Because most humans, who are users of computing devices, use base-10 for almost everything. The design of a system should be abstracted away from the customer. Should Word display binary numbers instead of characters? Should your cars speed be shown in tire revolutions per minute?
The end result is that the situation is now identical to what it was before the change... but now everybody is worse off because of the change
Not really... In the case of hard drive manufacturers, they are better off because they are all selling cheaper drives at the same price. With campaign spending, advertising channels are better off, as well as the political status quo being protecting by a large barrier to entry for people without money. With net neutrality, the telcos are better off, as they get more money for the same product. These examples are more like descriptions of cartels/monopolies. Though I guess it is still a tragedy for common people.
But color does indeed only exist inside our heads. Do "red" or "blue" exist as atomic phenomena in the universe? Or is it that what we experience as color is just the human symbolic representation in your mind for the signal it receives when radiation of a certain wavelength hits the eye?
When losing the sole copy of data, everyone always laughs and says you should have backed up. People, shut up please. That is a fair criticism to an IT or development professional, but not to an average computer user. While average users do know that data loss can occur and will often backup important files to a CD or DVD, there is no standard and easy way for users to backup ALL their important data, do it at regular intervals, test it, an distribute it geographically. Much of this process must be automated. Also, either the quality of media needs to go up, or specifically designed backup-grade hard drives and media need to be developed and released, because the current crop of equipment is pretty unreliable.
Are people expected to keep a second car around if their main one fails? Are people expected to perform regular scheduled maintenance on their cars themselves? No, because it is too complex and troublesome for the average users.
I've reviewed several backup applications and services, and none of them would pass the "mom" easy of use test. I believe there is a potential market for a robust comprehensive backup system...
I didn't realize that you lived in China yourself. Anyway, living in the US you know that two Americans can have widely varying opinions on their own country, even though they both lived in the country all their lives. I don't think that your opinion and my opinion on China differ that much, I just think that there is a lot of propaganda and exaggeration going on in the US about what is happening in China, and people should try to find the real information instead of parroting what they read in newspapers. Also, I don't think that the actions of the US are any better. Being able to say certain things in public is nice, with the first amendment and all, but the country is still responsible for millions of deaths through decades of unjust foreign intervention. Can you honestly say that the US is somehow more moral and just than China? Just because you have a nice place to live and a job and live peacefully in your little corner of the US, doesn't mean people haven't suffered to prop up your lifestyle.
You seem pretty aggressive and rude for a topic you know nothing about. The topics you listed are widely discussed in public here. What you can't do is talk about them on national TV or publish a newspaper article on them.
read this news about how family members were prevented, by the police with physical violence, from taking pictures of the dead body of the father who died overnight in the city jail
Yes, I can read Chinese, but firstly, your link is dead, and secondly, if you want to make a point, you shouldn't use links from MAINLAND news sources. This is a MAINLAND CHINA news source that finds this appalling and is reporting on it, not covering it up. Have you seen any news about police conduct in the US? It's pretty damn bad too. Have you seen what's going on with DRM? US foreign intervention in the middle east and south america? Net Neutrality? CIA prison camps? NSA privacy invasion? Forced inflation? Mainstream media control by corporate entities tied in with the government? The US is one of the biggest human rights violators in the world. I'm not defending China, I'm just saying that it is hypocritical to say that somehow that China is evil and the US is not.
If you can't, well, just shut up and quit pretending that you know what's going on in China.
I've LIVED here for almost 3 years, and you've apparently read some propaganda spoon fed to your robotic mind. Who knows what is going on here? There are some real assholes on Slashdot....
I can tell you that the things in the west are very exaggerated. You can pretty much speak about anything you want here in public, as long as it doesn't cover a few hot-button topics. You can take photos and video anywhere. Many services are paid for anonymously, so there is very little tracking. And the public is aware that internet filtering is more of manifestation of a policy than the policy itself. This is very common in Chinese culture - the outward manifestation and the implicit reality being two different things. This allows for quick flexibility, whether it be bending the rules by those that obey them, or changing the rules by those that create them. You are expected to know where this implicit line lies so that you do not step on toes, even though it will never be explicitly described. It has it's positives and negatives, for example the ability to quickly override bureaucracy, but also greasing the skids of nepotism.
