"weeding out the population" of all the dumb shits too stupid to accept fact
I've heard that one before. Of course you will be the one selecting who is stupid and who is not. Good thing you are a lowly Slashdotter and not in a position to dictate state policy...
They have caused more pain and suffering in this world under the idea of uniting it than any scientific advancement has, including nuclear bombs.
I appreciate your fervor, but most pain and suffering (and death is certainly suffering in my book) was caused _not_ by religiuos people but by Communists (Stalin) and Nazis (Hitler). Yes, in that particular order, Stalin killed about 17 million civilians and 9 million soldiers. That's about 26 million people. Pause and think about how big that number is. In comparison New York is probably less than 10 million people.
Next time when you bash whoever/whatever at least do it accurately or you just might start sounding like one of those religious fanantics.
I think it happens to most large companies -- they become large, fat and lazy. They also lose focus and get cocky and arrogant : "Oh, let's make an operating system, oh, and games, and office, and let's not forget about keyboards and mice and then xbox and webtv and then invent a new programing language and then everyone likes music so we need to make a music player etc, etc..."
Eventually they start focusing on quantity of products not quality. And by a "quality product" I mean a product that a consumer would want. It doesn't have to be the best, maybe just the best marketed.
The difference is that here Vista is to blame, while on Linuzz everyobody magically undarstand that this is a driver's problem.
Perhaps because 'Linuzz' is open it is easy to see where the problem lies. With Vista you get huge binary blob and if it's broken you don't know if it is the drivers or Vista -- you can't debug it and look at the source so you call MS tech support and wait 6 months for a service pack or MS tells you to call ATI/AMD and you wait 6 month for a fix. Binary drivers suck that's the problem here...
I second that. fglrx in Linux on x86_64 still sucks. And where the hell is Composite? Why is that not working yet? That should have been done a long time ago. They keep releasing new versions (such as 8.37) but they never fix the outstanding issues. Installation is still no fun if you happen to run a non-RPM based distro (you know... Ubuntu or Debian). It sucks that my laptop came with X1400 and I'm stuck with AMD/ATI...
well organized society where you can offer people incentives to raise kids), but of course that remains to be seen.
That usually is the case. A government that has enough resources (i.e. is not dirt poor) will monitor birth rates and will provide adequate incentives to either encourage or discourage population growth. There is something "strange" about this as it makes people into goods/commodities. The country needs more so they "ramp up the production", if the country needs less they "will pull back" (pun intended!;-). But sometimes, because of other constraints (such as resources or territory, there will have to be a choice of allowing more births or saving resources and have an older population). Two extreme cases are probably China and Japan. Both in Asia. China promotes a policy of reducing birth rates and Japan grows increasingly old (but I am not sure it is really trying to increase birth rates...).
I think it's hard quantify or measure anything in this regard because the economic system was not isolated but rather intimately tied in with politics (internal and external), societal issues and culture (yes, culture too, one could argue that Chinese culture of uniformity is better suited to communism than the American culture of individualism, but it's hard to say which gives rise to which of course).
In other words one would have to create some kind of computer model that would account for human behavior (averaged) but will be immune to other variables (Cold War, Chernobyl etc.) to see if the communism could sustain itself. In this model it will be important to consider 'what preceded communism' or what did people overthrow and establish communism instead. After so many peasants were fed up with the Czarist rule they were very willing to work for a 'bright communist future'.
After WWII again, people saw Nazism and in contrast they were very happy to build up their country, and communism seemed like a great idea. However, just one generation after WWII (my parents' generation: born in 1945-1955) people started to realize that they could take advantage of the common goods and produce less than they would consume. This stemmed from the artificial idea of "equality for all" , which on the other hand meant "no matter how hard you work, you won't get to own a Mercedes..ever => might as well not work very hard". As soon as that starts happening the system will start to disintegrate. A large country like ex Soviet Union will coast for quite bit (20 or more years perhaps) but eventually it will self implode.
I usually go into this explanation every time Americans boast they they 'beat' the Soviet in the Cold War. I argue that they didn't even have to do anything and the Soviet Union would have self-destroyed eventually.
Well, just like many terrorist cells they might not get direct orders from anyone they just follow the same general agenda. Probably just a bunch of bored teenagers that want to feel powerful and famous. They wouldn't even be working for money, just for the recognition of their l33t skillz.
