You couldn't have just said "between those who let someone else install it for them"? It had to be gendered?
Sure I could, but then you wouldn't start ranting right away. Where would the fun be?
In any case, who the hell cares? Have you ever tried to talk someone into using a new browser?
Perhaps my point was... What if the person who is currently using a non-standard browser is so oblivious of what's happening with the computing device that he/she simply hasn't realized that someone close to him/her has replaced standard browser with non-standard browser? I know a few of those... from both sexes.
How's that for a gender neutral paragraph? What about from a technological neutrality point of view? The fact I never mentioned Firefox or Chrome pleases you? The fact that I didn't mention computer, specifically, but computing device so it can include phones, tablets and what not pleases you?
I couldn't care less about record companies or artists owning private jets and stately homes. All I know is that artists need to get money from somewhere...
And how much do artists* take in from the sales of their albums? If the labels are here to help the artists, then it's certainly a big share. But all I hear/read points in some other direction.
* When I say "artists, I'm not talking about U2, Britney Spears, Linkin' Park or any other big name, who basically have made all the money they'd ever need if they weren't wasting it in Ferraris, coke, or whatever. I'm talking about small bands who are starting their careers and make their first albums through a label. Those with basically no power to negotiate the terms with the label.
He should have shifted into neutral as soon as he realized he couldn't keep the engine from accelerating the car beyond where he wanted it to be.
One acronym for you: RTFA.
I'll give you some of the content. Warning, there's some spoilers:
"Lecerf has filed a legal complaint after his Renault Laguna, which is adapted for disabled drivers, (...) and the brakes failed"
"A Renault technician had been on the phone with police throughout the chase trying to help but couldn't come up with a solution."
So yeah, he should have done all that... and obviously in a one hour run over the highway, with police involved, no one came up with that idea. Why aren't you a French policeman... everything would have been so different!
From what I read a few years ago, Airbus absolutely limits what the pilot can do
Take a look at what happened to AF447 the Airbus that crashed over the Atlantic a few years back. Indeed the standard operating procedure from Airbus limits what the pilot can do. However, when the system detects problems (e.g. faulty speed sensors) it goes into a more permissive mode. In this mode the airplane gives full(er) control to the pilot.
I won't introduce any spoilers, but a take a look at the account of the end of the flight. Worth a read to know how things work (when they don't) in the cockpit.
There's Gustafson's Law exactly for this. Amdahl's law is not appropriate at this case. In fact, even the Wikipedia page of Amdahl's law mentions this. You are never going to use a computer with 1 million cores to do something done manageable time for a 4 core cpu or whatever. If the portion of the code that is serial is consistently small (let's suppose just reading the initial conditions from a text file) then you make sure you are applying the 1 million-cpu machine to a large enough job.
People don't want to compute fixed-size jobs (which is what Amdahl's law refers to). People want to calculate the biggest job possible and parallelization helps for that... otherwise no one would make a 1 million cpu machine.
The cell phone I bought quite a few years ago (more than a decade) has a Li-pol battery.
This seems to be based on a similar idea (they mention a polymer matrix as well) so solid but flexible electrolyte is not a first, as I have a consumer device over a decade old that has exactly that.[1]
The novelty seems to be (from reading the actual pay-walled article, God forbid!) that this can be printed. But even this may just be similar to all of these "in a computer" patents. Maybe back then it was also true, but now printable is fashion in science. So, this seems to be a case of "scientists develop an improved version of what has been on consumer devices for over a decade. Expect to see it in the market by 2030 due to costs."
[1] Granted, it's packaged in a non-flexible case, but I that's how I like my phones to be anyway.
There were some scenes in Burton's 2010 adaptation of Alice In Wonderland [wikipedia.org] where 3D helped tell the story.
We must have seen different versions of it. All I saw was the 3D being used as a gimmick to make me pay a few more bucks. I only remember one scene where the 3D was readily noticeable. Independently of that being a good or bad thing, it hardly makes it that the 3D helped the story.
Of course, this is just my opinion... which happens to be just the opposite of your opinion.
Talk about acting smart... why don't you do the same?
How can you even think a fast train going at 300 km/h arrives at a stop only to stay there for half an hour? How can you think someone goes and pays the hefty price of a high speed train ticket only to spend half the time stopped in stations? Just because that's all you've seen?
