"Obviously, because the glaciers from the ice age just started retreating from the Carolinas when the industrial revolution began in the 1800s."
This sarcastic line is of course suggesting that because the glaciers actually retreated
long ago, global warming must be due to causes other than the human caused increase in
CO2. Actually, the glaciers retreated so long ago that by now we should be well into the next glaciation. A Scientific American article some time back suggested that the changes brought about by the spread of agriculture modified the climate sufficiently to postpone the next glaciation (through such procesess as increased methane emissions). Climate scientists are in pretty much universal agreement that by the later decades of the 20th century we'd already added enough CO2 to prevent the next glaciation from happening at all. But now CO2 levels are continuing to rise, and at a faster rate than ever before.
Oh, I get it, we should be listening to science fiction authors rather than to actual climate scientists.
It will take decades to move our energy infrastructure away from its current very heavy dependence on fossil fuels. We can not afford to wait until people like Michael Crichton are convinced, at which point Manhattan will be underwater.
And if crop failures start being a regular event, building multi-billion dollar dykes to save some coastal urban areas will be beside the point.
So far I haven't seen much evidence of artificial intelligence coming out of Google. Their most successful product, their search engine, uses human intelligence. Joe, Mary, and Bob each link to Jane's web site, so Google considers Jane's web site to be important. It was the judgement of Joe, Mary and Bob that did the trick.
As for machine translation, Google's statistical approach may well do better than other machine translators, but that's not saying much. All machine translations are a joke compared to a competent human translation. Good quality translation is AI-complete -- you have to actually understand what you're translating. Google seems no closer than anyone else to cracking that nut.
According to the article the problem with CDR lifespan is that the dyes degrade, not that
the metal oxidizes. So it's not clear what benefit you get with using gold.
I still think C++ was invented as a joke. I mean, fancy allowing standard operators to be overloaded. And reference variables? I now have to carefully examine very function prototype when I need to know if a function call might have side effects.
And now garbage collection? That just a feature to fix poorly written code.
When I found the C language, I stopped looking. Ah well.
Suppose I see this call in C:
foobar(&a, &b, &c)
The standard way to pass a large structure in C is by its address, rather than copying the whole thing, whether or not the structure is going to be modified inside the routine. So here I know that a, b, and c might be modified, but then again, they might not. How is this any better than C++? After all, every reference argument in C++ code becomes a pointer argument in the equivalent C code. At least with C++ I have the option of making a reference "const".
Overloading operators allows for useful syntactic sugar -- that's why the C++ Complex class is so much more pleasant to use than the Java Complex class. It can of course be abused. So what? Any language feature can be abused.
As for gargage collection, 95% of the time is isn't needed -- the simple paradigm of allocating storage in constructors and deallocating in destructors does what you need. But for the other 5%, when you have no way to know when the lifetime of an object is over, there's just no good substitute for a garbage collection system. I don't know what the C++ garbage collector will look like, but if it allows some things to be garbage collected and others not it will be a very useful addition to the language while not forcing every damn object to be garbage collected the way Java does.
I said subscribers to classical music review magazines, corresponding to collectors of classical music. It is true that attendees at classical concerts (and for that matter, performers) are much closer to 50/50. And I suggest that you contact the publishers of Gramophone or Fanfare if you have any skepticism about how their subscriber base breaks down.
I see no reason at all why a 28% (or less) female presence in computer science couldn't be due to intrinsic differences in male and female interests. Go to any horse barn where horses are kept as a hobby (rather than for work, as in an Amish barn). I guarantee that fewer than 28% of the horse riders are male. The one or two men you might find took up riding because their wife or girl friend already did. You'll find it hard to convince me that this is due to invidious social conditioning. After all, such media depictions of horse riding as there are tend to be masculine -- John Wayne, the Marlboro man, and all that.
On the other hand, if you ask editors of classical music recording review magazines, such as Gramophone, Fanfare or American Record Guide, what percentage of their subscribers are female, I'm quite certain it will be well below 28%. This is despite the fact that there is no social conditioning whatsoever that pressures boys (rather than girls) to take an interest in classical music. Quite to the contrary, any boy who has such an interest knows to keep it to himself if he doesn't want to get beaten up as a wimp.
People are the way they are despite social conditioning, not because of it.
"Any sensible business should be either re-installing the systems themselves after purchase, or paying someone else to do so - in both cases based on the company's actual requirements (software, network/profile setup, configuration, devices)."
Unfortunately, as the review made clear, the Dell doesn't come with any install discs. So have fun trying to "reinstall". This seems to be a general trend -- my sister recently bought a Gateway, and it too came without the OS installation discs. You were supposed to create them yourself with a special one-time-use-only routine that copied the OS to CD-RW discs. But the routine crapped out, and produced bad install discs. Gateway's support recommendatation was for her to send the machine back to get her drives reinitialized! Building your own box is making a lot more sense now.
