I see this was modded a +1 insightful, -1 troll. Troll how? I see no reason why someone can mod down something as a troll on such a whim. Where is the troll elememt? The C/C++ bit? If someone cannot see such a patently tongue in cheek comment (with parenthesis added so even idiots can understand) then there is no hope for a moderation system.
The/. mod system is broken. I am pissed off because I wrote a fairly well-thought out argument, and some tit mods it down for erasons of his own. Negative mod point just do not work; a comment I have heard often but not really appreciated until now.
I set my home page to Google, and a lot of the time when I open IE (on XP), rather than open up google on IE, it gives me a download box - trying to download [/] from www.google.com -> open / save / cancel; it seems to think google is a file rather than a URL. What's with that? Works if I just keep trying though.Pain in the ass.
My third attempt at posting this (Slashdot requires you to wait 20 seconds between hitting reply and posting, they figured on the back button too somehow)
Re:Not a troll, just a question ...
on
AMD's Athlon XP 2700+
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
For most users, the answer is no, you don't need any faster. Today's 'obsolete' chips (like my AMD XP 1500+) are much faster than what I need. For a few power users (scientific stuff, large app compiling, rendering, SETI...) these will offer some benefit. For a few 'bleeding edge' enthusiasts, they are desirable. For the rich, they may as well have them. Everyone else - 800MHz is probably enough; it's about the bare minimum for decent DVD playback (you can scape by on a bit less but that's a reasonable minimum.)
Remember also that today's 'normal user' chips are yesterday's fastest - if chip makers thought the way you did, then we might have stopped with only a few hundred MHz (and of course 740K RAM).
The other benefit is in coding - today's languages are designed with bloat in mind. That's why C++ is better than C (war! war!) - C is more efficient, faster, and therefore better... but C++ on a faster processor is just as fast (or faster), who cares about efficiency, and easier to program and maintain (the whole purpose of OO programming) - the point is, let the RAM and processor take care of the dirty work, and give us the apps to play with. The bloat simply doesn't matter any more. Obviously this is oversimplifying somewhat (peace! peace!) but the principles hold true... just think, if processors were fast enough, and computers were powerful enough, then programming languages could be so powerful (read - idiot friendly) that all you would need to do is fire up your 'Microsoft NaturalLanguage++(h4X0r 3d¦7¦0n)' and type in "/\/\4k3 4 l33t g4/\/\3 4 8¦7 l¦k3 'quake 8'" (make a l33t game a bit like Quake 8 - I'm not very fluent in h4x0r I'm afraid) and it would do all the dirty work for you.
In the short term it's nice when things do start a little bit faster, but for most intents and purposes it doesn't matter. In the long term, when your house central server is automagically ordering your groceries, booking the car in to get a service, paying your bills, playing you two different DVDs in different rooms and some elevator music in the hall, running SETI and PersonalGenomeDecoder (OK, I made that one up) in the background, and the kids are deathmatching with a video-link up to their friends (who live in big plastic bubbles on the moon), and sending all this info and more back to microsoft; only then will you appreciate what these slight incremental power-ups might do in the long term.
But that's missing the point - they are distributing the software free. As such, surely they shouldn't bitch when someone uses it an a way that they don't like?
The problem here is that their plan backfired. It was a good plan in theory - write good program for DVD burning, give away free to get people to use the new superdrive; unfortunately the world as it is doesn't care - it's just free to them now.
So now someone has figured out a way to use it on non-Apple hardware - tha's a bit sucky for Apple, I admit. But in all honesty, they should have realised beforehand that this was going to happen. After all, they're in the computer business. Thye know what's going on.
If they wanted to profit for the time and effort, they should have sold it, or bundled it free with thte superdrive only with protection from the standard anti-copying laws. People might have got round it anyway, but it would have been more low-key, strictly non-legit. This was notihng more than a marketing ploy.
Incidentally, it was stopped because of the DMCA - could the un-modified version not be used in just the same way with the same DMCA violations, but using Apple hardware?
You ask what right we have to deny these people the drug. That they have an obligation to give the drug to these people. Do they really have an obligation? What right do you have to tell them what to do?
Although morally we could argue that every living person on this earth should try to help every other living person, everyone's interpretation of morality is different. Why should the poor people in Africa be any different from the rich people in Africa? Or the poor people in America (by which I mean the US)?
The truth is the company has no such obligation. I don't see you selling all your possessions to send to the needy - equally you should not say that they have to give up their rights. Remember that they are not the cause of the disease - infection is as much a part of life as living itself - these are merely organisms trying to survive. Just because they kill humans doens't change that (and don't bore me with a discussion of whether virii are actually alive or dead). So, these people are dying of a disease which exists in nature; we can help them, if we want. But we are under no obligation to do so.