Anyway, the firewall is like DRM. It 'protects' the general public from seeing things they shouldn't, but it isn't really effective against anyone who knows anything.
Can we get some statistics on reliability? Has reliability been once again sacrificed in the name of storage density? Will drives only last 6 months instead of a year now?
Where do we begin? First, there is this implied function of intelligence vs time. Who defines what intelligence is? There is still no real definition of intelligence, so how can you say when artificial intelligence has surpassed human intelligence? And until you can clearly map out all the technical steps required to reach this artificial intelligence, it is only faith that drives you to believe that it can be achieved. What if it turns out that the only physical systems that can support advanced intelligence are wetware neural networks, and that fucking or genetic modification (or a combination of the two) are actually more effective that coding in generating these AI? The dotcom boom is over folks, and despite the bullshit "web 2.0" aftershock it appears that bioinformatics is the new "thing" and you computer guys are just wearing your outdated polyester disco suits at genetic engineering grunge concert.
Lame, lack of vision, lack of perspective, trapped in the past, sorry guys. Grow up.
Once you start quoting John Wayne, well, you know, you've already lost. Not backing up is stupid for sys-admins, but let's talk about your mom and dad. It's like saying that not buying a second car is stupid because car quality has gone down. Have you taught your parents how to do backups yet? It's not as easy as it sounds. I've had to write a complex shell script to only backup important files because I can't afford to buy a second hard drive to mirror the whole thing. And why should we have to mirror an entire fucking drive? how about making them reliable in the first place. Are you doing backups, asshole? BTW, I call you an asshole because you call me stupid. anyway I don't know why I waste my time
is reliable drives. Most HDs are garbage now. I don't have any statistics to back this up, but the quality of drives seems to have gone down in the last few years. I don't expect hard drives to last more than 2 or 3 years now. How about working on the quality of your 3.5" magnetic drives, instead of putting all your effort into hype-filled cell phone external bullshit drives, you assholes. Tons of people have lost so much valuable personal and commercial data. Anyone who's gone through a failure without any backups knows the sickening feeling, and it can actually send people into depression. I'm wondering if anyone has actually committed suicide because some fucking suit over at Maxtor decided to sacrifice quality for for a few cents in manufacturing and QA costs.
Everyone is wondering what the bait and switch scheme is. Perhaps there is none. Microsoft may be realizing that the OS battle is a losing one. Just look at the Vista fiasco. The move to from local apps to web services has been predicted for a while and has had several false starts, but recently there seems to be some light at the end of the tunnel. Microsoft doesn't care if the the underlying operating system is Linux as long as you are running their web services on top of it.
So would that be true of jews as well? There are Ethiopian jews, European jews, Arabic jews, and Chinese jews, so would saying "Fuck Jews" not be racists?
Thanks, Captain Obvious! If you read the entire submission, he mentions in parentheses "(except in the case of conflicts)". He is aware of the problem. And thanks for the tip on using open source or free software over commercial software. That's a new one over here at Slashdot.
Come now, that's like asking whether the designers of an electric car will leave in the gas tank. Of course the controller would have the capability for distributing writes. Why wouldn't it?
I'm a foreigner in Asia, living amongst several Japanese, and your comment is simply embarrassing. If an American research project was discussed, my Japanese friends wouldn't immediately say that it had to be a) completely unaware b) house in a body of fat rolls c) spank its phallus on command and d) be pre-occupied with spying on neighbors and cowering schoolgirls, predicting it would be called ParentsBasementNet. War in the middle east and automated flying drones to come later.
If you needed more evidence to support the fact that Slashdot tags are worthless, unfunny, manipulated by editors, and clearly not reflective user input, just look at the fantastically retarded tags attached to this story:
theydomakethemliketheyusedto, gogogadgetlander
What exactly is the criteria for tags getting on the front page? Are you seriously saying that several Slashdot users all came up with these tags at the same time? That is clearly either evidence of editorial manipulation, or that cyanide pills need to be handed at the next nerd convention.