Microsoft is right. That's why we're so much better off with half the computer users using ASCII and the other half using EBCDIC. Think of the stagnation that would have happened if everyone had settled on ASCII.
Of course stopping porn is just the camel's nose under the tent.
Once the principle of mandatory filtering is in place, laws will be passed to stop "hate" web sites, the definition of which will of course be expanded to mean any political views, bloggers, or news sites the government hates.
Re:Overstates the case...
on
Requiem for Usenet
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think think any viable alternative to usenet would have to require that all newsgroups be moderated. It would also have to have much better security. (E.g., a public key for each newsgroup with the private keys held only by moderators.) The encryption part could be made painless and transparent with the right software, but there's no getting around the labor involved in moderation. I see no other way to keep the trolls and spammers down to acceptable levels.
Is there some license issue that's driving the KDE issue?
Well, of course with KDE there is that perpetual licensing issue -- commercial developers must either GPL their code or send $ to TrollTech, as KDE is based on QT. I see it as no biggie myself (if the Trolltech license fee is a show stopper you don't have a serious business plan anyway) but I'm sure the Gnome advocates at Novell pushed that issue among others.
Like others, I will not pay anything at all for any Sony content now or ever again. Their DRM rootkit crossed the line. They are the enemy. I would be happy to download a pirated copy of a Sony DVD or CD in the unlikely event they had something I wanted to see or hear. I will continue to pay cash for recordings from independent classical music labels so long as they don't try to shove DRM up my ass.
I don't think you understand. This bill requires analog watermarking, an in-band distortion of the signal that will be reproduced by any competent speakers and thus detected and blocked by a "legal" analog recorder. This is a more sophisticated version of the infamous "copynotch" proposal from the 80s. I presume the analog video watermarking works similarly, so would block your "legal" camcorder from recording.
While the writer makes many good points, he seems not to understand that it is less likely that Linux will achieve the goals he wants than Microsoft Windows.
Many people don't know the dirty little secret that many of the controls and tools that Microsoft builds into Office are not standard controls. This means that many features that are developed in Microsoft are coded three times, once for Office, once for the OS and at least one more time for the developer tools like Visual Studio. Toolbars, menus, File dialogs, color pickers, date pickers, etc, etc, all written at least three times. All with slightly different characteristics and API's.
This is a legitimate criticism of Windows, but it applies to Linux in spades.
GTK, QT, Lesstif, GNU Step, and the custom built toolkits for Mozilla and
Open Office duplicate basic GUI widgets in spades, all looking and behaving different
and all, of course, with different APIs.
- Spreadsheet functionality should be built into every list or grid. I should be able to sort, filter, copy paste any list like data cells.
- Spell check should be available from every text box from Firefox to Gimp.
Again, this is all made much harder by the fact that in Linux every widget is implemented at least 6 times in
different toolkits and languages.
- Create a single music solution that is consistent and flows easily from OS to music applications to TV experience.
- Create a single photo solution that is consistent and flows easily from OS thumbnails to previewing full screen to editing in a photo applications.
- Create an office suite that can be used as a component in other applications. Anywhere I have rich text editing I should also have red-underline spell checking, thesaurus, and other tools that help me write.
- There should be a single interface for dealing with contacts, buddies and users, and this should be used consistently across the OS and related programs.
It is far more likely that Microsoft will succeed in enforcing one right, correct way to do
each of these things than the herd of cats that is Linux developers.
To be sure, if you stick within one class of applications, such as the KDE suite, you can get
pretty close to what the author wants. But KDE lacks a lot of things, and inevitably people
have a mishmash of inconsistent looking and behaving applications on their Linux desktop.
The nature of Linux development is that it is much less likely to achieve uniformity and
consistency than an OS produced by a corporate monolith.
The author should just get a MAC OS/X machine and be happy.
One problem is that no one has figured out how to distinguish "worthy" software patents from the vast flood of trivial ones in a way that will work in real life, with government patent examiners who are paid a fraction of what lawyers get in private practice. I can think of a handful of genuinely innovative algorithms that have been patented, such as RSA and the Karmarkar LP algorithm. In all cases they were created by researchers who get paid for publishing their results. In other words, the ideas would have been developed anyway, without any patents, so society has gained nothing by granting them a monopoly on their ideas. Would we really be bereft of innovation in the software industry if there were no patents at all? No rational person can really believe that. So there is really no case for software patents.
"We are stronger than ever because we have a research lab in Cambridge, we have one now in China, one in India and that is where the top problems in computer science are going to be solved."
Apparently, none of the top problems in computer science are going to be solved in the United States.
