Re:Got a whole lotta hype
on
Brain Privacy
·
· Score: 1
Sure, because killing somebody is worse than just getting in a fight, i.e. you're sentenced partially on the severity of what you meant to do.
That exactly why hate crime legislation is so offensive. It implies that eg killing a Jew is worse than killing a White, just as murder is worse than fistfighting. Hate crime legislation places more value on some people than others and is an obvious violation of equal protection under the law.
It's a mistake, nobody is going to play a 2 grand entry fee. They should open it to everybody. Becoming the leading online music marketer would sooner or later be worth more than 2% of the personal computer market anyways.
I agree the naming scheme is stupid. But you won't go far wrong simply going by price. For instance, the cheapest 4-MX is $10 cheaper than the cheapest 3-Ti on pricewatch.
And unlike a benchmark, the price also reflects other factors like visual quality, fan noise, expected resale value, etc.
It may drive you nuts that somebody is going to make money, but that is exactly what WILL feed the people of Iraq (if anything does). Yes, we must be careful that the people of Iraq get their "fair" share of the ancestral entitlement (whatever that means).
First, Diamond's supposedly "most surprising" revelation is the most obvious one: tragedy of commons. This is old hat.
Second, he gives only passing mention to perhaps the biggest problem of all: uncertainty. We don't really know which long-term trends will turn out to be problems, because either we don't know what will happen, or we don't know how well we'll be able to respond to it in the future. Both are true in the case of pollution, overpopulation, and energy source depletion.
But in the professor's mind, all the world's problems are clear-cut, if only selfishness and religion would make way for collective rationality. This of course leads to nowhere but communism. Before accusing me of McCarthyism, reconsider Diamond's arguments: it is assumed implicitly that "we" have identified the problems, and the main barrier to fixing them is bending individual will to society's best interest. That is exactly what he is saying.
But based on results thus far, wouldn't you agree "biotech" has been overhyped? A "revolution" would be something that the average person would notice.
Actually, I think pricewatch deserves a lot of credit for forcing dealers to include shipping charges in their advertised prices. That was a very significant, pro-consumer move. I've had good luck with it, but I strongly prefer companies that actually answer their telephone, and confirm stock on hand before the order.
My AMD K6 233 is still chugging 24x7 after, what, 5 years? And it has shut down due to overheating a few times, too, from 1) forgetting to put on the heatsink during reassembly and 2) affixing the fan to the heatsink with a hot glue gun; the glue subsequently re-melted and the fan fell off - DUH! I hope I'm not this dumb anymore but I wonder if a newer processor would be as forgiving of my mistakes.
AMD beside the point, I've never seen a reliability problem with any brand of processor. My Cyrix chip worked fine (but slow), my Celeron 300a overclocked to 450 ran for a few years before I replaced it with a Celeron 566 overclocked to 800 Mhz, also 2 or 3 years ago. Hard drives come and go, but I've had little trouble with silicon.
I was an emusic subscriber. Even though I have now terminated my membership, I have to say it was worth what I spent on it (approx $70) I found several artists I never would have, and burned some CDs I still enjoy regularly. I eventually quit because it was taking more and more searching between each "find," but I might sign up again in a year or two, and see what new stuff they have.
Do they still have those little platic water rockets or have they gone the way of the lawn dart?
Earlier this year on a trip to San Jose I bought one for me and my son at Fry's (what an awesome place! Fry's I mean, not San Jose).
It was only about $2. Unfortunately it broke after the first meager launch. Very disappointing for a 4 1/2 year old. So I glued the crack shut and on the next launch it went BANG! (Give me a break, this is rocket science after all!) So I cut off the fins and pump fitting and epoxied them to a 1 liter pop bottle. Pumped that sucker up and whoosh! Looking up we saw only a thin column of water extending up into the air... like a fool I had used a clear pop bottle and we never did find the thing.
It doesn't even really matter whether you're cheating; they don't need a reason to force you to leave. If you figure out a legal way to win money, you'll still get kicked out.
This goes straight back to the poor communication skills your parent poster was slammed for.
