It takes creativity to incentivize good things - like Nintendo does with so many creative games, encouraging families to play together.
It takes little thought and plenty of self-congratulation and bluster to punish things you dislike - like Microsoft's approach here. What a crappy "feature."
They all run as a separate instance. Prism is based on WebRunner which you can try right now. Each runs as its own process so one screwing up doesn't screw up the others.
That said, WebRunner itself is extremely glitchy - maybe it's just behind the current Firefox code, but running things like Gmail and Meebo in it are major annoyances - above all, the cursor is never visible, in Gmail you often can't write a new email (only Reply to people), in Meebo closing a window causes the cursor to freak out and start selecting everything... pretty annoying. Prism will hopefully keep up with Firefox instead of doing its own thing like WebRunner seems to.
Who would you license it to instead? How would they keep their antennas running?
Running a network costs money and if we want to do anything with them they've got to make some money. What's evil is sacrificing everything to expand profits. Making a reasonable profit for expanding consumer's options (no cell providers, no cellphone) is essential to the continued expansion of services - and earning an honest wage. Abusing control to make every last dime off the consumer is the problem.
This is old news. The 2 open access requirements are a result of Google demanding the auction enforce 4 open access rules on any winner. The FCC made a political move by meeting Google half-way.
That said, it's good to finally see an article about this that doesn't invoke crazy conspiracy theories and applauds the FCC for taking (some) steps to protect consumers.
Good point, they could sell what amounts to patent lawsuit insurance.
The knee-jerk reaction "IBM is evil!" to this is short-sighted... and amazingly short-sighted around here. After all they've spent dealing with SCO, I think they deserve some trust in applying this patent for good means. The only evil I see is the USPTO if they grant something this insane - and I bet they will.
It's sad it's come to this, but this is a smart way to fix a broken system: submit the "Breaking the system is illegal" rule to the broken organization.
I wish Slashdot had a feature to move this reply to the top of the list, so it's the first response.
This is really the issue. Let's break down the issue specific to Computer Science a little:
1) US Computer Science education is really bad. The drop-off in quality from the top 5 schools to the top 30 is SHARP.
2) Unlike countries who take education seriously, college is very expensive in the US for most students - even the crappy colleges are.
3) Most job requirements demand a degree, and experience. Some just admit that 2 years experience trumps a degree. The truth is that 5 years of experience trumps a degree for 99% of jobs. High school + 5 years experience = college is irrelevant on your resume.
4) Even the best colleges can't compete with what you can learn in a couple years working for a big software firm. You'll learn to work in a development team and with newer technology and methods that industry won't pass on to the educational realm for years. A great example of this is "Golden Code" which I've mentioned here in the past.
So why would someone smart enough to recognize all of this go to college? In 5 years would you like to have the magic number of years of experience to get any job you like, with money in your pocket, or would you like to have a degree with $150,000 in debt?
It's a decision that's only made difficult by status quo thinking. A lot of Americans assume colleges are generally doing a good job and that going to ANY college, even the 95% or so that are woefully behind with their curriculum, is better than just working. The only thing complicating one's decision on this is the pressure you inevitably receive from your high school teachers, parents, and peers.
Yes, and we can do better than 80. Intel may be showcasing this but AMD (now owns ATI) benefits most. The ATI 2900 has 320 universal shaders! RT specific shaders could be even simpler, allowing for even more. If an RT dedicated card from ATI were released next year I wouldn't be shocked to find 800 Ray Tracers on a single card. Now that's parallelism.
I keep wondering why Intel bothers touting graphics engines for justification for CPUs. The GPU does that. It will keep doing that. The CPU runs slow x86 code while the GPU runs literally anything the designers can imagine, and tons of super simple shaders. That separation is extremely important and no expensive new Intel chip will change it.
Ray Tracing certainly opens new doors for gaming too. Earlier posts seem to think Radiosity is not something engine developers spend much time on - not true! Radiosity like making a red chair in a white room color the walls a little red, or the corners of a singly lit room still get a little light, can enhance realism but also lend itself to moods/theming, and that has major opprotunities for great games. Casting an infinite number of shadows also has cool benefit: like seeing the level boss's massive shadow before he comes around the corner.
Above all Ray Tracing offers true geometry - no need for triangles. That means infinite level of detail and true rounded surfaces. No more close-enough dodecahedrons masquerading as spheres and now you can have faces that look real, zoomes out or in. That's a major boon to new games.
