I wasn't actually looking for these common reasons why open source can be superior from a "I want to help as many people as possible" point of view. I'm wondering why even though there is a working closed source driver, even if its limited in its scope(only X86, only ppc, only whatever), why open source people would rather make it hard for others and not make those drivers also available. It's a completely different question. People confuse the two points constantly. I have read slashdot. I've worked with open source. I know the advantages, I also know the disadvantages. I am wondering why put one more hinderance in the way of making an open source program work more seemlessly simply because a part must be closed source(ie, the driver).
This is a different question than why use open source drivers in general. Let me illustrate. The response to my question I originally got was simply that ubuntu people didn't want to hinder the freedom of their machine by including the driver. Besides the fact that this is senseless(no one is forced to use that driver, simply because they aren't forced to buy that particular piece of hardware), that is no reason to put one more roadblock in the way of someone that loves linux but doesn't have the money to buy new hardware just to transition to new software. In this case, I would have just dumped that version of linux because it didn't make itself usable when it could have. Mine was a question on why be senselessly hardheaded. The advantages of open source to this discussion are irrelevent becasue there isn't and won't be an open source driver for the near term.
oh I don't know, having to live with an intel CPU and have a working nvidia graphics card seems far above not having the graphics card at all. Yes, I agree. I never said there weren't disadvantages. all I said was that you get the same treatment. It seems everyone thinks I didn't say that. just read the original post, that is all it said.
I'm not arguing which is superior, I'm not arguing which gives the most flexibility, and I'm not arguing which is the most profitable(because these probably contradict). I simply said that the intel drivers, as a poster said, existed and worked and the only reason that someone gave that they weren't included was that it somehow impinged on the freedom of their linux box(which it in no way does, a person is free to not use that driver).
guess what, the rich are gonna get that treatment. Its the advantage of working your way up to the top. Its also the advantage of being born in the top.
I didn't say it would send peopel to public transport either. I said it would change many people's buying habbits driving more and more people to buy cars with higher fuel efficiency. That's it. and I will bet dollars to dimes it did happen in the UK and all you are giving is your personal experience(which in no way always represents the real market). I bet more people do take public transport now. Try getting real stats before you say it doesn't work. Or maybe there are more cars on the road due to an economic boom that made it possible to continue with a lifestyle that people preferred.
If you are always worried about the transition costs, you will get stuck in the rut most governments are in. Helping people indefinitely for something that should have originally only taken a small amount of time. The market does work. I guarantee there are price points for oil that will make people either drive less or go from point A to B more efficiently.
your retorical question has a simple retorical answer, why didn't the people who came up with google's serach engine go work for Yahoo when they figured it out? Because they thought it was the best and could make them money. Its why noone who really thinks they can take a market by storm would ever give it away to another company.
Microsoft has been branching out into more in depth search, home media(I think they call it the digital lifestyle, but I'm not sure). Apple has been branching out into legal music download market, the MP3 player market, and there are rumors of branching out into a true Operating system company. Sure seems like the two businesses you were looking at are branching out constantly.
Why? Because there is money in it. MS and Apple have saturated their market. The leaders remember how they originally saw booming growth, delving into the new markets and tried to make a killing. Seems like MS is doing it again into the market that Yahoo trailblazed and Google now heads up.
nice play on words, but my question remains, if the driver is pre compiled and works fine for both windows and linux, why does a linux user feel they should have more than that. It was a simple question. I'm not talking about worsening the situation. I'm talking about including working drivers whether they are open source or not for a level of ease of use(to support already paid for hardware).
Now what you are saying is a good reason to release detailed specs for the hardware, except a lot of it could be trade secrets.
I guess I should clarify, I mean end user linux users and end user windows users. Both see the same thing. What companies do between themselves I have no knowledge of though I don't doubt at all that a company would share its source to let MS test it and tweek its own products(when it is a major piece of hardware).
but the point I am trying to make is oil prices don't spike in that kind of way. 20 or 25% happens, but the only time we have seen the price of end products like gasoline multiply was during an oil strike. What I mean is the economy is amazingly resilient. People think that teh price of oil will rise adn nothing will change until "it gets to be too late". Chances of that happening are unfathomable in an open economy.
wow, a linux fanatic. Yes your aims are different but your standards are not higher at all. This standards are also just different. My standard is an up to date computer that runs seemlessly. The day you get linux to run without any hardware support, I commend you(and suggest a patent). Until the day you figure out how to build that computer(and not have it be 10 years out of date), the rest of us will happily admit vendor support is a prerequisite. If a linux machine wants a top of the line graphics card, guess what it needs? if it wants to run any hardware at all, it needs some support from the vendors.
