So you are saying that you would rather use your freedom of speech to convince other people to change the world for you, rather than enacting the change yourself? That sounds a lot like "Do as I say, not as I do."
I myself am not responsible for the 50% of the population that do not vote. My voting one way or the other is not going to get them to vote. But that completely conflicts with what you said in your original reply! You said you are there to convince people to think and behave in a certain way. Now you are doing the opposite because you can't convince them. What you just said is exactly the kind of thinking that makes 50% of the people not vote. Every single one of those people is saying the same dang thing: that they don't matter. My entire point is that not only do they matter, but they are immensely powerful! It only takes 5% of you to make a huuuge difference.
Saying that you won't vote because you are not the majority is the kind of logic that leads to self-justified apathy. Don't pick-up a piece of trash, because what will one piece matter? Don't buy a fuel efficient car, because one car can't change things. Don't vote, because one vote doesn't make a difference. I bet by going out and voting you would convince 10 times as many people as you would by merely voicing your opinion then doing nothing.
If I followed your persuation, I would tell everyone to go out and pick up trash and buy fuel efficient cars, then drive around in my SUV throwing trash out the window while feeling smug about what good I've done.
Much of what I expect Obama to change is more of how the office of the president conducts business. I find that more important than how any candidate claims they will vote on a particular issue.
Off the top of my head: - I think he actually reads bills before he votes on them - He will probably slow the revolving door of the military-industrial complex (simply because he does not have cronies amongst major military contractors) - Restore the air of thoughtful intelligence to the office of the president, as was the tradition generations ago - Stop firing every Attorney General who tells him he can't do something because it violates the constitution - Eliminate the warhawks from the cabinet
Issues-wise: - Establish Network Neutrality - Stop engaging in stupid aggressive overseas wars - Open diplomatic talks to "rogue" nations instead of telling them that they are evil and must be stopped
Until such a candidate exists, there will be no acceptable choice for president. This is where you are selling yourself short. A party must get 5% of the vote to get recognition and funding by the government. In the last election about 50% of the population did not vote. So if they just voted completely randomly for 3rd-party candidates, there would be 10 additional recognized, funded political parties in this country.
So by choosing not to vote, you are cutting-off your own possibilities for alternatives. So please, go out and vote Green or Libertarian or whatever is a 3rd-party in your state. Then, you just might have a chance. Until then, you are wasting your breath.
Could you please list the reasons you hate McCain, and the reasons you hate Obama? (They are such vastly different people I cannot imagine seeing much overlap on that list. I'm very curious.)
Why does Slashdot love Google sooo much? Frankly, I find Yahoo to be a very competitive search engine. There are a few things I think it does better than Google, especial when searching for obscure information. Yahoo's movies, weather, etc. make it really useful. I think for the average home user who wants a "portal" Yahoo is the best balance between a pure search engine and a good home page. Why does everyone hate them so much?
The part tht scares me isn't the power of quantum cryptography. It's the power of a quantum computer to decrypt classical cryptography. It really does look like the end to privacy might be just around the corner.
And hundreds of years ago the American Indians were forced off their land by evil British colonists. Boycott Americans until they return the land to the natives! This same heinous act was done by the Dutch, French, and Spanish too. Boycott Danish goods because they were made by the descendents of African slaves!
Only Klingons blame descendants for 7 generations.
It's funny that you say that, because on my MacBook Pro it is the exact opposite. Safari does this and Internet Explorer does not.
Under OS X, when you click an installer image downloaded by Safari it says something like "The application 'Whatever' was downloaded from the Internet on {date}. Are you sure this is safe to open?'
I sometimes use IE on Windows (for testing sites I develop) and I've never seen a comparable message from Internet Explorer.
Maybe you are talking about IE on Vista and Safari on Windows?
I wonder what kinds of interesting and useful things one could do with that ability. - See recent places you've searched? - Find out where you and your friends live? - Access files on your hard drive?
Sorry to sound overly skeptical, but I remember when Microsoft thought that browser plug-ins were a great idea so they made Office embeddable inside a browser. Then came 10 years of security hell.
Technically you are right. I think the 2 missing items were: 1) Preemptive multitasking 2) Memory protection
Without #1 it was tough to have much running in the background. Ironically, it multi-tasked DOS apps better than Windows apps because it would preempt them.
