I think the previous poster's point, which you missed, is that if a person is so gullible that they'll do something just because they read about it somewhere, then we might as well give up and wait to die. The point is that people have to be smart enough to do a bit of research and think a little bit for themselves.
start hiding all of our files on floppy disks in the air conditioning vents behind the couch. It took a lot of searching to find it there -- would you mind just leaving it on the coffee table next time?
If things taken out of context and lies are a big problem, then releasing the real, complete documents is a great thing. Now people can look up the context of quotes or check if statements are true.
That said, those same soldiers are proud to be serving their nation (the "government" you speak of in your post) (snip) Actually, the Nation is your friends and family and all the other people in the country. It's great that you're proud to serve and protect them. The government is a small group of people who control the nation. Unfortunately, the goals of the government are not always in the best interests of the people, so you should ask yourself if the orders you follow serve the people of the nation, not just the government.
Say for example, you have a region of the midwest united states, the exact middle of the bible belt. For those unfamiliar with the term, that means a place where the christianity is high, and preached loudly, often, and to anyone within earshot, and the ability to be nonchristian is relatively low. But say you have this group of people, and a lot of their searches are of religious material. You could use them as sort of a "expert" group, giving a little more weight to their likes and dislikes as a whole to adjust pagerank for their area of study, religion.
Who (at Google) is going to decide which regions of the world contain the most "experts" on each topic? That sounds like a lot of work. A far better approach is to optimize pagerank for a particular topic -- such as religion -- based on all searches for that topic. Chances are people using the same search terms are looking for the same thing, regardless of where in the world they're searching from. If they're searching for something different, they should be using different search terms.
Very nice post, but I would like to point out that all kinds of information follow from IP (e.g. where you live) which helps search for things like restaurants. I search for restaurants by typing "{restaurant type} {city name}" and there's no need for them to check my IP address.
Seriously though, I read the article and was not impressed:
On traditional hard drives, the more separate files which the operating system has to load, the more seeking across the hard drive is required, and therefore overall performance takes a hit. Sure, there's a tiny performance hit for seek time, but once the libraries are loaded the application will be responsive.
providing support for legacy frameworks (COM, ATL,.NET Framework, etc) Minor point, but the Active Template Library is not a binary framework -- it's a source-code framework to simplify COM development in C++. He doesn't even mention the Win32 API, which is the most important framework for providing backwards compatibility.
including the MSHTML library (Internet Explorer's rendering engine) in the monolithic libraries would provide support for the old rendering functions of Explorer to legacy applications while still remaining hidden from the end-user, the primary complaint in the antitrust cases. On the Windows 7 side of things, Internet Explorer can be abstracted from the Windows 7 codebase making removal/inclusion as simple as installing a normal application. Mshtml.dll is already hidden from the end-user. Internet Explorer is a wrapper around the MsHtml COM control, so it is already a "normal application".
While the anti-Microsoft naysayers out there will claim that this is unethical business practice, however, technical users will appreciate that this is an excellent way of providing new features while maintaining backwards compatibility with legacy applications. I don't see how providing backwards compatibility through a virtual machine would be an unethical business practice, but I do agree that it's a great way to provide new features while still allowing legacy applications to run.
Since there are such obvious errors in this essay, I wonder if he really knows what he's talking about and what his source for information is -- or if he just made it all up.
As a (former) Windows developer I can see that maintaining binary compatibility with the Win32 API is really holding Microsoft back and an Apple-like emulation layer would allow them to switch their focus completely to a new framework such as.NET. It would be a great thing, but if developers are faced with the choice of learning a whole new framework and operating system they may consider switching to Mac or Linux because they'll still have to learn a new framework, but at least it will be a tried and tested one. I don't think Microsoft is willing to take that risk.
You've hit on an important point: tragedy does happen daily, but it doesn't stop the tragedy or improve my life and happiness to know all about it.
Taking it a step further, I think that the evening news and "cop drama shows" create an atmosphere and culture where violence and mistrust are normal. We know that copycat crimes happen, so it is possible that the news actually increases general levels of crime?
