I have Vista and it's really nice. I have all new hardware so it just works(tm), and when people talk about UAC always being in their face: well, the only time I see it is when I go into an OS configuration screen or I'm installing software ie, not very much so I don't get that complaint (although they could be running a lot of applications in XP compatibility mode - maybe). It's faster subjectively than XP on the same box (WinAmp loads a *lot* faster) maybe thats just because no matter what I tried (drivers, voodoo, etc) XP just wouldn't recognize my SATA HD (and I'm not an idiot - I know how to configure a computer) as anything but IDE where Vista sees it as SATA out of the box. And I'm an early adopter - XP has 6 years of patches to make it uber-stable. Vista's about to get SP1 and the fact of life is that it's only going to get better as it matures and as everyone just "gets it" with their new computers. When Windows 7 comes out we'll probably see the same situation: Linux at 2% market share (or in Slashspeak, 200% increase!!!), Vista running the major bulk of computers (and uber-stable by then), and Apple for people who wear stylish glasses (or just want a suite of applications to come with their computer). And people will complain about how Vista is so much better compared to Windows 7 then too.
Hasn't he been disbarred yet? Seriously if it was you or I going on like this month after month we'd probably at least get a month commited for evaluation. He's got something wrong with him and instead of looking inward to see what it is he projects it outward and thinks everyone needs to be saved from the demons that plague him.
I hardly ever rent movies, what I'm talking about is buying them. With my computer hooked up to my big-screen tv it makes it a very nice experience to have a movie "jukebox" at my disposal. And I don't want to re-buy them just because I've found a better operating system for my home-theatre-PC. DRM in the buying-context is an extra risk - what about 5 years from now, 10?. Newer versions of even the same operating system may not support the old-and-clunkly DRM systems of today and that leads right back to having to re-buy what you've already bought. And I'm not going to do that.
I refuse to download anything that has DRM on it. Especially considering that right *now* I buy my DVD's through retail channels and rip them myself (my country doesn't have DMCA idiocy preventing that) to the format of my choice. And when I switch around operating systems I don't fall into the trap of "sorry you're unsupported". Buying retail and ripping myself is what suits me best right now. Maybe when online retailers realize that DRM actually does nothing to stop piracy and only pisses off the people who actually do buy the product they'll drop it. And when/if they do drop DRM then I'll buy online instead of retail.
I actually stopped watching TV a few years ago, sure I watch the very occasional program but usually I don't watch anything at all. I average less than an hour a week watching tv and when I do it's turning on the news for 10 minutes every three or four days. I believe that I'm actually more fully engaged with the Internet and gaming as they are active forms of entertainment and having made the transition to them, well, I really don't even miss tv all that much.
Well, as more and more content is released under permissive licenses and that pool is getting larger everyday and is irrevocable short of making giving away your effort illegal... I guess we'll all turn into small contributers that others remix into great works. And in turn we'll remix others contributions into our own (maybe great) works. Kind of like a cottage industry on steroids. And we have the great tubes to thank by reducing the barrier to entry and more importantly providing a means to replicate information effortlessly and cheaply.
Where does one find information on the latest government travesties? Seriously, torture, detention without trial, ignoring checks and balances, elevation of corporate interests above citizens interests, lies, more lies, and it just seems to be getting worse each day. I'd like to be pointed to a resource where I could just get some facts for fodder to incorporate into a ye olde letter to the editor: if enough people could have their attention pulled away from the latest episode of Seinfeld for just a moment maybe the US could reclaim a bit of the integrity it used to have. A concerted effort by many citizens writing letters to many editors bypassing the politicians who don't seem to care about whats right if it doesn't get votes or donations may be one facet of a solution to stop America's current decline. If you had told me ten years ago what is going on today in the US I would have laughed in your face now I just shake my head in dismay. Time's archive of political cartoons is depressing but the events that inspire them just don't seem to be getting the attention they should demand in media and dialogue.
