Actually, Acer is cashing in on tablets. They have a tablet called the Acer Iconia A500. The tablet itself is pretty nice in the hardware department and even includes a USB host port. Honeycomb has issues though. I ended up giving mine away because of the locked bootloader.
You want spend the most effort to conserve the most expensive resource. And that is not the cpu, ram, or disk time. It's human time.
You are absolutely correct... however, it seems you are thinking of the wrong human here: The Programmer.
The Programmer's time is wasted once in writing and optimizing the code. The User's time is wasted each time that The User uses the program... but, it is even worse than that: There is typically more than one User... so multiply all of the time wasted for one User by the total number of Users. Now, let's compare that time (time == money) that was used by the Programmer vs the time that was used by the Users. Where is the majority of the money wasted?
But yes, you are absolutely correct: It is human time that is the most expensive.
The problem with CPUs is their horrible security model: it is either user or kernel mode for an application, there is no other security mode.
Wrong. The x86 architecture alone has numerous rings. Five I think? No mainstream kernels use more than two of those rings.
The problem with programming languages is that the most used programming languages for system programming are too open for abuse. I am talking about C/C++, of course. Take Windows, for example: hundreds of buffer overflows bugs, because C does not do bounds checking on arrays. If C was designed with safety first, performance second, and made checked array access the default, and unchecked array access explicit, less security issue would exist.
C is just a tool. How a tool is used is a methodology. The tool is not at fault, the methodology is. Even with a good methodology, you just can not have morons at the console writing the code. I know, business owners dream of a world where they can have low-cost interchangeable morons writing code. That is not going to ever happen (reliably).
Finally, communications over networks should have been encrypted by default, and only revert to unencrypted when it did not hurt to do so. The encryption support cost would have been minimal by now, as with all technologies that start expensive and get cheap as they are massively produced.
I think Phil Zimmerman is the name of a guy you should talk to. Working with encryption has been an extremely dangerous pastime in a not-too-distant history. ITAR is the acronym you should specifically be looking for. One example: Windows 2000 shipped capable of doing 56 bit encryption (useless) due to ITAR. Once you proved you were in America, you could upgrade to 128 bit encryption.
I can understand their business reasons for doing so
I understand their reasons for doing so as well. My point is that it is DRM that gets in the way while the OP was saying that it is a harmless "out of your way" DRM because offline mode is available.
In the meantime, Valve will take my money without the crazy bullshit DRM and I can play my games even if the Internet is down. If I want to try an Ubisoft game, I'll know where to go.
I keep seeing this meme being propagated... Have you ever seriously tried to use steam in offline mode? I have. It does not work.
Yes, if you have had an internet connection recently, it *may* work. Let me tell you about my offline experiences with steam though.
I was being deployed to a remote location so I ensured that steam and all of my games were updated properly and set it up to work in offline mode. After a few weeks of travel and "settling in" I finally had a chance to play some Half Life 2 so I launched steam and it said that it had to update itself. WTF? How could it possibly know there was an update since it could not communicate with anything? Fuck me. So I eventually fly out to a less remote location and am able to use a satellite terminal and the steam client downloaded a 200 megabyte update for itself. Over satellite. WTF? Is the steam client even 200 megabytes in size? What the hell? Okay... so it is updated again, offline mode tested, and I go remote again. The next time I open the steam client, it said some sort of ticket was invalid and that I needed to connect again before I could play.
I am no longer as remote and I have a 40mbit pipe to the internet now. The steam client is constantly updating itself with hundreds of megabytes of data. I have no idea what it is doing or why and I have no idea how all of the bandwidth usage is making my offline games any better. All I know is that steam adds no value to my single player games and that offline mode, while theoretically possible, is not actually viable.
I am glad you are satisfied with steam. I have no intention of telling other people how to spend their cash. The DRM is far too onerous for me though. I will not buy any more games that require/use steam.
"Welcome to human society. We have this neat little thing called specialization.
When I need my car fixed, I go to a mechanic. I don't understand everything he does, but if most mechanics agree I need an oil change, then I'll trust them."
