I'm starting to see the wisdom of appointing Ballmer. Notice how even the most vitriolic MS haters are now saying Gates wasn't so bad, he was just misunderstood.
What are the modern parallels of the tactics used in the revolutionary war? Guns are important, but the most important resource of a new American revolution would be communication. Maybe the militias should be fighting against wiretapping more than anti-gun laws.
Windows and the ease of use it introduced as opposed to character-based environments
Trolling Slashdot is dreadfully easy I wish there was a +1 troll mod:)
The truth is, without Microsoft, PCs today would be a bit better or a bit worse, there's no way of knowing for sure. Id wager that things would be a good bit better if there were several basically equal competing platforms. As much as I don't like the silly anti-MS zeal in this thread, I don't think anyone would argue that their monopoly has helped things.
You're right that most companies don't choose to engage in those ruthless tactics... the most powerful companies do. And we reward them.
Set your own safety and comfort aside and put a stop to it by whatever means are necessary. Comfort I can see (don't buy comfortable widget X from company Y because they kill puppies.) Safety though? Is there any company I need to stop - by whatever means necessary - to protect myself?
I don't know if women write better code or not, but I think we need to acknowledge that there are some disturbing barriers to entry for women entering male dominated fields. The whole dark matter thing is based on research from a woman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Rubin/ who was regularly denied access to facilities and resources solely based on gender.
In 1997, the Gartner Group reported that 80% of the world's business ran on COBOL. Is there really a good metric for "% of the world's business?" And if so, is a quote from 11 years ago really applicable today?
The fabric-based server of the future will treat memory, processors, and I/O cards as components in a pool, combining and recombining them into particular arrangements to suits the owner's needs. Just think: now your memory leak bug can only affect one box (how limiting), in the future you'll will be able to bring the entire data center to its knees.
By 2010, Web mashups will be the dominant model Because making disparate systems work together seamlessly is easy! Certainly there will be less IT support required...
resource efficiency can improve dramatically, flexibility can become automatic based on requirements, and services can be managed holistically, ensuring high levels of resiliency. This sounds like people in the 60s talking about "the year 2000." Unless I missed the memo about strong AI this is bullshit.
The rest of their items seem reasonable, except the ones that - correct me if I'm wrong - used a bunch of buzzwords to say "do stuff better."
it's simply amazing they would not notify mission control. I'm pretty sure we don't have the full story yet. Everyone seems to be responding as though the cosmonauts said "Hey wouldn't it be cool to totally change our reentry procedure... Yeah, and let's not tell mission control just to mess with them. hehe."
That's almost certainly not what happened.
Unless my sarcasm detector's broken, I'm having a hard time understanding how blaming music for inner city violence, illiteracy, and wife beating is +5 insightful worthy.
As much fun as it is to bash MS, they have some very difficult problems to deal with.
One reason for their success is that they never say: you need a certain version of glibc to run this app, or you need some outdated rpm chain of dependencies that conflict with the new version (may god have mercy on my karma.) If it's a Windows program it will run on Windows (sometimes.) I'd say 90% of the badness and kludginess of Windows is because of their desire to not break apps that people have been running since the 3.1/95 days.
With the kind of resources they have they should be doing a much better job, but I think anyone who's tried to provide backward compatibility in software even in trivial cases will agree that it quickly becomes an unmanageable clusterfuck.
Is the problem simply that waves of a certain frequency reinforce when bouncing back and forth between the walls of the rocket engine?
Art Garfunkle and former president James Taylor had a similar problem while recording. They installed some bass traps in the corners and made sure there were no parallel surfaces... But I'm sure you Slashdotters could care less about our resort town ways.
I think there's a hidden benefit for a certain type of PC gamer in the decreasing popularity of the platform. If all the AAA Halo/Madden stuff is exclusively console based and the PC becomes less mainstream, developers targetting it will have a smaller but also more homogonous audience; mostly people who enjoy the depth and flexibility not present in console games. Maybe we'll see a return to the days of flight sims, turn based strategy, and more involved RPGs.
USians modded the parent
Can we stop with the "USian" thing already. The word "American" works fine; Nobody wonders if you're talking about Brazilians or Canadians (and I think they like it that way.)
I use passwords like this all the time and like to think they're pretty secure, but with the number of comments mentioning this I'm wondering if attackers will start exploiting it. Everyone seems to use approximately the same type of patterns, and it seems like it might be as easy to brute force this type of password as an "insecure" word/number based one.
