"Well, that might help the people in cities, but what about most of the people who live in rural areas?"
Exactly. This will promote a small amount of growth in the developed areas that already have the wealthiest people. What these people primarily need, for long-term growth, is a better education, on a large scale. Better teachers, lots of books, etc. While you do need economic infrastructure development programs like this that build "from the top down", the only way to create real, meaningful widespread change is to also have programs that promote long-term growth from the bottom up, i.e. amongst the poorly educated majority of people.
80% of the population of Africa is under 25, young people who are more open to new and positive ideas and are faster learners; this implies that there is a lot of potental for positive change at the moment. Not to belittle the US efforts here, but programs like this are nicer for political image because they tend to show results relatively fast, i.e. after a few years. But for SERIOUS positive change, you need programs that are only going to show results 20 years down the line (e.g. better education country-wide for all children!), and nobody is willing to wait that long.
I agree completly. I bought a subscription a while back, before thinking about it. I was using it, without blocking the ads. Kind of a double payment to them. I have since kicked it into full no ads mode to use it up as quickly as possible and at the most cost to them, then I'm going to filter the ads from then on.
If you're the sort of person who doesn't click ads, or doesn't buy things from clicking on banner ads, then you're actually saving them money by not viewing the ads (they probably don't get money for ad views or even ad clicks; most ad affiliates these days only pay for actual generated sales). It costs money to send an advert, and if that ad view never gets turned into a sale, thats just lost money, and it would have been cheaper to simply not send an advert. Its only worthwhile to advertise online if you make more in banner ad sales than you spend on bandwidth, people, infrastructure etc to deliver the ads.
I would have some security concerns though since it makes it a lot easier for those of malicious intent to intercept the signal as its basically being broadcast in the open. The technology would seem to lend itself naturally to strong encryption though
Don't forget that the cellphone networks in the US started out on similar footing - no proper encryption/authentication, and malicious users building their own transmitters and forging the ID of the source, i.e. they let people make calls on the network while others footed the bill. Now the signals are encrypted. No reason why this couldn't go the same way. I mean, the basic cellphone signals themselves are still easy to fake, but generating a signal that means anything to a tower is another story.
So let me just make sure I understand you right. If we're talking about the accomplishments of a country, then its OK to keep blowing your horn about it for centuries after the event. But if we start talking about ugly stuff, like slavery or segregation or McCarthyism then its OK to argue, "hey, that stuff happened so long ago, its history, stop harping on about it!"?
He concluded, for example, that the Windows trashcan looked different enough from the Apple trashcan, so there was no infraction.
I must be missing something here. The first "trashcan" Microsoft ever had was the recycle bin in Windows 95, which came out in late 1995. Apple systems had trashcans already as early as 1984, over ten years earlier (I remember using one at the time). How can there ever have been any dispute about the trashcan? There is no doubt who copied it from whom.
Agreed.. to have fixed, unbending "you are not allowed to do this" or "not allowed to do that" rules is silly - sometimes it really is just the most practical solution to do some particular thing, such as copy 'n paste a function. Certain types of behaviour should of course be discouraged, and other types encouraged, but choosing what to do is very much dependent on precisely what you are doing. Its impractical and wasteful to always pair programmers, for example, but I believe it is a good idea to do it once in a while, particularly, less experienced programmers learn a lot when doing that. It sounds to me like the ACs "XP-destroyed project" had more to do with people trying to follow a bunch of rules "religiously". That, and more likely, (a) general poor management (i.e. unrealistic time/budget etc) and (b) bad programmers. Nothing can save you from bad programmers, and there seem to be more bad programmers than good out there.
Half the time the problem is the vendors telling management that their product will slash costs by 200% and be implemented in a week for a 10th the price of the competition.
And the managers keep doing this because by and large, software developers (especially less experienced ones), let themselves be walked all over. Instead of saying to their managers, "listen, this is insane, the answer is NO", they say.. "uh.. ok..." and then proceed to work 15 to 20 hour shifts for the next few months. So you bail the manager out, get a pat on the back, and the manager walks away with the idea that he can do this again, because his hardworking, obedient developers will save him each time.
