If you want suboptimal performance why not just go back to windows?
The performance difference between 64-bit and 32-bit is not nearly as big as between 32-bit and 16-bit. When making the transition to 32-bit, things were pretty much faster across the board. With 64-bit, the case isn't so cut and dried. On x86 machines, running in 64-bit mode, you get a couple of things. The biggest is a larger virtual address space, which lets you work with more than 4GB at once. You also get larger general purpose registers, and more registers to play with. Generally, larger registers aren't really needed. Things like MMX and SSE have already given us the ability to process data in 128-bit chunks if we need to, and I'd bet most things that really need large registers are already using SSE. More registers are nice, but they only help in compute-bound circumstances. Most of the time these days, you're I/O bound.
The downside is that in 64-bit mode, pointers are all twice as big, which means your program will need more memory and possibly memory bandwidth than the 32-bit version would. My experience is that 64-bit is usually slower, unless you have 4GB or more of RAM. Theoretically, 64-bit can be faster, but generally people don't switch because they need the faster CPU speed, they switch because they need the RAM.
My girlfriend has sometimes asked me which male celebrities are more attractive than others. I almost always get the answer completely wrong, by her standards. In the same way, I've heard girls complaining that other girls are pretty or ugly, and generally their opinion is the opposite of mine.
This could be because of something like jealousy, or perhaps men and women look for different things. I think it would make sense though that women notice subtler details about men and notice subtler details about women.
From my dictionary "Atheist - One who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods." Yet the study says 21% of atheists believe in God.
The conclusion I got from this is that 21% of atheists have absolutely no idea what atheism means, but they just call themselves atheists because they think it's cool. I'm pretty sure even on Slashdot I've read self-proclaimed atheists say they're open to the possibility of there being a god, they just don't know of any evidence for said god's existence. Anyway, not having any idea what your religion or lack thereof is really about seems to be a pretty common trait in America these days.
Are you talking about the links in the MSDN documentation, or elsewhere? I tried a couple of documents you mentioned, and at least the online versions seemed to work. I didn't try downloading the PDFs or anything though.
I was getting the same feeling from reading some of the comments here. You need to make it interesting for the kids, but that's not the same as dumbing it down. Of course, making something interesting without dumbing it down (which usually makes it boring anyway) definitely isn't easy.
I know when I was in third grade, my family had a computer with QBasic on it. I had some idea that the program had something to do with "programming," so I started typing random words into it until one switched into all caps. I hit F1 to read the help file, read some of the examples, and read about other key words, and eventually started writing my own really simple text-based RPG games. By 5th grade, I had gotten a copy of Visual Basic and written a really simple animation program. Third graders aren't stupid.
In college, I worked on an aerial robotics project and we got a couple of chances to give presentations for elementary school kids. The first time or two, we ran through our power point presentation about all the cool things we were doing, and the kids looked really bored. Then we decided to make it more interactive. One of the tasks we had to complete was write a computer vision algorithm that could identify a certain symbol. I asked the kids "Knowing that computers are really stupid, how would you teach a computer to recognize this logo?" They said "It looks like a black circle with a white X in the middle, with the letters I, A, R, and C around it." I asked "Ok, what's a black circle? What's an X? What's an I? What's an A? What's an R? What's a C?" They looked kind of exasperated at first, but then they though about how to break the problem down more and eventually they described basically the same algorithm we were using.
Once we'd figured that out, I should them a demo of our program running, and gave them a mockup of the symbol for the computer to recognize. I let them play around with it, and then asked them to think of ways to fool the computer into not recognizing the symbol, or falsely recognizing something else. Without too much trouble, they were able to identify pretty much all of our algorithm's flaws.
Kids are naturally scientists. They are constantly trying to figure out how stuff around them works. You just have to set the problem up in the right way, and they'll have tons of fun figuring out solutions to it.
I know this story is several days out of date, but as someone who has worked on producing some of these documents, I thought I'd point out that the documents are, in fact, on MSDN:
Of course, it would be nice to have bloodless wars...
