Isn't it a lot more difficult/expensive to code for multi-threaded programs (plus the fact that the vast majority of home users don't have more than one CPU)?
No, it doesn't have to be. It depends a lot on what the language/system offers the developers. Since we're talking about the Mac, Apple's Cocoa provides an NSThread class for multithreading, which is really easy to use. The tricky parts all involve coordination between threads. If you can decouple code enough, running it in another thread (or even in another process) doesn't complicate things much.
And you don't need multiple CPUs to take advantage of threads any more than you need multiple CPUs to take advantage of multiple processes. Think of a basic operation that a home user does, like a big file copy, and it's easy to see that is best stuffed into another thread so they can continue doing other things rather than sitting and waiting for it to finish.
So that's the story. Doesn't fit any of your scenarios.
Allow me to add insult to injury via a realistic summary. You were trying to play tough-guy-protector to a couple girls in a dangerous neighborhood armed only with strong words. You got what any intelligent person would expect to have gotten in a similar situation. The real question is what, if anything, you learned from the incident.
I always thought meeting people was the easy part, and that maintaining a relationship was the hard part. If you don't have the skills to meet new people continuing social interaction with people you do manage to meet should prove difficult at best.
You're wrong, based on my own personality type at least. I'm great with people I know, but I often make a terrible first impression. The reason is quite simple: I actually care about people I get to know, so a complete stranger capturing my attention is less important than who I'm with. If you think about it, that is the better way to handle relationships; to have the just the first step be difficult, and then make the days/months/years that follow simple.
Yes, right now memory cards are wildly more expensive. But hard drives used to be wildly more expensive than they currently are, too.
Internal market price changes are meaningless; you have to compare between the markets. Is flash memory decreasing in price at a faster rate than HDs? It doesn't look like it to me. And even if it is, the current per Gig price difference is about 100:1, which means flash has a lot of ground to make up.
because you want to control the ping to one every ten minutes. Imagine if 3 million people had notifier on and they were pinging your server every ten seconds each. That's 300,000 hits per second. No good.
Gee, if only there were some way to track down those abusers by virtue of their abuse rather than the nature (third-party) of the app doing the checking. You know, some sort of identifier like an email address or something . . .
I don't think you will ever lose the hierarchy. People think in hierarchies. They will always exist.
You've got it backwards, and I essentially cover that here. A hierarchy is something we create, not something we are built with. You look at a bird and think "bird", not "is the object I'm viewing an animal, vegetable, or mineral?"
What apple has done with spotlight is to let you build virtual hierarchies using queries.
And that's what can be done with a database like MS is doing, too. As I said, the main difference is where the metadata comes from. MS is favoring a ground-up structured approach, while Apple is doing an in-place indexing. Neither is obviously right or wrong at this point, and once both ship it will be really interesting to see if either shakes out to be superior in practice.
It's the classic agile and fast mindset vs the monolithic authotarian mindset.
I don't think so. Apple's solution isn't so much about being agile as it is about migration. MS wants to jump to a non-hierarchical system. In that way, MS is trying to be more agile than Apple. They are different approaches and while I have favored the "clean break" approach myself, I'm coming to see the advantages of Apple's approach to handling the metadata. It's still too early to tell which will "win", but as long as the strict hierarchy loses, I think I'll be happy.
Anarchy Online already has billboards advertising Alienware computers:)
Yep, and I have a screensaver for Mac OS X that can already get an updated billboard when a new sponsor comes along. A friggin' screensaver! It's not that hard, and yet these people are talking as though they've come up with something revolutionary.
I think MS might have been onto something with Penny Black...
You'd be wrong. I mean, 90% of the spam I'm seeing comes from spam zombies (i.e., exploited Windows boxes turned into mass mailers). Do you think Microsoft of all companies is actually going to push for something that further dings people who buy their crap OS? Nothing would get people off MS faster than the threat of a bill for $10,000 because some asshat can take your machine over and go joy-riding over inboxes across the Internet.