1) Use the sun on the acceleration half of the trip. Solar sails are not very heavy.
2) Take your time. Accelerate on the sun to just fast enough to get there in 2 weeks, or a month. Then you only need the nuclear reactor to decelerate.
3) Nuclear reactions generate more than heat. Is it possible to take the light given off by the reaction to partially provide light to the laser? If so that could be a dramatic increase in energy efficiency of the reactor.
Those numbers are very high, but you don't need them to get to Mars. Assuming 1 and 2 work, you might get there on 2 * 10^12 watts, or 2,000,000 megawatts. Or really, you might get there for free and LIVE because of 2million megawatts firing to slow you down.
If 3 is true then you're that much closer to delivering all that energy, but it's still an amazing amount of electricity. Can a nuclear core deliver that in a few days' time?
This is a major blunder by sony. Before this the PS3 seemed like a waste of money. Now, seeing how ready they are to screw their buyers, I'll never, ever consider it. The 5 or 10 people who actually bought a PS3 must feel had.
If they ever want to see this system have more success than the NeoGeo, which they're on target for, they need to release something that improves play in existing, strong PS2 titles - like instant save/load at any time in titles like Splinter Cell. A tessellation option to improve polygonal models in graphics. Anti-Aliasing.
Because right now, all they've got is the fact that PS2 was the best selling last-generation console. They need to get that market on board, or get out.
Sorry but regardless of the simplicity of bundling votes, letting Diebold prove to you electronic voting is fundamentally flawed is a bigger mistake than choosing either method.
Because the metric they are measured by is not technical competence. Business people choose business people to lead technical businesses. Then they make bonehead technical mistakes. It could be argued that a non-technical person in charge of a tech biz is itself a bad business decision, but conventional business thinking would disagree with you. The leaders of the most successful tech businesses would certainly agree, however.
Stocks have nothing to do with it. Stocks have more to do with investors reading tea leaves. Their sales of their software matter, and those are down down down.
I was actually thinking about this recently - the more time I spend on a site the less I view their ads. Two reasons:
1) The simple reason: I'm down in the content area where ads fear to tread (they all compete to be above the fold and that nonsense).
2) The geeky reason: The most annoying ads on the most annoying sites I visit are banned from my viewing by Firefox plugins. I've never been this annoyed by Google ads, but animated images sitting in the middle of the content (I'm looking at you, PCWorld, Slate.com, and CNet) get the BAN!
So time spent on the site is not the right metric. Something smarter is needed. What is that alternative? That's YOUR job, Nielsen.
You just worked way too hard to find SOME way to make providing free internet for everyone evil and solely driven by hunger for profit. That's really sad.
I've wondered for years why for example Wired Magazine, which is 2/3 ads, gets any advertising revenue whatsoever. I assumed the advertisers just never came around to reading a copy of the magazine.
Sounds like someone finally had a look at the way these companies operate, and moved to more effective, more accountable advertising.
Death knell to media companies: the days of putting 3 paragraphs of pasted content from an AMD press release on a page with 30 ads surrounding it are coming to a quick end. Get some real content.
That's completely untrue. Microsoft's public image used to be held back primarily by its "evil" appearance. That hasn't gone away but it's certainly faded because the rise of security flaws has been hammered in the press. Nothing has been more associated with Microsoft in the past 3 years than the words "security flaw." There is no one thing worse for Microsoft's public image - and so, their success - than these flaws.
So yes, while your computer getting virus does nothing to their bottom line, the viruses that make the press really hurt their ability to retain customers. The worse their image the more they open the door for Apple - and it's absolutely no surprise Apple has been more on the rise now than the past decade. It also opens the door for Linux, although the problem of providers is a nagging issue there - but that has to a lesser degree also been on the rise in a more significant way than it had prior to 3 years ago.
So yes, these flaws are a MAJOR impact to Microsoft's bottom line. I would say for the OS division - their most important division - this is THE single most important factor.
So, in light of that, I think paying for flaws is actually a very good idea. It is true that white hats have a sort of hard market to get into. Black hats have money waving in their faces.
Google already does something like this. For example, it was recently reported in the news that a 19 year old found a major flaw in Writely/Google Documents, and sent it to Google. Google hired him.
What you're asking for is often called Golden Code or Golden Pages and usually exists within large software engineering companies. The problem with gaining access to such things is that they usually are considered very important to the organization who owns them, so they are not made public - they're more or less considered trade secrets, a guide to that particular company's proprietarily developed best practices.
