This is exactly why these stores succeed. They are selling controlled products with controlled accessories in a completely specific environment. All the other comparisons are entirely unlike those, with stores that don't match (Best But), products which don't match (Windows plus whatever random software-of-the-day is interesting to people) and accessories from a bazillion companies which may or may not work perfectly, if at all. Apple is essentially selling its monopoly of control at the Apple store, so you can bet your ass it's gonna have a much better shot of coming together nicely.
Don't expect to EVER see this level of integration or experience at any store which isn't selling similarly integrated product lines.
Do I now have my fair-use rights back... Did you give them up? No? Then you still have them. As long as you are willing to fight for them, they remain your rights. As soon as you abdicate this decision to the government, they become privileges.
Searching for gas by price... how much disparity is there where you live? Around here, it's usually not more than a few cents a gallon within any reasonable driving distance (that is, the distance beyond which any savings you would realize are consumed by the extra gas spent.) And unless you are filling up by the hundreds of gallons, you won't save any measurable amount of cash by 'shopping around' for gas. So I am curious...
I assume by 'fear of death' you actually mean that most organisms try to persist. Not all organisms which try to persist have the capacity for fear. Or perhaps more correctly, our sense of 'fear' is really the way we perceive a more fundamental desire to persist.
Even here I feel language or our anthropic notions fails us. Perhaps it's better to say that those entites with self-replicating properties naturally tend to self-replicate. At our level with what we call consciousness, we perceive obstacles to the expression of these properties as "fear or death."
Eh, not so much. 30,000 busibodies often won't be able to recognize the wheat from the chaff because they lack training. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. You can get an infinite number of monkeys to eventually produce Shakesperes works, but only if they know how to type first.
What I found far more interesting was the tenor of the dialogue about whether or not proof should be on Wikipedia than the dialogue itself. (This just reflects my interest level, I have no opinion on the inclusion of proofs.) I was particularly dismayed by the comments by Michael Hardy and Tablemanners. I would hope that in the future they can learn to restrict their arguments to the facts at hand and not go after each other. It degrades the whole process when something like that occurs. As if any of the rest of the participants really cared if someone's feathers were getting all ruffled. *yawn*
Capitalism is what is currently enabling all of us to have this wonderful conversation, and in fact, enabled Stallman to have his soap box as he has it today. If Richard Stallman won, he certainly didn't do it at the expense of Capitalism.
There's an additional consideration which probably is interesting to Nokia - H.264 decoders for mobile devices are HIGHLY available. The same is likely not the case for Theora. These hardware devices don't have much computation power so a software video codec won't cut it for anything with decent resolution, nor is it power efficient to use the CPU for these tasks. Rather, a custom chip which can do the heavy lifting is the preferred/necessary solution. All the FOSS in the world doesn't get you a chip manufacturer who builds the silicon you need to actually have performant video streaming. Remember, when its mobile its MUCH more than just a software problem.
This assumes your teachers stop learning after they started teaching. Good teachers continue to learn, just like their students. The primary difference between teachers and graduates at college is that those who go on to work in the tech sector have to deal with a different problem space - writing software to deadlines and customer specifications for money - than do professors, who are more likely in a research project or two. This breeds different mindsets, but not more or less capable people.
I agree. From TFA:
According to his research, eating fatty foods doesn't lead to heart disease, cholesterol levels aren't something to worry about, and exercise doesn't help you lose weight.
This is stupid. If for no other reason, I think it would violate some thermodynamic laws to say exercise does not contribute to lowering your weight. For the same quantity of input energy (vis-a-vis food being digested) and a varying amount of output energy (exercise above and beyond the resting energy use of the body), you will have a net gain or loss of energy. We retain energy via various biochemical means, all of which involve putting it into cells and storing them somewhere. This results in more weight. If we utilize more energy than we take in, that energy has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is those same cells, which are consumed. Thus we lose weight.
The exact process may be more complicated, but I don't think the energy equations are.
You guys are an optometrists wet dream. Reading text for long periods on a 3" screen is dumb. Reading a book is is no way comparable to reading text messages. Just because you can deal with it at short sprints does not mean you'll be able to do it for long periods without serious eye problems.
