It is unhealthy to be ignorant of reality. Skepticism is only _healthy_ when it's warranted. If you are skeptical that the sun will rise tomorrow, I am right to laugh in your face. It's fine to be skeptical.
- the Perforce tools suck so badly. p4v is OK, but the command line tools are unacceptable. - the branching and merging features are completely overrated. They're hard to use. They don't give you anything Subversion doesn't already have. - they don't version the filesystem hierarchy. - don't get me started on what a mess viewspecs are. Everybody defines their own view of the repository! Fucking hell, what a nightmare! - the kludges you have to use in order to maintain a checkout of a particular label AND the top of tree (HEAD) are truly breathtaking.
In fairness, Perforce network operations are blazingly fast, even over VPN; they've optimized their wire protocol quite well. Of course, they had to, because you can't really work offline in Perforce. There are ways to get around this, but you risk losing data. There is no automatic merge in the Perforce model. On the other hand, a Subversion branch operation is often more efficient because you don't need to have an actual duplicate copy of all the data.
That sort of thing happens all the time in the US, thanks to the for-profit hospital system. You can shout BS all you want, but it happens all the time. Talk to somebody who actually works in healthcare.
So ultimately, I can't justify it. $600 is a lot of money, especially when I can get what--for me at least--will be a very similar experience for $400. I would like to own a PS3, and I hope that the price drops soon so I can consider it. But until then, this Official PlayStation Magazine editor will have to join the dark side.
(This editorial lapse in judgement probably explains why the magazine content was so awful. And could anybody actually read the headline fonts? Total mess.)
RoughlyDrafted and Digg
on
The Zune Cometh
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
RoughlyDrafted [...] also calls out what they called a "Digg Fraud Campaign"
This is nonsense. The Warner/McCain/etc bill is a total capitulation to the Bush/Cheney administration. The whole 'we're so independent, we're standing up to teh Prez!' thing is a bullshit kabuki dance intended to get McCain some independent cred for the 2008 presidential election in exchange for being considerably more publicly sympathetic to the theocratic agenda of the far right than he has been in the past.
Aside from legalizing torture, the bill effectively eliminates habeas corpus, an important principle of law enshrined in the main body of the US Constitution itself. Eliminating habeas corpus means that the administration can jail you indefinitely simply by calling you as a terrorist. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, but here it is, in one tidy package.
How can a former torture victim like McCain roll over like this? Easy: he's selfish, he's a far-right wingnut (not a centrist -- look at his voting record), and he's personally never going to be tortured again, so what does he care? He wants to be president, and that's all that matters to him.
Warner is a damn liar like the rest of them. And so is McCain. Remember in 2008.
Um. I have to point out that the media was much more likely to cover protests at that point, no matter how small. These days, they self-censor to an alarming degree, having been cowed by the right. The most massive protests against the US -- in history -- have taken place in the last five years, and you haven't known about it because the US media hasn't reported it or has trivialized it.
It's not just the outright blatant propaganda on Fox, the other news outlets are doing their own slanting, frequently through omission. Check this tangentially-related example out, for one:http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Newsweek_fea tures_Losing_Afghanistan_in_international_0925.htm l
It was never perfect between the US and Europe, but don't try to pretend that this is status quo. Shrub has made things exponentially worse.
(Posted as AC, cos working for NewsCorp and hanging out on slashdot is roughly the equivalent of wearing a fur coat to an animal rights meeting).
Huh? There are tons of anti-science, anti-education, creationist Republican trolls here on Slashdot, many of whom get uprated with surprising regularity.
You don't see a problem when fully 50% or more of the population is ignorant of basic science?
Maybe you will understand when they arrive with torches at your ivory tower.
If you're working in a scientific occupation, you *will* be scapegoated by the increasingly ignorant. These people actively sanction violence against judges. Do you think that they'll hesitate to send a few 'eggheads' to the hell they so fervently believe in?
Incidentally, Bushnell's company, Atari, was the first to take a license under my patents in the 70's. The fact that Nolan Bushnell developed PONG after he played a ping-pong game on an Odyssey 1TL200 at a L.A. Magnavox dealership demo in May of 1972 is also well-known.
1. Atari was tiny, practically nonexistent, before Pong came out. 2. Said Odyssey had already been released at the time Pong came out, and had not been a success.
So, whatever else you may claim, Pong has nothing to do with it.
[Core 2] does not gain much from 32 -> 64-bit code (in some cases it is a bit slower)
That assertion is not supported by the benchmarks in that article. There are real performance improvements to be had in the 64-bit mode in most of the benchmarks. In the benchmarks where Core2 lost performance in 64-bit mode, the other CPUs also lost peformance in 64-bit mode.