Morally you are right. If the companies have enough money to distribute their product to those who cannot afford it, then they should. Equally, The USA should distribute all its excess food and wealth to less needy countries.
You are very generous with other peoples' money. Don't assume that they share your false sense of morality just because you don't have to answer to shareholders.
I totally agree. There are very few internet using (males) who can claim to never have even thought about looking at some porn - including when some friend sends dirty pictures (usually of something gross, however). Despite the sheer numbers who do this (don't argue - just look how successful porn is on the internet), it is still seen as dirty, because society feels that way. If someone were to look at your log and see a few visits to porn sites, then don't doubt that if you are in court this will be used as character assassination. Never mind your innocence pertaining to the crime - suddenly everyone knows about your porn habits.
This isn't even going into the other problems - others using your computer, spoofed IPs, internet cafe access, sites with political affiliations, the security on these logs being lax, the potential for blackmail...
I would be curious as to what the politicians who might vote for this might feel if someone was to walk around and log all their activities - regardless of what you are doing, it is a fundamental right to privacy which is being overturned if such a thing was to pass.
For all windows faults (and there are many) and all Microsoft's faults (and there are more), it is still easy to use. You don't have to satisfy dependencies (unless you count DirectX, which is likely to be on the same CD as anything that needs it), you click a few buttons to install pretty much any program, and it is geared towards people just wanting to click on a few obvious buttons to be able to do what they want to do.
I'm not disagreeing with your criticisms of Microsoft, but my point is about the dumbing down of computers still going on. I could have just as easily put MacOS or KDE/Gnome being added to linux and the direction which they are all taking (i.e. toward the mythical 'use-friendliness') and my comment would have been just as relevant; however, zealots like you might not then have had ammunition which remains, sadly, irrelevant to the point I was making.
Incidentally, you cite my comment 'user-friendly' OS (MS) as being a delusion. But you haven't disproved it - all you have said is that they are anticompetitive and stifle innovation - well known facts. It doesn't change things - their OS is still designed to be user-friendly and hold the users' hands. Whether or not their practices have meant that otherwise we could be further along this road is, still, irrelevant. The original point was, and remains, that computer dumbing down has not stopped.
My reply was more to the other guy who was complaining more about not being able to get out once you were in, and getting put in was at the beck and call of some quack (the original topic being the minority report scenario...)
I can't speak directly about the US system, but it shows what is largely a problem with the US healthcare model (ours is by no means perfect, but when it is free at the point of delivery it seems to be a better idea). The funding is a problem here as well - there are certainly a good many people who are in regular jails who would be better served under psychiatric supervision. Politicians aren't generally interested in mental health - too much stereotype and stigma; the funding is directed towards political goals - breast care, cancer, heart disease; even when the evidence base is not really there (breast cancer screening, IIRC, has no objective evidence supporting it as a screening tool - there are a good deal of people who may have had their lives saved by it though, who I'm sure will disagree, but the point is, on a population scale, the same amount of money could have saved more people with some other disease - but an emotional subject for many and therefore a lot of investment).
Anyway, back to the point - you are right in that many people end up in the wrong place, although often it depends on the presentation - if you are seen to be dangerous to others, that doesn't neessarily mean you'll ever see a psychiatrist, in which case you'll never have a chance of seeing the inside of a mental hospital. Remember there are a lot of people without mental illness who are a danger to others as well - it has to be drawn to someone's attention, and it isn't always obvious.
The bottom line is money. Especially in the US, if you had to shell out $250 000 or more to go through med school (average debt at the moment here is about £12 000 ($18 000?) but we don't pay university fees or it would be much higher) then would you want to work for the government getting shit pay or get a million a year prescribing ritalin to kids whose parents couldn't cope with the fact that kids, as a rule, jump around and are generally unmanagable. (I have a lot of issues with the US system, and the mass prescribing of drugs to children who don't need them (only a very few of them do), often under the age that the drugs are licensed for, to keep the parents happy rather than to ofer any benefit to the kids, is nothing short of obscene. But that's what private healthcare does - "If you don't give me it, someone else will, and they will get my money instead")
Off the point again - a lot of the mentally ill here do not get into institutions; I can only imagine it would be worse in the US because it's a private system and as a general rule, the mentally ill are less likely to have cash (lower socioeconomic background, more difficult to hold down a job...). The people responsible, ultimately, are the politicians who allocate the funding, but until the mentally ill are viewed with more sympathy then this is unlikely to happen.
