If there is extra terrestrial life capable of FTL travel, wouldn't it stand to reason that it would put out colonies? No, it would not. How would you know what they'd want to do with this ability? Personally I find it very likely that at some point in the future human beings discover FTL travel, discover a few habitable planets, colonize them and then come up to a point that they just don't care to bother with it any more.
If we were able to evolve our economical structures to a point where we'd have cured world hunger/disease/etc. and stabilized the population due to some tricky social structures balancing, we might no longer feel the need to colonize more worlds due to lack of population pressure. Personally I think it is more unreasonable to expect an intelligent race to attempt to colonize the entire galaxy. To what end? Once you are intelligent enough to invent FTL travel, do you really still feel the need to satisfy this old biological imperative?
This was hashed out pretty well in the thread about Sweden or something suing Apple but I'll rehash it anyway. The difference between competitors' DRM and Apple's is that Apple refuses to license it to outsiders. This allows them to couple their dominance in the music player market (which was arguably well deserved and certainly not through underhand tactics) with dominance in the online music retail market. This kind of coupling between products is partially or wholly illegal in many EU countries.
I agree with you that Apple has no choice but to use DRM, but that has nothing to do with why they will end up getting sued in the EU.
I think you've got most of it down here. There is somewhat of a problem in computer science courses. For the longest time I didn't know how to apply a lot of the theoretical stuff I had been taught. Although I had had a lot of practical courses as well (the regular introduction to programming, programming, algorithms, datastructures, compilers, databases), some with a very good theoretical foundation, I never really got around to using a lot of the calculus, algebra and logic that was supposedly so important for my degree.
I think the problems most comp sci degrees are seeing are caused not by being too theoretical or relying on skills that are no longer valid, but by mistakes in teaching students how to evolve and apply the theoretic foundations they've been taught. It's not entirely applied mathematics (there's some engineering influences, and perhaps other things you could think of) but the applied part of those mathematics is often underrepresented.
Cutting mathematics out of the curriculum won't really help. The curriculum is sound, it's just that mathematics and regular software engineering courses are often taught as if they are something different. This is partly because of historical problems in the way the curriculum is built up, but also because computer science is still evolving, and pretty rapidly at that. Engineering degrees seem to have this all down a lot better than comp sci which is too bad, but maybe a sign of the things to come.
We're at a point here where major theoretical advances in comp sci (esp. in the formal and mathematical fields) are still possible. It's deplorable that so many schools seem to be restructuring their courses to look more like software engineering, which is more like applied computer science in its own right, instead of focusing on why mathematics are thought of as to be so important and what then is going wrong with the way students are taught those mathematical subjects.
Then you probably don't live in western europe either. There's plenty of trade school-like IT educations that I know of around here and in several other countries that I've heard of (including the UK and France).
Actually the GP has the better understanding on this one. You may want to consider that you were not comparing C and x86 asm per se, you were really comparing the libraries the respective languages come with. Using "library" loosely wrt the DOS asm interface. C is often considered a medium level language since it generally maps onto an architecture much more directly than other high level languages. Hence the comparison to asm.
I think C adds a bit more than a library. I'm not really an expert in assembly but the addition of for example logical statements and loop structures in a language really do make a difference. And that is not library stuff. A higher level language is usually considered a higher level language partly because its library. For instance python has dictionaries (maps) as a language-level feature, which definitely places it a bit above C.
The most important factor should be the level of abstraction the languages pose. Now C is a tight fit for systems programming, as was assembly one day. But try implementing something like quicksort in an assembly library as opposed to a C one. C allows you to abstract that away quite easily (void quicksort(equ_fun_pointer, list_or_array_struct_or_ptr)) while you'd be shuffling around bits for ages to just be able to call this function in assembly.
Anyway, I guess I missed the point just as much as the GP there.
Some people have answered you quite well, I just want to add that joking about it doesn't mean these people don't respect the man. Some people just can't appreciate morbid humor, but if you go around being all heavy handed and tabooish around things like death (or possible death) you're gonna end up living a very sad life. In the course of your life you will see many people die, I happen to think a bit of humor to deal with that isn't a bad thing at all.