The other problem with easy access to Golden Code is that it must be constantly maintained to remain... "golden." So even if someone were to post a great example online, they're probably not getting paid to do so, so it's probably going to lose its luster in a couple years. Companies who maintain Golden Code usually assign a particular product to be coded in a "golden" way and continuously maintained in that perfect state as an example to all. This requires a lot of money.
So the point is, if you want access to Golden Code, get hired at a big software company. There are a fair number of them out there if you look outside the most obvious markets. Enjoy.
Comp Sci, but only if it's from one of the very best CS curriculums in the world. Top 10 in the US, 30 in the world. Otherwise you're better off just picking up your career now and rolling with the experience, because most CS courses at most colleges, private included, are so far behind and out of touch with what's actually useful today, let alone by the time you graduate, that you won't be learning anything of relevance you couldn't have learned by cruising the web for interesting CS-related topics. In fact, cruising the web would probably teach you MORE. Googling Red Black Trees and Erlang will likely get you more prepared for a good job than attending something below the top 10 - piece of paper aside.
Personally if I could go back and do college again I'd get a Business degree. When it came time to do freelance, knowing business already so I could just code and invent and be happy would have made a world of difference.
I actually drink very little Coke. On the occasion I do, it better be American, with that corn syrup I'm used to, because the stuff based on sugar just tastes gross.
Worse, there are many products now in the US like Agave and Dew that propose to solve the corn syrup problem with their sugar-based sodas: And they suck. Even sweeteners aside they're disgusting beverages. Even Europeans, used to the sugar, find them gross.
If someone releases a sugar-based root beer that doesn't taste like elephant crap, I'll consider sugar-based sodas, but for the time being I'm thoroughly tired of people telling me I need to drink crap "OR ELSE!!"
I'm happy to have a doctor have a thorough go at my liver, but I've had friends have THEIR livers inspected for unrelated reasons who drink a lot more soda than I, to find they're quite healthy. I'm not saying some of this science is bunk, but I am saying the alarmist "FRUCTOSE IS KILLING US" needs to go.
Well you must begin with a set of assumptions before you begin doing these calculations, which is why I provide for the possibility of life being out there but not for it being anything like us. Given we exist, which I agree was very improbable, but given that we do, finding "us but a little different" without that other life form not having descended from us, or us from them, is woefully unlikely.
Exactly, I'm tired of all the rants about High Fructose Corn Syrup. I eat and drink a lot of fructose all day every day. I'm not fat - quite in shape really - and it's all through a miraculous item called exercise. I do this strange activity just once a week and yet somehow soldier on in what these articles depict as a deluded American hellscape where people grow corn and get it all sugary for my delight... so they can secretly kill me. Apparently I alone boldly stand in defiance of their evil plans, delighting in all of their sweet, fructosey products yet lacking a gut all the while.
Seriously, I'm tired of people telling me I can't have products with High Fructose Corn Syrup in it. Have you tried European Coke? I have. It sucks. Give me the one I grew up with and stop pretending people can't just get off their duff and exercise once in a while.
Why does this post say no possibility of life just because the planet is close to the sun? Although there's at least some credit to the idea that life can't exist without water (because we've never seen any without it), there's no credit to the idea that it can't exist in extreme temperature/lighting situations. We have them on our planet! Google "extremophiles." If the comment was made to instead mean "No chance of humans," well, duh... I hope that's not your expectation. If it was meant to mean "No chance of us living there," that again is false. Orbital and magnetic field conditions may prevent it from being habitable but its proximity to the sun should not.
I generally agree although if you want a gamer PC to run quiet you've really got to break this system down into 2 boxes:
1) A "smarts" box with all the solid state parts in it: mobo, cpu, ram, and graphics card. These parts all have higher temperature tolerances (~85C) and put out a lot of heat, especially the graphics card. It's not hard to arrange them in a wind tunnel fashion that allows for the most absurdly large PCI16 cards with the entire front of the box being an intake for single, large, high volume low rpm fan. Lots of air flow not much noise. Installing a fanless high-end graphics card would work very well here for a quiet, fast machine.
2) A storage box, containing the items with moving parts - Dvd drive and hard drives, all connected via eSata. These put out much less heat than a GPU but also can't tolerate much heat - ~55C is the breaking point here. Same windtunnel design except for the Dvd drive handles this nicely - you avoid a major point of contention that the current Shuttle struggles with: keeping that GPU from frying your hard drives. I just don't get why current designs put hard drives over the GPU - heat rises! It's basic science!