Seems like no-one takes the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis serious these days, but I always thought it makes sense.
Why? It seems to me that all manner of spontaneous word creation (and outright theft from other languages) is hobbled if it were true. I mean, if thoughts of 0 or 3+ things were important to these people, they would have that thought long before they came up with a clean word to express it. As another poster joked, a computer isn't hobbled by only having 0 and 1 at its disposal. I think it is more correct to say that these people are not Turing-complete (for whatever reason) rather than blaming the language.
I resent paying $13/mo for a tiny bit of data. I won't do it.
Not just tiny, but often bad data. I got a TiVo 4 years ago and I'm happy with the hardware, but I ditched the service after a year. Far too many of the shows I wanted to watch seemed to come after a sporting event that was allowed to go long. Given that I can manually program the same "accuracy" for regular programs, their guide had little value for me. As a VCR replacement it really is great, but the idea of pay even $5/month just to record at the same times week after week is just too much.
To me, if a character can be considered to be "active" while the player is offline, its just a form of authorized macro play. I would be fine with that, except such a system would probably isolate the automated character from the live characters, and that screws with the already shaky economies of most online games. If you can be offline and somehow get better at with a sword, why would you bother wasting time and risking loss by fighting rats/orcs/dragons to get better?
I would much rather see some MMORPG come out and say computer controlled players are OK. That keeps you in the game and part of the economy instead of creating skill out of thin air. It also creates a secondary market of virtual services to go along with virtual goods. Tired of kill rats all day? Spend $10 on Bob's kill-o-rat script, which does in 20/hour, or get Bill's version for $20 that takes out 50/hour!
I didn't list requirements, I listed typical specs of an entry level machine.
Like it or not, if you assume a person has that to throw at Java, that's a requirement list. More importantly, every app developer can list an entry level machine, but the minute the user actually tries to run a significant number of "entry level" apps at the same time, suddenly their entry level machine doesn't quite live up to the requirements. I want something that runs well with 500MHz CPU and 64MB of memory because I usually want to run 6 apps like that at the same time without having to endlessly wait for the computer.
Clearly your experience differs from mine. I came to Java from C/C++.
Yes, my experience clearly differs: I have some! It doesn't take a genius to see that Java is better than C++, but that just means that C++ is that much worse than the languages that came before it, too! That you can only count those two among your OO experience means you have a very great deal to learn. Get back to me when you've at least used Smalltalk, which pre-dates Java by decades.
Now, sure, none of that is unique to Java or necessarily missing from C/C++, but my current preference for Java is based on my experience, not on anything Sun's marketing department may have spewed out.
I'm sure you fully believe that, but the truth is you just switched from one language du jour to another, both pushed based on where they came from and not what they offered. As a developer, you would greatly benefit by looking at languages that don't get a lot of press releases. In them, you might just find something that better solves your problems.
despite entry level PCs now having specs along the lines of 2.5GHz processor and 256MB of RAM, lots of people on such sites are obssessed with perceived bloat
That's a bad argument. Firstly, you can't claim the bloat is perceived if at the same time you list relatively hefty machine requirements. Computer resources are finite. Yeah, there are more now than before, but what does Java really give you that is worth tossing all your resources into a glorified emulator?
lots of (but by no means all) people dissing Java are actually sysadmins, rather than programmers, and do all of the coding that they do do in perl, shell script, and similar
As a programmer, I can tell you you're dead wrong. A developer with any depth will look at Java and then look at the languages before (and after) it and properly judge it on what new benefits it brings to the table. Java really brings nothing new or technically interesting; you've been duped the Sun marketing department.
A modern PC spends almost all its time waiting on user input or IO bound anyway.
And yet the user also spends almost all their time waiting for computer to operate on their input. It can't go both ways. The reality is that people do burst processing. When the user is sitting idle, the machine is usually sitting idle; when the user is doing something, the machine can't finish fast enough! For what it does, Java is still a big pig and the users know it. A developer that gives a damn about their users won't force them to use a Java app. Java is not "back" because it never fulfilled the promises it originally made.
