I hate to point out the seemingly obvious but...is this really that useful? I mean, you have to remember 6 numbers (which the poster has proven not to be as easy as you might think!:P ) just to get 7 and a bit places worth of precision! (about 15% compression) why not just remember 141 and 593 and save yourself the CPU prower of having to decompress it?:-)
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday dear Something (is that him? yeah, that guy over there. No, behind the bald guy)
Happy Birthday to you!
Surely if you cannot remember that Alfred Wallace's first name is Alfred, and you're the one one supporting him, what exactly are you expecting?:-)
Doesn't this suggest a solution to anyone? In fact, a solution which is already implemented? Right now, if I don't opt in to have an internet connection, I am unable to receive violent, pornographic, or inappropriate material by anyone's standards.
I'm not able to receive appropriate material either, naturally.
So, instead I opt in by calling an ISP and having an account set up so that I can download whatever material I so desire.
The proposal as worded above is not that the PM wants to filter the internet, but make certain materials unattainable via the internet. I can't receive porn by mail order from Mars either; does that mean we should have government controls to screen incoming extra-terrestrial material for 'appropriateness' as well? I am completely of the opinion that if people can't manage their own censorship and the censorship of those in their immediate care, then they simply shouldn't request access to the distribution channel at all. Internet access is a privilege, not a basic human right!
You seem to have missed that while the moon happily moves in a large circle around the earth, if you drop a pen it won't orbit your hand. While I'm not denying that this wheel would ultimately provide perpetual motion about something as large as the earth, there's a gap in the logic leading to this being converted into a travel-size perpetual motion machine:-)
That requires you to trust the independent security firm. Maybe you do, maybe not. Depends how thick the tinfoil is; if you have several layers then you're able to check open software for yourself. If you have just one layer then you might consider agreement among several other trusted individuals to be good enough. If you don't know what I'm talking about then probably you'd probably be happy to take ebay's word for it anyway, and it doesn't matter.
The point is that a closed review by a closed company for closed software, you're unlikely to get any additional trust from me.
Current systems may meet the minimum requirements for Vista, sure. But are these minimum requirements for a system to boot without producing an advertisement for graphics card manufacturers, or minimum requirements to do useful work?
$200,000 for Virgin Galactic, but for only $100,000 I can let you see space.
You'll receive a kit including a a small plastic plaque, engraved with the words 'look up', and also a signed postcard from my personal island in the Bahamas.
Yes, but it's even weirder than that. Gambling isn't illegal in Australia - in fact, it's a big source of revenue for a lot of people (including the government). But advertising gambling is illegal.
There are all these studies showing that using cellphones are bad for health, but very few illustrating how many lives were saved because people in danger had the ability to call for help. I'm not saying the study isn't valid, it may be. It's just that I think, in general, we're much safer with cellphones than without them.
Same thing applies to high voltage electical lines running near or through towns, white noise from wind generators, and countless other examples of people not effectively weighing up the benefits of technology with the drawbacks.
What the hell is "Clippy"?
Clippy is the delightfully helpful paperclip in Microsoft's Office package.
I understand what you said. But there's a big difference between using AI to make helpful suggestions which you can ignore at no cost (such as not looking at Clippy, or ignoring 'other suggested books you might find interesting') and using AI to reformat your entire document because it looks like you're writing a letter. The latter requires you to actively fix the problem.
I don't know about you, but my window manager (WindowMaker) always opens Firefox in the same position I last had it in. And, even if I didn't like that, I could specify the geometry myself pretty easily. I'd hardly call that kind of behaviour AI. If I always do it... and if I don't always do it and the computer tries to get clever on me and gets it wrong, then it's just going to really annoy me.
So I take it that you're always delighted when Clippy offers to format your document as a letter?
For that matter, are you delighted when your mother-in-law suggests that it would be quicker to make a left at the next intersection?
AI will be good enough to lay out my windows how I want them to work optimally about as soon as AI can actually do the work for me. Neural nets? You must be kidding, right? Predicting what a human is trying to do is hard enough for other humans, let alone computers.