The universe has been around for over 10 billion years. Civilization - a few thousand. If you look at the human view of reality from 3000 years ago vs. now, the difference is vast. It seems reasonable to believe that, if we continue progress at our current rate, civilization 3000 years from now may be unrecognizable. The conception we have of the fundamental "stuff" of the universe and the dimensions that make it up are so different from before, and they will likely be different in the future. We are also moving towards total control of our genetic makeup and the implementation of those genes. It doesn't take much imagination to envision a future where there are no longer singular humans, but instead a merging of various specialized bio-systems and electronic systems to form a network entities unlike those ever known, operating in unforeseen dimensions discovered by future sciences. And then we come to science. Science is just one view, a tool, for operating in reality. It is not reality itself, but a way of generating models of reality. What lies underneath existed before science itself, and there are certainly other ways of engaging reality besides science, and perhaps even better systems that are more effective and closer to the truth, as yet undiscovered. To believe that in this last several hundred years we've discovered the final system that describes reality is hubris in the extreme.
Another idea, though a bit more in the realm of science-fiction, is that perhaps we are not as special as we think. Ants are likely not aware of birds and humans, and swallows are likely not aware of whales. What makes us think we can detect every branch of the tree of life? Perhaps there are beings far more advanced than ourselves, the same as we are in relation to ants, and they branch off of our tree, but just operate in dimensions that our organs are incapable of detecting. Oh, these human creatures and their "brains".
Anyway, my point is simply that the realm of possibility is so great, and I fear that we are anthropomorphizing the rest of the universe and limiting it in silly ways. Was there some greek boy 2000 years ago wondering why he hadn't got a chance to meet one of the gods yet? We see this as a silly question now, perhaps our current questions will be silly with a new perspective.
Hmm, you could lie about these things and perpetuate the obsessive-compulsive nature women have about their looks, or you can be honest and either get dumped or find that your woman gets used to the honesty. It may be harder to find a woman while acting as honest individual, but you will find the right women. It's possible, they exist.
Slashdot Mirror
Because most humans, who are users of computing devices, use base-10 for almost everything. The design of a system should be abstracted away from the customer. Should Word display binary numbers instead of characters? Should your cars speed be shown in tire revolutions per minute?
LS
The end result is that the situation is now identical to what it was before the change ... but now everybody is worse off because of the change
Not really... In the case of hard drive manufacturers, they are better off because they are all selling cheaper drives at the same price. With campaign spending, advertising channels are better off, as well as the political status quo being protecting by a large barrier to entry for people without money. With net neutrality, the telcos are better off, as they get more money for the same product. These examples are more like descriptions of cartels/monopolies. Though I guess it is still a tragedy for common people.
LS
I bet you came up with this idea AFTER seeing the Matrix. It's almost exactly the same.
But color does indeed only exist inside our heads. Do "red" or "blue" exist as atomic phenomena in the universe? Or is it that what we experience as color is just the human symbolic representation in your mind for the signal it receives when radiation of a certain wavelength hits the eye?
LS
When losing the sole copy of data, everyone always laughs and says you should have backed up. People, shut up please. That is a fair criticism to an IT or development professional, but not to an average computer user. While average users do know that data loss can occur and will often backup important files to a CD or DVD, there is no standard and easy way for users to backup ALL their important data, do it at regular intervals, test it, an distribute it geographically. Much of this process must be automated. Also, either the quality of media needs to go up, or specifically designed backup-grade hard drives and media need to be developed and released, because the current crop of equipment is pretty unreliable.
Are people expected to keep a second car around if their main one fails? Are people expected to perform regular scheduled maintenance on their cars themselves? No, because it is too complex and troublesome for the average users.
I've reviewed several backup applications and services, and none of them would pass the "mom" easy of use test. I believe there is a potential market for a robust comprehensive backup system...
LS
I didn't realize that you lived in China yourself. Anyway, living in the US you know that two Americans can have widely varying opinions on their own country, even though they both lived in the country all their lives. I don't think that your opinion and my opinion on China differ that much, I just think that there is a lot of propaganda and exaggeration going on in the US about what is happening in China, and people should try to find the real information instead of parroting what they read in newspapers. Also, I don't think that the actions of the US are any better. Being able to say certain things in public is nice, with the first amendment and all, but the country is still responsible for millions of deaths through decades of unjust foreign intervention. Can you honestly say that the US is somehow more moral and just than China? Just because you have a nice place to live and a job and live peacefully in your little corner of the US, doesn't mean people haven't suffered to prop up your lifestyle.
