Well, Adblock for Safari obviously exists: http://safariadblock.sourceforge.net/ , so I guess it's just a matter of Apple allowing 3rd party software installs. I don't own an iPhone, so I'm not really sure what the situation is there.
Actually, you are a much worse ranter than he is. And I don't believe that you are non-religious, nor do I believe your story about the fundamentalist astronomer (unless he is a rank amateur).
Idiots like the parent post help illustrate another problem: a lot of very complex fields have concepts that can, in part, be outlined in everyday English. So people with zero training in climatology, biology, genetics, or whatever feel qualified to debate highly specialised researchers, even though they have no idea what they are talking about. Other fields like physics are less affected by this because of the terminology and the math involved. Although come to think of it, the Big Bang is pretty heavily misunderstood - people tend to think it was this big explosion into empty space, when in fact the "explosion" itself WAS space.
I think what would really help is simple statistical training from an early age, so people are more likely to understand science as a probablistic enterprise rather than a "big book of facts" that is immutable or prone to "boondoggles".
Why do people have the idea that Sony somehow has exclusive rights to Blu-Ray? The Blu-Ray Disc Association is a collection of a whole bunch of companies, many of whom were involved in the format's development. Sony is just one of these companies. Some others are Apple, HP, Sun, Matsushita, etc. etc.
I think some European banks actually have systems a bit like what you describe. My friend has an account with a Dutch bank, and he has this little device that generates a unique passcode each time he wants to do any banking. I'm not really sure how it works, but its one-time-padness makes end user fraud a lot more difficult - you'd have to physically steal the device, its PIN, plus his actual banking password.
Actually, the article gives some examples of how the thefts occur, and it's normally not from network intrusions - rather, it's from things like a coworker in an office installing trojans on people's machines and stealing their passwords when they go to do online banking during their lunch hours or whatever.
How do you protect against this sort of thing? The banks have certain heuristics that deal with detecting fraudulent transactions, but this really seems like one of those cases where what you know (passphrase) + who you are (biometrics) would go a long way towards a solution.
Fair enough. I grew up in a rather windless valley where everyone in town had a fireplace and/or wood stove, and the air got pretty thick sometimes;) But I can certainly believe that things have improved.
I had no idea about the antioxidants thing, thanks for that. But isn't any sort of smoke particle going to cause lung problems in the end?
And btw, whenever someone tells me that woodburning is good for the environment, I always have to ask, *whose* environment? Not the environment of the people who have to breathe the surrounding air! Yeah, good point actually. People are really focused on the greenhouse gas thing and ignore the effects of particulates. If you've ever been to a place that has a lot of wood stoves and not much wind, then you'll know all about bad air quality thanks to wood burning.
What? MS posted 26% growth, as I said. That is impressive. You are conflating revenue growth with stock price, which is wrong. Their stock price is related, instead, to their rates of dividend payouts, which increase as profit increases. The stock becomes more attractive as dividend payouts increase, thus more people buy it, thus the price goes up. That's why MS needs to increase dividend payouts. This is known as "value investing". Since you don't seem to understand what I'm talking about, I'll let you Google it.
I'm not the one who needs to grow up here, kid. You obviously hold some kind of a misguided grudge against an entire corporation - "stupid human nature" indeed.
Actually, it's flat because MS is transitioning from being a pure growth stock to a blue chip stock, complete with dividend payouts, which are still too small. Successful blue chips generate huge profits and sustain predictable growth year over year, but their stock prices aren't particularly volatile. MS is not paying large enough dividends, causing the stock to flatline (this may have changed recently, as I'm not up to date with their latest actions).
MS is no longer like a Google-style volatile growth stock. It's more like investing in Johnson and Johnson or something. They need to increase their dividend payouts, if they haven't already.
Oh, I fully agree - I was just responding to the original post regarding the "treading water" comment. MS and Yahoo aren't really comparable in terms of relative growth.
"Treading water" implies little or no growth. MS continues to grow at an impressive clip. Growth rates are of course relative, not absolute, contrary to what your comment implied (26% quarterly growth is outstanding no matter how big your company is). So, care to enlighten me and everyone else here with your stock valuation "fundementals [sic]", brainiac?
Microsoft's year over year growth for the fourth quarter of 2007 was 26%. Their quarterly revenues were nearly equal to Google's entire financial year. Such growth can hardly be termed as "treading water", despite their lack of innovation.