Being pedantic is good in technical work. But to communicate with human beings you must learn to turn it off. Pedants get confused when people don't say exactly what they mean, or express their thoughts incompletely, which for better or worse is the norm.
Unless you gather that your interviewer is a nitpicker, the correct answer to "how many bits in a byte?" is "8," or "usually 8" if you want to show off.
However, it's a bit bizarre to see Debian fanboys posting about how great their OS is, and complaining about how Debian doesn't get as much commercial attention as, say, RedHat.
I've been using debian for years and never heard that.
Then again, I'm not all that "community" oriented. I just like the distro, and the simple, straightforward feel of it. No BS, and it doesn't try to get in your face or "brand" you. It's pure software, and I don't mean that from an ideological perspective, more in the sense that drinking pure water is nicer than drinking dirty water.
I'm certain that debian's goodness results from some hard work and even idealism by the people you're criticising. I think debian's ideals indirectly make it even nicer than other distros for "just getting stuff done." The only time it ever threw me for a minute was having to install gimp-nonfree for gif support.
As for these licensinig squabbles, 1) I'd never know about them if I didn't read it in slashdot and 2) that's democracy for you.
Re:A time of leaps and bounds
on
Secret Empire
·
· Score: 1
It's not just a matter of doing research though.
Once in a while people stumble onto a very fruitful new field and progres is fast for the first few years. Just like computing has been for the last few decades. I'm sure we'll live long enough to look back and realize that computing has stagnated.
Programmers don't become extinct, programmers for well-established applications simply become few and far between. Tons of people used to write compilers, now very few do. Carmack thinks graphics engines will be the same.
If you're asking whether all programmers might become extinct, well, "ever" is a long time. But I will say this: a program could no more easily replace programmers in general, than it could replace every other "information worker" job. In other words, even if computers do surpass our own intellect, programming would be one of the last jobs to go.
I often wonder whether people are any happier now than 4000 years ago, or on the frontier 150 years ago. Too bad there's no way to know the suicide rate among hunter-gatherers.
Of course, many more of us survive childhood now, which certainly seems good.
As it turns out it was totally useless and that's what he intended, to invent something mathematically correct that is totally useless... Indeed he is pissed off as he intended it to be useless.
Where are you getting this stuff? The guy was a 19th century rationalist who hoped to encode everything (ultimately including philosophy, politics, etc) so all of life's questions could be answered analytically. Boolean logic was always intended as rigorous reasoning, your assertion that it was intended to be purely abstract is wrong.
Your idea that Boole predated computers is also wrong, since Boole was a contemporary of Babbage. Which is not to say that Babbage's computers were digital, but the idea of encoding problems as calculations, and munging on them with machines, was definitely there.
Slashdot Mirror
That exactly why hate crime legislation is so offensive. It implies that eg killing a Jew is worse than killing a White, just as murder is worse than fistfighting. Hate crime legislation places more value on some people than others and is an obvious violation of equal protection under the law.
The other guy's response about releasing a Windows version of iTunes is much more to the point.
It's a mistake, nobody is going to play a 2 grand entry fee. They should open it to everybody. Becoming the leading online music marketer would sooner or later be worth more than 2% of the personal computer market anyways.
And unlike a benchmark, the price also reflects other factors like visual quality, fan noise, expected resale value, etc.
Then every object in the world is unique, because no two objects can be alike in every detail.
DES or 3DES? Either way, it's probably easier just to sniff the keyboard or bug the encrypted phone.
It may drive you nuts that somebody is going to make money, but that is exactly what WILL feed the people of Iraq (if anything does). Yes, we must be careful that the people of Iraq get their "fair" share of the ancestral entitlement (whatever that means).
First, Diamond's supposedly "most surprising" revelation is the most obvious one: tragedy of commons. This is old hat.
Second, he gives only passing mention to perhaps the biggest problem of all: uncertainty. We don't really know which long-term trends will turn out to be problems, because either we don't know what will happen, or we don't know how well we'll be able to respond to it in the future. Both are true in the case of pollution, overpopulation, and energy source depletion.