#2 was impossible since Windows 3.x still ran on 286's so it could not assume memory protections, 32-bit addressing, etc. It's really quite amazing what it could do on a platform with such a minimal "protected mode"
First and foremost, the Pentium Pro did not run 16-bit apps slower than 32-bit apps. The chip was optimized for 32-bit, since that is the direction Intel thought things would go. But it was definitely not slower.
At the time, Intel decided to market the Pentium Pro as a server chip, so it was not meant to run Windows '95. It was meant for NT and OS/2 exclusively. The Pentium Pro was supposed to compete with the big iron servers running Unix, and Intel gambled that 32-bit software would replace 16-bit software in time. They were right: But they were ahead of their time. The market was not ready to get rid of the cheap desktop OSs and the vast quantities of 16-bit software.
So Windows '95 was indeed a high point for Microsoft. They were the first to deliver a stable 32-bit-ish graphical OS to Intel PCs. And it was the first OS to integrate well enough with DOS to replace it. Windows 3.1 was more of a graphical shell than an operating system. Windows '95 is why we use the term "wintel" and it is why IBM and OS/2 did not win the operating system wars.
Back to the thread; So there was so much 16 bit code in the "new" 32bit Windows 95 that a new CPU optimized for 32bit code ran the software way slower than the old 16bit optimized Pentium CPU. Exactly what you'd expect from a company where marketing is job #1. IMO. Microsoft optimized Windows '95 to run on the CPUs available at the time, not the Pentium Pro which wasn't even released yet. If you wanted true a protected-mode 32-bit OS, Windows NT was the target. And it ran well on a Pentium Pro. Perhaps, had Microsoft done what you are suggesting, then OS/2 might be dominating the desktop today.
I can think of several ideas as to why it won't be on the Wii: 1) No 6-button controller. From the article:
Six-button controls for the game will return although having seen other fighting games on the Wii, I think a few gestures could more than make-up for that.
2) Limited graphics. But I'm not sure if that is the case or not:
renders characters and environments in stylized 3D, while the game plays in the classic Street Fighter 2D perspective "with additional 3D camera flourishes". The Wii has no problems doing some nice cell-shaded 3D stuff. It doesn't sound like they are doing hyper-realistic HDR rendering. And I don't see how that would apply to SF.
3) Wrong market. Maybe Wii gamers just don't play stuff like this. What have the sales been on other Wii fighting games like Bleach?
I have nothing much against illegal immigrants, as long as they are forced to pay taxes, and live by the greater societies standards. They call those "legal immigrants."
So, you really do have something against "illegal immigrants" which is perfectly rational, although politically incorrect. And the political correctness part is is kinda scary, since that means they have enough political power that society is afraid of them.
People just need to stop using web browsers as a way to control the desktop. If you are in a domain, then the domain administrator can push executable apps, policies, and commands down to the computer. HTML, Javascript, and ActiveX are not tools for administering networks.
Also, having developed desktop applications that used embedded IE, I can tell you the zones system is completely screwed-up. It changes in every version, the APIs are inconsistent across different Windows OS's, and there are crazy loopholes with magical URLs like res:, file:, about:. Then there's exceptions for files on the local hard drive, on the network, on mapped-drives. It's a total mess. All of it really just to support some stupid extensions to Javascript, VBScript, and Microsoft Office - that should never have been added in the first place.
I bet they install those boxes in the homes of chronic TV watchers. They won't waste their technology on somebody who Tivos the Discovery Channel and downloads the rest from BitTorrent. Just not the audience they need to monitor.
I thought that part of the FCC regs said that digital receivers must disable or down-scale analog outputs if the broadcast-flag was present. Or does it just mean that they put Macrovision into the analog signal? Either way, don't count on your analog hole forever.
Why the fuck would the United States Air Force want a botnet Because a botnet lets you do a DDOS attack more effectively since it comes from multiple points. There was a Slashdot article about it last week.
Why WndProc, HWND and WM_ messages are still there? understand Microsoft built a software monopoly... Having to rely on WndProc, HWND and WM_ messages seems a very bad design... This has nothing to do with Microsoft being a monopoly. You don't have to "rely on" any of those things. WinForms, GTK, GTK#, pyGTK, etc. are all the same way. In every windowing system, there is always a way to get to the low-level handle for the object. It's a "just in case" measure so that if there is some functionality that wasn't 100% wrapped by the API, or for compatibility with a 3rd-party library so that the developer isn't stuck. It isn't a disadvantage. In both WinForms and GTK#, it is extremely rare to need access to the HWND.
