When it comes to waiting a few secs, okay. I installed adblock, because fucking Slashdot would take up to a MINUTE for the front page to load (with ads blocked, below 3s). It isn't merely an inconvenience. It's a full-blown showstopper error.
Now it would be interesting, so far power supply for e-ink was big and bulky. There is already a technology of printing ICs on paper, meaning - electronic paper is at hand's reach.
Interestingly, this form factor would neatly fit some 512 MicroSD cards leaving enough room for mechanics (slots, frame) and electronics. Take 512 2GB cards, you get 1 terabyte of solid state memory. Each of the cards can work independently from the others = easy RAID of 512 disks = quite insane speeds possible, and cheap replacement of failing parts (you replace a single failing card, not the whole device). Of course the price would be higher, but still the 1TB drive isn't cheap for sure, and without RAID.
You have sent a packet of 15 bytes. Total fee: $0. [OK] You have received a packet of 38 bytes. Total fee: $0. [OK] You have sent a packet of 11 bytes. Total fee: $0. [OK] You have received a packet of 68 bytes. Total fee: $0. [OK] You have received a packet of 180 bytes. Total fee: $0. [OK] You have received a packet of 231 bytes. Total fee: $0. [OK] You have sent a packet of 31 bytes. Total fee: $0. [OK] You have received a packet of 98 bytes. Total fee: $0. [OK]
Why, of course they won't READ it. They just want it stored away in the archives "just in case". (of course the info is useless, but it won't be known until it's needed, that is, never.)
Actually, not painful at all, because you're unconscious:) The liquids in "open vessels" would go first, but blood near skin surface, your eyes and so on would follow shortly.
I wonder how much good a small bottle of oxygen for breathing would do you.
For those who don't remember it: man-boobs forbidden.
Oblivion originally used the same skin for both male and female models. Males had normal male chests with normal nipples on them. Female models had an extra unremovable piece of clothing - a bra or a strap of cloth, or some other halter, so the breasts never show. Except a mod removed the piece of clothing and what you got were stretched, misplaced textures of nipples that came from the male body.
Result? "Bethesda tried to sneak adult content into the game!" outrage. And re-rating it.
Incidentially, the male nipples appearing on female models were more offensive (and caused re-rating the game) than a mission to murder all children of a mother, then the mother herself, or performing a live sacrifice (ok, not actually human, but sentient...), or murdering innocent citizens on behalf of a schizophrenic madman... oh well, things that kids shouldn't be allowed to play. But cheating, stealing, murdering innocents in cool blood, that was all OK to ESBR. Piss-poor textures of nipples weren't.
Most of web server software user base are admins with a clue, trained professionals who know what they want and know what they are doing. Most of web browser user base are plain users without clue, people who got no training whatsoever and want things 'just working'. Admins usually know what is good for them. Users rarely so.
Not without reason too. Hotmail and MSN were purposedly breaking the site in Opera. If you browsed the site in Opera with user agent spoofing set to MSIE, it worked just fine. If the string contained 'Opera', it would break.
It "theoretically" supports Firefox, but you need to jump through hoops to get it running (e.g. extract a filename from source of the page, download it to hard drive, save it in a directory somewhere in Firefox plugins). Otherwise you can log in, you can view your account, but you just can't sign (and in effect finalize) any transaction.
"there is almost nothing they can offer to a mere user and there are no major disadvantages in IE which can be seen by a mere user."
The keyword being "almost". Tabbed browsing in IE7 lags by a decade behind the competition, and it seems to be the major feature people look for. With the rest, there's no one single 'killer feature' that would appeal to most users, but there are hundreds of small ones that appeal to few each. Often including extensions. Adblock being one of bigger ones. Mouse Gestures being another. DownThemAll as alternative to external download accelerators. There's a forum post: "I'd love this site to have..." and answer: "Grab Firefox, GreaseMonkey and this script, and you have it." Another happy FF user. "Don't you find these new commercials annoying?" "What commercials? Oh, you use IE? You poor bastard.", "How do I display these SVG images?" "Grab the plugin or (recommended) move to Firefox". And so on, and so on. There's no single big hole that gets IE users on the firefox side. There are hundreds of small cracks that leak them in tiny groups.
Oh well, here the kind of beta Safari/Win is, is called alpha.
And I don't think Apple could do any worse than to load a test release with crapware. (okay, I don't mind Quicktime but I have no desire to install iTunes, and it won't even let me pick "never update it" (where 'update' means from 'not uninstalled' to 'current').)
"First, the premise that God is separate from his creations implies that God is finite."
False but moot. For finite X: Infinity - X = Infinity.
"If God is finite and separate from his creations, then the two must be contained in some greater thing, and this greater thing would be more perfect than God, by virtue of being a superset of him."