Is this based on anything? It's slower than raw C or assembly of course, but quite fast overall.
More importantly, no language is faster than a programmer who doesn't know algorithms. Looking at the "S-L-O-W" code through the link provided, it's some of the shittiest toy benchmarking I've ever seen. It compares static strings through an inner method call and nested inside two loops! Even a freshman seeing that code would have had the sense to move the compares outside all that. So in 10 seconds, I was able to take code that was claimed 6x slower than Java and make it 2x faster than Java. Of course, it is still a toy benchmark that accomplishes nothing of value.
1) I don't get paid, I volunteer (more snide comments?)
Absolutely! See, you're a big part of the problem. Instead of the research lab incurring the actual costs of running Windows, you hide the problems in an attempt to seem helpful. You think you're doing the right thing, but you're really just supporting a multi-billion dollar monopoly.
2) I don't own the machines
So what? Either you actually manage the lab for the owners or you don't. It sounds like you don't. It sounds like your just another cheap IT drone.
3) I have tried providing GNU/Linux concept machines, but users shied away, even with instruction and encouragement.
Where did I say to use Linux? Depending on the details, maybe they should have gotten a Mac. But here's an idea: when you put in the Linux machines, did you say you wouldn't support the Windows boxes anymore? Did you flat out tell them to get comfortable as a Linux user or get comfortable as a MSCE? If they shy away, it's usually because they think they can get out of having to change, and that sounds like exactly what happened.
You have failed to support your case, so stop bitching about Windows exploits. Stop whining about valuable "lost" time when you know full well what to expect when running Windows. Stop pretending any one person outside of Redmond is at all responsible for your bad situation except yourself.
I manage a small reasearch lab server and infrastructure.
So you picked Windows as the secure means of doing that? You should be fired. Stop blaming this one kid for your bad decisions.
Even with what I consider to be an above-average skill set, an outbreak can waste anywhere up to 30 hours of my time depending how serious and how fast it is. You call my lost time, resources, and users' data "phantom damages"?
Yes, I do. If you dropped the ball, don't blame gravity for making it fall. Gravity is just doing what everyone with sense expects it to do. Everyone with sense knows that Windows is a can of worms. It's not like this guy was the first, nor has he been the last, to exploit MS software. If your time is so valuable and exploits are so costly, why do you continue to run Windows?
Maybe someone can enlighten me, because I never understood why SETI got much effort at all. Any random signal we could eavesdrop on seems like it would likely becoming from a planet like ours, transmitter on a surface that is moving around an axis that is moving around a sun that is moving around a galaxy. Radio waves might cut a fair (if increasingly faint) arc into the Universe under such conditions, but a laser? Wouldn't that make it a pressing assumption that aliens knew we were here? And I don't mean just "here here" but "there here": contact in a manner that accounted for our movements over the time scales it would take for a directed signal to reach the planet. I mean, pick any random star of billions in the night sky and assume a planet around it had intelligent life on it. Now where exactly would you point your beacon so that it actually hit that target? And why is it we think we're on the receiving end of such improbable attention?
I think the subdivision of a foot into 12 inches is fantastic; it allows one to easily divide dimensions into thirds, something that's a PITA in the metric world.
Yeah, because if I have a 25.4 cm board and I want thirds, it works out to a messy 8.46666... cm
But with imperial, that's a 10 inch board that so easily splits into pieces that are 3.3333... inches!
Instead of/in addition to posting about the error here, why not send off a note to the Times to let them know about the important flaw in their coverage of this story?
Better, why not put the note on a page that requires someone at the Times to register in order to read the correction?:-)
1. So, you are arguing that when CNN carries a CNN story in preference to a FOX story, that is a paid placement and an unethical act? You would have me believe that a news site giving preference to content produced by its own employeess is wrong. That's absurd.