Although the economy is a bit rough at the moment, that does NOT mean that employee abuse is somehow OK. Developers, learn to "just say NO" to ridiculous expectations. Tell him straight, that you think it is just not reasonable to be able to finish the project in the specified amount of time. Work hard but work normal hours, with maybe a little overtime, and if the project still runs late, it means that not enough time was allocated. Your boss will have to answer to the client, and after this happens a few time, he will start to learn not to make insane promises to clients. If you honestly worked as hard as possible within reasonable work hours, it plain and simple is not your fault that the project ran late.
Managers abuse employees because employees let them.
I guess it's damned if you do damned if you don't.
I guess so, but on the other hand, you can't please everyone - someone out there will always have a problem with what you say. I suppose the best one can do is to just always try to be as honest as possible, and conversely, someone out there will find the value in what you say. There may many "rabidly" anti-MS people on/., and they are probably the most vocal, but there are probably plenty other (probably more knowledgable people) who are capable of seeing what Microsoft does do right, and will get something out of your post.
Personally I'm very anti-Microsoft because their products and their APIs are mostly of shockingly bad quality, in my experience. But they do get some things right, sometimes. And although buggy, their products do fill most of the needs that they are supposed to, and this is an important point that some OSS developers miss. In my opinion, software is bad everywhere at the moment, not just Microsoft. Programmers across the board (from commercial to OSS) could do with a bit of constructive criticism. Currently we seem to have a lot of developers who just (a) blindly copy everything of someone elses, even the bad stuff and (b) "re-invent the wheel, badly". Although to be fair, there are some really high quality software products out there, in both OSS and proprietary.
Well, it could be argued that if Microsoft themselves had NOT in the past attempted to manipulate public opinion with fake "grass roots support" campaigns that they would have more credibility in the public eye, and fewer people would be inclined to suspect that you are planted here by Microsoft. However, since MS has already shown that it does that sort of thing (they've been caught a few times), how can anybody now realistically trust any pro-Microsoft information on popular forums such as/.? Microsoft has dug their own grave on this one - they've destroyed their own credibility.
And people (surprise surprise) really really do not like being manipulated and deceived - they remember it, and don't want to be fooled again - so they consider it better to distrust any information that might just be more lies and manipulation. DO YOU BLAME THEM? I don't.
Then how do I keep telling the truth in such a way that I keep clear of the MS shill reputation?
In short, you can't. Microsoft, with their past behaviour, has made sure of this for you. Since they do do things like plant pro-MS posts in forums like this, any reasonable person knows not to trust any post that resembles a "planted" post.
Interestingly, one of the ways that more savvy "geurilla marketers" now try to deal with the problem of erosion of public trust is to try make their plants look like objective reviewers that people can trust. For example, the slashdot crowd is much more likely to trust the opinion of someone who claims to be "a Unix user, BUT... (something positive about MS products)..".
The whole of corporate America seems to be currently digging their own credibility graves in this way. In the short-term, cheap deceitful strategies like fake movie fan sites, fake positive reviews, fake pro-product postings on online forums, fake "news" articles in television and newspaper media etc, all of these will in the short term increase brand "mindshare". In the longer term though, as more and more people start to realise they're being manipulated, public trust will erode to the point where people will no longer believe even genuine positive articles about a product.
When companies stop this BS, then maybe people might begin to trust your opinions again. Until then, its a one-way slide downhill.
Nonsense. Time on slashdot is recreation time, much like watching TV or going to the movies. So you're saying that anyone who makes time for recreational activities, that their time means nothing to them? How ludicrous. Nobody can spend every waking moment working, we all need a bit of rest and relaxation. I would argue that/. is at least more intellectual an activity than watching TV. So if you spend even half an hour a week watching TV, then your time means nothing to you?
Bull. I'm free to spend my spare time in any way I like. If I have ten "free hours" a week, I may opt to spend 2 of them doing taxes with software and the other 8 on/., or I may opt to spend all 10 hours doing my taxes by hand. The existence of free time doesn't imply that it is worthless. On the contrary, since I have so little of it, I value my free time very highly. Spending time doing low-concentration "vegetation" activities is important rest time. I'm so sick of people with your attitude that free time is up for grabs for any activity. Back at Univ I would often get this "since you're not doing anything right now, you can help me with my computer". "Me-time" is just that, "me-time". It doesn't mean that that time is AVAILABLE for doing work for other people, or for filling in my tax forms by hand. Anyone who is fairly busy would understand this.