That's not to say I don't agree that the metaphor is pretty ridiculous. Hey, it looks really cool. Everyone else in the office was looking over my shoulder. But would I actually want it in my window manager? Not likely.
I'm going to make a wild guess here that you have no idea how much work goes into creating an OS. A simple kernel isn't that hard, I've written one myself back in the day. Even virtual memory, memory management, the filesystem etc, while probably the most complex things I've ever had to contend with, were not impossible for one person to do in a few years in spare time.
But the device drivers. Average Joe cannot be expected to write a driver for some hardware he and only 500 other people bought from a company in Taiwan 3 years ago. To some extent, this is part of the problem in Linux; nonstandard hardware is generally supported by manufacturers in Windows first, and other OSs later. Every time a new kernel comes out I'm there checking the change log to see if my network card will finally work with suspend-to-ram yet. (and no, so far it doesn't)
Apple has a real advantage in the OS world: They have almost total control over the hardware. That's IMO why MacOS can do so well. Windows has a good decade of desktop acceptance. Linux is catching up, but slowly. Why on earth would Google want to try and compete? They may as well try and invent their own language and try and market it as a replacement for English or Chinese.
Bill Bryson has some interesting examples in his book 'A Complete History of Nearly Everything'. Such as a noted geologist who published several rather long and dry but important papers about rock formation, but was convinced that given the right materials, he could make himself invisible.
The discovery of matches arose from a scientist convinced that urine could be turned into gold (primarily due to the colour similarity). He had buckets of it in his basement, and eventually they evapourated to form a compound high in phosphor which would spontateously ignite. At one time this substance was so valuable they enlisted the entire Swedish (I think, some northern European) army to generate bucketloads of urine. It turned out to be worth 5x its weight in gold!
Newton also did other experiments, such as staring at the sun until he couldn't bare the pain, to see what would happen; he once stuck a needle in his eyeball and moved it around. In both cases (amazingly) he suffered no long term damage, but did have to spend a long time inside after staring at the sun before his vision returned.
Just because we (the unwashed masses) now 'understand' science, we have a different opinion of what now seems ludicrous in the past. Imagine what Newton would have thought of quantum mechanics (heck, I think it's quackery and I have a degree in physics!). Nature is weird and wonderful, and often the only way we can seperate fantasy from fantastic reality is through seemingly bizzare experimentation.
Isn't it interesting how often the text 'grammer' appears on a page complaining about the lack of spelling standards? As far as I can tell 'grammer' is not an Americanism (it's not in dictionary.com as a real word).
I don't even pronounce grammar gram-mer, I pronounce it gram-mah, which makes it all the more grating (granted, I don't live in the USA). Further still, grammar is a term that comes up a lot in computer oriented tasks, specifically parsing, so you could even say it was a technical computer term.
It's getting ridiculous. This has been the second major outage to NZ's telecommunications in as many months, and just today we've all been using cellphones because apparently someone disconnected the main cable between Wellington (the capital city) and the city on the other side of the harbour.
The question which no one seems to have asked so far is this: Supposing that you block annoying flashing pop up advertisements. Is it really fair to say that you're costing the site money? Do people actually click on such ads, except by mistake when they pop up where you're about to click? If you weren't going to click on the link, does it matter if the image banner is broken?
Advertising is a double edged sword - you have to promote your product to people who might want to buy it while at the same time not making them hate you for needlessly intruding in to their lives. I believe there's a popular search engine which does quite nicely out of unobtrusive advertising, and no one seems to be making plugins to eliminate their ads...
Slashdot Mirror
But I couldn't get the damn thing to compile!
Don't you mean bullshitine?
I hate to point out the seemingly obvious but...is this really that useful? I mean, you have to remember 6 numbers (which the poster has proven not to be as easy as you might think! :P ) just to get 7 and a bit places worth of precision! (about 15% compression) why not just remember 141 and 593 and save yourself the CPU prower of having to decompress it? :-)
Of course he does!
