Do you happen to remember when democrats had a large majority in the House and a super majority in the Senate for 2 months?
FTFY. The actual time with Congress in session with 60 senators was not a long one, and even then it's only 60 if you counted the Independents that caucus with Democrats.
Not that you can't (or shouldn't) be able to get something done in 2 months, but let's try not to rewrite history, especially when it's such recent and well-documented history.
Nope. At best, the public thinks they want freedom, period, until someone else wants to do something with their freedom that they don't like. Then it's: "I like freedom, but X is just wrong."
The percentage of the public that believes you should be allowed to have an assault rifle and an abortion is vanishingly small enough that you can't really call it the public -- and that's without naming anything especially unpopular.
Really, if the contents of the insurance file are real, it would probably still be smarter to kill him while it's small and before other people decide that pulling the same thing is a good idea.
Although engine trouble is too tame a way to do it -- you'd want him to, say, be captured by "terrorists" who put up a long, long video of torturing him to death in the most demeaning ways possible. Kill Julian Assange and you probably create ten more Julian Assanges. Let the world see Julian Assange be violated by goats for days at a time and people will think twice about it.
Assuming I was an evil government out to stop Wikileaks, of course -- I'm not advocating for that as the morally correct response.
In the real world, expect almost everyone to prioritize "what works best" over "what the standard says" except insofar as satisfying B is necessary to achieve A.
Government employees also have to deal with a shittier segment of the public than most businesspeople. You think it's basically the same people, but you genuinely have no idea.
If you work in the private sector (as I do) and no one has ever urinated on you at work, be thankful for your private sector job as I am.
Had his laptop been heavily encrypted, they wouldn't have gotten anywhere.
You know how they say you can root any system as long as you have physical access to the machine and enough time?
You can break any (practically useful) encryption, as long as you have physical access to a person who knows the key and are willing to attach a car battery to their gonads. The classic "Jack Bauer" style of crypto-hacking, if you will.
Hybrid is the way to go. The ones with 40mpg or better mileage (i.e. Prius, Civic, Insight) are ranked by greenercars.org to be just as clean (or cleaner) as the EVs
Hmm... but what if I like the idea of the Volt because I hate buying gas (and have a short enough commute) and not because I love the environment?
I'm still holding a grudge against them for Monorail.
Let's throw away the useful parts of ASP.NET while still keeping its overhead, in order to make writing the kinds of web apps that already aren't very hard faster and the kinds of web apps that are interesting impossible to create! And while we're at it, let's put most of the useful documentation in videos instead of something sensible.
Disclaimer: I worked with it circa '07 and it may not be as rage-inducing now.
Oh, so this is acceptable behavior now because "everybody's doing it"? When did that start being a valid excuse?
It's a valid reason whenever we're being pragmatic or dwelling in the real world instead of happy magic unicorn fairy land.
If people optimize to benchmarks (and they do, they always have, for every benchmark ever), does a person grounded in reality
A) Yell "Cheatzors!!!!", or
B) Try to come up with a means to gauge performance that isn't so trivially gamed.
I mean, when the RIAA attempts to blatantly ignore reality to make an outdated business model that cannot continue to function work, we point out how stupid this is -- but if we're trying to get JavaScript benchmarks that cannot work for their theoretically intended purpose to work it somehow becomes a matter of morality and not reality?
It shows that Microsoft is more concerned about getting a good score on the benchmark than they are about providing a good customer experience.
For that to be true, you'll need to demonstrate that they put more effort into scoring well on the benchmark than they did in improving performance in general. I don't think you can.
Improving performance in general is worth doing and I'm sure it's being done, but it's hard. Improving performance on a benchmark dramatically is often not that hard, and it's worth doing if it gets your product noticed.
I'm sure all browser makers are doing the exact same thing on both counts -- anonymous Mozilla guy is just bitter because he did a shittier job of the less-important task of benchmark performance.
Nostalgic purpose / dreams / cool numbers, yeah, but what matter is today, and actual perceived performance.
Absolutely.
Except in the sense that you can get a lot of good press / free advertising by stomping a mudhole in the other guy's performance in a benchmark. There's a clear incentive to improve your actual performance, because when real people get ahold of your benchmarked piece of software/hardware/whatever they're going to notice that actual performance -- but there's also some incentive to improve you benchmark performance for cheap advertising. The former is more valuable than the latter, and I'm sure it gets more time/money/effort proportionately.
This is the nature of benchmarks... whenever people start caring about them enough, software/hardware designers optimize for the benchmark.
Next we're going to be shocked that 8th grade history students try to memorize the material they think will be on their test rather than seeking a deep and insightful mastery of the subject and its modern societal implications.
I said, in essence, with China's current situation it's easier to get N volunteers if you want to ship N men.
Your goal in this, as China, isn't to fix your gender imbalance by shipping men to Mars, it's to take advantage of your gender imbalance to find more volunteers to ship to Mars.