Also look up Erlang and tuple spaces. The latter are implemented in various ways: LinuxSpaces, JavaSpaces, etc.
Erlang's huge uptime and reliability is notable. It is of course the one language designed specifically for running parallel applications.
I look at the threading issue kind of like how we used to look at memory management: it's unnecessary bookkeeping for most apps and subtracts time spent on the actual problem domain. Ten years ago, we worried about memory management, but then garbage collection came along and for most purposes, memory management wasn't a huge issue any more (I'm not talking about the areas where C/C++ are crucial, obviously). In the same sense, programmers currently spent an inordinate amount of time debugging threaded apps when they should be focused on other things, like solving the business problem they've been presented with.
Clearly there's room for improvement, and I wonder if tuple spaces will do for parallel programming what garbage collection did for memory management.
I guess it's because writers now get revenue for material that gets distributed online, and given how the battles around here rage about that stuff, it seems relevant.
What? Post a link to support this. Also, since when is the EU a single country? We might as well add in the NAFTA signatories to the US gdp figures then.
Unfortunately, it also boils down to time to market. As you stated, you code four times faster, and with a decent framework and unit tests, you can get working code out the door four times faster (presumably). To my clients at least, that's worth way more than saving some clock cycles. No one really cares about that stuff unless you're working within some serious hardware limitations. They just want the stuff out there and working and earning. It's all about the bottom line.
However, this allows others to take your work & extend it without releasing the improvements back to the community (a good example of this is Apple's treatment of Darwin) Here's the Darwin source: http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/ You are free to use it as you wish, as the APSL is a Free Software license. You'll find launchd in there as well, the successor to inetd and friends, created by Apple and released as free software.
The only people "debating" evolution as a whole are religious zealots like you. Meanwhile, scientists work at refining the details, which involves actual debate. They do NOT refer to "macro" and "micro" evolution; those terms were invented by anti-science religious types, and have zero scientific credibility or applicability.
So yeah, biological evolution is extremely specific, and you are clearly not qualified to argue otherwise.
Hopefully you also understand that Canadians own guns too. Lots of them, according to Michael Moore (he of dubious accuracy), and yes, that includes handguns (my father, for example, has several). Gun culture here does tend to be a predominantly rural thing, though.
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Well, Adblock for Safari obviously exists: http://safariadblock.sourceforge.net/ , so I guess it's just a matter of Apple allowing 3rd party software installs. I don't own an iPhone, so I'm not really sure what the situation is there.
Actually, you are a much worse ranter than he is. And I don't believe that you are non-religious, nor do I believe your story about the fundamentalist astronomer (unless he is a rank amateur).
And anyway, I believe prebinding has been deprecated for Leopard as it didn't speed things up much.
Idiots like the parent post help illustrate another problem: a lot of very complex fields have concepts that can, in part, be outlined in everyday English. So people with zero training in climatology, biology, genetics, or whatever feel qualified to debate highly specialised researchers, even though they have no idea what they are talking about. Other fields like physics are less affected by this because of the terminology and the math involved. Although come to think of it, the Big Bang is pretty heavily misunderstood - people tend to think it was this big explosion into empty space, when in fact the "explosion" itself WAS space.
I think what would really help is simple statistical training from an early age, so people are more likely to understand science as a probablistic enterprise rather than a "big book of facts" that is immutable or prone to "boondoggles".
Why do people have the idea that Sony somehow has exclusive rights to Blu-Ray? The Blu-Ray Disc Association is a collection of a whole bunch of companies, many of whom were involved in the format's development. Sony is just one of these companies. Some others are Apple, HP, Sun, Matsushita, etc. etc.
I think some European banks actually have systems a bit like what you describe. My friend has an account with a Dutch bank, and he has this little device that generates a unique passcode each time he wants to do any banking. I'm not really sure how it works, but its one-time-padness makes end user fraud a lot more difficult - you'd have to physically steal the device, its PIN, plus his actual banking password.
Actually, the article gives some examples of how the thefts occur, and it's normally not from network intrusions - rather, it's from things like a coworker in an office installing trojans on people's machines and stealing their passwords when they go to do online banking during their lunch hours or whatever.
How do you protect against this sort of thing? The banks have certain heuristics that deal with detecting fraudulent transactions, but this really seems like one of those cases where what you know (passphrase) + who you are (biometrics) would go a long way towards a solution.
In ten years, these things will be totally fucking cult.