What the article does state is that Athlon gains more from 64-bit than Core2 does.
AT&T didn't hand over any voice tapes of your private conversations
Well, thank god! Phew. Dodged a bullet. But, one thing, can you tell me, please, how you know this? I know a blanket assertion without a backing citation or reference is totally awesome, but still.
Because privacy is such a nebulous property, the answers to these questions are anything but clear
This is a bullshit slippery-slope argument. if you're handing over a phonebook, it's not private. If you're handing over someone's unlisted number, it's a violation of privacy. If it's in the phone book, it's not unlisted. End of story.
Why isn't the local Registrar of Voters being sued for giving her my personal information? Why isn't Yahoo being sued for selling my account information to the highest bidder? Why isn't my old landlord being sued for telling my creditors where I moved? What makes that any of that different from what AT&T did?
This is irrelevant. It's like asking, why is the sky green when I eat red apples? The federal government has powers beyond those of mortal businesses, grasshopper. Didn't you read the history of the Nixon administration? The enemies list? The FBI spying? The IRS spying? Pay attention in history class.
Senator Barbara Boxer regularly spams my inbox with junk. How did she get my address?
Gosh, i assume it's 'cause you gave it to her, Rush, to keep up with them leftist media whores. Or one of your buddies is having a really keen joke. Senators, intelligent ones, anyway, don't spam. But they probably don't authenticate.
This, like the "Mac Daily Journal Power 25" list that preceded it, seems to be an accounting of 'people who we have heard of'. What does it actually indicate? Do these people have some kind of influence over something? It just seems to be a particularly pointless popularity contest.
Whatever else anyone might say about President Carter, he was both (a) absolutely right and (b) truthful at all times. Unfortunately, Americans didn't like it when he told them the truth in 1977:
Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you about a problem unprecedented in our history. With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes. The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly.
Reagan got elected partly by telling Americans he loved them and didn't want them to make any changes like pesky ol' conservation. He 'solved' the energy crisis by mortaging the future -- a typical conservative tactic, unfortunately. Hope the Democrats pull it together and present real opposition before the elections, 'cause we need it.
Also, Intel's marketing wizards didn't think CPUs were a viable market (circa 1974) and had to be forced to sell them instead of the RAM chips which had been Intel's moneymakers. Intel doesn't make RAM anymore.:)
Doesn't necessarily contradict grandparent poster's point, though. Engineers frequently need to do a better job of evangelizing new products or features. (And, of course, product groups should be structured to allow that interaction).
We want to have so much power that the rest of the world is FORCED to follow our lead or pay the price for getting in front.
I agree. Our military spending prevented 9/11 from happening. And boy, did we whip bin Laden's ass for even thinking about it! We put his shrunken head on the Washington Monument! Let that shit be a lesson to all you terrorisms!
Put another way: You think Bush dropping his pants and waving his tiny little nuclear warhead around is going to scare the religious jihadists? We're talking RELIGIOUS WINGNUT SUICIDE BOMBERS here. They don't care what happens to the rest of the world after they leave it. They think, for whatever reason, that they're doing the work of their god. Imagine if Hannity had an army of fervent followers who would be willing and eager to literally die for him.
China and India have over a billion people each. The economic force of such numbers mean that realistically THEY should be the superpowers, not us. But they (in my lifetime) will not dare challenge the authority of the U.S. because they know that we have a millitary that can take them back to the stone ages if they cross us. Because of our military, we get access to cheaper and more resources than they do (Iraq oil anyone?) Because of our military, we will stay on top of the world long after when we should no longer be.
Put down the crack pipe and the Tiger Balm, Rush. Who do you think is buying the debt that is used to pay for our military misadventures? I can't believe it's not... CHINA! Yes!
Newsflash, O'Falafel: Thanks to the Bush Administration's wanton spending spree, China could crash our economy into a zillion little shards . They have a strong economic incentive not to do that, but they could if they so chose. Bush and Cheney have given them that power over us.
It never did. If you're voting for a party, you're a moron. Vote for people, not parties. There are good ones and awful ones in all of them.
Ah, the smell of bullshit in the evening. This is what Republicans would like you to think, especially in an election year where their utter incompetence/corruption/malfeasance is an issue. You're aware they control both houses of Congress as well as the executive branch, right?
(a) Zonk is wrong. Lieberman is a Republican, in all but name, and progressive Democrats are trying hard to get him out of the party in the August Dem CT primary by replacing him with a true Democrat (google "Ned Lamont"). The count is 2 Republican bills, 4 Democratic, one Democrat-in-name-only-lunatic-censorship-boy.
