The fact that Moore pulled marketing stunts to increase the popularity of his movie has no bearing on the amount of merit there may or may not be in the message of the movie. A lot of people seem to be unable to separate the two; they diss the movie itself because they don't like Moore's marketing methods. Whether or not people like the messenger (or the message itself for that matter) should not affect their willingness to hear a message that is true, but it does:/ Myself, I don't see any problem with him marketing his documentaries. There is nothing wrong with either trying to make money off of your documentary or with trying to get a message that you believe in out to as wide an audience as possible. And yet people seem to think he should rather shrink back and humbly stand quietly in the corner. Hmph.
A process blocked waiting for I/O requests to complete does not consume CPU time (obviously, because it is blocked), and that time waiting is not tallied with the "CPU time" shown in e.g. the Task Manager or top. AV scanners are usually only CPU intensive, they *appear* to be I/O intensive because they "happen to" run their checks whenever files are being accessed, so they slow down all file accesses, but not by increasing I/O, rather they're "studying the data" that is being read/written by other programs. Theoretically they don't even need to do any disk I/O at all if they have their signatures in memory, because all they're doing is 'catching' the file read/write requests of other processes, at which time they can analyse the file data already in memory.
Still, 9 days a year sounds hokey to me.
I would say a badly infected system (lots of adware, spyware etc) can easily take up to a day, especially if you have to install service packs etc. on a system, which takes long just sitting and waiting. But you're right, even if 1 day per incident per machine, 9 such 'incidents' per year sounds like a lot.
But you've missed an important point: the problem with the "the latest Windows worm" hitting your company is that when it does, it tends to hit BIG, i.e. normally nearly everyone gets infected at once (e.g. because it hits before the Windows Updates and/or AV updates for the exploit/virus are available). Now (for obvious economic reasons) the IT department of any company is only staffed sufficiently to handle day-to-day average workload, not hundreds of systems going down at once. So suddenly the IT department is hugely overloaded, a handful of people trying to clean hundreds of infected machines, just not possible, so now 1 day easily becomes 3 or 4 days to get round to all the machines. So now it only takes two major Windows worms per year to reach 7 or 8 days, plus another day or two on average other normal downtime, re-install time etc.
Um, sorry, forgive me for point this out, but aren't you talking complete rubbish? Most ad affiliate sites (e.g. commission junction) started moving to per-click YEARS ago, and in fact years ago most started dropping even pay-per-click, the "standard" now is pay-per-SALE. I think you're about four years behind here - this all happened just after the dot-com crash. I swear, reading your post was like a flashback to "slashdot '99".
Where on earth did I say that it wasn't a joke? That has nothing to do with anything, I 'got the joke' and nothing in my post implies otherwise, you are just making assumptions. Or is the rule that you can only reply to jokes with more jokes? Grow up.
Even when we don't care about something (like soccer) we're still pretty damn good at it.
That has a lot to do with firstly sheer size (300,000,000 people, about the third most populous country in the world, with more than three times the population of e.g. Germany) and secondly, plenty of resources (e.g. widespread access to equipment and facilities - virtually anyone interested in a sport will with a little effort be able to find somewhere to play, equipment to play with, people to practice against, and often even sponsors to pay for the time). Also due to the US's general high average wealth and low unemployment (yes the US has very low unemployment compared to most countries), many people often do not need to be economically active to have their basic needs taken care of, e.g. often a spouse can take care of that while they stay home - so you have more free time on your hands, on average, which gives you time to pursue endeavours like sport. In fact, just by resources and size of population, you should really be number 1 at soccer too (but I guess if you don't count the obese people, who won't be good at sport, you're probably back at around the same population as Germany!). BTW I'm not aware that anyone elsewhere in the world is "pissed off" that the US is good at things like soccer.
Your comment on the time required to tweak something is also spot on, in so far as these activities are generally rare in the Windows world.