I used to think it'd be a good idea for nations to just have big battles on Age of Empires of Command and Conquer rather than actually going to war. The problem is if diplomacy is working well enough that two countries would agree to accept the outcome of a video game (or game of cricket, baseball, etc), then chances are they wouldn't need to go to war in the first place.
The truth is that war has to have a massive cost, and human life is about the only thing valuable enough to us that we'll decide we've had enough and end a war. Damaging infrastructure might work, but what are you going to do? Say, "Please abandon this power plant so we can blow it up without killing anyone?" Chances are the other side will start killing you before you can pull that off.
I suppose you might be able to get part of the way there by having a bunch of unmanned vehicles blowing each other up in a deserted field, as this has a physical cost without killing human life. Still, I suspect the losing side will eventually attacking the vehicle factories, and then human life starts getting involved again.
Ultimately, you either have no war, or you have bloody wars. There's not a lot in between.
I know you meant that as flamebait, but I think you kind of missed the point of what I was saying. I generally don't think that people are deliberately evil (though there are some cases where this is true), and I agree with you that the news outlets are not getting up and trying to spin things so it makes their side look good. I think biases generally work on a more subconscious level though.
Though I didn't say it, my post was more a personal admission that I do not have the ability to be unbiased. My biases are the result of a large variety of factors, including the way I was raised, my experiences, the things I've read and done, and the opinions I hold. These are very fundamental to who I am, and anything I say is going to be colored by them in some way. Sure, sometimes I try to be unbiased. The way I end up doing that is usually by being tougher on my own side than I would against the other.
Perhaps others actually have the ability to completely set their biases aside and report only objective reality free of any personal interpretations of reality, and the inability to be unbiased is my fault alone. My biases lead me to believe I'm not so unusual though.
You get much better information from someone you know is biased than when their bias is hidden, even if your own biases don't match.
This is a really good point. As much as we may try, it's pretty much impossible to be non-biased. I think we should give up the whole notion of unbiased information, and instead make it the norm to be really up front about our biases, so the people listening can interpret your words in the context of your biases.
I believe the cost is mostly in memory. I'm going from something I heard somewhere right now, so take it with a grain of salt, but I seem to remember hearing that at least on Windows, the data structures to keep track of a process are on the order of 2-3 megs. A thread, on the other hand, I would guess takes well under 100KB. The stacks may be larger, but I'd expect they start out as demand zero pages, so they don't actually count yet. Two to three megs seems high to me, but I guess it's not totally inconceivable.
IE 8 actually a process-per-tab (almost) model, like Chrome does. The logic of how to split tabs and stuff into different processes is different, but the general idea is the same. One thing Chrome does that IE doesn't, as far as I know, is that Chrome runs plugins like Flash in a separate process, while IE still keeps them in the tab's process.
The threads vs process distinction is very important, actually. Processes each get their own address space, while threads share an address space. This means processes can't write to each other's memory (except through things like shared memory segments), whereas threads can trample all over the other threads. A thread per tab model does protect you from a rogue Javascript freezing the browser's UI, but it doesn't protect you from a poorly written plugin that does something stupid like dereference a NULL pointer. If you really want reliability, you want processes instead. The downside is that processes are a lot heavier than threads.
Even if we can take atoms and molecules and arrange them in such a way that they exhibit all the same behaviors of life, there will always be the question of where these atoms came from, and why do they exist in such a way that it's possible to arrange them into life forms. Of course, creationism has a parallel question of where the creator came from and why did the creator feel the need to create everything exactly as it is.
I saw a comment on Slashdot a while back, possibly quoting someone else, that seems relevant. Unfortunately, I can't quite it with quite the same eloquence, but it was basically that even if scientists manage to completely duplicate abiogenesis and evolution under laboratory settings, they've simply shown that it's possible. They haven't shown that it actually happened, but since they are also presumably intelligent beings conducting the experiments, they've also not ruled out intelligent design. In the end, the whole thing ends up exactly where we are now.
The disappointing thing is that your science teacher was spreading doubt on the subject when the answers were out there to be found.