:-)
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday dear Something (is that him? yeah, that guy over there. No, behind the bald guy)
Happy Birthday to you!
Surely if you cannot remember that Alfred Wallace's first name is Alfred, and you're the one one supporting him, what exactly are you expecting?
Doesn't this suggest a solution to anyone? In fact, a solution which is already implemented? Right now, if I don't opt in to have an internet connection, I am unable to receive violent, pornographic, or inappropriate material by anyone's standards.
I'm not able to receive appropriate material either, naturally.
So, instead I opt in by calling an ISP and having an account set up so that I can download whatever material I so desire.
The proposal as worded above is not that the PM wants to filter the internet, but make certain materials unattainable via the internet. I can't receive porn by mail order from Mars either; does that mean we should have government controls to screen incoming extra-terrestrial material for 'appropriateness' as well? I am completely of the opinion that if people can't manage their own censorship and the censorship of those in their immediate care, then they simply shouldn't request access to the distribution channel at all. Internet access is a privilege, not a basic human right!
You seem to have missed that while the moon happily moves in a large circle around the earth, if you drop a pen it won't orbit your hand. While I'm not denying that this wheel would ultimately provide perpetual motion about something as large as the earth, there's a gap in the logic leading to this being converted into a travel-size perpetual motion machine :-)
Is that you Jack?
If only I could make some clever comment tying the difference between './' and '/.' to the use of mirrors.
Nope. Nothing springs to mind.
That requires you to trust the independent security firm. Maybe you do, maybe not. Depends how thick the tinfoil is; if you have several layers then you're able to check open software for yourself. If you have just one layer then you might consider agreement among several other trusted individuals to be good enough. If you don't know what I'm talking about then probably you'd probably be happy to take ebay's word for it anyway, and it doesn't matter.
The point is that a closed review by a closed company for closed software, you're unlikely to get any additional trust from me.Replace "challenging" with "Parralell"
Replace "parralell" with "parallel"You mean like how Windows 95 runs on a 486?
Current systems may meet the minimum requirements for Vista, sure. But are these minimum requirements for a system to boot without producing an advertisement for graphics card manufacturers, or minimum requirements to do useful work?
Works for me :-)
$200,000 for Virgin Galactic, but for only $100,000 I can let you see space.
You'll receive a kit including a a small plastic plaque, engraved with the words 'look up', and also a signed postcard from my personal island in the Bahamas.
Yes, but it's even weirder than that. Gambling isn't illegal in Australia - in fact, it's a big source of revenue for a lot of people (including the government). But advertising gambling is illegal.
Bruce here is head of the document security department, and is also in charge of the sheep dip.
I'm guessing you're an architect then? :-)
There are all these studies showing that using cellphones are bad for health, but very few illustrating how many lives were saved because people in danger had the ability to call for help. I'm not saying the study isn't valid, it may be. It's just that I think, in general, we're much safer with cellphones than without them.
Same thing applies to high voltage electical lines running near or through towns, white noise from wind generators, and countless other examples of people not effectively weighing up the benefits of technology with the drawbacks.
Damn it, it's slashdotted already. Did anyone get a mirror before it went down?
What the hell is "Clippy"? Clippy is the delightfully helpful paperclip in Microsoft's Office package.
I understand what you said. But there's a big difference between using AI to make helpful suggestions which you can ignore at no cost (such as not looking at Clippy, or ignoring 'other suggested books you might find interesting') and using AI to reformat your entire document because it looks like you're writing a letter. The latter requires you to actively fix the problem.
I don't know about you, but my window manager (WindowMaker) always opens Firefox in the same position I last had it in. And, even if I didn't like that, I could specify the geometry myself pretty easily. I'd hardly call that kind of behaviour AI. If I always do it... and if I don't always do it and the computer tries to get clever on me and gets it wrong, then it's just going to really annoy me.
