Your parent-poster made a well-reasoned argument that with proper pre- and post-conditions for each function and appropriate checking, correctness can be shown and bugs can be avoided. You then tell him he's wrong, and repeat your conclusion that "If you try to mathematically prove that a program is correct you simply cannot do it beyond a very simple level of complexity." without providing any evidence.
He comes off significantly more convincing than you.
So, what's great about that is, unless someone is tapping your phone line, or some well-placed FT employee is a thieve, there is no way in hell anybody can steal your personal information.
Nope. The fact that FT operates the whole network only means that man-in-the-middle and sniffing attacks are no longer possible. Insofar as "doing business online" still involves you giving personal information to the third party (which is to say, FT does not operate in the merchant credit services capacity) then that third party can still rip you off. And since actual incidents of sniffing/mim are insignificant compared to the unprotected types of scams, the difference is pretty unimportant...particularly in light of giving up the decentralized and freely-evolving nature of the Internet.
Go check out ProMash...I couldn't begin to describe all the stuff it does for you. A logbook is nice...but a ledger isn't quickbooks, know what I mean? Aaron says Beersmith is cool too, so might take a look there...I intend to.
Most of the people in the US are very poorly educated.
Sorry, this is total bullshit. You can just make things up, or you can go down to http://www.uis.unesco.org/ or any of a thousand other places to see how our education stacks up. We produce one of the best-trained workforces in the world, and your wishful superiority complex (let me guess, you're the one guy who's so gifted that the horrible public education here didn't ruin you, right?) doesn't change that a bit.
You are correct. If you are willing to pay for Windows, the 4 anti-malware apps you mention, and a Linux box (router/fw) to protect it, then Windows can be made safe. As long as you are willing to keep up with those 4 programs. And not click in the wrong place on the wrong day with Internet Explorer.
I don't claim it's a terrible system. It's pretty good for most folks' needs. But it is far, far more expensive than it would be under a competitive market. Microsoft is using its market power (which it gets via a network externality, mostly) to impose the monopolist solution on the market. This doesn't mean it's a "monopoly" from antitrust law's perspective. It means that from an economist's perspective they have chosen to produce where their marginal costs equal marginal revenues rather than where total costs equal demand. This maximizes profit by "capturing" what would otherwise be a consumer surplus (money in our pockets). As a side note, this also causes a dead-weight loss...the extra profit they receive is less than the extra amount we have to pay.
But luckily it's looking more and more like they won't be able to keep it up for long. Ballmer is already talking about increasing revenue by 13% next year, and mentions specifically that they'll need to drop prices to do it. Looks like the Mac's big gains of late and Linux's increasing maturity may be having an impact.
For my part, I use Linux on all my machines, and have for several years now. It's not really for the various technical advantages...the disadvantages are there as well, and more or less balance out. At least as important is the fact that I don't want to pirate software and Windows (and associated software) is really expensive. I do have one of my machines dual-booting with Vista RC1...it was free (as in beer). But my Linux side with Beryl, Beagle, etc is easily as impressive. I guess I would sum it up with this: I don't have a problem with Windows, I just don't see a lot of value for the money over what I can get on Linux for free.
At least they actually make things in China. The only things we make here anymore are cars...
And aircraft, computer chips, and lots of other high-tech stuff. But so what? Boo hoo, we don't have much commodity product manufacturing around here. Because such manufacturing is basically a solved problem these days, so everybody knows how to do it and there's relatively little profit to be had from it. We've got way more profitable activities to engage in here, things which are more befitting a highly-educated workforce sitting on some of the best infrastructure in the world. Hence, outsourcing. Manufacturing was just the first thing we sent over.
While the content (TV show, movie, etc) is not their legal property, they did produce the file that exists on the TiVo and on the user's computer once transfered.
So what? You are arbitrarily attaching significance to the act of creating a file; there is no such significance in the DMCA or in the greater body of copyright law. By your logic, if I call Prentice Hall and get permission to distribute photocopies of a chapter of a textbook to a class (a perfectly normal case), then I can sue the students if they then violate the copyright. That's ridiculous; I'm not the copyright holder, I just have his permission to make a few copies. The only person who could sue the students would be the copyright holder (in this case PH or the author).