No, you're being absurd because you're trying to build your argument by straddling both sides of the fence. For this point, you're claiming it's an MSNBC property and they can do whatever they want; I agree with that point. Elsewhere you will claim it is of no great concern to an aggregate's consumers, which is not true. You need to find a consistent argument to continue this debate.
2. What wool? What eyes? What are you talking about? It's an MSNBC site. The fact that it uses an aggregator doesn't commit it to selecting stories at random. I expect it to favor it's own amterial. What's your problem?
Again, I don't take issue with that point (in isolation). I would naturally expect the same behavior associated with MS. They are again leveraging their monopoly to control the consumer. Newsbot is just another facet of that operation, and that is my problem.
3. I am not defending MS. Nor did I say that the story selection on the MSNBC site won't impact the consumer.
You've done both. If you re-read your posts and don't see it, I feel sorry for you.
Frankly, I've lost track of what it is you're trying to say. It sounds like you're arguing that the MS site is acting unethically by giving preference to its own stories. If so, I think that's a ludicrous position. You accuse me of defeding this alleged unethical behavior, when all I've done is point to the behavior.
No, my issue has been with your inconsistent view of the matter. I don't think MSNBC is necessarily being unethical simply because they favor their their material. Go back and actually read what I wrote and you'll see my concern is that, in publishing as an aggregate, there is a potential for further abuse of power. History has shown that, for MS, that kind of potential is continually realized.
All news is created and reported by someone with a point of view, ither interests, pressures, and a deadline. If news consumers don't understand that and make an effort to comprehend the influences working on their chosen news providers, they are naive. By definition, software aggregators create and report no news.
Then you argue from a position of ignorance. As some who runs an aggregator, I assure that we create meta-news. Using a (fair) aggregator not only exposes you to the news, it adds information about who is covering it and who isn't. Did you bother to look at the MAT site I posted? Even if you don't use OS X, it should be clear looking at the page that, at a minimum, information about timeliness is reported. Could I take money from Apple to list their relatively infrequent updates first? Yeah, but that doesn't benefit the viewer and so I won't.
Your position would be like saying "diff" doesn't have a value. It is precisely the single-source influences you mention that make an aggregator so important in highlighting the differences to the news consumer. Newsbot is flawed because it is less about reporting those differences (the true purpose of an aggregator) and more about further pushing MSNBC content.
1. An MS site giving preference to stories prepared by MSNBC is not paid placement.
Incorrect. In fact, it is the worst form of paid placement. That #1 slot has an infinite price for any other news service and a zero price point for MSNBC. How you missed something that obvious is beyond me.
I certainly wouldn't expect to see the MSNBC story at the CNN site. The fact that the MSNBC site uses an aggregator is not important to me, as a consumer.
It must be nice to so comfortably pull the wool over your own eyes. As a consumer, you absolutely should care, because it does affect the presentation of the news whether you realize it or not.
I'm not defending MS. (What is it about Slashdot readers that they think any point of disagreement with the party line represents a defense of MS?) I've said that I am no more surprised that MS gives preference to its own stories on its own site than I am surprised that any other news source gives preference to its stories versus stories produced by its competitors.
You are defending MS. I agree that it's natural to expect them to do this, but to pretend that the consumer is unaffected goes beyond any party line. Only MSNBC benefits from the bias, and at least they know that better than you, or they wouldn't be doing it in the first place.
I've stated that I gave up on Google's aggregator because it often buries reports from significant and relevant sources while floating worthless secondary and tertiary reports to the top. The human editor that I trust more than any other to decide what's important is me, not some algorithm.
I see no evidence that MSNBC articles are more relevant for a topic than ones chosen by Google. I see no evidence that a human editor is involved in the story selection at MSNBC. Please stick to the debate at hand instead of trying to start tangents.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't it a lot more difficult/expensive to code for multi-threaded programs (plus the fact that the vast majority of home users don't have more than one CPU)?