LS
You seem pretty aggressive and rude for a topic you know nothing about. The topics you listed are widely discussed in public here. What you can't do is talk about them on national TV or publish a newspaper article on them.
read this news about how family members were prevented, by the police with physical violence, from taking pictures of the dead body of the father who died overnight in the city jail
Yes, I can read Chinese, but firstly, your link is dead, and secondly, if you want to make a point, you shouldn't use links from MAINLAND news sources. This is a MAINLAND CHINA news source that finds this appalling and is reporting on it, not covering it up. Have you seen any news about police conduct in the US? It's pretty damn bad too. Have you seen what's going on with DRM? US foreign intervention in the middle east and south america? Net Neutrality? CIA prison camps? NSA privacy invasion? Forced inflation? Mainstream media control by corporate entities tied in with the government? The US is one of the biggest human rights violators in the world. I'm not defending China, I'm just saying that it is hypocritical to say that somehow that China is evil and the US is not.
If you can't, well, just shut up and quit pretending that you know what's going on in China.
I've LIVED here for almost 3 years, and you've apparently read some propaganda spoon fed to your robotic mind. Who knows what is going on here? There are some real assholes on Slashdot....
LS
I can tell you that the things in the west are very exaggerated. You can pretty much speak about anything you want here in public, as long as it doesn't cover a few hot-button topics. You can take photos and video anywhere. Many services are paid for anonymously, so there is very little tracking. And the public is aware that internet filtering is more of manifestation of a policy than the policy itself. This is very common in Chinese culture - the outward manifestation and the implicit reality being two different things. This allows for quick flexibility, whether it be bending the rules by those that obey them, or changing the rules by those that create them. You are expected to know where this implicit line lies so that you do not step on toes, even though it will never be explicitly described. It has it's positives and negatives, for example the ability to quickly override bureaucracy, but also greasing the skids of nepotism.
Anyway, the firewall is like DRM. It 'protects' the general public from seeing things they shouldn't, but it isn't really effective against anyone who knows anything.
LS
Can we get some statistics on reliability? Has reliability been once again sacrificed in the name of storage density? Will drives only last 6 months instead of a year now?
LS
Where do we begin? First, there is this implied function of intelligence vs time. Who defines what intelligence is? There is still no real definition of intelligence, so how can you say when artificial intelligence has surpassed human intelligence? And until you can clearly map out all the technical steps required to reach this artificial intelligence, it is only faith that drives you to believe that it can be achieved. What if it turns out that the only physical systems that can support advanced intelligence are wetware neural networks, and that fucking or genetic modification (or a combination of the two) are actually more effective that coding in generating these AI? The dotcom boom is over folks, and despite the bullshit "web 2.0" aftershock it appears that bioinformatics is the new "thing" and you computer guys are just wearing your outdated polyester disco suits at genetic engineering grunge concert.
Lame, lack of vision, lack of perspective, trapped in the past, sorry guys. Grow up.
Once you start quoting John Wayne, well, you know, you've already lost. Not backing up is stupid for sys-admins, but let's talk about your mom and dad. It's like saying that not buying a second car is stupid because car quality has gone down. Have you taught your parents how to do backups yet? It's not as easy as it sounds. I've had to write a complex shell script to only backup important files because I can't afford to buy a second hard drive to mirror the whole thing. And why should we have to mirror an entire fucking drive? how about making them reliable in the first place. Are you doing backups, asshole? BTW, I call you an asshole because you call me stupid. anyway I don't know why I waste my time
from the submission: up to 1% to 10%
"up to" is the equivalent of "maximum". How can you have a range for a maximum value?
LS
is reliable drives. Most HDs are garbage now. I don't have any statistics to back this up, but the quality of drives seems to have gone down in the last few years. I don't expect hard drives to last more than 2 or 3 years now. How about working on the quality of your 3.5" magnetic drives, instead of putting all your effort into hype-filled cell phone external bullshit drives, you assholes. Tons of people have lost so much valuable personal and commercial data. Anyone who's gone through a failure without any backups knows the sickening feeling, and it can actually send people into depression. I'm wondering if anyone has actually committed suicide because some fucking suit over at Maxtor decided to sacrifice quality for for a few cents in manufacturing and QA costs.