That windtunnel design offers great airflow, and simple airflow - which is important because it's hard for system builders to screw it up. Some cases with good airflow exist but the wrong arrangement of parts will kill it - making it simple makes it hard to miss.
It also provides for 2 segments of gamers: the kind with a single big hard drive, and the kind who uses many hard drives, either to break out page, swap, programs and media onto their own drives (that's me), or to run RAID. There could be a super slim storage box with room for an HD and a Dvd drive, for the single HD user wanting to save a little more space; and there could be a big storage box for up to 5 HDs and a Dvd drive.
Anyone who's assembled one of these Shuttles knows a dedicated, simple box for hard drives would simplify PC construction dramatically. Getting those heavy hard drives into that cramped box with fragile things like graphics cards and RAM already sitting in there as hazards is... well... hazardous.
And it would open up some interesting portability options. I could take my Storage box and bring it to a friend's as a super simple way to bring music and movies over - unplug and walk. I could use the Smarts box as a mobile Thin Client. The Smarts box also might let you help a friend diagnose a PC issue: you could plug it into their Storage to quickly tell if they've got a hardware issue (it works!) or software (it's dead). And the larger Storage box could be designed in a way that makes swapping drives simple.
A man about to die swears under penalty of law that he saw aliens. He then dies before any such legal penalty could possibly take effect. In other words, the affidavit adds absolutely no authority to these claims. But let's explore the highly unlikely possibility he's telling the truth.
If what this guy is saying is true - the events and observations he lists - then his conclusion that these were aliens from outer space can almost certainly not be true.
His claims are pretty consistent with the standard alien conspiracy theory:
1) Egg-shaped machine flying featuring no external features we currently associate with flying vehicles 2) Said machine was either taken down by our own fighters or malfunctioned and crashed 3) Machine was built of incredibly strong light metal 4) Creatures that are basically humans with certain features pronounced are found dead
IF all of this really happened, then it is incredibly, highly, amazingly statistically unlikely these dead creatures were aliens.
1) If the craft was shot down, why in the world would a craft so advanced that it flies 3x the speed of our best planes, in our atmosphere without any clear method of flight and with super-strong metal not survive attacks by such old US planes? Such a ship would either survive or at the very least escape.
2) Why in the world would the aliens look humanoid? It's arguably unlikely they'd even be carbon-based, they may not even be primarily solid (they could be cells of gases for example). It's nearly impossible they'd be in any way similar in size or shape to us.
The most damning part of #2 is the "like us" problem - it's essentially the same basic reason to question any God hypothesis - because nearly all God descriptions say God is essentially humanoid, which is very self-centered to assume that something so completely foreign and powerful should look anything like us. Both God and these aliens are as statistically likely to look like The Flying Spaghetti Monster as they are us, but more importantly they are MUCH more likely to look as strange as a floating cobble of spaghetti than they are to look familiar to us.
Since statistically this conclusion is so unlikely to be true we need to consider the observations and find an alternate explanation.
Statistically speaking, if we ever did find alien life it would be at a technological state nowhere near our own - so either way, way behind us (we found bacteria!) or way, way ahead of us. They got here so they're not that way behind us kind - so they must be leaps ahead of us. Not hundreds or thousands of years of technology but millions or billions of years ahead of us. Not the kind we shoot down with some crappy planes.
But what does suit this set of observations is a very different conclusion: That the ships observed were ourselves, perhaps 1000 years in the future, experimenting with time travel. They appear, the vessels fail or, not being designed for war (and not having interstellar capability) are shot down, and the dead people inside are what we have evolved to look like.
Whether time travel is actually possible is up for debate, and these observations are obviously dubious, but IF you are to accept this dying man's final words, then you cannot possibly conclude he saw aliens from outer space. He more likely saw our future selves.
Your statement assumes the user wants their visits rearranged in this manner; what if you really need to visit places in the order you specified them?
If you want to organize them for minimal travel you just drag and drop your list of destinations on the left side, reordering them as it suits you. I was able to organize a 20-location My Maps in this fashion to see 20 apartments in 8 hours when looking for a new place (tied into housingmaps.com) - it made a huge difference in the number of places I was able to evaluate before making a decision.