This is worse. I find their we-are-better-than-anyone-else attitude very arrogant. They are basically saying "well since WE wouldn't even have a solution, NOBODY else on the planet can possibly be capable of coming up with a solution." This is like a physician saying that since HE doesn't know how to cure Geoffrey, there is no point in telling him, in the belief that no other doctor in the world might have a good idea about how to save Geoffrey.
Who knows, perhaps some Russian scientists could rig up something clever with a few leftover cold-war nukes to stop such a hypothetical asteroid. But I guess we'd never know now, since nobody else will now ever be given the chance to try come up with a solution. Because obviously if Geoffrey Sommers can't think up a solution, then nobody can.
Hmm.. it could of course be that Symantec, although they may have known about the worm, may not have known that it was going to be as big as it was. They probably find new worms all the time, and perhaps they saw it as "just another worm". Since the thing apparently ripped through the internet in about 10 minutes, or something ludicrous like that, it may anyway already have been too late once they realised that it was going to a big one.
I don't see why people expect companies to donate information that costs them to find
OK, right. So if I find a major security exploit in Symantec's antivirus products, I now don't see why I should be expected to provide that information to them. It was my manhours that were used to find the exploit. Heck, according to your reasoning, I even have a right to sell this information to, say, Symantec's competitors. Thats "my right", see, to "make money".
Apparently these days the "right" to make money trumps just about everything else in American society.
Wouldn't there be some sort of criminal negligence issue here though? Allegedly, they (a) knew in advance that this was coming and (b) knew it would do damage to many people and (c) had the capability of warning many of those people and (d) chose not to. Isn't there something in the law about this? If I know the car you're about to step into is rigged with explosives, and I choose not to tell you (for whatever reason) even though I could have warned you, surely I am still in the wrong somehow?
This is nuts. I often use at least two browsers. I use Mozilla for most browsing, but occasionally will also open IE if a page needs it. Furthermore, opening media files off the internet with that crappy Windows Media Player ALSO fetches files via HTTP but with a different browser identifier. So opening IE and MPlayer together will get you flagged by your ISP? Thats ludicrous.
Lastly, certain types of tasks REQUIRE many browsers to be used together. Ask any of the hundreds of thousands of people who do web page development. (At least, those who actually bother to check if their page works in anything other than IE). Every responsible web page developer, while coding HTML, typically tests their page in at least two browsers.
Personally, I think ISPs should just start selling what they're supposed to be selling, i.e. bandwidth and a (usually temporary) IP address. If they can't afford to do that at current prices under a flat pricing structure, then change the pricing structure, or offer less bandwidth. I don't see why two people doing casual, low-bandwidth-using web surfing through one NAT connection should be seen as worse than one user downloading huge files at full speed.
No no moderators, this is not informative, its a misunderstanding. The "vector" processing that turgid is talking about is the "3D math vector" (x,y,z), which more modern CPUs and GPUs have built-in optimized instructions for manipulating. The "vector" processing that zymano is talking about is an ENTIRELY different way of building graphics cards whereby you have an array of smaller, cheaper, simpler processes each dedicated to drawing particular portions of the screen. So instead of one humongous super-powerful chip trying to draw the whole screen (a la GeForceFX), you have a whole bunch of smaller chips, each drawing a different section of the screen, in parallel. The idea being that a smaller chip can draw, say, 1/32th of the screen in less time than a large processor can fill the entire screen, and since you'd have 32 processors working in parallel, the entire image would be drawn faster.
Some graphics card manufacturers were attempting to build video cards based on this idea, but to my knowledge there have been no mainstream successes.
Almost ditto here. I have 128 MB, and Mozilla is taking up 31 MB, with 5 pages open. I don't think I've ever seen it go over 40, except once when I loaded a 16 MB HTML file.
I occasionally use the history feature, if I am trying to get back to a site I visited recently but can't remember the URL, then it comes in handy. Otherwise, I don't really use it. I guess thats what its for though.
thegoldenear's comment though reminds of an incident some years back when I was browsing the job ads in a newspaper. The Java programming language at that time was three years old. This company was advertising a position that required a minimum of 5 years Java programming experience.
