Finally, please, PLEASE Steve, simple admit that a two-button mouse (along with scroll well which also serves as a third button) is simply better than a single-button Apple mouse, and get on with it!!! A one-button mouse SUCKS!!!
I know that this is feeding the troll, but anyway:
the majority of mac users are dumbos that get frustrated with even 1 mousebutton. Adding 2 + a wheel would drive those users bananas. My mother loves her mac (among other reasons) for the simplicty of never having to ask me 'which mouse button is that, left or right ?'
The remainder of the mac community are nerds & freaks who don't mind paying 49$ for an optical 3button wheel mouse.
So tell me again, why should steve introduce a needlessly complex device when a simple, appropriate one exists for the dumbos, and a complex appropriate one exists for the nerds ?
many developers depend on them. I hardly ever send mail to such lists, but read all of them. Not really fair if they'd have to pay for sending me valuable information.
It's so silly to see so many complex anti spam solutions, if all we need is jurisdiction aruond the concept. The biggest issue with spam is that tere's no law forbidding it. Fix that, and trigger happy lawyers will take care of the problem.
being belgian, so am I !
we don't have much of a wine culture, dumbo. We're beer drinkers. Check out www.belgianbeer.com. We pratically invented the stuff.
20% to 30% is the max discount we get here. Dell gives far higher volume discounts for our university : I don't know the financial details, but *every machine* bought by univ money is a Dell. Project budgets can be spent anywhere offcourse, but univ techies will fix only Dells. Even if it's a dumb floppy drive install.
The sad part is that Apple is even losing in the univ hospital : "Ghasthuisberg" is the biggest hospital in belgium (it's huge for belgian norms. It's a small city on its own) and ran 50% macs about 10 years ago. Now that's perhaps 5%, mainly due to the price and lack of support from sales.
That sales support is painfull too : My dad, who is a prof at the univ, wanted 3 new flatpanel iMacs, standard model, nothing fancy. Guess what ? It took 4 weeks to ship them !!!!!
This is gonna be a very painful episode : my kids are in elementary school, and whenever computers have to be purchased, budget is usually limited at 100$ per machine. There's never a new PC purchased, as por that price they can get 5 second hand machines. Macs, being expensive even in second hand, completely falls out of the boat here.
Educational spending on computers is at a historical low in Belgium, and I figure most other contries too since the dot.com.bubble.burst.
No way there's an iMac in a classroom of a small school. Not even an eMac. And as we all now : elementary schools pave the path to highschools. What kids liearn at age 10, is what they want at age 15.
what's the status of the infinitely more amazing speech-to-text ? Being from belgium, and thus beiung scammed by Lernout&Hauspie who promised true S2T to be reality by 2000, I'm kinda sceptical towards it by now.
Will it ever be possible ? As far as I can tell, S2T is quite a bit more difficult then english->french translation for instance, and that still has a long way to go...
We've got this for quite a few years now in belgium. All small stores have cardreaders now. Parking meters, payphones, cola machines, even movie theaters. I rarely carry cash anymore. The only disadvantages so far are that it doesn't work (yet) outside belgium, and that the readers seem to be a bit more fragile than coin-operated machines. The coke machine in our building has a crashed card reader once every 2 week. But apparently the machine resets itself every day, so the next morning they're back OK.
For the merchants, the advantage is 2fold : no cash in the store so less attractive to thieves, but also there is no permanent connection needed with the bank : the cardreader can store the balance internally, and upload a transaction log at the end of the day. This makes proton payment a lot cheaper for the merchants (payment by visa costs a percentage, and payment by bankcard costs a fixed fee)
I never really understood the advantages of a DLL over a static lib in modern times.
In the old days, when diskspace & memory were precious goods, they made sense to share code. But today, what's the burden of 4MB extra app size compared to the DLL misery ?
Except for plugins, I see no reason why developers would need DLLs. Can anyone shed some light here ?