Only if you assume more=better. A superset that includes negative elements is "worse" than a subset of only positive elements. A likely assumption that our world contains bad, negative and so on elements means God containing them would be less perfect than one without them.
"if he's finite, that opens up the possibility that he is not singular." It opens up the possibility that he might not be singular. It doesn't imply he isn't. (in the meaning of 'finite' as 'not superset of everything'.)
"Second, something which is perfect must logically be immutable." Not if it's a subset of a mutable whole. With world changing and parts becoming worse or better, the value of 'perfect' changes. If 'perfect' means 'containing all the positive elements and none of the negative', as elements switch their value, they enter or leave that set. Also, the content of neutral (meaningless) elements is arbitraty. Of course this still doesn't imply, and strongly suggests against the ability of thinking, but it still leaves it a possibility.
Google PageRank was discovered by accident. Originally it was a system for annotating pictures, with an extra feature of search. Only later they found the search could be applied to anything outside pictures, and works much better than existing search engines.
The latter would be just as interesting in many ways, and certainly also violates the laws of physics, but it's not really the same thing.
Not really, it just follows them to the letter, which isn't realistic. For Physics, that would be just a gimmick, a proof of long-known laws, without introducing anything new. For Technology, this would be something incredible though. The gist is, this machine would have to be perfect. And the basic belief of Techology is: we can't do "perfect". We can only do "good enough". But this is only a belief, with solid basis in the experience, but not a law. And possibly a false one, because of quantum nature of the universe - on scale of a single atom, we don't approach indefinitely to zero with certain property which in our specific case means perfection - below specific value we make a quantum jump and it -is- zero, a solid quantum level. We can do it with a single atom. We can do it with a finite number of atoms. Once that number is big enough to build a mechanism, we can have a perfect machine. We just lack skill, resources, knowledge and so on, how to do it.
Oh, the idea isn't all that bad. Google works on similar basis, people start their projects and whichever project gains popularity, becomes a standard. Gmail, maps, froogle, code search, they were all pet projects of separate Google employees, invented by them and created without any market research whatsoever. Except Google people seem to remember compatibility/interoperability is one of most desired features. Sony seems to prefer a lock-in and reinventing the wheel without any good reasons.
Got to use one of these cameras extensively. Sure the floppies were cheap, and the fact I carried a bag with 100 or so of them with me for each trip, as one would fit 3-4 pics of reasonable resolution, but they were a killer to the batteries, and the proprietary batteries sucked ass. About 20 floppies, meaning some 60-80 pics and the original battery included with the camera was dead. One of extended lifetime, and much more expensive would survive the other 80 or so.
Pouring resources into fighting them is not the problem. The problem is pouring resources into -them-, as in buying their products, purchasing stuff from malware popup sites, generally giving them money.
I'm the first to start a campaign "Punch a spammer's customer today". If you hear someone bought something from a spammer, punch them and explain "That's for funding another 1000 messages to flood my mailbox."
Except the marketspeak used in the cited sentence matches the situation perfectly. Deep discounts resulting in increase of sales, without citing the original sales which got increased, without writing about how (un)profitable the sale is after the deep discounts, without predictions about sustaining the sales level (is it just emptying the shelves of unwanted junk, or a promotion) etc.
Reminds me of a joke from soviet era. A The most famous runner from Poland was to compete against a soviet champion. It was a one on one race. The official message stated the results: "the Russian got the honourable second place, the Pole came in but-last."
Minidisk, Memory Stick, and now this. Sony seems to have its mind set on producing a medium that is more expensive than any of the competition, doesn't add anything significant feature-wise and is totally incompatibile with the rest of the world. In one hand, this is kind of lock-in, buy ours, not the competitor's. In the other hand, the Memory Stick was a deciding factor in not picking a Sony when I was buying a camera...
Microsoft, IBM, GE, Ford... All these companies base many of their product designs on future technology. If you started designing a computer program around the computers available at the beginning of the design process, or designed the program on your prediction of the computers available at the end of the development process, the latter would be the better product - suited to the technology available at the time the consumers were ready to use it.
Nvidia does too. Like, the GeForce FX series of their cards. They were to be released together with DirectX 9. Except that nobody knew what DX9 would support and due to some disagreement between Nvidia and Microsoft, Microsoft wouldn't tell. So Nvidia was "predicting the features of DirectX 9". That is, guessing. And guess what? They guessed wrong. GeForce FX was packed with wonderful features which had no support whatsoever in the OS, while features required by DX9 were quickly hacked into the drivers and worked at snail speed in software emulation.
Sure -sometimes- the predictions work. But when it doesn't, it fails hard.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, yes. They seem to have fixed the adservers. See my last journal.
When it comes to waiting a few secs, okay. I installed adblock, because fucking Slashdot would take up to a MINUTE for the front page to load (with ads blocked, below 3s).
It isn't merely an inconvenience. It's a full-blown showstopper error.