To what extent would highly trained professionals or otherwise very successful people be rewarded in the Soviet Union?
Not by much and that was the problem. The only individuals who got plenty of luxuries were the members of the party and the government workers. No wonder by the time of Brejnev, the bureaucratic apparatus of the Soviet Union was large enough to run all the countries in the world. The people who worked harder and were professional would not be compensated proportionately. If they would have been, it would have created a situation of inequality. That would be totally incompatible with the 'everyone is equal' state policy. I admire the Scandinavian countries. Indeed, they seem to have found a golden middle between "let big corporations own everyone's lives" capitalism and Soviet's "submit to the state" system.
It wasn't something organized by the Russian government. The closest you can get to the government is a group called Nashi, which is a young adult supporters of Putin. I doubt Putin himself would have issued the orders as that would have put him in an extremely bad light. And Russian military is not up to such things yet. This doesn't mean that groups of Russian hackers would not have done, I am sure they did, especially the ones living __in Estonia__. But Russian hackers != Russia. Just like the Israeli hackers that deface Arab websites != State of Israel and vice versa. Media just likes to throw words like "cyberwar" around to create sensationalism.
And the economy collapsed in large part because of having to compete with the military developments of the West.
Even if they didn't have to compete. Human nature would have done its job. People will stop working and throwing money in the common pot if they know that they can get all the public goodies like free healthcare (which wasn't bad at all by the way!), education and housing anyway. Eventually people will find ways to slide by and not put in their share of work. As soon as enough people realize this fact the system is headed for collapse. Yes Afghanistan and Cold War sped it up considerably but the system was rotting from within. My grandparent's generation after the war really believed in building a better future and look how much the Soviet system progressed in those years. As they started to retire and my parent's generation came around, the system was already headed for decline. And I was there to witness it...
I lived in the Soviet Union during the time of it's collapse. The fundamental reason of the collapse is that people will stop working if they cannot directly take their salary home but are forced to share it with everyone. After a while, most will realize that they can just not work much and still get the free healthcare, the state sponsored housing and so on. One of my grandfathers was an avid communist (my other one was an ex-Orthodox monk -- I have an interesting family, don't I;-). And my grandfathers' generation believed they were building a better country (well nevermind the repressions and the famine). So their generation won the war and built up the country like never before. However my parent's generation realized that it's all bullshit. People were never equal and will never be equal, eventually they stopped working. As soon as the net consumption exceeded the net production the system was headed downhill. Compound that with the logistical nightmare to micromanage the economy of a country larger than most continents out there (just stuff like setting a price for everything -- bread was 0.2 rubles -- _everywhere_!) and you have a failed system. Because prices were fixed, it led to a deficit of goods (therefore the breadlines).
Yes, the war in Afghanistan sped up the collapse but it was already coasting on fumes by then.
If everyone didn't have to wait in freaking breadlines like me and my parents did. If we had normal living conditions, I don't think people would have minded the communists as much, but of course that is provided that human nature is different and / or there is an unlimited supply of funds.
I guess a cyberwar against Estonia just wasn't enough for them
You mean the war that wasn't and was just a... a hoax. Oh yeah, I forgot, we accept everything Slashdot feeds us as gospel. Good thing Bush doesn't read Slashdot, he might have decided to get his preemptive strike 'on'..
And who won the cold war? Did we win it? That is what we want to tell ourselves -- that someone won and of course it is the almighty America. In fact if you study history you'll find that Soviet Union collapsed because it's economy collapsed. Soviet style communism simply does not work. We can shout all we want that we 'won' but it is more like the Soviet Union just slowly killed itself. So I guess you can say that you won a fight if the opponent gets the plague and dies in the process but it doesn't mean that you beat the opponent, you just 'won' by default.
You probably don't realize how much power and influence Russia has in Europe simply because it controls all the energy. It doesn't have to shoot any rockets anywhere, it just needs to shut down the pipelines. So you can keep cursing at Putin all you want if it makes you feel better, but Russia is a player that we will still have to reckon with.
And by the way one of these puppies won't be stopped by our multi-bullion dollar missile defense system. Probably should have used that money for healthcare and better schools...Hmm, excessive spending on military infrastructure at the expense of taking care of it's citizens sounds familiar... oh yeah.. Soviet Union did that. Perhaps we are not that different after all. Now that's a thought!
