Tell me, Microsoft, what games of YOURS are still being played 20 to 30 years later?
Well, Microsoft Flight Simulator was launched in 1982, that is almost 35 years ago; Solitaire came with Windows 3.0, in 1990 (and believe me, there are many more people still playing Solitaire than ever played Colossal Cave or Zork). Minesweeper was originally part of the MS Entertainment Pack (also 1990) but was bundled with Windows I believe starting with Windows for Workgroups. Freecell came a bit later, can't remember exactly when, but was there before Win95, which makes it at least 18 years old, I'm sure there are more.
Google is not a business that is built around distributing FOSS.
Android.
You're confusing the means with the end: it's like saying a fishing company has built its business around distributing free bait. The fishing company wants to catch fish, and Google wants to catch eyeballs; those are the products the companies sell. Both the bait and the code are just production expenses, and not part of the business model.
(IIRC two different methods for determining avagadros number were giving slighly different results).
I wonder if it may be easier to define Avogadro's number as a given constant and derive the kilogram as a fraction of a mole of a known isotope, like 1/12 of a kmole of C-12 (or maybe 1/4 of a kmole of He-4, to reduce the loss of energy in chemical bonds). Of course, this moves the difficulty to counting an exact number of similar atoms and measuring their mass precisely but at least it ties the kg to a physical value instead on an arbitrary metal lump.
So, WTF isn't our US government doing it best to try to fight this trend.
They are there, after all.....supposedly...to fight for our interests above all other countries.
Why don't we fight anymore to try to fucking win??
I think you're a bit confused about whose interests the government is fighting for; it's only "our interests above all other countries", if you define "our" as pretty much overlapping with the one percenters. Most of the moves the US government made in the last 20 or more years have been very beneficial to the richest Americans, and neutral or harmful to the rest (just look at the evolution of the inequality index in the USA). The first to be affected were blue collar workers and the really poor, but the process continues, and the impact on the middle class in the USA is growing and I believe will do so for the foreseeable future.
The big losers in this are the middle classes in the developed countries (especially the USA). The US rich are doing great, as they have the US government fighting for them, and, interestingly, workers in other countries have gained quite a bit from the US policies. With the relaxation in trade and regulations, the lot of the average worker in China, Vietnam or some of the Eastern European countries (or even places like Bangladesh) has improved considerably. Of course, long term the economy is not a zero sum game, but short term, the increase of the quality of life for the average Chinese or Vietnamese comes at the expense of stagnant salaries, trade deficits and growing unemployment in the developed world.
So most people on Slashdot should expect their income to grow slowly (if not remain stagnant or even go down) during their lifetime, as globalization forces the worldwide equalization of incomes - which equalization will, for basic economic reasons, happen close to the lower end of the income spectrum. I expect the whole global economy will eventually grow enough for middle class incomes to get back to what the developed countries have enjoyed until recently, but i'm afraid for most of us it may be a rather long time.
The point of DNT is not itself to stop tracking, but to give the user a voice about their preference. The difference is a bit subtle, but you can understand it in less than 30 seconds if you try. [...]
Giving your preferences a voice is valuable.
Well, I tried understanding what you're talking about for more than thirty seconds and I'm sorry, but your post doesn't make sense. MS's decision to set DNT by default does not in any way remove the user's "voice about their preference". Any users who prefer being tracked or find it interferes with their browsing experience can disable the flag, so your argument is completely besides the point.
What you should perhaps think instead about for a few seconds (hopefully it won't even require 30) is the real issue: the fact that we were offered such a Catch 22 of a "standard", with no teeth, no way to enforce the user's choice, and not even a way for users to know if their option is honored. *That*'s the issue, and I'd like to understand why such a broken design is even seriously considered for a standard. The only reasonable explanation I could come up with is that the whole thing is just a PR exercise, a snow job whose purpose is to make Google and Mozilla seem user friendly; I'm surprised so many technical people have swallowed this whole, hooks and all - so much so that they complain when the whole thing is proven not to work.
MS broke the standard agreement for do-not-track, so I don't blame anyone for ignoring the setting if from IE10. The standard was there for a reason: It was the only chance any site would agree to following the headers intention.
If you stop and think for a minute, this alleged "standard" is nothing more than a promise from the ad companies that they will honor the "do not track" flag as long as we promise to never set it. And you really don't see a problem with that, but blame MS instead? Sheesh, you should be glad MS has called their bluff and exposed the "standard" as the fraud it really is.