Aditionally, with digital content being copied, you don't notice it, and your stock won't be decreasing.
So you don't lose anything, but also don't notice not gaining anything either (loss of potential profit). IMHO the 'not notice' is the essential part here, because it circumvents human's inborn nature for greed.
There is a big difference : when Gutenberg introduced printing over scribe, the price of a book went down to 1% of its original value, but the amount of published books increased by factor 100.000 or so, resulting in 1000fold increase of profits.
In the case of online music vs CD, there is a yet-to-be-determined increase of copied audio files (an increase that still has to reach its peak) but the price of the good has dropped to zero% of the original. That means a net profit of 0$. Coming from a billion dollar industry, that hurts and the folks behind that industry will fight with all their power to stop the evolution. (not that that will work in the long run)
the ONLY solution is if someone comes up with a busines model that gives profit for the salesmen side. Right now, the profit is all on customer side, so there is no money to be made business-wise.
To make the prob worse : I fear that there is NO profitable model ! Any model that requires payment is doomed because it can not compete with Kazaa-like stuff. Any model with encryption is doomed because any encryption can be broken. Hell, in the end you could connect your audio-out to your microphone and record the damd thing the good old analogue-way! (with no environment noise offcourse)
the issue is that the Internet has made any digitally duplicatable resource worthless, just as light bulbs made candles worthless (except for cuddly types) and CDs made vinyl worthless.
Lie detectors said the same thing 20 years ago
on
Going Cyberpunk
·
· Score: 1
here's what google thinks about such classic lie detectors.
My guess is that in 20 years this chip will turn out to be a hoax tool that had people scentenced for nothing. I say drop it.
hm... you could be right about that, but such an attitude would not only be dictatorial indeed, it also clashes with the wannabe-billboard-of-the-nerd-community-attitude.
Let me explain : slashdot thrives on the horde of nerds that adhere to it. These nerds adhere to/. as a concept they themselves helped to grow into something amazing. They are the very food slashdot feeds on. If it wasn't for the nerds,/. wouldn't be where it is now. Rob recognises this (on his own website for instance) and embraces the community. But the/. editor flock goes further than this : they have an attitude which kinda claims some superiority and know-it-all when it comes to/. (not explicit, but not deniable either. I'm not eloquent enough to point it all out as I mean it, but I assume a regular reader understands what I mean. I'm not a native english speaker)
Basically what I'm trying to say is that the momentum of the/. website comes from the sheer amount of readers behind it, not the editors themselves. They hold the rudder, but we *are* the boat. Okay indeed, the rudder controls the boat, but any good captain rspects its boat. And if the boat cracks to much, it will be taken care of by a good captain.
With slashdot, I have the impression that we're on a leased boat. They *are* not the rudder anymore. They sold the rudder and te boat, and are now merely controlling it. and that's not a nice feeling.
Now I'm not saying that malda & co should worship their readers or anything, but a certain amount of grattitude and respect for the momentum that they receive from their reader base would be appropriate. And IMHO, grattitude is best expressed by doing your job with a sufficient amount of care and attention. Which I miss a bit...
"Offtopic" mod seems to be used improperly more often than not.
very true indeed.
This whole little subdiscussion is very likely to get moderated as offtopic, whereas the only consistent topic in the entire comments is the fact that it's a dupe, which is offtopic.
The whole issue basically comes down to wether slashdot is a "discussion site" or an "information site based on comments". If the main purpose of slashdot is to create a vast and useful archive of comments that can enlighten a visitor seraching for info on a "news for nerd" subject, then indeed we are offtopic. If on the other hand, slashdot is a forum in which nerds can discuss anything they consider nerdstuff, almost everything is on topic !
I suppose the best way is something in between, but right now, I have the impression the balance is shifted way to much towards the first type. Plus, as many of us have said, the biggest problem is the fact that due to the recursive nature of the problem, the problem itself can't be discussed on slashdot.