Incidentally, ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) is very effective for some people - like any treatment, it doesn't benefit everyone, and a few years ago they thought it was great so they did overprescribe it a bit (OK, a lot). I do see a lot of idiots being very vocal about it, however ('barbaric', 'painful', 'assault') who are clearly talking with compensation in mind. A minority of them have a point - it was not always administered properly. But most are just after a quick buck from a class action lawsuit.
The diaper days of the computer industry are over? That seems a little wrong; computers have been becoming more and more dumbed down since they were invented; consider the 'timeline' ->
big clunky room sized machines, require punch cards for data entry
big clunky desk sized machines, terminal based, bizarre data entry language, tape storage(if any), monochrome display
clunky machine the size of a portable TV, disk storage, colour display, window-based input and output; sound
Success of 'user-friendly' OS (MS)
Choose your size of computer from server to palmtop, billions of colours, 5.1 sound, DVD, MP3, all programs automatically install (even in Linux it only takes a configure/make/make install, most packages are available in a format to suit your OS so you don't have to play with the source, or you can even just use RPM / apt-get / red-carpet / autoupdater of various flavours); Wizards to set up email / WWW / whatever in 'under 15 minutes'
This timeline is still going in the same direction. Programs are easier and easier to use. User friendliness and eye candy are the norm. Programming is object oriented. The success of linux can be arguably attributed to the recent shift towards ease of use.
People have other things to do - if the computer doesn't work easily, they will do something else. All the snobs who say everyone should have xxxxx amount of understanding or they may as well not even have a computer are just being self-righteous; why should a secretary know what's under the hood to type her letters? Why should my gran configure her email from the command line? They don't have to, so they won't. They won't be worse people for it, and no one will care. It's as ridiculous a statement as to say that to own a car you should be able to fix it when it breaks down - there are some who can, some who can fix a minor problem, and a whole lot who just about know where the petrol cap is.
Things will continue to be dumbed down until they reach a point where they are almost instinctive to use. This is called market force, and is as much a part of western society as any other luxury (and to most, computers are a luxury, no matter how much they become the norm and their prices drop) like soft toilet paper, already grated cheese, food tins with an easily removable peel off top rather than use the can-opener (electric of course).
As a practising MD, (not a psychiatrist though, but I did spend some time (as a student!) in inpatient hospitals ans have seen the secure units (Carstairs, in Scotland).
Firstly, these places are NOT prisons - they are secure hospitals - while this does mean that you are not free to go, equally if you are deemed medically fit you may be let out even though in a conventional prison you might have barely served any sentence at all.
Secondly, the 'whim' of a doctor is a bit of a pointed term. Remember that these are professionals who have been practising for usually many years before they can commit someone for the longer stays - and this is constantly reviewed by consultants working with the patients every day. There are many different orders ('Sections' of our mental health act) which range from 6 hour detention (can be ordered by a qualified nurse) to 24h ( which I could do on my own, as I am fully registered (i.e. out of med school for over 1 year), to 48h, a week or two, a month or two, six months, a year, and indefinitely (I cannot remember all the exact times). For anything longer than 24h two docs must agree, or e.g. a court official. These people are very answerable for this decision; I would try to avoid sectioning a patient as I am no expert unless I thought I really had to - they would have to be pretty barking for this to happen. Of course, as a hospital doc, I could usually get them assessed by the on-call psychiatrist and pass the buck.
Both docs will have access to medical records, but each has to interview the patient and assess them. Patients can appeal against these decisions in which case a third 'impartial' doc is brought in -any number of times. Obviously they'll be an inpatient at the time though.
All in all it's a pretty good system - not infallible, but the benefit of doubt is always with the patient. No doc I know would risk their career with a blatantly wrong assessment, but not all are competent. The vast majority are though.
In practice you have to be pretty doo-lally to get commited. And you get out soon when better. OTOH, if you are a real head-casem you might be there for a while.
If the entire community is wrong, then why not lecture it? I'll be happy to admit I'm wrong if I am. My point is that people are almost automatically modded up or down depending on the subject rather than the content - an OSS/AMD/Linux zealot gets +5 insightful and the anti-MS/Intel/Disney zealot also gets the same +5; someone with more big-business friendly commecnts gets modded down just as automatically.
On the other hand, these same people who you say care about the specs go crying to their parents because the best specs do not belong to their favourite company. This is just missing the point. I can get a top-of-the-line Ford or a top-of-the-line Jaguar. The jag is likely to be more expensive, go faster (and incidentally get me more chicks) but at a price. If I am prepared to pay the extra cash then why shouldn't I get it? Because the community favours Fords? Don't be ridiculous.
Anyway, the community would just start spouting some shite about how the comparison was unfair because the Jag engine had more valves or BHP or something; but the Jag would still go faster regardless. And the Ford still wouldn't have more valves, so why even compare?