(b) Zonk doesn't seem to know how Congress works. A bill must pass both houses of Congress to become law, so we're actually looking at four attempts at lawmaking, three Democratic and one Republican. Let's look at the bills:
1. One set of bills, including Clinton's bill, bar sale or rental of "mature" video games to minors. Aside from Clinton's obvious pandering to the rednecks (progressives aren't happy with her either, she won't be the nominee in '08, trust me) what's the problem here? The alternative in this supposedly 'Christian' theocracy-mined political climate is to ban M-rated games entirely.
2. One set of bills, including Lieberman's bill orders Fed study on effects of "electronic media" on kids. Ooh, a study! Scary stuff! Again, we're going to remove Lieberman this August. Progressives hate him; he's not a real Democrat; First Amendment fans hate him; gamers hate him; music fans hate him. Oil companies and the religious theocrats love him.
3. One House bill, which has no Senate equivalent, is broad in scope, and it was introduced by some backwards Dem in the House: "Requires study of computer game rating system and recommendations for new laws". This would suck.
4. The Republican bills instruct the FTC to investigate GTA, which strikes me as crazy-ass buearacratic meddling, but whatever.
Because of this Apple has a lot more leeway on compatibility. They can break every application there is, but the users will still be happy as long as OS X and Apple apps continue to run.
Yeah, and third-party developers would leave the platform overnight. Apple takes extreme pains to provide backward compatibility. Many Mac OS development resources within Apple are allocated to ensure backward compatibility. You can still run ten-year-old old Mac apps in Classic.
Bonus trivia: Did you know that you could still run MacPaint 1.0 as late as Mac OS 9 _if_ you had a display card capable of 1-bit resolution?
To raise the money to start Apple Records, the group foolishly sold the publishing rights around 1968.
This is the one highly inaccurate part of your otherwise excellent essay. The control of Northern Songs (the company that held the rights to all Lennon/McCartney songwriting (aside from a handful of very early songs)) was actually sold from underneath the Beatles by people they had trusted to manage their assets.
Many on the left run on pro-censorship platforms (Hillary Clinton and her fight against obscene video games, for example)
Hillary does this to pander to the extremist right and secure her so-called "moderate" credentials. (Leiberman is probably honest about it, however.) If the wingnuts disappeared overnight, Hillary would drop it like a ton of bricks. She doesn't really care. She may be forced to drop that position anyway to compete successfully on the left, but probably she'll just run on it and lose the primary. Gotta hope.
Also, taking the position that free speech always trumps people's desire not to be offended would definitely cause a backlash among the "hate speech is thoughtcrime and must be banned" faction of the left.
You mean the fictional faction that Big Pharma Rush Limbaugh created to prop up his talking points?
For what it's worth, Rush's friends at the ACLU frequently take exactly the position "that free speech always trumps people's desire not to be offended."
Slashdot Mirror
Patented?
It is unhealthy to be ignorant of reality. Skepticism is only _healthy_ when it's warranted. If you are skeptical that the sun will rise tomorrow, I am right to laugh in your face. It's fine to be skeptical.
It doesn't really matter, since:
- the Perforce tools suck so badly. p4v is OK, but the command line tools are unacceptable.
- the branching and merging features are completely overrated. They're hard to use. They don't give you anything Subversion doesn't already have.
- they don't version the filesystem hierarchy.
- don't get me started on what a mess viewspecs are. Everybody defines their own view of the repository! Fucking hell, what a nightmare!
- the kludges you have to use in order to maintain a checkout of a particular label AND the top of tree (HEAD) are truly breathtaking.
In fairness, Perforce network operations are blazingly fast, even over VPN; they've optimized their wire protocol quite well. Of course, they had to, because you can't really work offline in Perforce. There are ways to get around this, but you risk losing data. There is no automatic merge in the Perforce model. On the other hand, a Subversion branch operation is often more efficient because you don't need to have an actual duplicate copy of all the data.
That sort of thing happens all the time in the US, thanks to the for-profit hospital system. You can shout BS all you want, but it happens all the time. Talk to somebody who actually works in healthcare.
http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=7344653&publi
(This editorial lapse in judgement probably explains why the magazine content was so awful. And could anybody actually read the headline fonts? Total mess.)
Pot, meet kettle.
When Comcast called, I told them, politely, to fuck off until the price was $10 less than it currently is.
I'm not paying $34 a month for unreliable telephone service. (Power goes out -> telco phone still lives.)
This is nonsense. The Warner/McCain/etc bill is a total capitulation to the Bush/Cheney administration. The whole 'we're so independent, we're standing up to teh Prez!' thing is a bullshit kabuki dance intended to get McCain some independent cred for the 2008 presidential election in exchange for being considerably more publicly sympathetic to the theocratic agenda of the far right than he has been in the past.