The reason people get so screwed up is because they interpret things literally, when all those personifications are meant to be a device to allow wisdom and knowledge about the universe to be preserved and propagated through an oral tradition. Essentially you're saying that religion is a guide for living written in poetry and passed down orally. Since religious teachings are translated to new languages and passed through people like The Telephone Game, it's no surprise that the original interpretations are lost. There's a lot of good advice on cleanliness in Leviticus, but it's not written in clear language.
Imagine legal text written in poetry - EULAs, criminal law, contracts. Imagine medical texts written in poetry. Heck, imagine cooking recipes written in poetry. Everyone would have their own wildly different interpretations and it would be chaos. Poetry is not a good way to convey specific information.
there is just as much need for the scientific community to acknowledge that there are things that science cannot answer We know that science cannot answer all questions. This is why scientific knowledge is written in 'theories' -- we readily admit that our understanding is not complete.
Science doesn't tell you that you can't eat pork, or that you should eat fish on Friday. Science does tell you that you should cook your meat to kill bacteria, but that's clearly good advice. Now that we have the knowledge to understand why meat can make you sick, we can teach the reasons why instead of teaching ancient poetry about what meat is good or bad.
The modern scientific mindset is very fatalistic and nihilistic Science can be described as 'cold' because it doesn't deal with the emotional and cultural aspects of our lives like religion does, but science is not intended to deal with those things. Religion deals with emotions, culture, and technical knowledge such as what meats to eat, but it often gets the technical parts wrong. That's the problem with religion -- poetry is not a good way to convey technical information.
Science is simply a way to gain and test knowledge, so you can use science for that and also have spiritual or religious practices and beliefs to deal with emotional and cultural aspects of life. For example, science tells you what happens to a body when it dies, but doesn't tell you how to deal with the grief. Religion gets the technical parts of death wrong, but it can help you deal with the grief. They're different tools for different jobs.
What if they wrote in the policy book that you can't work there while being black, female, gay or whatever? Could they then fire all the blacks, women, gays and anyone else they don't like?
Just because someone wrote it in the policy book doesn't mean it is or should be legal.
Yes, the transforms can be stored and applied to the source image, but with a large library of files the previews will take ages to appear if each image needs to be transformed. It's better to save a preview of the transformed images on disk and display those.
The only thing preventing me from being able to legally burn a Madonna CD and sell it to you for cheaper than the official distributor is copyright law.
I think the original point is that the artist should own the copyright, not the distributor. What's to prevent an artist from licensing to more than one distributor and letting those distributors compete on their merits. Then there would be an incentive for distributors to keep the prices low, in contrast to the current system where they've been convicted of price fixing.
Plus, imagine that Distributor A releases a CD in a two CD set with some bonus tracks and a booklet with photos and lyrics while Distributor B releases one CD with a simple insert at a lower price. Then consumers could decide who they want to buy from.
You're willing to believe that the exit polls may have been rigged based on no evidence and yet you are not willing to consider that the election may have been rigged based on actual evidence?
MS often breaks their own rules, and the fact that they've used screenshots of existing Windows features to show what NOT to do highlights this. As a specific example, these new guidelines say not to use a Welcome page or a Congratulations page in a Wizard, yet many of their Wizards -- such as the Zip File Wizard -- do exactly that.
It's great that they've written up these UI Guidelines, but it isn't going to make much difference until they start following their own rules. Is a developer who uses Windows daily going to follow these interface guidelines, or are they going to copy the Windows UI style even though it breaks the guidelines?
> If I own a hotel, should I be allowed to turn away people based on their religion? I don't think so.
You *should* be allowed to. That you're not is just one more example of a bad law.
In fact, we should make people wear armbands so we can tell what religion they belong to so we know who to turn away....wait, does that sound like a bad idea to anyone else?