Trains in any civilized part of the world stop for a few minutes at anything but the terminal stops. Even in major stops along the route it won't stop for more than 5 minutes. You get it, and while the train is already moving you find a seat and a place to put your luggage. And trains go at their full speed most of the time. They don't slow down for curves! For HSR the entire track is designed so the train goes at its rated speed. The curves are wide enough (and superelevated) so that a train that can go at 300 km/h doesn't have to slow down to 60 km/h or whatever speed you think is acceptable.
And your original comment with its "I suggest the route is undoable in 10 hours"... it's a typical case of "guy in internet forum knows better than the world". Grow up!
Among the reasons cited for the school district's choice of PCs over Mac's were (...) cost.
And yet Linux was never an option? Avoided Apple to reduce the cost and ended up hiring 5 people to contain the damage that came as a consequence of their choice... way to go!
I remember in `99 I compiled XFree86 at home and it took 3 days to compile. Later when I first heard about X.org people were saying, they are modernizing the code. And sure enough, I tried it and it compiled in just a few hours.
Well, if we consider that the initial version of X.org came out in 2004 (5 years after your XFree86 adventure) and we take into account Moore's Law (and other advancements) I'd say 98% of the speed improvement you observed is due to the computer you were compiling it in.
Well, about 6 months to one year back I was trying to show a friend that OpenOffice (or was it LibreOffice, can't remember) was a nice alternative to Microsoft Word. I typed some text in a OpenOffice Writer file, saved it as a doc and went to open it on Microsoft Word. The point I was trying to make was that it was interoperable with the de facto standard office suite. And she would have it legally.
As soon as I opened it on Microsoft Word, it crashed the program. It had about 20 characters of text. No formatting, no different font or size, nothing!
She laughed at me and I installed her the illegal version of Microsoft Office she had.
People want Microsoft Office because that's what everyone else has. And they won't give a rat's ass about OpenOffice if they can't share documents with other people. Doesn't matter if they are doing it for the wrong motives or not. They care about interoperability, even if the content could easily be in a text file and occupy 1/100th of the space of the doc.
It's pretty funny that he says one of his mistakes was using Facebook to promote himself and that he learned not to do that. That he should help build something and the publicity comes as a consequence of that. And here we are, 6 years after he left Facebook, reading about him and Facebook.
Especially for specialised tissue such as brain (...) once you've lost it, it's gone for good. If we can figure out how to make these parts regenerate, then it will revolutionize the treatment of all kinds of illness.
While in general I agree with your statement, I think the brain is where things will get muddy. A lung or heart or even a leg is "relatively" simple. Provided you grown the bones on the right place and the right kind of muscle in the right kind of configuration, it works fine. It may not be a lung working at 100% capacity, or a leg equal to the other one, but it works. A brain on the other hand, it's not just a static collection of cells. We know that our brain reorganizes (e.g. during the learning process and as a consequence of it) and so, even regrowing the brain tissue would still leave you with a scar. Not necessarily a physical one, you could be capable of controlling all your bodily functions (maintaining a heartbeat, using your legs) without a problem, but a self scar. If the disease touches the parts that control who you are (i.e. personality related areas, and there's plenty of them), even getting them back would result in a different you. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing... but it still not really a cure for the "illness", it's a treatment (in the sense that you don't get your old self back, but you get to a different steady state.
Open devices make for a more attractive product, speed application development and make for a loyal customer base.
As Apple has shown us time and again?!
People complain(ed) about the Steve Jobs reality distortion field, but I think the Openness distortion field we see at Slashdot is equally disturbing. No one cares about openness (us 2% geeks do not count, trust me). People are not even worried about their privacy, let alone the locked-ness of their device.
And "application development"? Random Joe will buy Kindle to read books (among other things) and stay with it if it works. Hell, people stayed with Internet Explorer 6 for years when Firefox and alternatives offered a much richer experience, in an OS that is as open as many users have ever known and still they didn't change. Why would it matter now?
The submitter doesn't understand the work "fragmentation" just like the submitter of yesterday's post couldn't understand what a QR code is.
What both posts have in common is that they were approved by timothy. Can't we just get him out of Slashdot? He's the one accepting all these sensationalist baseless articles and diluting the little that Slashdot still has of value.
I don't believe we ever need to go this fast in an airplane (in our atmosphere).
It would be interesting to go back and read newspapers from a time when cars or trains started showing up, or to listen to what people said back then. I'm certain there would be some stating: "What's the point on having these traveling machines? All our needs are covered by horses and these vehicles will be a fad that rapidly goes away."
