If this new MS team can improve the core to the point where it's as good or better than Linux, then the only reason anyone would use Linux would be cost.
When I read it, it reminds me of a certain enormous bullet from some level of some Mario Bros game that I haven't played in ages (one that you have to duck in a certain low point of the level to avoid, as you can't jump over it).
That might not be what he's referring to, but it's what it reminds me of.
That's *exactly* what I was thinking. It'd be great if torrent websites simply provided an RSS feed of their torrents instead of an HTML page; that way there'd be less HTTP traffic to the server, allowing more bandwidth for the bt trackers to play.
You think Mozilla needed AOL's backing just to get anything done? Yeah right!
First of all, Moz had a great product long before AOL bought them. Secondly, AOL has been doing more harm than good; AOL has blown off all the Moz developers, destroyed Netscape, and is now trying to milk the last drops out of the Netscape brand for their latest ISP offering, which uses Internet Explorer.
It looks to me more like AOL's goal was to destroy Mozilla, not to support it and allow it to bloom.
given no time cues, the human body naturally drifts into a 25-hour cycle
Strange; one year during summer vacation, I lived in a basement with no windows and no clocks -- my body quickly changed to a 36-hour cycle. I was alseep for 13 hours, then awake for 23.
My guess would be that established monopolies don't feel like putting up the costs of the initial investment for broadband (ie, they're perfectly happy to fleece you for existing services, they don't want to pay anything to give you broadband, even if they'll make lots of money in the future). Chalk it up to slow, stupid beurocracies, that are incapable of accepting short term losses as broadband is implemented, in order to get long-term gains as people sign up for broadband.
I'm not sure how that's really much different in Canada, because the cable company and the phone company are both huge, stupid beurocracies... (just try the tech support for either one).
You know, I've always thought that OpenOffice wasn't slow enough, but I could never think of a decent way to make it slower. You've really hit the nail on the head, though: We can add another abstraction layer to the code!
Seriously, though, I think OOo is already big and slow enough, it needs to become faster, not more bloated. The idea of rewriting OOo's interface in XUL (which is basically XML + javascript) makes me shudder.
I don't mean to single out this author, but we have a Slashdot article that supposed to be about the Nova show on Amos Ives Root, and it contains ten links to various articles of various relevance, only one of which will bring you to the article you wish to read, and it's not even clear which link that is! This is quite common with Slashdot articles, and it makes Slashdot more than a bit difficult to navigate.
I mostly agree with you, but you have to understand that there is a huge pool of people submitting slashdot stories, and all the ones that are posted are essentially posted verbatim; the editors edit nothing, they simply choose which to post and which not to post. So with a wide variety of story submitters having essentially free reign on the story text, various linking styles (including the "random garbage" style seen here) will appear in different stories.
I just rely on the statusbar in my browser to tell me if the link is worth clicking on or not. Typically I only click if the link is long (ie, not to a root page), and if the link isn't to somewhere else on slashdot.:)
It kind of does. Compare the technological development of, say, the past 5 years verses the past 500 or 5,000 years. Perhaps the total knowledge of all humans doesn't double every 18 months, but the more technology we have, the faster we get more technology.
I agree with you, but it makes for a very boring discussion:)
Ergo, no time travel which involves any kind of interaction with the past. Period.
But what if your time travel into the past was already a part of the causality? Eg, the world that exists today is only the way it is because time travlers messing with the past have made it this way. They can't "change" anything, any time traveller going into the past with the intent of changing events will find out that they are largely the cause of why the events are the way they are. Think Skynet. Skynet only exists because they sent a terminator back to kill the human opposition, and the human opposition only exists because they sent a human back to stop the terminator (who coincidentally fathered the leader of the human rebellion). Each side of the war sent an agent back in time; these agents weren't able to change anything, they simply fullfilled the creation of the world that sent them back in time to begin with.
Of course, Terminator isn't the greatest example because people messing with the past do manage to "change" the future, though only slightly (they can delay Skynet, but not prevent it). So that analogy is flawed.