I disagree. From the GP, it sounds like this teacher raised some good thought questions, such as "what if a scientist creates life in a test tube?" These types of questions would prompt some of the students to go seek out answers on their own, and very likely the ones that do this and find answers come away with a lot better understanding. Sure, there are questions that we really don't have answers to that the teacher could have asked instead, but many of them would be beyond a high school science student's ability. The thing is, even if these questions already have answers, the students don't know them, and this exercise gives them the chance to develop their own research skills while learning the information. Many students won't go on to get a Ph.D., and to just say "here are all the answers" up until then will further the idea that they should take the scientists' word on blind faith, which is the exact same behavior that many fault religion for as well.
I read this post hoping to see a discussion of Sarah Palin's views on technology, which is what the headline suggested I'd see here. Instead, pretty much the whole discussion has been turned into another creation vs evolution flamewar. Next time, can we just mod this comment flamebait or off topic and be done with it?
The question is really whether employers care if their employees get plastered. If they do care, they'll have to come to terms with the fact that many of their employees have probably done that at some point in time. If they don't care, why does it matter if pictures get posted on the Internet?
But really, I suspect privacy is probably a relatively new and temporary concept. Back when people primarily lived in smaller communities, everyone pretty much knew everyone and had a pretty good idea what was going on in each other's life. People knew better than to do things they'd be embarrassed if people found out about. Our communities grew faster than our ability to keep track of people did, and we got used to being anonymous in huge crowds of people. Now that the technology is catching up, we'll have to get used to the idea that our small-town community has gotten a whole lot bigger.
This probably means we'll need to be more careful about what we do, but it also means we need to be more tolerant of the fact that people do stupid stuff that gets posted on the Internet. I don't think people do stupider stuff than they used to, it's just easier to find out about now.
You know, I've heard the "tabs just reinvent the taskbar" argument before, and I don't buy it. I find managing dozens of tabs in a browser a lot easier or more intuitive than trying to do the same in the taskbar. To me, it makes sense to have a single browser window with several tabs. It means "this window is meant for all of my web browsing." If I want to, I can even start up multiple windows for different web browsing topics. I definitely do not want to go back to just having the taskbar to manage all my browsing.
That being said, perhaps the problem is that the window managers haven't gotten it right yet. What if the window manager let you group windows into tabs and providing that as a service to applications, rather than applications doing this on their own? It seems like this would give you the advantages of both approaches, and also make it easier to extend tabs to other applications. Who knows, it might even make sense to group a word processor and a file manager into the same tab in some cases.
My favorite is "I live in a (blue|red) state, so my vote doesn't matter, the state will go with (blue|red) candidate regardless, so I won't vote."
You know, I'm actually finding this liberating this election cycle. I typically vote Republican, but I live in King County, Washington (the county that includes Seattle), and based on some of the recent elections, my cynical opinion is that King County will keep counting the votes and finding votes that they somehow magically lost until the Democrats win. It's extremely unlikely that Washington will turn red for the presidential election, so effectively if I vote for McCain, my vote won't count. (I'm not convinced I really even like McCain that much, but I definitely like him better than Obama)
What this means though is can can basically stay out of the battle between McCain and Obama. I'd love to see a third party become more viable, so now I can contribute to that by voting for a third party and at least having my vote show up in the popular vote counts. This time around, if I were to vote for McCain or Obama, my particular vote wouldn't matter that much. I think my vote will actually matter a lot more if I cast it for a third party.
I'm a fan of the version that includes a computer scientist. After all of this with the engineer, the physicist and the mathematician, the computer scientist sets his room on fire, thereby reducing the problem to another one with a known solution.
I can't profess to know how Microsoft engineered this
Here's a blog post from the IE team that describes how the feature works, if you're interested in more. Basically, it creates a couple different processes, which are all separate from the main UI frame. This means one process can crash, bringing down all the tabs in that process, but the rest are unaffected.
I agree, I think it's a pretty exciting feature. It almost makes crashing your browser an enjoyable experience. (I managed to crash a tab when I installed the Adobe SVG plugin to see if I could get another point or two on the Acid3 test).
