Taxes on dividends are "double taxation", as profits have been taxed at the corporate level once, and then they get taxed again when they're dispersed to the shareholders.
So what? Do you call it double taxation when the profits are taxed at the corporate level, then taxed when payroll is dispersed to employees?
When someone receives income, they pay taxes. Double taxation isn't some strange exception, it's a natural result of incorporating to form a new legal entity. The corporation adds an extra someone to the chain of payment, and that someone pays taxes. Calling for an end to the dividend tax is essentially asking to have one link in the circular chain of income to not have to pay taxes while the rest of the links still do. It's a shameful handout to a subset of the population. Taxes on dividends no more encourages companies to see other ways to pay shareholders than taxes on salaries encourages companies to find other ways to pay employees. Maybe it will change some details (indeed, benefits like health insurance are a common non-taxed form of compensation), but people still want the cash.
(Quotes are Jonah Goldberg from NRO, not parent poster.)
Nevertheless, after 9/11, Congress declared that "the president has authority under the Constitution to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism" and authorized "all necessary and appropriate force" against al Qaeda. That strikes me as ample justification for tapping phone calls between al Qaeda associates in Cleveland and Cairo.
I hope my local police have authorization to engage in "all necessary and appropriate force" to protect us from crime, but it's hardly a blanket permission to ignore laws specifically written to limit the actions of the police.
But, according to Risen's book, "about 500 people" living in the U.S. who were in contact with suspected terrorists had their communications tapped. Risen calls this "large-scale" spying on the American people, even though, as The Weekly Standard recently noted, this constitutes "1.7 ten-thousandths of 1% of the U.S. population."
The point of laws is to protect the minorities, not the majorities. The government abusing the rights of a single American is a crime for which it should be chastized. We should be judged on how we handle the least of us, not the majority. It's easy to protect the rights of the majority. That sort of stupid, "it's just a minute fraction of the country" is an embarassment.
Even with warrants issued by the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, the National Security Agency usually had to erase the "American" side of the conversation between suspected terrorists before handing them over to the FBI.
If the American side of the conversation isn't guilty of anything, why is their part of the conversation relevant? If they're guilty, it's fair game. Police doing domestic wire taps run under much harsher rules and manage to get the job done.
When somebody prays or carries out other religious expression during meetings or on government property, it does not force everyone else to support their religion.
I agree. So does the ACLU. The ACLU has involved itself in just these sorts of cases and issues. It's why they supported allowing a grade-school student sing a religious song in a talent show. They supported the right of jurors to engage in religious expression. They've repeatedly defended the rights of students to express their religion by spoken and written word on public school property.
The ACLU isn't hostile to religion. But they see a clear line where the state should not cross. They draw that line differently from you (they would suggest that the government spending money on a religious display for a particular faith would be out of line), but they're hardly rabidly anti-religious.
Unless of course, it's the ability to carry out prayer or other religioius expression during meetings or on government property. Then the ACLU is indeed forcing government (courts) to take your rights away.
Indeed. Except, of course, for those one or two exceptions. Like the ACLU supporting a second-grader's righ to sing "Awesome God" at a talent show. Or defending the right of jurors to engage in religious expression. Or defending the right of students to wear t-shirts with religious messages to school. Or protecting a church from eviction. Or protecting the right of a minister to preach on public streets. Or protecting the right to perform baptisms in public parks. Or stopping schools from censoring religious yearbook entries. Or defending students who distribute religious messages on campus. Or joining Jerry Falwell to protect a church's right to incorporate. Or defending a religious group's right to advertise on city subways. Other than that, the ACLU sure wants to take your rights away.
Back on subject, if the thought that ~36 authorizations of international phone calls were tapped after significant concern about terrorism was called in bothers you, then you have some bigger issues. This is about international intelligence gathering and not the US Gov using "poisoned fruit" evidence in a criminal trial of a US citizen.
This is about the President publically declaring the executive branch has right to spy on Americans without a warrant. In direct violation of a law passed specifically to control the ability of the executive branch to spy on Americans to limit abuse by a President. If the president had even the slightest shred of evidence that a wiretap was required, he has a secret court he can ask permission from. The court has grants thousands of requests over the years, only rejecting four. He can even ask permission after the fact. This isn't about protecting us from terror. The executive branch already has the tools for that. This is about demanding absolute, unquestionable power in the name of fighting a war that can never be completely won. The President has announced that so long as he feels something is necessary to protect us from terrorism, a threat that will never go away, he can take whatever measures he feels is necessary. This is an insult to our laws, our Constitution, and our country. This is a Big Fucking Deal.
Re:Perl is between awk and C?
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What is Perl 6?
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Perl is between awk and C? By what strange measure? Some spectrum where "complex" is on one end and "cumbersome" is on the other? A strange measure indeed.
Perl is hardly "lower level" than awk. Indeed, Perl comes with a richer language, piles of useful support libraries, and the CPAN archive for even more useful libraries. All of these taken as a whole should make Perl a good fit for problems that are "too cumbersome to write in C" while being even more efficient to write than awk.