Every linux junkie(some of my very close friends) I know has always told me the biggest problem they have with getting linux up and running on a random machine is driver support. When my buddy spent a week of all his free time trying to get his wireless card working(in the end he couldn't get it to work in certain flavors of linux), he cursed not having vendor support. So it seems not everyone can conjure up drivers by just looking at their wireless card and not everyone can afford to find the wireless card that works for all flavors of linux. Now that sucks and the vendor is partially at fault here, but when the vendor takes the time to write a working driver, it would be nice for the flavors of Linux to include it.
Many companies have long since chosen not to cater to power users and have been doing just fine. I'm not sure what this process is you are referring to. All those companies seem to be only getting stronger(as are the comapnies that do cater to power users). Just because Joe Nerd can use the command line in his sleep doesn't mean Joe Sixpack has any desire at all for a machine where he has to do that.
Nothing I said was designed to offend but obviously you are trying to do just that. All I said was as long as certain flavors of linux will not even include closed source drivers to make their product more usable(out of the box), those brands will have a steeper learning curve. Redhat was a breeze for me to get up and running. Mandrake almost worked. It was downhill from there.
Just read what I wrote again and turn off your "everyone who isn't an open source zealot is obviously in bed with bill gates" alarm for just 2 seconds. Maybe you'll get my point.
its not something that does damage as in sets us back. people really overblow this problem. It means growth will slow down. And guess what, those rising oil prices are the greatest incentive towards making cars more "green".
Think about all the people who choose to buy fuel efficient cars. Every person I know who buys them does so because it saves them a great deal of money on gas. Oil prices get up to 70 or 80 dollars a barrel(which isn't hard to imagine with production not increasing by much and China beginning to consume oil on the level of the US) and you will see very few people who are willing to spend 100 dollars to drive a hummer 100 miles. It just gets too damn expensive.
Money works both ways. Making it drives what companies will produce and saving it drives what consumers demand(in large part). So I say if you really want to protect the environment from car emissions, find some way to double the price of oil rather quickly.
but the driver doesn't have to be given out under the GPL. That is the difference. Of course you can't release something under the GPL that is just an.exe, but there is not rule that you have to do that. Now if they included some of linux's source code in the writing of the driver, then it would be a violation of the GPL, but there is no need for them to do that.
I think you got your example wrong. Vendors like intel cooperate just the same with windows as they do with Linux, they release compiled drivers. Why someone who runs linux feels they should get more than that confounds me.
Really, its as long as open source zealots are not willing to coexist with closed source(even though most closed source is willing to go the other way) many Linux distributions will have a steeper learning curve.
47 valedictorians is absurd, but grade inflation in most public schools I've had experience with is nonexistent. At my school there was at times 2 valedictorians but that was always two very smart people who took the highest classes and aced them all.
And slide rules are as bad as calculators. Both can be done very mechanically. Neither can help you understand what is going on. The only difference is a slide rule is slower.
I like your second to last point though. But what you miss is improvements in our ability to educate usually have a lot to do with adding in new technology(yes, that slide rule you want everyone to use was once a new technology, and I'm sure people like you existed back then who said paper and pencil was the only way to really learn math).
How about we all just admit something simple: education in the US is one of the best in the world.
If you need any proof, look at which country dominates in higher education(the US) and also remember that none of these schools are dominated by students from other countries. US students on average do not do well on standardized tests but we are changing that. Thanks to Bush and those like him, we now have a school system in some areas(especially Florida) where 75% of the education a student recieves is centered on how to excel on a test(hurray for the critical thinking we are building).
I say one thing could fix most of the "problems" we encounter in public education, parental involvement(or in some cases, having the parents be there at all).
your first example isn't any good. A vast majority of Linux has been done by paid developers for some time. Of course, the community is invaluable in that they are willing to do a great deal of bug testing and correct small problems(which is very important), but the leaps have been driven in the last 8 or so years starting wtih RedHat and now several companies.