In my experience this isn't true - what is true is that people just tend not to notice when they waste a day "tweaking" issues in Windows, they just accept it as normal, but become very 'aware' when having to spend a whole day on some issue in Linux. Often our jobs require using Windows, so when something doesn't work right in Windows we just accept having to blow hours or even days getting it to work without a second thought (e.g. it took me hours of googling for info and fiddling with obscure registry settings before Win2K would finally set the MTU for my 3g wireless connection, but because it's just part of the job, hey, that's how it goes). Once my Windows boot sector just corrupted itself somehow (no trojans/worms/viruses and no abnormal crashes or unclean shutdowns, no idea how it happened), I spent several hours trying to get it to repair the boot sector using the repair tools on the Windows CD, but the fixes wouldn't "stick", I could get into Windows in a round-about way but the next time I rebooted, it wouldn't boot again. I ended up spending several days reinstalling Windows and all my applications. But hey, it's all 'part of the job', so I take it in stride.
But when I spend even just a few hours on a weekend struggling with some issue on Linux (or e.g. trying to get my coLinux installation to see the Internet because my VMWare network devices are somehow interfering or because Windows can't give me a local IP if the network cable is unplugged and coLinux needs it), well, that just damn irritates the hell out of me, because it's my limited weekend time that's being eaten up.
And so we apply this double standard. When we have to waste time tweaking or repairing screw-ups in Microsoft's products, it's OK, but if Linux isn't 100% perfect and run 100% smoothly all the time, it's immediately crap.
Many of the hassles we have with Windows we have years on the job learning to work around, and become "experts" on 'tweaking Windows', so purely thanks to all that experience we know exactly where to go when we need to e.g. modify the virtual memory settings, configure the display refresh rate, etc. We also learn a lot of these things from our colleagues, gaining from their experience and long struggles. We know Windows so well, we just think that Windows is easier to use. If things were switched around, and I had as much experience on Linux, and all my colleagues had as much experience on Linux, I guarantee you that we/they'd know how to get around and set things up very quickly in Linux, would not think twice about blowing a whole day at work on setting up something, and would hold the "foreign, strange" Windows OS to different and unreasonable standards, complaining bitterly every time we had to spend a few hours figuring out to set the MTU size, while knowing from experience exactly where to do the same in Linux.
I have coded in VB for fifteen years, and in Java for over ten
Hehe.. Java of course came out in '95... Anyway, I remember back in '98 I was reading the jobs section of a newspaper, and remember laughing at one company's ad: they were looking for Java programmers, and required that applicants had a minimum of five years Java programming experience.
Hmm.. I use Firefox every single day, and I think it's crashed about twice in six months. How do you make something already that stable "far more stable"?
My gf's dogs are Chinese (as she is) - they only understand Chinese. They are pretty intelligent and can understand a wide range of relatively complex instructions and queries - I have been consistently surprised at their intelligence as previously I had a very low opinion about dogs. Interestingly they even "know" the Chinese language tone system - if you use the incorrect tones, they don't understand.
I don't know if one could design an "optimal" language for dogs, that's an interesting question. It might be that simpler languages allow larger vocabulary storage. Or it may be that more complex languages (like Chinese) improve the dog's general cognitive skills, making it more intelligent. It would be an interesting topic to research. (In general, I actually think it's rather pathetic/shameful that we've done so relatively little research on animal intelligence and communication in our history - probably a reflection of a bias against the very idea of animal intelligence that is only now beginning to fade from our culture, yet is still evident today even in posts on/.).
Last I heard the average human had a vocab of around 2500 words or less
No, it's definitely higher than this. I'm learning a few languages at the moment, and this is about the basic vocab you need to learn just to have a basis (productive and passive vocabulary). A small student's dictionary should have at least 5000 words in it, and to become fluent in a language you pretty much need to have that many words as part of your productive vocabulary (productive = actively used to create sentences, passive = understand it when read/heard but almost never used by the speaker - we all have a much larger passive vocab than productive).