The point of sport is exercising your body for the fun and health benefits.
That is true at the level amateurs do it. At the professional level fun is long gone and the health benefits are not so clear. Just look at Michael Phelps... to train for the 2008 Olympics he was training 5 or 6 hours a day and eating over 10000 calories a day. Or look at the pictures of Chinese 5 year old kids preparing to be gymnasts in three Olympiads. Fun isn't that their faces convey.
Sure, but who says the point was trying to avoid being discovered
To me it sounds more like a method to avoid being detected where it hadn't been yet. Let's say the biggest bad ass in the neighborhood just got to know about Flame. As others have pointed, unless he backed up his computer, he will never be able to find out if he was infected. For whomever built this, I'd say this is very valuable.
People have been "sliding to unlock" for hundreds (if not thousands) of years also and it hasn't prevented a certain company from patenting that...
When are we going to stop with this argument of "people have done this for X years" (where X is a large number)? It should be clear by now that either the patent system is too screwed as it is and prior art means nothing at all or that the electronic world is seen by the Patent Office as sufficiently different so that "sliding to unlock" and "gifting" can be awarded patents even though real world equivalents are too basic to merit a patent. Is it a bunch of crap? Yes, it is! Does it get patented anyway? Yes, it does!
And so did ETA in Spain. In fact, when after the bombings in Madrid people started pointing fingers at ETA, one of the first things that was offered as a rebuttal was their track record at informing of previous bombings.
I went to a summer school last year and one of the professors told us about the book where he went into detail on most of what he had explained. It was from a major publisher on science textbooks.
He told us to go ahead and buy it, he was planning on getting rich with the 12 cents he got per copy sold. Yes, that's it... the author was getting 12 cents of a dollar per book sold!
If your professors are arranging to get their books sold by their colleagues, the must have some great deals out of textbook companies.
Slashdot Mirror
You couldn't have just said "between those who let someone else install it for them"? It had to be gendered?
Sure I could, but then you wouldn't start ranting right away. Where would the fun be?
In any case, who the hell cares? Have you ever tried to talk someone into using a new browser?
Perhaps my point was... What if the person who is currently using a non-standard browser is so oblivious of what's happening with the computing device that he/she simply hasn't realized that someone close to him/her has replaced standard browser with non-standard browser? I know a few of those... from both sexes.
How's that for a gender neutral paragraph? What about from a technological neutrality point of view? The fact I never mentioned Firefox or Chrome pleases you? The fact that I didn't mention computer, specifically, but computing device so it can include phones, tablets and what not pleases you?
"Among other things, its analysis found that those applicants who have bothered to install new web browsers on their computers"
How do they distinguish those who installed a new browser from those that let their boyfriends, brothers, friends, etc. install a new browser?
And was it one of these independent artists that sued this company?
I couldn't care less about record companies or artists owning private jets and stately homes. All I know is that artists need to get money from somewhere...
And how much do artists* take in from the sales of their albums? If the labels are here to help the artists, then it's certainly a big share. But all I hear/read points in some other direction.
* When I say "artists, I'm not talking about U2, Britney Spears, Linkin' Park or any other big name, who basically have made all the money they'd ever need if they weren't wasting it in Ferraris, coke, or whatever. I'm talking about small bands who are starting their careers and make their first albums through a label. Those with basically no power to negotiate the terms with the label.
He should have shifted into neutral as soon as he realized he couldn't keep the engine from accelerating the car beyond where he wanted it to be.
One acronym for you: RTFA.
I'll give you some of the content. Warning, there's some spoilers:
"Lecerf has filed a legal complaint after his Renault Laguna, which is adapted for disabled drivers, (...) and the brakes failed"
"A Renault technician had been on the phone with police throughout the chase trying to help but couldn't come up with a solution."
So yeah, he should have done all that... and obviously in a one hour run over the highway, with police involved, no one came up with that idea. Why aren't you a French policeman... everything would have been so different!
From what I read a few years ago, Airbus absolutely limits what the pilot can do
Take a look at what happened to AF447 the Airbus that crashed over the Atlantic a few years back. Indeed the standard operating procedure from Airbus limits what the pilot can do. However, when the system detects problems (e.g. faulty speed sensors) it goes into a more permissive mode. In this mode the airplane gives full(er) control to the pilot.