The second point you make really is a moot point, think about open source. 99% of the stuff is written for the people who are writing it. of course they are going to know what they want, but then again, the target audience usually remains incredibly small.
The amateur quote you are pissed about is probably an interpretation thing. I figured what he meant was exactly what you say he did, programmers doing it in their free time. That still makes them amateurs!! its the definition of the world. Being involved in an area and not getting paid. Think amateur figure skater who gets a gold at the olympics, are they somehow an inferior group to profressional figure skaters?
I don't think this guy feels that open source is a bad model, just that to become COMMERICALLY VIABLE a project needs to get funding. All he means is its the next step. VLC is the best media player I have ever used and I think the world of the people willing to take the effort to program something so good. But that doesn't mean it can begin to compete with WMP(which I hate, and I'm not implying that the project ever needs to do this) unless the development fundamentally changes to address the needs of people who don't know anything about the project. For those things, corporations and marketting departments are worth their weight in gold.
no, the effects have been showing for quite some time with the german education system. its why there are several movements to get rid of the 3 tiered foolery. I would find it interesting that germany once led the world in scientific research and for the last 50 years has had only menial contributions(especially compared to what they used to do)
yeah, but unfortunately, this virus, and most virii in general, are not things that make systems more secure. Usually the patch preceeds the virus(or is out at around the same time). People who make viruses are ass holes. People who find the holes are the ones driving security forward.
anyways, the rest of the world was not having fun with this. It was just a kid with mediocre skills(he didn't exactly find this exploit, it was already found and patched) trying to be an asshole for attention.
I'm all for criminalizing virus writers and throwing in Jail for absurd periods of time. I'm also all for preserving the rights of a person to find and publish an exploit to see that they get fixed quickly.
why should it go one way and not the other? if the retard can get off being tried as a child, why can't the prodigy be held to a higher standard?
maybe its the same reason Germany's education system is in the pits.
Re:Hope it's better than ILM of the past.
on
Lucas's New HQ
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
easy, it can be a sweatshop because lots of geeks are foolish enough to greatly desire that job. Its just supply and demand. as long as the worker doesn't think of it as exploitation, then it isn't. If he does and sticks with it with when there are definitely other jobs to be had, then he is just an idiot.
you can work somewhere else, its not nonsense. people like to complain. and hey, those people have all the intangible benefits of saying they worked on The Phantom Menace.
GO is not more complex than chess by any means. It is the simplicity of the game that gets computers. The problems is the sheer size of the board. Unlike chess, there are 225 opening moves(15x15 board) in Go. The patterns are actually quite simple in the game, except they can be entered into in so many different ways.
The funny thing is its hard to program computers to see patterns. Early computers brute forced chess, and they were terrible. Most human players well below the master level would be even opponents. The best programs today do a mixture of brute force and pattern recognition.
Programming Go is just not the holy grail that programming chess is right now. Give it time, and maybe IBM, and you will probably see huge leaps and bounds in the skill of computer controlled players.
if you mean proof by consensus of the educated class, then the earth has been round well before the 16th century. just to let you know. When columbus sailed the educated class knew quite well the earth was round(at least had more than enough evidence for this) and most sailors believed the earth to be round from experience.
actually, reviewer needs to learn that in a book about sci-fi or SF, things about LOTR is completely off basis. Just because people who like sci-fi also like fantasy, they are not the same. Also, the reviewer probably needs to realize that comic book heroes are NOT sci-fi by the measures of almost all people. Comic books are mostly their own domain(at least the classic comic books which have been the ones to be turned into movies).
If the reviewer is going to bash someone for including Small Soldiers, he should probably figure out that what he wanted to read about had nothing at all to do with the book title as well.
history is quite a ways against you on that, before wwII we almost always completely dismantled our armed forces after a war. and when a new war came, we reorganized. Only after WWII and our decision to involve ourselves in everything going on in the rest of the world(and to tell people who to do it right) did we require a full time large army. And the only time we were attacked(besides indian wars that were all small scale after 1812) was the war of 1812. No other war required us to quickly defend from an invading force.
anywyas, ways dictators are supported by a large and powerful army. So I don't know if your statement of that army keeping the dictator our is misguided or merely not properly clarified(ie. a military who's vast majority of its loyality is to the people of a country and not a single person).
rape is not something you do to simply survive, its something a pitiful excuse for a human being does. Guess what, lots of men in the military are like inmates in prison, keep them away from women they can get for long enough and they turn to rape.