If awk's solving your problems, great. There is always more than one way to do it, and awk's a fine way. Indeed, I occasionally run into places where Perl seems overkill and break out awk myself. But for anything but simple tools I can whip up Perl solutions faster that I can write an awk or awk-and-other-shell-programs solution.
'At the end of the day, we don't play games for social interaction... We play games to escape.' Microsoft's strategy is 'absolutely flawed,' he added.""
Yeah, if you focus on online play you'll only end up with an itty-bitty niche market. An online game might have to struggle with a measely 5 million players. Truly online gaming is doomed.
One can make many reasonable arguments against Microsofts investment. I do agree that single player games will continue to be a major force. But online play can create new an interesting ideas. While I don't like playing online with random people because there are too many asshats, I'm looking forward to more cooperative games.
Games should not be doing the kind of things that need Administrator privilege to do!
It's the core security problem of Windows: the development culture doesn't respect security. Developers went for decades of DOS and Windows 3.1/9x without needing to worry about users and permissions. So they got used to assuming they could write whereever they wanted. When real user seperation and permissions became mainstream with Windows 2000 and XP, they weren't prepared to change. Because so much software required full access the easiest way to get stuff running is to run in an Administrator account. And since so many people (developers included) run as Administrator, why bother doing the right thing? Games are usually guilty, but there are piles of business and research software that is equally guilty. My brother is a sysadmin for a research lab. To keep Administrator access out of users hands, he has to bend of backwards to get the machines running the software his users need. A 2005 release of a $3,000 package that refuses to be placed in a directory with whitespace or a tilde, meaning it can't be installed in C:\Program Files. A $500 package that demands write access to a file in the C:\Windows directory.
This is one case where backward compatibility came at the expense of security. The development culture is moving too slowly. Bigger companies are starting to do the right thing and you get the occasional smaller development house following the rules. The killer is that huge mass of more specialized software. Apple bit the bullet when they cut over to Mac OS X; software had to do the right thing or it stopped working. Microsoft needs to make such a dramatic change or we'll be putting up with this bullshit for at least another five years.
Rename the GIMP so that people who aren't already devoted to it might have a clue as to what it does.
Yeah, can you picture a world in which people went around giving programs stupid names like Kazaa, Napster, and Firefox. And naming websites Google or Yahoo! Fortunately that hasn't happened.
The GIMP's name is suboptimal, but if eDonkey can succeed, clearly an embarassing name isn't a fatal flaw. The GIMP has more serious problems holding it back from widespread adoptation. People doing Serious Work typically already own Photoshop and have little incentive to switch away from a product they've already paid for. People who don't need the full power of Photoshop will find both Photoshop and the GIMP daunting. On Windows the GIMP isn't using native controls and as a result always looks and feels weirdly alien. It feels weird to me to use the GIMP under Windows, and I use the GIMP under Linux (where it feels nicely native) quite frequently. The get increased usage the GIMP needs to move forward on a number of fronts. The name just isn't as important as many people seem to thing.
Me, I don't really care. I like the GIMP. It does what I need quite well. The developers seem perfectly happy to keep working on it given their current growth rate. I suggest it to people who need a free but powerful image editor, but I don't worry about it too much.
"9. iPod still can't do bluetooth" "Why would you want your iPod to do bluetooth?"
You seem to have overlooked the obvious one: bluetooth headphones. Not earth shatteringly useful, but it would be pretty cool. And conceivably you could use the same set of bluetooth headphones for both your cell phone and your ipod.
Why in the world do your users need root access? On Windows it makes sense; all too many poorly written programs refuse to install or run unless they can run roughshod over the entire system. But this is Unix. It's a rare piece of software that can't be installed and run as a user. Most can even be installed as a user but made available to others. Yeah, it's a bit more frustrating that you can't just install the latest RPM, but if you're skilled enough to install an RPM, you can probably manage "./configure && make --prefix=~/mybin && make install". Changing file ownership? Again, why do you want that? If you're sharing files with other users, get a group set up and chgrp the files appropriately. If you have lots of complex sharing needs, set up one of the Access Control List options.
Ultimately users shouldn't need root. Professionally I development clustering software for Linux and other Unix systems. I regularly install new applications I'd like to use in my home directory. Our administrators set us up with a good ACL system (courtesy of AFS).
I do the cast majority of my work as my own account. The only time I need it is to test root-specific aspects of our software (if launched as root, it runs jobs as the user who submitted it). I can't remember the last time I switched to root, probably a month or so ago.
Unless you've got a damn good reason, your administrators are right to withhold root access from you. Your desires aren't good enough.
That's a pretty good example of the sort of prank I loathe. Telling someone a plausible lie that makes them panic is hardly clever or funny. Because it's plausible, the poor victim has to investigate. There is no cleverness there. "I can tell a lie" is hardly worthy of being titled a prank. Convincing someone that they may have a serious medical condition and will likely have to undergo more unpleasant tests? You weren't a clever prankster, you were just a dick laughing at someone else's suffering.