Aside from legalizing torture, the bill effectively eliminates habeas corpus, an important principle of law enshrined in the main body of the US Constitution itself. Eliminating habeas corpus means that the administration can jail you indefinitely simply by calling you as a terrorist. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, but here it is, in one tidy package.
How can a former torture victim like McCain roll over like this? Easy: he's selfish, he's a far-right wingnut (not a centrist -- look at his voting record), and he's personally never going to be tortured again, so what does he care? He wants to be president, and that's all that matters to him.
Warner is a damn liar like the rest of them. And so is McCain. Remember in 2008.
they don't have a choice. Amendments to bills can be added by vote or in committee. They can only complain.
Um. I have to point out that the media was much more likely to cover protests at that point, no matter how small. These days, they self-censor to an alarming degree, having been cowed by the right. The most massive protests against the US -- in history -- have taken place in the last five years, and you haven't known about it because the US media hasn't reported it or has trivialized it.
a tures_Losing_Afghanistan_in_international_0925.htm l
It's not just the outright blatant propaganda on Fox, the other news outlets are doing their own slanting, frequently through omission. Check this tangentially-related example out, for one:http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Newsweek_fe
It was never perfect between the US and Europe, but don't try to pretend that this is status quo. Shrub has made things exponentially worse.
Huh? There are tons of anti-science, anti-education, creationist Republican trolls here on Slashdot, many of whom get uprated with surprising regularity.
You don't see a problem when fully 50% or more of the population is ignorant of basic science?
Maybe you will understand when they arrive with torches at your ivory tower.
If you're working in a scientific occupation, you *will* be scapegoated by the increasingly ignorant. These people actively sanction violence against judges. Do you think that they'll hesitate to send a few 'eggheads' to the hell they so fervently believe in?
It matters.
Has that ever been successfully enforced against an end user (as opposed to a distributor)?
Ralph Baer thinks Nolan Bushnell stole the idea from him, Nolan denies it, but they came to a settlement:
http://www.pong-story.com/inventor.htm
1. Atari was tiny, practically nonexistent, before Pong came out.
2. Said Odyssey had already been released at the time Pong came out, and had not been a success.
So, whatever else you may claim, Pong has nothing to do with it.
That assertion is not supported by the benchmarks in that article. There are real performance improvements to be had in the 64-bit mode in most of the benchmarks. In the benchmarks where Core2 lost performance in 64-bit mode, the other CPUs also lost peformance in 64-bit mode.
What the article does state is that Athlon gains more from 64-bit than Core2 does.
AT&T didn't hand over any voice tapes of your private conversations
Well, thank god! Phew. Dodged a bullet. But, one thing, can you tell me, please, how you know this? I know a blanket assertion without a backing citation or reference is totally awesome, but still.
Because privacy is such a nebulous property, the answers to these questions are anything but clear
This is a bullshit slippery-slope argument. if you're handing over a phonebook, it's not private. If you're handing over someone's unlisted number, it's a violation of privacy. If it's in the phone book, it's not unlisted. End of story.
Why isn't the local Registrar of Voters being sued for giving her my personal information? Why isn't Yahoo being sued for selling my account information to the highest bidder? Why isn't my old landlord being sued for telling my creditors where I moved? What makes that any of that different from what AT&T did?
This is irrelevant. It's like asking, why is the sky green when I eat red apples? The federal government has powers beyond those of mortal businesses, grasshopper. Didn't you read the history of the Nixon administration? The enemies list? The FBI spying? The IRS spying? Pay attention in history class.
Senator Barbara Boxer regularly spams my inbox with junk. How did she get my address?
Gosh, i assume it's 'cause you gave it to her, Rush, to keep up with them leftist media whores. Or one of your buddies is having a really keen joke. Senators, intelligent ones, anyway, don't spam. But they probably don't authenticate.
This, like the "Mac Daily Journal Power 25" list that preceded it, seems to be an accounting of 'people who we have heard of'. What does it actually indicate? Do these people have some kind of influence over something? It just seems to be a particularly pointless popularity contest.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ps_e
Reagan got elected partly by telling Americans he loved them and didn't want them to make any changes like pesky ol' conservation. He 'solved' the energy crisis by mortaging the future -- a typical conservative tactic, unfortunately. Hope the Democrats pull it together and present real opposition before the elections, 'cause we need it.
This is what conservatives say when they want to pretend to be moderates in order to troll liberals. I'm not buying it.