These days, with a wife and a child, I guess I'll envy those who go, but wont be amongst them.
I had a similar thought, and it made me wonder in turn if this could be a big opportunity for China and their generation of surplus men. If your prospects for a wife are limited, being a Mars pioneer has to look a lot more attractive.
Netscape's death was clearly a suicide. No one could put out software as bad as latter-day Netscape's by accident.
But again: that's Microsoft trying to kill their competitors, it's not Microsoft trying to kill themselves -- which everyone seems to be arguing would somehow happen because it's the most evil thing.
Now that Arnold Schwarzenegger will be unemployed, they could get him for recruitment ads for one-way astronauts.
"Get your ass to Mars! Then stay there and form a colony."
Overall the idea of sending pioneers seems like a good one to me, although it also seems like we have a long way to go yet in the terraforming science to make it work?
What percentage of that market is going to say, "What, I can't get the manual in a non-.doc format?! You'll not get my business again! How dare you provide me a document in the de-facto standard format for documents!?"
There may exist some such people, but I submit to you that they're removing themselves from the gene pool because anyone who's that completely rigid about such a ridiculous thing has almost no chance of producing offspring that will survive to adulthood.
He's not just some guy, he's David Arlie. He's done work on Xorg stuff, including the nouveau driver. You should be honoured that he called you an idiot, especially since it's his second comment on Slashdot, after the first posted in 2005.
So what you're saying is... he's not just any pompous windbag going off on some random guy on a messageboard with the kind of insult most of us outgrew in the 7th grade, but a specific pompous windbag with some kind of claim to nerd street cred in a particular nerd subculture going off on some random guy on a messageboard with the kind of insult most of us outgrew in the 7th grade?
That's informative, but I still don't think the aforementioned random guy should feel honored. You've got somewhat odd criteria for choosing your objects of worship.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you happen to remember when democrats had a large majority in the House and a super majority in the Senate for 2 months?
FTFY. The actual time with Congress in session with 60 senators was not a long one, and even then it's only 60 if you counted the Independents that caucus with Democrats.
Not that you can't (or shouldn't) be able to get something done in 2 months, but let's try not to rewrite history, especially when it's such recent and well-documented history.
It seems the public just wants freedom period
Nope. At best, the public thinks they want freedom, period, until someone else wants to do something with their freedom that they don't like. Then it's: "I like freedom, but X is just wrong."
The percentage of the public that believes you should be allowed to have an assault rifle and an abortion is vanishingly small enough that you can't really call it the public -- and that's without naming anything especially unpopular.
Really, if the contents of the insurance file are real, it would probably still be smarter to kill him while it's small and before other people decide that pulling the same thing is a good idea.
Although engine trouble is too tame a way to do it -- you'd want him to, say, be captured by "terrorists" who put up a long, long video of torturing him to death in the most demeaning ways possible. Kill Julian Assange and you probably create ten more Julian Assanges. Let the world see Julian Assange be violated by goats for days at a time and people will think twice about it.
Assuming I was an evil government out to stop Wikileaks, of course -- I'm not advocating for that as the morally correct response.
What I don't understand is why doesn't Wikileaks uploads a copy of all that to Freenet?
Because then only people looking for particularly unsavory pornography would find it.
This.
In the real world, expect almost everyone to prioritize "what works best" over "what the standard says" except insofar as satisfying B is necessary to achieve A.
Government employees also have to deal with a shittier segment of the public than most businesspeople. You think it's basically the same people, but you genuinely have no idea.
If you work in the private sector (as I do) and no one has ever urinated on you at work, be thankful for your private sector job as I am.
Had his laptop been heavily encrypted, they wouldn't have gotten anywhere.
You know how they say you can root any system as long as you have physical access to the machine and enough time?
You can break any (practically useful) encryption, as long as you have physical access to a person who knows the key and are willing to attach a car battery to their gonads. The classic "Jack Bauer" style of crypto-hacking, if you will.
Hybrid is the way to go. The ones with 40mpg or better mileage (i.e. Prius, Civic, Insight) are ranked by greenercars.org to be just as clean (or cleaner) as the EVs
Hmm... but what if I like the idea of the Volt because I hate buying gas (and have a short enough commute) and not because I love the environment?
I'm still holding a grudge against them for Monorail.
Let's throw away the useful parts of ASP.NET while still keeping its overhead, in order to make writing the kinds of web apps that already aren't very hard faster and the kinds of web apps that are interesting impossible to create! And while we're at it, let's put most of the useful documentation in videos instead of something sensible.
Disclaimer: I worked with it circa '07 and it may not be as rage-inducing now.
Oh, so this is acceptable behavior now because "everybody's doing it"? When did that start being a valid excuse?
It's a valid reason whenever we're being pragmatic or dwelling in the real world instead of happy magic unicorn fairy land.
If people optimize to benchmarks (and they do, they always have, for every benchmark ever), does a person grounded in reality
A) Yell "Cheatzors!!!!", or
B) Try to come up with a means to gauge performance that isn't so trivially gamed.