One negative side effect of this is that there is some overhead in creating new processes. This will probably lead to Slashdot complaining about how much memory IE uses and how bloated it is, but personally, I find the reliability gains worth it. Another positive side effect though is that it isolates the Javascript interpreters from each other, which keeps one misbehaving page from locking up the whole browser.
Your last Firefox session closed unexpectedly. YOu can restore the tabs and windows from your previous sessions, or start a new session if you think the problem was related to a page you were viewing.
Ahh, you haven't actually seen IE8's automatic crash recovery feature then. Each of the tabs are isolated from each other, so if one tab crashes it doesn't take down the whole browser. The tab just goes away and then pops back up with a message saying IE recovered the tab. It's definitely not the same thing as "Restore Previous Session."
When I was in high school, I wrote an online voting program for our student body government elections. I think it was my first web site that did anything more dynamic than print out the current time. It was written in ASP, running on an old IIS server using Access datbase for storage.
This system was certainly prone to race conditions. We had several computer labs throughout the school all set up to allow people to come in and vote during passing periods, which means the software probably had to deal with around 60 people using the site within a couple of minutes. Access apparently doesn't make any concurrency guarantees, at least not the kind a real database server would have. The page recorded enough information that there should have been some internal consistency in the data base, like that the sum of votes for all candidates should have been the same as the number of votes cast.
Unfortunately, I did some manual checks and saw that the numbers didn't add up the way they should. On the bright side, none of the races were close, and they were all well outside what seemed to be the margin of error in my system. However, this shows that even well-meaning people can manage to screw this up.
Of course, I'm a much better programmer now, and I would know better than to make these mistakes were I to write voting software again. I'd also be very likely to refuse to write such software. Maybe for high school elections it's okay, but governmental elections need to be conducted on paper. If you must use electronic voting machines, it should simply print out your ballot and you physically drop that ballot in the ballot box. Voting machines shouldn't be doing the counting, they should only help you fill out your ballot.
It would have been nice to watch the video without knowing that it was a fake. I don't think I would have noticed, but you're right, it did look like something was wrong. It's almost like she was wearing too much makeup.
It was sort of like watching Firefly or Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. For some reason, Summer Glau always strikes me as not quite real. Of course, the parts she plays are meant to look a little inhuman. At any rate, it seems like the animators have at least gotten good at duplicating a human pretending not to be one.
Should things that aeronautical engineers come up with not be patentable before aeronautical engineering is just an arbitrary subset of physics? I'll gladly agree that there is something seriously broken with software patents as they are currently implemented, but I certainly don't claim to know the best way to fix them. I don't think we should completely get rid of them though.
By this point, software engineering is practiced very differently than abstract mathematics. It's much more akin to taking different building blocks and finding ways to put them together. In the same way that an aeronautical engineer would combine different hydraulics, flaps, bolts, fixtures, bearings and control surfaces, a software engineer will combine input routines, sorting functions, display functions and storage devices. We speak of software in terms of interconnected components that each preform a certain task and together perform a more complicated task, not in terms of mathematical proofs, even if you can express proofs as software and vice versa.
Furthermore, I'd argue that software is at one end of a spectrum that includes firmware and hardware. I think most readily agree that things on the hardware end of the spectrum are patentable. Where is the line that makes software exempt from these same protections. Imagine trying to patent an MP3 player. The software is an integral part of this invention. The MP3 player would be impossible without the software it runs.
Something is absolutely broken with software patents in their current incarnation. The bar for "obviousness" seems far too low. The patent term seems rather long, given the speed at which the industry moves. The treble damages for knowingly infringing a patent, while it makes sense to a certain extent, leads to some braindead behavior, like never reading patents in fear that you might accidentally knowingly infringe someone else's patent. Despite these flaws, software is sufficiently similar to other types of inventions that there is a place for patents on software as well.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want suboptimal performance why not just go back to windows?