For now the biggest advantage of multiple cores is the ability to run multiple applications with each running at full speed. Within each application the problems get a lot more complex, using current algorithms many tasks are not easily subdivided. With data that is inherently paralizable it's pretty easy - each pixel on your display is relatively independent of the others and drawing on a common dataset. However the majority of other areas are not so easy. Generally, how do you take an algorithm and divide it in such a way that step A is separate from step B? Especially if the input of step B depends on the output of step A. Now that multicores are becoming common more research will be done in coming up with a fundementally new approach to algorithms themselves but two cores absolutely does not mean two times speed improvements - some algorithms simply cannot be divided with our current level of understanding.
Inevitability, Mr. Anderson.
on
NYSE Moves to Linux
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Linux this, KDE that, Wikipedia here... What all of Free has in common is "Openness" - imagine twenty years from now: I believe that more and more content will move towards a modern variation of the "stone soup" parable until its the defacto standard. Openness allows the rapid creation and innovation of practically anything under the sun. And that pool only gets larger everyday. The only thing that can stop it is if government explicity steps in and makes giving away your effort illegal - other than that it is simply inevitable, give or take twenty years - that Openness will be the primary regulating force for all manner of content.
We're not evolving faster, the increased population size just means we can explore a larger portion of the evolutionary search space at one time than we were able to previously. There is still the minimal time between reproduction(s) which currently stands at about ~14 years (not taking into account morality) which is needed to introduce change(s) into the population. And Evolution is based on negative feedback, we don't evolve towards something - everything that isn't suitable dies.
This is welcome in that it a step towards enforcing Universal Rights by our value system not rules to interpret of anothers. Universal Rights are something we fought hard for here and on principle alone we should not compromise them elsewhere because they aren't enlightened (from my perspective) enough yet.
I just finished reading The Wisdom of Crowds. Great book, highly recommended. Anyway in the context of group decisions the book postulates that one of the fundamental requirements to make good group decisions is diversity. Without it you end up in the "me too" situation where opinions cascade through the group simply because there are less building blocks to improve on. With less diversity there is less granularity to approaching a problem leading to situations where a groups decision doesn't fit the original problem as well as it could have.
Right now the book is just a proposal - it will take much more time to empirically test the ideas put forth in it.
Apathy is the problem, in a by-gone age people would believe that the politicians stood for something. Today everyone knows that they're shills and only pay lip-service so no-one votes. I say buy guns as an insurance against possible outcomes, I don't trust the group to prevent a future government I would find abhorrent. So stock up. There are obviously too many guns loose in the US for the government to round up all of them - and it only takes one gun to ruin an appropriate persons day. Military surplus stores are very useful as well, I don't know how easy it would be to get it today given the climate but I do have an original copy of the US Militaries "TM31-210 Improvised Munitions Handbook" and I would not be against scanning that puppy. The US isn't to the point where I personally would consider anything drastic at all but at the same time I'm appalled by the current leaderships blatant disrespect for the very principles that make the US one of the greatest nations to live in.
Franklin D. Roosevelt said on fascism in 1942:
"The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power."
Um, Corporatism anyone? The problem with history is that those who don't remember it drag the rest of us through it again and again. Corporate power is on the rise in the US and that very definately diminishes individual ability to effect change in the course of government.
Taken individually all the measures that are being enacted in the USA over the last few years are almost laughable. But together, I just can't believe that more organizations like the ACLU or even the EFF aren't screaming from the rooftops about the encroachment on liberties! I mean really, it's the USA not the USSA: what happened to the land of the free? It seems to be going down the proverbial tubes, when will the madness stop? Will the US go fully down the road to facism?? Just buy guns, lots of them. Just in case.
I'm all for expending steel instead of lives. The only misgiving I would have at all is domestic uses of these technologies. Not SWAT or special response situations but more general use. At home I believe the final barrier to misuse is a real human being who says: "You know what? I'm not going to pull the f*cking trigger.". Without this as the ultimate safe-guard at home then it entertains the very real possibility of a hostile hijacking of liberties.