What if Microsoft were to do something great? Like all the money Bill Gates gives to charities? They would still get shit from/. (he doesn't deserve that money / it's a drop in the ocean for him / he's just trying to look good). I buy AMD, I like fast processors, I run Linux, I hardly ever give to charity, and I don't expect to do so if they don't want to. But to arbitrarily decide that all actions a company or individual make are evil based on their other actions is small minded. Just because Microsoft have an abominable record does not make every single one of their actions wrong, so to just say that they all are is being fairly pathetic and petty.
Too artisan an audience...
on
Pentium 4 2.8GHz
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This is getting ridiculous. Why so much Intel bashing? I realise that they are associated with 'the enemy' to most/.ers (i.e. Microsoft, big business, probably DMCA, RIAA and Disney...) but they release the fastest processor on the market and all they get is abuse.
Who cares that their processor is inefficient, poorly designed, and expensive? Not the ones who buy it certainly; there is a market fpor it, and they should not be penalised for serving their market - they are a business after all.
For all those arguing that these tests ar 'not fair' (memory, RAMBUS, blah, blah, blah) - you are missing the point. Boo hoo, they are using different equipment; I could equallly argue that AMD is shooting itself in the foot for not utilising the fastest memory architecture available. For most people, 700 or 800 MHz is more than necessary to do almost anything - above that only specialised areas will see any real benefit. Is it really any benefit to be able to play games at 32 bit compared to 24? Can you actually tell the difference at speed? Isn't it more to do with the graphics card anyway? Scientific applications, yes - these can be markedly improved with faster processors. But most readers here do not work in a render farm in Hollywood.
But back to the original point, we shouldn't be so aggressive towards them just because of who they are. They are serving a market, doing if very successfully, and for those people who do have $$$/£££ to spend, they represent the maximum performance. I will continue to buy AMD because I think they give more value, and my XP 1500+, although now slow compared to newer processors, is far faster than I need, even for compiling Mozilla or running KDE3, WinXP or Serious Sam 2. But that doesn't mean I should refuse to talk to people with an Intel chip in their machine.
And don't mod this down as flame/troll just because you disagree -use your points properly and mod up someone you agree with. And stop being small minded too...
Get the people to stop churning out crappy commercials. There's nothing better than a clever, cool, or just funny advert - good ads can make for good viewing too. That's why some companies (e.g. Levi's have a certain cult following to their ads. Always with a good soundtrack and beautiful people. I never buy their stuff, though...) will always do well to keep their advertising the way it is.
What I don't like is these awful ads that rich comapnies put out, and the even worse ones on local TV which are obviously drawn up by idiots with a handycam and a lobotomy. Don't even get me started on radio ads...
Good placement is important too - viewer profiling (a la Opera where you can put in your demography and it will only show you relevant ads) is feasible with cable and any future broadband 'TV' - I am interested in some adverts just because of the product, even if I won't necessarily buy anything.
But TV will not survive without advertising, unless we pay much more than we do at the moment; it just need to be less offensive than it is at the moment. I change the channel when some come on - what a poor representation of the company that is...
As the other guy mentioned, because they were born there.
The other thing is that in "less-developed" societies, the only way to safeguard your old age (read - over 30) is to have lots of children to support you - with high infant mortality, early death, infectious disease rampant and no insurance/pension/whatever, it's the only way to plan ahead.
Does it work? No...
China has had a population problem for many, many years (i.e. before western society as we know it) -partly cultural, but mostly human nature. The first world would be just as bad if we weren't so rich - now we can afford insurance, social security, emergency healthcare (even in those countries so backward that they don't have a publicly-funded health service (although ours is falling apart - discussion for another time)) so we can get away with an average of 2.4 kids or whatever and just slowly increase our population. But the other thing is that we have so much land (again, because we're rich is the fundamentals of it - North America did not always belong to the rifle-wielding USA'ers (nee Britons when it was still a colonial empire)). Overall, we have lots of land, little need for it, and can pay poor overcrowded 9 year old sweatshop workers a pittance because our artificial economy has created capitalism - a system of relative wealth where they need to be poor so that we can be rich.
Linus' point is that he is not wilfully violating someone else's property - he can only do this if he is aware there is a patent/IP issue, but he doesn't check...
As he says, he has no problem with you violating his IP - he does not think software engineers should concern themselves with such things.
Patent law is a big issue (as I'm sure any./ reader knows) to the OS community - the internet has broken down barriers which were there artificially before and this has accelerated (along with capitalism and the desire to make a quick buck regardless of ethics) the usual problem of laws only holding up after being suitably challenged.