In short, allowing me to make a photocopy of the work definitely doesn't transfer the copyright to me. And content producers allowing TiVo to copy their work doesn't either. The only people with rights to sue here are the copyright holders, and they can't do it based on the DRM-circumvention. They would need to show some violation of copyright law (say, giving the copy you made to a friend or putting up a torrent) and DRM-circumvention is only a violation if the copyright holder placed the DRM on the work. The fact that TiVo "produced the files" is 100% irrelevant.
I see in the news all the time that in the UK and Japan 10MBit/S connections are fairly common, but here in the US and Canada a 1 to 3 MBit/S connection is fairly uncommon.
Surely we're not so backwater....I mean, I'm in the middle of Missouri (not exactly a metropolitan locality) and I've got 5mbps cable. And that's just their standard speed...if I wanted to pay another $15 I could have 10mbps. The DSL speeds range from.5-7mbps IIRC. I find it hard to fathom that the vast majority of Americans (note, the vast majority of us are in the major cities now...) don't have access to similar or better services.
You have obviously been spendig too much time drinking the scifi cool-aid and not enough time logically thinking things through. And yes, I am a scientist (physicist).
Oh AC, your false pretenses always astound me. Are we really to believe that this quote-unquote "physicist" doesn't know how to spell "kool-aid"!?
Er...maybe I'm reading this wrong, but how the hell is this "video IM"? Instant messenging I think of as me and someone else simultaneously interacting....I type while he types, and we get each other's stuff in real time. This doesn't sound like that. This sounds like a pastebin; I upload my 60 secs and anybody can go look at it. Which I guess is ok....but it's certainly not as handy as actual IM functionality would be.
...so after Steam get Railroad, then Industrialization. Then build factories...
Your tech tree is so 1996. These days, factories come with Assembly Line, well before Industrialism. You don't even need railroad to get them. Industrialism is later, in any case, requiring electricity; but since there's no Mobile Warfare tech, you get to build tanks (and battleships) with Industrialism. So now my typical path is Steam Power -> Assembly Line -> Railroad -> Combustion -> Electricity -> Industrialism.
Isn't that a rather redundant term? After all, wouldn't one expect that a DVD contains video?
No. DVD's are used to store lots of things other than video. The studios like to call them "Digital Video Disc" but the computer and software industries have tended to favor "Digital Versatile Disc" instead. And in this case the (video) DVD is coming from a source (Debian) that has previously released many DVDs....the vast majority (all?) of which contained only non-video content. Had the title just been "Debian Conference DVDs released" it would have been highly ambiguous regarding whether this was a software product (say, a bootable distro setup for video-conferencing) or a video. Adding the descriptor is very useful.
I appears they want to make the money back selling the games.
Well thank God at least somebody around here is smarter than that dumbass who wrote TFA. I kept waiting for him to add back in at least some profit from game sales...but he never did. This entire article uses the assumption that Sony will not sell a single PS3 game. Granted, if that happens, Sony may well go under.
Uh...maybe in an intro econ or management course. Here in the real world, any large company will typically have some resources not being fully used. Layoffs are both logistically difficult and politically distasteful.
On the other hand, I think the underlying assumption the blurb makes is the bigger problem. Who says that supporting two Linux distributions takes big blue twice as long as it would to support one? For my part I consider that ridiculous on its face. The second system you test on should never take as long as the first, even if they share very little in common. For two extremely similar systems like these, the extra time should be minor. I'm sure IBM has a very clear idea of how much extra time it's taking them to support 2 distros, and for that matter how long it'll take to support three. And I'll bet dollars to donuts that for all three it's way, way less than double the time it would have taken to handle one.
Only if you venture out into the wild armed with nothing but a spear and a loincloth, hunt down the animal, and stuff yourself with its still-warm raw flesh at the site of the kill.
So, the spear is natural? And the loincloth? Sounds to me like if you want to cordon off human use of technology (the stinking buildings, the trade with strangers, etc.) then you'd have to take us all the way back to being fruit-eating "gatherers" rather than "hunter-gatherers" that used teamwork, communication, and technology. This means taking us back to before the homonids branched off from the other primates.