Wow, that's a crazy idea! You get the message the second you turn it on, but you need to leave it on for hundreds years, otherwise they won't be able to send you the message that you already recieved:)
Most people would probably think "well, we already got the message, lets just shut the damn thing off now", but if it's off, nobody can send the message...
On the other hand if you got the message, you could rest assured that the machine will be left off for the required amount of time for the message to be sent.
Personally, if I was operating the machine, after about 10 minutes, I'd send a message back 9 minutes that said "in 9 minutes, you'll get bored and send this message to yourself".
That's a good point; I spend a great deal of my time anxiously waiting for the next exciting version of my favorite open source software, I figure most people from the future would be too busy enjoying their great software to bother coming back here to bother us:)
It's complications like that that make me wonder if time travel hasn't already been invented, it's just the poor guy sent himself into a deadly vacuum.
Ever heard of a little thing called relativity? I highly doubt that any time machine, no matter how contrived, could move you through time while keeping you absolutely fixed in space (mostly because there's no such thing as being Absolutely fixed in space; every measurement is relative to something else).
When travelling through time, you have to get from Time A to Time B, and somewhere in between, the process that takes you there would keep you fixed in position relative to where you were before, ie, you'd still be on Earth.
Even then, if time travel somehow kept you absolutely fixed in space, then you'd have to do your time travel on a spaceship that's moving quickly. In the case of going back in time, aim the ship at where the Earth came from, so that you'll be near it when you arrive at your destination time; if your destination is the future, aim your ship at where the Earth is going, and then when you arrive, the earth will be there too.
Then again, time travel is a trivially easy process... just as long as you're moving forwards:) (I'm currently travelling forward through time at a rate of 1 s/s, so I guess you could say my coefficient of time travel is 1. I wonder if there is work being done to alter this coefficient; negative numbers would be travel back in time, 0-1 would be slow motion, and more than 1 would be going into the future).
Speaking of that, I don't really believe that any time machine could instantaneously move you from Time A to Time B, for the same reason that it's not generally possible to move instantaneously from Place A to Place B. It takes time to move through space, so I guess it takes time to move through time (like I said above, we're cruising along at 1 s/s; there'd be rates of movement through time, just like there are rates of movement through space). Your time machine could have "fast forward" and "rewind" buttons, but you couldn't really have "skip to this date." Time machines would be more like tape decks than CD players:)
Disclaimer: I'm a total sucker for time-travel in movies and TV shows, even if it's only peripheral to the plot. I've yet to see a tv show or movie (or book, for that matter) that involved time travel that I didn't like. All the episodes of Star Trek with time travel were awesome, I loved Quantum Leap, Star Trek IV, Timecop, Millenium, 12:01, Groundhog Day, and the million other movies with time travel in them... I have a bit of a physics background, and I like to ponder the (im)possibilities.
Overall, sounds like a step backwards to me. I'll stick with my Shaw 300KB/second cable-Internet for $30 Canadian a month.
Exactly! I currently have TWO 6.5 GB torrents open, they're going quickly but it'll take a couple of days to complete. I shudder to think how much waiting I'd have to do on a "dialup, but with compression" connection, considering it's already video data and doesn't compress well.
Slashdot Mirror
I look at it as though I'm leveling the playing field.
Do you also steal from the wealthy?
You should be using gentoo.
If this new MS team can improve the core to the point where it's as good or better than Linux, then the only reason anyone would use Linux would be cost.
Tell that to RMS.
I actually received the nickname Sancho for a different reasons
Why, is your best friend Don Quixote?
When I read it, it reminds me of a certain enormous bullet from some level of some Mario Bros game that I haven't played in ages (one that you have to duck in a certain low point of the level to avoid, as you can't jump over it).
That might not be what he's referring to, but it's what it reminds me of.
You could use Slashcode, IIRC they have a half-decent demo of it in production.
Any thoughts?
Simple, take your sweet fucking time.