If I patent software, and in 50 years we discover aliens from Mars have implemented the same thing, can I sue them, even though they couldn't have known about it? (assuming of course they haven't been intercepting our broadcasts for years...) Obviously not. How then can I sue some guy in another continent/country/state/town who happens to have had the same idea? We're not talking about the same code, or the same song, or the same book a la copyright - just the idea.
The point is there are large grey areas - the laws are there to protect someone copying someone else's work at the first person's expense, but they do not take into account that two pepole can have the same idea. What if the first person who discovered it had patented fire? ACtually, I can see next week's slashdot headline as someone realises there are no previous claimants and does so...
And the worst side of it is: the companies/people who patent things which are known about but not previously patented. That's using the whole protection of ideas thing but potentially against the original designer.
Just get them to bring samples of their work, be they source, binary programs, or web sites - anything that fits their intended role. Then ask them about these - how did they do X or Y? What problems did they have? What help did they get? Where did they find it?
If they are in a slightly different role, e.g. sysadmin, see the sites they run. Ask them about uptimes, downtimes, reasons for these, possible improvements. What would they change? What do they like?
These questions are all easy - if they actually work on the articles in question, they should have no problems. Their answers might surprise or impress you (or not). If you like their work, and you appreciate how they achieved it, then hire them.
My website (down at present and I don't want it slashdotted anyhoo) is based on remarkably (less than one week's) little coding experience - but it runs MySQL/PHP/Apache and I like to think it looks pretty. Could it get me a job? No - I don't know enough. But I could talk about it enthusiastically, to anyone who would be interested, and I could explain exactly how I achieved what I did, and how (IRC, those web monkeys built my damn site, I admit it!) I would change things a second time. Getting the job done is far more important than than how (unless you are Sigma designs...) and what better to talk about than your own work? After all, you know more about it than anyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
Affect is to mood what climate is to weather.
The /. mod system is broken. I am pissed off because I wrote a fairly well-thought out argument, and some tit mods it down for erasons of his own. Negative mod point just do not work; a comment I have heard often but not really appreciated until now.
My third attempt at posting this (Slashdot requires you to wait 20 seconds between hitting reply and posting, they figured on the back button too somehow)
Remember also that today's 'normal user' chips are yesterday's fastest - if chip makers thought the way you did, then we might have stopped with only a few hundred MHz (and of course 740K RAM).
The other benefit is in coding - today's languages are designed with bloat in mind. That's why C++ is better than C (war! war!) - C is more efficient, faster, and therefore better... but C++ on a faster processor is just as fast (or faster), who cares about efficiency, and easier to program and maintain (the whole purpose of OO programming) - the point is, let the RAM and processor take care of the dirty work, and give us the apps to play with. The bloat simply doesn't matter any more. Obviously this is oversimplifying somewhat (peace! peace!) but the principles hold true... just think, if processors were fast enough, and computers were powerful enough, then programming languages could be so powerful (read - idiot friendly) that all you would need to do is fire up your 'Microsoft NaturalLanguage++(h4X0r 3d¦7¦0n)' and type in "/\/\4k3 4 l33t g4/\/\3 4 8¦7 l¦k3 'quake 8'" (make a l33t game a bit like Quake 8 - I'm not very fluent in h4x0r I'm afraid) and it would do all the dirty work for you.
In the short term it's nice when things do start a little bit faster, but for most intents and purposes it doesn't matter. In the long term, when your house central server is automagically ordering your groceries, booking the car in to get a service, paying your bills, playing you two different DVDs in different rooms and some elevator music in the hall, running SETI and PersonalGenomeDecoder (OK, I made that one up) in the background, and the kids are deathmatching with a video-link up to their friends (who live in big plastic bubbles on the moon), and sending all this info and more back to microsoft; only then will you appreciate what these slight incremental power-ups might do in the long term.
The problem here is that their plan backfired. It was a good plan in theory - write good program for DVD burning, give away free to get people to use the new superdrive; unfortunately the world as it is doesn't care - it's just free to them now.
So now someone has figured out a way to use it on non-Apple hardware - tha's a bit sucky for Apple, I admit. But in all honesty, they should have realised beforehand that this was going to happen. After all, they're in the computer business. Thye know what's going on.
If they wanted to profit for the time and effort, they should have sold it, or bundled it free with thte superdrive only with protection from the standard anti-copying laws. People might have got round it anyway, but it would have been more low-key, strictly non-legit. This was notihng more than a marketing ploy.
Incidentally, it was stopped because of the DMCA - could the un-modified version not be used in just the same way with the same DMCA violations, but using Apple hardware?
...what these guys could do with an old 386...