With regard to "word recall ability" and how many times you have to hear a word to remember it, it's also interesting to note that the family of language makes a huge difference. Speakers of English and other European languages find it much easier to remember new words in related languages (e.g. other European languages), but it's much harder and takes many more exposures to words, especially in the beginning, to remember words from other language families (e.g. Asian or African). It takes your brain time and practice to "get used to" the general sound system of a language, but once it does your recall ability starts to improve. So for example a Chinese speaker will find it much easier to learn Japanese than English or French, while an English person would find it much easier to learn French than either Chinese or Japanese (this has been shown in research too). I wonder if dogs would have a similar experience, i.e. would a Chinese dog find it harder to learn English commands?
Hmm.. very small chance, but I wonder if I might be able to find any accounts involving my own grandfather, a RAF pilot in WWII.. that would be interesting (to me at least).
You might feel outrage over the prison abuse, as you should, but keep in mind that a huge portion of the US population don't, and a reasonable percentage even support it and make comments suggesting that the Iraqis deserved it or that they deserved even worse. Still many more simply don't care about what happened in the prisons. The views of America at large are more relevant to this discussion than your particular views. Muslim moderates should take a stand against extremism just as surely as a significant percentage of Americans should take a stand against e.g. the prison abuse - and don't.
I fully agree that people MUST take a stand against extremism not just when 'another group' are the perpetrators, but equally when their 'own group' are the perpetrators. But most people don't see it that way. It's like racism - whites take a strong stand against black-on-white racism (and vice-versa), but both groups often tolerate or condone similar racism when it's against the 'other' group. The terrible logic is that by condoning racism by your own people, you are condoning racism at large, and thus must accept racism against your own people since by your own standards you've already implicitly said "racism is A-OK by me". Same goes for religous extremism. In fact, we should speak out even stronger when our 'own side' are the perpetrators.
Indeed, it seems to be an increasingly common misconception amongst an increasingly less technically literate/. audience that the release of source code inherently allows hackers to then know how to 'break into' the software. Clearly they don't understand software very well or the software development process. All that releasing the source code might do is help hackers to find flaws in the design faster, but those flaws are just that, flaws, a door accidentally left open which can simply be fixed by the vendor and a binary patch released.
Well it was pretty much my point, and the response really just confirmed it. Why it is annoying is that the US claims to be some huge defender of democracies, abiding by democratic principles and so on. My point was precisely that pragmatic concerns rather easily simply override this claimed principle, so we all agree here. My point with Taiwan was forward-looking: the current president of Taiwan is pro-independence (or at least that is his image) and China continues with it's military/missile build-up over the strait, seemingly with every intent of invasion. So if we presume China does invade in the year 200X, and Taiwan (having a pro-independence president) attempts to fight back, the US, having aligned with China for practical reasons, will become the de facto enemy of Taiwan (which is why I said "de facto" too). So the irony lies in the US, while claiming to be the world's greates champions and defenders of democracy, aligning with the world's largest communist country (and STILL a major area of ongoing human rights violator in spite of relatively harmless foreign policy) against a modern democratic country. Of course it makes every sense from a practical perspective in the medium term, but it makes no sense in terms of claimed principles of the US, and this blatant hypocrisy is one of the reasons the US is not terribly popular in the world.
Well, I know it was a joke, but the Bush administration actually officially supports (totalitarian, communist) China over (the democracy) Taiwan. Communist China are becoming friends of the US, de facto making democratic Taiwan an enemy, I guess the US only supports democracies when it happens to align with their own interests.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that Moore pulled marketing stunts to increase the popularity of his movie has no bearing on the amount of merit there may or may not be in the message of the movie. A lot of people seem to be unable to separate the two; they diss the movie itself because they don't like Moore's marketing methods. Whether or not people like the messenger (or the message itself for that matter) should not affect their willingness to hear a message that is true, but it does :/ Myself, I don't see any problem with him marketing his documentaries. There is nothing wrong with either trying to make money off of your documentary or with trying to get a message that you believe in out to as wide an audience as possible. And yet people seem to think he should rather shrink back and humbly stand quietly in the corner. Hmph.