If anybody asks why you're such a slowpoke, just say you're making extra careful that everything is perfect, so there aren't any problems.
That's *exactly* what I was thinking. It'd be great if torrent websites simply provided an RSS feed of their torrents instead of an HTML page; that way there'd be less HTTP traffic to the server, allowing more bandwidth for the bt trackers to play.
You think Mozilla needed AOL's backing just to get anything done? Yeah right!
First of all, Moz had a great product long before AOL bought them. Secondly, AOL has been doing more harm than good; AOL has blown off all the Moz developers, destroyed Netscape, and is now trying to milk the last drops out of the Netscape brand for their latest ISP offering, which uses Internet Explorer.
It looks to me more like AOL's goal was to destroy Mozilla, not to support it and allow it to bloom.
That's an *excellent* point.
:)
(just waiting for my +5, insightful
given no time cues, the human body naturally drifts into a 25-hour cycle
:)
Strange; one year during summer vacation, I lived in a basement with no windows and no clocks -- my body quickly changed to a 36-hour cycle. I was alseep for 13 hours, then awake for 23.
Drove my parent's crazy
I want the Duct Tape Wallet for christmas!
Why is it so hard here?
My guess would be that established monopolies don't feel like putting up the costs of the initial investment for broadband (ie, they're perfectly happy to fleece you for existing services, they don't want to pay anything to give you broadband, even if they'll make lots of money in the future). Chalk it up to slow, stupid beurocracies, that are incapable of accepting short term losses as broadband is implemented, in order to get long-term gains as people sign up for broadband.
I'm not sure how that's really much different in Canada, because the cable company and the phone company are both huge, stupid beurocracies... (just try the tech support for either one).
rewrite OOo into XUL/XPCOM/Gecko?
Brilliant!
You know, I've always thought that OpenOffice wasn't slow enough, but I could never think of a decent way to make it slower. You've really hit the nail on the head, though: We can add another abstraction layer to the code!
Seriously, though, I think OOo is already big and slow enough, it needs to become faster, not more bloated. The idea of rewriting OOo's interface in XUL (which is basically XML + javascript) makes me shudder.
I don't mean to single out this author, but we have a Slashdot article that supposed to be about the Nova show on Amos Ives Root, and it contains ten links to various articles of various relevance, only one of which will bring you to the article you wish to read, and it's not even clear which link that is! This is quite common with Slashdot articles, and it makes Slashdot more than a bit difficult to navigate.
:)
I mostly agree with you, but you have to understand that there is a huge pool of people submitting slashdot stories, and all the ones that are posted are essentially posted verbatim; the editors edit nothing, they simply choose which to post and which not to post. So with a wide variety of story submitters having essentially free reign on the story text, various linking styles (including the "random garbage" style seen here) will appear in different stories.
I just rely on the statusbar in my browser to tell me if the link is worth clicking on or not. Typically I only click if the link is long (ie, not to a root page), and if the link isn't to somewhere else on slashdot.
I wish all technology followed moore's law ; )
It kind of does. Compare the technological development of, say, the past 5 years verses the past 500 or 5,000 years. Perhaps the total knowledge of all humans doesn't double every 18 months, but the more technology we have, the faster we get more technology.
patients might not like the word nuclear.
:)
I wonder if those same patients imploded upon learning that their very bodies were made up of nuclear particles (ie, protons and neutrons)
"It's nuclear! It must be bad!"
Paradox, violation of causality. Not allowed.
:)
I agree with you, but it makes for a very boring discussion
Ergo, no time travel which involves any kind of interaction with the past. Period.
But what if your time travel into the past was already a part of the causality? Eg, the world that exists today is only the way it is because time travlers messing with the past have made it this way. They can't "change" anything, any time traveller going into the past with the intent of changing events will find out that they are largely the cause of why the events are the way they are. Think Skynet. Skynet only exists because they sent a terminator back to kill the human opposition, and the human opposition only exists because they sent a human back to stop the terminator (who coincidentally fathered the leader of the human rebellion). Each side of the war sent an agent back in time; these agents weren't able to change anything, they simply fullfilled the creation of the world that sent them back in time to begin with.