I wonder a little at why anyone would ever plot a 10,000 point graph in either program... all the applications I can think of are better served by graphing or scientific programs rather than a spreadsheet.
Perhaps because he doesn't want to have to learn yet another application. After all, a spreadsheet can calculate stuff and graph the results, so he has decided to use his spreadsheet to calculate stuff and graph the results. Saying that he should have to move his data to another application to graph it is a rather lame excuse for not making OOo fast enough.
Slashdot Mirror
"Obviously, because the glaciers from the ice age just started retreating from the Carolinas when the industrial revolution began in the 1800s."
This sarcastic line is of course suggesting that because the glaciers actually retreated long ago, global warming must be due to causes other than the human caused increase in CO2. Actually, the glaciers retreated so long ago that by now we should be well into the next glaciation. A Scientific American article some time back suggested that the changes brought about by the spread of agriculture modified the climate sufficiently to postpone the next glaciation (through such procesess as increased methane emissions). Climate scientists are in pretty much universal agreement that by the later decades of the 20th century we'd already added enough CO2 to prevent the next glaciation from happening at all. But now CO2 levels are continuing to rise, and at a faster rate than ever before.
Oh, I get it, we should be listening to science fiction authors rather than to actual climate scientists.
It will take decades to move our energy infrastructure away from its current very heavy dependence on fossil fuels. We can not afford to wait until people like Michael Crichton are convinced, at which point Manhattan will be underwater.
And if crop failures start being a regular event, building multi-billion dollar dykes to save some coastal urban areas will be beside the point.
Actually, if they gave up market share in two or more markets (desktops and servers, say) then they did indeed give up market shares.
So far I haven't seen much evidence of artificial intelligence coming out of Google. Their most successful product, their search engine, uses human intelligence. Joe, Mary, and Bob each link to Jane's web site, so Google considers Jane's web site to be important. It was the judgement of Joe, Mary and Bob that did the trick.
As for machine translation, Google's statistical approach may well do better than other machine translators, but that's not saying much. All machine translations are a joke compared to a competent human translation. Good quality translation is AI-complete -- you have to actually understand what you're translating. Google seems no closer than anyone else to cracking that nut.
According to the article the problem with CDR lifespan is that the dyes degrade, not that the metal oxidizes. So it's not clear what benefit you get with using gold.
Actually, Porsche and Ferrari make nothing but gas guzzlers. But they're fun gas guzzlers.
Suppose I see this call in C:
The standard way to pass a large structure in C is by its address, rather than copying the whole thing, whether or not the structure is going to be modified inside the routine. So here I know that a, b, and c might be modified, but then again, they might not. How is this any better than C++? After all, every reference argument in C++ code becomes a pointer argument in the equivalent C code. At least with C++ I have the option of making a reference "const".Overloading operators allows for useful syntactic sugar -- that's why the C++ Complex class is so much more pleasant to use than the Java Complex class. It can of course be abused. So what? Any language feature can be abused.
As for gargage collection, 95% of the time is isn't needed -- the simple paradigm of allocating storage in constructors and deallocating in destructors does what you need. But for the other 5%, when you have no way to know when the lifetime of an object is over, there's just no good substitute for a garbage collection system. I don't know what the C++ garbage collector will look like, but if it allows some things to be garbage collected and others not it will be a very useful addition to the language while not forcing every damn object to be garbage collected the way Java does.
Google is preparing an opening for a competitor.
I said subscribers to classical music review magazines, corresponding to collectors of classical music. It is true that attendees at classical concerts (and for that matter, performers) are much closer to 50/50. And I suggest that you contact the publishers of Gramophone or Fanfare if you have any skepticism about how their subscriber base breaks down.
I see no reason at all why a 28% (or less) female presence in computer science couldn't be due to intrinsic differences in male and female interests. Go to any horse barn where horses are kept as a hobby (rather than for work, as in an Amish barn). I guarantee that fewer than 28% of the horse riders are male. The one or two men you might find took up riding because their wife or girl friend already did. You'll find it hard to convince me that this is due to invidious social conditioning. After all, such media depictions of horse riding as there are tend to be masculine -- John Wayne, the Marlboro man, and all that.
On the other hand, if you ask editors of classical music recording review magazines, such as Gramophone, Fanfare or American Record Guide, what percentage of their subscribers are female, I'm quite certain it will be well below 28%. This is despite the fact that there is no social conditioning whatsoever that pressures boys (rather than girls) to take an interest in classical music. Quite to the contrary, any boy who has such an interest knows to keep it to himself if he doesn't want to get beaten up as a wimp.
People are the way they are despite social conditioning, not because of it.
"Any sensible business should be either re-installing the systems themselves after purchase, or paying someone else to do so - in both cases based on the company's actual requirements (software, network/profile setup, configuration, devices)."