Sadly for a subset of people this is considered brilliant humor. When they target someone who doesn't find it funny, they get offended. "It was just a joke! Why don't you have a sense of humor?" Perhaps not everyone finds being mocked for engaging is perfectly reasonable behavior funny.
Snuck in around lots of interesting contents are small comments reinforcing popular myths.
"If smokers can sue tobacco companies (and win) because they didn't know cigarettes can cause cancer, or if obese individuals can sue McDonalds (and win) because they didn't know that Big Macs contain enormous fat content..." Big Tobacco didn't get smacked simply because their customers were ignorant. Big Tobacco got smacked down because they knew that their product was a serious carcinogen but spent decades lieing about it and fighting to hide the truth. That's sick. I don't think anyone is seriously accusing McDonald's of a similar conspiracy. Secondly, Big Tobacco got a big smackdown. McDonald's hasn't. The few attempts at a class action lawsuit were thrown out of court, and rightly so.
"Lawsuit is the first word spit out after a car accident, or after someone burns themselves with boiling coffee that didn't include a flashing warning label."In the most famous coffee lawsuit case the woman in question didn't first sue. She first asked for compensation for medical bills. Only when McDonald's refused did she sue.
I notice the article also doesn't list the result of Esther Walker's lawsuit against Nintendo. That's a big deal. If Esther lost, it dramatically reduces the importance of her claims.
We are a litigious society, but the situation isn't as bad as the article suggests.
You're buying into Roomba's marketting hype. Fundamentally the Roomba is a really simple design. They made the right decision, most people tried to make really smart vacuums. The result was complex and expensive. Roomba's brilliant insight was that a pretty stupid machine could be Good Enough.
Most people would suggest that "learning" and "memory" mean things like it remembers how big a room is between cleaning sessions, or that as you clean the same room repeatedly the Roomba will deduce more effectice cleaning paths. The Roomba does neither. It maintains some internal state while running, but that internal state clearly doesn't include anything as complex as a "map". If it had a map it would make fewer suboptimal choices.
Have you watched a Roomba do a run? The cycle always starts the same: spiral. If it doesn't hit an edge (be it a hard object, an IR wall, or a drop off) while doing a core spiral (about 5 feet in diameter) it picks a direction and runs straight until it hits an edge. Either way, once it's found an edge it will follow the edge for "a while". Eventually it will decide to shoot off in a random direction against. Repeat. For added spice, sometimes while shooting off in a random direction, it will stop and try to spiral again.
The result is that the Roomba often vacuums a given spot many times. Not because the spot is particularly dirty, it's just not smart enough to realize that it's doing so. The Roomba is also often missing some parts of the room. But the missed spots tend to be small and if you vary the initial placement and direction it will tend to catch them next time.
This leads to the next question, which is "why is there no competition?"
That's easy. Auction sites benefit from network effect. Network effect leads to a natural monopoly. If you as a seller were to move to another auction site you'd find fewer buyers and would generally sell your stuff for less. As a buyer there are fewer sellers, so you'll have a worse selection*. Thus, everyone goes to eBay.
* It's a bit of work, but I understand one can do well buying things for a reduced price on, say, Yahoo Auctions, then immediately reselling it on eBay at the higher price.
Because not accepting PayPal dramatically reduces the number of potential buyers. It's the defacto standard and many people aren't willing to mess with anything else. The real question is: is it worth the loss in potential buyers to reduce the risk? No idea. Both eBay and PayPal are scum, but they're the scum with the natural monopoly courtesy of network effect.
Sweet Turing, please bring me a non-crappy interface for FPS games on a console. This does assume that the Revolution's controller is as wonderful as Nintendo would have me believe, but what we have at the moment sucks hard. A joystick is a crappy way to aim. A joystick has many strengths (ever try a flying game with a mouse?), but it cannot match the speed and precision of a mouse for aiming at targets. There is a reason that auto-aim and auto-correction is a rare thing on PC FPS games, but common consoles. I'll play a good enough FPS game on a console, but it had better been great to compensate for the controls. I'm hoping the Revolution will fix the problem, giving us something at least close to the effectiveness of a mouse. FPS games are the driving reason I upgrade my PC. If console FPS controls become good enough, I can finally stop the upgrade cycle and having to maintain a copy of Windows.
The CNN reviewer wrote:
When it comes to console shooters, I'm terrible. I can finish them, but I'm nowhere near as competent as I am with my mouse/keyboard setup for the PC. In the early stages of the "Metroid" demo, it looked like this trend would continue, as I was all over the screen. By mid-way, though, I was better able to move and aim - and enjoyed the game far more than I did with the GameCube controller
That gives me hope. I gave up on Metroid Prime. It's a fun, good looking game, but the controls frustrated me.
"NVIDIA openly recognises that a large proportion of chipset innovation happens in the Far East where ULi is based - and that is one of the things that made ULi an attractive proposition."