This one was a VERY bad example. Cars were designed to fail and mechanics as a group were set to take advantage of you as much as possible during the 70s and 80s in America. People like me remember this and will STILL not buy an American car nor trust a mechanic that we do not have a personal relationship with.
So, appealing to "all the climate scientists say" really bothers me. I expect my mechanic to describe in enough detail any problems and I expect the same out of climate scientists. If the scientists hide data or refuse to entertain dialogue, what they say no longer matters even if it is correct.
I am untrained so that adds another data point to bolster the idea that cymbals are really hard to encode.:)
I think I will go over to the website after I leave work and see if I can contribute anything. I doubt it since I am not an audiophile and really can not distinguish much in modern music. It mostly sounds like mud to me.
Concerning favorite tricky passage, I have yet to hear any encoder perform well on a song by Primus that is called: My Name is Mud. For some weird reason, every encoder adds a clicking noise to one degree or another. Very weird... but then the song is a bit odd too.
What difference does the encoding make if the source material is crappy to begin with? I do not mean crappy like (insert favorite type of music to hate here), I mean crappy like you can not even really distinguish the instruments from each other? I am told this is due to "loudness wars" but I really have no idea. There is very little clarity in modern music so the encoding really does not matter very much.
"If you really can easily distinguish well-encoded AAC or MP3 from FLAC you should lend us at HA your golden ears!"
Meh. It is not the ears that make the difference. It is the brain. Picking up on patterns is easy for some people. Other people just do not care. Supply enough confusion to the brain and even the people who care will be unable to distinguish the AAC from the raw audio.
I have heard mp3s listed as encoded at 320k and could immediately recognize that it was 128k before being encoded at 320k (why do people do that?!).
Anyways... it is about the patterns. The light airy sound of cymbals are a dead giveaway to encoded material. I just can not help but notice. Just through the cymbals alone, I can frequently tell what bit rate an mp3 is encoded at due to the patterns on the edges of the sounds. Perhaps some anti-aliasing (CPU as per the last story) would help?
Hm. What is required to help you folks over at HA? I do not have much free time but I am willing to lend a hand if you see my qualities (or lack thereof (i have no idea what a middle C sounds like and have no real knowledge of music (i just like it))) as useful.
They give no information about how they measured and came up with this: a dollar's worth of NAND flash improves PC performance more than adding a dollar's worth of DRAM. The closest they come to explaining it is this: After reviewing a "wide range of DRAM and NAND configurations," as well as nearly 300 industry-standard PC benchmarks
Total garbage. After working with systems that have huge amounts of RAM in them, I can only conclude they are basing this off of Microsoft's paging algorithms. Put the swap/pagefile on a NAND device and things will really speed up due to the abusively aggressive nature of Microsoft's paging algorithms. If you could make a virtual ram drive to put the page file in, it would be even faster than a NAND solution... but these guys probably do not know how to do that.
Again, if such grandiose claims are going to be made, provide some hard data.
You can choose to have your pictures and video uploaded automatically to google+. I have the app on my phone. It also allows you to make the pictures immediately public if you want. (default is private)
If only a few people have all of the money, you WILL have to go to those people to get money. This is extremely self evident.
Do not be deceived, athletes and movie stars are NOT wealthy. They are not paupers as they can generally buy whatever physical trinkets they want at any time they want, but they are not wealthy.
Bill Gates or Warren Buffet have astounding amounts of money (rich!) but they are not the truly wealthy either... as wealth is more than about decimal points in a ledger somewhere. The truly wealthy can move that decimal point anywhere they want if the consequences suit them. Wealthy people may have a few hundred million in a bank account somewhere or other such abnormal manifestations of worthless trinkets but to focus on the dollar is to miss what wealth is: Control of resources.
Taxing Bill Gates and others like him will help somewhat but it will not solve the problem. I could go on but it devolves in to conspiracy theories and such which are a waste of time: The huge increase of the price of rice in 2008 was a clear sign.
I keep seeing memes like these: It is just a rounding error in the budget.
As a senator once said, "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon we are talking about real money."
I do not know about you but 7 billion dollars is a LOT of money now. When our currency becomes worthless, a loaf of bread might be 7 billion dollars but for now, it is a very large sum of money even if it is miniscule compared to something much larger.
