It's a widely known and reported fact that US food exports are extremely heavily subsidised. I don't see how having the exact figure to hand would contribute anything to the discussion, especially as part of my criticism was that the poster had figures but no context to put them in perspective. I asked a lot of rhetorical questions to emphasise my point, and that was one of them.
Also, I don't see how your whining about not having a figure to hand contributes anything. Talk about hypocrisy...
The article stated that there will be 300m Americans. What is the collective noun for those who inhabit the Americas? Err...
Absolutely, Americans can mean US citizens, but it can also mean continental residents. I wasn't saying that everyone is "so stupid!" (and why you seem to have taken it so personally is puzzling), nor that the article poster is stupid. I wasn't even saying the article was wrong! I was pointing out that it was ambiguous and should perhaps have been composed more carefully, in the interests of clarifying debate, albeit a slightly fatuous thing to point out.
Now, get down off the roof, wipe the foam from your mouth, and have a good think about why you reacted so badly.
Wow; it was fascinating to watch that post go from +5 funny to -1 Flamebait after you posted your heart-rending plea.
Thing is, Funny is both a) subjective and b) unrelated to "tasteful" (well, inversely related if anything). I don't mind being modded down - that's what the system's for - but your statement that "it isn't funny" means that you didn't find it funny. Clearly at least 3 other people did at the time, which is what humour is about - timing. The following Troll/Flamebait mods only appeared after you sulked and wept your heart out.
I can appreciate it wasn't funny to you - yes, it was tasteless - but I knew people who were badly affected by the London bombings and who that very night were making jokes about it. Partly it was a coping mechanism, but partly it was just that some people like edgy humour and prefer to distance themselves from tragedy with levity. In some ways it's a way of confronting tragedy head-on. Iodine for the wound, as it were. I've no doubt you would have found those jokes as funny as they and I did. You might have felt slightly uneasy about it, but it was that ability to laugh, to shrug it off, at least to be pragmatic, that stopped everyone from going bug-fuck paranoid and bitter at the time, and which allowed London to get on with its life instead of doing exactly what the terrorists wanted - freaking out.
Sorry if I offended you. However, your knee-jerk reply suggests that you aren't well equipped to deal with the stings and blows that everyone experiences in life. Still, it is interesting how quickly the mod-tide turned...
How much of that low-cost is due to subsidising? How does the US stack up against developing countries pre-subsidy? I'd like a figure please.
More to the point, do you have any idea what impact subsidising your food exports has on the global economy? Specifically, have you got a clue just how badly fucked the third-world, agriculture-based economies are thanks to your heroic efforts to get rid of this food that your farmers are overproducing so they can reap the benefits of such a heavily manipulated market?
You may not be sucking up other nations' resources in this regard, but you are destroying their ability to be economically profitable and competitive. The thing is, economically speaking it doesn't make much difference to the US - just a few less wasted fields here or there, a marginally improved national deficit figure - but to the countries who rely on food export to maintain any kind of currency in the global market, it is everything. Still, as long as nothing inconveniences the honest 'Merkin, yes?
Gotta be honest: barring the occasional unique game, just about every game I've seen for the PC in the last few years has just featured an artist's impression of a key or common character from the game looking heroic on the front. Everything from Warcraft to Psychonauts to bloody Stronghold - even HL2 has Gordon looking steamy and marginally psychotic in close-up, dammit! Okay, it is an attractive cover, and it does give you a fairly accurate impression of the look and feel of the game (hardly standard practice), but it's nothing compared to the understated, gritty text-on-distressed-industrial-surface of HL1 (which, again, somehow set the tone for the game).
Thing is, who one Earth would even consider spending £30 (or whatever that translates into in Earth-Dollars) or more on a game when they can't even be bothered to look at the screenshots on the back of the box, let alone read a preview or find out how badly Penny Arcade slags it off. If that's how easily you're parted with your cash, you deserve it.