It in no way makes them a good person. It makes them little more than an animal.
This isn't to say everyone in the military is that. But to defend indefensible actions (that do not keep them alive) is simply sad.
that's just complete horse shit. Give me any complex program, no matter how its developed and I guarantee someone will find a weakness in it. There isn't a single program yet to be completely secure.
Attacks improve just as programming does. Crackers exploit what will always exist.
Consider a very real world example outside of computers. The WTC was built to withstand a strike from a 737, the largest plane at the time. Guess what they got hit with? Bigger planes. Tools improve just as code does. We can always look back and say the WTC should have been built to withstand an even bigger plane, but then they would just be vulnerable to the next largest one.
Same thing happens with computers. Just as the tech improves, so do the methods of breaking the technology. There is no cracker that is beneficial. I would rather live in a world without crackers and all the tech they have spawned(mainly Virus scanners and fire walls) than have the new programs I have to pay for. That's like thanking morons with guns for giving us kevlar vests.
Oh, and if you think it helps people in the long run, I can't wait to see the looks on VISA or MC's face when they or their customers see how much money was stolen(at no fault of either of them).
you're wrong again, what you are complaining about is poor case design. A person could spend 2 hours and do it themselves and save several hundred dollars as compared to a Mac.
Now if your time is worth more than a couple hundred dollars per hour, go for the Mac. For me, cheaper, faster, adn just as easy to mess with is more than worth it.
besides the other point made about your post, your plain wrong. YOu seem to act like you know something of economics here. which is fine, but you seem to think you need to be in the industry to know something about this. So here is one:
Software does not have a cost that grows with each copy sold simply because there isn't a single EULA that doesn't absolve the company for any faults in the program.
Another good response was made earlier to this, but this is far from insightful. Having to fix problems simply means the time wasn't taken earlier to do it. If you choose not to fix it, then so be it. But this isn't like an engine that breaks down after 4 years, long after any reasonable company would test it. It is a problem that was there from the beginning.
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't actually looking for these common reasons why open source can be superior from a "I want to help as many people as possible" point of view. I'm wondering why even though there is a working closed source driver, even if its limited in its scope(only X86, only ppc, only whatever), why open source people would rather make it hard for others and not make those drivers also available. It's a completely different question. People confuse the two points constantly. I have read slashdot. I've worked with open source. I know the advantages, I also know the disadvantages. I am wondering why put one more hinderance in the way of making an open source program work more seemlessly simply because a part must be closed source(ie, the driver).
This is a different question than why use open source drivers in general. Let me illustrate. The response to my question I originally got was simply that ubuntu people didn't want to hinder the freedom of their machine by including the driver. Besides the fact that this is senseless(no one is forced to use that driver, simply because they aren't forced to buy that particular piece of hardware), that is no reason to put one more roadblock in the way of someone that loves linux but doesn't have the money to buy new hardware just to transition to new software. In this case, I would have just dumped that version of linux because it didn't make itself usable when it could have. Mine was a question on why be senselessly hardheaded. The advantages of open source to this discussion are irrelevent becasue there isn't and won't be an open source driver for the near term.
oh I don't know, having to live with an intel CPU and have a working nvidia graphics card seems far above not having the graphics card at all. Yes, I agree. I never said there weren't disadvantages. all I said was that you get the same treatment. It seems everyone thinks I didn't say that. just read the original post, that is all it said.
I'm not arguing which is superior, I'm not arguing which gives the most flexibility, and I'm not arguing which is the most profitable(because these probably contradict). I simply said that the intel drivers, as a poster said, existed and worked and the only reason that someone gave that they weren't included was that it somehow impinged on the freedom of their linux box(which it in no way does, a person is free to not use that driver).
guess what, the rich are gonna get that treatment. Its the advantage of working your way up to the top. Its also the advantage of being born in the top.
I didn't say it would send peopel to public transport either. I said it would change many people's buying habbits driving more and more people to buy cars with higher fuel efficiency. That's it. and I will bet dollars to dimes it did happen in the UK and all you are giving is your personal experience(which in no way always represents the real market). I bet more people do take public transport now. Try getting real stats before you say it doesn't work. Or maybe there are more cars on the road due to an economic boom that made it possible to continue with a lifestyle that people preferred.
