That was written thirty years ago and targeted at people much less poor and ignorant than some Russian provincial schoolteacher. It hardly rules out the possibility that Gates may be merciful in this case.
Oh boo hoo, he hasn't heard of these two random other languages, one of which is obscure and the other long-dead. He must really be an incompetent fool: anyone who wasn't around in the days of TECO is. What was your point again?
Great. So bank vault locks don't need to work properly either, since in the real world there will usually be people around. Antivirus programs aren't necessary, since the firewall ought to block everything. Restricted user accounts aren't necessary, since bad guys should be stopped from entering the system in the first place.
The point of multilayer security is that they provide essential fallbacks when other layers fail. If an inner layer fails, despite the fact that it is mitigated by the existence of upper layers, that is still a serious compromise not to be brushed off by anyone serious about security. And the fact that Diebold is pooh-poohing this tells me that they aren't serious at all.
(I am not a quantum cryptographer, but have attended a few talks that quantum cryptographers have given here at Caltech.)
Good for you, Mr. Caltech smarty-pants. Despite your sterling education you're still totally wrong on this. Do you think the physical bits on HD-DVDs, Blu-ray or any other storage format can be somehow "quantum"?
Sentient life, which is a far bigger deal than just life. I'm not that excited about the question of whether there are primitive bacteria on Mars, personally.
I can agree to some extent for end-user applications like word processor, and for programming language core features -- such as the sometimes confusing and quirky syntax in C++ and Perl -- but I have to disagree with you completely when it comes to programming language standard functions. I can seriously see no productivity or otherwise disadvantage to having a huge standard library, and if such a library is available (as in Java -- and it's the single greatest strength of that language in my opinion) it should be used as much as possible. It sounds like you're advocating reinventing the wheel as a matter of everyday policy.
Take, say, a string-to-integer conversion function. Sure you could easily implement it yourself, it's a simple algorithm which will take maybe 10 minutes to write in order to deal with the set of cases you're currently dealing with. But you're bound to miss a bunch of corner cases (what happens when the number starts with a zero? when there's a space between the minus sign and the number?) that will cause pain and waste time in the future. There's also the matter of documentation -- the standard library will document the function's behavior with nitpicking precision and is liable to be familiar to other programmers in the first place, whereas you are very unlikely to produce anything of similar quality. (I am aware you would be likely to actually do use the standard library function in the specific case of string-to-integer conversion, but the same principles apply to more obscure features.)
Look, I understand the allure of "flow". Code reuse seems to be, somehow, emotionally painful to most programmers (myself included), which is one of the reasons why it's done so little. And frequently, existing libraries genuinely aren't suited to your specific need and you do need to start from scratch. But jeez, before you do that at least sift through the documentation and figure out what the standard library actually provides. It's the single easiest form of reuse you can do -- standard libraries are the most general, bug-free and well-documented APIs of all. And even if you feel it's more productive not to bother, that's only a feeling. It is worth the effort of sifting through those manuals.
The claim that advertising informs consumers is laughable. Advertising usually goes out of its way to at least somewhat misrepresent the product sold and to provide minimal actual information, focusing on vague emotional appeal. Look, I agree marketing and sales in general is valuable, but advertising per se is the most useless form of marketing.
The real reason advertising is valuable to the economy is because it provides a business model for newspapers, television, websites etc. which provide genuine information and entertainment. In itself it's pure waste.
Of course it's complete bollocks. But that's racists' main argument nowadays, some gullible people believe them, and the best way to reduce their credibility is to get rid of these laws.
These hate speech (or 'anti-free speech', doubleplusgood) laws you conflate with fascism aren't the only thing controlling crime, but they don't hurt. And yet you 'conclude' that they're ineffective! Guess I'll just have to take your word for it, right?
What is the number one point Ahmadinejad made at his Holocaust denier conference? That countries like Germany ban denying the Holocaust, and that as a result it's impossible to objectively examine the facts. Hate-speech rules do nothing but empower racists, who'll use them to paint themselves as heroic martyrs fighting for truth in the face of government oppression.
Latency is 99% percent due to delays over the Internet, not anything that happens on your local machine. What does this card do, sprinkle magic fairy dust over packets so they go faster through the wire?
This reminds me of gold-plated power cords for sound systems. Guaranteed to create richer, deeper sound!
Remember that huge blackout that took out most of the east coast a while ago? Sure Google is great, but they probably don't have the magic powers to stop their service going down if something similar hits them where their main centers are located.
Re:PageRank doesn't seem to be based on keywords
on
The Math Behind PageRank
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
Now I'm moderated troll for pointing out the parent was blatantly wrong? The reason the 95% percent word commonality was pointed out in the article introduction was to go on to explain why keyword search is basically ineffective and PageRank is based on links!