You under-estimate the Russian missiles. US says that the defense systems are there for the missiles flying from North Korea. Russian missiles a lot more advanced than North Korean ones. Take this little puppy for example. She is beautiful, isn't she!.
An attack with those babies will not be stopped by the current generation of missile defense systems. It is _not_ a completely ballistic rocket. In other words predicting, calculating it's trajectory and using all the billions of dollars of infrastructure designed for ballistic missiles is not as useful anymore.
The competition between missile defense and missiles will mostly end up with a win for the missile. This reminds me of the competition between artillery and armor. There are certain artillery shells that no current armor can protect against it.
I was merely speaking 'the language' of the grandparent post. They used an ad-hominem attack because I wrote 'know' instead of 'now' => I am a not a credible source and not a good scientists or not... (insert whatever). So assuming that ad-hominem attacks work great in arguments, I mentioned that English is my third language to make myself look better. But I have miserably failed as it turns out they speak Dutch and German. (Don't you like the ad nauseam details?) I was just hoping they would be an American and only speak English. What did we learn today kids? -- We learned that ad hominem attacks do not work and are silly.
I was not talking about GIT at all and I was not talking about interfaces. I was saying that CVS is deficient and SVN is usually a better choice. Both SVN and CVS have good interfaces. Please learn to read _and_ understand what is written in the post before replying. Otherwise, it is hard to take your opinion seriously.
brane comes from membrane. You got your 1-branes which are the "classic" cosmic strings. But of course they say that there are n-branes (0-branes, 2-branes etc.)
You see theoretical scientists (you know the ones that have been working on stuff for decades and still don't have a single experimental piece of evidence) like to make up terminology and throw around big scary formulas to justify wasting time and money working on stuff that cannot even be proven experimentally. Sorry for the bitterness, but I wouldn't even call these people scientists. They might as well say that a giant spaghetti monster flies around and his noodly appendages form tiny knots and those knots are the elementary particles....BUT...OMG! the appendages are so thin that we cannot experimentally detect their presence...but they are there, trust us, here is a big hairy formula (don't worry about the solutions for know) it proves everything -- Give us another PhD!
Yes, that's your opinion and then there are hundreds of project and thousands of developers who disagree. If CVS was so good, there would not be an army of people behind SVN.
Not the crap from Hollywood! I wouldn't even see it if someone gave me the tickets. I would want my "free" back at the end of the movie probably. The movies I like I can either borrow from the library (classics) and yes, I am paying for them as well through taxes and I pay for the movies I support just to support them. In other words it doesn't matter if I see a movie at my friend's house and I could have a copy made, I would go an buy it just to support the artist (most of them are "indie" films, that's why).
What I could never understand is why so many people pay so much money for Hollywood crap. The prices are not cheap -- more than 10 dollars / ticket! And an even better question is why do people risk getting nabbed by the **AA's and downloading this shit. It would really be sad to know that someone will go to jail or pay a $20,000 fine for downloading "Big Momma's House".
That makes sense. The GPUs sometimes have a a higher transistor count than CPUs...
The problem with Fusion is if they kill the add-on graphics and you just buy one Fusion processor that costs say $400 to plug into the CPU slot. In the meantime, NVIDIA releases their new generation board and Intel releases a new generation CPU. The consumer can choose to upgrade one or the other or both, but an AMD customer is stuck just one expensive part and would have to upgrade it as one piece.
Perhaps in the future the CPU, the graphics card and the memory will all be on one giant module. You get high performance but not the ability to customize individual components.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what I say. I am naked even as I type this message.
That's your (grand)*500.mother we are talking about, you instensitive clod!
I've heard that one before. Of course you will be the one selecting who is stupid and who is not. Good thing you are a lowly Slashdotter and not in a position to dictate state policy...
They have caused more pain and suffering in this world under the idea of uniting it than any scientific advancement has, including nuclear bombs.
I appreciate your fervor, but most pain and suffering (and death is certainly suffering in my book) was caused _not_ by religiuos people but by Communists (Stalin) and Nazis (Hitler). Yes, in that particular order, Stalin killed about 17 million civilians and 9 million soldiers. That's about 26 million people. Pause and think about how big that number is. In comparison New York is probably less than 10 million people.