I've run Linux as my only OS for a whole year once, but now I'm back to XP simply because I like to play my games. I see no compelling reason to upgrade to Vista - I don't have DX10 hardware and WindowBlinds makes XP look almost as nice. Right now I run Linux in VMWare and I really hope someday that I can switch to Linux fully as my booted OS and run my Windows games in VMWare or equivalent! Games are the *only* reason I still use Windows, Linux is much more fun to tweak for a person like me!
They are obviously blinding themselves to the true nature of the Universe! God didn't create it, we did about 7.2 million years from now! And I can't believe nobodies brought up the instrument of the creation, his noodly appendage himself!
How hard would it be to create a xml-schema type system where your document editor of choice could just download the latest "definitions" or "filters" to load from or save to the format of the day? We're connected (to get the updates) from now until we go extinct so an active system could keep moving with the times instead of needing to be redefined every ten years!
The Supreme Court in the states has ruled that patents that are combinations of existing inventions or would have come about anyway are not valid. Geez! Didn't Sun Tzu demonstrate the 'divide and conquer' method like millenia ago? Just because you combine it with a computer network does not make it new or novel.
Used to be is relevent because it highlights that things change. When it comes to striking a balance between the common good and the current situation we're not perfect - we may not get it right all the time. Crypto might need to be relegated back to a subset of specific uses like financial transactions. Privacy is really a blanket for activity where you don't agree with the law or would be embarrassed. If the laws are just and you keep your dirty laundry in your head and off public networks privacy concerns become less of an issue.
Playing fair would be enforced outside of what the user has access to - on the network not their machine.
Cooperation would not be neccessary from other countries, Bit-Torrent/file-sharing type traffic could be blocked from outside the sovereignty of a nation - in effect an electronic "passport" could enforce said nations laws beginning at their borders. A chilling example would be China, the reason their "great firewall" doesn't work is because they let their citizens use a US TCP/IP stack - they are not enforcing their sovereignty.
Slashdot Mirror
I have Vista and it's really nice. I have all new hardware so it just works(tm), and when people talk about UAC always being in their face: well, the only time I see it is when I go into an OS configuration screen or I'm installing software ie, not very much so I don't get that complaint (although they could be running a lot of applications in XP compatibility mode - maybe). It's faster subjectively than XP on the same box (WinAmp loads a *lot* faster) maybe thats just because no matter what I tried (drivers, voodoo, etc) XP just wouldn't recognize my SATA HD (and I'm not an idiot - I know how to configure a computer) as anything but IDE where Vista sees it as SATA out of the box. And I'm an early adopter - XP has 6 years of patches to make it uber-stable. Vista's about to get SP1 and the fact of life is that it's only going to get better as it matures and as everyone just "gets it" with their new computers. When Windows 7 comes out we'll probably see the same situation: Linux at 2% market share (or in Slashspeak, 200% increase!!!), Vista running the major bulk of computers (and uber-stable by then), and Apple for people who wear stylish glasses (or just want a suite of applications to come with their computer). And people will complain about how Vista is so much better compared to Windows 7 then too.
Hasn't he been disbarred yet? Seriously if it was you or I going on like this month after month we'd probably at least get a month commited for evaluation. He's got something wrong with him and instead of looking inward to see what it is he projects it outward and thinks everyone needs to be saved from the demons that plague him.
I hardly ever rent movies, what I'm talking about is buying them. With my computer hooked up to my big-screen tv it makes it a very nice experience to have a movie "jukebox" at my disposal. And I don't want to re-buy them just because I've found a better operating system for my home-theatre-PC. DRM in the buying-context is an extra risk - what about 5 years from now, 10?. Newer versions of even the same operating system may not support the old-and-clunkly DRM systems of today and that leads right back to having to re-buy what you've already bought. And I'm not going to do that.
I refuse to download anything that has DRM on it. Especially considering that right *now* I buy my DVD's through retail channels and rip them myself (my country doesn't have DMCA idiocy preventing that) to the format of my choice. And when I switch around operating systems I don't fall into the trap of "sorry you're unsupported". Buying retail and ripping myself is what suits me best right now. Maybe when online retailers realize that DRM actually does nothing to stop piracy and only pisses off the people who actually do buy the product they'll drop it. And when/if they do drop DRM then I'll buy online instead of retail.
