible consequence and determine that there is no way for this to fail within a probability of 99.999999%? I doubt it. And that's why we shouldn't do it.
Well the whole "repopulate" argument is just another way to justify what they are doing. Helping nature repopulate itself is the next logical step for humans as we tend to think we are above nature.
Maybe if we started to realize that in nature, species die off. It happens all the time and hasn't been just recently b/c of humans. Yes, we've caused our share of destruction but has it ever been analyzed against prior species domination?
I'm sure the sabre-toothed tiger never sat back and thought "Shit, i'm killing off these wooly mammoths like crazy! I better think of a way to encourage repopulation before they're extinct!". It just thought "Hey look! It's my next meal to ensure my survival".
Who's to say closed source can't/doesn't do this? In a company, there may be many projects on the go and many other developers to pull knowledge from. Once a project is nearing completion (and even throughout it's entire lifecycle), the code can be looked over by other people at the company either at formal code reviews or informal "hey, take a look at this and let me know what you think" reviews. It may not gain the scale the open source peer reviews *could* generate but it still is effective nonetheless.
Remember, there are lots of forms of closed source software and they aren't all evil.
"Isn't it?"
Well, I suppose it is representative of the open source programming ideal.
In the context of the original post that I responded to, the poster was saying that since the IE pseudo-patch had a lot of bugs in a small code base, that MS patches for IE must be 6 times worse based on an ill-conceived "Rule of 6 times" for open vs closed source. I felt it was misleading to label that software as open source quality (not to say all open source is good) and especially more misleading to simply assume that closed source patches were even worse than that.
That's where my response was coming from though I guess I may have worded it improperly.
That open source patch was quite shoddily and hastily written. It wasn't even a patch really. Using it as representative of open source is not fair in any way whatsoever to other successful open source products.
"Now apply the 'Rule of 6 times' to Microsoft's closed source IE patches..."
There is no 'Rule of 6 times'. An analysis concluded that MySQL had a very limited number of defects in their code base. Kudos to them. This doesn't define a rule to be used in the open source vs. closed source holy war.
You ain't a friend of mine man. I don't know you from Adam which was the point of apologizing for missing the joke.
Well, my apologies for not reading that as a joke. There was no wink or smile so how was I to know for sure that it was a joke? I thought maybe you just didn't realize this new release was big news. I have no prior knowledge of your linux experience and what not now do I ;)
From the following Cnet article:n efd_top
http://news.com.com/2100-7344_3-5127627.html?tag=
All these quotes apparently came from Mr. Morton himself.
"...the part of 2.6 that communicates with memory is less efficient, imposing a practical limit of 24GB of memory to the 32GB that 2.4 could handle. However, he believes that programmers will address the problem."
Is this reduced limit useful? Why should it be up to programmers to code around? Did I miss something?
"The new kernel also monitors for new events more frequently--1,000 times per second instead of 100--a fact that slows down the system about 1 percent..."
I assume it's to try and respond to events faster but increasing it tenfold, isn't that overkill? I mean, it slows the system down by 1% which isn't horrible and if a real-time app has a problem with it, you can always modify the kernel yourself but couldn't they have upped the polling to 250 which is a decent increase but not a 10x one.
"In addition, 2.6 requires somewhat more memory to run and shows worse performance when it has to use hard drives as extra memory under heavy loads... "
That seems reasonable that it needs a bit more memory but why should it see adverse effects under heavy loads as compared to the 2.4 kernel? Shouldn't they degrade at around the same level or are there some new file system issues that cause this?
Enlighten me.