What I thought was interesting in the article was how many of his complaints were probably due not to bad design per se, but to poor practices
Right, the complaints were largely a result of poor practices resulting from bad design. Example: Microsoft provides the System32 folder as a place for the system's libraries, but they do not provide in their design a place for third-party libraries. When third-party developers dump their dlls into system32 it's bad practices resulting from bad design. A similar example is that Microsoft themselves litter the Windows folder with desktop bitmaps, various ini, log and install files and other cruft. When third parties follow suite it is poor practices again, but still resulting from bad design.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the previous poster's point, which you missed, is that if a person is so gullible that they'll do something just because they read about it somewhere, then we might as well give up and wait to die. The point is that people have to be smart enough to do a bit of research and think a little bit for themselves.
If things taken out of context and lies are a big problem, then releasing the real, complete documents is a great thing. Now people can look up the context of quotes or check if statements are true.
Why did you read the article? Just think how much time we could save if nobody read the article!
Who (at Google) is going to decide which regions of the world contain the most "experts" on each topic? That sounds like a lot of work. A far better approach is to optimize pagerank for a particular topic -- such as religion -- based on all searches for that topic. Chances are people using the same search terms are looking for the same thing, regardless of where in the world they're searching from. If they're searching for something different, they should be using different search terms.
Seriously though, I read the article and was not impressed:
On traditional hard drives, the more separate files which the operating system has to load, the more seeking across the hard drive is required, and therefore overall performance takes a hit. Sure, there's a tiny performance hit for seek time, but once the libraries are loaded the application will be responsive.
providing support for legacy frameworks (COM, ATL,
including the MSHTML library (Internet Explorer's rendering engine) in the monolithic libraries would provide support for the old rendering functions of Explorer to legacy applications while still remaining hidden from the end-user, the primary complaint in the antitrust cases. On the Windows 7 side of things, Internet Explorer can be abstracted from the Windows 7 codebase making removal/inclusion as simple as installing a normal application. Mshtml.dll is already hidden from the end-user. Internet Explorer is a wrapper around the MsHtml COM control, so it is already a "normal application".
While the anti-Microsoft naysayers out there will claim that this is unethical business practice, however, technical users will appreciate that this is an excellent way of providing new features while maintaining backwards compatibility with legacy applications. I don't see how providing backwards compatibility through a virtual machine would be an unethical business practice, but I do agree that it's a great way to provide new features while still allowing legacy applications to run.
Since there are such obvious errors in this essay, I wonder if he really knows what he's talking about and what his source for information is -- or if he just made it all up. As a (former) Windows developer I can see that maintaining binary compatibility with the Win32 API is really holding Microsoft back and an Apple-like emulation layer would allow them to switch their focus completely to a new framework such as
You've hit on an important point: tragedy does happen daily, but it doesn't stop the tragedy or improve my life and happiness to know all about it.
Taking it a step further, I think that the evening news and "cop drama shows" create an atmosphere and culture where violence and mistrust are normal. We know that copycat crimes happen, so it is possible that the news actually increases general levels of crime?
The reason people get so screwed up is because they interpret things literally, when all those personifications are meant to be a device to allow wisdom and knowledge about the universe to be preserved and propagated through an oral tradition.
Essentially you're saying that religion is a guide for living written in poetry and passed down orally. Since religious teachings are translated to new languages and passed through people like The Telephone Game, it's no surprise that the original interpretations are lost. There's a lot of good advice on cleanliness in Leviticus, but it's not written in clear language. Imagine legal text written in poetry - EULAs, criminal law, contracts. Imagine medical texts written in poetry. Heck, imagine cooking recipes written in poetry. Everyone would have their own wildly different interpretations and it would be chaos. Poetry is not a good way to convey specific information. there is just as much need for the scientific community to acknowledge that there are things that science cannot answer We know that science cannot answer all questions. This is why scientific knowledge is written in 'theories' -- we readily admit that our understanding is not complete. Science doesn't tell you that you can't eat pork, or that you should eat fish on Friday. Science does tell you that you should cook your meat to kill bacteria, but that's clearly good advice. Now that we have the knowledge to understand why meat can make you sick, we can teach the reasons why instead of teaching ancient poetry about what meat is good or bad. The modern scientific mindset is very fatalistic and nihilistic Science can be described as 'cold' because it doesn't deal with the emotional and cultural aspects of our lives like religion does, but science is not intended to deal with those things. Religion deals with emotions, culture, and technical knowledge such as what meats to eat, but it often gets the technical parts wrong. That's the problem with religion -- poetry is not a good way to convey technical information. Science is simply a way to gain and test knowledge, so you can use science for that and also have spiritual or religious practices and beliefs to deal with emotional and cultural aspects of life. For example, science tells you what happens to a body when it dies, but doesn't tell you how to deal with the grief. Religion gets the technical parts of death wrong, but it can help you deal with the grief. They're different tools for different jobs.