Signed, you mean like a credit card receipt? She may have paid in cash, true, but a no return policy is bordering on common sense for many things.
All I meant by this really was that if you are, say, standing in a retail store that sells lawnmowers, and before you buy it you are discussing the purchase with the owner, and he verbally just sort of "off-hand" tells you that if you buy it, and it doesn't work, then tough luck you're on your own, then, well, this may or may not be a verbal agreement of an alternate warranty arrangement, but it is going to be difficult for any one side to prove anything should it turn out that the lawnmower WAS broken, and you take the guy to court. The courts then have nothing but your word against the store owners. If the store owner wants to implement such a policy and have it stand up in court, it would be better to have some signed documents, and it should be made amply clear to any customers in the store before they make purchases that you offer no warranty whatsoever (e.g. lots of signs indicating as such).
Vote with your wallet. Don't buy things with EULAs inside.
Indeed.. luckily, this is slowly becoming easier. (As someone who is thinking about starting a business soon, and looking at the phenomenal licensing costs of Visual Studio.NET, Microsoft Office etc, I am MOST DEFINITELY looking at alternatives such OpenWatcom, MingW (gcc), OpenOffice.org, CVS, etc. OpenSource alternatives are really beginning to approach a quality that makes them feasible choices for my business (and in some cases have been of good quality for a long time). It is a bit sad though that the industry has been unable to regulate itself in a reasonable way within the capitalist framework -- all of their attempts at being too greedy and trying to grab too much are now forcing people to find solutions outside of conventional economic enterprise. If they had been willing to offer reasonable prices, reasonable terms, and good quality, then I would pay up and buy their products. In the longer term they are going to just keep losing business, and many will probably go under rather than let go of their greed).
You are correct that the implied warranty argument may have been a little "beside the point" here, because they product (crashes and software bugs and security holes aside) more or less does perform as functioned. This is a little subjective though, I would consider Windows an extremely broken and defective product, but most people seem to think that all the bugs are acceptable.
Because the programmers don't usually do graphics - you need a large team of professional artists to make good game graphics, something that OpenSource games don't seem to able to compete with, unfortunately. In a typical Id game you probably have less than 10 programmers and over 30 talented professional qualified artists working full-time. A game like BF 1942 also typically has over 30 full-time artists.
The programmers cannot "make" the game look good. Only the artists can do that. The programmer provides the technical means for the artists to be able to do what they do.
You are assuming everyone is trying to get into the city centre. I live about 20 km from the city centre (a city with about 2 million people), in an averagely-dense but rapidly growing urban area. Until recently most of the roads out this far were single lane, and there have been a LOT of traffic congestion problems. One by one they are doubling the roads, and each time it DEFINITELY helps ease congestion, often shaving more than half the commute time off. When there is only one lane, traffic backs up sometimes for kilometers all along the way, particularly at turnoffs, because nobody can go around when somebody wants to turn. Double the lane up, and people can go around, which eases up traffic a lot.
Most of these people are NOT trying to get into the city centre. The typical commute is about 10 km, to decentralised mini-CBDs outside of the city center. There are many office complexes around this +/- 10 km distance from the city centre. So widening the roads is universally helping traffic congestion.
What currently also happens is that the traffic has forced larger numbers of people to take long short-cuts through urban areas, which isn't nice for the home-owners there, but in some cases helps local businesses in such areas. (The opening of a new toll booth recently has pushed many commuters to go through some previously quiet neighboorhoods, which are experiencing mini economic booms). Widening the main routes definitely puts more people back onto them and out of the neighboorhoods.
Around here though there is extremely little public transport to speak of, so the only practical choice is usually to have ones own car. And people NEED to get to work. They are going to drive one way or another. So the ONLY solution is to widen the roads.
Interestingly though, the city council has pulled a few other tricks to try coax people to use alternative routes (and also to coax people to drive slower).. one of which is that they modified the traffic light cycle times such that you get many more red lights along particular routes.
Slashdot Mirror
"Well, that might help the people in cities, but what about most of the people who live in rural areas?"