Slashdot Mirror
It takes creativity to incentivize good things - like Nintendo does with so many creative games, encouraging families to play together.
It takes little thought and plenty of self-congratulation and bluster to punish things you dislike - like Microsoft's approach here. What a crappy "feature."
They all run as a separate instance. Prism is based on WebRunner which you can try right now. Each runs as its own process so one screwing up doesn't screw up the others.
That said, WebRunner itself is extremely glitchy - maybe it's just behind the current Firefox code, but running things like Gmail and Meebo in it are major annoyances - above all, the cursor is never visible, in Gmail you often can't write a new email (only Reply to people), in Meebo closing a window causes the cursor to freak out and start selecting everything... pretty annoying. Prism will hopefully keep up with Firefox instead of doing its own thing like WebRunner seems to.
Who would you license it to instead? How would they keep their antennas running?
Running a network costs money and if we want to do anything with them they've got to make some money. What's evil is sacrificing everything to expand profits. Making a reasonable profit for expanding consumer's options (no cell providers, no cellphone) is essential to the continued expansion of services - and earning an honest wage. Abusing control to make every last dime off the consumer is the problem.
This is old news. The 2 open access requirements are a result of Google demanding the auction enforce 4 open access rules on any winner. The FCC made a political move by meeting Google half-way.
That said, it's good to finally see an article about this that doesn't invoke crazy conspiracy theories and applauds the FCC for taking (some) steps to protect consumers.
Good point, they could sell what amounts to patent lawsuit insurance.
The knee-jerk reaction "IBM is evil!" to this is short-sighted... and amazingly short-sighted around here. After all they've spent dealing with SCO, I think they deserve some trust in applying this patent for good means. The only evil I see is the USPTO if they grant something this insane - and I bet they will.
It's sad it's come to this, but this is a smart way to fix a broken system: submit the "Breaking the system is illegal" rule to the broken organization.
I wish Slashdot had a feature to move this reply to the top of the list, so it's the first response.
This is really the issue. Let's break down the issue specific to Computer Science a little:
1) US Computer Science education is really bad. The drop-off in quality from the top 5 schools to the top 30 is SHARP.
2) Unlike countries who take education seriously, college is very expensive in the US for most students - even the crappy colleges are.
3) Most job requirements demand a degree, and experience. Some just admit that 2 years experience trumps a degree. The truth is that 5 years of experience trumps a degree for 99% of jobs. High school + 5 years experience = college is irrelevant on your resume.
4) Even the best colleges can't compete with what you can learn in a couple years working for a big software firm. You'll learn to work in a development team and with newer technology and methods that industry won't pass on to the educational realm for years. A great example of this is "Golden Code" which I've mentioned here in the past.
So why would someone smart enough to recognize all of this go to college? In 5 years would you like to have the magic number of years of experience to get any job you like, with money in your pocket, or would you like to have a degree with $150,000 in debt?
It's a decision that's only made difficult by status quo thinking. A lot of Americans assume colleges are generally doing a good job and that going to ANY college, even the 95% or so that are woefully behind with their curriculum, is better than just working. The only thing complicating one's decision on this is the pressure you inevitably receive from your high school teachers, parents, and peers.
Yes, and we can do better than 80. Intel may be showcasing this but AMD (now owns ATI) benefits most. The ATI 2900 has 320 universal shaders! RT specific shaders could be even simpler, allowing for even more. If an RT dedicated card from ATI were released next year I wouldn't be shocked to find 800 Ray Tracers on a single card. Now that's parallelism.
I keep wondering why Intel bothers touting graphics engines for justification for CPUs. The GPU does that. It will keep doing that. The CPU runs slow x86 code while the GPU runs literally anything the designers can imagine, and tons of super simple shaders. That separation is extremely important and no expensive new Intel chip will change it.
Ray Tracing certainly opens new doors for gaming too. Earlier posts seem to think Radiosity is not something engine developers spend much time on - not true! Radiosity like making a red chair in a white room color the walls a little red, or the corners of a singly lit room still get a little light, can enhance realism but also lend itself to moods/theming, and that has major opprotunities for great games. Casting an infinite number of shadows also has cool benefit: like seeing the level boss's massive shadow before he comes around the corner.
Above all Ray Tracing offers true geometry - no need for triangles. That means infinite level of detail and true rounded surfaces. No more close-enough dodecahedrons masquerading as spheres and now you can have faces that look real, zoomes out or in. That's a major boon to new games.