I think that's rather silly. What makes the "homo-" family so successful it its natural mental ability to work together and produce technology that allows more efficient expansion. Whether that's a spear, atlatl, wheat (Did you know that for the last 8000 years wheat has been domestic only? That is, it will not grow or spread on its own, and is entirely dependant on humans?), farming, or corporate slaughterhouses, it all seems natural to me.
Sega Saturn: 9.26 Million (Japan: 5.74, Other: 3.52)
Nintendo 64: 32.93 Million (Japan: 5.54, The Americas: 20.63, Other Regions: 6.75)
PlayStation: 102.49 Million as of March 31, 2005 (Japan: 21.59, USA: 40.78, Europe: 40.12) including 28.15 Million "PS one" units (Japan: 4.19, USA: 12.7, Europe: 11.26)
In other words, the Playstation more than tripled the N64's sales. When you sell three times as many units as your closest competitor, I don't think it's unreasonable to call it "Absolutely Dominating."
Libertarian the word has some nice ideas attached to it. The active political party identified as the Libertarian party is full of crazies, or at least, really extreme viewpoints.
No, you've got it backwards. Libertarian, the ideal, is an extreme viewpoint. Furthermore, its basic tenants (government is always inefficient, the unregulated free market will work smoothly and provide for everyone's best interest, individuals can provide for their own security) are demonstrably false. There are some Libertarian people out there that aren't insane...but I frequently question whether they've really thought through to the inevitabilities of what Libertarianism leads to when actually put into practice.
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Your parent-poster made a well-reasoned argument that with proper pre- and post-conditions for each function and appropriate checking, correctness can be shown and bugs can be avoided. You then tell him he's wrong, and repeat your conclusion that "If you try to mathematically prove that a program is correct you simply cannot do it beyond a very simple level of complexity." without providing any evidence.
He comes off significantly more convincing than you.
Judging by the 11-hour period without comments.
So, what's great about that is, unless someone is tapping your phone line, or some well-placed FT employee is a thieve, there is no way in hell anybody can steal your personal information.
Nope. The fact that FT operates the whole network only means that man-in-the-middle and sniffing attacks are no longer possible. Insofar as "doing business online" still involves you giving personal information to the third party (which is to say, FT does not operate in the merchant credit services capacity) then that third party can still rip you off. And since actual incidents of sniffing/mim are insignificant compared to the unprotected types of scams, the difference is pretty unimportant...particularly in light of giving up the decentralized and freely-evolving nature of the Internet.
It behooves you? Are you sure?
I love it! Most underrated post of the story. No doubt.
Go check out ProMash...I couldn't begin to describe all the stuff it does for you. A logbook is nice...but a ledger isn't quickbooks, know what I mean? Aaron says Beersmith is cool too, so might take a look there...I intend to.
Most of the people in the US are very poorly educated.
Sorry, this is total bullshit. You can just make things up, or you can go down to http://www.uis.unesco.org/ or any of a thousand other places to see how our education stacks up. We produce one of the best-trained workforces in the world, and your wishful superiority complex (let me guess, you're the one guy who's so gifted that the horrible public education here didn't ruin you, right?) doesn't change that a bit.
But w/ a 100Gb Ethernet you can download the Real Doll data of the supermodel to your desktop fabber real fast!
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Weird Science was a fictional work...
Hey, neat, another ProMash+Wine user!
Way to set them up for computer litterate jobs in the real world. :rolleyes:
You have an excellent point. After all, no one uses Linux in their computer literate real world jobs. Certainly not me...
...oh, wait. My whole livelihood comes from working with Linux. Never mind, you're a dumbfuck.
You are correct. If you are willing to pay for Windows, the 4 anti-malware apps you mention, and a Linux box (router/fw) to protect it, then Windows can be made safe. As long as you are willing to keep up with those 4 programs. And not click in the wrong place on the wrong day with Internet Explorer.