And that attitude is what we usually call censorship. Slashdot is more and more becoming a selfcensoring community. I've tried to find analogies in the real world, but fail to see one so far. The only thing I'm sure of, is that it is not a GoodThing(tm)
I don't understand how this gets moderated as 'funny'... Anyway, the fact that it reaches +5 means that moderators agree with it. Now if only the message gets thru to the editors:-(
Seriously taco & co : if once in a while someone posts trolls about dupes, you can mod them down and ignore them. But if 1 out of 5 posts gets a +5 remark, I think it really is time to consider actions.
At least say sumtin about it. Right now, the editor attitude "hu, can't hear ya" is seriously giving the impression that they don't give a flying fuck about it.
obligatory /.-ted remark
on
Cross-Site-TRACE
·
· Score: 2, Funny
highly popular blog
apparenlty a bit to popular right now:-)
Some sort of smart dump of every variable & call in your app at any point. (Offourse for a short period of time only to avoid overflowing your memory. For instance limited to the last 5 function calls)
This could allow you to replay a certain function with exact parameters as they were. I now often find myself repeating 5 minutes of clicking & typing to reproduce a certain function behavior of one line of code which *sometimes* crashes.
it crawls a measly 20fps on my GeForce ti4600. When this gFX comes out, I'll get one right away, even at 500$. I can afford it and it's tax-deductible. I want one cause I want the best.
Still a long way to go, but if they get it aquafied, MS might eventually get hurt. Offcourse, they'll change doc format faster than you can say 'blub'...
Slashdot Mirror
Finally, please, PLEASE Steve, simple admit that a two-button mouse (along with scroll well which also serves as a third button) is simply better than a single-button Apple mouse, and get on with it!!! A one-button mouse SUCKS!!!
:
I know that this is feeding the troll, but anyway
the majority of mac users are dumbos that get frustrated with even 1 mousebutton. Adding 2 + a wheel would drive those users bananas. My mother loves her mac (among other reasons) for the simplicty of never having to ask me 'which mouse button is that, left or right ?'
The remainder of the mac community are nerds & freaks who don't mind paying 49$ for an optical 3button wheel mouse.
So tell me again, why should steve introduce a needlessly complex device when a simple, appropriate one exists for the dumbos, and a complex appropriate one exists for the nerds ?
many developers depend on them. I hardly ever send mail to such lists, but read all of them. Not really fair if they'd have to pay for sending me valuable information.
It's so silly to see so many complex anti spam solutions, if all we need is jurisdiction aruond the concept. The biggest issue with spam is that tere's no law forbidding it. Fix that, and trigger happy lawyers will take care of the problem.
I am pouring all my Belgian wine down the toilet
being belgian, so am I !
we don't have much of a wine culture, dumbo. We're beer drinkers. Check out www.belgianbeer.com. We pratically invented the stuff.
Details may vary overseas.
You bet they do !
20% to 30% is the max discount we get here. Dell gives far higher volume discounts for our university : I don't know the financial details, but *every machine* bought by univ money is a Dell. Project budgets can be spent anywhere offcourse, but univ techies will fix only Dells. Even if it's a dumb floppy drive install.
The sad part is that Apple is even losing in the univ hospital : "Ghasthuisberg" is the biggest hospital in belgium (it's huge for belgian norms. It's a small city on its own) and ran 50% macs about 10 years ago. Now that's perhaps 5%, mainly due to the price and lack of support from sales.
That sales support is painfull too : My dad, who is a prof at the univ, wanted 3 new flatpanel iMacs, standard model, nothing fancy. Guess what ? It took 4 weeks to ship them !!!!!
Apple needs the education market back.
This is gonna be a very painful episode : my kids are in elementary school, and whenever computers have to be purchased, budget is usually limited at 100$ per machine. There's never a new PC purchased, as por that price they can get 5 second hand machines. Macs, being expensive even in second hand, completely falls out of the boat here.