Similarly powerful PCs cost 1/2 as much as a Mac does, in almost all areas. Not according to any reviews I've ever found. For example, this month's Popular Mechanics comparison pits a PC and a Mac at the exact same price, and the Mac blows it away.
You will find this to be consistent. I bought my MacBook Pro after reading the review in the December issue of Laptop magazine where the regular MacBook was the price/performance king in the home/office category. I personally priced a Dell, an AlienWare, and an Apple. The AlienWare was the cheapest (despite the reputation they have, AlienWare laptops are very price competitive in the high-end), Apple was the next by about $100, and the Dell was over $1000 more expensive. I went with the Apple because it was half the weight of the Alienware and because the Alienware came with Vista.
The reason Apple has this reputation is because they don't sell cheap computers. You can compare an $1800 PC with an $1800 Mac: but you can't compare a $500 PC to a $500 Mac because Apple doesn't sell to that market.
* Note: In defense of PC manufacturers, they are crippled recently because Vista is making their benchmarks look terrible. When they compare the Mac's running XP to PC's running XP, the OS X advantage goes away and the results are nearly identical at the same price.
Siverlight is a far better environment for developing real applications in than Flash, which is really only suitable for animations (from a software developer perspective). When Flash started, it was as you say: it was meant for animations, with a little bit of scripting thrown in. The Macromedia/Adobe development environments are still geared toward this. Same with the books and all the cheesy animation tools and slideshow tools. Seeing that hole, Microsoft replicated Flash, but geared the tools for developers and marketed it as such. But under the hood Flash is far better for developing applications than Silverlight. But to realize this, you must 1) Use tools other than the Adobe animation-like tools, and 2) Try to actually maek a real app in Silverlight.
For tools, FlashDevelop and Flex will make you change your mind. Today, Flash is the de-facto standard for creating user interfaces in serious games (Ex: Command and Conquer), and is also common for casual games and cell-phone apps. Flex is geared toward web-application development.
Creating serious web apps in Silverlight is nearly impossible. Silverlight 1.0 has no support for controls, which makes it painful to develop a UI. Since it uses Javascript it has no advantage for the developer over Flash. In theory, Silverlight 1.1 will be comparable to (or better than) Flash for application development. But the language isn't there, the tools are unstable, and even Microsoft partners will tell you to make your web apps in Flash.
On that last part: I've been to several presentations on Silverlight. Microsoft is paying partners to learn Silverlight and to replace their Flash apps with Silverlight. Then they show it off at every user group they can. But if you talk to those partners after the presentation, or you pay them for their services, they will recommend and use Flash unless Microsoft is throwing money at them. They are hopeful for Silverlight's future, but there is presently no benefit to it. (Even once Silverlight 1.1 is out and stable, it will still take time for the tools, 3rd-party support, client-side support, etc. to proliferate)
Much like Java, Flash is finding a market in places it wasn't intended for. In the 90's, Java was headed toward a client-side UI for cross-platform web apps. But it found success in server-side development, largely thanks to beans. Flash is finding that developers are in need of an easy scripting language with good UI tools built-in. And the 3rd-party Flash players, flash tools, plus stuff like Flex and AIM are making Flash branch into other areas. If Adobe is smart, and realizes that this is Flash's future (not cheesy intro screens on web sites) then Flash will do well. If they don't realize this, then Flash will be relegated to silly animations and might eventually vanish. The ball is in Adobe's court.
Yeah, that does seem to conflict with the other line I quoted. If there was a Trojan in there, what OS did it apply to? Was it in the installer or in the language packs that it installed?
Slashdot Mirror
So you are saying that you would rather use your freedom of speech to convince other people to change the world for you, rather than enacting the change yourself? That sounds a lot like "Do as I say, not as I do."
People follow by example.
Saying that you won't vote because you are not the majority is the kind of logic that leads to self-justified apathy. Don't pick-up a piece of trash, because what will one piece matter? Don't buy a fuel efficient car, because one car can't change things. Don't vote, because one vote doesn't make a difference. I bet by going out and voting you would convince 10 times as many people as you would by merely voicing your opinion then doing nothing.
If I followed your persuation, I would tell everyone to go out and pick up trash and buy fuel efficient cars, then drive around in my SUV throwing trash out the window while feeling smug about what good I've done.
Much of what I expect Obama to change is more of how the office of the president conducts business. I find that more important than how any candidate claims they will vote on a particular issue.