No, it doesn't have to be. It depends a lot on what the language/system offers the developers. Since we're talking about the Mac, Apple's Cocoa provides an NSThread class for multithreading, which is really easy to use. The tricky parts all involve coordination between threads. If you can decouple code enough, running it in another thread (or even in another process) doesn't complicate things much.
And you don't need multiple CPUs to take advantage of threads any more than you need multiple CPUs to take advantage of multiple processes. Think of a basic operation that a home user does, like a big file copy, and it's easy to see that is best stuffed into another thread so they can continue doing other things rather than sitting and waiting for it to finish.
So that's the story. Doesn't fit any of your scenarios.
Allow me to add insult to injury via a realistic summary. You were trying to play tough-guy-protector to a couple girls in a dangerous neighborhood armed only with strong words. You got what any intelligent person would expect to have gotten in a similar situation. The real question is what, if anything, you learned from the incident.
I always thought meeting people was the easy part, and that maintaining a relationship was the hard part. If you don't have the skills to meet new people continuing social interaction with people you do manage to meet should prove difficult at best.
You're wrong, based on my own personality type at least. I'm great with people I know, but I often make a terrible first impression. The reason is quite simple: I actually care about people I get to know, so a complete stranger capturing my attention is less important than who I'm with. If you think about it, that is the better way to handle relationships; to have the just the first step be difficult, and then make the days/months/years that follow simple.
And VersionTracker along with the Apple OSX download page will be your new friends...
To more easily keep up-to-date with those and other Mac software release listings, try the Mac Aggregate Tracker.
Yes, right now memory cards are wildly more expensive. But hard drives used to be wildly more expensive than they currently are, too.
Internal market price changes are meaningless; you have to compare between the markets. Is flash memory decreasing in price at a faster rate than HDs? It doesn't look like it to me. And even if it is, the current per Gig price difference is about 100:1, which means flash has a lot of ground to make up.
because you want to control the ping to one every ten minutes. Imagine if 3 million people had notifier on and they were pinging your server every ten seconds each. That's 300,000 hits per second. No good.
Gee, if only there were some way to track down those abusers by virtue of their abuse rather than the nature (third-party) of the app doing the checking. You know, some sort of identifier like an email address or something . . .
I don't think you will ever lose the hierarchy. People think in hierarchies. They will always exist.
You've got it backwards, and I essentially cover that here. A hierarchy is something we create, not something we are built with. You look at a bird and think "bird", not "is the object I'm viewing an animal, vegetable, or mineral?"
What apple has done with spotlight is to let you build virtual hierarchies using queries.
And that's what can be done with a database like MS is doing, too. As I said, the main difference is where the metadata comes from. MS is favoring a ground-up structured approach, while Apple is doing an in-place indexing. Neither is obviously right or wrong at this point, and once both ship it will be really interesting to see if either shakes out to be superior in practice.
It's the classic agile and fast mindset vs the monolithic authotarian mindset.
I don't think so. Apple's solution isn't so much about being agile as it is about migration. MS wants to jump to a non-hierarchical system. In that way, MS is trying to be more agile than Apple. They are different approaches and while I have favored the "clean break" approach myself, I'm coming to see the advantages of Apple's approach to handling the metadata. It's still too early to tell which will "win", but as long as the strict hierarchy loses, I think I'll be happy.
Can we have a policy of modding down people who advertise pyramid scams in their sigs?
What sigs?
Anarchy Online already has billboards advertising Alienware computers :)
Yep, and I have a screensaver for Mac OS X that can already get an updated billboard when a new sponsor comes along. A friggin' screensaver! It's not that hard, and yet these people are talking as though they've come up with something revolutionary.
I think MS might have been onto something with Penny Black...
You'd be wrong. I mean, 90% of the spam I'm seeing comes from spam zombies (i.e., exploited Windows boxes turned into mass mailers). Do you think Microsoft of all companies is actually going to push for something that further dings people who buy their crap OS? Nothing would get people off MS faster than the threat of a bill for $10,000 because some asshat can take your machine over and go joy-riding over inboxes across the Internet.