If you are always worried about the transition costs, you will get stuck in the rut most governments are in. Helping people indefinitely for something that should have originally only taken a small amount of time. The market does work. I guarantee there are price points for oil that will make people either drive less or go from point A to B more efficiently.
your retorical question has a simple retorical answer, why didn't the people who came up with google's serach engine go work for Yahoo when they figured it out? Because they thought it was the best and could make them money. Its why noone who really thinks they can take a market by storm would ever give it away to another company.
Microsoft has been branching out into more in depth search, home media(I think they call it the digital lifestyle, but I'm not sure). Apple has been branching out into legal music download market, the MP3 player market, and there are rumors of branching out into a true Operating system company. Sure seems like the two businesses you were looking at are branching out constantly.
Why? Because there is money in it. MS and Apple have saturated their market. The leaders remember how they originally saw booming growth, delving into the new markets and tried to make a killing. Seems like MS is doing it again into the market that Yahoo trailblazed and Google now heads up.
nice play on words, but my question remains, if the driver is pre compiled and works fine for both windows and linux, why does a linux user feel they should have more than that. It was a simple question. I'm not talking about worsening the situation. I'm talking about including working drivers whether they are open source or not for a level of ease of use(to support already paid for hardware).
Now what you are saying is a good reason to release detailed specs for the hardware, except a lot of it could be trade secrets.
I guess I should clarify, I mean end user linux users and end user windows users. Both see the same thing. What companies do between themselves I have no knowledge of though I don't doubt at all that a company would share its source to let MS test it and tweek its own products(when it is a major piece of hardware).
but the point I am trying to make is oil prices don't spike in that kind of way. 20 or 25% happens, but the only time we have seen the price of end products like gasoline multiply was during an oil strike. What I mean is the economy is amazingly resilient. People think that teh price of oil will rise adn nothing will change until "it gets to be too late". Chances of that happening are unfathomable in an open economy.
wow, a linux fanatic. Yes your aims are different but your standards are not higher at all. This standards are also just different. My standard is an up to date computer that runs seemlessly. The day you get linux to run without any hardware support, I commend you(and suggest a patent). Until the day you figure out how to build that computer(and not have it be 10 years out of date), the rest of us will happily admit vendor support is a prerequisite. If a linux machine wants a top of the line graphics card, guess what it needs? if it wants to run any hardware at all, it needs some support from the vendors.
Every linux junkie(some of my very close friends) I know has always told me the biggest problem they have with getting linux up and running on a random machine is driver support. When my buddy spent a week of all his free time trying to get his wireless card working(in the end he couldn't get it to work in certain flavors of linux), he cursed not having vendor support. So it seems not everyone can conjure up drivers by just looking at their wireless card and not everyone can afford to find the wireless card that works for all flavors of linux. Now that sucks and the vendor is partially at fault here, but when the vendor takes the time to write a working driver, it would be nice for the flavors of Linux to include it.
Many companies have long since chosen not to cater to power users and have been doing just fine. I'm not sure what this process is you are referring to. All those companies seem to be only getting stronger(as are the comapnies that do cater to power users). Just because Joe Nerd can use the command line in his sleep doesn't mean Joe Sixpack has any desire at all for a machine where he has to do that.
Nothing I said was designed to offend but obviously you are trying to do just that. All I said was as long as certain flavors of linux will not even include closed source drivers to make their product more usable(out of the box), those brands will have a steeper learning curve. Redhat was a breeze for me to get up and running. Mandrake almost worked. It was downhill from there.
Just read what I wrote again and turn off your "everyone who isn't an open source zealot is obviously in bed with bill gates" alarm for just 2 seconds. Maybe you'll get my point.
its not something that does damage as in sets us back. people really overblow this problem. It means growth will slow down. And guess what, those rising oil prices are the greatest incentive towards making cars more "green".
Think about all the people who choose to buy fuel efficient cars. Every person I know who buys them does so because it saves them a great deal of money on gas. Oil prices get up to 70 or 80 dollars a barrel(which isn't hard to imagine with production not increasing by much and China beginning to consume oil on the level of the US) and you will see very few people who are willing to spend 100 dollars to drive a hummer 100 miles. It just gets too damn expensive.