Next time when you bash whoever/whatever at least do it accurately or you just might start sounding like one of those religious fanantics.
Eventually they start focusing on quantity of products not quality. And by a "quality product" I mean a product that a consumer would want. It doesn't have to be the best, maybe just the best marketed.
Perhaps because 'Linuzz' is open it is easy to see where the problem lies. With Vista you get huge binary blob and if it's broken you don't know if it is the drivers or Vista -- you can't debug it and look at the source so you call MS tech support and wait 6 months for a service pack or MS tells you to call ATI/AMD and you wait 6 month for a fix. Binary drivers suck that's the problem here...
I second that. fglrx in Linux on x86_64 still sucks. And where the hell is Composite? Why is that not working yet? That should have been done a long time ago. They keep releasing new versions (such as 8.37) but they never fix the outstanding issues. Installation is still no fun if you happen to run a non-RPM based distro (you know... Ubuntu or Debian). It sucks that my laptop came with X1400 and I'm stuck with AMD/ATI...
That usually is the case. A government that has enough resources (i.e. is not dirt poor) will monitor birth rates and will provide adequate incentives to either encourage or discourage population growth. There is something "strange" about this as it makes people into goods/commodities. The country needs more so they "ramp up the production", if the country needs less they "will pull back" (pun intended! ;-). But sometimes, because of other constraints (such as resources or territory, there will have to be a choice of allowing more births or saving resources and have an older population). Two extreme cases are probably China and Japan. Both in Asia. China promotes a policy of reducing birth rates and Japan grows increasingly old (but I am not sure it is really trying to increase birth rates...).
I think it's hard quantify or measure anything in this regard because the economic system was not isolated but rather intimately tied in with politics (internal and external), societal issues and culture (yes, culture too, one could argue that Chinese culture of uniformity is better suited to communism than the American culture of individualism, but it's hard to say which gives rise to which of course).
In other words one would have to create some kind of computer model that would account for human behavior (averaged) but will be immune to other variables (Cold War, Chernobyl etc.) to see if the communism could sustain itself. In this model it will be important to consider 'what preceded communism' or what did people overthrow and establish communism instead. After so many peasants were fed up with the Czarist rule they were very willing to work for a 'bright communist future'.
After WWII again, people saw Nazism and in contrast they were very happy to build up their country, and communism seemed like a great idea. However, just one generation after WWII (my parents' generation: born in 1945-1955) people started to realize that they could take advantage of the common goods and produce less than they would consume. This stemmed from the artificial idea of "equality for all" , which on the other hand meant "no matter how hard you work, you won't get to own a Mercedes ..ever => might as well not work very hard". As soon as that starts happening the system will start to disintegrate. A large country like ex Soviet Union will coast for quite bit (20 or more years perhaps) but eventually it will self implode.
I usually go into this explanation every time Americans boast they they 'beat' the Soviet in the Cold War. I argue that they didn't even have to do anything and the Soviet Union would have self-destroyed eventually.
Well, just like many terrorist cells they might not get direct orders from anyone they just follow the same general agenda. Probably just a bunch of bored teenagers that want to feel powerful and famous. They wouldn't even be working for money, just for the recognition of their l33t skillz.
Not by much and that was the problem. The only individuals who got plenty of luxuries were the members of the party and the government workers. No wonder by the time of Brejnev, the bureaucratic apparatus of the Soviet Union was large enough to run all the countries in the world. The people who worked harder and were professional would not be compensated proportionately. If they would have been, it would have created a situation of inequality. That would be totally incompatible with the 'everyone is equal' state policy. I admire the Scandinavian countries. Indeed, they seem to have found a golden middle between "let big corporations own everyone's lives" capitalism and Soviet's "submit to the state" system.
It wasn't something organized by the Russian government. The closest you can get to the government is a group called Nashi, which is a young adult supporters of Putin. I doubt Putin himself would have issued the orders as that would have put him in an extremely bad light. And Russian military is not up to such things yet. This doesn't mean that groups of Russian hackers would not have done, I am sure they did, especially the ones living __in Estonia__. But Russian hackers != Russia. Just like the Israeli hackers that deface Arab websites != State of Israel and vice versa. Media just likes to throw words like "cyberwar" around to create sensationalism.