I mean, when the RIAA attempts to blatantly ignore reality to make an outdated business model that cannot continue to function work, we point out how stupid this is -- but if we're trying to get JavaScript benchmarks that cannot work for their theoretically intended purpose to work it somehow becomes a matter of morality and not reality?
It shows that Microsoft is more concerned about getting a good score on the benchmark than they are about providing a good customer experience.
For that to be true, you'll need to demonstrate that they put more effort into scoring well on the benchmark than they did in improving performance in general. I don't think you can.
Improving performance in general is worth doing and I'm sure it's being done, but it's hard. Improving performance on a benchmark dramatically is often not that hard, and it's worth doing if it gets your product noticed.
I'm sure all browser makers are doing the exact same thing on both counts -- anonymous Mozilla guy is just bitter because he did a shittier job of the less-important task of benchmark performance.
Nostalgic purpose / dreams / cool numbers, yeah, but what matter is today, and actual perceived performance.
Absolutely.
Except in the sense that you can get a lot of good press / free advertising by stomping a mudhole in the other guy's performance in a benchmark. There's a clear incentive to improve your actual performance, because when real people get ahold of your benchmarked piece of software/hardware/whatever they're going to notice that actual performance -- but there's also some incentive to improve you benchmark performance for cheap advertising. The former is more valuable than the latter, and I'm sure it gets more time/money/effort proportionately.
This is the nature of benchmarks... whenever people start caring about them enough, software/hardware designers optimize for the benchmark.
Next we're going to be shocked that 8th grade history students try to memorize the material they think will be on their test rather than seeking a deep and insightful mastery of the subject and its modern societal implications.
I didn't say ship a million men.
I said, in essence, with China's current situation it's easier to get N volunteers if you want to ship N men.
Your goal in this, as China, isn't to fix your gender imbalance by shipping men to Mars, it's to take advantage of your gender imbalance to find more volunteers to ship to Mars.
These days, with a wife and a child, I guess I'll envy those who go, but wont be amongst them.
I had a similar thought, and it made me wonder in turn if this could be a big opportunity for China and their generation of surplus men. If your prospects for a wife are limited, being a Mars pioneer has to look a lot more attractive.
Netscape's death was clearly a suicide. No one could put out software as bad as latter-day Netscape's by accident.
But again: that's Microsoft trying to kill their competitors, it's not Microsoft trying to kill themselves -- which everyone seems to be arguing would somehow happen because it's the most evil thing.
Now that Arnold Schwarzenegger will be unemployed, they could get him for recruitment ads for one-way astronauts.
"Get your ass to Mars! Then stay there and form a colony."
Overall the idea of sending pioneers seems like a good one to me, although it also seems like we have a long way to go yet in the terraforming science to make it work?
Desktops. 10% linux on Desktops. It's probably a little higher than that, mind.
Citation? I've yet to see credible numbers that peg it at even 2% much less 10.
I myself have bought computers for total amounts in the tens of thousands US$ out of Linux compatibility as selective reason.
"I pick stuff that's compatible with Linux" != "I won't buy it if you won't give me a .pdf."
Let's just take that as a given for kicks.
What percentage of that market is going to say, "What, I can't get the manual in a non-.doc format?! You'll not get my business again! How dare you provide me a document in the de-facto standard format for documents!?"
There may exist some such people, but I submit to you that they're removing themselves from the gene pool because anyone who's that completely rigid about such a ridiculous thing has almost no chance of producing offspring that will survive to adulthood.
He's not just some guy, he's David Arlie. He's done work on Xorg stuff, including the nouveau driver. You should be honoured that he called you an idiot, especially since it's his second comment on Slashdot, after the first posted in 2005.
So what you're saying is... he's not just any pompous windbag going off on some random guy on a messageboard with the kind of insult most of us outgrew in the 7th grade, but a specific pompous windbag with some kind of claim to nerd street cred in a particular nerd subculture going off on some random guy on a messageboard with the kind of insult most of us outgrew in the 7th grade?
That's informative, but I still don't think the aforementioned random guy should feel honored. You've got somewhat odd criteria for choosing your objects of worship.
it will increase our market target by 10% which is the penetration for Linux on our products
Wait, what has a 10% penetration for Linux?
And nothing in the server world counts, because no one's hooking a monitor to those machines and trying to read a PDF or a .doc.
Can we at least pick semi-realistic examples?
If Microsoft wanted portability and independence from Windows there would only be Mono.
Well, obviously that's not their goal. They need to make money or they'll end up like Sun, and how does that help anyone except Larry Ellison's ego?
There's not liking something and then there's bashing on it without attempting at all to back it up with reasons.
The first can be the start of a conversation, the second is just trolling.
I support your choice to pick work to fit your principles -- but your principles are silly.
In ten years, if you think of this at all, you'll look back and think how young, dumb, and naive you were.