These are two devices with decidedly different applications. They are not in the same market.
a) Prove it. b) You aren't the latest bogeyman yet. When you are, why should *I* care?
Ultimately, people swayed by the arguments you presented do not possess the critical thinking ability to understand the situation, let alone understand any counter arguments you present. Your best bet is to simply make them afraid of whatever you need to in order to move on with your life. If you can't elevate them to your level, then put them to use at the level of which they have shown themselves capable, low though it may be. There is no particular need for your life to be crap just because the people around you enjoy crappiness.
They don't have anybody by the balls. If they had us by the balls, they could stop producing/selling goods to us. They can't do that. Ergo, they don't have any more control than we let them have by mutual agreement. That's how it works with globalization. They play by the same rules, its just that for now we see value in the lower cost of goods from them.
Yes, China can become a superpower perhaps. If they are smart, they won't bother with a huge military buildup a-la the Cold War because that's a true waste of money, and there is nothing to gain from it. Like the US, they don't really want to rock the boat *too* much, because uncertainty is just as bad for them as it is for us - after all you can't really do a good job of controlling your economy if you can't reasonably predict what is going to happen in the next few years.
The only 'danger' there is is that China will truly have to be dealt with as an equal and respected as a technological force - eventually. That's not a bad thing, it can only help all of us to have another set of bright people building stuff.
I agree with you here. I do not approve of the fact that the major computer manufacturers have signed these agreements with MS. I'd much rather the OS win (or fail) on the merits than any sort of marketing shenanigans.
The only MS product that people in the media are looking at. People who actually give a damn about productivity don't look to the media to tell them this information, and they have more to think about than the latest operating system.
Ubuntu and Google are not threats to the core business of Microsoft right now. People like to think that because they want someone - anyone - to come along and be their white knight and rescue them from... from what exactly is not well determined because it depends on who you talk to.
You have to take the blinders off and drop your dogma by the wayside before you can look at the whole situation with anythink like rationality.
Do you actually believe what you write, or are you just trolling? You speak of Vista as if that were the only product we had. Most of us don't even work on Vista. There are 80,000 employees at Microsoft. We have a bazillion products to work on covering a huge variety of the software engineering space.
The people who are going to Google are going there presumably because Google is offering them something fun to work on or a new environment for them. I originally left Microsoft in 2000 to work at a startup for the same reason. I came back this year because - Slashdot imaginations notwithstanding - Microsoft is actually a great company to work for.
You guys talk about 'drinking the Koolaid' and how bad it is. Slashdot has its own Koolaid you know. How much of it are YOU drinking?
Er... depending on the compression level, I can put arbitrarily large source-resolution material on an arbitrarily small data medium.
What I am more interested in is how high the video quality really is. Ideally, it would be a lossless transfer. Anything less necessarily compromises video quality to varying degrees, whether it's color resolution, spatial resolution or what have you.
And for those who claim that the difference between DVD and HD is too small to be noticeable, you are terribly mistaken. Go look at the material on good equipment (e.g. a 1080p monitor or projector.) The difference is night and day.
Nothing replaces experience. If this is a form of Google apprenticeship, great. I'm all for apprenticeships. However, to compare these guys to senior managers with years of experience is absurd. Working long hours has no, repeat NO bearing on productivity. Learning how to use the hours you have wisely is FAR more important, especially to manager types who are going to be answering to schedules which are often impossible to achieve.
There is a difference of almost 2 orders of magnitude on the Scoville scale between the capsasin content of a habanero and pure capsaicin used in the article. It is probably unfair to compare ingested capsaicin with that applied directly to a wound, and even more so to use that from a pepper that is almost 100 times less hot than the pure form being used.
So they changed the column type of userId from INT32 to INT64. Who gives a fuck? It would be much less expensive for Slashdot to simply post SQL change logs than to have editors on the clock.
We need the ability to mod stories, so that the editors can more clearly see when they aren't doing their job.