There is a great deal of chipset innovation in the "Far East".
Uli is in the "Far East".
Nvidia wants chipset innovation.
Therefore... Nvidia buys Uli?
Someone needs a refresher in logic.
Come to think of it, a large proportion of desktop operating systems are developed in the United States where ChaosDiscordOS is based - and that is one of the things that made ChaosDiscordOS an attractive proposition. Anyone want to buy full rights to my operating system, ChaosDiscordOS*? I figure $10,000,000 is a reasonable price, since it's so attractive.
* Warning: Operating system may consist of nothing more than an ugly logo thrown together in the GIMP and a main.c file that contains, "/* TODO: Write operating system */"
Your rant about economic freedom is really off topic. And as an added bonus your claims are filled with questionable assumptions and faulty logic.
This isn't about kids with BAs in business. This is about engineering degrees. Hard stuff. People who design CPUs, cars, airplanes, bridges, buildings. This isn't a field for someone with only a high school degree. When I get on an airplane I want the engineers who designed it to know their field inside and out. An engineering degree provides a certain base level of knowledge. The only option for someone with only a high school degree is self educate. Some can do it, but how would you know if a given applicate had the necessary base level of knowledge? Could you be sure the person hadn't accidentally overlooked some important areas? A university degree isn't a guarantee of suitable knowledge, but it's better than nothing.
This isn't about some mysterious them taking away your unspecified economic freedoms. This is about the world having moved on. While you weren't looking, technology has become increasingly complex. If all you've got is a high school education, you lack the groundwork for the significant jobs of today and tomorrow. It's possible to overcome that limitation, but it's a big hurdle to leap.
I imagine most Slashdot readers are traditional power users, so I'm not surprised people want lots and lots of things to configure and tweak. I'm a little saddened that so many posters don't understand where Gnome and Metacity are coming from, and why there might be problems with lots and lots of configuration knobs.
Typical users don't configure things. Your typical user might tweak a few really simple settings like their desktop background, but they're never going to touch the "Wireframe or opaque resize" checkbox. Heck, I have problems convincing people with LCD monitors try switching from simple greyscale antialiasing to subpixel antialiasing (ClearType) to see if they like it. Most love it when they see it, but they're so scared by the fairly technical configuration that they don't want to mess with it. Ultimately adding lots and lots of things to tweak means your probably spending lots of time trying to satisfy a very small percentage of computer users. If you're trying to satisfy the mass market (and Gnome is), that may not be a good use of your time.
More options means more bugs. Every time you add an option, you need to debug it. And you need to debug its interactions with all of your other options. More options means slower development time to ensure correct interaction between all of the options. To just pull two examples that have irritated me, Metacity is a pretty small piece of code for a window manager, and it still had really annoying redraw bugs in the "low resource mode" (wireframe mode). The wiki backend MoinMoin has a number of options to control how it displays pages for logged in users. I fiddled with them and somehow found just the right combination that caused it occasionally fail to close links. I banged my head against it for an hour or so trying to create a test case to submit as a bug, but couldn't craft one. I ended up giving up and turning off one of my configuration changes.
Designers are supposed to make decisions, not shrug and ask the user. Sometimes there is reasonable debate on an option. Sometimes different use cases need different options. But all too often an option is added because a designer either doesn't know what to do, or is trying to support some unreasonable user. Some options are simply bad. For example, windowshading (a form of minimizing that keeps the title bar visible but hides the rest of the window) is pretty much dead. While may make sense for some specialized uses, as a general solution for desktop windows it's a failure. Yet more than one window manager drags around an old "double click title bar to windowshade?" option.
It is, of course, possible to go too far. Gnome pushes very far in the simplification direction and they've made mistakes. Just one example, Metacity's author fought against wireframe resize and move for a long time, claiming, "But computers are so fast now." Not such a good argument for an operating system famous for working great on older computers. Definately a bad argument for a window manager designed to be small and fast. It's finally been added as a hidden option (something like "low resource mode").
Nope, Andrew Orlowski is a troll. I still have no idea why The Reg keeps him on. An article or two about the flaws of Wikipedia? Great! An occasional cheap shot at the "We're going to defeat all traditional encyclopedias" silliness? That's what I like about The Register! But seven full articles attacking Wikipedia, all written by Orlowski?
(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) This isn't journalism, not even of the snarky sort The Reg is good at. This isn't about expressing an opposing viewpoint. This is about trying to be controversal, to rile people up, and generally be an ass.
Wikipedia must have abused Andrew Orlowski as a child, because I can't think of any good reason for him to keep harping on it. Check out the Register's archives. All of the Wikipedia bashing is from Orlowski. Wow, Andrew, great reporting. I totally didn't know that some things on the internet are false. Way to go on the investigative reporting! Could we maybe get a twenty part series entitled, "Shock! Falsehoods found on internet!"