Perl is a hacker language: powerful, flexible, opaque to beginners. But that's what we have C and assembly for... to scare off first year CS students. Scripting languages have evolved, and for getting real work done there are better options now.
IMO Perl is a bad choice (for a new project) for anything that involves functions being called. I think even the most ardent Perl fanboi will admit that passing arguments to functions in Perl is completely broken. When you can write a single big flat procedure or a one liner that does a bunch of text processing it puts Python to shame, but beyond that you're doing a lot of unnecessary work.
In the real world, CPAN is a big plus, and the amount of Perl code running huge portions of the internet will not go away anytime soon (nor should it.) Perl hackers should continue to ply their craft; Obviously, what works prevails over my rambling, but I think Perl is going the way of COBOL.
P.S. Yes, I understand the irony of posting this via an impressive array of Perl code.
classify each person's behavior into one of 10 categories (waiting, wandering, walking fast, etc). In practice the most useful types of behavior for this robot to classify will be:
Being pummeled mercilessly for being an annoyance
Being welcomed as our new overlord
Having its valuable robot parts forcibly removed for use by non-overlord-welcoming types
Mock humping of the robot from outside its limited field of view in a comical fashion
phones will enable users to snap a photo of an article of clothing, pull in results from the Web about the brand and where to buy it, and then render the garment on top of a 3-D image of the user
Bullshit. Unless I missed a memo, image recognition is nowhere near this. Also, who's building the 3D models for the garments? Isn't this the same industry that's paying Malaysian kids 7 cents a day to manufacture their products? And where do I get the 3D model of me to "render the garment on top of?"
Although to be fair, I guess by the time this technology's viable I could just check out how it looks on Duke Nukem Forever...
I think we should stop modding up these "mod down myminicity" posts. It creates a situation where the people reading at +x are exposed to the word myminicity repeatedly, which is presumably their goal.
I guess this "dont mod up the "mod down minicity" posts" post should also be not modded up (If I'm missing the point I'll take +5 insightful:).)
As silly as Colbert's SC-only run is (was?), it's interesting how not being the Democratic or Republican candidate is equated with being "shot down." As much as I hate the tragic consequence of Ralph Nader's run (with some help from Monica Lewinsky) it seems clear that we're repeatedly being given the shit sandwich/giant douche choice.
The entrenched apparatus that leads to the republican/democratic primaries is not producing potentially effective candidates, it's producing "electable" candidates.
I don't have a solution for this problem but I think I know what the cause is. Most people probably get their information about the candidates from TV, and the coverage seems to be usually about 4 seconds of the guy talking.
$8000 speaker cables.... Tube amplifiers... $485 wooden volume control knobs for your tube amplifiers. Tube amps really do frequently sound different than transistor amps. If the goal is precise reproduction, a good transistor amp is hard to beat, but tubes can introduce some subtle distortion and non-linearity that many people like.
When less subtle distortion is required (guitar amps) tube amps are used almost exclusively.
I'm not sure if the argument for using tubes in an end user listening system is valid, but I don't think it's in the same category as $8000 cables and the rest of that crap.
Slashdot Mirror
Would the Iron Man movie have been made if they were only going to sell one ticket?
I'm starting to see the wisdom of appointing Ballmer. Notice how even the most vitriolic MS haters are now saying Gates wasn't so bad, he was just misunderstood.
It is a question of movement, do I want a government that will move toward more social spending and a larger public sector?
I'm pretty sure the contractors hired by your conservatives are more expensive than the proposed government employees you're talking about.
What are the modern parallels of the tactics used in the revolutionary war? Guns are important, but the most important resource of a new American revolution would be communication. Maybe the militias should be fighting against wiretapping more than anti-gun laws.
When you're inside the Reality Distortion Field, nobody could possibly have any use for more than $89,000.
I don't know if women write better code or not, but I think we need to acknowledge that there are some disturbing barriers to entry for women entering male dominated fields. The whole dark matter thing is based on research from a woman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Rubin/ who was regularly denied access to facilities and resources solely based on gender.
The rest of their items seem reasonable, except the ones that - correct me if I'm wrong - used a bunch of buzzwords to say "do stuff better."
That's almost certainly not what happened.