Still. This wasn't really a serious article, was it. *ahem*
Hmmm, gotta disagree with you their. First, Mona Lisa was full of "greater meaning", just like damned-near every painting created during that period, and Leonardo was as guilty of it as anyone. Second, how exactly it Pacman deeply layered? I can't see any depth to it, and I was under the very strong impression that was why so many people liked it. Not to put too fine a point on it, your third statement almost directly contradicts your first, and they're both fairly far off the mark anyway.
Not that anything you're saying isn't true, but you seem to be missing the point. The poster was saying that there are generally accepted to be 4 commonly experienced axes relative to any position. The fact that from a human perspective we are inherently likely to distinguish these perpendicular axes as up/down, left/right, forward/backward and future/past IS a commonly accepted framework when dealing with human perception and interaction - which is what this controller is for - means that he was using a language that better expresses his point, thusly:
The poster's point was that we are generally agreed that, while there may be other dimensions in spacetime, we are only fairly sure about the existence of 4 of them and the rest are entirely hypothetical at this point - some hypotheses being more likely and useful than others (6? 10? who knows?), but hypothetical nonetheless. He could have said "okay, I know we have four commonly-perceived perpendicular dimensions in spacetime, so where are they getting the other two?", but chose to be a little more curt and descriptive, saying effectively the same thing but in slightly inaccurate laymen's terms which had a somewhat greater impact than your unspoken alternative. His point was that the name suggests Sony miscounted or have gone off on one, and he made it well. You appear to have gotten caught up in the technicalities, which really aren't relevant here. So shut up please.
There are people out there who would understand what you said, but they don't need reminding. They got the point, and it seems you didn't. Then there are people who wouldn't understand what you said, who really don't give a damn, and will probably wonder what the hell you're getting upset about. Either way, you're not contributing to the discussion - just giong offtopic by contributing your adorably unique combination of a relatively high technical intelligence and an embarrassingly low social intelligence. This was the wrong outlet for that, I'm afraid.
Yeah, this is pretty stupid. Normally I'd order halal, but I'm pretty sure that I'll be too tense to eat anything on my NY flight this November, and I should probably fast on my last day on Earth...
There needs to be a complete quantum leap somewhere along the line to push everything forward. We believe PCM are going to be that quantum leap.
You mean... like... a leap so small that it's impossible to make a conventional leap any smaller, and measuring and predicting effects on such a tiny scale are so experimental and imperceptible that they require a unique perspective of the laws of nature in order to make any sense of them?
It's really touching, all that stuff about raising a family that he goes into, but (while Heidi might be strangely attractive) does he realise how ugly his kids might be? Course not, he's a father.
Honestly, if I plugged my mouse into the keyboard port and spat the input into a text editor, it'd look like Perl. I know that's an incredibly immature way of looking at a language but, dammit, even Assembly is prettier! Should that really be the case?
(Disclaimer: this is not a comment on Perl's functionality.)
Yeah, he does sound like a bit of a dick. I'll modify my last point to "It would be lovely to work for Google because I can transfer off whatever project the author's on."
Maybe it's the "services" themselves you should be worrying about...
Okay, that's a bit of a cheap stab, but it's important to remember that white-hats and black-hats are only separated by the particular direction their careers took them (consider that "security consultant" guy in NZ who narrowly escaped a conviction).
There's no such thing as a completely secure system. A security cracking service for testing your systems is paid to identify weaknesses, but there's no way they could make sure you were completely secure - their motivation is to do a decent job and get paid, which means identifying obvious flaws and telling you how to fix them. They're not going to spend their waking lives figuring out how to breach it.
If a black-hat of a similar caliber really wants to, they'll find a way into your system. It just might take time. Mostly though, they want into the easiest systems they can penetrate, so getting a white-hat in to make their job harder is worthwhile - it's just not a guarantee.