Seems like no-one takes the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis serious these days, but I always thought it makes sense.
Why? It seems to me that all manner of spontaneous word creation (and outright theft from other languages) is hobbled if it were true. I mean, if thoughts of 0 or 3+ things were important to these people, they would have that thought long before they came up with a clean word to express it. As another poster joked, a computer isn't hobbled by only having 0 and 1 at its disposal. I think it is more correct to say that these people are not Turing-complete (for whatever reason) rather than blaming the language.
I resent paying $13/mo for a tiny bit of data. I won't do it.
Not just tiny, but often bad data. I got a TiVo 4 years ago and I'm happy with the hardware, but I ditched the service after a year. Far too many of the shows I wanted to watch seemed to come after a sporting event that was allowed to go long. Given that I can manually program the same "accuracy" for regular programs, their guide had little value for me. As a VCR replacement it really is great, but the idea of pay even $5/month just to record at the same times week after week is just too much.
To me, if a character can be considered to be "active" while the player is offline, its just a form of authorized macro play. I would be fine with that, except such a system would probably isolate the automated character from the live characters, and that screws with the already shaky economies of most online games. If you can be offline and somehow get better at with a sword, why would you bother wasting time and risking loss by fighting rats/orcs/dragons to get better?
I would much rather see some MMORPG come out and say computer controlled players are OK. That keeps you in the game and part of the economy instead of creating skill out of thin air. It also creates a secondary market of virtual services to go along with virtual goods. Tired of kill rats all day? Spend $10 on Bob's kill-o-rat script, which does in 20/hour, or get Bill's version for $20 that takes out 50/hour!
I didn't list requirements, I listed typical specs of an entry level machine.
Like it or not, if you assume a person has that to throw at Java, that's a requirement list. More importantly, every app developer can list an entry level machine, but the minute the user actually tries to run a significant number of "entry level" apps at the same time, suddenly their entry level machine doesn't quite live up to the requirements. I want something that runs well with 500MHz CPU and 64MB of memory because I usually want to run 6 apps like that at the same time without having to endlessly wait for the computer.
Clearly your experience differs from mine. I came to Java from C/C++.
Yes, my experience clearly differs: I have some! It doesn't take a genius to see that Java is better than C++, but that just means that C++ is that much worse than the languages that came before it, too! That you can only count those two among your OO experience means you have a very great deal to learn. Get back to me when you've at least used Smalltalk, which pre-dates Java by decades.
Now, sure, none of that is unique to Java or necessarily missing from C/C++, but my current preference for Java is based on my experience, not on anything Sun's marketing department may have spewed out.
I'm sure you fully believe that, but the truth is you just switched from one language du jour to another, both pushed based on where they came from and not what they offered. As a developer, you would greatly benefit by looking at languages that don't get a lot of press releases. In them, you might just find something that better solves your problems.
despite entry level PCs now having specs along the lines of 2.5GHz processor and 256MB of RAM, lots of people on such sites are obssessed with perceived bloat
That's a bad argument. Firstly, you can't claim the bloat is perceived if at the same time you list relatively hefty machine requirements. Computer resources are finite. Yeah, there are more now than before, but what does Java really give you that is worth tossing all your resources into a glorified emulator?
lots of (but by no means all) people dissing Java are actually sysadmins, rather than programmers, and do all of the coding that they do do in perl, shell script, and similar
As a programmer, I can tell you you're dead wrong. A developer with any depth will look at Java and then look at the languages before (and after) it and properly judge it on what new benefits it brings to the table. Java really brings nothing new or technically interesting; you've been duped the Sun marketing department.
A modern PC spends almost all its time waiting on user input or IO bound anyway.
And yet the user also spends almost all their time waiting for computer to operate on their input. It can't go both ways. The reality is that people do burst processing. When the user is sitting idle, the machine is usually sitting idle; when the user is doing something, the machine can't finish fast enough! For what it does, Java is still a big pig and the users know it. A developer that gives a damn about their users won't force them to use a Java app. Java is not "back" because it never fulfilled the promises it originally made.