Some Wikipedia fans are little overenthusiastic. Wikipedia's lack of review is a weakness. But just because it's a weakness doesn't make it useless. Indeed, most of the internet is full of unreviewed crap, yet we all still use it. While Wikipedia would like to think of itself as challenging traditional encyclopedias, I don't see it happening. But compared to doing research on the internet as whole (say, via Google), it's a definate win. Wikipedia is, compared to the general internet, better organized, more neutral, and better reviewed. For a quick overview of a topic I find it an extremely valuable resource. I accept its weaknesses, help flesh stuff out as I can, and get on with my life. If Orlowski thinks Wikipedia is unredeemable crap, so be it. He's reported that. Now move the fuck on. Reposting "Wikipedia has some errors and is therefore completely useless" every week is hardly a good use his time or The Register's money.
The professional way to handle it is to stop whining and enjoy.
I don't think it's whining, just naive. He wants to do right by his company and rightfully feels slapped in the face. (After all, if he's dangerous to the company now, why wasn't he two hours ago when he knew he was going to resign, but hadn't yet submitted the letter of resignation?) He erroneously concluded that he didn't resign properly, that he failed his company. So he wants to improve for the future. His only fault is not realizing that this isn't about him at all. It's standard procedure (or unusual proceed and his boss is a dick). As you say, he should enjoy the vacation!
Companies are rightfully paranoid that a departing employee -- particulalrly one with root access -- may decide to do something nasty on the way out the door.
It's their choice, but it's a stupid choice. If the employee was trustworthy 10 minutes before handing in their letter of resignation, why aren't they trustworthy now? They could use the 2 weeks to finalize projects and help prepare transition materials for the guy who will replace you. If you were really a danger to the company, you'd have done the dirty deed before you announced your resignation. Someone giving notice is hardly a risk.
Of course, yhen you're fired or laid off, the situation is totally different. Someone might decide then to lash out. I've seen trivial examples (sending out an angry email to everyone in the company), and can imagine the worse cases. Doubly so if you're firing the person because you don't trust them. This is also a good reason to make layoffs as quick as possible. If people know layoffs are coming, possibly because layoffs are constantly happening, they could engage in the hostile behavior at any point.
Slashdot Mirror
So what? Do you call it double taxation when the profits are taxed at the corporate level, then taxed when payroll is dispersed to employees?
When someone receives income, they pay taxes. Double taxation isn't some strange exception, it's a natural result of incorporating to form a new legal entity. The corporation adds an extra someone to the chain of payment, and that someone pays taxes. Calling for an end to the dividend tax is essentially asking to have one link in the circular chain of income to not have to pay taxes while the rest of the links still do. It's a shameful handout to a subset of the population. Taxes on dividends no more encourages companies to see other ways to pay shareholders than taxes on salaries encourages companies to find other ways to pay employees. Maybe it will change some details (indeed, benefits like health insurance are a common non-taxed form of compensation), but people still want the cash.
Ruben Bolling summarized the situation effectively in his Tom the Dancing Bug comic "Can you spot the double taxation?"
I hope my local police have authorization to engage in "all necessary and appropriate force" to protect us from crime, but it's hardly a blanket permission to ignore laws specifically written to limit the actions of the police.
The point of laws is to protect the minorities, not the majorities. The government abusing the rights of a single American is a crime for which it should be chastized. We should be judged on how we handle the least of us, not the majority. It's easy to protect the rights of the majority. That sort of stupid, "it's just a minute fraction of the country" is an embarassment.
If the American side of the conversation isn't guilty of anything, why is their part of the conversation relevant? If they're guilty, it's fair game. Police doing domestic wire taps run under much harsher rules and manage to get the job done.
I agree. So does the ACLU. The ACLU has involved itself in just these sorts of cases and issues. It's why they supported allowing a grade-school student sing a religious song in a talent show. They supported the right of jurors to engage in religious expression. They've repeatedly defended the rights of students to express their religion by spoken and written word on public school property.
The ACLU isn't hostile to religion. But they see a clear line where the state should not cross. They draw that line differently from you (they would suggest that the government spending money on a religious display for a particular faith would be out of line), but they're hardly rabidly anti-religious.
Indeed. Except, of course, for those one or two exceptions. Like the ACLU supporting a second-grader's righ to sing "Awesome God" at a talent show. Or defending the right of jurors to engage in religious expression. Or defending the right of students to wear t-shirts with religious messages to school. Or protecting a church from eviction. Or protecting the right of a minister to preach on public streets. Or protecting the right to perform baptisms in public parks. Or stopping schools from censoring religious yearbook entries. Or defending students who distribute religious messages on campus. Or joining Jerry Falwell to protect a church's right to incorporate. Or defending a religious group's right to advertise on city subways. Other than that, the ACLU sure wants to take your rights away.
This is about the President publically declaring the executive branch has right to spy on Americans without a warrant. In direct violation of a law passed specifically to control the ability of the executive branch to spy on Americans to limit abuse by a President. If the president had even the slightest shred of evidence that a wiretap was required, he has a secret court he can ask permission from. The court has grants thousands of requests over the years, only rejecting four. He can even ask permission after the fact. This isn't about protecting us from terror. The executive branch already has the tools for that. This is about demanding absolute, unquestionable power in the name of fighting a war that can never be completely won. The President has announced that so long as he feels something is necessary to protect us from terrorism, a threat that will never go away, he can take whatever measures he feels is necessary. This is an insult to our laws, our Constitution, and our country. This is a Big Fucking Deal.