I actually stopped watching TV a few years ago, sure I watch the very occasional program but usually I don't watch anything at all. I average less than an hour a week watching tv and when I do it's turning on the news for 10 minutes every three or four days. I believe that I'm actually more fully engaged with the Internet and gaming as they are active forms of entertainment and having made the transition to them, well, I really don't even miss tv all that much.
"What will happen then?"
Well, as more and more content is released under permissive licenses and that pool is getting larger everyday and is irrevocable short of making giving away your effort illegal... I guess we'll all turn into small contributers that others remix into great works. And in turn we'll remix others contributions into our own (maybe great) works. Kind of like a cottage industry on steroids. And we have the great tubes to thank by reducing the barrier to entry and more importantly providing a means to replicate information effortlessly and cheaply.
Where does one find information on the latest government travesties? Seriously, torture, detention without trial, ignoring checks and balances, elevation of corporate interests above citizens interests, lies, more lies, and it just seems to be getting worse each day. I'd like to be pointed to a resource where I could just get some facts for fodder to incorporate into a ye olde letter to the editor: if enough people could have their attention pulled away from the latest episode of Seinfeld for just a moment maybe the US could reclaim a bit of the integrity it used to have. A concerted effort by many citizens writing letters to many editors bypassing the politicians who don't seem to care about whats right if it doesn't get votes or donations may be one facet of a solution to stop America's current decline. If you had told me ten years ago what is going on today in the US I would have laughed in your face now I just shake my head in dismay. Time's archive of political cartoons is depressing but the events that inspire them just don't seem to be getting the attention they should demand in media and dialogue.
For now the biggest advantage of multiple cores is the ability to run multiple applications with each running at full speed. Within each application the problems get a lot more complex, using current algorithms many tasks are not easily subdivided. With data that is inherently paralizable it's pretty easy - each pixel on your display is relatively independent of the others and drawing on a common dataset. However the majority of other areas are not so easy. Generally, how do you take an algorithm and divide it in such a way that step A is separate from step B? Especially if the input of step B depends on the output of step A. Now that multicores are becoming common more research will be done in coming up with a fundementally new approach to algorithms themselves but two cores absolutely does not mean two times speed improvements - some algorithms simply cannot be divided with our current level of understanding.
Linux this, KDE that, Wikipedia here... What all of Free has in common is "Openness" - imagine twenty years from now: I believe that more and more content will move towards a modern variation of the "stone soup" parable until its the defacto standard. Openness allows the rapid creation and innovation of practically anything under the sun. And that pool only gets larger everyday. The only thing that can stop it is if government explicity steps in and makes giving away your effort illegal - other than that it is simply inevitable, give or take twenty years - that Openness will be the primary regulating force for all manner of content.
We're not evolving faster, the increased population size just means we can explore a larger portion of the evolutionary search space at one time than we were able to previously. There is still the minimal time between reproduction(s) which currently stands at about ~14 years (not taking into account morality) which is needed to introduce change(s) into the population. And Evolution is based on negative feedback, we don't evolve towards something - everything that isn't suitable dies.
This is welcome in that it a step towards enforcing Universal Rights by our value system not rules to interpret of anothers. Universal Rights are something we fought hard for here and on principle alone we should not compromise them elsewhere because they aren't enlightened (from my perspective) enough yet.
:) Tongue in cheek or do you really mean it! ;)
I just finished reading The Wisdom of Crowds. Great book, highly recommended. Anyway in the context of group decisions the book postulates that one of the fundamental requirements to make good group decisions is diversity. Without it you end up in the "me too" situation where opinions cascade through the group simply because there are less building blocks to improve on. With less diversity there is less granularity to approaching a problem leading to situations where a groups decision doesn't fit the original problem as well as it could have.
Right now the book is just a proposal - it will take much more time to empirically test the ideas put forth in it.