But in the professor's mind, all the world's problems are clear-cut, if only selfishness and religion would make way for collective rationality. This of course leads to nowhere but communism. Before accusing me of McCarthyism, reconsider Diamond's arguments: it is assumed implicitly that "we" have identified the problems, and the main barrier to fixing them is bending individual will to society's best interest. That is exactly what he is saying.
But based on results thus far, wouldn't you agree "biotech" has been overhyped? A "revolution" would be something that the average person would notice.
Actually, I think pricewatch deserves a lot of credit for forcing dealers to include shipping charges in their advertised prices. That was a very significant, pro-consumer move. I've had good luck with it, but I strongly prefer companies that actually answer their telephone, and confirm stock on hand before the order.
AMD beside the point, I've never seen a reliability problem with any brand of processor. My Cyrix chip worked fine (but slow), my Celeron 300a overclocked to 450 ran for a few years before I replaced it with a Celeron 566 overclocked to 800 Mhz, also 2 or 3 years ago. Hard drives come and go, but I've had little trouble with silicon.
I was an emusic subscriber. Even though I have now terminated my membership, I have to say it was worth what I spent on it (approx $70) I found several artists I never would have, and burned some CDs I still enjoy regularly. I eventually quit because it was taking more and more searching between each "find," but I might sign up again in a year or two, and see what new stuff they have.
It was only about $2. Unfortunately it broke after the first meager launch. Very disappointing for a 4 1/2 year old. So I glued the crack shut and on the next launch it went BANG! (Give me a break, this is rocket science after all!) So I cut off the fins and pump fitting and epoxied them to a 1 liter pop bottle. Pumped that sucker up and whoosh! Looking up we saw only a thin column of water extending up into the air... like a fool I had used a clear pop bottle and we never did find the thing.
It doesn't even really matter whether you're cheating; they don't need a reason to force you to leave. If you figure out a legal way to win money, you'll still get kicked out.
Being pedantic is good in technical work. But to communicate with human beings you must learn to turn it off. Pedants get confused when people don't say exactly what they mean, or express their thoughts incompletely, which for better or worse is the norm.
Unless you gather that your interviewer is a nitpicker, the correct answer to "how many bits in a byte?" is "8," or "usually 8" if you want to show off.
Then again, I'm not all that "community" oriented. I just like the distro, and the simple, straightforward feel of it. No BS, and it doesn't try to get in your face or "brand" you. It's pure software, and I don't mean that from an ideological perspective, more in the sense that drinking pure water is nicer than drinking dirty water.
I'm certain that debian's goodness results from some hard work and even idealism by the people you're criticising. I think debian's ideals indirectly make it even nicer than other distros for "just getting stuff done." The only time it ever threw me for a minute was having to install gimp-nonfree for gif support.
As for these licensinig squabbles, 1) I'd never know about them if I didn't read it in slashdot and 2) that's democracy for you.
Once in a while people stumble onto a very fruitful new field and progres is fast for the first few years. Just like computing has been for the last few decades. I'm sure we'll live long enough to look back and realize that computing has stagnated.
Quite the opposite for me - Alan Turing is the *only* computer scientist whose sex life I learned anything at all about in school.
If you're asking whether all programmers might become extinct, well, "ever" is a long time. But I will say this: a program could no more easily replace programmers in general, than it could replace every other "information worker" job. In other words, even if computers do surpass our own intellect, programming would be one of the last jobs to go.
I often wonder whether people are any happier now than 4000 years ago, or on the frontier 150 years ago. Too bad there's no way to know the suicide rate among hunter-gatherers.
Of course, many more of us survive childhood now, which certainly seems good.
Your idea that Boole predated computers is also wrong, since Boole was a contemporary of Babbage. Which is not to say that Babbage's computers were digital, but the idea of encoding problems as calculations, and munging on them with machines, was definitely there.
Okay, go ahead and argue it.
That's exactly what Olestra is.
He already said his expenses were "just about 0," so I don't see how there could be any corporation assets to begin with.