PC is short for personal computer. Sure the nuance would be lost on most people if you were to go "Oh hi I'm a " but saying a mac isn't a PC is like saying a toyota hybrid isn't a car. What bothers me most about these ads though is that they seem to perpetuate the myth that there is some holy unseverable connection between the OS and its hardware. I realise from Apple's standpoint it's good advertising (the mac as an "appliance") but macs run windows, and "pc's" run other operating systems too.
Someone must have updated that page since you posted it because it seems to explain the starcraft connection quite acceptably (kekeke is the romanized form of hahaha in korean, starcraft did not support korean characters in the first few versions).
Regardless, I just wanted to say World of Warcraft users seem to use KEK and not kekeke. People tend to say lol more ingame than going for lololol.
And I find it unbelievable that so many people would actually defend Apple in this one. All these fanboys frothing foam at the mouth, geez. Think about this for a while: how big would Apple's online music store market share be if they did not keep their DRM inaccessible to outsiders? It might be 90% (or whatever the number is) but they'd sure have to put up with some competition.
This entire thread is funny, but in a really sad way.
That's nice and all, but I can't find any trace of these on the belgian site. I assume this is USA only. And the rest of the world doesn't want to run linux on their computers or what?
It won't be, simply because the buzz is already building. Microsoft has a good marketing department and a lot of mainstream support. I'm already seeing windows vista mentioned in lots of newspapers and the like and almost always in a positive light. Sure, we who follow the tech reporting know it's not all its cracked up to be, but the rest just sees "ooh shiny" and "it's the next best thing".
No I don't think Vista will the Zune of operating systems, I think it will outsell all previous Microsoft operating systems. Actually I'm pretty damn sure about that one.
2. Airliners and jet fuel can cause millions of tons of concrete reinforced steel to turn to a fine powder because that's "just the way fire rolls."
Moonbat alert. Did you also buy one of the tens of different books written on the subject? If so you've just been duped, congrats. I think you're including the wrong party in your conspiracy here but hey that's just my cynical side talking. Take that, sarcasm!
Based on how many people slag it off, and documentaries I've seen on the subject the education system in Britain needs some major reform. There are schools where the problems are minor, such as your example but there are schools (and you find this in any western country nowadays) where the majority of the teaches simply do not want to work. Basically the students have gotten so far out of control as to be completely unmanageable.
This story shows exactly what's wrong with those schools. Instead of providing any form of structure for the children in their schools, the teachers let the problems get out of control, then turn around to blame the children, modern society, the parents, public transportation, the window makers, random people who they say should have picked up the rocks, the military-industrial complex,... Well, anything that isn't them.
What they need is a) more money, b) an end to position-for-life arrangements (which work demotivating, see GP's example) and c) to fix their own damn quality problems. I don't know how it works in the UK but in my own country how well you teach seems to have little bearing on your evaluation, it's mostly stacks upon stacks of paperwork teachers need to fill out. Aside from being (again) terribly demotivating this is a completely inane way of quality assessment, but it's popular nevertheless. Pencil pushers ftw.
If you look at it it is just one big horrible blurb of text. (no I'm not the AC) Twelve sentences per paragraph might be alright if your sentences are short, but not in this case. Paragraphs are about readability, not silly rules you learned in grade school. And as far as schooling goes, mine taught me to divide my thoughts into neat little packets and use paragraphs to distinguish between them. Using unwieldy long paragraphs makes you look like a sloppy thinker, not to mention that 90% of people probably didn't even read your post, as the grandparent post was pointing out.
Best practice would be to have a plaintext version of any html mail you send out so you can send them both as parts to the same mail. Any reasonable graphical mail client will show you the html version and text clients will default to the plaintext version. This makes your mail more accessible (in terms of screenreaders and unix fossils), gives you a wider audience and scores you brownie points with the geek crowd. No reason not to do it I'd say.
I'm not sure where you get your data but you deserve a few mods up for it since it's highly interesting (if it's all correct).
Anyway, all this makes me understand why they need a restart once every week, and I never really minded. As mentioned above, EU players have their own server network (which I gather the author of TFS doesn't realise) and thus downtime isn't much of an issue for us as it is in the US. (starts at like 3 AM I think)
However, almost every single time they've taken the server down for maintenance they have not been able to make their very own deadline, y'know the one they post on the website. It always ends up going "okay, we're extending our deadline 2 hours" and then 2 hours later "our deadline is extended indefinitely till we work something out". On a normal maintenance these are usually a few realms (in the same datacenter I guess), on a patch day it all goes down.