Educational spending on computers is at a historical low in Belgium, and I figure most other contries too since the dot.com.bubble.burst.
No way there's an iMac in a classroom of a small school. Not even an eMac. And as we all now : elementary schools pave the path to highschools. What kids liearn at age 10, is what they want at age 15.
what's the status of the infinitely more amazing speech-to-text ? Being from belgium, and thus beiung scammed by Lernout&Hauspie who promised true S2T to be reality by 2000, I'm kinda sceptical towards it by now.
Will it ever be possible ? As far as I can tell, S2T is quite a bit more difficult then english->french translation for instance, and that still has a long way to go...
We've got this for quite a few years now in belgium. All small stores have cardreaders now. Parking meters, payphones, cola machines, even movie theaters. I rarely carry cash anymore. The only disadvantages so far are that it doesn't work (yet) outside belgium, and that the readers seem to be a bit more fragile than coin-operated machines. The coke machine in our building has a crashed card reader once every 2 week. But apparently the machine resets itself every day, so the next morning they're back OK.
For the merchants, the advantage is 2fold : no cash in the store so less attractive to thieves, but also there is no permanent connection needed with the bank : the cardreader can store the balance internally, and upload a transaction log at the end of the day. This makes proton payment a lot cheaper for the merchants (payment by visa costs a percentage, and payment by bankcard costs a fixed fee)
Not everything needs to be useful.
That's ridiculous. Hobbies must be useful. That's why we all collect stamps & hotelsoap.
it's not that hard : go to another machine and write down the url (http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/camino/releases/Camino -0.7.dmg.gz)
and then use curl or wget in terminal.
I never really understood the advantages of a DLL over a static lib in modern times.
In the old days, when diskspace & memory were precious goods, they made sense to share code. But today, what's the burden of 4MB extra app size compared to the DLL misery ?
Except for plugins, I see no reason why developers would need DLLs. Can anyone shed some light here ?
Aditionally, with digital content being copied, you don't notice it, and your stock won't be decreasing.
So you don't lose anything, but also don't notice not gaining anything either (loss of potential profit). IMHO the 'not notice' is the essential part here, because it circumvents human's inborn nature for greed.
There is a big difference : when Gutenberg introduced printing over scribe, the price of a book went down to 1% of its original value, but the amount of published books increased by factor 100.000 or so, resulting in 1000fold increase of profits.
In the case of online music vs CD, there is a yet-to-be-determined increase of copied audio files (an increase that still has to reach its peak) but the price of the good has dropped to zero% of the original. That means a net profit of 0$. Coming from a billion dollar industry, that hurts and the folks behind that industry will fight with all their power to stop the evolution. (not that that will work in the long run)
the ONLY solution is if someone comes up with a busines model that gives profit for the salesmen side. Right now, the profit is all on customer side, so there is no money to be made business-wise.
To make the prob worse : I fear that there is NO profitable model ! Any model that requires payment is doomed because it can not compete with Kazaa-like stuff. Any model with encryption is doomed because any encryption can be broken. Hell, in the end you could connect your audio-out to your microphone and record the damd thing the good old analogue-way! (with no environment noise offcourse)
the issue is that the Internet has made any digitally duplicatable resource worthless, just as light bulbs made candles worthless (except for cuddly types) and CDs made vinyl worthless.
here's what google thinks about such classic lie detectors.
My guess is that in 20 years this chip will turn out to be a hoax tool that had people scentenced for nothing. I say drop it.
I seriously can not imagine such stuff ever to happen in Belgium, and perhaps not even in Europe...
Has anyone on the ancient continent ever been blackmailed like this ?
wow, that would make 98+99.9+2 = 199,9 percent of al webpages obsolete.
In related news, Google inc has 10.000 80GB harddisks for sale. Willing to trade for a floppy.
You mean Jackie Chan kicked off the race to build the atom bomb ?