As a famous person once said, "A penny saved is a penny earned."
Now do not get me wrong, I am not arguing against funding science here. I am merely pointing out that the attitude of "what is 7 billion when compared against X" is the wrong attitude to have as it leads to waste and poor planning.
If you want my two cents worth, science should have plenty of funding and plenty of oversight to ensure that the money does not get funneled to someone's friends.
None of those patents look non-obvious to me: Someone who has had no formal training in Software Design.
Can you just patent anything that has not been implemented yet and charge anyone else for doing it afterwards? That seems a rather odd way for the laws to be set up.
Except Windows Media Player autostarts and examines EVERY item you stick in to a computer, whether USB, CD, DVD, whatever. Effectively, autorun can never be disabled due to this behavior. (to test, open up Task Manager and click on "show processes from all users" and then stick something in. even with all autorun disabled, you will see windows media launch)
What this means is that an attacker merely needs to finds a vulnerability in Windows Media to automagically exploit your computer.
"Soon, this will become another one of those "and the Russians used a pencil" sayings - I bet every other military just has their soldiers adapt to the same conditions as the people they are fighting - cheaper, more sensible, more efficient and a lot greater sense.
And like the Russian pencil thing, it is plain wrong. Do you know what happens when the "lead" breaks in a pencil? A conductive piece of graphite goes floating about in zero gravity and could end up shorting out a very important circuit.
Do you know what happens when a server is operating in 50C (as it gets where I am deployed at) dusty weather? It dies within days, especially if it is doing any real work (as it should be doing). Cisco switches seem to survive a lot better as I have had one hit by an AK47 round and all it required was a cycling of the power (while it was operating in 39C temps).
Interesting factoid. Did you know that from March 2003 to December 2004, no tents of any sort were air conditioned? Lowering heat stress on combat troops is very important regardless of the electronics they take with them. That is what makes them better able to do their job.
Holy cow! Google Translate is a LOT better than it used to be. All of those translations to/from actually came back semi-intelligibly.
Yes, I had the advantage of knowing the original post. It would have been fascinating to read the double translations first and then to read the original post to find out how much I was automatically translating in my head.
Absolutely incredible. I am amazed at how not-poorly Google Translate did.
"Yeah, iMacs and iPods were made cool by nerds *facepalm*
If nerds had that much sway, the majority of people would be running Linux on the desktop, with all popular and important commercial apps and games available for it. And there would be no copyright or patents. And they'd be too busy with their girlfriends to use computers much of the time. "
Ahem. When did Macs start to become popular? Was it when they based it off of Unix? Who uses Unix? Yeah, it is the jock who is busy banging your girlfriend that made the Mac what it is today. *facepalm*
Ah. Nice. The lie is made more palatable by changing the location of the bloodshed. "Sorry, we mislead you to believe that the evil Chinese slaughtered their own people in some important square. In order to help you feel less betrayed by our dishonesty, we will make allegations that there was still some slaughtering going, but it was around the corner where no TV reporters were."
And so the lie is complete... but was there really slaughtering going on in the square? Was there really slaughtering going on "around the corner"? Was there even a mass protest?
Some application of logic and probabilities states there probably were mass protests and that numerous people died in the square.
Was it an intentional slaughter as it was portrayed? Well, that is what is being retracted now. Why was it important to portray it as an intentional slaughter then and why is it so important to retract that portrayal now?
Ultimately it does not matter. What does matter to me is that it is clear that Slashdot is controlled by "them" now. Interesting.
(I love these CAPTCHAs. How they do make them so omniscient? Mine is currently "annexed". Reality is too hilarious to be real.
It is a shame that I just used my last mod points on the previous article. You deserve another +1 insightful mod to your +4 insightful post.
"in my experience when you try to hide the details from users you end up with an interface that's Artificially Stupid, not Artificially Intelligent."
This is what Gnome, Apple, Microsoft, and many others are moving towards and it is driving me crazy. Stop! I want control of my stuff. Sure, manage the complexity so the casual user is not bothered (hide the arcane controls in a well documented place if necessary), but do not remove them entirely.