As mentioned by someone else in this thread, this really makes wednesday a lost day since the servers are practically unplayable up to the moment they go down again and they end up going up early on thursday. Since we're paying blizz a certain amount of money that nets them a huge income I'm sure, you'd expect that they at least get this process right. This is something they do every week (the restarts) or every month (the patches) and they haven't even been able to meet their own deadline, let alone do it in any reasonable timeframe.
I just don't understand how that is possible, surely they could work out the kinks in their restart process eventually? What's taking them so long? And no I don't feel bad whining about it. I pay blizz a lot of money for the privilege of whining about it.:-)
The second and third movie might have treaded more philosophical ground but they were quite frankly just plain bad movies. I could make excuses all day for the plot holes in it but some of it was so weak it's embarassing, e.g. the whole french man thing in the matrix reloaded. Or the burly brawl scene, which I cannot stand to watch because of the god-awful CG.
It's like the entire movie is about bigger, better, faster stunts and visual fx, but the movie as a whole suffers, mostly because of the 2 cent plot.
That's exactly what I was thinking. I remember playing Ages of Empires online via the Zone. This was about the only gaming community I knew at the time that actually worked and it worked quite well, which is pretty amazing for any online venture from Microsoft. I was pretty fond of it but it seems to have died out due to lack of interest from the part of Microsoft. There were also some other initiatives, like DirectPlay that got rolled in a couple of games as a way to make it easier to do multiplay programming. (and give users a common interface I guess) Never really caught on though.
It's nice that Microsoft is now revisiting this area though they dropped the ball way back when. I wonder how this would work for a cross platform game (I'd like to say linux/windows but more likely mac os x/windows). Will it be allowed to use the same box or will those vendors be forced to release two different boxes? Why do vendors make two boxes for the same game anyway, seems it would be better if you just chuck 2 cd's in there instead of one, it's not like they're that expensive to make, while the overhead on two different boxes is probably much higher.
Most of those features are already available in linux, albeit probably not completely standard in the distributions. Compiz for 3d features (including exposé like functionality), tomboy for writing notes, deskbar-applet + beagle for searching (though ubuntu is apparently going to use something else, forgot the name), etc.
I'm not sure who came up first with what. For instance, I remember KDE having a note-taking application way back when, but it didn't allow you to link notes. In any case, I am apparently still one of the few people who think the nautilus spatial browser is a very good and clean design. If you go to the non-spatial version it also looks very similar to the new ms browser. (albeit a bit more bland, which I actually like)
Personally I don't mind everybody copying from everybody. I think it clearly shows how innovation happens in the computing industry as opposed to other engineering disciplines. On a philosophical note, you cannot really "steal" an idea. If the other person gets to know the idea of the first person both of them have it, it is not lost to either of them. People who use this kind of language are usually the same people who support software patents, and entirely for the wrong reasons.
I'm following most people on here when it comes to the developers that licensed their software to MacHeist. I guess that was a bad business call on their part. However, what I take issue with is this part of the blurb:
25% of the money brought in goes to charity.
You see more and more companies these days giving part of the profit per unit(!) to charity. So they come off looking like the good guy (image gain, which they normally would pay advertising firms for), whilst sales increase or are even driven by the charity hook. Personally I think this is morally questionable at best. If they really want to make good on charity they should donate money after the fact, i.e. every year on their bottom line. Instead, they not only get cheap advertising, but also higher profits because of this.
If it gets more money to the people that need it, it's all for the better I guess. It just doesn't seem right at all.
Which illustrates exactly what is wrong with the FSF's definition of 'derivative work'. You might use memcmp or isupper or whatever out of libc to write a program. That certainly doesn't mean your program/library is just a derivative work of libc. It utilises libc to accomplish a certain purpose. As long as it doesn't claim to be an alternative to libc (with sugar added) it's not a derivative work IMHO.
There's a whole lot of people bending over backwards to try and follow the FSF's position because that's probably the smartest thing to do right now, but it just doesn't seem logical to me. ABy the above reasoning, if you use a library by dynamic linking (i.e. #include a header and let ld worry about libraries) it's supposedly okay, but if you link statically (including the entire binary library) it's not. The difference is merely technical and shouldn't have a bearing on licensing but according to RMS it does.