LS
Was that sound the exploding head of a grammar nazi who doesn't get the joke?
Everyone is wondering what the bait and switch scheme is. Perhaps there is none. Microsoft may be realizing that the OS battle is a losing one. Just look at the Vista fiasco. The move to from local apps to web services has been predicted for a while and has had several false starts, but recently there seems to be some light at the end of the tunnel. Microsoft doesn't care if the the underlying operating system is Linux as long as you are running their web services on top of it.
LS
So would that be true of jews as well? There are Ethiopian jews, European jews, Arabic jews, and Chinese jews, so would saying "Fuck Jews" not be racists?
I think your analogy is flawed. While I don't agree to holding ISPs responsible for monitoring user traffic, I think a better analogy would be:
making toll road owners responsible monitoring drivers carrying contraband.
LS
Thanks, Captain Obvious! If you read the entire submission, he mentions in parentheses "(except in the case of conflicts)". He is aware of the problem. And thanks for the tip on using open source or free software over commercial software. That's a new one over here at Slashdot.
Man, the mods are definitely asleep today.
LS
Come now, that's like asking whether the designers of an electric car will leave in the gas tank. Of course the controller would have the capability for distributing writes. Why wouldn't it?
I'm a foreigner in Asia, living amongst several Japanese, and your comment is simply embarrassing. If an American research project was discussed, my Japanese friends wouldn't immediately say that it had to be a) completely unaware b) house in a body of fat rolls c) spank its phallus on command and d) be pre-occupied with spying on neighbors and cowering schoolgirls, predicting it would be called ParentsBasementNet. War in the middle east and automated flying drones to come later.
LS
Seriously, guys, don't quit your day jobs. I may have to start filtering on the "funny" comments...
LS
If you needed more evidence to support the fact that Slashdot tags are worthless, unfunny, manipulated by editors, and clearly not reflective user input, just look at the fantastically retarded tags attached to this story:
theydomakethemliketheyusedto, gogogadgetlander
What exactly is the criteria for tags getting on the front page? Are you seriously saying that several Slashdot users all came up with these tags at the same time? That is clearly either evidence of editorial manipulation, or that cyanide pills need to be handed at the next nerd convention.
LS
He probably stopped taking drugs. No, I'm not joking...
LS
The universe has been around for over 10 billion years. Civilization - a few thousand. If you look at the human view of reality from 3000 years ago vs. now, the difference is vast. It seems reasonable to believe that, if we continue progress at our current rate, civilization 3000 years from now may be unrecognizable. The conception we have of the fundamental "stuff" of the universe and the dimensions that make it up are so different from before, and they will likely be different in the future. We are also moving towards total control of our genetic makeup and the implementation of those genes. It doesn't take much imagination to envision a future where there are no longer singular humans, but instead a merging of various specialized bio-systems and electronic systems to form a network entities unlike those ever known, operating in unforeseen dimensions discovered by future sciences. And then we come to science. Science is just one view, a tool, for operating in reality. It is not reality itself, but a way of generating models of reality. What lies underneath existed before science itself, and there are certainly other ways of engaging reality besides science, and perhaps even better systems that are more effective and closer to the truth, as yet undiscovered. To believe that in this last several hundred years we've discovered the final system that describes reality is hubris in the extreme.
Another idea, though a bit more in the realm of science-fiction, is that perhaps we are not as special as we think. Ants are likely not aware of birds and humans, and swallows are likely not aware of whales. What makes us think we can detect every branch of the tree of life? Perhaps there are beings far more advanced than ourselves, the same as we are in relation to ants, and they branch off of our tree, but just operate in dimensions that our organs are incapable of detecting. Oh, these human creatures and their "brains".
Anyway, my point is simply that the realm of possibility is so great, and I fear that we are anthropomorphizing the rest of the universe and limiting it in silly ways. Was there some greek boy 2000 years ago wondering why he hadn't got a chance to meet one of the gods yet? We see this as a silly question now, perhaps our current questions will be silly with a new perspective.
LS
Hmm, you could lie about these things and perpetuate the obsessive-compulsive nature women have about their looks, or you can be honest and either get dumped or find that your woman gets used to the honesty. It may be harder to find a woman while acting as honest individual, but you will find the right women. It's possible, they exist.