I live in Russia and I have to say that the news source cited in the summary is questionable at best, so I wouldn't rely on it. However, shuttle rusting in a junk heap is pretty believable:)
There were two of them built back then, and the only one that actually was in space is an exposition in amusement park "Gorky Park": Here is one of the photos.
Well, I have no way to prove it for sure, but I do feel that Counter Strike, Quake and CoD helped me to get better at real world navigation. I was having huge troubles using maps and getting grasp of "where am I". Then (in my adult life -- 20+) I bought myself a good gaming PC and started playing action games. At first, I sucked most at the same thing: navigation. Radar was absolutely useless to me, as I had problems finding the simplest paths.
But now, I'm pretty good at it. And in real life too.
Perhaps Big Brother is precisely what we, as a civilization, need in order to realize that it's a horrible thing to live like that. After all, experience is a good teacher.
I have a couple of bad news for you, named Hitler and Stalin. Probable many more can get into this list.
If experience really did teach us something, this shit would not be happening right now at all.
This lawsuit boggles my mind. I'm sure the guys running Oracle are pretty smart. Can't they see that no matter the outcome of the lawsuit, they are losing big on reputation and client lock-in just by pursuing it? Am I missing some great strategic outcome Oracle is hoping for?
I don't think Oracle is going to lose any reputation, because the way they are behaving right now is exactly how they have earned their "current" reputation. It is exactly what their shareholders expect of them, so while they do act like jerks, if will be foolish for them to act otherwise.
On the other hand, if you were going to distribute CP in a big way, what better cover for all that infrastructure than a white-knight expose-the-evil site? They come after you for the CP, and conspiracy theorists the world over kick up a stink about cover-ups. Who's to say this "Insurance" file isn't actually a huge stack of CP that's being decrypted by paedophiles the world over as we speak?
Personally, I think that's all a bit tinfoil-hat, but it's always possible.
This just changes general public's opinion on the subject, not the fact that you are still going to jail.
The news is OK, IMO, but the reporting is terrible: no pictures, no article, just the results tables. I was actually hoping to see a video of some awesome moves and the pictures from the event to get the feeling of it, but.. well, keep googling...
I wonder if this could be as big and as interesting(for the geek community) a fight as SCO v Novell
I'm sure that in ~10 years (when this one gets settled) somebody will be able to write an exciting and full of intrigue 2k words article about it, but the process itself is boring. May be their PR teams' fight will add a little spice, but still... boring.
GUIs aren't magic - they are just bits visible to the user: read and play and you realize they are trivial.
I see you've never done any serious GUI development, if you think it is trivial. I did my share of core, DB, system programming and I have to say that GUI is *by far* the hardest part for implementation. Let me explain why.
No clearly defined protocols. Users do stuff. They do it in pretty much unpredictable and quite often unreasonable way, with different pace. You just can't rely on *anything* and have to check every step the user takes. What if he gets distracted in the middle of some several-step-dialog and session expires? What if he, on the other hand, clicks buttons too quickly and mutually exclusive actions are started? What if this is a malicious user? etc. etc. etc. GUI programmer is the one checking and validating the data before passing it to the core, which, in effect, works in a "safe zone".
Number of controls is overwhelming. Right now in your browser window you can *literally* see *hundreds* of controls, each of them listening to ~20 events. There are again literally thousands of possible combinations of states for these controls and foreseeing every one of them is impossible.
Automatic testing is next to impossible. See above. You just can't emulate a user.
GUI is the only visible part. You'd have to look into *every bug* of the application, before delegating it to core/DB/whatever team, because to the user and to the tester every bug is the GUI bug.
It is always your fault. When something goes wrong in the core and it functions improperly on some input or some feature does not work right, in 90% cases you will be the one "quickly" fixing it, by installing some "temporary" hooks, because the core team needs another month to fix it properly.
So, you see, GUI development, while may be not so math/science intensive (which I suspect is your definition of "hard"), is pretty hard to do, even if you know how to handle it.
In CIS countries (Russia, Ukraine, etc.) ICQ is the most popular messenger. I don't like it, but that is what I have to stick to here for the same reason you are sticking to MSN.
freelancers in Ukraine will have several choices: stop doing freelance work, start working illegally, become a full-fledged company subject to multiple cumbersome rules for taxation, or leave the country.
As a ukrainian I can easily guess which option my fellow citizens will choose. And I'm not proud of it...
Letting the free market sort it out, with some companies offering convenience and none dedicated to privacy,...
There, fixed that for you.
Seriously, though, how many companies do you know that "dedicated to privacy"? Free market leads companies in the direction of money and coincidentally this direction is the opposite of privacy, because nobody cares [I hope I can add "yet" here]
So, basically, you have to options: go with the flow and give up privacy or stick with the privacy and become an "antisocial freak". Most slashdotters, though, already made that choice when they were considering career options.:)
The wrong thing in this picture is that you assume that I don't use it because it lacks *this exact feature*.
I don't use it because it lack a bunch of other features: NoScript, CookieSafe. Xmarks also don't work for me (and yes, I don't bother to figure out why), haven't tried the port of firebug yet, but several extensions' fiasco don't give me much of a hope.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention that this will be fixed in a matter of months.