The performance difference between 64-bit and 32-bit is not nearly as big as between 32-bit and 16-bit. When making the transition to 32-bit, things were pretty much faster across the board. With 64-bit, the case isn't so cut and dried. On x86 machines, running in 64-bit mode, you get a couple of things. The biggest is a larger virtual address space, which lets you work with more than 4GB at once. You also get larger general purpose registers, and more registers to play with. Generally, larger registers aren't really needed. Things like MMX and SSE have already given us the ability to process data in 128-bit chunks if we need to, and I'd bet most things that really need large registers are already using SSE. More registers are nice, but they only help in compute-bound circumstances. Most of the time these days, you're I/O bound.
The downside is that in 64-bit mode, pointers are all twice as big, which means your program will need more memory and possibly memory bandwidth than the 32-bit version would. My experience is that 64-bit is usually slower, unless you have 4GB or more of RAM. Theoretically, 64-bit can be faster, but generally people don't switch because they need the faster CPU speed, they switch because they need the RAM.
My girlfriend has sometimes asked me which male celebrities are more attractive than others. I almost always get the answer completely wrong, by her standards. In the same way, I've heard girls complaining that other girls are pretty or ugly, and generally their opinion is the opposite of mine.
This could be because of something like jealousy, or perhaps men and women look for different things. I think it would make sense though that women notice subtler details about men and notice subtler details about women.
From my dictionary "Atheist - One who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods." Yet the study says 21% of atheists believe in God.
The conclusion I got from this is that 21% of atheists have absolutely no idea what atheism means, but they just call themselves atheists because they think it's cool. I'm pretty sure even on Slashdot I've read self-proclaimed atheists say they're open to the possibility of there being a god, they just don't know of any evidence for said god's existence. Anyway, not having any idea what your religion or lack thereof is really about seems to be a pretty common trait in America these days.
Are you talking about the links in the MSDN documentation, or elsewhere? I tried a couple of documents you mentioned, and at least the online versions seemed to work. I didn't try downloading the PDFs or anything though.
I was getting the same feeling from reading some of the comments here. You need to make it interesting for the kids, but that's not the same as dumbing it down. Of course, making something interesting without dumbing it down (which usually makes it boring anyway) definitely isn't easy.
I know when I was in third grade, my family had a computer with QBasic on it. I had some idea that the program had something to do with "programming," so I started typing random words into it until one switched into all caps. I hit F1 to read the help file, read some of the examples, and read about other key words, and eventually started writing my own really simple text-based RPG games. By 5th grade, I had gotten a copy of Visual Basic and written a really simple animation program. Third graders aren't stupid.
In college, I worked on an aerial robotics project and we got a couple of chances to give presentations for elementary school kids. The first time or two, we ran through our power point presentation about all the cool things we were doing, and the kids looked really bored. Then we decided to make it more interactive. One of the tasks we had to complete was write a computer vision algorithm that could identify a certain symbol. I asked the kids "Knowing that computers are really stupid, how would you teach a computer to recognize this logo?" They said "It looks like a black circle with a white X in the middle, with the letters I, A, R, and C around it." I asked "Ok, what's a black circle? What's an X? What's an I? What's an A? What's an R? What's a C?" They looked kind of exasperated at first, but then they though about how to break the problem down more and eventually they described basically the same algorithm we were using.
Once we'd figured that out, I should them a demo of our program running, and gave them a mockup of the symbol for the computer to recognize. I let them play around with it, and then asked them to think of ways to fool the computer into not recognizing the symbol, or falsely recognizing something else. Without too much trouble, they were able to identify pretty much all of our algorithm's flaws.
Kids are naturally scientists. They are constantly trying to figure out how stuff around them works. You just have to set the problem up in the right way, and they'll have tons of fun figuring out solutions to it.
I know this story is several days out of date, but as someone who has worked on producing some of these documents, I thought I'd point out that the documents are, in fact, on MSDN:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc216517.aspx
Of course, it would be nice to have bloodless wars...
I used to think it'd be a good idea for nations to just have big battles on Age of Empires of Command and Conquer rather than actually going to war. The problem is if diplomacy is working well enough that two countries would agree to accept the outcome of a video game (or game of cricket, baseball, etc), then chances are they wouldn't need to go to war in the first place.