Now it would be interesting, so far power supply for e-ink was big and bulky. There is already a technology of printing ICs on paper, meaning - electronic paper is at hand's reach.
Interestingly, this form factor would neatly fit some 512 MicroSD cards leaving enough room for mechanics (slots, frame) and electronics. Take 512 2GB cards, you get 1 terabyte of solid state memory. Each of the cards can work independently from the others = easy RAID of 512 disks = quite insane speeds possible, and cheap replacement of failing parts (you replace a single failing card, not the whole device). Of course the price would be higher, but still the 1TB drive isn't cheap for sure, and without RAID.
You have sent a packet of 15 bytes. Total fee: $0.
[OK]
You have received a packet of 38 bytes. Total fee: $0.
[OK]
You have sent a packet of 11 bytes. Total fee: $0.
[OK]
You have received a packet of 68 bytes. Total fee: $0.
[OK]
You have received a packet of 180 bytes. Total fee: $0.
[OK]
You have received a packet of 231 bytes. Total fee: $0.
[OK]
You have sent a packet of 31 bytes. Total fee: $0.
[OK]
You have received a packet of 98 bytes. Total fee: $0.
[OK]
Why, of course they won't READ it. They just want it stored away in the archives "just in case". (of course the info is useless, but it won't be known until it's needed, that is, never.)
Steve Jobs' bill looks nerdy, and skinny, wears glasses, and sucks Steve's cock every morning in exchange for ideas he can implement in Windows.
Actually, not painful at all, because you're unconscious :)
The liquids in "open vessels" would go first, but blood near skin surface, your eyes and so on would follow shortly.
I wonder how much good a small bottle of oxygen for breathing would do you.
Oblivion has different skins for males and females,
With 1.1 patch or without?
AFAIK "nipple-free female skin textures" were added in the patch.
For those who don't remember it: man-boobs forbidden.
Oblivion originally used the same skin for both male and female models. Males had normal male chests with normal nipples on them. Female models had an extra unremovable piece of clothing - a bra or a strap of cloth, or some other halter, so the breasts never show. Except a mod removed the piece of clothing and what you got were stretched, misplaced textures of nipples that came from the male body.
Result? "Bethesda tried to sneak adult content into the game!" outrage. And re-rating it.
Incidentially, the male nipples appearing on female models were more offensive (and caused re-rating the game) than a mission to murder all children of a mother, then the mother herself, or performing a live sacrifice (ok, not actually human, but sentient...), or murdering innocent citizens on behalf of a schizophrenic madman... oh well, things that kids shouldn't be allowed to play. But cheating, stealing, murdering innocents in cool blood, that was all OK to ESBR. Piss-poor textures of nipples weren't.
Most of web server software user base are admins with a clue, trained professionals who know what they want and know what they are doing. Most of web browser user base are plain users without clue, people who got no training whatsoever and want things 'just working'.
Admins usually know what is good for them.
Users rarely so.
Not without reason too. Hotmail and MSN were purposedly breaking the site in Opera. If you browsed the site in Opera with user agent spoofing set to MSIE, it worked just fine. If the string contained 'Opera', it would break.
bph.pl
It "theoretically" supports Firefox, but you need to jump through hoops to get it running (e.g. extract a filename from source of the page, download it to hard drive, save it in a directory somewhere in Firefox plugins). Otherwise you can log in, you can view your account, but you just can't sign (and in effect finalize) any transaction.
"there is almost nothing they can offer to a mere user and there are no major disadvantages in IE which can be seen by a mere user."
The keyword being "almost".
Tabbed browsing in IE7 lags by a decade behind the competition, and it seems to be the major feature people look for. With the rest, there's no one single 'killer feature' that would appeal to most users, but there are hundreds of small ones that appeal to few each. Often including extensions. Adblock being one of bigger ones. Mouse Gestures being another. DownThemAll as alternative to external download accelerators. There's a forum post: "I'd love this site to have..." and answer: "Grab Firefox, GreaseMonkey and this script, and you have it." Another happy FF user. "Don't you find these new commercials annoying?" "What commercials? Oh, you use IE? You poor bastard.", "How do I display these SVG images?" "Grab the plugin or (recommended) move to Firefox". And so on, and so on. There's no single big hole that gets IE users on the firefox side. There are hundreds of small cracks that leak them in tiny groups.
Oh well, here the kind of beta Safari/Win is, is called alpha.
And I don't think Apple could do any worse than to load a test release with crapware. (okay, I don't mind Quicktime but I have no desire to install iTunes, and it won't even let me pick "never update it" (where 'update' means from 'not uninstalled' to 'current').)
"First, the premise that God is separate from his creations implies that God is finite."
False but moot. For finite X: Infinity - X = Infinity.