The kind of people who get votes from devout Christians in America are people who understand how to exploit religion as a way to rally political supporters
Isn't it effectively a distinction without a difference? Once a politician starts relying on the religious voters, he'll have to support a religion-driven agenda or risk being denounced as a turn-coat and kicked out of office - for a religious voter is a jealous voter. Whether he supports the religious agenda from personal conviction or for political survival is immaterial in the end.
Your argumentum ad verecundiam fails. An obviously bad design remains obviously bad no matter who may have come up with it. Accepting it blindly, without looking at its technical merits, just because it has been blessed by the W3C is silly (not to mention that the authority you appeal to, the W3C, has one of the worst track records in regards to coming up with reasonable and feasible designs).
But I think you can reach some interesting conclusions by looking at the originators of the proposed standard - they're Google and Mozilla. And if you really expect Google, whose main source of income is tracking people to put a lot of effort into designing an efficient way for people to avoid being tracked, I got this great opportunity for you to enter the glamorous and fast growing world of bridge owners!
Because when all is said and done, it doesn't matter what else you have if you don't have food.
Of course that's true, if you don't have food. But if there was a shortage of food, local farmers wouldn't have a problem. The grand-parent's complaint was precisely the opposite: an abundance of free/low cost food driving the small farmer out of business - as the GP says, free food is a staple. If I were an African leader I'd see this as a chance: the biggest problem, (is providing for the population) is at least partially solved; that gives the country a window of opportunity where the freed resources should be concentrated on improving the education and infrastructure.
there's no incentive for a farmer to plant if he knows that he'll have to compete with 'free' by the time his crop is ready for harvest. For example, in Mozambique the UN-donated flour is a staple, meaning that it's almost impossible to locally produce any carbohydrate food source because it isn't profitable. People are poor, and they're not going to pay for food when there is a free alternative.
Of course not - why pay for something when you can get it free? But what you seem to say is that somehow everybody owes the farmer you mention a living? That the world should not donate or the African people should not choose the free food because the farmer can't compete? That sounds wrong, not to mention borderline patronizing. Why should the African farmer's effort be wasted on low productivity agricultural work? Why not take the opportunity to switch to something more productive which would allow him to build capital and know-how, and later compete directly with the West? Also, how would the lives of non-farming Africans be improved by forcing them to pay a potentially large percentage of their income on food grown expensively on low productivity local farms? And since Africa doesn't have yet the same level of social/governmental control mechanisms the West has painfully developed over centuries, wouldn't extensive local farming have a larger negative impact on the environment than it could?
What the Chinese are doing is using local labour with Chinese foremen to build roads and bridges, but that's just so that they can extract as much mineral-wealth as efficiently as possible. Any positive change they're making in the region is just a lucky side effect.
Duh, and what exactly would you expect? China or Europe, or the US to build Africa's infrastructure as a Christmas gift? Of course they do it to advance their own interests - and that should be a very valuable lesson! It's the responsibility of the Africans to defend their interests - if the Chinese want the resources, the African leaders should make sure they get as good a bargain as possible, and they should plan for the future - use the income from whatever resources they sell now to build the human capital and the infrastructure which will allow them to prosper even after the resources are depleted.
Microsoft is planning on destroying the standard/convention by not implementing it properly in IE; e.g. by Default pretending that the user has opted out by supplying a DNT 1 value; instead of the user taking no preference
That's particularly silly. A well designed standard isn't "destroyed" by using it. The issue is not with Microsoft using the standard, it's with the fact that the "standard" is (I believe intentionally) badly designed; I think it was intended as nothing more than a PR exercise, to give Google and Mozilla the appearance of caring for users' privacy while the contrary will happen in reality. That you buy into this spin and blame Microsoft for Google's faults is quite funny.
Even funnier is the fact that the solution you suggest in your post (the use of blacklists and browser warnings to users) is almost identical to the standard Microsoft proposed to the W3C (see here. Of course, that solution would have worked, (as opposed to the current one), which is why I think it was blithely ignored by Mozilla and Google.
Not for DSLRs, no. You often want to watch the subject and change settings at the same time, in order to catch the perfect moment. Buttons and knobs with mechanical feedback let the experienced photographer change and set things by touch, without having to look at the camera. Taking the camera away from your eye to navigate menus or find the right small icon on the small screen would be a huge distraction.
The same way everybody does, I assume, or perhaps a little easier since for my set the closed oscillation circuit was tuned to the three standard waves at the Marconi factory, which means I can mostly use the aerial ammeter alone.