It's easy to jump on this guy for making us all feel shit about our inevitable working conditions (you think you've got it bad? Try working in local government...). However, really what he's doing is putting in clear, simple terms some concepts that we all understand deep down, to whit:
- Google is a company whose success is almost entirely based on innovation
- Innovation comes from intelligent, well-motivated people
- The best way to motivate intelligent people to innovate is to give them total freedom (rewards are just to give them a direction, NOT to motivate them - they are motivated because they love what they do. Try offering rewards for something they don't want to do, and see what happens...)
- Most companies (even software companies) make the majority of their money through churning out the goods, not innovating
- Most companies do not have the funds or the original culture to even contemplate the above working practices
- It would be lovely to work for Google.
Personally I'm really glad this article got posted - it's not telling everyone how everyone should work, but it does offer insight into how Google works, and that's valuable insight indeed as long as it's not taken out of context.
It's good to see a bit of humour creep into these articles:
Russian jamming systems are publicly known -- the Air Force destroyed such a system deployed to Iraq to keep American GPS guided bombs from finding their targets during the 2003. The site was destroyed by GPS guided bombs.
I'm not sure what an application layer could do for multi-threading applications.
If a program has been written to perform tasks sequentially, there's nothing an app-layer could do to multi-thread it. If a program has been written to multi-thread, then the app-layer is a useless intermediary that will just make it marginally slower.
Until there is a massive culture-shift in programming, multicore processors will simply allow you to run more than one program simultaneously (excepting specialist apps). That shift is starting to happen, but it's generational; it tends to happen as a result of the older generation moving out of the business, and the younger generation - who have grown up with the concept - moving in. The same thing happened with OOP, with website development and so on. It will happen, but visionaries who're ahead of their time are few and far between. All they can do is push back the boundaries and talk about it, so the incoming young programmers can learn about it from the start and implement it into their programming philosophy.
Hmm, fair point - I didn't look into it much. I do sincerely hope this is a genuine innovation though, and not just an attempt to wow the media with the latest buzzword. Let's be honest, the possibility of being in the spotlight can't have been far from Intel's mind when they announced this...
I was genuinely excited when the Cell processor was being talked about, but they seem to have screwed up the commercial implementation somewhat. I was just as excited about the Crusoe architecture all of 5 years ago, but that never even made it out the laboratory door.
If Intel really do take a great new idea and make it work, hats off to them. I'm just wary of the ol' dinosaur falling back into old habits, as it's very easy for big-big companies to do.
I'm sorry but, well... didn't you guys do this with processor speed a while ago?
That didn't work because AMD worked out that architecture can trump speed. They innovated, and then did it again with decent dual-core (as in NOT the two-dies-on-one-chip cack that you churned out at first).
So, you improved your architecture and implemented dual-core properly, to produce the fantastic Duo. You got back in the race.
And then there was talk of more cores. And you went "Fuck that, bitches, stay DOWN - we is gon' fuck you up good with 80 cores, bitch, an' dat hard!". Yes, you decided to try and dominate the pissing contest of multi-core instead of megahurtz.
Jesus guys, didn't you learn a fucking thing? STOP trying to turn out something that little bit "more" than the competition, just get on with innovating and coming up with damn good chips. That's how AMD threatened you and, if you go on with this "anything you can do" shit again, you'll be back to square one.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, I don't see how your whining about not having a figure to hand contributes anything. Talk about hypocrisy...
Absolutely, Americans can mean US citizens, but it can also mean continental residents. I wasn't saying that everyone is "so stupid!" (and why you seem to have taken it so personally is puzzling), nor that the article poster is stupid. I wasn't even saying the article was wrong! I was pointing out that it was ambiguous and should perhaps have been composed more carefully, in the interests of clarifying debate, albeit a slightly fatuous thing to point out.
Now, get down off the roof, wipe the foam from your mouth, and have a good think about why you reacted so badly.
Thing is, Funny is both a) subjective and b) unrelated to "tasteful" (well, inversely related if anything). I don't mind being modded down - that's what the system's for - but your statement that "it isn't funny" means that you didn't find it funny. Clearly at least 3 other people did at the time, which is what humour is about - timing. The following Troll/Flamebait mods only appeared after you sulked and wept your heart out.