"If God is finite and separate from his creations, then the two must be contained in some greater thing, and this greater thing would be more perfect than God, by virtue of being a superset of him."
Only if you assume more=better. A superset that includes negative elements is "worse" than a subset of only positive elements. A likely assumption that our world contains bad, negative and so on elements means God containing them would be less perfect than one without them.
"if he's finite, that opens up the possibility that he is not singular."
It opens up the possibility that he might not be singular. It doesn't imply he isn't. (in the meaning of 'finite' as 'not superset of everything'.)
"Second, something which is perfect must logically be immutable." Not if it's a subset of a mutable whole. With world changing and parts becoming worse or better, the value of 'perfect' changes. If 'perfect' means 'containing all the positive elements and none of the negative', as elements switch their value, they enter or leave that set. Also, the content of neutral (meaningless) elements is arbitraty. Of course this still doesn't imply, and strongly suggests against the ability of thinking, but it still leaves it a possibility.
Google PageRank was discovered by accident.
Originally it was a system for annotating pictures, with an extra feature of search. Only later they found the search could be applied to anything outside pictures, and works much better than existing search engines.
The latter would be just as interesting in many ways, and certainly also violates the laws of physics, but it's not really the same thing.
Not really, it just follows them to the letter, which isn't realistic. For Physics, that would be just a gimmick, a proof of long-known laws, without introducing anything new. For Technology, this would be something incredible though. The gist is, this machine would have to be perfect. And the basic belief of Techology is: we can't do "perfect". We can only do "good enough". But this is only a belief, with solid basis in the experience, but not a law. And possibly a false one, because of quantum nature of the universe - on scale of a single atom, we don't approach indefinitely to zero with certain property which in our specific case means perfection - below specific value we make a quantum jump and it -is- zero, a solid quantum level. We can do it with a single atom. We can do it with a finite number of atoms. Once that number is big enough to build a mechanism, we can have a perfect machine. We just lack skill, resources, knowledge and so on, how to do it.
Oh, the idea isn't all that bad. Google works on similar basis, people start their projects and whichever project gains popularity, becomes a standard. Gmail, maps, froogle, code search, they were all pet projects of separate Google employees, invented by them and created without any market research whatsoever.
Except Google people seem to remember compatibility/interoperability is one of most desired features. Sony seems to prefer a lock-in and reinventing the wheel without any good reasons.
Got to use one of these cameras extensively.
Sure the floppies were cheap, and the fact I carried a bag with 100 or so of them with me for each trip, as one would fit 3-4 pics of reasonable resolution, but they were a killer to the batteries, and the proprietary batteries sucked ass. About 20 floppies, meaning some 60-80 pics and the original battery included with the camera was dead. One of extended lifetime, and much more expensive would survive the other 80 or so.
Pouring resources into fighting them is not the problem. The problem is pouring resources into -them-, as in buying their products, purchasing stuff from malware popup sites, generally giving them money.
I'm the first to start a campaign "Punch a spammer's customer today". If you hear someone bought something from a spammer, punch them and explain "That's for funding another 1000 messages to flood my mailbox."
Except the marketspeak used in the cited sentence matches the situation perfectly. Deep discounts resulting in increase of sales, without citing the original sales which got increased, without writing about how (un)profitable the sale is after the deep discounts, without predictions about sustaining the sales level (is it just emptying the shelves of unwanted junk, or a promotion) etc.
Reminds me of a joke from soviet era. A The most famous runner from Poland was to compete against a soviet champion. It was a one on one race. The official message stated the results: "the Russian got the honourable second place, the Pole came in but-last."
Minidisk, Memory Stick, and now this. Sony seems to have its mind set on producing a medium that is more expensive than any of the competition, doesn't add anything significant feature-wise and is totally incompatibile with the rest of the world.
In one hand, this is kind of lock-in, buy ours, not the competitor's. In the other hand, the Memory Stick was a deciding factor in not picking a Sony when I was buying a camera...
Microsoft, IBM, GE, Ford... All these companies base many of their product designs on future technology. If you started designing
a computer program around the computers available at the beginning of the design process, or designed the program on your
prediction of the computers available at the end of the development process, the latter would be the better product - suited to
the technology available at the time the consumers were ready to use it.
Nvidia does too. Like, the GeForce FX series of their cards. They were to be released together with DirectX 9. Except that nobody knew what DX9 would support and due to some disagreement between Nvidia and Microsoft, Microsoft wouldn't tell. So Nvidia was "predicting the features of DirectX 9". That is, guessing. And guess what? They guessed wrong. GeForce FX was packed with wonderful features which had no support whatsoever in the OS, while features required by DX9 were quickly hacked into the drivers and worked at snail speed in software emulation.
Sure -sometimes- the predictions work. But when it doesn't, it fails hard.
Then bring them the requested amount (+-3%) in pennies. "I can be an asshole too, sir."