All I have to do is adjust the open and closed circuits to resonance, and locate the proper secondary inductance for the maximum aerial current. After doing that a few times it hardly takes me more than a half an hour anymore. Of course, I use the shortcut of turning the coupling handle on the front of the panel set, thereby mechanically placing the primary winding closer to the secondary, or farther away, also making sure that I obtain two or even three points of coupling for the quenched spark transmitter (which can easily be found by watching for the maximum reading on the aerial ammeter). Once the position of the taps for the secondary winding and the plug aerial tuning inductance are located, no further adjustment is required (unless, obviously, some change in the antenna is made).
Actually no, the argument put forth by NeoMorphy is a classic fallacious argument that doesn't hold up well to scrutiny. It's used for pretty much anything that should be a personal choice that certain people have moral or ideological objections to.
It's an instance of a more generic logical fallacy C.S. Lewis named Bulverism. He explained it thus (quote is from Wikipedia):
You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly.
if you don't want to vaccinate your kids, that's your right
I don't think that should be the case: isn't it reckless endangerment of a minor? How is it different from dangling your kid out the window, for example? Why would a parent's right to be a stubborn ignorant trump the child's right to safety?
And if we follow THAT logic to its conclusion, then mothers should be able to kill newborns or infants.
No, that's doesn't follow at all. After the birth, a mother that's unable or unwilling to care for the newborn or infant has other choices beyond abortion. Newborns or infants don't require the presence and effort of the mother anymore - they only need care, which can be provided by other people, and there are many organizations that do exactly that. Before the birth those choices don't exist.
If you're not intentionally distorting the issue, you should worry that your logic is so faulty.
If you extend that to "... underappreciated by modern audiences", I can think of a few
[snipped very good list]
And I'd like to add Theodore Sturgeon (who I'm told was actually the model Vonnegut used for Kilgore Trout) and Robert Bloch (not so much a writer of sci fi as horror, but a great writer anyway)
Slashdot Mirror
Tell me, Microsoft, what games of YOURS are still being played 20 to 30 years later?
Well, Microsoft Flight Simulator was launched in 1982, that is almost 35 years ago; Solitaire came with Windows 3.0, in 1990 (and believe me, there are many more people still playing Solitaire than ever played Colossal Cave or Zork). Minesweeper was originally part of the MS Entertainment Pack (also 1990) but was bundled with Windows I believe starting with Windows for Workgroups. Freecell came a bit later, can't remember exactly when, but was there before Win95, which makes it at least 18 years old, I'm sure there are more.
Google is not a business that is built around distributing FOSS.
Android.
You're confusing the means with the end: it's like saying a fishing company has built its business around distributing free bait. The fishing company wants to catch fish, and Google wants to catch eyeballs; those are the products the companies sell. Both the bait and the code are just production expenses, and not part of the business model.
They never tell us how much dog is in our hot dogs either :(
The price of freedom is that people are free to install malware.
Which makes Windows the freest platform of all by far.
(IIRC two different methods for determining avagadros number were giving slighly different results).
I wonder if it may be easier to define Avogadro's number as a given constant and derive the kilogram as a fraction of a mole of a known isotope, like 1/12 of a kmole of C-12 (or maybe 1/4 of a kmole of He-4, to reduce the loss of energy in chemical bonds). Of course, this moves the difficulty to counting an exact number of similar atoms and measuring their mass precisely but at least it ties the kg to a physical value instead on an arbitrary metal lump.
So, WTF isn't our US government doing it best to try to fight this trend.
They are there, after all.....supposedly...to fight for our interests above all other countries.
Why don't we fight anymore to try to fucking win??
I think you're a bit confused about whose interests the government is fighting for; it's only "our interests above all other countries", if you define "our" as pretty much overlapping with the one percenters. Most of the moves the US government made in the last 20 or more years have been very beneficial to the richest Americans, and neutral or harmful to the rest (just look at the evolution of the inequality index in the USA). The first to be affected were blue collar workers and the really poor, but the process continues, and the impact on the middle class in the USA is growing and I believe will do so for the foreseeable future.
The big losers in this are the middle classes in the developed countries (especially the USA). The US rich are doing great, as they have the US government fighting for them, and, interestingly, workers in other countries have gained quite a bit from the US policies. With the relaxation in trade and regulations, the lot of the average worker in China, Vietnam or some of the Eastern European countries (or even places like Bangladesh) has improved considerably. Of course, long term the economy is not a zero sum game, but short term, the increase of the quality of life for the average Chinese or Vietnamese comes at the expense of stagnant salaries, trade deficits and growing unemployment in the developed world.
So most people on Slashdot should expect their income to grow slowly (if not remain stagnant or even go down) during their lifetime, as globalization forces the worldwide equalization of incomes - which equalization will, for basic economic reasons, happen close to the lower end of the income spectrum. I expect the whole global economy will eventually grow enough for middle class incomes to get back to what the developed countries have enjoyed until recently, but i'm afraid for most of us it may be a rather long time.