I don't claim it's a terrible system. It's pretty good for most folks' needs. But it is far, far more expensive than it would be under a competitive market. Microsoft is using its market power (which it gets via a network externality, mostly) to impose the monopolist solution on the market. This doesn't mean it's a "monopoly" from antitrust law's perspective. It means that from an economist's perspective they have chosen to produce where their marginal costs equal marginal revenues rather than where total costs equal demand. This maximizes profit by "capturing" what would otherwise be a consumer surplus (money in our pockets). As a side note, this also causes a dead-weight loss...the extra profit they receive is less than the extra amount we have to pay.
But luckily it's looking more and more like they won't be able to keep it up for long. Ballmer is already talking about increasing revenue by 13% next year, and mentions specifically that they'll need to drop prices to do it. Looks like the Mac's big gains of late and Linux's increasing maturity may be having an impact.
For my part, I use Linux on all my machines, and have for several years now. It's not really for the various technical advantages...the disadvantages are there as well, and more or less balance out. At least as important is the fact that I don't want to pirate software and Windows (and associated software) is really expensive. I do have one of my machines dual-booting with Vista RC1...it was free (as in beer). But my Linux side with Beryl, Beagle, etc is easily as impressive. I guess I would sum it up with this: I don't have a problem with Windows, I just don't see a lot of value for the money over what I can get on Linux for free.
At least they actually make things in China. The only things we make here anymore are cars...
And aircraft, computer chips, and lots of other high-tech stuff. But so what? Boo hoo, we don't have much commodity product manufacturing around here. Because such manufacturing is basically a solved problem these days, so everybody knows how to do it and there's relatively little profit to be had from it. We've got way more profitable activities to engage in here, things which are more befitting a highly-educated workforce sitting on some of the best infrastructure in the world. Hence, outsourcing. Manufacturing was just the first thing we sent over.
Thank you for this [un|mis]informed hodgepodge of miscalculations, misunderstandings, and conspiracy theories.
While the content (TV show, movie, etc) is not their legal property, they did produce the file that exists on the TiVo and on the user's computer once transfered.
So what? You are arbitrarily attaching significance to the act of creating a file; there is no such significance in the DMCA or in the greater body of copyright law. By your logic, if I call Prentice Hall and get permission to distribute photocopies of a chapter of a textbook to a class (a perfectly normal case), then I can sue the students if they then violate the copyright. That's ridiculous; I'm not the copyright holder, I just have his permission to make a few copies. The only person who could sue the students would be the copyright holder (in this case PH or the author).
In short, allowing me to make a photocopy of the work definitely doesn't transfer the copyright to me. And content producers allowing TiVo to copy their work doesn't either. The only people with rights to sue here are the copyright holders, and they can't do it based on the DRM-circumvention. They would need to show some violation of copyright law (say, giving the copy you made to a friend or putting up a torrent) and DRM-circumvention is only a violation if the copyright holder placed the DRM on the work. The fact that TiVo "produced the files" is 100% irrelevant.
I see in the news all the time that in the UK and Japan 10MBit/S connections are fairly common, but here in the US and Canada a 1 to 3 MBit/S connection is fairly uncommon.
Surely we're not so backwater....I mean, I'm in the middle of Missouri (not exactly a metropolitan locality) and I've got 5mbps cable. And that's just their standard speed...if I wanted to pay another $15 I could have 10mbps. The DSL speeds range from .5-7mbps IIRC. I find it hard to fathom that the vast majority of Americans (note, the vast majority of us are in the major cities now...) don't have access to similar or better services.
You have obviously been spendig too much time drinking the scifi cool-aid and not enough time logically thinking things through. And yes, I am a scientist (physicist).
Oh AC, your false pretenses always astound me. Are we really to believe that this quote-unquote "physicist" doesn't know how to spell "kool-aid"!?
Ha! Some physicist...
Er...maybe I'm reading this wrong, but how the hell is this "video IM"? Instant messenging I think of as me and someone else simultaneously interacting....I type while he types, and we get each other's stuff in real time. This doesn't sound like that. This sounds like a pastebin; I upload my 60 secs and anybody can go look at it. Which I guess is ok....but it's certainly not as handy as actual IM functionality would be.