Of course, Terminator isn't the greatest example because people messing with the past do manage to "change" the future, though only slightly (they can delay Skynet, but not prevent it). So that analogy is flawed.
Wow, that's a crazy idea! You get the message the second you turn it on, but you need to leave it on for hundreds years, otherwise they won't be able to send you the message that you already recieved :)
Most people would probably think "well, we already got the message, lets just shut the damn thing off now", but if it's off, nobody can send the message...
On the other hand if you got the message, you could rest assured that the machine will be left off for the required amount of time for the message to be sent.
Personally, if I was operating the machine, after about 10 minutes, I'd send a message back 9 minutes that said "in 9 minutes, you'll get bored and send this message to yourself".
why on earth would you want to come to 2003?
:)
That's a good point; I spend a great deal of my time anxiously waiting for the next exciting version of my favorite open source software, I figure most people from the future would be too busy enjoying their great software to bother coming back here to bother us
It's complications like that that make me wonder if time travel hasn't already been invented, it's just the poor guy sent himself into a deadly vacuum.
:) (I'm currently travelling forward through time at a rate of 1 s/s, so I guess you could say my coefficient of time travel is 1. I wonder if there is work being done to alter this coefficient; negative numbers would be travel back in time, 0-1 would be slow motion, and more than 1 would be going into the future).
:)
Ever heard of a little thing called relativity? I highly doubt that any time machine, no matter how contrived, could move you through time while keeping you absolutely fixed in space (mostly because there's no such thing as being Absolutely fixed in space; every measurement is relative to something else).
When travelling through time, you have to get from Time A to Time B, and somewhere in between, the process that takes you there would keep you fixed in position relative to where you were before, ie, you'd still be on Earth.
Even then, if time travel somehow kept you absolutely fixed in space, then you'd have to do your time travel on a spaceship that's moving quickly. In the case of going back in time, aim the ship at where the Earth came from, so that you'll be near it when you arrive at your destination time; if your destination is the future, aim your ship at where the Earth is going, and then when you arrive, the earth will be there too.
Then again, time travel is a trivially easy process... just as long as you're moving forwards
Speaking of that, I don't really believe that any time machine could instantaneously move you from Time A to Time B, for the same reason that it's not generally possible to move instantaneously from Place A to Place B. It takes time to move through space, so I guess it takes time to move through time (like I said above, we're cruising along at 1 s/s; there'd be rates of movement through time, just like there are rates of movement through space). Your time machine could have "fast forward" and "rewind" buttons, but you couldn't really have "skip to this date." Time machines would be more like tape decks than CD players
Disclaimer: I'm a total sucker for time-travel in movies and TV shows, even if it's only peripheral to the plot. I've yet to see a tv show or movie (or book, for that matter) that involved time travel that I didn't like. All the episodes of Star Trek with time travel were awesome, I loved Quantum Leap, Star Trek IV, Timecop, Millenium, 12:01, Groundhog Day, and the million other movies with time travel in them... I have a bit of a physics background, and I like to ponder the (im)possibilities.
Overall, sounds like a step backwards to me. I'll stick with my Shaw 300KB/second cable-Internet for $30 Canadian a month.
Exactly! I currently have TWO 6.5 GB torrents open, they're going quickly but it'll take a couple of days to complete. I shudder to think how much waiting I'd have to do on a "dialup, but with compression" connection, considering it's already video data and doesn't compress well.
You have to dig pretty deep on the African continent to find anywhere a typical European traveler would be going.
Why, are they all underground?
Down with custom file dialogs! Hooray for KDE file dialogs!
Yeah, I love the KDE file dialog, it's awesome. Way better than the GTK2 one...
Also, KDE's choice of focus models verse GNOME make KDE awesome (GNOME's focus model just gets worse and worse with every version).
The Cajun Spam Gang is mentioned in the linked article.
I guess it's a pretty safe bet, then, eh?