Unless my sarcasm detector's broken, I'm having a hard time understanding how blaming music for inner city violence, illiteracy, and wife beating is +5 insightful worthy.
As much fun as it is to bash MS, they have some very difficult problems to deal with.
One reason for their success is that they never say: you need a certain version of glibc to run this app, or you need some outdated rpm chain of dependencies that conflict with the new version (may god have mercy on my karma.) If it's a Windows program it will run on Windows (sometimes.) I'd say 90% of the badness and kludginess of Windows is because of their desire to not break apps that people have been running since the 3.1/95 days.
With the kind of resources they have they should be doing a much better job, but I think anyone who's tried to provide backward compatibility in software even in trivial cases will agree that it quickly becomes an unmanageable clusterfuck.
Is the problem simply that waves of a certain frequency reinforce when bouncing back and forth between the walls of the rocket engine? Art Garfunkle and former president James Taylor had a similar problem while recording. They installed some bass traps in the corners and made sure there were no parallel surfaces ... But I'm sure you Slashdotters could care less about our resort town ways.
I think there's a hidden benefit for a certain type of PC gamer in the decreasing popularity of the platform. If all the AAA Halo/Madden stuff is exclusively console based and the PC becomes less mainstream, developers targetting it will have a smaller but also more homogonous audience; mostly people who enjoy the depth and flexibility not present in console games. Maybe we'll see a return to the days of flight sims, turn based strategy, and more involved RPGs.
Can we stop with the "USian" thing already. The word "American" works fine; Nobody wonders if you're talking about Brazilians or Canadians (and I think they like it that way.)
I use passwords like this all the time and like to think they're pretty secure, but with the number of comments mentioning this I'm wondering if attackers will start exploiting it. Everyone seems to use approximately the same type of patterns, and it seems like it might be as easy to brute force this type of password as an "insecure" word/number based one.
Perl is a hacker language: powerful, flexible, opaque to beginners. But that's what we have C and assembly for ... to scare off first year CS students. Scripting languages have evolved, and for getting real work done there are better options now.
IMO Perl is a bad choice (for a new project) for anything that involves functions being called. I think even the most ardent Perl fanboi will admit that passing arguments to functions in Perl is completely broken. When you can write a single big flat procedure or a one liner that does a bunch of text processing it puts Python to shame, but beyond that you're doing a lot of unnecessary work.
In the real world, CPAN is a big plus, and the amount of Perl code running huge portions of the internet will not go away anytime soon (nor should it.) Perl hackers should continue to ply their craft; Obviously, what works prevails over my rambling, but I think Perl is going the way of COBOL.
P.S. Yes, I understand the irony of posting this via an impressive array of Perl code.
I used to ignore them ... let them slowly accumulate until new ones weren't noticeable.
This year I realized that GCC wasn't trying to annoy me. It was trying to help.
phones will enable users to snap a photo of an article of clothing, pull in results from the Web about the brand and where to buy it, and then render the garment on top of a 3-D image of the user
Bullshit. Unless I missed a memo, image recognition is nowhere near this. Also, who's building the 3D models for the garments? Isn't this the same industry that's paying Malaysian kids 7 cents a day to manufacture their products? And where do I get the 3D model of me to "render the garment on top of?"
Although to be fair, I guess by the time this technology's viable I could just check out how it looks on Duke Nukem Forever...
I think we should stop modding up these "mod down myminicity" posts. It creates a situation where the people reading at +x are exposed to the word myminicity repeatedly, which is presumably their goal.
:).)
I guess this "dont mod up the "mod down minicity" posts" post should also be not modded up (If I'm missing the point I'll take +5 insightful
As silly as Colbert's SC-only run is (was?), it's interesting how not being the Democratic or Republican candidate is equated with being "shot down." As much as I hate the tragic consequence of Ralph Nader's run (with some help from Monica Lewinsky) it seems clear that we're repeatedly being given the shit sandwich/giant douche choice.
The entrenched apparatus that leads to the republican/democratic primaries is not producing potentially effective candidates, it's producing "electable" candidates.
I don't have a solution for this problem but I think I know what the cause is. Most people probably get their information about the candidates from TV, and the coverage seems to be usually about 4 seconds of the guy talking.
When less subtle distortion is required (guitar amps) tube amps are used almost exclusively.
I'm not sure if the argument for using tubes in an end user listening system is valid, but I don't think it's in the same category as $8000 cables and the rest of that crap.