1) Use the sun on the acceleration half of the trip. Solar sails are not very heavy.
2) Take your time. Accelerate on the sun to just fast enough to get there in 2 weeks, or a month. Then you only need the nuclear reactor to decelerate.
3) Nuclear reactions generate more than heat. Is it possible to take the light given off by the reaction to partially provide light to the laser? If so that could be a dramatic increase in energy efficiency of the reactor.
Those numbers are very high, but you don't need them to get to Mars. Assuming 1 and 2 work, you might get there on 2 * 10^12 watts, or 2,000,000 megawatts. Or really, you might get there for free and LIVE because of 2million megawatts firing to slow you down.
If 3 is true then you're that much closer to delivering all that energy, but it's still an amazing amount of electricity. Can a nuclear core deliver that in a few days' time?
This is a major blunder by sony. Before this the PS3 seemed like a waste of money. Now, seeing how ready they are to screw their buyers, I'll never, ever consider it. The 5 or 10 people who actually bought a PS3 must feel had.
If they ever want to see this system have more success than the NeoGeo, which they're on target for, they need to release something that improves play in existing, strong PS2 titles - like instant save/load at any time in titles like Splinter Cell. A tessellation option to improve polygonal models in graphics. Anti-Aliasing.
Because right now, all they've got is the fact that PS2 was the best selling last-generation console. They need to get that market on board, or get out.
Sorry but regardless of the simplicity of bundling votes, letting Diebold prove to you electronic voting is fundamentally flawed is a bigger mistake than choosing either method.
Because the metric they are measured by is not technical competence. Business people choose business people to lead technical businesses. Then they make bonehead technical mistakes. It could be argued that a non-technical person in charge of a tech biz is itself a bad business decision, but conventional business thinking would disagree with you. The leaders of the most successful tech businesses would certainly agree, however.
Stocks have nothing to do with it. Stocks have more to do with investors reading tea leaves. Their sales of their software matter, and those are down down down.
I was actually thinking about this recently - the more time I spend on a site the less I view their ads. Two reasons:
1) The simple reason: I'm down in the content area where ads fear to tread (they all compete to be above the fold and that nonsense).
2) The geeky reason: The most annoying ads on the most annoying sites I visit are banned from my viewing by Firefox plugins. I've never been this annoyed by Google ads, but animated images sitting in the middle of the content (I'm looking at you, PCWorld, Slate.com, and CNet) get the BAN!
So time spent on the site is not the right metric. Something smarter is needed. What is that alternative? That's YOUR job, Nielsen.
You just worked way too hard to find SOME way to make providing free internet for everyone evil and solely driven by hunger for profit. That's really sad.
I've wondered for years why for example Wired Magazine, which is 2/3 ads, gets any advertising revenue whatsoever. I assumed the advertisers just never came around to reading a copy of the magazine.
Sounds like someone finally had a look at the way these companies operate, and moved to more effective, more accountable advertising.
Death knell to media companies: the days of putting 3 paragraphs of pasted content from an AMD press release on a page with 30 ads surrounding it are coming to a quick end. Get some real content.
That's completely untrue. Microsoft's public image used to be held back primarily by its "evil" appearance. That hasn't gone away but it's certainly faded because the rise of security flaws has been hammered in the press. Nothing has been more associated with Microsoft in the past 3 years than the words "security flaw." There is no one thing worse for Microsoft's public image - and so, their success - than these flaws.
So yes, while your computer getting virus does nothing to their bottom line, the viruses that make the press really hurt their ability to retain customers. The worse their image the more they open the door for Apple - and it's absolutely no surprise Apple has been more on the rise now than the past decade. It also opens the door for Linux, although the problem of providers is a nagging issue there - but that has to a lesser degree also been on the rise in a more significant way than it had prior to 3 years ago.
So yes, these flaws are a MAJOR impact to Microsoft's bottom line. I would say for the OS division - their most important division - this is THE single most important factor.
So, in light of that, I think paying for flaws is actually a very good idea. It is true that white hats have a sort of hard market to get into. Black hats have money waving in their faces.
Google already does something like this. For example, it was recently reported in the news that a 19 year old found a major flaw in Writely/Google Documents, and sent it to Google. Google hired him.
What you're asking for is often called Golden Code or Golden Pages and usually exists within large software engineering companies. The problem with gaining access to such things is that they usually are considered very important to the organization who owns them, so they are not made public - they're more or less considered trade secrets, a guide to that particular company's proprietarily developed best practices.