Although morally we could argue that every living person on this earth should try to help every other living person, everyone's interpretation of morality is different. Why should the poor people in Africa be any different from the rich people in Africa? Or the poor people in America (by which I mean the US)?
The truth is the company has no such obligation. I don't see you selling all your possessions to send to the needy - equally you should not say that they have to give up their rights. Remember that they are not the cause of the disease - infection is as much a part of life as living itself - these are merely organisms trying to survive. Just because they kill humans doens't change that (and don't bore me with a discussion of whether virii are actually alive or dead). So, these people are dying of a disease which exists in nature; we can help them, if we want. But we are under no obligation to do so.
Morally you are right. If the companies have enough money to distribute their product to those who cannot afford it, then they should. Equally, The USA should distribute all its excess food and wealth to less needy countries.
You are very generous with other peoples' money. Don't assume that they share your false sense of morality just because you don't have to answer to shareholders.
This isn't even going into the other problems - others using your computer, spoofed IPs, internet cafe access, sites with political affiliations, the security on these logs being lax, the potential for blackmail...
I would be curious as to what the politicians who might vote for this might feel if someone was to walk around and log all their activities - regardless of what you are doing, it is a fundamental right to privacy which is being overturned if such a thing was to pass.
Anyway, who says they're not doing it already?
I'm not disagreeing with your criticisms of Microsoft, but my point is about the dumbing down of computers still going on. I could have just as easily put MacOS or KDE/Gnome being added to linux and the direction which they are all taking (i.e. toward the mythical 'use-friendliness') and my comment would have been just as relevant; however, zealots like you might not then have had ammunition which remains, sadly, irrelevant to the point I was making.
Incidentally, you cite my comment 'user-friendly' OS (MS) as being a delusion. But you haven't disproved it - all you have said is that they are anticompetitive and stifle innovation - well known facts. It doesn't change things - their OS is still designed to be user-friendly and hold the users' hands. Whether or not their practices have meant that otherwise we could be further along this road is, still, irrelevant. The original point was, and remains, that computer dumbing down has not stopped.
I can't speak directly about the US system, but it shows what is largely a problem with the US healthcare model (ours is by no means perfect, but when it is free at the point of delivery it seems to be a better idea). The funding is a problem here as well - there are certainly a good many people who are in regular jails who would be better served under psychiatric supervision. Politicians aren't generally interested in mental health - too much stereotype and stigma; the funding is directed towards political goals - breast care, cancer, heart disease; even when the evidence base is not really there (breast cancer screening, IIRC, has no objective evidence supporting it as a screening tool - there are a good deal of people who may have had their lives saved by it though, who I'm sure will disagree, but the point is, on a population scale, the same amount of money could have saved more people with some other disease - but an emotional subject for many and therefore a lot of investment).
Anyway, back to the point - you are right in that many people end up in the wrong place, although often it depends on the presentation - if you are seen to be dangerous to others, that doesn't neessarily mean you'll ever see a psychiatrist, in which case you'll never have a chance of seeing the inside of a mental hospital. Remember there are a lot of people without mental illness who are a danger to others as well - it has to be drawn to someone's attention, and it isn't always obvious.
The bottom line is money. Especially in the US, if you had to shell out $250 000 or more to go through med school (average debt at the moment here is about £12 000 ($18 000?) but we don't pay university fees or it would be much higher) then would you want to work for the government getting shit pay or get a million a year prescribing ritalin to kids whose parents couldn't cope with the fact that kids, as a rule, jump around and are generally unmanagable. (I have a lot of issues with the US system, and the mass prescribing of drugs to children who don't need them (only a very few of them do), often under the age that the drugs are licensed for, to keep the parents happy rather than to ofer any benefit to the kids, is nothing short of obscene. But that's what private healthcare does - "If you don't give me it, someone else will, and they will get my money instead")
Off the point again - a lot of the mentally ill here do not get into institutions; I can only imagine it would be worse in the US because it's a private system and as a general rule, the mentally ill are less likely to have cash (lower socioeconomic background, more difficult to hold down a job...). The people responsible, ultimately, are the politicians who allocate the funding, but until the mentally ill are viewed with more sympathy then this is unlikely to happen.