Don't *even* suggest this. If you have gotten to this point in your thinking, move to China because that's where stuff like this is supposed to happen, not here.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod Parent UP
This is exactly why these stores succeed. They are selling controlled products with controlled accessories in a completely specific environment. All the other comparisons are entirely unlike those, with stores that don't match (Best But), products which don't match (Windows plus whatever random software-of-the-day is interesting to people) and accessories from a bazillion companies which may or may not work perfectly, if at all. Apple is essentially selling its monopoly of control at the Apple store, so you can bet your ass it's gonna have a much better shot of coming together nicely.
Don't expect to EVER see this level of integration or experience at any store which isn't selling similarly integrated product lines.
This is Slashdot. No one would bat an eye...
Searching for gas by price... how much disparity is there where you live? Around here, it's usually not more than a few cents a gallon within any reasonable driving distance (that is, the distance beyond which any savings you would realize are consumed by the extra gas spent.) And unless you are filling up by the hundreds of gallons, you won't save any measurable amount of cash by 'shopping around' for gas. So I am curious...
No, no, you don't understand...
Ok, actually you do.
Look on the bright side. If you really believe the government is stepping over their bounds, you can always exercise your 2nd Amendment rights.
I assume by 'fear of death' you actually mean that most organisms try to persist. Not all organisms which try to persist have the capacity for fear. Or perhaps more correctly, our sense of 'fear' is really the way we perceive a more fundamental desire to persist.
Even here I feel language or our anthropic notions fails us. Perhaps it's better to say that those entites with self-replicating properties naturally tend to self-replicate. At our level with what we call consciousness, we perceive obstacles to the expression of these properties as "fear or death."
Eh, not so much. 30,000 busibodies often won't be able to recognize the wheat from the chaff because they lack training. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. You can get an infinite number of monkeys to eventually produce Shakesperes works, but only if they know how to type first.
What I found far more interesting was the tenor of the dialogue about whether or not proof should be on Wikipedia than the dialogue itself. (This just reflects my interest level, I have no opinion on the inclusion of proofs.) I was particularly dismayed by the comments by Michael Hardy and Tablemanners. I would hope that in the future they can learn to restrict their arguments to the facts at hand and not go after each other. It degrades the whole process when something like that occurs. As if any of the rest of the participants really cared if someone's feathers were getting all ruffled. *yawn*
Capitalism is what is currently enabling all of us to have this wonderful conversation, and in fact, enabled Stallman to have his soap box as he has it today. If Richard Stallman won, he certainly didn't do it at the expense of Capitalism.
There's an additional consideration which probably is interesting to Nokia - H.264 decoders for mobile devices are HIGHLY available. The same is likely not the case for Theora. These hardware devices don't have much computation power so a software video codec won't cut it for anything with decent resolution, nor is it power efficient to use the CPU for these tasks. Rather, a custom chip which can do the heavy lifting is the preferred/necessary solution. All the FOSS in the world doesn't get you a chip manufacturer who builds the silicon you need to actually have performant video streaming. Remember, when its mobile its MUCH more than just a software problem.
Um... *cough*
The article was referring to Ogg Theora, not Ogg Vorbis. In fact, the whole article was plainly talking about VIDEO.
Sorry to pick on you, I just had to see if this thread was going to be reined in or not...
This assumes your teachers stop learning after they started teaching. Good teachers continue to learn, just like their students. The primary difference between teachers and graduates at college is that those who go on to work in the tech sector have to deal with a different problem space - writing software to deadlines and customer specifications for money - than do professors, who are more likely in a research project or two. This breeds different mindsets, but not more or less capable people.
This is stupid. If for no other reason, I think it would violate some thermodynamic laws to say exercise does not contribute to lowering your weight. For the same quantity of input energy (vis-a-vis food being digested) and a varying amount of output energy (exercise above and beyond the resting energy use of the body), you will have a net gain or loss of energy. We retain energy via various biochemical means, all of which involve putting it into cells and storing them somewhere. This results in more weight. If we utilize more energy than we take in, that energy has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is those same cells, which are consumed. Thus we lose weight.
The exact process may be more complicated, but I don't think the energy equations are.
You guys are an optometrists wet dream. Reading text for long periods on a 3" screen is dumb. Reading a book is is no way comparable to reading text messages. Just because you can deal with it at short sprints does not mean you'll be able to do it for long periods without serious eye problems.