A process blocked waiting for I/O requests to complete does not consume CPU time (obviously, because it is blocked), and that time waiting is not tallied with the "CPU time" shown in e.g. the Task Manager or top. AV scanners are usually only CPU intensive, they *appear* to be I/O intensive because they "happen to" run their checks whenever files are being accessed, so they slow down all file accesses, but not by increasing I/O, rather they're "studying the data" that is being read/written by other programs. Theoretically they don't even need to do any disk I/O at all if they have their signatures in memory, because all they're doing is 'catching' the file read/write requests of other processes, at which time they can analyse the file data already in memory.
Still, 9 days a year sounds hokey to me. I would say a badly infected system (lots of adware, spyware etc) can easily take up to a day, especially if you have to install service packs etc. on a system, which takes long just sitting and waiting. But you're right, even if 1 day per incident per machine, 9 such 'incidents' per year sounds like a lot.
But you've missed an important point: the problem with the "the latest Windows worm" hitting your company is that when it does, it tends to hit BIG, i.e. normally nearly everyone gets infected at once (e.g. because it hits before the Windows Updates and/or AV updates for the exploit/virus are available). Now (for obvious economic reasons) the IT department of any company is only staffed sufficiently to handle day-to-day average workload, not hundreds of systems going down at once. So suddenly the IT department is hugely overloaded, a handful of people trying to clean hundreds of infected machines, just not possible, so now 1 day easily becomes 3 or 4 days to get round to all the machines. So now it only takes two major Windows worms per year to reach 7 or 8 days, plus another day or two on average other normal downtime, re-install time etc.
Oh wait, you talking about advertiser rates?
That's why the standard is per impression
Um, sorry, forgive me for point this out, but aren't you talking complete rubbish? Most ad affiliate sites (e.g. commission junction) started moving to per-click YEARS ago, and in fact years ago most started dropping even pay-per-click, the "standard" now is pay-per-SALE. I think you're about four years behind here - this all happened just after the dot-com crash. I swear, reading your post was like a flashback to "slashdot '99".
The fear is that MS will simply not work hard to make their OS secure from viruses
You mean like they have in past, before they decided to enter the AV market? ;)
Microsoft will back a huge open standard? This is the silliest thing I've read in a long time, you're either shilling or smoking something strange ..
Where on earth did I say that it wasn't a joke? That has nothing to do with anything, I 'got the joke' and nothing in my post implies otherwise, you are just making assumptions. Or is the rule that you can only reply to jokes with more jokes? Grow up.
Even when we don't care about something (like soccer) we're still pretty damn good at it.
That has a lot to do with firstly sheer size (300,000,000 people, about the third most populous country in the world, with more than three times the population of e.g. Germany) and secondly, plenty of resources (e.g. widespread access to equipment and facilities - virtually anyone interested in a sport will with a little effort be able to find somewhere to play, equipment to play with, people to practice against, and often even sponsors to pay for the time). Also due to the US's general high average wealth and low unemployment (yes the US has very low unemployment compared to most countries), many people often do not need to be economically active to have their basic needs taken care of, e.g. often a spouse can take care of that while they stay home - so you have more free time on your hands, on average, which gives you time to pursue endeavours like sport. In fact, just by resources and size of population, you should really be number 1 at soccer too (but I guess if you don't count the obese people, who won't be good at sport, you're probably back at around the same population as Germany!). BTW I'm not aware that anyone elsewhere in the world is "pissed off" that the US is good at things like soccer.
I hate Windows as much as the next guy, but I'm on Win2KSP4 here and I'm afraid it didn't reboot or crash or anything. Just pings normally.
Your comment on the time required to tweak something is also spot on, in so far as these activities are generally rare in the Windows world.