I believe that gyroscope thingy you are talking about is called "powerball": http://www.powerballs.com/
I live in Russia and I have to say that the news source cited in the summary is questionable at best, so I wouldn't rely on it. However, shuttle rusting in a junk heap is pretty believable :)
There were two of them built back then, and the only one that actually was in space is an exposition in amusement park "Gorky Park": Here is one of the photos.
So, um, wanna play a game on my iPad while we wait ?
I would love to! Does you iPad run Modern Warfare 2?
Wow, this is cool! Whether they succeed or not, I kind of hope this is the way social networking will be in the future.
The same topic covered at arstechnica and the article explicitly states that improvement was ONLY in speed. I think I trust ars more on this one...
Well, I have no way to prove it for sure, but I do feel that Counter Strike, Quake and CoD helped me to get better at real world navigation. I was having huge troubles using maps and getting grasp of "where am I". Then (in my adult life -- 20+) I bought myself a good gaming PC and started playing action games. At first, I sucked most at the same thing: navigation. Radar was absolutely useless to me, as I had problems finding the simplest paths.
But now, I'm pretty good at it. And in real life too.
Perhaps Big Brother is precisely what we, as a civilization, need in order to realize that it's a horrible thing to live like that. After all, experience is a good teacher.
I have a couple of bad news for you, named Hitler and Stalin. Probable many more can get into this list.
If experience really did teach us something, this shit would not be happening right now at all.
I'm not holding my breath for companies to start migrating *to* NoSQL
This lawsuit boggles my mind. I'm sure the guys running Oracle are pretty smart. Can't they see that no matter the outcome of the lawsuit, they are losing big on reputation and client lock-in just by pursuing it? Am I missing some great strategic outcome Oracle is hoping for?
I don't think Oracle is going to lose any reputation, because the way they are behaving right now is exactly how they have earned their "current" reputation. It is exactly what their shareholders expect of them, so while they do act like jerks, if will be foolish for them to act otherwise.
On the other hand, if you were going to distribute CP in a big way, what better cover for all that infrastructure than a white-knight expose-the-evil site? They come after you for the CP, and conspiracy theorists the world over kick up a stink about cover-ups. Who's to say this "Insurance" file isn't actually a huge stack of CP that's being decrypted by paedophiles the world over as we speak?
Personally, I think that's all a bit tinfoil-hat, but it's always possible.
This just changes general public's opinion on the subject, not the fact that you are still going to jail.
The news is OK, IMO, but the reporting is terrible: no pictures, no article, just the results tables. I was actually hoping to see a video of some awesome moves and the pictures from the event to get the feeling of it, but.. well, keep googling...
I wonder if this could be as big and as interesting(for the geek community) a fight as SCO v Novell
I'm sure that in ~10 years (when this one gets settled) somebody will be able to write an exciting and full of intrigue 2k words article about it, but the process itself is boring. May be their PR teams' fight will add a little spice, but still... boring.
Contrast this to people such as yourself, who are pathologically incapable of admitting when Apple does something good.
Yeah, but luckily for us, it never happens.
GUIs aren't magic - they are just bits visible to the user: read and play and you realize they are trivial.
I see you've never done any serious GUI development, if you think it is trivial. I did my share of core, DB, system programming and I have to say that GUI is *by far* the hardest part for implementation. Let me explain why.
So, you see, GUI development, while may be not so math/science intensive (which I suspect is your definition of "hard"), is pretty hard to do, even if you know how to handle it.
The iPhone was offering something new.
Like what?
Yes, and what do the powered license plates display when they break? And what will they display when hacked?
The second one is easy: porn
In CIS countries (Russia, Ukraine, etc.) ICQ is the most popular messenger. I don't like it, but that is what I have to stick to here for the same reason you are sticking to MSN.
So, ICQ ship is doing OK.
Especially for the billion plus people around the world who live more than a few hours walk or drive from the nearest doctor.
Yeah, to all four of them, who actually have a smartphone
As a ukrainian I can easily guess which option my fellow citizens will choose. And I'm not proud of it...
Easy. Because money is not the only measure of value and success. WTF is wrong with you people?
StackOverflow is mostly run by Windows/.NET programmers, so results are somewhat biased there.
Letting the free market sort it out, with some companies offering convenience and none dedicated to privacy, ...
There, fixed that for you.
Seriously, though, how many companies do you know that "dedicated to privacy"? Free market leads companies in the direction of money and coincidentally this direction is the opposite of privacy, because nobody cares [I hope I can add "yet" here]
So, basically, you have to options: go with the flow and give up privacy or stick with the privacy and become an "antisocial freak". Most slashdotters, though, already made that choice when they were considering career options. :)
If government workers did play that PAC-MAN, then it was the most useful thing they did in a week.
The wrong thing in this picture is that you assume that I don't use it because it lacks *this exact feature*.
I don't use it because it lack a bunch of other features: NoScript, CookieSafe. Xmarks also don't work for me (and yes, I don't bother to figure out why), haven't tried the port of firebug yet, but several extensions' fiasco don't give me much of a hope.