What?
Oh, right. Never mind. It is not "my" stuff. I am just leasing it or borrowing it. I guess that means you are just leasing or borrowing my money too right?
Actually, only episodes 4 and 5 were pretty good. Episode 6 had some issues.
Recently, I watched Episode 3 again and for some reason, I was no longer blinded by "magic" and I could see the movie clearly. While I enjoyed watching it many times before, I can now see through the "glamor" and my god, it is horrible. The story is atrocious and the acting, while professional, is still terrible.
I am kind of afraid of watching episodes 4 and 5 again in case the glamor is gone from them too. I prefer my rosy memories.
Your comment (along with its moderation of +5 Funny) should be bookmarked and viewed again in 50 (maybe even 30?) years time. I am betting nobody will be laughing then.
The ultimate problem is that you are never allowed control by the programs that you use. The software is not designed FOR you, it is designed to be used BY you. The software is designed with purposes other than serving you in mind.
Look at the permissions for your Android based phone. There are very few apps on the market that can be installed without giving them some pretty nasty permissions. Why were the permissions grouped as they were? To ensure a minimal amount of control by you while allowing the greatest amount of control to the developer. So why implement any permissions at all? So that they (Google) can say that they implemented a permissions system, it is not their fault you gave the app permissions it did not need. Very slick using grouping like that.
Look at the plugins permissions on IE 9 or Safari. They are set to push you to just "allow all" if you try to control it. The endless nagging to run flash player can not be stopped unless you never want to use flash player anywhere. To see how it SHOULD be done, look at the noscript plugin for Firefox.
We are not in control of our software. Virus writers take advantage of that lack of control. This will never end because we will never have control over our software. Whoever creates (which is not usually the programmer for commercial software) the software will always be the one in control. It is not human nature to ever relinquish control.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Acer is cashing in on tablets. They have a tablet called the Acer Iconia A500. The tablet itself is pretty nice in the hardware department and even includes a USB host port. Honeycomb has issues though. I ended up giving mine away because of the locked bootloader.
strike
You want spend the most effort to conserve the most expensive resource. And that is not the cpu, ram, or disk time. It's human time.
You are absolutely correct... however, it seems you are thinking of the wrong human here: The Programmer.
The Programmer's time is wasted once in writing and optimizing the code. The User's time is wasted each time that The User uses the program... but, it is even worse than that: There is typically more than one User... so multiply all of the time wasted for one User by the total number of Users. Now, let's compare that time (time == money) that was used by the Programmer vs the time that was used by the Users. Where is the majority of the money wasted?
But yes, you are absolutely correct: It is human time that is the most expensive.
Regards,
strike
(CAPTCHA is subsidy, ROFL)
The problem with CPUs is their horrible security model: it is either user or kernel mode for an application, there is no other security mode.
Wrong. The x86 architecture alone has numerous rings. Five I think? No mainstream kernels use more than two of those rings.
The problem with programming languages is that the most used programming languages for system programming are too open for abuse. I am talking about C/C++, of course. Take Windows, for example: hundreds of buffer overflows bugs, because C does not do bounds checking on arrays. If C was designed with safety first, performance second, and made checked array access the default, and unchecked array access explicit, less security issue would exist.
C is just a tool. How a tool is used is a methodology. The tool is not at fault, the methodology is. Even with a good methodology, you just can not have morons at the console writing the code. I know, business owners dream of a world where they can have low-cost interchangeable morons writing code. That is not going to ever happen (reliably).
Finally, communications over networks should have been encrypted by default, and only revert to unencrypted when it did not hurt to do so. The encryption support cost would have been minimal by now, as with all technologies that start expensive and get cheap as they are massively produced.
I think Phil Zimmerman is the name of a guy you should talk to. Working with encryption has been an extremely dangerous pastime in a not-too-distant history. ITAR is the acronym you should specifically be looking for. One example: Windows 2000 shipped capable of doing 56 bit encryption (useless) due to ITAR. Once you proved you were in America, you could upgrade to 128 bit encryption.