The point of DNT is not itself to stop tracking, but to give the user a voice about their preference. The difference is a bit subtle, but you can understand it in less than 30 seconds if you try. [...]
Giving your preferences a voice is valuable.
Well, I tried understanding what you're talking about for more than thirty seconds and I'm sorry, but your post doesn't make sense. MS's decision to set DNT by default does not in any way remove the user's "voice about their preference". Any users who prefer being tracked or find it interferes with their browsing experience can disable the flag, so your argument is completely besides the point.
What you should perhaps think instead about for a few seconds (hopefully it won't even require 30) is the real issue: the fact that we were offered such a Catch 22 of a "standard", with no teeth, no way to enforce the user's choice, and not even a way for users to know if their option is honored. *That*'s the issue, and I'd like to understand why such a broken design is even seriously considered for a standard. The only reasonable explanation I could come up with is that the whole thing is just a PR exercise, a snow job whose purpose is to make Google and Mozilla seem user friendly; I'm surprised so many technical people have swallowed this whole, hooks and all - so much so that they complain when the whole thing is proven not to work.
MS broke the standard agreement for do-not-track, so I don't blame anyone for ignoring the setting if from IE10. The standard was there for a reason: It was the only chance any site would agree to following the headers intention.
If you stop and think for a minute, this alleged "standard" is nothing more than a promise from the ad companies that they will honor the "do not track" flag as long as we promise to never set it. And you really don't see a problem with that, but blame MS instead? Sheesh, you should be glad MS has called their bluff and exposed the "standard" as the fraud it really is.
So one person says something and that represents the country? Name a PM who endorses this?
Uhh... David Ben-Gurion? He was the first PM of Israel, you know...
so something EVIL must be going on!
Yeah, I think the right question is: what lurks there under the sleeping waters of lake Vostok that ate EVEN the microbes?
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtag'n!
The kind of people who get votes from devout Christians in America are people who understand how to exploit religion as a way to rally political supporters
Isn't it effectively a distinction without a difference? Once a politician starts relying on the religious voters, he'll have to support a religion-driven agenda or risk being denounced as a turn-coat and kicked out of office - for a religious voter is a jealous voter. Whether he supports the religious agenda from personal conviction or for political survival is immaterial in the end.
So, you've read all the W3C papers?
Your argumentum ad verecundiam fails. An obviously bad design remains obviously bad no matter who may have come up with it. Accepting it blindly, without looking at its technical merits, just because it has been blessed by the W3C is silly (not to mention that the authority you appeal to, the W3C, has one of the worst track records in regards to coming up with reasonable and feasible designs).
But I think you can reach some interesting conclusions by looking at the originators of the proposed standard - they're Google and Mozilla. And if you really expect Google, whose main source of income is tracking people to put a lot of effort into designing an efficient way for people to avoid being tracked, I got this great opportunity for you to enter the glamorous and fast growing world of bridge owners!
Because when all is said and done, it doesn't matter what else you have if you don't have food.
Of course that's true, if you don't have food. But if there was a shortage of food, local farmers wouldn't have a problem. The grand-parent's complaint was precisely the opposite: an abundance of free/low cost food driving the small farmer out of business - as the GP says, free food is a staple. If I were an African leader I'd see this as a chance: the biggest problem, (is providing for the population) is at least partially solved; that gives the country a window of opportunity where the freed resources should be concentrated on improving the education and infrastructure.
there's no incentive for a farmer to plant if he knows that he'll have to compete with 'free' by the time his crop is ready for harvest. For example, in Mozambique the UN-donated flour is a staple, meaning that it's almost impossible to locally produce any carbohydrate food source because it isn't profitable. People are poor, and they're not going to pay for food when there is a free alternative.
Of course not - why pay for something when you can get it free? But what you seem to say is that somehow everybody owes the farmer you mention a living? That the world should not donate or the African people should not choose the free food because the farmer can't compete? That sounds wrong, not to mention borderline patronizing. Why should the African farmer's effort be wasted on low productivity agricultural work? Why not take the opportunity to switch to something more productive which would allow him to build capital and know-how, and later compete directly with the West? Also, how would the lives of non-farming Africans be improved by forcing them to pay a potentially large percentage of their income on food grown expensively on low productivity local farms? And since Africa doesn't have yet the same level of social/governmental control mechanisms the West has painfully developed over centuries, wouldn't extensive local farming have a larger negative impact on the environment than it could?