Is this based on anything? It's slower than raw C or assembly of course, but quite fast overall.
More importantly, no language is faster than a programmer who doesn't know algorithms. Looking at the "S-L-O-W" code through the link provided, it's some of the shittiest toy benchmarking I've ever seen. It compares static strings through an inner method call and nested inside two loops! Even a freshman seeing that code would have had the sense to move the compares outside all that. So in 10 seconds, I was able to take code that was claimed 6x slower than Java and make it 2x faster than Java. Of course, it is still a toy benchmark that accomplishes nothing of value.
1) I don't get paid, I volunteer (more snide comments?)
Absolutely! See, you're a big part of the problem. Instead of the research lab incurring the actual costs of running Windows, you hide the problems in an attempt to seem helpful. You think you're doing the right thing, but you're really just supporting a multi-billion dollar monopoly.
2) I don't own the machines
So what? Either you actually manage the lab for the owners or you don't. It sounds like you don't. It sounds like your just another cheap IT drone.
3) I have tried providing GNU/Linux concept machines, but users shied away, even with instruction and encouragement.
Where did I say to use Linux? Depending on the details, maybe they should have gotten a Mac. But here's an idea: when you put in the Linux machines, did you say you wouldn't support the Windows boxes anymore? Did you flat out tell them to get comfortable as a Linux user or get comfortable as a MSCE? If they shy away, it's usually because they think they can get out of having to change, and that sounds like exactly what happened.
You have failed to support your case, so stop bitching about Windows exploits. Stop whining about valuable "lost" time when you know full well what to expect when running Windows. Stop pretending any one person outside of Redmond is at all responsible for your bad situation except yourself.
I manage a small reasearch lab server and infrastructure.
So you picked Windows as the secure means of doing that? You should be fired. Stop blaming this one kid for your bad decisions.
Even with what I consider to be an above-average skill set, an outbreak can waste anywhere up to 30 hours of my time depending how serious and how fast it is. You call my lost time, resources, and users' data "phantom damages"?
Yes, I do. If you dropped the ball, don't blame gravity for making it fall. Gravity is just doing what everyone with sense expects it to do. Everyone with sense knows that Windows is a can of worms. It's not like this guy was the first, nor has he been the last, to exploit MS software. If your time is so valuable and exploits are so costly, why do you continue to run Windows?
Maybe someone can enlighten me, because I never understood why SETI got much effort at all. Any random signal we could eavesdrop on seems like it would likely becoming from a planet like ours, transmitter on a surface that is moving around an axis that is moving around a sun that is moving around a galaxy. Radio waves might cut a fair (if increasingly faint) arc into the Universe under such conditions, but a laser? Wouldn't that make it a pressing assumption that aliens knew we were here? And I don't mean just "here here" but "there here": contact in a manner that accounted for our movements over the time scales it would take for a directed signal to reach the planet. I mean, pick any random star of billions in the night sky and assume a planet around it had intelligent life on it. Now where exactly would you point your beacon so that it actually hit that target? And why is it we think we're on the receiving end of such improbable attention?
So, the Mac UI is a bunch of unlabeled switches and random blinking lights?
You can get pretty close!
I think the subdivision of a foot into 12 inches is fantastic; it allows one to easily divide dimensions into thirds, something that's a PITA in the metric world.
Yeah, because if I have a 25.4 cm board and I want thirds, it works out to a messy 8.46666... cm
But with imperial, that's a 10 inch board that so easily splits into pieces that are 3.3333... inches!
Fantastic! No, wait, the other thing. Moronic.
Instead of/in addition to posting about the error here, why not send off a note to the Times to let them know about the important flaw in their coverage of this story?