Fair enough. I grew up in a rather windless valley where everyone in town had a fireplace and/or wood stove, and the air got pretty thick sometimes ;) But I can certainly believe that things have improved.
I had no idea about the antioxidants thing, thanks for that. But isn't any sort of smoke particle going to cause lung problems in the end?
What? MS posted 26% growth, as I said. That is impressive. You are conflating revenue growth with stock price, which is wrong. Their stock price is related, instead, to their rates of dividend payouts, which increase as profit increases. The stock becomes more attractive as dividend payouts increase, thus more people buy it, thus the price goes up. That's why MS needs to increase dividend payouts. This is known as "value investing". Since you don't seem to understand what I'm talking about, I'll let you Google it.
I'm not the one who needs to grow up here, kid. You obviously hold some kind of a misguided grudge against an entire corporation - "stupid human nature" indeed.
Actually, it's flat because MS is transitioning from being a pure growth stock to a blue chip stock, complete with dividend payouts, which are still too small. Successful blue chips generate huge profits and sustain predictable growth year over year, but their stock prices aren't particularly volatile. MS is not paying large enough dividends, causing the stock to flatline (this may have changed recently, as I'm not up to date with their latest actions).
MS is no longer like a Google-style volatile growth stock. It's more like investing in Johnson and Johnson or something. They need to increase their dividend payouts, if they haven't already.
Oh, I fully agree - I was just responding to the original post regarding the "treading water" comment. MS and Yahoo aren't really comparable in terms of relative growth.
"Treading water" implies little or no growth. MS continues to grow at an impressive clip. Growth rates are of course relative, not absolute, contrary to what your comment implied (26% quarterly growth is outstanding no matter how big your company is). So, care to enlighten me and everyone else here with your stock valuation "fundementals [sic]", brainiac?
Microsoft's year over year growth for the fourth quarter of 2007 was 26%. Their quarterly revenues were nearly equal to Google's entire financial year. Such growth can hardly be termed as "treading water", despite their lack of innovation.
This IEEE article sums it up nicely: http://www.computer.org/portal/site/computer/menuitem.5d61c1d591162e4b0ef1bd108bcd45f3/index.jsp?&pName=computer_level1_article&TheCat=1005&path=computer/homepage/0506&file=cover.xml&xsl=article.xsl
Also look up Erlang and tuple spaces. The latter are implemented in various ways: LinuxSpaces, JavaSpaces, etc.
Erlang's huge uptime and reliability is notable. It is of course the one language designed specifically for running parallel applications.
I look at the threading issue kind of like how we used to look at memory management: it's unnecessary bookkeeping for most apps and subtracts time spent on the actual problem domain. Ten years ago, we worried about memory management, but then garbage collection came along and for most purposes, memory management wasn't a huge issue any more (I'm not talking about the areas where C/C++ are crucial, obviously). In the same sense, programmers currently spent an inordinate amount of time debugging threaded apps when they should be focused on other things, like solving the business problem they've been presented with.
Clearly there's room for improvement, and I wonder if tuple spaces will do for parallel programming what garbage collection did for memory management.
I guess it's because writers now get revenue for material that gets distributed online, and given how the battles around here rage about that stuff, it seems relevant.
What? Post a link to support this. Also, since when is the EU a single country? We might as well add in the NAFTA signatories to the US gdp figures then.
Unfortunately, it also boils down to time to market. As you stated, you code four times faster, and with a decent framework and unit tests, you can get working code out the door four times faster (presumably). To my clients at least, that's worth way more than saving some clock cycles. No one really cares about that stuff unless you're working within some serious hardware limitations. They just want the stuff out there and working and earning. It's all about the bottom line.
You sound like you're in high school. You didn't even respond to the parent.
Because stuff is way more hilarious when you are drunk. No one cares how well they do. It's all about the laughs. Fun != playing well.
You implied Apple closed Darwin. There's the source. You lose.
The only people "debating" evolution as a whole are religious zealots like you. Meanwhile, scientists work at refining the details, which involves actual debate. They do NOT refer to "macro" and "micro" evolution; those terms were invented by anti-science religious types, and have zero scientific credibility or applicability.
So yeah, biological evolution is extremely specific, and you are clearly not qualified to argue otherwise.
Hopefully you also understand that Canadians own guns too. Lots of them, according to Michael Moore (he of dubious accuracy), and yes, that includes handguns (my father, for example, has several). Gun culture here does tend to be a predominantly rural thing, though.