Off the top of my head:
- I think he actually reads bills before he votes on them
- He will probably slow the revolving door of the military-industrial complex (simply because he does not have cronies amongst major military contractors)
- Restore the air of thoughtful intelligence to the office of the president, as was the tradition generations ago
- Stop firing every Attorney General who tells him he can't do something because it violates the constitution
- Eliminate the warhawks from the cabinet
Issues-wise:
- Establish Network Neutrality
- Stop engaging in stupid aggressive overseas wars
- Open diplomatic talks to "rogue" nations instead of telling them that they are evil and must be stopped
So by choosing not to vote, you are cutting-off your own possibilities for alternatives. So please, go out and vote Green or Libertarian or whatever is a 3rd-party in your state. Then, you just might have a chance. Until then, you are wasting your breath.
Could you please list the reasons you hate McCain, and the reasons you hate Obama? (They are such vastly different people I cannot imagine seeing much overlap on that list. I'm very curious.)
Why does Slashdot love Google sooo much? Frankly, I find Yahoo to be a very competitive search engine. There are a few things I think it does better than Google, especial when searching for obscure information. Yahoo's movies, weather, etc. make it really useful. I think for the average home user who wants a "portal" Yahoo is the best balance between a pure search engine and a good home page. Why does everyone hate them so much?
The part tht scares me isn't the power of quantum cryptography. It's the power of a quantum computer to decrypt classical cryptography. It really does look like the end to privacy might be just around the corner.
And hundreds of years ago the American Indians were forced off their land by evil British colonists. Boycott Americans until they return the land to the natives! This same heinous act was done by the Dutch, French, and Spanish too. Boycott Danish goods because they were made by the descendents of African slaves!
Only Klingons blame descendants for 7 generations.
It's funny that you say that, because on my MacBook Pro it is the exact opposite. Safari does this and Internet Explorer does not.
Under OS X, when you click an installer image downloaded by Safari it says something like "The application 'Whatever' was downloaded from the Internet on {date}. Are you sure this is safe to open?'
I sometimes use IE on Windows (for testing sites I develop) and I've never seen a comparable message from Internet Explorer.
Maybe you are talking about IE on Vista and Safari on Windows?
I wonder what kinds of interesting and useful things one could do with that ability.
- See recent places you've searched?
- Find out where you and your friends live?
- Access files on your hard drive?
Sorry to sound overly skeptical, but I remember when Microsoft thought that browser plug-ins were a great idea so they made Office embeddable inside a browser. Then came 10 years of security hell.
Technically you are right. I think the 2 missing items were:
1) Preemptive multitasking
2) Memory protection
Without #1 it was tough to have much running in the background. Ironically, it multi-tasked DOS apps better than Windows apps because it would preempt them.
#2 was impossible since Windows 3.x still ran on 286's so it could not assume memory protections, 32-bit addressing, etc. It's really quite amazing what it could do on a platform with such a minimal "protected mode"
At the time, Intel decided to market the Pentium Pro as a server chip, so it was not meant to run Windows '95. It was meant for NT and OS/2 exclusively. The Pentium Pro was supposed to compete with the big iron servers running Unix, and Intel gambled that 32-bit software would replace 16-bit software in time. They were right: But they were ahead of their time. The market was not ready to get rid of the cheap desktop OSs and the vast quantities of 16-bit software.
So Windows '95 was indeed a high point for Microsoft. They were the first to deliver a stable 32-bit-ish graphical OS to Intel PCs. And it was the first OS to integrate well enough with DOS to replace it. Windows 3.1 was more of a graphical shell than an operating system. Windows '95 is why we use the term "wintel" and it is why IBM and OS/2 did not win the operating system wars. Back to the thread; So there was so much 16 bit code in the "new" 32bit Windows 95 that a new CPU optimized for 32bit code ran the software way slower than the old 16bit optimized Pentium CPU. Exactly what you'd expect from a company where marketing is job #1. IMO. Microsoft optimized Windows '95 to run on the CPUs available at the time, not the Pentium Pro which wasn't even released yet. If you wanted true a protected-mode 32-bit OS, Windows NT was the target. And it ran well on a Pentium Pro. Perhaps, had Microsoft done what you are suggesting, then OS/2 might be dominating the desktop today.
1) No 6-button controller. From the article: Six-button controls for the game will return although having seen other fighting games on the Wii, I think a few gestures could more than make-up for that.
2) Limited graphics. But I'm not sure if that is the case or not: renders characters and environments in stylized 3D, while the game plays in the classic Street Fighter 2D perspective "with additional 3D camera flourishes". The Wii has no problems doing some nice cell-shaded 3D stuff. It doesn't sound like they are doing hyper-realistic HDR rendering. And I don't see how that would apply to SF.