The truth is that war has to have a massive cost, and human life is about the only thing valuable enough to us that we'll decide we've had enough and end a war. Damaging infrastructure might work, but what are you going to do? Say, "Please abandon this power plant so we can blow it up without killing anyone?" Chances are the other side will start killing you before you can pull that off.
I suppose you might be able to get part of the way there by having a bunch of unmanned vehicles blowing each other up in a deserted field, as this has a physical cost without killing human life. Still, I suspect the losing side will eventually attacking the vehicle factories, and then human life starts getting involved again.
Ultimately, you either have no war, or you have bloody wars. There's not a lot in between.
The arms race ends, either once we are all dead or they have so destroyed society that when are sent back into the stone age.
Going back to the stone age doesn't end the arms race, it just starts it over.
I know you meant that as flamebait, but I think you kind of missed the point of what I was saying. I generally don't think that people are deliberately evil (though there are some cases where this is true), and I agree with you that the news outlets are not getting up and trying to spin things so it makes their side look good. I think biases generally work on a more subconscious level though.
Though I didn't say it, my post was more a personal admission that I do not have the ability to be unbiased. My biases are the result of a large variety of factors, including the way I was raised, my experiences, the things I've read and done, and the opinions I hold. These are very fundamental to who I am, and anything I say is going to be colored by them in some way. Sure, sometimes I try to be unbiased. The way I end up doing that is usually by being tougher on my own side than I would against the other.
Perhaps others actually have the ability to completely set their biases aside and report only objective reality free of any personal interpretations of reality, and the inability to be unbiased is my fault alone. My biases lead me to believe I'm not so unusual though.
You get much better information from someone you know is biased than when their bias is hidden, even if your own biases don't match.
This is a really good point. As much as we may try, it's pretty much impossible to be non-biased. I think we should give up the whole notion of unbiased information, and instead make it the norm to be really up front about our biases, so the people listening can interpret your words in the context of your biases.
I believe the cost is mostly in memory. I'm going from something I heard somewhere right now, so take it with a grain of salt, but I seem to remember hearing that at least on Windows, the data structures to keep track of a process are on the order of 2-3 megs. A thread, on the other hand, I would guess takes well under 100KB. The stacks may be larger, but I'd expect they start out as demand zero pages, so they don't actually count yet. Two to three megs seems high to me, but I guess it's not totally inconceivable.
IE 8 actually a process-per-tab (almost) model, like Chrome does. The logic of how to split tabs and stuff into different processes is different, but the general idea is the same. One thing Chrome does that IE doesn't, as far as I know, is that Chrome runs plugins like Flash in a separate process, while IE still keeps them in the tab's process.
The threads vs process distinction is very important, actually. Processes each get their own address space, while threads share an address space. This means processes can't write to each other's memory (except through things like shared memory segments), whereas threads can trample all over the other threads. A thread per tab model does protect you from a rogue Javascript freezing the browser's UI, but it doesn't protect you from a poorly written plugin that does something stupid like dereference a NULL pointer. If you really want reliability, you want processes instead. The downside is that processes are a lot heavier than threads.
Even if we can take atoms and molecules and arrange them in such a way that they exhibit all the same behaviors of life, there will always be the question of where these atoms came from, and why do they exist in such a way that it's possible to arrange them into life forms. Of course, creationism has a parallel question of where the creator came from and why did the creator feel the need to create everything exactly as it is.
I saw a comment on Slashdot a while back, possibly quoting someone else, that seems relevant. Unfortunately, I can't quite it with quite the same eloquence, but it was basically that even if scientists manage to completely duplicate abiogenesis and evolution under laboratory settings, they've simply shown that it's possible. They haven't shown that it actually happened, but since they are also presumably intelligent beings conducting the experiments, they've also not ruled out intelligent design. In the end, the whole thing ends up exactly where we are now.
The disappointing thing is that your science teacher was spreading doubt on the subject when the answers were out there to be found.