Money works both ways. Making it drives what companies will produce and saving it drives what consumers demand(in large part). So I say if you really want to protect the environment from car emissions, find some way to double the price of oil rather quickly.
but the driver doesn't have to be given out under the GPL. That is the difference. Of course you can't release something under the GPL that is just an .exe, but there is not rule that you have to do that. Now if they included some of linux's source code in the writing of the driver, then it would be a violation of the GPL, but there is no need for them to do that.
I think you got your example wrong. Vendors like intel cooperate just the same with windows as they do with Linux, they release compiled drivers. Why someone who runs linux feels they should get more than that confounds me.
Really, its as long as open source zealots are not willing to coexist with closed source(even though most closed source is willing to go the other way) many Linux distributions will have a steeper learning curve.
47 valedictorians is absurd, but grade inflation in most public schools I've had experience with is nonexistent. At my school there was at times 2 valedictorians but that was always two very smart people who took the highest classes and aced them all.
And slide rules are as bad as calculators. Both can be done very mechanically. Neither can help you understand what is going on. The only difference is a slide rule is slower.
I like your second to last point though. But what you miss is improvements in our ability to educate usually have a lot to do with adding in new technology(yes, that slide rule you want everyone to use was once a new technology, and I'm sure people like you existed back then who said paper and pencil was the only way to really learn math).
How about we all just admit something simple: education in the US is one of the best in the world.
If you need any proof, look at which country dominates in higher education(the US) and also remember that none of these schools are dominated by students from other countries. US students on average do not do well on standardized tests but we are changing that. Thanks to Bush and those like him, we now have a school system in some areas(especially Florida) where 75% of the education a student recieves is centered on how to excel on a test(hurray for the critical thinking we are building).
I say one thing could fix most of the "problems" we encounter in public education, parental involvement(or in some cases, having the parents be there at all).
your first example isn't any good. A vast majority of Linux has been done by paid developers for some time. Of course, the community is invaluable in that they are willing to do a great deal of bug testing and correct small problems(which is very important), but the leaps have been driven in the last 8 or so years starting wtih RedHat and now several companies.
The second point you make really is a moot point, think about open source. 99% of the stuff is written for the people who are writing it. of course they are going to know what they want, but then again, the target audience usually remains incredibly small.
The amateur quote you are pissed about is probably an interpretation thing. I figured what he meant was exactly what you say he did, programmers doing it in their free time. That still makes them amateurs!! its the definition of the world. Being involved in an area and not getting paid. Think amateur figure skater who gets a gold at the olympics, are they somehow an inferior group to profressional figure skaters?
I don't think this guy feels that open source is a bad model, just that to become COMMERICALLY VIABLE a project needs to get funding. All he means is its the next step. VLC is the best media player I have ever used and I think the world of the people willing to take the effort to program something so good. But that doesn't mean it can begin to compete with WMP(which I hate, and I'm not implying that the project ever needs to do this) unless the development fundamentally changes to address the needs of people who don't know anything about the project. For those things, corporations and marketting departments are worth their weight in gold.
no, the effects have been showing for quite some time with the german education system. its why there are several movements to get rid of the 3 tiered foolery. I would find it interesting that germany once led the world in scientific research and for the last 50 years has had only menial contributions(especially compared to what they used to do)
yeah, but unfortunately, this virus, and most virii in general, are not things that make systems more secure. Usually the patch preceeds the virus(or is out at around the same time). People who make viruses are ass holes. People who find the holes are the ones driving security forward.
anyways, the rest of the world was not having fun with this. It was just a kid with mediocre skills(he didn't exactly find this exploit, it was already found and patched) trying to be an asshole for attention.
I'm all for criminalizing virus writers and throwing in Jail for absurd periods of time. I'm also all for preserving the rights of a person to find and publish an exploit to see that they get fixed quickly.
why should it go one way and not the other? if the retard can get off being tried as a child, why can't the prodigy be held to a higher standard? maybe its the same reason Germany's education system is in the pits.
easy, it can be a sweatshop because lots of geeks are foolish enough to greatly desire that job. Its just supply and demand. as long as the worker doesn't think of it as exploitation, then it isn't. If he does and sticks with it with when there are definitely other jobs to be had, then he is just an idiot.
you can work somewhere else, its not nonsense. people like to complain. and hey, those people have all the intangible benefits of saying they worked on The Phantom Menace.