Your tech tree is so 1996. These days, factories come with Assembly Line, well before Industrialism. You don't even need railroad to get them. Industrialism is later, in any case, requiring electricity; but since there's no Mobile Warfare tech, you get to build tanks (and battleships) with Industrialism. So now my typical path is Steam Power -> Assembly Line -> Railroad -> Combustion -> Electricity -> Industrialism.
Isn't that a rather redundant term? After all, wouldn't one expect that a DVD contains video?
No. DVD's are used to store lots of things other than video. The studios like to call them "Digital Video Disc" but the computer and software industries have tended to favor "Digital Versatile Disc" instead. And in this case the (video) DVD is coming from a source (Debian) that has previously released many DVDs....the vast majority (all?) of which contained only non-video content. Had the title just been "Debian Conference DVDs released" it would have been highly ambiguous regarding whether this was a software product (say, a bootable distro setup for video-conferencing) or a video. Adding the descriptor is very useful.
I appears they want to make the money back selling the games.
Well thank God at least somebody around here is smarter than that dumbass who wrote TFA. I kept waiting for him to add back in at least some profit from game sales...but he never did. This entire article uses the assumption that Sony will not sell a single PS3 game. Granted, if that happens, Sony may well go under.
Uh...maybe in an intro econ or management course. Here in the real world, any large company will typically have some resources not being fully used. Layoffs are both logistically difficult and politically distasteful.
On the other hand, I think the underlying assumption the blurb makes is the bigger problem. Who says that supporting two Linux distributions takes big blue twice as long as it would to support one? For my part I consider that ridiculous on its face. The second system you test on should never take as long as the first, even if they share very little in common. For two extremely similar systems like these, the extra time should be minor. I'm sure IBM has a very clear idea of how much extra time it's taking them to support 2 distros, and for that matter how long it'll take to support three. And I'll bet dollars to donuts that for all three it's way, way less than double the time it would have taken to handle one.
Er, am I the only one missing the distinction between "New Sugar Interface" and "GNOME Desktop" ????
Only if you venture out into the wild armed with nothing but a spear and a loincloth, hunt down the animal, and stuff yourself with its still-warm raw flesh at the site of the kill.
So, the spear is natural? And the loincloth? Sounds to me like if you want to cordon off human use of technology (the stinking buildings, the trade with strangers, etc.) then you'd have to take us all the way back to being fruit-eating "gatherers" rather than "hunter-gatherers" that used teamwork, communication, and technology. This means taking us back to before the homonids branched off from the other primates.
I think that's rather silly. What makes the "homo-" family so successful it its natural mental ability to work together and produce technology that allows more efficient expansion. Whether that's a spear, atlatl, wheat (Did you know that for the last 8000 years wheat has been domestic only? That is, it will not grow or spread on its own, and is entirely dependant on humans?), farming, or corporate slaughterhouses, it all seems natural to me.
Sony barely got more than half when fighting the N64. I wouldn't call it "Absolutely Dominated." They won, but not by that much.
Hey, I've got an idea: why don't you just make shit up? Or, here's a better idea: you could actually look it up.
Here's what Wikipedia has to say on the subject:
Sega Saturn: 9.26 Million (Japan: 5.74, Other: 3.52)
Nintendo 64: 32.93 Million (Japan: 5.54, The Americas: 20.63, Other Regions: 6.75)
PlayStation: 102.49 Million as of March 31, 2005 (Japan: 21.59, USA: 40.78, Europe: 40.12) including 28.15 Million "PS one" units (Japan: 4.19, USA: 12.7, Europe: 11.26)
In other words, the Playstation more than tripled the N64's sales. When you sell three times as many units as your closest competitor, I don't think it's unreasonable to call it "Absolutely Dominating."
Libertarian the word has some nice ideas attached to it. The active political party identified as the Libertarian party is full of crazies, or at least, really extreme viewpoints.
No, you've got it backwards. Libertarian, the ideal, is an extreme viewpoint. Furthermore, its basic tenants (government is always inefficient, the unregulated free market will work smoothly and provide for everyone's best interest, individuals can provide for their own security) are demonstrably false. There are some Libertarian people out there that aren't insane...but I frequently question whether they've really thought through to the inevitabilities of what Libertarianism leads to when actually put into practice.