What the Chinese are doing is using local labour with Chinese foremen to build roads and bridges, but that's just so that they can extract as much mineral-wealth as efficiently as possible. Any positive change they're making in the region is just a lucky side effect.
Duh, and what exactly would you expect? China or Europe, or the US to build Africa's infrastructure as a Christmas gift? Of course they do it to advance their own interests - and that should be a very valuable lesson! It's the responsibility of the Africans to defend their interests - if the Chinese want the resources, the African leaders should make sure they get as good a bargain as possible, and they should plan for the future - use the income from whatever resources they sell now to build the human capital and the infrastructure which will allow them to prosper even after the resources are depleted.
Microsoft is planning on destroying the standard/convention by not implementing it properly in IE; e.g. by Default pretending that the user has opted out by supplying a DNT 1 value; instead of the user taking no preference
That's particularly silly. A well designed standard isn't "destroyed" by using it. The issue is not with Microsoft using the standard, it's with the fact that the "standard" is (I believe intentionally) badly designed; I think it was intended as nothing more than a PR exercise, to give Google and Mozilla the appearance of caring for users' privacy while the contrary will happen in reality. That you buy into this spin and blame Microsoft for Google's faults is quite funny.
Even funnier is the fact that the solution you suggest in your post (the use of blacklists and browser warnings to users) is almost identical to the standard Microsoft proposed to the W3C (see here. Of course, that solution would have worked, (as opposed to the current one), which is why I think it was blithely ignored by Mozilla and Google.
In the Czech Republic? So it is the global pee reserve?
Hey, man, Czech beer is the best in the world, bar none!
- Touch screen vs ridiculous amounts of buttons
Not for DSLRs, no. You often want to watch the subject and change settings at the same time, in order to catch the perfect moment. Buttons and knobs with mechanical feedback let the experienced photographer change and set things by touch, without having to look at the camera. Taking the camera away from your eye to navigate menus or find the right small icon on the small screen would be a huge distraction.
How do you tune the radio in your car?
The same way everybody does, I assume, or perhaps a little easier since for my set the closed oscillation circuit was tuned to the three standard waves at the Marconi factory, which means I can mostly use the aerial ammeter alone.
All I have to do is adjust the open and closed circuits to resonance, and locate the proper secondary inductance for the maximum aerial current. After doing that a few times it hardly takes me more than a half an hour anymore. Of course, I use the shortcut of turning the coupling handle on the front of the panel set, thereby mechanically placing the primary winding closer to the secondary, or farther away, also making sure that I obtain two or even three points of coupling for the quenched spark transmitter (which can easily be found by watching for the maximum reading on the aerial ammeter). Once the position of the taps for the secondary winding and the plug aerial tuning inductance are located, no further adjustment is required (unless, obviously, some change in the antenna is made).
Actually no, the argument put forth by NeoMorphy is a classic fallacious argument that doesn't hold up well to scrutiny. It's used for pretty much anything that should be a personal choice that certain people have moral or ideological objections to.
It's an instance of a more generic logical fallacy C.S. Lewis named Bulverism. He explained it thus (quote is from Wikipedia):
You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly.
Engineering time and it started life as perl written in 1997 by a college student
That makes sense - how can anybody complete a new feature with only fifteen years of development?
if you don't want to vaccinate your kids, that's your right
I don't think that should be the case: isn't it reckless endangerment of a minor? How is it different from dangling your kid out the window, for example? Why would a parent's right to be a stubborn ignorant trump the child's right to safety?
And if we follow THAT logic to its conclusion, then mothers should be able to kill newborns or infants.
No, that's doesn't follow at all. After the birth, a mother that's unable or unwilling to care for the newborn or infant has other choices beyond abortion. Newborns or infants don't require the presence and effort of the mother anymore - they only need care, which can be provided by other people, and there are many organizations that do exactly that. Before the birth those choices don't exist.
If you're not intentionally distorting the issue, you should worry that your logic is so faulty.
Maybe their objection in this case is not that they may be forced to see it, but the thought that other people might be enjoying it. :D
Heh, Ambrose Bierce put it best;. from The Devil's Dictionary:
Puritanism: the haunting feeling that someone, somewhere, might be happy
probably involves some kind of hokey religion that uses the mummies to legitimize the rule of the priest/king class
I see what you mean...
If you extend that to "... underappreciated by modern audiences", I can think of a few
[snipped very good list]
And I'd like to add Theodore Sturgeon (who I'm told was actually the model Vonnegut used for Kilgore Trout) and Robert Bloch (not so much a writer of sci fi as horror, but a great writer anyway)