Perl is between awk and C? By what strange measure? Some spectrum where "complex" is on one end and "cumbersome" is on the other? A strange measure indeed.
Perl is hardly "lower level" than awk. Indeed, Perl comes with a richer language, piles of useful support libraries, and the CPAN archive for even more useful libraries. All of these taken as a whole should make Perl a good fit for problems that are "too cumbersome to write in C" while being even more efficient to write than awk.
If awk's solving your problems, great. There is always more than one way to do it, and awk's a fine way. Indeed, I occasionally run into places where Perl seems overkill and break out awk myself. But for anything but simple tools I can whip up Perl solutions faster that I can write an awk or awk-and-other-shell-programs solution.
Yeah, if you focus on online play you'll only end up with an itty-bitty niche market. An online game might have to struggle with a measely 5 million players. Truly online gaming is doomed.
One can make many reasonable arguments against Microsofts investment. I do agree that single player games will continue to be a major force. But online play can create new an interesting ideas. While I don't like playing online with random people because there are too many asshats, I'm looking forward to more cooperative games.
It's the core security problem of Windows: the development culture doesn't respect security. Developers went for decades of DOS and Windows 3.1/9x without needing to worry about users and permissions. So they got used to assuming they could write whereever they wanted. When real user seperation and permissions became mainstream with Windows 2000 and XP, they weren't prepared to change. Because so much software required full access the easiest way to get stuff running is to run in an Administrator account. And since so many people (developers included) run as Administrator, why bother doing the right thing? Games are usually guilty, but there are piles of business and research software that is equally guilty. My brother is a sysadmin for a research lab. To keep Administrator access out of users hands, he has to bend of backwards to get the machines running the software his users need. A 2005 release of a $3,000 package that refuses to be placed in a directory with whitespace or a tilde, meaning it can't be installed in C:\Program Files. A $500 package that demands write access to a file in the C:\Windows directory.
This is one case where backward compatibility came at the expense of security. The development culture is moving too slowly. Bigger companies are starting to do the right thing and you get the occasional smaller development house following the rules. The killer is that huge mass of more specialized software. Apple bit the bullet when they cut over to Mac OS X; software had to do the right thing or it stopped working. Microsoft needs to make such a dramatic change or we'll be putting up with this bullshit for at least another five years.
Yeah, can you picture a world in which people went around giving programs stupid names like Kazaa, Napster, and Firefox. And naming websites Google or Yahoo! Fortunately that hasn't happened.
The GIMP's name is suboptimal, but if eDonkey can succeed, clearly an embarassing name isn't a fatal flaw. The GIMP has more serious problems holding it back from widespread adoptation. People doing Serious Work typically already own Photoshop and have little incentive to switch away from a product they've already paid for. People who don't need the full power of Photoshop will find both Photoshop and the GIMP daunting. On Windows the GIMP isn't using native controls and as a result always looks and feels weirdly alien. It feels weird to me to use the GIMP under Windows, and I use the GIMP under Linux (where it feels nicely native) quite frequently. The get increased usage the GIMP needs to move forward on a number of fronts. The name just isn't as important as many people seem to thing.
Me, I don't really care. I like the GIMP. It does what I need quite well. The developers seem perfectly happy to keep working on it given their current growth rate. I suggest it to people who need a free but powerful image editor, but I don't worry about it too much.
"9. iPod still can't do bluetooth" "Why would you want your iPod to do bluetooth?"
You seem to have overlooked the obvious one: bluetooth headphones. Not earth shatteringly useful, but it would be pretty cool. And conceivably you could use the same set of bluetooth headphones for both your cell phone and your ipod.
Why in the world do your users need root access? On Windows it makes sense; all too many poorly written programs refuse to install or run unless they can run roughshod over the entire system. But this is Unix. It's a rare piece of software that can't be installed and run as a user. Most can even be installed as a user but made available to others. Yeah, it's a bit more frustrating that you can't just install the latest RPM, but if you're skilled enough to install an RPM, you can probably manage "./configure && make --prefix=~/mybin && make install". Changing file ownership? Again, why do you want that? If you're sharing files with other users, get a group set up and chgrp the files appropriately. If you have lots of complex sharing needs, set up one of the Access Control List options.
Ultimately users shouldn't need root. Professionally I development clustering software for Linux and other Unix systems. I regularly install new applications I'd like to use in my home directory. Our administrators set us up with a good ACL system (courtesy of AFS). I do the cast majority of my work as my own account. The only time I need it is to test root-specific aspects of our software (if launched as root, it runs jobs as the user who submitted it). I can't remember the last time I switched to root, probably a month or so ago.