In my experience this isn't true - what is true is that people just tend not to notice when they waste a day "tweaking" issues in Windows, they just accept it as normal, but become very 'aware' when having to spend a whole day on some issue in Linux. Often our jobs require using Windows, so when something doesn't work right in Windows we just accept having to blow hours or even days getting it to work without a second thought (e.g. it took me hours of googling for info and fiddling with obscure registry settings before Win2K would finally set the MTU for my 3g wireless connection, but because it's just part of the job, hey, that's how it goes). Once my Windows boot sector just corrupted itself somehow (no trojans/worms/viruses and no abnormal crashes or unclean shutdowns, no idea how it happened), I spent several hours trying to get it to repair the boot sector using the repair tools on the Windows CD, but the fixes wouldn't "stick", I could get into Windows in a round-about way but the next time I rebooted, it wouldn't boot again. I ended up spending several days reinstalling Windows and all my applications. But hey, it's all 'part of the job', so I take it in stride.
But when I spend even just a few hours on a weekend struggling with some issue on Linux (or e.g. trying to get my coLinux installation to see the Internet because my VMWare network devices are somehow interfering or because Windows can't give me a local IP if the network cable is unplugged and coLinux needs it), well, that just damn irritates the hell out of me, because it's my limited weekend time that's being eaten up.
And so we apply this double standard. When we have to waste time tweaking or repairing screw-ups in Microsoft's products, it's OK, but if Linux isn't 100% perfect and run 100% smoothly all the time, it's immediately crap.
Many of the hassles we have with Windows we have years on the job learning to work around, and become "experts" on 'tweaking Windows', so purely thanks to all that experience we know exactly where to go when we need to e.g. modify the virtual memory settings, configure the display refresh rate, etc. We also learn a lot of these things from our colleagues, gaining from their experience and long struggles. We know Windows so well, we just think that Windows is easier to use. If things were switched around, and I had as much experience on Linux, and all my colleagues had as much experience on Linux, I guarantee you that we/they'd know how to get around and set things up very quickly in Linux, would not think twice about blowing a whole day at work on setting up something, and would hold the "foreign, strange" Windows OS to different and unreasonable standards, complaining bitterly every time we had to spend a few hours figuring out to set the MTU size, while knowing from experience exactly where to do the same in Linux.
That should be +1 Insightful/Informative, not just +1 Funny .. :) (Amazing how many people can only handle 'black and white' thinking.)
I have coded in VB for fifteen years, and in Java for over ten
Hehe .. Java of course came out in '95 ... Anyway, I remember back in '98 I was reading the jobs section of a newspaper, and remember laughing at one company's ad: they were looking for Java programmers, and required that applicants had a minimum of five years Java programming experience.
Hmm .. I use Firefox every single day, and I think it's crashed about twice in six months. How do you make something already that stable "far more stable"?
You're either -1 Troll or -1 Naive.
Not very bright, are you. "not something to play with" = idiomatic language for "something that should be treated seriously, not lightly"
My gf's dogs are Chinese (as she is) - they only understand Chinese. They are pretty intelligent and can understand a wide range of relatively complex instructions and queries - I have been consistently surprised at their intelligence as previously I had a very low opinion about dogs. Interestingly they even "know" the Chinese language tone system - if you use the incorrect tones, they don't understand.
I don't know if one could design an "optimal" language for dogs, that's an interesting question. It might be that simpler languages allow larger vocabulary storage. Or it may be that more complex languages (like Chinese) improve the dog's general cognitive skills, making it more intelligent. It would be an interesting topic to research. (In general, I actually think it's rather pathetic/shameful that we've done so relatively little research on animal intelligence and communication in our history - probably a reflection of a bias against the very idea of animal intelligence that is only now beginning to fade from our culture, yet is still evident today even in posts on /.).
Last I heard the average human had a vocab of around 2500 words or less
No, it's definitely higher than this. I'm learning a few languages at the moment, and this is about the basic vocab you need to learn just to have a basis (productive and passive vocabulary). A small student's dictionary should have at least 5000 words in it, and to become fluent in a language you pretty much need to have that many words as part of your productive vocabulary (productive = actively used to create sentences, passive = understand it when read/heard but almost never used by the speaker - we all have a much larger passive vocab than productive).