Incidentally, ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) is very effective for some people - like any treatment, it doesn't benefit everyone, and a few years ago they thought it was great so they did overprescribe it a bit (OK, a lot). I do see a lot of idiots being very vocal about it, however ('barbaric', 'painful', 'assault') who are clearly talking with compensation in mind. A minority of them have a point - it was not always administered properly. But most are just after a quick buck from a class action lawsuit.
big clunky room sized machines, require punch cards for data entry
big clunky desk sized machines, terminal based, bizarre data entry language, tape storage(if any), monochrome display
clunky machine the size of a portable TV, disk storage, colour display, window-based input and output; sound
Success of 'user-friendly' OS (MS)
Choose your size of computer from server to palmtop, billions of colours, 5.1 sound, DVD, MP3, all programs automatically install (even in Linux it only takes a configure/make/make install, most packages are available in a format to suit your OS so you don't have to play with the source, or you can even just use RPM / apt-get / red-carpet / autoupdater of various flavours); Wizards to set up email / WWW / whatever in 'under 15 minutes'
This timeline is still going in the same direction. Programs are easier and easier to use. User friendliness and eye candy are the norm. Programming is object oriented. The success of linux can be arguably attributed to the recent shift towards ease of use.
People have other things to do - if the computer doesn't work easily, they will do something else. All the snobs who say everyone should have xxxxx amount of understanding or they may as well not even have a computer are just being self-righteous; why should a secretary know what's under the hood to type her letters? Why should my gran configure her email from the command line? They don't have to, so they won't. They won't be worse people for it, and no one will care. It's as ridiculous a statement as to say that to own a car you should be able to fix it when it breaks down - there are some who can, some who can fix a minor problem, and a whole lot who just about know where the petrol cap is.
Things will continue to be dumbed down until they reach a point where they are almost instinctive to use. This is called market force, and is as much a part of western society as any other luxury (and to most, computers are a luxury, no matter how much they become the norm and their prices drop) like soft toilet paper, already grated cheese, food tins with an easily removable peel off top rather than use the can-opener (electric of course).
Firstly, these places are NOT prisons - they are secure hospitals - while this does mean that you are not free to go, equally if you are deemed medically fit you may be let out even though in a conventional prison you might have barely served any sentence at all.
Secondly, the 'whim' of a doctor is a bit of a pointed term. Remember that these are professionals who have been practising for usually many years before they can commit someone for the longer stays - and this is constantly reviewed by consultants working with the patients every day. There are many different orders ('Sections' of our mental health act) which range from 6 hour detention (can be ordered by a qualified nurse) to 24h ( which I could do on my own, as I am fully registered (i.e. out of med school for over 1 year), to 48h, a week or two, a month or two, six months, a year, and indefinitely (I cannot remember all the exact times). For anything longer than 24h two docs must agree, or e.g. a court official. These people are very answerable for this decision; I would try to avoid sectioning a patient as I am no expert unless I thought I really had to - they would have to be pretty barking for this to happen. Of course, as a hospital doc, I could usually get them assessed by the on-call psychiatrist and pass the buck.
Both docs will have access to medical records, but each has to interview the patient and assess them. Patients can appeal against these decisions in which case a third 'impartial' doc is brought in -any number of times. Obviously they'll be an inpatient at the time though.
All in all it's a pretty good system - not infallible, but the benefit of doubt is always with the patient. No doc I know would risk their career with a blatantly wrong assessment, but not all are competent. The vast majority are though.
In practice you have to be pretty doo-lally to get commited. And you get out soon when better. OTOH, if you are a real head-casem you might be there for a while.
Go on, mod me down. If you think it's as stoopit as I do, mod me up. We'll see what wins out...
On the other hand, these same people who you say care about the specs go crying to their parents because the best specs do not belong to their favourite company. This is just missing the point. I can get a top-of-the-line Ford or a top-of-the-line Jaguar. The jag is likely to be more expensive, go faster (and incidentally get me more chicks) but at a price. If I am prepared to pay the extra cash then why shouldn't I get it? Because the community favours Fords? Don't be ridiculous.
Anyway, the community would just start spouting some shite about how the comparison was unfair because the Jag engine had more valves or BHP or something; but the Jag would still go faster regardless. And the Ford still wouldn't have more valves, so why even compare?
What if Microsoft were to do something great? Like all the money Bill Gates gives to charities? They would still get shit from /. (he doesn't deserve that money / it's a drop in the ocean for him / he's just trying to look good). I buy AMD, I like fast processors, I run Linux, I hardly ever give to charity, and I don't expect to do so if they don't want to. But to arbitrarily decide that all actions a company or individual make are evil based on their other actions is small minded. Just because Microsoft have an abominable record does not make every single one of their actions wrong, so to just say that they all are is being fairly pathetic and petty.
that's meant to be partisan, sorry
Who cares that their processor is inefficient, poorly designed, and expensive? Not the ones who buy it certainly; there is a market fpor it, and they should not be penalised for serving their market - they are a business after all.