I disagree. From the GP, it sounds like this teacher raised some good thought questions, such as "what if a scientist creates life in a test tube?" These types of questions would prompt some of the students to go seek out answers on their own, and very likely the ones that do this and find answers come away with a lot better understanding. Sure, there are questions that we really don't have answers to that the teacher could have asked instead, but many of them would be beyond a high school science student's ability. The thing is, even if these questions already have answers, the students don't know them, and this exercise gives them the chance to develop their own research skills while learning the information. Many students won't go on to get a Ph.D., and to just say "here are all the answers" up until then will further the idea that they should take the scientists' word on blind faith, which is the exact same behavior that many fault religion for as well.
I read this post hoping to see a discussion of Sarah Palin's views on technology, which is what the headline suggested I'd see here. Instead, pretty much the whole discussion has been turned into another creation vs evolution flamewar. Next time, can we just mod this comment flamebait or off topic and be done with it?
The question is really whether employers care if their employees get plastered. If they do care, they'll have to come to terms with the fact that many of their employees have probably done that at some point in time. If they don't care, why does it matter if pictures get posted on the Internet?
But really, I suspect privacy is probably a relatively new and temporary concept. Back when people primarily lived in smaller communities, everyone pretty much knew everyone and had a pretty good idea what was going on in each other's life. People knew better than to do things they'd be embarrassed if people found out about. Our communities grew faster than our ability to keep track of people did, and we got used to being anonymous in huge crowds of people. Now that the technology is catching up, we'll have to get used to the idea that our small-town community has gotten a whole lot bigger.
This probably means we'll need to be more careful about what we do, but it also means we need to be more tolerant of the fact that people do stupid stuff that gets posted on the Internet. I don't think people do stupider stuff than they used to, it's just easier to find out about now.
You know, I've heard the "tabs just reinvent the taskbar" argument before, and I don't buy it. I find managing dozens of tabs in a browser a lot easier or more intuitive than trying to do the same in the taskbar. To me, it makes sense to have a single browser window with several tabs. It means "this window is meant for all of my web browsing." If I want to, I can even start up multiple windows for different web browsing topics. I definitely do not want to go back to just having the taskbar to manage all my browsing.
That being said, perhaps the problem is that the window managers haven't gotten it right yet. What if the window manager let you group windows into tabs and providing that as a service to applications, rather than applications doing this on their own? It seems like this would give you the advantages of both approaches, and also make it easier to extend tabs to other applications. Who knows, it might even make sense to group a word processor and a file manager into the same tab in some cases.
44 years old middle class (certainly no millionaire) woman mother of 5
I'm really glad they didn't choose a 44 year old middle class man mother of 5...
My favorite is "I live in a (blue|red) state, so my vote doesn't matter, the state will go with (blue|red) candidate regardless, so I won't vote."
You know, I'm actually finding this liberating this election cycle. I typically vote Republican, but I live in King County, Washington (the county that includes Seattle), and based on some of the recent elections, my cynical opinion is that King County will keep counting the votes and finding votes that they somehow magically lost until the Democrats win. It's extremely unlikely that Washington will turn red for the presidential election, so effectively if I vote for McCain, my vote won't count. (I'm not convinced I really even like McCain that much, but I definitely like him better than Obama)
What this means though is can can basically stay out of the battle between McCain and Obama. I'd love to see a third party become more viable, so now I can contribute to that by voting for a third party and at least having my vote show up in the popular vote counts. This time around, if I were to vote for McCain or Obama, my particular vote wouldn't matter that much. I think my vote will actually matter a lot more if I cast it for a third party.
I'm a fan of the version that includes a computer scientist. After all of this with the engineer, the physicist and the mathematician, the computer scientist sets his room on fire, thereby reducing the problem to another one with a known solution.
I can't profess to know how Microsoft engineered this
Here's a blog post from the IE team that describes how the feature works, if you're interested in more. Basically, it creates a couple different processes, which are all separate from the main UI frame. This means one process can crash, bringing down all the tabs in that process, but the rest are unaffected.