Exactly. This will promote a small amount of growth in the developed areas that already have the wealthiest people. What these people primarily need, for long-term growth, is a better education, on a large scale. Better teachers, lots of books, etc. While you do need economic infrastructure development programs like this that build "from the top down", the only way to create real, meaningful widespread change is to also have programs that promote long-term growth from the bottom up, i.e. amongst the poorly educated majority of people.
80% of the population of Africa is under 25, young people who are more open to new and positive ideas and are faster learners; this implies that there is a lot of potental for positive change at the moment. Not to belittle the US efforts here, but programs like this are nicer for political image because they tend to show results relatively fast, i.e. after a few years. But for SERIOUS positive change, you need programs that are only going to show results 20 years down the line (e.g. better education country-wide for all children!), and nobody is willing to wait that long.
I agree completly. I bought a subscription a while back, before thinking about it. I was using it, without blocking the ads. Kind of a double payment to them. I have since kicked it into full no ads mode to use it up as quickly as possible and at the most cost to them, then I'm going to filter the ads from then on.
If you're the sort of person who doesn't click ads, or doesn't buy things from clicking on banner ads, then you're actually saving them money by not viewing the ads (they probably don't get money for ad views or even ad clicks; most ad affiliates these days only pay for actual generated sales). It costs money to send an advert, and if that ad view never gets turned into a sale, thats just lost money, and it would have been cheaper to simply not send an advert. Its only worthwhile to advertise online if you make more in banner ad sales than you spend on bandwidth, people, infrastructure etc to deliver the ads.
I would have some security concerns though since it makes it a lot easier for those of malicious intent to intercept the signal as its basically being broadcast in the open. The technology would seem to lend itself naturally to strong encryption though
Don't forget that the cellphone networks in the US started out on similar footing - no proper encryption/authentication, and malicious users building their own transmitters and forging the ID of the source, i.e. they let people make calls on the network while others footed the bill. Now the signals are encrypted. No reason why this couldn't go the same way. I mean, the basic cellphone signals themselves are still easy to fake, but generating a signal that means anything to a tower is another story.
So let me just make sure I understand you right. If we're talking about the accomplishments of a country, then its OK to keep blowing your horn about it for centuries after the event. But if we start talking about ugly stuff, like slavery or segregation or McCarthyism then its OK to argue, "hey, that stuff happened so long ago, its history, stop harping on about it!"?
He concluded, for example, that the Windows trashcan looked different enough from the Apple trashcan, so there was no infraction.
I must be missing something here. The first "trashcan" Microsoft ever had was the recycle bin in Windows 95, which came out in late 1995. Apple systems had trashcans already as early as 1984, over ten years earlier (I remember using one at the time). How can there ever have been any dispute about the trashcan? There is no doubt who copied it from whom.
Agreed.. to have fixed, unbending "you are not allowed to do this" or "not allowed to do that" rules is silly - sometimes it really is just the most practical solution to do some particular thing, such as copy 'n paste a function. Certain types of behaviour should of course be discouraged, and other types encouraged, but choosing what to do is very much dependent on precisely what you are doing. Its impractical and wasteful to always pair programmers, for example, but I believe it is a good idea to do it once in a while, particularly, less experienced programmers learn a lot when doing that. It sounds to me like the ACs "XP-destroyed project" had more to do with people trying to follow a bunch of rules "religiously". That, and more likely, (a) general poor management (i.e. unrealistic time/budget etc) and (b) bad programmers. Nothing can save you from bad programmers, and there seem to be more bad programmers than good out there.
Half the time the problem is the vendors telling management that their product will slash costs by 200% and be implemented in a week for a 10th the price of the competition.
And the managers keep doing this because by and large, software developers (especially less experienced ones), let themselves be walked all over. Instead of saying to their managers, "listen, this is insane, the answer is NO", they say .. "uh .. ok ..." and then proceed to work 15 to 20 hour shifts for the next few months. So you bail the manager out, get a pat on the back, and the manager walks away with the idea that he can do this again, because his hardworking, obedient developers will save him each time.
Although the economy is a bit rough at the moment, that does NOT mean that employee abuse is somehow OK. Developers, learn to "just say NO" to ridiculous expectations. Tell him straight, that you think it is just not reasonable to be able to finish the project in the specified amount of time. Work hard but work normal hours, with maybe a little overtime, and if the project still runs late, it means that not enough time was allocated. Your boss will have to answer to the client, and after this happens a few time, he will start to learn not to make insane promises to clients. If you honestly worked as hard as possible within reasonable work hours, it plain and simple is not your fault that the project ran late.