Slashdot Mirror
If we were able to evolve our economical structures to a point where we'd have cured world hunger/disease/etc. and stabilized the population due to some tricky social structures balancing, we might no longer feel the need to colonize more worlds due to lack of population pressure. Personally I think it is more unreasonable to expect an intelligent race to attempt to colonize the entire galaxy. To what end? Once you are intelligent enough to invent FTL travel, do you really still feel the need to satisfy this old biological imperative?
This was hashed out pretty well in the thread about Sweden or something suing Apple but I'll rehash it anyway. The difference between competitors' DRM and Apple's is that Apple refuses to license it to outsiders. This allows them to couple their dominance in the music player market (which was arguably well deserved and certainly not through underhand tactics) with dominance in the online music retail market. This kind of coupling between products is partially or wholly illegal in many EU countries.
I agree with you that Apple has no choice but to use DRM, but that has nothing to do with why they will end up getting sued in the EU.
good point. Was gonna mod you insightful but hit redundant instead so just posting to undo it. Sorry about that. :)
I think you've got most of it down here. There is somewhat of a problem in computer science courses. For the longest time I didn't know how to apply a lot of the theoretical stuff I had been taught. Although I had had a lot of practical courses as well (the regular introduction to programming, programming, algorithms, datastructures, compilers, databases), some with a very good theoretical foundation, I never really got around to using a lot of the calculus, algebra and logic that was supposedly so important for my degree.
I think the problems most comp sci degrees are seeing are caused not by being too theoretical or relying on skills that are no longer valid, but by mistakes in teaching students how to evolve and apply the theoretic foundations they've been taught. It's not entirely applied mathematics (there's some engineering influences, and perhaps other things you could think of) but the applied part of those mathematics is often underrepresented.
Cutting mathematics out of the curriculum won't really help. The curriculum is sound, it's just that mathematics and regular software engineering courses are often taught as if they are something different. This is partly because of historical problems in the way the curriculum is built up, but also because computer science is still evolving, and pretty rapidly at that. Engineering degrees seem to have this all down a lot better than comp sci which is too bad, but maybe a sign of the things to come.
We're at a point here where major theoretical advances in comp sci (esp. in the formal and mathematical fields) are still possible. It's deplorable that so many schools seem to be restructuring their courses to look more like software engineering, which is more like applied computer science in its own right, instead of focusing on why mathematics are thought of as to be so important and what then is going wrong with the way students are taught those mathematical subjects.
Then you probably don't live in western europe either. There's plenty of trade school-like IT educations that I know of around here and in several other countries that I've heard of (including the UK and France).
I think C adds a bit more than a library. I'm not really an expert in assembly but the addition of for example logical statements and loop structures in a language really do make a difference. And that is not library stuff. A higher level language is usually considered a higher level language partly because its library. For instance python has dictionaries (maps) as a language-level feature, which definitely places it a bit above C.
The most important factor should be the level of abstraction the languages pose. Now C is a tight fit for systems programming, as was assembly one day. But try implementing something like quicksort in an assembly library as opposed to a C one. C allows you to abstract that away quite easily (void quicksort(equ_fun_pointer, list_or_array_struct_or_ptr)) while you'd be shuffling around bits for ages to just be able to call this function in assembly.
Anyway, I guess I missed the point just as much as the GP there.
Some people have answered you quite well, I just want to add that joking about it doesn't mean these people don't respect the man. Some people just can't appreciate morbid humor, but if you go around being all heavy handed and tabooish around things like death (or possible death) you're gonna end up living a very sad life. In the course of your life you will see many people die, I happen to think a bit of humor to deal with that isn't a bad thing at all.
PC is short for personal computer. Sure the nuance would be lost on most people if you were to go "Oh hi I'm a " but saying a mac isn't a PC is like saying a toyota hybrid isn't a car. What bothers me most about these ads though is that they seem to perpetuate the myth that there is some holy unseverable connection between the OS and its hardware. I realise from Apple's standpoint it's good advertising (the mac as an "appliance") but macs run windows, and "pc's" run other operating systems too.