The other problem with easy access to Golden Code is that it must be constantly maintained to remain... "golden." So even if someone were to post a great example online, they're probably not getting paid to do so, so it's probably going to lose its luster in a couple years. Companies who maintain Golden Code usually assign a particular product to be coded in a "golden" way and continuously maintained in that perfect state as an example to all. This requires a lot of money.
So the point is, if you want access to Golden Code, get hired at a big software company. There are a fair number of them out there if you look outside the most obvious markets. Enjoy.
Comp Sci, but only if it's from one of the very best CS curriculums in the world. Top 10 in the US, 30 in the world. Otherwise you're better off just picking up your career now and rolling with the experience, because most CS courses at most colleges, private included, are so far behind and out of touch with what's actually useful today, let alone by the time you graduate, that you won't be learning anything of relevance you couldn't have learned by cruising the web for interesting CS-related topics. In fact, cruising the web would probably teach you MORE. Googling Red Black Trees and Erlang will likely get you more prepared for a good job than attending something below the top 10 - piece of paper aside.
Personally if I could go back and do college again I'd get a Business degree. When it came time to do freelance, knowing business already so I could just code and invent and be happy would have made a world of difference.
I actually drink very little Coke. On the occasion I do, it better be American, with that corn syrup I'm used to, because the stuff based on sugar just tastes gross.
Worse, there are many products now in the US like Agave and Dew that propose to solve the corn syrup problem with their sugar-based sodas: And they suck. Even sweeteners aside they're disgusting beverages. Even Europeans, used to the sugar, find them gross.
If someone releases a sugar-based root beer that doesn't taste like elephant crap, I'll consider sugar-based sodas, but for the time being I'm thoroughly tired of people telling me I need to drink crap "OR ELSE!!"
I'm happy to have a doctor have a thorough go at my liver, but I've had friends have THEIR livers inspected for unrelated reasons who drink a lot more soda than I, to find they're quite healthy. I'm not saying some of this science is bunk, but I am saying the alarmist "FRUCTOSE IS KILLING US" needs to go.
Well you must begin with a set of assumptions before you begin doing these calculations, which is why I provide for the possibility of life being out there but not for it being anything like us. Given we exist, which I agree was very improbable, but given that we do, finding "us but a little different" without that other life form not having descended from us, or us from them, is woefully unlikely.
Exactly, I'm tired of all the rants about High Fructose Corn Syrup. I eat and drink a lot of fructose all day every day. I'm not fat - quite in shape really - and it's all through a miraculous item called exercise. I do this strange activity just once a week and yet somehow soldier on in what these articles depict as a deluded American hellscape where people grow corn and get it all sugary for my delight... so they can secretly kill me. Apparently I alone boldly stand in defiance of their evil plans, delighting in all of their sweet, fructosey products yet lacking a gut all the while.
Seriously, I'm tired of people telling me I can't have products with High Fructose Corn Syrup in it. Have you tried European Coke? I have. It sucks. Give me the one I grew up with and stop pretending people can't just get off their duff and exercise once in a while.
Why does this post say no possibility of life just because the planet is close to the sun? Although there's at least some credit to the idea that life can't exist without water (because we've never seen any without it), there's no credit to the idea that it can't exist in extreme temperature/lighting situations. We have them on our planet! Google "extremophiles." If the comment was made to instead mean "No chance of humans," well, duh... I hope that's not your expectation. If it was meant to mean "No chance of us living there," that again is false. Orbital and magnetic field conditions may prevent it from being habitable but its proximity to the sun should not.
I generally agree although if you want a gamer PC to run quiet you've really got to break this system down into 2 boxes:
1) A "smarts" box with all the solid state parts in it: mobo, cpu, ram, and graphics card. These parts all have higher temperature tolerances (~85C) and put out a lot of heat, especially the graphics card. It's not hard to arrange them in a wind tunnel fashion that allows for the most absurdly large PCI16 cards with the entire front of the box being an intake for single, large, high volume low rpm fan. Lots of air flow not much noise. Installing a fanless high-end graphics card would work very well here for a quiet, fast machine.
2) A storage box, containing the items with moving parts - Dvd drive and hard drives, all connected via eSata. These put out much less heat than a GPU but also can't tolerate much heat - ~55C is the breaking point here. Same windtunnel design except for the Dvd drive handles this nicely - you avoid a major point of contention that the current Shuttle struggles with: keeping that GPU from frying your hard drives. I just don't get why current designs put hard drives over the GPU - heat rises! It's basic science!