I can understand their business reasons for doing so
I understand their reasons for doing so as well. My point is that it is DRM that gets in the way while the OP was saying that it is a harmless "out of your way" DRM because offline mode is available.
strike
In the meantime, Valve will take my money without the crazy bullshit DRM and I can play my games even if the Internet is down. If I want to try an Ubisoft game, I'll know where to go.
I keep seeing this meme being propagated... Have you ever seriously tried to use steam in offline mode? I have. It does not work.
Yes, if you have had an internet connection recently, it *may* work. Let me tell you about my offline experiences with steam though.
I was being deployed to a remote location so I ensured that steam and all of my games were updated properly and set it up to work in offline mode. After a few weeks of travel and "settling in" I finally had a chance to play some Half Life 2 so I launched steam and it said that it had to update itself. WTF? How could it possibly know there was an update since it could not communicate with anything? Fuck me. So I eventually fly out to a less remote location and am able to use a satellite terminal and the steam client downloaded a 200 megabyte update for itself. Over satellite. WTF? Is the steam client even 200 megabytes in size? What the hell? Okay... so it is updated again, offline mode tested, and I go remote again. The next time I open the steam client, it said some sort of ticket was invalid and that I needed to connect again before I could play.
I am no longer as remote and I have a 40mbit pipe to the internet now. The steam client is constantly updating itself with hundreds of megabytes of data. I have no idea what it is doing or why and I have no idea how all of the bandwidth usage is making my offline games any better. All I know is that steam adds no value to my single player games and that offline mode, while theoretically possible, is not actually viable.
I am glad you are satisfied with steam. I have no intention of telling other people how to spend their cash. The DRM is far too onerous for me though. I will not buy any more games that require/use steam.
strike
It's pretty easy to tell if she often tweets about her penis.
You are clearly NOT married. :)
"Welcome to human society. We have this neat little thing called specialization.
When I need my car fixed, I go to a mechanic. I don't understand everything he does, but if most mechanics agree I need an oil change, then I'll trust them."
This one was a VERY bad example. Cars were designed to fail and mechanics as a group were set to take advantage of you as much as possible during the 70s and 80s in America. People like me remember this and will STILL not buy an American car nor trust a mechanic that we do not have a personal relationship with.
So, appealing to "all the climate scientists say" really bothers me. I expect my mechanic to describe in enough detail any problems and I expect the same out of climate scientists. If the scientists hide data or refuse to entertain dialogue, what they say no longer matters even if it is correct.
strike
I am untrained so that adds another data point to bolster the idea that cymbals are really hard to encode. :)
I think I will go over to the website after I leave work and see if I can contribute anything. I doubt it since I am not an audiophile and really can not distinguish much in modern music. It mostly sounds like mud to me.
Concerning favorite tricky passage, I have yet to hear any encoder perform well on a song by Primus that is called: My Name is Mud. For some weird reason, every encoder adds a clicking noise to one degree or another. Very weird... but then the song is a bit odd too.
strike
What difference does the encoding make if the source material is crappy to begin with? I do not mean crappy like (insert favorite type of music to hate here), I mean crappy like you can not even really distinguish the instruments from each other? I am told this is due to "loudness wars" but I really have no idea. There is very little clarity in modern music so the encoding really does not matter very much.
strike
"If you really can easily distinguish well-encoded AAC or MP3 from FLAC you should lend us at HA your golden ears!"
Meh. It is not the ears that make the difference. It is the brain. Picking up on patterns is easy for some people. Other people just do not care. Supply enough confusion to the brain and even the people who care will be unable to distinguish the AAC from the raw audio.
I have heard mp3s listed as encoded at 320k and could immediately recognize that it was 128k before being encoded at 320k (why do people do that?!).
Anyways... it is about the patterns. The light airy sound of cymbals are a dead giveaway to encoded material. I just can not help but notice. Just through the cymbals alone, I can frequently tell what bit rate an mp3 is encoded at due to the patterns on the edges of the sounds. Perhaps some anti-aliasing (CPU as per the last story) would help?
Hm. What is required to help you folks over at HA? I do not have much free time but I am willing to lend a hand if you see my qualities (or lack thereof (i have no idea what a middle C sounds like and have no real knowledge of music (i just like it))) as useful.