I won't introduce any spoilers, but a take a look at the account of the end of the flight. Worth a read to know how things work (when they don't) in the cockpit.
There's Gustafson's Law exactly for this. Amdahl's law is not appropriate at this case. In fact, even the Wikipedia page of Amdahl's law mentions this. You are never going to use a computer with 1 million cores to do something done manageable time for a 4 core cpu or whatever. If the portion of the code that is serial is consistently small (let's suppose just reading the initial conditions from a text file) then you make sure you are applying the 1 million-cpu machine to a large enough job.
People don't want to compute fixed-size jobs (which is what Amdahl's law refers to). People want to calculate the biggest job possible and parallelization helps for that... otherwise no one would make a 1 million cpu machine.
The cell phone I bought quite a few years ago (more than a decade) has a Li-pol battery.
This seems to be based on a similar idea (they mention a polymer matrix as well) so solid but flexible electrolyte is not a first, as I have a consumer device over a decade old that has exactly that.[1]
The novelty seems to be (from reading the actual pay-walled article, God forbid!) that this can be printed. But even this may just be similar to all of these "in a computer" patents. Maybe back then it was also true, but now printable is fashion in science.
So, this seems to be a case of "scientists develop an improved version of what has been on consumer devices for over a decade. Expect to see it in the market by 2030 due to costs."
[1] Granted, it's packaged in a non-flexible case, but I that's how I like my phones to be anyway.
There were some scenes in Burton's 2010 adaptation of Alice In Wonderland [wikipedia.org] where 3D helped tell the story.
We must have seen different versions of it. All I saw was the 3D being used as a gimmick to make me pay a few more bucks. I only remember one scene where the 3D was readily noticeable. Independently of that being a good or bad thing, it hardly makes it that the 3D helped the story.
Of course, this is just my opinion... which happens to be just the opposite of your opinion.
Talk about acting smart... why don't you do the same?
How can you even think a fast train going at 300 km/h arrives at a stop only to stay there for half an hour? How can you think someone goes and pays the hefty price of a high speed train ticket only to spend half the time stopped in stations? Just because that's all you've seen?
Trains in any civilized part of the world stop for a few minutes at anything but the terminal stops. Even in major stops along the route it won't stop for more than 5 minutes. You get it, and while the train is already moving you find a seat and a place to put your luggage. And trains go at their full speed most of the time. They don't slow down for curves! For HSR the entire track is designed so the train goes at its rated speed. The curves are wide enough (and superelevated) so that a train that can go at 300 km/h doesn't have to slow down to 60 km/h or whatever speed you think is acceptable.
And your original comment with its "I suggest the route is undoable in 10 hours"... it's a typical case of "guy in internet forum knows better than the world". Grow up!
Among the reasons cited for the school district's choice of PCs over Mac's were (...) cost.
And yet Linux was never an option? Avoided Apple to reduce the cost and ended up hiring 5 people to contain the damage that came as a consequence of their choice... way to go!
I remember in `99 I compiled XFree86 at home and it took 3 days to compile. Later when I first heard about X.org people were saying, they are modernizing the code. And sure enough, I tried it and it compiled in just a few hours.
Well, if we consider that the initial version of X.org came out in 2004 (5 years after your XFree86 adventure) and we take into account Moore's Law (and other advancements) I'd say 98% of the speed improvement you observed is due to the computer you were compiling it in.
Well, about 6 months to one year back I was trying to show a friend that OpenOffice (or was it LibreOffice, can't remember) was a nice alternative to Microsoft Word. I typed some text in a OpenOffice Writer file, saved it as a doc and went to open it on Microsoft Word. The point I was trying to make was that it was interoperable with the de facto standard office suite. And she would have it legally.
As soon as I opened it on Microsoft Word, it crashed the program. It had about 20 characters of text. No formatting, no different font or size, nothing!
She laughed at me and I installed her the illegal version of Microsoft Office she had.
People want Microsoft Office because that's what everyone else has. And they won't give a rat's ass about OpenOffice if they can't share documents with other people. Doesn't matter if they are doing it for the wrong motives or not. They care about interoperability, even if the content could easily be in a text file and occupy 1/100th of the space of the doc.
It's pretty funny that he says one of his mistakes was using Facebook to promote himself and that he learned not to do that. That he should help build something and the publicity comes as a consequence of that. And here we are, 6 years after he left Facebook, reading about him and Facebook.