Very weird. A form of 302 hijacking maybe?
Someone must have updated that page since you posted it because it seems to explain the starcraft connection quite acceptably (kekeke is the romanized form of hahaha in korean, starcraft did not support korean characters in the first few versions).
Regardless, I just wanted to say World of Warcraft users seem to use KEK and not kekeke. People tend to say lol more ingame than going for lololol.
And I find it unbelievable that so many people would actually defend Apple in this one. All these fanboys frothing foam at the mouth, geez. Think about this for a while: how big would Apple's online music store market share be if they did not keep their DRM inaccessible to outsiders? It might be 90% (or whatever the number is) but they'd sure have to put up with some competition.
This entire thread is funny, but in a really sad way.
That's nice and all, but I can't find any trace of these on the belgian site. I assume this is USA only. And the rest of the world doesn't want to run linux on their computers or what?
Think I'll put my money somewhere else thank you.
Isn't that usually attributed to George Santayana?
It won't be, simply because the buzz is already building. Microsoft has a good marketing department and a lot of mainstream support. I'm already seeing windows vista mentioned in lots of newspapers and the like and almost always in a positive light. Sure, we who follow the tech reporting know it's not all its cracked up to be, but the rest just sees "ooh shiny" and "it's the next best thing".
No I don't think Vista will the Zune of operating systems, I think it will outsell all previous Microsoft operating systems. Actually I'm pretty damn sure about that one.
Moonbat alert. Did you also buy one of the tens of different books written on the subject? If so you've just been duped, congrats. I think you're including the wrong party in your conspiracy here but hey that's just my cynical side talking. Take that, sarcasm!
Based on how many people slag it off, and documentaries I've seen on the subject the education system in Britain needs some major reform. There are schools where the problems are minor, such as your example but there are schools (and you find this in any western country nowadays) where the majority of the teaches simply do not want to work. Basically the students have gotten so far out of control as to be completely unmanageable.
... Well, anything that isn't them.
This story shows exactly what's wrong with those schools. Instead of providing any form of structure for the children in their schools, the teachers let the problems get out of control, then turn around to blame the children, modern society, the parents, public transportation, the window makers, random people who they say should have picked up the rocks, the military-industrial complex,
What they need is a) more money, b) an end to position-for-life arrangements (which work demotivating, see GP's example) and c) to fix their own damn quality problems. I don't know how it works in the UK but in my own country how well you teach seems to have little bearing on your evaluation, it's mostly stacks upon stacks of paperwork teachers need to fill out. Aside from being (again) terribly demotivating this is a completely inane way of quality assessment, but it's popular nevertheless. Pencil pushers ftw.
It doesn't count when the bulk of it is "OMGWTFBBQ ur mum's so phat!!!1eleven!one!!".
If you look at it it is just one big horrible blurb of text. (no I'm not the AC) Twelve sentences per paragraph might be alright if your sentences are short, but not in this case. Paragraphs are about readability, not silly rules you learned in grade school. And as far as schooling goes, mine taught me to divide my thoughts into neat little packets and use paragraphs to distinguish between them. Using unwieldy long paragraphs makes you look like a sloppy thinker, not to mention that 90% of people probably didn't even read your post, as the grandparent post was pointing out.
Best practice would be to have a plaintext version of any html mail you send out so you can send them both as parts to the same mail. Any reasonable graphical mail client will show you the html version and text clients will default to the plaintext version. This makes your mail more accessible (in terms of screenreaders and unix fossils), gives you a wider audience and scores you brownie points with the geek crowd. No reason not to do it I'd say.
Only bad developers lose out on this one.
I'm not sure where you get your data but you deserve a few mods up for it since it's highly interesting (if it's all correct).
:-)
Anyway, all this makes me understand why they need a restart once every week, and I never really minded. As mentioned above, EU players have their own server network (which I gather the author of TFS doesn't realise) and thus downtime isn't much of an issue for us as it is in the US. (starts at like 3 AM I think)
However, almost every single time they've taken the server down for maintenance they have not been able to make their very own deadline, y'know the one they post on the website. It always ends up going "okay, we're extending our deadline 2 hours" and then 2 hours later "our deadline is extended indefinitely till we work something out". On a normal maintenance these are usually a few realms (in the same datacenter I guess), on a patch day it all goes down.