Unless you've got a damn good reason, your administrators are right to withhold root access from you. Your desires aren't good enough.
That's a pretty good example of the sort of prank I loathe. Telling someone a plausible lie that makes them panic is hardly clever or funny. Because it's plausible, the poor victim has to investigate. There is no cleverness there. "I can tell a lie" is hardly worthy of being titled a prank. Convincing someone that they may have a serious medical condition and will likely have to undergo more unpleasant tests? You weren't a clever prankster, you were just a dick laughing at someone else's suffering.
Sadly for a subset of people this is considered brilliant humor. When they target someone who doesn't find it funny, they get offended. "It was just a joke! Why don't you have a sense of humor?" Perhaps not everyone finds being mocked for engaging is perfectly reasonable behavior funny.
"Lawsuit is the first word spit out after a car accident, or after someone burns themselves with boiling coffee that didn't include a flashing warning label." In the most famous coffee lawsuit case the woman in question didn't first sue. She first asked for compensation for medical bills. Only when McDonald's refused did she sue.
I notice the article also doesn't list the result of Esther Walker's lawsuit against Nintendo. That's a big deal. If Esther lost, it dramatically reduces the importance of her claims.
We are a litigious society, but the situation isn't as bad as the article suggests.
You're buying into Roomba's marketting hype. Fundamentally the Roomba is a really simple design. They made the right decision, most people tried to make really smart vacuums. The result was complex and expensive. Roomba's brilliant insight was that a pretty stupid machine could be Good Enough.
Most people would suggest that "learning" and "memory" mean things like it remembers how big a room is between cleaning sessions, or that as you clean the same room repeatedly the Roomba will deduce more effectice cleaning paths. The Roomba does neither. It maintains some internal state while running, but that internal state clearly doesn't include anything as complex as a "map". If it had a map it would make fewer suboptimal choices.
Have you watched a Roomba do a run? The cycle always starts the same: spiral. If it doesn't hit an edge (be it a hard object, an IR wall, or a drop off) while doing a core spiral (about 5 feet in diameter) it picks a direction and runs straight until it hits an edge. Either way, once it's found an edge it will follow the edge for "a while". Eventually it will decide to shoot off in a random direction against. Repeat. For added spice, sometimes while shooting off in a random direction, it will stop and try to spiral again.
The result is that the Roomba often vacuums a given spot many times. Not because the spot is particularly dirty, it's just not smart enough to realize that it's doing so. The Roomba is also often missing some parts of the room. But the missed spots tend to be small and if you vary the initial placement and direction it will tend to catch them next time.
If my "we" you mean, "myself and other ignorant people," fair enough.
The rest of us don't find "their" and "they" as singular indefinite pronouns to be a problem. Indeed, "their" as a singular indefinite pronoun has a long history. If it was good enough for the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, C.S. Lewis, and Oscar Wilde, it's good enough for me.
Don't be grammar nazi unless you're damn sure of yourself. And even then, don't be a grammar nazi because it makes you a dick.
That's easy. Auction sites benefit from network effect. Network effect leads to a natural monopoly. If you as a seller were to move to another auction site you'd find fewer buyers and would generally sell your stuff for less. As a buyer there are fewer sellers, so you'll have a worse selection*. Thus, everyone goes to eBay.
* It's a bit of work, but I understand one can do well buying things for a reduced price on, say, Yahoo Auctions, then immediately reselling it on eBay at the higher price.
Because not accepting PayPal dramatically reduces the number of potential buyers. It's the defacto standard and many people aren't willing to mess with anything else. The real question is: is it worth the loss in potential buyers to reduce the risk? No idea. Both eBay and PayPal are scum, but they're the scum with the natural monopoly courtesy of network effect.
The CNN reviewer wrote:
That gives me hope. I gave up on Metroid Prime. It's a fun, good looking game, but the controls frustrated me.
Someone needs a refresher in logic.
Come to think of it, a large proportion of desktop operating systems are developed in the United States where ChaosDiscordOS is based - and that is one of the things that made ChaosDiscordOS an attractive proposition. Anyone want to buy full rights to my operating system, ChaosDiscordOS*? I figure $10,000,000 is a reasonable price, since it's so attractive.
* Warning: Operating system may consist of nothing more than an ugly logo thrown together in the GIMP and a main.c file that contains, "/* TODO: Write operating system */"
This isn't about kids with BAs in business. This is about engineering degrees. Hard stuff. People who design CPUs, cars, airplanes, bridges, buildings. This isn't a field for someone with only a high school degree. When I get on an airplane I want the engineers who designed it to know their field inside and out. An engineering degree provides a certain base level of knowledge. The only option for someone with only a high school degree is self educate. Some can do it, but how would you know if a given applicate had the necessary base level of knowledge? Could you be sure the person hadn't accidentally overlooked some important areas? A university degree isn't a guarantee of suitable knowledge, but it's better than nothing.