For all those arguing that these tests ar 'not fair' (memory, RAMBUS, blah, blah, blah) - you are missing the point. Boo hoo, they are using different equipment; I could equallly argue that AMD is shooting itself in the foot for not utilising the fastest memory architecture available. For most people, 700 or 800 MHz is more than necessary to do almost anything - above that only specialised areas will see any real benefit. Is it really any benefit to be able to play games at 32 bit compared to 24? Can you actually tell the difference at speed? Isn't it more to do with the graphics card anyway? Scientific applications, yes - these can be markedly improved with faster processors. But most readers here do not work in a render farm in Hollywood.
But back to the original point, we shouldn't be so aggressive towards them just because of who they are. They are serving a market, doing if very successfully, and for those people who do have $$$/£££ to spend, they represent the maximum performance. I will continue to buy AMD because I think they give more value, and my XP 1500+, although now slow compared to newer processors, is far faster than I need, even for compiling Mozilla or running KDE3, WinXP or Serious Sam 2. But that doesn't mean I should refuse to talk to people with an Intel chip in their machine.
And don't mod this down as flame/troll just because you disagree -use your points properly and mod up someone you agree with. And stop being small minded too...
What I don't like is these awful ads that rich comapnies put out, and the even worse ones on local TV which are obviously drawn up by idiots with a handycam and a lobotomy. Don't even get me started on radio ads...
Good placement is important too - viewer profiling (a la Opera where you can put in your demography and it will only show you relevant ads) is feasible with cable and any future broadband 'TV' - I am interested in some adverts just because of the product, even if I won't necessarily buy anything.
But TV will not survive without advertising, unless we pay much more than we do at the moment; it just need to be less offensive than it is at the moment. I change the channel when some come on - what a poor representation of the company that is...
Discussing a joke always make it funnier.
The other thing is that in "less-developed" societies, the only way to safeguard your old age (read - over 30) is to have lots of children to support you - with high infant mortality, early death, infectious disease rampant and no insurance/pension/whatever, it's the only way to plan ahead.
Does it work? No...
China has had a population problem for many, many years (i.e. before western society as we know it) -partly cultural, but mostly human nature. The first world would be just as bad if we weren't so rich - now we can afford insurance, social security, emergency healthcare (even in those countries so backward that they don't have a publicly-funded health service (although ours is falling apart - discussion for another time)) so we can get away with an average of 2.4 kids or whatever and just slowly increase our population. But the other thing is that we have so much land (again, because we're rich is the fundamentals of it - North America did not always belong to the rifle-wielding USA'ers (nee Britons when it was still a colonial empire)). Overall, we have lots of land, little need for it, and can pay poor overcrowded 9 year old sweatshop workers a pittance because our artificial economy has created capitalism - a system of relative wealth where they need to be poor so that we can be rich.
As he says, he has no problem with you violating his IP - he does not think software engineers should concern themselves with such things.
Patent law is a big issue (as I'm sure any ./ reader knows) to the OS community - the internet has broken down barriers which were there artificially before and this has accelerated (along with capitalism and the desire to make a quick buck regardless of ethics) the usual problem of laws only holding up after being suitably challenged.
If I patent software, and in 50 years we discover aliens from Mars have implemented the same thing, can I sue them, even though they couldn't have known about it? (assuming of course they haven't been intercepting our broadcasts for years...) Obviously not. How then can I sue some guy in another continent/country/state/town who happens to have had the same idea? We're not talking about the same code, or the same song, or the same book a la copyright - just the idea.
The point is there are large grey areas - the laws are there to protect someone copying someone else's work at the first person's expense, but they do not take into account that two pepole can have the same idea. What if the first person who discovered it had patented fire? ACtually, I can see next week's slashdot headline as someone realises there are no previous claimants and does so...
And the worst side of it is: the companies/people who patent things which are known about but not previously patented. That's using the whole protection of ideas thing but potentially against the original designer.
If they are in a slightly different role, e.g. sysadmin, see the sites they run. Ask them about uptimes, downtimes, reasons for these, possible improvements. What would they change? What do they like?
These questions are all easy - if they actually work on the articles in question, they should have no problems. Their answers might surprise or impress you (or not). If you like their work, and you appreciate how they achieved it, then hire them. My website (down at present and I don't want it slashdotted anyhoo) is based on remarkably (less than one week's) little coding experience - but it runs MySQL/PHP/Apache and I like to think it looks pretty. Could it get me a job? No - I don't know enough. But I could talk about it enthusiastically, to anyone who would be interested, and I could explain exactly how I achieved what I did, and how (IRC, those web monkeys built my damn site, I admit it!) I would change things a second time. Getting the job done is far more important than than how (unless you are Sigma designs...) and what better to talk about than your own work? After all, you know more about it than anyone else.
How do you know it isn't in fact DIVX which is XVID backwards, eh?