Re:PageRank doesn't seem to be based on keywords
on
The Math Behind PageRank
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
I love slashdot fools that post as quickly as possible to have a better chance of being moderated up, but they don't RTFA and are way, way off.
Wikipedia is already so big (within the top 20 sites in the world) that there is already a huge incentive to spam it. Wikipedia is currently holding its own against the spammers -- it helps that, unlike Usenet, the servers are centrally managed -- and I don't see why the situation might get worse in the future
It's true, I've been running Windows exclusively for the past few years and hadn't followed the developments in this area. Well, fine Linux advocates like you are certainly encouraging me to switch to it.
Sandboxes? We don't even have to use the SELinux model as an example, though it's certainly a really good one. Have you never heard of chroot jails? "We've" had those for a long, long time now.
Yeah, I'm aware of them. The difference is that IE7 is sandboxed by default and seamlessly, whereas extra effort is required to invoke those things in Linux in most distributions, so users are unlikely to use them. This kind of issue always comes up when arguing about Linux capabilities...
Windows is monolithic? Yes and no. Windows is certainly more of a microkernel rather than monolithic. Linux is still all monolithic.
At the kernel level, you're right. When considering the entire Windows install or an entire Linux distribution, I find that Windows is basically monolithic whereas a Linux distribution is made out of swappable and removable pieces. \Windows\system32 is a huge ton of mysterious DLLs and you can't just go around deleting the ones you don't need. In Linux you can remove arbitrary functionality, including the entire GUI if you like.
I also read in the blog of a former Microsoft employee recently that Windows is full of interdependencies between random components, forming (to exaggerate a little) a kind of dependency blob. Whereas Linux distribution dependencies are in a clean tree structure.
The U.S. government yearly budget is $2.8 trillion. Bill Gates' net worth is a comparatively puny $53 billion. If he only succeeds in adjusting the budget by 0.5%, it would, over his 4-year term, direct the same amount of money as his entire forture.
Go ahead, please make me look like a fuckwit by telling me about wonderful Linux features I've never heard of. As it is, Googling turns up this, which indicates that the Linux kernel has some support for capabilities but it's really clunky and nobody uses it. (To be fair, the same accusation could be leveled at Windows...)
Slashdot Mirror
That was written thirty years ago and targeted at people much less poor and ignorant than some Russian provincial schoolteacher. It hardly rules out the possibility that Gates may be merciful in this case.
Oh boo hoo, he hasn't heard of these two random other languages, one of which is obscure and the other long-dead. He must really be an incompetent fool: anyone who wasn't around in the days of TECO is. What was your point again?
Great. So bank vault locks don't need to work properly either, since in the real world there will usually be people around. Antivirus programs aren't necessary, since the firewall ought to block everything. Restricted user accounts aren't necessary, since bad guys should be stopped from entering the system in the first place.
The point of multilayer security is that they provide essential fallbacks when other layers fail. If an inner layer fails, despite the fact that it is mitigated by the existence of upper layers, that is still a serious compromise not to be brushed off by anyone serious about security. And the fact that Diebold is pooh-poohing this tells me that they aren't serious at all.
Thanks for the link. Nothing beats insults to get people to provide information!
If I understand the abstract correctly, it sounds like such a scheme would mean data is no longer accessible after the first reading?
Good for you, Mr. Caltech smarty-pants. Despite your sterling education you're still totally wrong on this. Do you think the physical bits on HD-DVDs, Blu-ray or any other storage format can be somehow "quantum"?
Not to mention, NT-based Windows kernels have always been pretty solid. The problems with Windows aren't due to the kernel.
Sentient life, which is a far bigger deal than just life. I'm not that excited about the question of whether there are primitive bacteria on Mars, personally.
I can agree to some extent for end-user applications like word processor, and for programming language core features -- such as the sometimes confusing and quirky syntax in C++ and Perl -- but I have to disagree with you completely when it comes to programming language standard functions. I can seriously see no productivity or otherwise disadvantage to having a huge standard library, and if such a library is available (as in Java -- and it's the single greatest strength of that language in my opinion) it should be used as much as possible. It sounds like you're advocating reinventing the wheel as a matter of everyday policy.
Take, say, a string-to-integer conversion function. Sure you could easily implement it yourself, it's a simple algorithm which will take maybe 10 minutes to write in order to deal with the set of cases you're currently dealing with. But you're bound to miss a bunch of corner cases (what happens when the number starts with a zero? when there's a space between the minus sign and the number?) that will cause pain and waste time in the future. There's also the matter of documentation -- the standard library will document the function's behavior with nitpicking precision and is liable to be familiar to other programmers in the first place, whereas you are very unlikely to produce anything of similar quality. (I am aware you would be likely to actually do use the standard library function in the specific case of string-to-integer conversion, but the same principles apply to more obscure features.)