Better, why not put the note on a page that requires someone at the Times to register in order to read the correction? :-)
1. So, you are arguing that when CNN carries a CNN story in preference to a FOX story, that is a paid placement and an unethical act? You would have me believe that a news site giving preference to content produced by its own employeess is wrong. That's absurd.
No, you're being absurd because you're trying to build your argument by straddling both sides of the fence. For this point, you're claiming it's an MSNBC property and they can do whatever they want; I agree with that point. Elsewhere you will claim it is of no great concern to an aggregate's consumers, which is not true. You need to find a consistent argument to continue this debate.
2. What wool? What eyes? What are you talking about? It's an MSNBC site. The fact that it uses an aggregator doesn't commit it to selecting stories at random. I expect it to favor it's own amterial. What's your problem?
Again, I don't take issue with that point (in isolation). I would naturally expect the same behavior associated with MS. They are again leveraging their monopoly to control the consumer. Newsbot is just another facet of that operation, and that is my problem.
3. I am not defending MS. Nor did I say that the story selection on the MSNBC site won't impact the consumer.
You've done both. If you re-read your posts and don't see it, I feel sorry for you.
Frankly, I've lost track of what it is you're trying to say. It sounds like you're arguing that the MS site is acting unethically by giving preference to its own stories. If so, I think that's a ludicrous position. You accuse me of defeding this alleged unethical behavior, when all I've done is point to the behavior.
No, my issue has been with your inconsistent view of the matter. I don't think MSNBC is necessarily being unethical simply because they favor their their material. Go back and actually read what I wrote and you'll see my concern is that, in publishing as an aggregate, there is a potential for further abuse of power. History has shown that, for MS, that kind of potential is continually realized.
All news is created and reported by someone with a point of view, ither interests, pressures, and a deadline. If news consumers don't understand that and make an effort to comprehend the influences working on their chosen news providers, they are naive. By definition, software aggregators create and report no news.
Then you argue from a position of ignorance. As some who runs an aggregator, I assure that we create meta-news. Using a (fair) aggregator not only exposes you to the news, it adds information about who is covering it and who isn't. Did you bother to look at the MAT site I posted? Even if you don't use OS X, it should be clear looking at the page that, at a minimum, information about timeliness is reported. Could I take money from Apple to list their relatively infrequent updates first? Yeah, but that doesn't benefit the viewer and so I won't.
Your position would be like saying "diff" doesn't have a value. It is precisely the single-source influences you mention that make an aggregator so important in highlighting the differences to the news consumer. Newsbot is flawed because it is less about reporting those differences (the true purpose of an aggregator) and more about further pushing MSNBC content.
1. An MS site giving preference to stories prepared by MSNBC is not paid placement.
Incorrect. In fact, it is the worst form of paid placement. That #1 slot has an infinite price for any other news service and a zero price point for MSNBC. How you missed something that obvious is beyond me.
I certainly wouldn't expect to see the MSNBC story at the CNN site. The fact that the MSNBC site uses an aggregator is not important to me, as a consumer.
It must be nice to so comfortably pull the wool over your own eyes. As a consumer, you absolutely should care, because it does affect the presentation of the news whether you realize it or not.
I'm not defending MS. (What is it about Slashdot readers that they think any point of disagreement with the party line represents a defense of MS?) I've said that I am no more surprised that MS gives preference to its own stories on its own site than I am surprised that any other news source gives preference to its stories versus stories produced by its competitors.
You are defending MS. I agree that it's natural to expect them to do this, but to pretend that the consumer is unaffected goes beyond any party line. Only MSNBC benefits from the bias, and at least they know that better than you, or they wouldn't be doing it in the first place.
I've stated that I gave up on Google's aggregator because it often buries reports from significant and relevant sources while floating worthless secondary and tertiary reports to the top. The human editor that I trust more than any other to decide what's important is me, not some algorithm.
I see no evidence that MSNBC articles are more relevant for a topic than ones chosen by Google. I see no evidence that a human editor is involved in the story selection at MSNBC. Please stick to the debate at hand instead of trying to start tangents.