What if they wrote in the policy book that you can't work there while being black, female, gay or whatever? Could they then fire all the blacks, women, gays and anyone else they don't like? Just because someone wrote it in the policy book doesn't mean it is or should be legal.
I propose that this kind of abuse of power based on false pretenses such as "executive power" be called 'georgewbullshit' or maybe just 'bushit'.
Stop making sense!
Yes, the transforms can be stored and applied to the source image, but with a large library of files the previews will take ages to appear if each image needs to be transformed. It's better to save a preview of the transformed images on disk and display those.
That will teach internetnews.com to host their site on a Windows box. :P
The only thing preventing me from being able to legally burn a Madonna CD and sell it to you for cheaper than the official distributor is copyright law.
I think the original point is that the artist should own the copyright, not the distributor. What's to prevent an artist from licensing to more than one distributor and letting those distributors compete on their merits. Then there would be an incentive for distributors to keep the prices low, in contrast to the current system where they've been convicted of price fixing.
Plus, imagine that Distributor A releases a CD in a two CD set with some bonus tracks and a booklet with photos and lyrics while Distributor B releases one CD with a simple insert at a lower price. Then consumers could decide who they want to buy from.
You're willing to believe that the exit polls may have been rigged based on no evidence and yet you are not willing to consider that the election may have been rigged based on actual evidence?
Wait... are you telling us that a salesman lied to you in order to make a sale!? Woah, stop the presses!
I vote we have a National Breast Awareness month (without the cancer) next month.
;)
I like your idea, but maybe we can just use the other eleven months to celebrate breasts without cancer?
MS often breaks their own rules, and the fact that they've used screenshots of existing Windows features to show what NOT to do highlights this. As a specific example, these new guidelines say not to use a Welcome page or a Congratulations page in a Wizard, yet many of their Wizards -- such as the Zip File Wizard -- do exactly that.
It's great that they've written up these UI Guidelines, but it isn't going to make much difference until they start following their own rules. Is a developer who uses Windows daily going to follow these interface guidelines, or are they going to copy the Windows UI style even though it breaks the guidelines?
> If I own a hotel, should I be allowed to turn away people based on their religion? I don't think so.
You *should* be allowed to. That you're not is just one more example of a bad law.
In fact, we should make people wear armbands so we can tell what religion they belong to so we know who to turn away....wait, does that sound like a bad idea to anyone else?
preparing our younger generations for dealing with a new and rapidly evolving world
Is that another way of saying: won't somebody think of the children!
If they all get a blue screen of death at the same time then they'll have something in common to talk about -- sounds like a good start. ;)
In a nutshell, OS-X is built upon a known animal, whereas Windows is an animal which continues to be re-invented, like a leopard
... dog. ;)
I think you've got it wrong. Windows is not like a Leopard even though it wants to be. No, Windows is more of a
What I thought was interesting in the article was how many of his complaints were probably due not to bad design per se, but to poor practices
Right, the complaints were largely a result of poor practices resulting from bad design. Example: Microsoft provides the System32 folder as a place for the system's libraries, but they do not provide in their design a place for third-party libraries. When third-party developers dump their dlls into system32 it's bad practices resulting from bad design. A similar example is that Microsoft themselves litter the Windows folder with desktop bitmaps, various ini, log and install files and other cruft. When third parties follow suite it is poor practices again, but still resulting from bad design.