These are two devices with decidedly different applications. They are not in the same market.
a) Prove it.
b) You aren't the latest bogeyman yet. When you are, why should *I* care?
Ultimately, people swayed by the arguments you presented do not possess the critical thinking ability to understand the situation, let alone understand any counter arguments you present. Your best bet is to simply make them afraid of whatever you need to in order to move on with your life. If you can't elevate them to your level, then put them to use at the level of which they have shown themselves capable, low though it may be. There is no particular need for your life to be crap just because the people around you enjoy crappiness.
They don't have anybody by the balls. If they had us by the balls, they could stop producing/selling goods to us. They can't do that. Ergo, they don't have any more control than we let them have by mutual agreement. That's how it works with globalization. They play by the same rules, its just that for now we see value in the lower cost of goods from them.
Yes, China can become a superpower perhaps. If they are smart, they won't bother with a huge military buildup a-la the Cold War because that's a true waste of money, and there is nothing to gain from it. Like the US, they don't really want to rock the boat *too* much, because uncertainty is just as bad for them as it is for us - after all you can't really do a good job of controlling your economy if you can't reasonably predict what is going to happen in the next few years.
The only 'danger' there is is that China will truly have to be dealt with as an equal and respected as a technological force - eventually. That's not a bad thing, it can only help all of us to have another set of bright people building stuff.
I agree with you here. I do not approve of the fact that the major computer manufacturers have signed these agreements with MS. I'd much rather the OS win (or fail) on the merits than any sort of marketing shenanigans.
The only MS product that people in the media are looking at. People who actually give a damn about productivity don't look to the media to tell them this information, and they have more to think about than the latest operating system.
Ubuntu and Google are not threats to the core business of Microsoft right now. People like to think that because they want someone - anyone - to come along and be their white knight and rescue them from... from what exactly is not well determined because it depends on who you talk to.
You have to take the blinders off and drop your dogma by the wayside before you can look at the whole situation with anythink like rationality.
Do you actually believe what you write, or are you just trolling? You speak of Vista as if that were the only product we had. Most of us don't even work on Vista. There are 80,000 employees at Microsoft. We have a bazillion products to work on covering a huge variety of the software engineering space.
The people who are going to Google are going there presumably because Google is offering them something fun to work on or a new environment for them. I originally left Microsoft in 2000 to work at a startup for the same reason. I came back this year because - Slashdot imaginations notwithstanding - Microsoft is actually a great company to work for.
You guys talk about 'drinking the Koolaid' and how bad it is. Slashdot has its own Koolaid you know. How much of it are YOU drinking?
Er... depending on the compression level, I can put arbitrarily large source-resolution material on an arbitrarily small data medium.
What I am more interested in is how high the video quality really is. Ideally, it would be a lossless transfer. Anything less necessarily compromises video quality to varying degrees, whether it's color resolution, spatial resolution or what have you.
And for those who claim that the difference between DVD and HD is too small to be noticeable, you are terribly mistaken. Go look at the material on good equipment (e.g. a 1080p monitor or projector.) The difference is night and day.
Nothing replaces experience. If this is a form of Google apprenticeship, great. I'm all for apprenticeships. However, to compare these guys to senior managers with years of experience is absurd. Working long hours has no, repeat NO bearing on productivity. Learning how to use the hours you have wisely is FAR more important, especially to manager types who are going to be answering to schedules which are often impossible to achieve.
There is a difference of almost 2 orders of magnitude on the Scoville scale between the capsasin content of a habanero and pure capsaicin used in the article. It is probably unfair to compare ingested capsaicin with that applied directly to a wound, and even more so to use that from a pepper that is almost 100 times less hot than the pure form being used.
So they changed the column type of userId from INT32 to INT64. Who gives a fuck? It would be much less expensive for Slashdot to simply post SQL change logs than to have editors on the clock.
We need the ability to mod stories, so that the editors can more clearly see when they aren't doing their job.
Don't *even* suggest this. If you have gotten to this point in your thinking, move to China because that's where stuff like this is supposed to happen, not here.