(rofl, the captcha is spinner)
strike
They give no information about how they measured and came up with this: a dollar's worth of NAND flash improves PC performance more than adding a dollar's worth of DRAM. The closest they come to explaining it is this: After reviewing a "wide range of DRAM and NAND configurations," as well as nearly 300 industry-standard PC benchmarks
Total garbage. After working with systems that have huge amounts of RAM in them, I can only conclude they are basing this off of Microsoft's paging algorithms. Put the swap/pagefile on a NAND device and things will really speed up due to the abusively aggressive nature of Microsoft's paging algorithms. If you could make a virtual ram drive to put the page file in, it would be even faster than a NAND solution... but these guys probably do not know how to do that.
Again, if such grandiose claims are going to be made, provide some hard data.
strike
You can choose to have your pictures and video uploaded automatically to google+. I have the app on my phone. It also allows you to make the pictures immediately public if you want. (default is private)
strike
If only a few people have all of the money, you WILL have to go to those people to get money. This is extremely self evident.
Do not be deceived, athletes and movie stars are NOT wealthy. They are not paupers as they can generally buy whatever physical trinkets they want at any time they want, but they are not wealthy.
Bill Gates or Warren Buffet have astounding amounts of money (rich!) but they are not the truly wealthy either... as wealth is more than about decimal points in a ledger somewhere. The truly wealthy can move that decimal point anywhere they want if the consequences suit them. Wealthy people may have a few hundred million in a bank account somewhere or other such abnormal manifestations of worthless trinkets but to focus on the dollar is to miss what wealth is: Control of resources.
Taxing Bill Gates and others like him will help somewhat but it will not solve the problem. I could go on but it devolves in to conspiracy theories and such which are a waste of time: The huge increase of the price of rice in 2008 was a clear sign.
strike
I keep seeing memes like these: It is just a rounding error in the budget.
As a senator once said, "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon we are talking about real money."
I do not know about you but 7 billion dollars is a LOT of money now. When our currency becomes worthless, a loaf of bread might be 7 billion dollars but for now, it is a very large sum of money even if it is miniscule compared to something much larger.
As a famous person once said, "A penny saved is a penny earned."
Now do not get me wrong, I am not arguing against funding science here. I am merely pointing out that the attitude of "what is 7 billion when compared against X" is the wrong attitude to have as it leads to waste and poor planning.
If you want my two cents worth, science should have plenty of funding and plenty of oversight to ensure that the money does not get funneled to someone's friends.
strike
So they essentially patented using a finger gesture to lock the screen in portrait or landscape mode...
I am guessing that you can figure out what the finger gesture is that I have for the patent office and Apple.
None of those patents look non-obvious to me: Someone who has had no formal training in Software Design.
Can you just patent anything that has not been implemented yet and charge anyone else for doing it afterwards? That seems a rather odd way for the laws to be set up.
strike
Except Windows Media Player autostarts and examines EVERY item you stick in to a computer, whether USB, CD, DVD, whatever. Effectively, autorun can never be disabled due to this behavior. (to test, open up Task Manager and click on "show processes from all users" and then stick something in. even with all autorun disabled, you will see windows media launch)
What this means is that an attacker merely needs to finds a vulnerability in Windows Media to automagically exploit your computer.
strike
"Soon, this will become another one of those "and the Russians used a pencil" sayings - I bet every other military just has their soldiers adapt to the same conditions as the people they are fighting - cheaper, more sensible, more efficient and a lot greater sense.
And like the Russian pencil thing, it is plain wrong. Do you know what happens when the "lead" breaks in a pencil? A conductive piece of graphite goes floating about in zero gravity and could end up shorting out a very important circuit.
Do you know what happens when a server is operating in 50C (as it gets where I am deployed at) dusty weather? It dies within days, especially if it is doing any real work (as it should be doing). Cisco switches seem to survive a lot better as I have had one hit by an AK47 round and all it required was a cycling of the power (while it was operating in 39C temps).
Interesting factoid. Did you know that from March 2003 to December 2004, no tents of any sort were air conditioned? Lowering heat stress on combat troops is very important regardless of the electronics they take with them. That is what makes them better able to do their job.