Unfortunately, as the review made clear, the Dell doesn't come with any install discs. So have fun trying to "reinstall". This seems to be a general trend -- my sister recently bought a Gateway, and it too came without the OS installation discs. You were supposed to create them yourself with a special one-time-use-only routine that copied the OS to CD-RW discs. But the routine crapped out, and produced bad install discs. Gateway's support recommendatation was for her to send the machine back to get her drives reinitialized! Building your own box is making a lot more sense now.
Microsoft is right. That's why we're so much better off with half the computer users using ASCII and the other half using EBCDIC. Think of the stagnation that would have happened if everyone had settled on ASCII.
Of course stopping porn is just the camel's nose under the tent.
Once the principle of mandatory filtering is in place, laws will be passed to stop "hate" web sites, the definition of which will of course be expanded to mean any political views, bloggers, or news sites the government hates.
I think think any viable alternative to usenet would have to require that all newsgroups be moderated. It would also have to have much better security. (E.g., a public key for each newsgroup with the private keys held only by moderators.) The encryption part could be made painless and transparent with the right software, but there's no getting around the labor involved in moderation. I see no other way to keep the trolls and spammers down to acceptable levels.
Of course any self respecting rootkit modifies the Task Manager code so that it doesn't show the keylogging process at all.
Is there some license issue that's driving the KDE issue?
Well, of course with KDE there is that perpetual licensing issue -- commercial developers must either GPL their code or send $ to TrollTech, as KDE is based on QT. I see it as no biggie myself (if the Trolltech license fee is a show stopper you don't have a serious business plan anyway) but I'm sure the Gnome advocates at Novell pushed that issue among others.
Like others, I will not pay anything at all for any Sony content now or ever again. Their DRM rootkit crossed the line. They are the enemy. I would be happy to download a pirated copy of a Sony DVD or CD in the unlikely event they had something I wanted to see or hear. I will continue to pay cash for recordings from independent classical music labels so long as they don't try to shove DRM up my ass.
I don't think you understand. This bill requires analog watermarking, an in-band distortion of the signal that will be reproduced by any competent speakers and thus detected and blocked by a "legal" analog recorder. This is a more sophisticated version of the infamous "copynotch" proposal from the 80s. I presume the analog video watermarking works similarly, so would block your "legal" camcorder from recording.
While the writer makes many good points, he seems not to understand that it is less likely that Linux will achieve the goals he wants than Microsoft Windows.
This is a legitimate criticism of Windows, but it applies to Linux in spades. GTK, QT, Lesstif, GNU Step, and the custom built toolkits for Mozilla and Open Office duplicate basic GUI widgets in spades, all looking and behaving different and all, of course, with different APIs. Again, this is all made much harder by the fact that in Linux every widget is implemented at least 6 times in different toolkits and languages. It is far more likely that Microsoft will succeed in enforcing one right, correct way to do each of these things than the herd of cats that is Linux developers.To be sure, if you stick within one class of applications, such as the KDE suite, you can get pretty close to what the author wants. But KDE lacks a lot of things, and inevitably people have a mishmash of inconsistent looking and behaving applications on their Linux desktop. The nature of Linux development is that it is much less likely to achieve uniformity and consistency than an OS produced by a corporate monolith.
The author should just get a MAC OS/X machine and be happy.
One problem is that no one has figured out how to distinguish "worthy" software patents from the vast flood of trivial ones in a way that will work in real life, with government patent examiners who are paid a fraction of what lawyers get in private practice. I can think of a handful of genuinely innovative algorithms that have been patented, such as RSA and the Karmarkar LP algorithm. In all cases they were created by researchers who get paid for publishing their results. In other words, the ideas would have been developed anyway, without any patents, so society has gained nothing by granting them a monopoly on their ideas. Would we really be bereft of innovation in the software industry if there were no patents at all? No rational person can really believe that. So there is really no case for software patents.
the day that someone explains to me how they learned vector calculus by watching the tube.
"We are stronger than ever because we have a research lab in Cambridge, we have one now in China, one in India and that is where the top problems in computer science are going to be solved."
Apparently, none of the top problems in computer science are going to be solved in the United States.
I wonder a little at why anyone would ever plot a 10,000 point graph in either program... all the applications I can think of are better served by graphing or scientific programs rather than a spreadsheet.
Perhaps because he doesn't want to have to learn yet another application. After all, a spreadsheet can calculate stuff and graph the results, so he has decided to use his spreadsheet to calculate stuff and graph the results. Saying that he should have to move his data to another application to graph it is a rather lame excuse for not making OOo fast enough.
They are solar powered.
I basically see the phone as a cool gadget to kill some time while travelling or attending a very boring class.
I use books for that. No user manual required.