Managers abuse employees because employees let them.
I guess it's damned if you do damned if you don't.
I guess so, but on the other hand, you can't please everyone - someone out there will always have a problem with what you say. I suppose the best one can do is to just always try to be as honest as possible, and conversely, someone out there will find the value in what you say. There may many "rabidly" anti-MS people on /., and they are probably the most vocal, but there are probably plenty other (probably more knowledgable people) who are capable of seeing what Microsoft does do right, and will get something out of your post.
Personally I'm very anti-Microsoft because their products and their APIs are mostly of shockingly bad quality, in my experience. But they do get some things right, sometimes. And although buggy, their products do fill most of the needs that they are supposed to, and this is an important point that some OSS developers miss. In my opinion, software is bad everywhere at the moment, not just Microsoft. Programmers across the board (from commercial to OSS) could do with a bit of constructive criticism. Currently we seem to have a lot of developers who just (a) blindly copy everything of someone elses, even the bad stuff and (b) "re-invent the wheel, badly". Although to be fair, there are some really high quality software products out there, in both OSS and proprietary.
Well, it could be argued that if Microsoft themselves had NOT in the past attempted to manipulate public opinion with fake "grass roots support" campaigns that they would have more credibility in the public eye, and fewer people would be inclined to suspect that you are planted here by Microsoft. However, since MS has already shown that it does that sort of thing (they've been caught a few times), how can anybody now realistically trust any pro-Microsoft information on popular forums such as /.? Microsoft has dug their own grave on this one - they've destroyed their own credibility.
And people (surprise surprise) really really do not like being manipulated and deceived - they remember it, and don't want to be fooled again - so they consider it better to distrust any information that might just be more lies and manipulation. DO YOU BLAME THEM? I don't.
Then how do I keep telling the truth in such a way that I keep clear of the MS shill reputation?
In short, you can't. Microsoft, with their past behaviour, has made sure of this for you. Since they do do things like plant pro-MS posts in forums like this, any reasonable person knows not to trust any post that resembles a "planted" post.
Interestingly, one of the ways that more savvy "geurilla marketers" now try to deal with the problem of erosion of public trust is to try make their plants look like objective reviewers that people can trust. For example, the slashdot crowd is much more likely to trust the opinion of someone who claims to be "a Unix user, BUT ... (something positive about MS products) ..".
The whole of corporate America seems to be currently digging their own credibility graves in this way. In the short-term, cheap deceitful strategies like fake movie fan sites, fake positive reviews, fake pro-product postings on online forums, fake "news" articles in television and newspaper media etc, all of these will in the short term increase brand "mindshare". In the longer term though, as more and more people start to realise they're being manipulated, public trust will erode to the point where people will no longer believe even genuine positive articles about a product.
When companies stop this BS, then maybe people might begin to trust your opinions again. Until then, its a one-way slide downhill.
Indeed, some good points.
Incidentally I don't use software for my tax returns, nor do I fill them out by hand. I pay my accountant to do them.
From your shallow comments I can guess how you are spending your "free" time.
Really? OK, lets hear your guesses, I doubt you're anywhere close to correct.
Ah, here in the Incorporated States, such sentiments clearly mark you as a thief
Ah, but I don't live in the States .. which is perhaps why I don't get it...?
Nonsense. Time on slashdot is recreation time, much like watching TV or going to the movies. So you're saying that anyone who makes time for recreational activities, that their time means nothing to them? How ludicrous. Nobody can spend every waking moment working, we all need a bit of rest and relaxation. I would argue that /. is at least more intellectual an activity than watching TV. So if you spend even half an hour a week watching TV, then your time means nothing to you?
Bull. I'm free to spend my spare time in any way I like. If I have ten "free hours" a week, I may opt to spend 2 of them doing taxes with software and the other 8 on /., or I may opt to spend all 10 hours doing my taxes by hand. The existence of free time doesn't imply that it is worthless. On the contrary, since I have so little of it, I value my free time very highly. Spending time doing low-concentration "vegetation" activities is important rest time. I'm so sick of people with your attitude that free time is up for grabs for any activity. Back at Univ I would often get this "since you're not doing anything right now, you can help me with my computer". "Me-time" is just that, "me-time". It doesn't mean that that time is AVAILABLE for doing work for other people, or for filling in my tax forms by hand. Anyone who is fairly busy would understand this.