Look, I understand the allure of "flow". Code reuse seems to be, somehow, emotionally painful to most programmers (myself included), which is one of the reasons why it's done so little. And frequently, existing libraries genuinely aren't suited to your specific need and you do need to start from scratch. But jeez, before you do that at least sift through the documentation and figure out what the standard library actually provides. It's the single easiest form of reuse you can do -- standard libraries are the most general, bug-free and well-documented APIs of all. And even if you feel it's more productive not to bother, that's only a feeling. It is worth the effort of sifting through those manuals.
Quite right. This is why airlines are installing cellphone "tower" equipment inside planes, which will neatly bypass all those issues.
The claim that advertising informs consumers is laughable. Advertising usually goes out of its way to at least somewhat misrepresent the product sold and to provide minimal actual information, focusing on vague emotional appeal. Look, I agree marketing and sales in general is valuable, but advertising per se is the most useless form of marketing.
The real reason advertising is valuable to the economy is because it provides a business model for newspapers, television, websites etc. which provide genuine information and entertainment. In itself it's pure waste.
The Star Trek universe doesn't have money or (much) religion either; its predictions for what will disappear are none too plausible.
Of course it's complete bollocks. But that's racists' main argument nowadays, some gullible people believe them, and the best way to reduce their credibility is to get rid of these laws.
Indeed, I'd say the claim is obviously false.
What is the number one point Ahmadinejad made at his Holocaust denier conference? That countries like Germany ban denying the Holocaust, and that as a result it's impossible to objectively examine the facts. Hate-speech rules do nothing but empower racists, who'll use them to paint themselves as heroic martyrs fighting for truth in the face of government oppression.
Latency is 99% percent due to delays over the Internet, not anything that happens on your local machine. What does this card do, sprinkle magic fairy dust over packets so they go faster through the wire?
This reminds me of gold-plated power cords for sound systems. Guaranteed to create richer, deeper sound!
Remember that huge blackout that took out most of the east coast a while ago? Sure Google is great, but they probably don't have the magic powers to stop their service going down if something similar hits them where their main centers are located.
Now I'm moderated troll for pointing out the parent was blatantly wrong? The reason the 95% percent word commonality was pointed out in the article introduction was to go on to explain why keyword search is basically ineffective and PageRank is based on links!
I love slashdot fools that post as quickly as possible to have a better chance of being moderated up, but they don't RTFA and are way, way off.
For further reading, here's a great whitepaper from the Cato Institute with a lot of facts on the militarization of U.S. police.
Wikipedia is already so big (within the top 20 sites in the world) that there is already a huge incentive to spam it. Wikipedia is currently holding its own against the spammers -- it helps that, unlike Usenet, the servers are centrally managed -- and I don't see why the situation might get worse in the future
You're the only one patronizing here. Just correct people when they make a mistake instead of going on and on about how superior you are.
It's true, I've been running Windows exclusively for the past few years and hadn't followed the developments in this area. Well, fine Linux advocates like you are certainly encouraging me to switch to it.
Yeah, I'm aware of them. The difference is that IE7 is sandboxed by default and seamlessly, whereas extra effort is required to invoke those things in Linux in most distributions, so users are unlikely to use them. This kind of issue always comes up when arguing about Linux capabilities...
At the kernel level, you're right. When considering the entire Windows install or an entire Linux distribution, I find that Windows is basically monolithic whereas a Linux distribution is made out of swappable and removable pieces. \Windows\system32 is a huge ton of mysterious DLLs and you can't just go around deleting the ones you don't need. In Linux you can remove arbitrary functionality, including the entire GUI if you like.
I also read in the blog of a former Microsoft employee recently that Windows is full of interdependencies between random components, forming (to exaggerate a little) a kind of dependency blob. Whereas Linux distribution dependencies are in a clean tree structure.
The U.S. government yearly budget is $2.8 trillion. Bill Gates' net worth is a comparatively puny $53 billion. If he only succeeds in adjusting the budget by 0.5%, it would, over his 4-year term, direct the same amount of money as his entire forture.
Go ahead, please make me look like a fuckwit by telling me about wonderful Linux features I've never heard of. As it is, Googling turns up this, which indicates that the Linux kernel has some support for capabilities but it's really clunky and nobody uses it. (To be fair, the same accusation could be leveled at Windows...)