With regard to "word recall ability" and how many times you have to hear a word to remember it, it's also interesting to note that the family of language makes a huge difference. Speakers of English and other European languages find it much easier to remember new words in related languages (e.g. other European languages), but it's much harder and takes many more exposures to words, especially in the beginning, to remember words from other language families (e.g. Asian or African). It takes your brain time and practice to "get used to" the general sound system of a language, but once it does your recall ability starts to improve. So for example a Chinese speaker will find it much easier to learn Japanese than English or French, while an English person would find it much easier to learn French than either Chinese or Japanese (this has been shown in research too). I wonder if dogs would have a similar experience, i.e. would a Chinese dog find it harder to learn English commands?
This is slashdot, anything that claims to harm the environment in any way is immediately classified as propaganda.
Very nice! Any chance of making the full archive database dump downloadable (like wikipedia)?
Um, I don't think you are missing his/her subtlety, I think you are missing his/her blatantly overt: "Something has changed, something not"
Hmm .. very small chance, but I wonder if I might be able to find any accounts involving my own grandfather, a RAF pilot in WWII .. that would be interesting (to me at least).
Except that I do
You might feel outrage over the prison abuse, as you should, but keep in mind that a huge portion of the US population don't, and a reasonable percentage even support it and make comments suggesting that the Iraqis deserved it or that they deserved even worse. Still many more simply don't care about what happened in the prisons. The views of America at large are more relevant to this discussion than your particular views. Muslim moderates should take a stand against extremism just as surely as a significant percentage of Americans should take a stand against e.g. the prison abuse - and don't.
I fully agree that people MUST take a stand against extremism not just when 'another group' are the perpetrators, but equally when their 'own group' are the perpetrators. But most people don't see it that way. It's like racism - whites take a strong stand against black-on-white racism (and vice-versa), but both groups often tolerate or condone similar racism when it's against the 'other' group. The terrible logic is that by condoning racism by your own people, you are condoning racism at large, and thus must accept racism against your own people since by your own standards you've already implicitly said "racism is A-OK by me". Same goes for religous extremism. In fact, we should speak out even stronger when our 'own side' are the perpetrators.
Indeed, it seems to be an increasingly common misconception amongst an increasingly less technically literate /. audience that the release of source code inherently allows hackers to then know how to 'break into' the software. Clearly they don't understand software very well or the software development process. All that releasing the source code might do is help hackers to find flaws in the design faster, but those flaws are just that, flaws, a door accidentally left open which can simply be fixed by the vendor and a binary patch released.
Well it was pretty much my point, and the response really just confirmed it. Why it is annoying is that the US claims to be some huge defender of democracies, abiding by democratic principles and so on. My point was precisely that pragmatic concerns rather easily simply override this claimed principle, so we all agree here. My point with Taiwan was forward-looking: the current president of Taiwan is pro-independence (or at least that is his image) and China continues with it's military/missile build-up over the strait, seemingly with every intent of invasion. So if we presume China does invade in the year 200X, and Taiwan (having a pro-independence president) attempts to fight back, the US, having aligned with China for practical reasons, will become the de facto enemy of Taiwan (which is why I said "de facto" too). So the irony lies in the US, while claiming to be the world's greates champions and defenders of democracy, aligning with the world's largest communist country (and STILL a major area of ongoing human rights violator in spite of relatively harmless foreign policy) against a modern democratic country. Of course it makes every sense from a practical perspective in the medium term, but it makes no sense in terms of claimed principles of the US, and this blatant hypocrisy is one of the reasons the US is not terribly popular in the world.
Well, I know it was a joke, but the Bush administration actually officially supports (totalitarian, communist) China over (the democracy) Taiwan. Communist China are becoming friends of the US, de facto making democratic Taiwan an enemy, I guess the US only supports democracies when it happens to align with their own interests.