Holy cow! Google Translate is a LOT better than it used to be. All of those translations to/from actually came back semi-intelligibly.
Yes, I had the advantage of knowing the original post. It would have been fascinating to read the double translations first and then to read the original post to find out how much I was automatically translating in my head.
Absolutely incredible. I am amazed at how not-poorly Google Translate did.
"Yeah, iMacs and iPods were made cool by nerds *facepalm*
If nerds had that much sway, the majority of people would be running Linux on the desktop, with all popular and important commercial apps and games available for it. And there would be no copyright or patents. And they'd be too busy with their girlfriends to use computers much of the time.
"
Ahem. When did Macs start to become popular? Was it when they based it off of Unix? Who uses Unix? Yeah, it is the jock who is busy banging your girlfriend that made the Mac what it is today. *facepalm*
Ah. Nice. The lie is made more palatable by changing the location of the bloodshed. "Sorry, we mislead you to believe that the evil Chinese slaughtered their own people in some important square. In order to help you feel less betrayed by our dishonesty, we will make allegations that there was still some slaughtering going, but it was around the corner where no TV reporters were."
And so the lie is complete... but was there really slaughtering going on in the square? Was there really slaughtering going on "around the corner"? Was there even a mass protest?
Some application of logic and probabilities states there probably were mass protests and that numerous people died in the square.
Was it an intentional slaughter as it was portrayed? Well, that is what is being retracted now. Why was it important to portray it as an intentional slaughter then and why is it so important to retract that portrayal now?
Ultimately it does not matter. What does matter to me is that it is clear that Slashdot is controlled by "them" now. Interesting.
(I love these CAPTCHAs. How they do make them so omniscient? Mine is currently "annexed". Reality is too hilarious to be real.
strike
It is a shame that I just used my last mod points on the previous article. You deserve another +1 insightful mod to your +4 insightful post.
"in my experience when you try to hide the details from users you end up with an interface that's Artificially Stupid, not Artificially Intelligent."
This is what Gnome, Apple, Microsoft, and many others are moving towards and it is driving me crazy. Stop! I want control of my stuff. Sure, manage the complexity so the casual user is not bothered (hide the arcane controls in a well documented place if necessary), but do not remove them entirely.
What?
Oh, right. Never mind. It is not "my" stuff. I am just leasing it or borrowing it. I guess that means you are just leasing or borrowing my money too right?
Meh. Thieves.
Actually, only episodes 4 and 5 were pretty good. Episode 6 had some issues.
Recently, I watched Episode 3 again and for some reason, I was no longer blinded by "magic" and I could see the movie clearly. While I enjoyed watching it many times before, I can now see through the "glamor" and my god, it is horrible. The story is atrocious and the acting, while professional, is still terrible.
I am kind of afraid of watching episodes 4 and 5 again in case the glamor is gone from them too. I prefer my rosy memories.
Your comment (along with its moderation of +5 Funny) should be bookmarked and viewed again in 50 (maybe even 30?) years time. I am betting nobody will be laughing then.
You comment is extraordinarily insightful.
The ultimate problem is that you are never allowed control by the programs that you use. The software is not designed FOR you, it is designed to be used BY you. The software is designed with purposes other than serving you in mind.
Look at the permissions for your Android based phone. There are very few apps on the market that can be installed without giving them some pretty nasty permissions. Why were the permissions grouped as they were? To ensure a minimal amount of control by you while allowing the greatest amount of control to the developer. So why implement any permissions at all? So that they (Google) can say that they implemented a permissions system, it is not their fault you gave the app permissions it did not need. Very slick using grouping like that.
Look at the plugins permissions on IE 9 or Safari. They are set to push you to just "allow all" if you try to control it. The endless nagging to run flash player can not be stopped unless you never want to use flash player anywhere. To see how it SHOULD be done, look at the noscript plugin for Firefox.
We are not in control of our software. Virus writers take advantage of that lack of control. This will never end because we will never have control over our software. Whoever creates (which is not usually the programmer for commercial software) the software will always be the one in control. It is not human nature to ever relinquish control.