Clearly he learned all he's preaching
Especially for specialised tissue such as brain (...) once you've lost it, it's gone for good. If we can figure out how to make these parts regenerate, then it will revolutionize the treatment of all kinds of illness.
While in general I agree with your statement, I think the brain is where things will get muddy. A lung or heart or even a leg is "relatively" simple. Provided you grown the bones on the right place and the right kind of muscle in the right kind of configuration, it works fine. It may not be a lung working at 100% capacity, or a leg equal to the other one, but it works.
A brain on the other hand, it's not just a static collection of cells. We know that our brain reorganizes (e.g. during the learning process and as a consequence of it) and so, even regrowing the brain tissue would still leave you with a scar. Not necessarily a physical one, you could be capable of controlling all your bodily functions (maintaining a heartbeat, using your legs) without a problem, but a self scar. If the disease touches the parts that control who you are (i.e. personality related areas, and there's plenty of them), even getting them back would result in a different you. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing... but it still not really a cure for the "illness", it's a treatment (in the sense that you don't get your old self back, but you get to a different steady state.
Open devices make for a more attractive product, speed application development and make for a loyal customer base.
As Apple has shown us time and again?!
People complain(ed) about the Steve Jobs reality distortion field, but I think the Openness distortion field we see at Slashdot is equally disturbing. No one cares about openness (us 2% geeks do not count, trust me). People are not even worried about their privacy, let alone the locked-ness of their device.
And "application development"? Random Joe will buy Kindle to read books (among other things) and stay with it if it works. Hell, people stayed with Internet Explorer 6 for years when Firefox and alternatives offered a much richer experience, in an OS that is as open as many users have ever known and still they didn't change. Why would it matter now?
The submitter doesn't understand the work "fragmentation" just like the submitter of yesterday's post couldn't understand what a QR code is.
What both posts have in common is that they were approved by timothy. Can't we just get him out of Slashdot? He's the one accepting all these sensationalist baseless articles and diluting the little that Slashdot still has of value.
I don't believe we ever need to go this fast in an airplane (in our atmosphere).
It would be interesting to go back and read newspapers from a time when cars or trains started showing up, or to listen to what people said back then. I'm certain there would be some stating: "What's the point on having these traveling machines? All our needs are covered by horses and these vehicles will be a fad that rapidly goes away."
The point of sport is exercising your body for the fun and health benefits.
That is true at the level amateurs do it. At the professional level fun is long gone and the health benefits are not so clear. Just look at Michael Phelps... to train for the 2008 Olympics he was training 5 or 6 hours a day and eating over 10000 calories a day. Or look at the pictures of Chinese 5 year old kids preparing to be gymnasts in three Olympiads. Fun isn't that their faces convey.
Does a famous quote from Gandhi apply here?
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
It doesn't bode well for us, if it does apply.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. - George Santayana
PS - Take a look here if you have a problem grasping what I mean with that sentence.
Sure, but who says the point was trying to avoid being discovered
To me it sounds more like a method to avoid being detected where it hadn't been yet. Let's say the biggest bad ass in the neighborhood just got to know about Flame. As others have pointed, unless he backed up his computer, he will never be able to find out if he was infected. For whomever built this, I'd say this is very valuable.
People have been "sliding to unlock" for hundreds (if not thousands) of years also and it hasn't prevented a certain company from patenting that...
When are we going to stop with this argument of "people have done this for X years" (where X is a large number)? It should be clear by now that either the patent system is too screwed as it is and prior art means nothing at all or that the electronic world is seen by the Patent Office as sufficiently different so that "sliding to unlock" and "gifting" can be awarded patents even though real world equivalents are too basic to merit a patent. Is it a bunch of crap? Yes, it is! Does it get patented anyway? Yes, it does!
And so did ETA in Spain. In fact, when after the bombings in Madrid people started pointing fingers at ETA, one of the first things that was offered as a rebuttal was their track record at informing of previous bombings.
I went to a summer school last year and one of the professors told us about the book where he went into detail on most of what he had explained. It was from a major publisher on science textbooks.
He told us to go ahead and buy it, he was planning on getting rich with the 12 cents he got per copy sold. Yes, that's it... the author was getting 12 cents of a dollar per book sold!
If your professors are arranging to get their books sold by their colleagues, the must have some great deals out of textbook companies.