As mentioned by someone else in this thread, this really makes wednesday a lost day since the servers are practically unplayable up to the moment they go down again and they end up going up early on thursday. Since we're paying blizz a certain amount of money that nets them a huge income I'm sure, you'd expect that they at least get this process right. This is something they do every week (the restarts) or every month (the patches) and they haven't even been able to meet their own deadline, let alone do it in any reasonable timeframe.
I just don't understand how that is possible, surely they could work out the kinks in their restart process eventually? What's taking them so long? And no I don't feel bad whining about it. I pay blizz a lot of money for the privilege of whining about it.
The second and third movie might have treaded more philosophical ground but they were quite frankly just plain bad movies. I could make excuses all day for the plot holes in it but some of it was so weak it's embarassing, e.g. the whole french man thing in the matrix reloaded. Or the burly brawl scene, which I cannot stand to watch because of the god-awful CG.
It's like the entire movie is about bigger, better, faster stunts and visual fx, but the movie as a whole suffers, mostly because of the 2 cent plot.
That's exactly what I was thinking. I remember playing Ages of Empires online via the Zone. This was about the only gaming community I knew at the time that actually worked and it worked quite well, which is pretty amazing for any online venture from Microsoft. I was pretty fond of it but it seems to have died out due to lack of interest from the part of Microsoft. There were also some other initiatives, like DirectPlay that got rolled in a couple of games as a way to make it easier to do multiplay programming. (and give users a common interface I guess) Never really caught on though.
It's nice that Microsoft is now revisiting this area though they dropped the ball way back when. I wonder how this would work for a cross platform game (I'd like to say linux/windows but more likely mac os x/windows). Will it be allowed to use the same box or will those vendors be forced to release two different boxes? Why do vendors make two boxes for the same game anyway, seems it would be better if you just chuck 2 cd's in there instead of one, it's not like they're that expensive to make, while the overhead on two different boxes is probably much higher.
Most of those features are already available in linux, albeit probably not completely standard in the distributions. Compiz for 3d features (including exposé like functionality), tomboy for writing notes, deskbar-applet + beagle for searching (though ubuntu is apparently going to use something else, forgot the name), etc.
I'm not sure who came up first with what. For instance, I remember KDE having a note-taking application way back when, but it didn't allow you to link notes. In any case, I am apparently still one of the few people who think the nautilus spatial browser is a very good and clean design. If you go to the non-spatial version it also looks very similar to the new ms browser. (albeit a bit more bland, which I actually like)
Personally I don't mind everybody copying from everybody. I think it clearly shows how innovation happens in the computing industry as opposed to other engineering disciplines. On a philosophical note, you cannot really "steal" an idea. If the other person gets to know the idea of the first person both of them have it, it is not lost to either of them. People who use this kind of language are usually the same people who support software patents, and entirely for the wrong reasons.
I'm following most people on here when it comes to the developers that licensed their software to MacHeist. I guess that was a bad business call on their part. However, what I take issue with is this part of the blurb:
25% of the money brought in goes to charity.You see more and more companies these days giving part of the profit per unit(!) to charity. So they come off looking like the good guy (image gain, which they normally would pay advertising firms for), whilst sales increase or are even driven by the charity hook. Personally I think this is morally questionable at best. If they really want to make good on charity they should donate money after the fact, i.e. every year on their bottom line. Instead, they not only get cheap advertising, but also higher profits because of this.
If it gets more money to the people that need it, it's all for the better I guess. It just doesn't seem right at all.
Which illustrates exactly what is wrong with the FSF's definition of 'derivative work'. You might use memcmp or isupper or whatever out of libc to write a program. That certainly doesn't mean your program/library is just a derivative work of libc. It utilises libc to accomplish a certain purpose. As long as it doesn't claim to be an alternative to libc (with sugar added) it's not a derivative work IMHO.
There's a whole lot of people bending over backwards to try and follow the FSF's position because that's probably the smartest thing to do right now, but it just doesn't seem logical to me. ABy the above reasoning, if you use a library by dynamic linking (i.e. #include a header and let ld worry about libraries) it's supposedly okay, but if you link statically (including the entire binary library) it's not. The difference is merely technical and shouldn't have a bearing on licensing but according to RMS it does.