Well, the statistic might be mathematically valid, but no matter how you look at it, its still an incredibly bloody pointless statistic.
This is worse. I find their we-are-better-than-anyone-else attitude very arrogant. They are basically saying "well since WE wouldn't even have a solution, NOBODY else on the planet can possibly be capable of coming up with a solution." This is like a physician saying that since HE doesn't know how to cure Geoffrey, there is no point in telling him, in the belief that no other doctor in the world might have a good idea about how to save Geoffrey.
Who knows, perhaps some Russian scientists could rig up something clever with a few leftover cold-war nukes to stop such a hypothetical asteroid. But I guess we'd never know now, since nobody else will now ever be given the chance to try come up with a solution. Because obviously if Geoffrey Sommers can't think up a solution, then nobody can.
Hmm.. it could of course be that Symantec, although they may have known about the worm, may not have known that it was going to be as big as it was. They probably find new worms all the time, and perhaps they saw it as "just another worm". Since the thing apparently ripped through the internet in about 10 minutes, or something ludicrous like that, it may anyway already have been too late once they realised that it was going to a big one.
I don't see why people expect companies to donate information that costs them to find
OK, right. So if I find a major security exploit in Symantec's antivirus products, I now don't see why I should be expected to provide that information to them. It was my manhours that were used to find the exploit. Heck, according to your reasoning, I even have a right to sell this information to, say, Symantec's competitors. Thats "my right", see, to "make money".
Apparently these days the "right" to make money trumps just about everything else in American society.
Wouldn't there be some sort of criminal negligence issue here though? Allegedly, they (a) knew in advance that this was coming and (b) knew it would do damage to many people and (c) had the capability of warning many of those people and (d) chose not to. Isn't there something in the law about this? If I know the car you're about to step into is rigged with explosives, and I choose not to tell you (for whatever reason) even though I could have warned you, surely I am still in the wrong somehow?
This is nuts. I often use at least two browsers. I use Mozilla for most browsing, but occasionally will also open IE if a page needs it. Furthermore, opening media files off the internet with that crappy Windows Media Player ALSO fetches files via HTTP but with a different browser identifier. So opening IE and MPlayer together will get you flagged by your ISP? Thats ludicrous.
Lastly, certain types of tasks REQUIRE many browsers to be used together. Ask any of the hundreds of thousands of people who do web page development. (At least, those who actually bother to check if their page works in anything other than IE). Every responsible web page developer, while coding HTML, typically tests their page in at least two browsers.
Personally, I think ISPs should just start selling what they're supposed to be selling, i.e. bandwidth and a (usually temporary) IP address. If they can't afford to do that at current prices under a flat pricing structure, then change the pricing structure, or offer less bandwidth. I don't see why two people doing casual, low-bandwidth-using web surfing through one NAT connection should be seen as worse than one user downloading huge files at full speed.
No no moderators, this is not informative, its a misunderstanding. The "vector" processing that turgid is talking about is the "3D math vector" (x,y,z), which more modern CPUs and GPUs have built-in optimized instructions for manipulating. The "vector" processing that zymano is talking about is an ENTIRELY different way of building graphics cards whereby you have an array of smaller, cheaper, simpler processes each dedicated to drawing particular portions of the screen. So instead of one humongous super-powerful chip trying to draw the whole screen (a la GeForceFX), you have a whole bunch of smaller chips, each drawing a different section of the screen, in parallel. The idea being that a smaller chip can draw, say, 1/32th of the screen in less time than a large processor can fill the entire screen, and since you'd have 32 processors working in parallel, the entire image would be drawn faster.
Some graphics card manufacturers were attempting to build video cards based on this idea, but to my knowledge there have been no mainstream successes.
Almost ditto here. I have 128 MB, and Mozilla is taking up 31 MB, with 5 pages open. I don't think I've ever seen it go over 40, except once when I loaded a 16 MB HTML file.