I agree, I think it's a pretty exciting feature. It almost makes crashing your browser an enjoyable experience. (I managed to crash a tab when I installed the Adobe SVG plugin to see if I could get another point or two on the Acid3 test).
One negative side effect of this is that there is some overhead in creating new processes. This will probably lead to Slashdot complaining about how much memory IE uses and how bloated it is, but personally, I find the reliability gains worth it. Another positive side effect though is that it isolates the Javascript interpreters from each other, which keeps one misbehaving page from locking up the whole browser.
Your last Firefox session closed unexpectedly. YOu can restore the tabs and windows from your previous sessions, or start a new session if you think the problem was related to a page you were viewing.
Ahh, you haven't actually seen IE8's automatic crash recovery feature then. Each of the tabs are isolated from each other, so if one tab crashes it doesn't take down the whole browser. The tab just goes away and then pops back up with a message saying IE recovered the tab. It's definitely not the same thing as "Restore Previous Session."
When I was in high school, I wrote an online voting program for our student body government elections. I think it was my first web site that did anything more dynamic than print out the current time. It was written in ASP, running on an old IIS server using Access datbase for storage.
This system was certainly prone to race conditions. We had several computer labs throughout the school all set up to allow people to come in and vote during passing periods, which means the software probably had to deal with around 60 people using the site within a couple of minutes. Access apparently doesn't make any concurrency guarantees, at least not the kind a real database server would have. The page recorded enough information that there should have been some internal consistency in the data base, like that the sum of votes for all candidates should have been the same as the number of votes cast.
Unfortunately, I did some manual checks and saw that the numbers didn't add up the way they should. On the bright side, none of the races were close, and they were all well outside what seemed to be the margin of error in my system. However, this shows that even well-meaning people can manage to screw this up.
Of course, I'm a much better programmer now, and I would know better than to make these mistakes were I to write voting software again. I'd also be very likely to refuse to write such software. Maybe for high school elections it's okay, but governmental elections need to be conducted on paper. If you must use electronic voting machines, it should simply print out your ballot and you physically drop that ballot in the ballot box. Voting machines shouldn't be doing the counting, they should only help you fill out your ballot.
It would have been nice to watch the video without knowing that it was a fake. I don't think I would have noticed, but you're right, it did look like something was wrong. It's almost like she was wearing too much makeup.
It was sort of like watching Firefly or Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. For some reason, Summer Glau always strikes me as not quite real. Of course, the parts she plays are meant to look a little inhuman. At any rate, it seems like the animators have at least gotten good at duplicating a human pretending not to be one.
Should things that aeronautical engineers come up with not be patentable before aeronautical engineering is just an arbitrary subset of physics? I'll gladly agree that there is something seriously broken with software patents as they are currently implemented, but I certainly don't claim to know the best way to fix them. I don't think we should completely get rid of them though.
By this point, software engineering is practiced very differently than abstract mathematics. It's much more akin to taking different building blocks and finding ways to put them together. In the same way that an aeronautical engineer would combine different hydraulics, flaps, bolts, fixtures, bearings and control surfaces, a software engineer will combine input routines, sorting functions, display functions and storage devices. We speak of software in terms of interconnected components that each preform a certain task and together perform a more complicated task, not in terms of mathematical proofs, even if you can express proofs as software and vice versa.
Furthermore, I'd argue that software is at one end of a spectrum that includes firmware and hardware. I think most readily agree that things on the hardware end of the spectrum are patentable. Where is the line that makes software exempt from these same protections. Imagine trying to patent an MP3 player. The software is an integral part of this invention. The MP3 player would be impossible without the software it runs.
Something is absolutely broken with software patents in their current incarnation. The bar for "obviousness" seems far too low. The patent term seems rather long, given the speed at which the industry moves. The treble damages for knowingly infringing a patent, while it makes sense to a certain extent, leads to some braindead behavior, like never reading patents in fear that you might accidentally knowingly infringe someone else's patent. Despite these flaws, software is sufficiently similar to other types of inventions that there is a place for patents on software as well.