3) Wrong market. Maybe Wii gamers just don't play stuff like this. What have the sales been on other Wii fighting games like Bleach?
So, you really do have something against "illegal immigrants" which is perfectly rational, although politically incorrect. And the political correctness part is is kinda scary, since that means they have enough political power that society is afraid of them.
This is great! I've got a take home quiz due next week - I'll just fax it to Fermilab and wait for the answers to appear on Slashdot!
There's also billions of photons coming out of the Sun every second. Yet we still use light to communicate.
People just need to stop using web browsers as a way to control the desktop. If you are in a domain, then the domain administrator can push executable apps, policies, and commands down to the computer. HTML, Javascript, and ActiveX are not tools for administering networks.
Also, having developed desktop applications that used embedded IE, I can tell you the zones system is completely screwed-up. It changes in every version, the APIs are inconsistent across different Windows OS's, and there are crazy loopholes with magical URLs like res:, file:, about:. Then there's exceptions for files on the local hard drive, on the network, on mapped-drives. It's a total mess. All of it really just to support some stupid extensions to Javascript, VBScript, and Microsoft Office - that should never have been added in the first place.
I bet they install those boxes in the homes of chronic TV watchers. They won't waste their technology on somebody who Tivos the Discovery Channel and downloads the rest from BitTorrent. Just not the audience they need to monitor.
I thought that part of the FCC regs said that digital receivers must disable or down-scale analog outputs if the broadcast-flag was present. Or does it just mean that they put Macrovision into the analog signal? Either way, don't count on your analog hole forever.
You will find this to be consistent. I bought my MacBook Pro after reading the review in the December issue of Laptop magazine where the regular MacBook was the price/performance king in the home/office category. I personally priced a Dell, an AlienWare, and an Apple. The AlienWare was the cheapest (despite the reputation they have, AlienWare laptops are very price competitive in the high-end), Apple was the next by about $100, and the Dell was over $1000 more expensive. I went with the Apple because it was half the weight of the Alienware and because the Alienware came with Vista.
The reason Apple has this reputation is because they don't sell cheap computers. You can compare an $1800 PC with an $1800 Mac: but you can't compare a $500 PC to a $500 Mac because Apple doesn't sell to that market.
* Note: In defense of PC manufacturers, they are crippled recently because Vista is making their benchmarks look terrible. When they compare the Mac's running XP to PC's running XP, the OS X advantage goes away and the results are nearly identical at the same price.
For tools, FlashDevelop and Flex will make you change your mind. Today, Flash is the de-facto standard for creating user interfaces in serious games (Ex: Command and Conquer), and is also common for casual games and cell-phone apps. Flex is geared toward web-application development.
Creating serious web apps in Silverlight is nearly impossible. Silverlight 1.0 has no support for controls, which makes it painful to develop a UI. Since it uses Javascript it has no advantage for the developer over Flash. In theory, Silverlight 1.1 will be comparable to (or better than) Flash for application development. But the language isn't there, the tools are unstable, and even Microsoft partners will tell you to make your web apps in Flash.
On that last part: I've been to several presentations on Silverlight. Microsoft is paying partners to learn Silverlight and to replace their Flash apps with Silverlight. Then they show it off at every user group they can. But if you talk to those partners after the presentation, or you pay them for their services, they will recommend and use Flash unless Microsoft is throwing money at them. They are hopeful for Silverlight's future, but there is presently no benefit to it. (Even once Silverlight 1.1 is out and stable, it will still take time for the tools, 3rd-party support, client-side support, etc. to proliferate)
Much like Java, Flash is finding a market in places it wasn't intended for. In the 90's, Java was headed toward a client-side UI for cross-platform web apps. But it found success in server-side development, largely thanks to beans. Flash is finding that developers are in need of an easy scripting language with good UI tools built-in. And the 3rd-party Flash players, flash tools, plus stuff like Flex and AIM are making Flash branch into other areas. If Adobe is smart, and realizes that this is Flash's future (not cheesy intro screens on web sites) then Flash will do well. If they don't realize this, then Flash will be relegated to silly animations and might eventually vanish. The ball is in Adobe's court.
Yeah, that does seem to conflict with the other line I quoted. If there was a Trojan in there, what OS did it apply to? Was it in the installer or in the language packs that it installed?
Fair enough. So long as we don't have a pipe dream of covering an area the size of Australia.