Even if they didn't have to compete. Human nature would have done its job. People will stop working and throwing money in the common pot if they know that they can get all the public goodies like free healthcare (which wasn't bad at all by the way!), education and housing anyway. Eventually people will find ways to slide by and not put in their share of work. As soon as enough people realize this fact the system is headed for collapse. Yes Afghanistan and Cold War sped it up considerably but the system was rotting from within. My grandparent's generation after the war really believed in building a better future and look how much the Soviet system progressed in those years. As they started to retire and my parent's generation came around, the system was already headed for decline. And I was there to witness it...
Yes, the war in Afghanistan sped up the collapse but it was already coasting on fumes by then.
If everyone didn't have to wait in freaking breadlines like me and my parents did. If we had normal living conditions, I don't think people would have minded the communists as much, but of course that is provided that human nature is different and / or there is an unlimited supply of funds.
You mean the war that wasn't and was just a ... a hoax. Oh yeah, I forgot, we accept everything Slashdot feeds us as gospel. Good thing Bush doesn't read Slashdot, he might have decided to get his preemptive strike 'on'..
You probably don't realize how much power and influence Russia has in Europe simply because it controls all the energy. It doesn't have to shoot any rockets anywhere, it just needs to shut down the pipelines. So you can keep cursing at Putin all you want if it makes you feel better, but Russia is a player that we will still have to reckon with.
And by the way one of these puppies won't be stopped by our multi-bullion dollar missile defense system. Probably should have used that money for healthcare and better schools...Hmm, excessive spending on military infrastructure at the expense of taking care of it's citizens sounds familiar ... oh yeah.. Soviet Union did that. Perhaps we are not that different after all. Now that's a thought!
An attack with those babies will not be stopped by the current generation of missile defense systems. It is _not_ a completely ballistic rocket. In other words predicting, calculating it's trajectory and using all the billions of dollars of infrastructure designed for ballistic missiles is not as useful anymore.
The competition between missile defense and missiles will mostly end up with a win for the missile. This reminds me of the competition between artillery and armor. There are certain artillery shells that no current armor can protect against it.
I was merely speaking 'the language' of the grandparent post. They used an ad-hominem attack because I wrote 'know' instead of 'now' => I am a not a credible source and not a good scientists or not ... (insert whatever). So assuming that ad-hominem attacks work great in arguments, I mentioned that English is my third language to make myself look better. But I have miserably failed as it turns out they speak Dutch and German. (Don't you like the ad nauseam details?) I was just hoping they would be an American and only speak English. What did we learn today kids? -- We learned that ad hominem attacks do not work and are silly.
Sorry, English is my third language. How many languages do you speak?
I was not talking about GIT at all and I was not talking about interfaces. I was saying that CVS is deficient and SVN is usually a better choice. Both SVN and CVS have good interfaces. Please learn to read _and_ understand what is written in the post before replying. Otherwise, it is hard to take your opinion seriously.
You see theoretical scientists (you know the ones that have been working on stuff for decades and still don't have a single experimental piece of evidence) like to make up terminology and throw around big scary formulas to justify wasting time and money working on stuff that cannot even be proven experimentally. Sorry for the bitterness, but I wouldn't even call these people scientists. They might as well say that a giant spaghetti monster flies around and his noodly appendages form tiny knots and those knots are the elementary particles....BUT...OMG! the appendages are so thin that we cannot experimentally detect their presence...but they are there, trust us, here is a big hairy formula (don't worry about the solutions for know) it proves everything -- Give us another PhD!
Yes, that's your opinion and then there are hundreds of project and thousands of developers who disagree. If CVS was so good, there would not be an army of people behind SVN.
What I could never understand is why so many people pay so much money for Hollywood crap. The prices are not cheap -- more than 10 dollars / ticket! And an even better question is why do people risk getting nabbed by the **AA's and downloading this shit. It would really be sad to know that someone will go to jail or pay a $20,000 fine for downloading "Big Momma's House".
The problem with Fusion is if they kill the add-on graphics and you just buy one Fusion processor that costs say $400 to plug into the CPU slot. In the meantime, NVIDIA releases their new generation board and Intel releases a new generation CPU. The consumer can choose to upgrade one or the other or both, but an AMD customer is stuck just one expensive part and would have to upgrade it as one piece.
Perhaps in the future the CPU, the graphics card and the memory will all be on one giant module. You get high performance but not the ability to customize individual components.