Apathy is the problem, in a by-gone age people would believe that the politicians stood for something. Today everyone knows that they're shills and only pay lip-service so no-one votes. I say buy guns as an insurance against possible outcomes, I don't trust the group to prevent a future government I would find abhorrent. So stock up. There are obviously too many guns loose in the US for the government to round up all of them - and it only takes one gun to ruin an appropriate persons day. Military surplus stores are very useful as well, I don't know how easy it would be to get it today given the climate but I do have an original copy of the US Militaries "TM31-210 Improvised Munitions Handbook" and I would not be against scanning that puppy. The US isn't to the point where I personally would consider anything drastic at all but at the same time I'm appalled by the current leaderships blatant disrespect for the very principles that make the US one of the greatest nations to live in.
Franklin D. Roosevelt said on fascism in 1942:
"The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power."
Um, Corporatism anyone? The problem with history is that those who don't remember it drag the rest of us through it again and again. Corporate power is on the rise in the US and that very definately diminishes individual ability to effect change in the course of government.
Taken individually all the measures that are being enacted in the USA over the last few years are almost laughable. But together, I just can't believe that more organizations like the ACLU or even the EFF aren't screaming from the rooftops about the encroachment on liberties! I mean really, it's the USA not the USSA: what happened to the land of the free? It seems to be going down the proverbial tubes, when will the madness stop? Will the US go fully down the road to facism?? Just buy guns, lots of them. Just in case.
I'm all for expending steel instead of lives. The only misgiving I would have at all is domestic uses of these technologies. Not SWAT or special response situations but more general use. At home I believe the final barrier to misuse is a real human being who says: "You know what? I'm not going to pull the f*cking trigger.". Without this as the ultimate safe-guard at home then it entertains the very real possibility of a hostile hijacking of liberties.
I've run Linux as my only OS for a whole year once, but now I'm back to XP simply because I like to play my games. I see no compelling reason to upgrade to Vista - I don't have DX10 hardware and WindowBlinds makes XP look almost as nice. Right now I run Linux in VMWare and I really hope someday that I can switch to Linux fully as my booted OS and run my Windows games in VMWare or equivalent! Games are the *only* reason I still use Windows, Linux is much more fun to tweak for a person like me!
They are obviously blinding themselves to the true nature of the Universe! God didn't create it, we did about 7.2 million years from now! And I can't believe nobodies brought up the instrument of the creation, his noodly appendage himself!
How hard would it be to create a xml-schema type system where your document editor of choice could just download the latest "definitions" or "filters" to load from or save to the format of the day? We're connected (to get the updates) from now until we go extinct so an active system could keep moving with the times instead of needing to be redefined every ten years!
Do you want me to Get Off Your Lawn too? Creativty and imagination skills *are* improved with interactive fiction.
Buy the kid a Wii and Super Mario Galaxy and he'll get a load more longevity out of it as he can buy *new* games when he's over SMG!
...Not if you pass on the hookers and cocaine. Pick up a guitar, press record, play a song, upload to the Internet...
I was thinking more of the 6GB game instead of a 5MB mp3 but you are right for music: the barriers are lower.
The Supreme Court in the states has ruled that patents that are combinations of existing inventions or would have come about anyway are not valid. Geez! Didn't Sun Tzu demonstrate the 'divide and conquer' method like millenia ago? Just because you combine it with a computer network does not make it new or novel.
Used to be is relevent because it highlights that things change. When it comes to striking a balance between the common good and the current situation we're not perfect - we may not get it right all the time. Crypto might need to be relegated back to a subset of specific uses like financial transactions. Privacy is really a blanket for activity where you don't agree with the law or would be embarrassed. If the laws are just and you keep your dirty laundry in your head and off public networks privacy concerns become less of an issue.
Playing fair would be enforced outside of what the user has access to - on the network not their machine.
Cooperation would not be neccessary from other countries, Bit-Torrent/file-sharing type traffic could be blocked from outside the sovereignty of a nation - in effect an electronic "passport" could enforce said nations laws beginning at their borders. A chilling example would be China, the reason their "great firewall" doesn't work is because they let their citizens use a US TCP/IP stack - they are not enforcing their sovereignty.