That windtunnel design offers great airflow, and simple airflow - which is important because it's hard for system builders to screw it up. Some cases with good airflow exist but the wrong arrangement of parts will kill it - making it simple makes it hard to miss.
It also provides for 2 segments of gamers: the kind with a single big hard drive, and the kind who uses many hard drives, either to break out page, swap, programs and media onto their own drives (that's me), or to run RAID. There could be a super slim storage box with room for an HD and a Dvd drive, for the single HD user wanting to save a little more space; and there could be a big storage box for up to 5 HDs and a Dvd drive.
Anyone who's assembled one of these Shuttles knows a dedicated, simple box for hard drives would simplify PC construction dramatically. Getting those heavy hard drives into that cramped box with fragile things like graphics cards and RAM already sitting in there as hazards is... well... hazardous.
And it would open up some interesting portability options. I could take my Storage box and bring it to a friend's as a super simple way to bring music and movies over - unplug and walk. I could use the Smarts box as a mobile Thin Client. The Smarts box also might let you help a friend diagnose a PC issue: you could plug it into their Storage to quickly tell if they've got a hardware issue (it works!) or software (it's dead). And the larger Storage box could be designed in a way that makes swapping drives simple.
Give me that system!
A man about to die swears under penalty of law that he saw aliens. He then dies before any such legal penalty could possibly take effect. In other words, the affidavit adds absolutely no authority to these claims. But let's explore the highly unlikely possibility he's telling the truth.
If what this guy is saying is true - the events and observations he lists - then his conclusion that these were aliens from outer space can almost certainly not be true.
His claims are pretty consistent with the standard alien conspiracy theory:
1) Egg-shaped machine flying featuring no external features we currently associate with flying vehicles
2) Said machine was either taken down by our own fighters or malfunctioned and crashed
3) Machine was built of incredibly strong light metal
4) Creatures that are basically humans with certain features pronounced are found dead
IF all of this really happened, then it is incredibly, highly, amazingly statistically unlikely these dead creatures were aliens.
1) If the craft was shot down, why in the world would a craft so advanced that it flies 3x the speed of our best planes, in our atmosphere without any clear method of flight and with super-strong metal not survive attacks by such old US planes? Such a ship would either survive or at the very least escape.
2) Why in the world would the aliens look humanoid? It's arguably unlikely they'd even be carbon-based, they may not even be primarily solid (they could be cells of gases for example). It's nearly impossible they'd be in any way similar in size or shape to us.
The most damning part of #2 is the "like us" problem - it's essentially the same basic reason to question any God hypothesis - because nearly all God descriptions say God is essentially humanoid, which is very self-centered to assume that something so completely foreign and powerful should look anything like us. Both God and these aliens are as statistically likely to look like The Flying Spaghetti Monster as they are us, but more importantly they are MUCH more likely to look as strange as a floating cobble of spaghetti than they are to look familiar to us.
Since statistically this conclusion is so unlikely to be true we need to consider the observations and find an alternate explanation.
Statistically speaking, if we ever did find alien life it would be at a technological state nowhere near our own - so either way, way behind us (we found bacteria!) or way, way ahead of us. They got here so they're not that way behind us kind - so they must be leaps ahead of us. Not hundreds or thousands of years of technology but millions or billions of years ahead of us. Not the kind we shoot down with some crappy planes.
But what does suit this set of observations is a very different conclusion: That the ships observed were ourselves, perhaps 1000 years in the future, experimenting with time travel. They appear, the vessels fail or, not being designed for war (and not having interstellar capability) are shot down, and the dead people inside are what we have evolved to look like.
Whether time travel is actually possible is up for debate, and these observations are obviously dubious, but IF you are to accept this dying man's final words, then you cannot possibly conclude he saw aliens from outer space. He more likely saw our future selves.
Your statement assumes the user wants their visits rearranged in this manner; what if you really need to visit places in the order you specified them?
If you want to organize them for minimal travel you just drag and drop your list of destinations on the left side, reordering them as it suits you. I was able to organize a 20-location My Maps in this fashion to see 20 apartments in 8 hours when looking for a new place (tied into housingmaps.com) - it made a huge difference in the number of places I was able to evaluate before making a decision.