I can appreciate it wasn't funny to you - yes, it was tasteless - but I knew people who were badly affected by the London bombings and who that very night were making jokes about it. Partly it was a coping mechanism, but partly it was just that some people like edgy humour and prefer to distance themselves from tragedy with levity. In some ways it's a way of confronting tragedy head-on. Iodine for the wound, as it were. I've no doubt you would have found those jokes as funny as they and I did. You might have felt slightly uneasy about it, but it was that ability to laugh, to shrug it off, at least to be pragmatic, that stopped everyone from going bug-fuck paranoid and bitter at the time, and which allowed London to get on with its life instead of doing exactly what the terrorists wanted - freaking out.
Sorry if I offended you. However, your knee-jerk reply suggests that you aren't well equipped to deal with the stings and blows that everyone experiences in life. Still, it is interesting how quickly the mod-tide turned...
How much of that low-cost is due to subsidising? How does the US stack up against developing countries pre-subsidy? I'd like a figure please.
More to the point, do you have any idea what impact subsidising your food exports has on the global economy? Specifically, have you got a clue just how badly fucked the third-world, agriculture-based economies are thanks to your heroic efforts to get rid of this food that your farmers are overproducing so they can reap the benefits of such a heavily manipulated market?
You may not be sucking up other nations' resources in this regard, but you are destroying their ability to be economically profitable and competitive. The thing is, economically speaking it doesn't make much difference to the US - just a few less wasted fields here or there, a marginally improved national deficit figure - but to the countries who rely on food export to maintain any kind of currency in the global market, it is everything. Still, as long as nothing inconveniences the honest 'Merkin, yes?
Actually, the population of America is more like 858,000,000. The population of the USA, however...
Shit! Quick, go to a school and start a killing spree! It's the only way to keep this thing under control.
It's not often a wallet can be funny. Bravo.
Thing is, who one Earth would even consider spending £30 (or whatever that translates into in Earth-Dollars) or more on a game when they can't even be bothered to look at the screenshots on the back of the box, let alone read a preview or find out how badly Penny Arcade slags it off. If that's how easily you're parted with your cash, you deserve it.
Still. This wasn't really a serious article, was it. *ahem*
Hmmm, gotta disagree with you their. First, Mona Lisa was full of "greater meaning", just like damned-near every painting created during that period, and Leonardo was as guilty of it as anyone. Second, how exactly it Pacman deeply layered? I can't see any depth to it, and I was under the very strong impression that was why so many people liked it. Not to put too fine a point on it, your third statement almost directly contradicts your first, and they're both fairly far off the mark anyway.
The poster's point was that we are generally agreed that, while there may be other dimensions in spacetime, we are only fairly sure about the existence of 4 of them and the rest are entirely hypothetical at this point - some hypotheses being more likely and useful than others (6? 10? who knows?), but hypothetical nonetheless. He could have said "okay, I know we have four commonly-perceived perpendicular dimensions in spacetime, so where are they getting the other two?", but chose to be a little more curt and descriptive, saying effectively the same thing but in slightly inaccurate laymen's terms which had a somewhat greater impact than your unspoken alternative. His point was that the name suggests Sony miscounted or have gone off on one, and he made it well. You appear to have gotten caught up in the technicalities, which really aren't relevant here. So shut up please.
There are people out there who would understand what you said, but they don't need reminding. They got the point, and it seems you didn't. Then there are people who wouldn't understand what you said, who really don't give a damn, and will probably wonder what the hell you're getting upset about. Either way, you're not contributing to the discussion - just giong offtopic by contributing your adorably unique combination of a relatively high technical intelligence and an embarrassingly low social intelligence. This was the wrong outlet for that, I'm afraid.
Well, that's what I imagined, anyway...
The axes of Fun and RSI! It's the next level in gaming!