I occasionally use the history feature, if I am trying to get back to a site I visited recently but can't remember the URL, then it comes in handy. Otherwise, I don't really use it. I guess thats what its for though.
thegoldenear's comment though reminds of an incident some years back when I was browsing the job ads in a newspaper. The Java programming language at that time was three years old. This company was advertising a position that required a minimum of 5 years Java programming experience.
Signed, you mean like a credit card receipt? She may have paid in cash, true, but a no return policy is bordering on common sense for many things.
All I meant by this really was that if you are, say, standing in a retail store that sells lawnmowers, and before you buy it you are discussing the purchase with the owner, and he verbally just sort of "off-hand" tells you that if you buy it, and it doesn't work, then tough luck you're on your own, then, well, this may or may not be a verbal agreement of an alternate warranty arrangement, but it is going to be difficult for any one side to prove anything should it turn out that the lawnmower WAS broken, and you take the guy to court. The courts then have nothing but your word against the store owners. If the store owner wants to implement such a policy and have it stand up in court, it would be better to have some signed documents, and it should be made amply clear to any customers in the store before they make purchases that you offer no warranty whatsoever (e.g. lots of signs indicating as such).
Vote with your wallet. Don't buy things with EULAs inside.
Indeed.. luckily, this is slowly becoming easier. (As someone who is thinking about starting a business soon, and looking at the phenomenal licensing costs of Visual Studio .NET, Microsoft Office etc, I am MOST DEFINITELY looking at alternatives such OpenWatcom, MingW (gcc), OpenOffice.org, CVS, etc. OpenSource alternatives are really beginning to approach a quality that makes them feasible choices for my business (and in some cases have been of good quality for a long time). It is a bit sad though that the industry has been unable to regulate itself in a reasonable way within the capitalist framework -- all of their attempts at being too greedy and trying to grab too much are now forcing people to find solutions outside of conventional economic enterprise. If they had been willing to offer reasonable prices, reasonable terms, and good quality, then I would pay up and buy their products. In the longer term they are going to just keep losing business, and many will probably go under rather than let go of their greed).
You are correct that the implied warranty argument may have been a little "beside the point" here, because they product (crashes and software bugs and security holes aside) more or less does perform as functioned. This is a little subjective though, I would consider Windows an extremely broken and defective product, but most people seem to think that all the bugs are acceptable.
Because the programmers don't usually do graphics - you need a large team of professional artists to make good game graphics, something that OpenSource games don't seem to able to compete with, unfortunately. In a typical Id game you probably have less than 10 programmers and over 30 talented professional qualified artists working full-time. A game like BF 1942 also typically has over 30 full-time artists.
The programmers cannot "make" the game look good. Only the artists can do that. The programmer provides the technical means for the artists to be able to do what they do.
You are assuming everyone is trying to get into the city centre. I live about 20 km from the city centre (a city with about 2 million people), in an averagely-dense but rapidly growing urban area. Until recently most of the roads out this far were single lane, and there have been a LOT of traffic congestion problems. One by one they are doubling the roads, and each time it DEFINITELY helps ease congestion, often shaving more than half the commute time off. When there is only one lane, traffic backs up sometimes for kilometers all along the way, particularly at turnoffs, because nobody can go around when somebody wants to turn. Double the lane up, and people can go around, which eases up traffic a lot.
Most of these people are NOT trying to get into the city centre. The typical commute is about 10 km, to decentralised mini-CBDs outside of the city center. There are many office complexes around this +/- 10 km distance from the city centre. So widening the roads is universally helping traffic congestion.
What currently also happens is that the traffic has forced larger numbers of people to take long short-cuts through urban areas, which isn't nice for the home-owners there, but in some cases helps local businesses in such areas. (The opening of a new toll booth recently has pushed many commuters to go through some previously quiet neighboorhoods, which are experiencing mini economic booms). Widening the main routes definitely puts more people back onto them and out of the neighboorhoods.
Around here though there is extremely little public transport to speak of, so the only practical choice is usually to have ones own car. And people NEED to get to work. They are going to drive one way or another. So the ONLY solution is to widen the roads.
Interestingly though, the city council has pulled a few other tricks to try coax people to use alternative routes (and also to coax people to drive slower) .. one of which is that they modified the traffic light cycle times such that you get many more red lights along particular routes.