Also, Intel's marketing wizards didn't think CPUs were a viable market (circa 1974) and had to be forced to sell them instead of the RAM chips which had been Intel's moneymakers. Intel doesn't make RAM anymore. :)
Doesn't necessarily contradict grandparent poster's point, though. Engineers frequently need to do a better job of evangelizing new products or features. (And, of course, product groups should be structured to allow that interaction).
I agree. Our military spending prevented 9/11 from happening. And boy, did we whip bin Laden's ass for even thinking about it! We put his shrunken head on the Washington Monument! Let that shit be a lesson to all you terrorisms!
Put another way: You think Bush dropping his pants and waving his tiny little nuclear warhead around is going to scare the religious jihadists? We're talking RELIGIOUS WINGNUT SUICIDE BOMBERS here. They don't care what happens to the rest of the world after they leave it. They think, for whatever reason, that they're doing the work of their god. Imagine if Hannity had an army of fervent followers who would be willing and eager to literally die for him.
Put down the crack pipe and the Tiger Balm, Rush. Who do you think is buying the debt that is used to pay for our military misadventures? I can't believe it's not
Newsflash, O'Falafel: Thanks to the Bush Administration's wanton spending spree, China could crash our economy into a zillion little shards . They have a strong economic incentive not to do that, but they could if they so chose. Bush and Cheney have given them that power over us.
It never did. If you're voting for a party, you're a moron. Vote for people, not parties. There are good ones and awful ones in all of them.
Ah, the smell of bullshit in the evening. This is what Republicans would like you to think, especially in an election year where their utter incompetence/corruption/malfeasance is an issue. You're aware they control both houses of Congress as well as the executive branch, right?
(a) Zonk is wrong. Lieberman is a Republican, in all but name, and progressive Democrats are trying hard to get him out of the party in the August Dem CT primary by replacing him with a true Democrat (google "Ned Lamont"). The count is 2 Republican bills, 4 Democratic, one Democrat-in-name-only-lunatic-censorship-boy.
(b) Zonk doesn't seem to know how Congress works. A bill must pass both houses of Congress to become law, so we're actually looking at four attempts at lawmaking, three Democratic and one Republican. Let's look at the bills:
1. One set of bills, including Clinton's bill, bar sale or rental of "mature" video games to minors. Aside from Clinton's obvious pandering to the rednecks (progressives aren't happy with her either, she won't be the nominee in '08, trust me) what's the problem here? The alternative in this supposedly 'Christian' theocracy-mined political climate is to ban M-rated games entirely.
2. One set of bills, including Lieberman's bill orders Fed study on effects of "electronic media" on kids. Ooh, a study! Scary stuff! Again, we're going to remove Lieberman this August. Progressives hate him; he's not a real Democrat; First Amendment fans hate him; gamers hate him; music fans hate him. Oil companies and the religious theocrats love him.
3. One House bill, which has no Senate equivalent, is broad in scope, and it was introduced by some backwards Dem in the House: "Requires study of computer game rating system and recommendations for new laws". This would suck.
4. The Republican bills instruct the FTC to investigate GTA, which strikes me as crazy-ass buearacratic meddling, but whatever.
Because of this Apple has a lot more leeway on compatibility. They can break every application there is, but the users will still be happy as long as OS X and Apple apps continue to run.
Yeah, and third-party developers would leave the platform overnight. Apple takes extreme pains to provide backward compatibility. Many Mac OS development resources within Apple are allocated to ensure backward compatibility. You can still run ten-year-old old Mac apps in Classic.
Bonus trivia: Did you know that you could still run MacPaint 1.0 as late as Mac OS 9 _if_ you had a display card capable of 1-bit resolution?
This is the one highly inaccurate part of your otherwise excellent essay. The control of Northern Songs (the company that held the rights to all Lennon/McCartney songwriting (aside from a handful of very early songs)) was actually sold from underneath the Beatles by people they had trusted to manage their assets.
Many on the left run on pro-censorship platforms (Hillary Clinton and her fight against obscene video games, for example)
Hillary does this to pander to the extremist right and secure her so-called "moderate" credentials. (Leiberman is probably honest about it, however.) If the wingnuts disappeared overnight, Hillary would drop it like a ton of bricks. She doesn't really care. She may be forced to drop that position anyway to compete successfully on the left, but probably she'll just run on it and lose the primary. Gotta hope.
Also, taking the position that free speech always trumps people's desire not to be offended would definitely cause a backlash among the "hate speech is thoughtcrime and must be banned" faction of the left.
You mean the fictional faction that Big Pharma Rush Limbaugh created to prop up his talking points?
For what it's worth, Rush's friends at the ACLU frequently take exactly the position "that free speech always trumps people's desire not to be offended."