Yeah, this is pretty stupid. Normally I'd order halal, but I'm pretty sure that I'll be too tense to eat anything on my NY flight this November, and I should probably fast on my last day on Earth...
Hardly news then, right?
Why don't they just use batteries? I hear Sony has a surplus.
Honestly, if I plugged my mouse into the keyboard port and spat the input into a text editor, it'd look like Perl. I know that's an incredibly immature way of looking at a language but, dammit, even Assembly is prettier! Should that really be the case?
(Disclaimer: this is not a comment on Perl's functionality.)
Yeah, he does sound like a bit of a dick. I'll modify my last point to "It would be lovely to work for Google because I can transfer off whatever project the author's on."
Okay, that's a bit of a cheap stab, but it's important to remember that white-hats and black-hats are only separated by the particular direction their careers took them (consider that "security consultant" guy in NZ who narrowly escaped a conviction).
There's no such thing as a completely secure system. A security cracking service for testing your systems is paid to identify weaknesses, but there's no way they could make sure you were completely secure - their motivation is to do a decent job and get paid, which means identifying obvious flaws and telling you how to fix them. They're not going to spend their waking lives figuring out how to breach it.
If a black-hat of a similar caliber really wants to, they'll find a way into your system. It just might take time. Mostly though, they want into the easiest systems they can penetrate, so getting a white-hat in to make their job harder is worthwhile - it's just not a guarantee.
"PS3 launch is destined for Oblivion"
- Google is a company whose success is almost entirely based on innovation
- Innovation comes from intelligent, well-motivated people
- The best way to motivate intelligent people to innovate is to give them total freedom (rewards are just to give them a direction, NOT to motivate them - they are motivated because they love what they do. Try offering rewards for something they don't want to do, and see what happens...)
- Most companies (even software companies) make the majority of their money through churning out the goods, not innovating - Most companies do not have the funds or the original culture to even contemplate the above working practices
- It would be lovely to work for Google.
Personally I'm really glad this article got posted - it's not telling everyone how everyone should work, but it does offer insight into how Google works, and that's valuable insight indeed as long as it's not taken out of context.
If a program has been written to perform tasks sequentially, there's nothing an app-layer could do to multi-thread it. If a program has been written to multi-thread, then the app-layer is a useless intermediary that will just make it marginally slower.
Until there is a massive culture-shift in programming, multicore processors will simply allow you to run more than one program simultaneously (excepting specialist apps). That shift is starting to happen, but it's generational; it tends to happen as a result of the older generation moving out of the business, and the younger generation - who have grown up with the concept - moving in. The same thing happened with OOP, with website development and so on. It will happen, but visionaries who're ahead of their time are few and far between. All they can do is push back the boundaries and talk about it, so the incoming young programmers can learn about it from the start and implement it into their programming philosophy.
I was genuinely excited when the Cell processor was being talked about, but they seem to have screwed up the commercial implementation somewhat. I was just as excited about the Crusoe architecture all of 5 years ago, but that never even made it out the laboratory door.
If Intel really do take a great new idea and make it work, hats off to them. I'm just wary of the ol' dinosaur falling back into old habits, as it's very easy for big-big companies to do.
That didn't work because AMD worked out that architecture can trump speed. They innovated, and then did it again with decent dual-core (as in NOT the two-dies-on-one-chip cack that you churned out at first).
So, you improved your architecture and implemented dual-core properly, to produce the fantastic Duo. You got back in the race.
And then there was talk of more cores. And you went "Fuck that, bitches, stay DOWN - we is gon' fuck you up good with 80 cores, bitch, an' dat hard!". Yes, you decided to try and dominate the pissing contest of multi-core instead of megahurtz.
Jesus guys, didn't you learn a fucking thing? STOP trying to turn out something that little bit "more" than the competition, just get on with innovating and coming up with damn good chips. That's how AMD threatened you and, if you go on with this "anything you can do" shit again, you'll be back to square one.