This isn't about some mysterious them taking away your unspecified economic freedoms. This is about the world having moved on. While you weren't looking, technology has become increasingly complex. If all you've got is a high school education, you lack the groundwork for the significant jobs of today and tomorrow. It's possible to overcome that limitation, but it's a big hurdle to leap.
I imagine most Slashdot readers are traditional power users, so I'm not surprised people want lots and lots of things to configure and tweak. I'm a little saddened that so many posters don't understand where Gnome and Metacity are coming from, and why there might be problems with lots and lots of configuration knobs.
Typical users don't configure things. Your typical user might tweak a few really simple settings like their desktop background, but they're never going to touch the "Wireframe or opaque resize" checkbox. Heck, I have problems convincing people with LCD monitors try switching from simple greyscale antialiasing to subpixel antialiasing (ClearType) to see if they like it. Most love it when they see it, but they're so scared by the fairly technical configuration that they don't want to mess with it. Ultimately adding lots and lots of things to tweak means your probably spending lots of time trying to satisfy a very small percentage of computer users. If you're trying to satisfy the mass market (and Gnome is), that may not be a good use of your time.
More options means more bugs. Every time you add an option, you need to debug it. And you need to debug its interactions with all of your other options. More options means slower development time to ensure correct interaction between all of the options. To just pull two examples that have irritated me, Metacity is a pretty small piece of code for a window manager, and it still had really annoying redraw bugs in the "low resource mode" (wireframe mode). The wiki backend MoinMoin has a number of options to control how it displays pages for logged in users. I fiddled with them and somehow found just the right combination that caused it occasionally fail to close links. I banged my head against it for an hour or so trying to create a test case to submit as a bug, but couldn't craft one. I ended up giving up and turning off one of my configuration changes.
Designers are supposed to make decisions, not shrug and ask the user. Sometimes there is reasonable debate on an option. Sometimes different use cases need different options. But all too often an option is added because a designer either doesn't know what to do, or is trying to support some unreasonable user. Some options are simply bad. For example, windowshading (a form of minimizing that keeps the title bar visible but hides the rest of the window) is pretty much dead. While may make sense for some specialized uses, as a general solution for desktop windows it's a failure. Yet more than one window manager drags around an old "double click title bar to windowshade?" option.
It is, of course, possible to go too far. Gnome pushes very far in the simplification direction and they've made mistakes. Just one example, Metacity's author fought against wireframe resize and move for a long time, claiming, "But computers are so fast now." Not such a good argument for an operating system famous for working great on older computers. Definately a bad argument for a window manager designed to be small and fast. It's finally been added as a hidden option (something like "low resource mode").
I suck. The missing missing link 4 from above.
Andrew Orlowski is a troll.
Wikipedia must have abused Andrew Orlowski as a child, because I can't think of any good reason for him to keep harping on it. Check out the Register's archives. All of the Wikipedia bashing is from Orlowski. Wow, Andrew, great reporting. I totally didn't know that some things on the internet are false. Way to go on the investigative reporting! Could we maybe get a twenty part series entitled, "Shock! Falsehoods found on internet!"
Some Wikipedia fans are little overenthusiastic. Wikipedia's lack of review is a weakness. But just because it's a weakness doesn't make it useless. Indeed, most of the internet is full of unreviewed crap, yet we all still use it. While Wikipedia would like to think of itself as challenging traditional encyclopedias, I don't see it happening. But compared to doing research on the internet as whole (say, via Google), it's a definate win. Wikipedia is, compared to the general internet, better organized, more neutral, and better reviewed. For a quick overview of a topic I find it an extremely valuable resource. I accept its weaknesses, help flesh stuff out as I can, and get on with my life. If Orlowski thinks Wikipedia is unredeemable crap, so be it. He's reported that. Now move the fuck on. Reposting "Wikipedia has some errors and is therefore completely useless" every week is hardly a good use his time or The Register's money.
I don't think it's whining, just naive. He wants to do right by his company and rightfully feels slapped in the face. (After all, if he's dangerous to the company now, why wasn't he two hours ago when he knew he was going to resign, but hadn't yet submitted the letter of resignation?) He erroneously concluded that he didn't resign properly, that he failed his company. So he wants to improve for the future. His only fault is not realizing that this isn't about him at all. It's standard procedure (or unusual proceed and his boss is a dick). As you say, he should enjoy the vacation!
It's their choice, but it's a stupid choice. If the employee was trustworthy 10 minutes before handing in their letter of resignation, why aren't they trustworthy now? They could use the 2 weeks to finalize projects and help prepare transition materials for the guy who will replace you. If you were really a danger to the company, you'd have done the dirty deed before you announced your resignation. Someone giving notice is hardly a risk.
Of course, yhen you're fired or laid off, the situation is totally different. Someone might decide then to lash out. I've seen trivial examples (sending out an angry email to everyone in the company), and can imagine the worse cases. Doubly so if you're firing the person because you don't trust them. This is also a good reason to make layoffs as quick as possible. If people know layoffs are coming, possibly because layoffs are constantly happening, they could engage in the hostile behavior at any point.