That explains the broken foot...
hm... you could be right about that, but such an attitude would not only be dictatorial indeed, it also clashes with the wannabe-billboard-of-the-nerd-community-attitude.
/. as a concept they themselves helped to grow into something amazing. They are the very food slashdot feeds on. If it wasn't for the nerds, /. wouldn't be where it is now. Rob recognises this (on his own website for instance) and embraces the community. But the /. editor flock goes further than this : they have an attitude which kinda claims some superiority and know-it-all when it comes to /. (not explicit, but not deniable either. I'm not eloquent enough to point it all out as I mean it, but I assume a regular reader understands what I mean. I'm not a native english speaker)
/. website comes from the sheer amount of readers behind it, not the editors themselves. They hold the rudder, but we *are* the boat. Okay indeed, the rudder controls the boat, but any good captain rspects its boat. And if the boat cracks to much, it will be taken care of by a good captain.
Let me explain : slashdot thrives on the horde of nerds that adhere to it. These nerds adhere to
Basically what I'm trying to say is that the momentum of the
With slashdot, I have the impression that we're on a leased boat. They *are* not the rudder anymore. They sold the rudder and te boat, and are now merely controlling it. and that's not a nice feeling.
Now I'm not saying that malda & co should worship their readers or anything, but a certain amount of grattitude and respect for the momentum that they receive from their reader base would be appropriate. And IMHO, grattitude is best expressed by doing your job with a sufficient amount of care and attention. Which I miss a bit...
Doh... I ramble too much. Sorry.
"Offtopic" mod seems to be used improperly more often than not.
very true indeed.
This whole little subdiscussion is very likely to get moderated as offtopic, whereas the only consistent topic in the entire comments is the fact that it's a dupe, which is offtopic.
The whole issue basically comes down to wether slashdot is a "discussion site" or an "information site based on comments". If the main purpose of slashdot is to create a vast and useful archive of comments that can enlighten a visitor seraching for info on a "news for nerd" subject, then indeed we are offtopic. If on the other hand, slashdot is a forum in which nerds can discuss anything they consider nerdstuff, almost everything is on topic !
I suppose the best way is something in between, but right now, I have the impression the balance is shifted way to much towards the first type. Plus, as many of us have said, the biggest problem is the fact that due to the recursive nature of the problem, the problem itself can't be discussed on slashdot.
And that attitude is what we usually call censorship. Slashdot is more and more becoming a selfcensoring community. I've tried to find analogies in the real world, but fail to see one so far. The only thing I'm sure of, is that it is not a GoodThing(tm)
I don't understand how this gets moderated as 'funny'... Anyway, the fact that it reaches +5 means that moderators agree with it. Now if only the message gets thru to the editors :-(
Seriously taco & co : if once in a while someone posts trolls about dupes, you can mod them down and ignore them. But if 1 out of 5 posts gets a +5 remark, I think it really is time to consider actions.
At least say sumtin about it. Right now, the editor attitude "hu, can't hear ya" is seriously giving the impression that they don't give a flying fuck about it.
highly popular blog
apparenlty a bit to popular right now:-)
Some sort of smart dump of every variable & call in your app at any point. (Offourse for a short period of time only to avoid overflowing your memory. For instance limited to the last 5 function calls)
This could allow you to replay a certain function with exact parameters as they were. I now often find myself repeating 5 minutes of clicking & typing to reproduce a certain function behavior of one line of code which *sometimes* crashes.
Someone locate Ralsky & Co !
Doom 3
it crawls a measly 20fps on my GeForce ti4600. When this gFX comes out, I'll get one right away, even at 500$. I can afford it and it's tax-deductible. I want one cause I want the best.
a team of researchers say that they are 95% sure Zsa Zsa Gabor is between 86 and 172 years old
more detailed schedule found here
Still a long way to go, but if they get it aquafied, MS might eventually get hurt. Offcourse, they'll change doc format faster than you can say 'blub'...