So I take it that you're always delighted when Clippy offers to format your document as a letter?
For that matter, are you delighted when your mother-in-law suggests that it would be quicker to make a left at the next intersection?
AI will be good enough to lay out my windows how I want them to work optimally about as soon as AI can actually do the work for me. Neural nets? You must be kidding, right? Predicting what a human is trying to do is hard enough for other humans, let alone computers.
That's not to say I don't agree that the metaphor is pretty ridiculous. Hey, it looks really cool. Everyone else in the office was looking over my shoulder. But would I actually want it in my window manager? Not likely.
I'm going to make a wild guess here that you have no idea how much work goes into creating an OS. A simple kernel isn't that hard, I've written one myself back in the day. Even virtual memory, memory management, the filesystem etc, while probably the most complex things I've ever had to contend with, were not impossible for one person to do in a few years in spare time.
But the device drivers. Average Joe cannot be expected to write a driver for some hardware he and only 500 other people bought from a company in Taiwan 3 years ago. To some extent, this is part of the problem in Linux; nonstandard hardware is generally supported by manufacturers in Windows first, and other OSs later. Every time a new kernel comes out I'm there checking the change log to see if my network card will finally work with suspend-to-ram yet. (and no, so far it doesn't)
Apple has a real advantage in the OS world: They have almost total control over the hardware. That's IMO why MacOS can do so well. Windows has a good decade of desktop acceptance. Linux is catching up, but slowly. Why on earth would Google want to try and compete? They may as well try and invent their own language and try and market it as a replacement for English or Chinese.
Bill Bryson has some interesting examples in his book 'A Complete History of Nearly Everything'. Such as a noted geologist who published several rather long and dry but important papers about rock formation, but was convinced that given the right materials, he could make himself invisible.
The discovery of matches arose from a scientist convinced that urine could be turned into gold (primarily due to the colour similarity). He had buckets of it in his basement, and eventually they evapourated to form a compound high in phosphor which would spontateously ignite. At one time this substance was so valuable they enlisted the entire Swedish (I think, some northern European) army to generate bucketloads of urine. It turned out to be worth 5x its weight in gold!
Newton also did other experiments, such as staring at the sun until he couldn't bare the pain, to see what would happen; he once stuck a needle in his eyeball and moved it around. In both cases (amazingly) he suffered no long term damage, but did have to spend a long time inside after staring at the sun before his vision returned.
Just because we (the unwashed masses) now 'understand' science, we have a different opinion of what now seems ludicrous in the past. Imagine what Newton would have thought of quantum mechanics (heck, I think it's quackery and I have a degree in physics!). Nature is weird and wonderful, and often the only way we can seperate fantasy from fantastic reality is through seemingly bizzare experimentation.
Isn't it interesting how often the text 'grammer' appears on a page complaining about the lack of spelling standards? As far as I can tell 'grammer' is not an Americanism (it's not in dictionary.com as a real word).
I don't even pronounce grammar gram-mer, I pronounce it gram-mah, which makes it all the more grating (granted, I don't live in the USA). Further still, grammar is a term that comes up a lot in computer oriented tasks, specifically parsing, so you could even say it was a technical computer term.It's getting ridiculous. This has been the second major outage to NZ's telecommunications in as many months, and just today we've all been using cellphones because apparently someone disconnected the main cable between Wellington (the capital city) and the city on the other side of the harbour.
At least I'm not the guy pedalling on the UPS...
The question which no one seems to have asked so far is this: Supposing that you block annoying flashing pop up advertisements. Is it really fair to say that you're costing the site money? Do people actually click on such ads, except by mistake when they pop up where you're about to click? If you weren't going to click on the link, does it matter if the image banner is broken?
Advertising is a double edged sword - you have to promote your product to people who might want to buy it while at the same time not making them hate you for needlessly intruding in to their lives. I believe there's a popular search engine which does quite nicely out of unobtrusive advertising, and no one seems to be making plugins to eliminate their ads...