GO is not more complex than chess by any means. It is the simplicity of the game that gets computers. The problems is the sheer size of the board. Unlike chess, there are 225 opening moves(15x15 board) in Go. The patterns are actually quite simple in the game, except they can be entered into in so many different ways.
The funny thing is its hard to program computers to see patterns. Early computers brute forced chess, and they were terrible. Most human players well below the master level would be even opponents. The best programs today do a mixture of brute force and pattern recognition.
Programming Go is just not the holy grail that programming chess is right now. Give it time, and maybe IBM, and you will probably see huge leaps and bounds in the skill of computer controlled players.
if you mean proof by consensus of the educated class, then the earth has been round well before the 16th century. just to let you know. When columbus sailed the educated class knew quite well the earth was round(at least had more than enough evidence for this) and most sailors believed the earth to be round from experience.
actually, reviewer needs to learn that in a book about sci-fi or SF, things about LOTR is completely off basis. Just because people who like sci-fi also like fantasy, they are not the same. Also, the reviewer probably needs to realize that comic book heroes are NOT sci-fi by the measures of almost all people. Comic books are mostly their own domain(at least the classic comic books which have been the ones to be turned into movies).
If the reviewer is going to bash someone for including Small Soldiers, he should probably figure out that what he wanted to read about had nothing at all to do with the book title as well.
history is quite a ways against you on that, before wwII we almost always completely dismantled our armed forces after a war. and when a new war came, we reorganized. Only after WWII and our decision to involve ourselves in everything going on in the rest of the world(and to tell people who to do it right) did we require a full time large army. And the only time we were attacked(besides indian wars that were all small scale after 1812) was the war of 1812. No other war required us to quickly defend from an invading force.
anywyas, ways dictators are supported by a large and powerful army. So I don't know if your statement of that army keeping the dictator our is misguided or merely not properly clarified(ie. a military who's vast majority of its loyality is to the people of a country and not a single person).
rape is not something you do to simply survive, its something a pitiful excuse for a human being does. Guess what, lots of men in the military are like inmates in prison, keep them away from women they can get for long enough and they turn to rape. It in no way makes them a good person. It makes them little more than an animal. This isn't to say everyone in the military is that. But to defend indefensible actions (that do not keep them alive) is simply sad.
that's just complete horse shit. Give me any complex program, no matter how its developed and I guarantee someone will find a weakness in it. There isn't a single program yet to be completely secure.
Attacks improve just as programming does. Crackers exploit what will always exist.
Consider a very real world example outside of computers. The WTC was built to withstand a strike from a 737, the largest plane at the time. Guess what they got hit with? Bigger planes. Tools improve just as code does. We can always look back and say the WTC should have been built to withstand an even bigger plane, but then they would just be vulnerable to the next largest one.
Same thing happens with computers. Just as the tech improves, so do the methods of breaking the technology. There is no cracker that is beneficial. I would rather live in a world without crackers and all the tech they have spawned(mainly Virus scanners and fire walls) than have the new programs I have to pay for. That's like thanking morons with guns for giving us kevlar vests.
Oh, and if you think it helps people in the long run, I can't wait to see the looks on VISA or MC's face when they or their customers see how much money was stolen(at no fault of either of them).
you're wrong again,
what you are complaining about is poor case design. A person could spend 2 hours and do it themselves and save several hundred dollars as compared to a Mac.
Now if your time is worth more than a couple hundred dollars per hour, go for the Mac. For me, cheaper, faster, adn just as easy to mess with is more than worth it.
besides the other point made about your post, your plain wrong. YOu seem to act like you know something of economics here. which is fine, but you seem to think you need to be in the industry to know something about this. So here is one: Software does not have a cost that grows with each copy sold simply because there isn't a single EULA that doesn't absolve the company for any faults in the program. Another good response was made earlier to this, but this is far from insightful. Having to fix problems simply means the time wasn't taken earlier to do it. If you choose not to fix it, then so be it. But this isn't like an engine that breaks down after 4 years, long after any reasonable company would test it. It is a problem that was there from the beginning.