As for toasters etc., the QUALITY of modern items tends to be horrible. They frequently are not realistically repairable, due to labor costs / parts availability.
Right, but I'm saying that the quality of modern items has declined because no one bothers repairing thing. Why would I, as a manufacturer, spend money building to standards and spending time stocking spares for consumers when I know my buyers are going to throw the widget away when it breaks and buy a new one?
Why do you get to define "adequate" for anyone other than yourself?
Ok, replace "adequate" with "functional". His point still stands - Americans have an awful tendency of throwing out perfectly functional hardware to deal with software problems. I personally know people who threw (or were about to throw) out laptops because they were infested with spyware, or because Windows had become slow and unusable. In one of the cases, I was able to make the machine adequate simply by backing up, reformatting and reinstalling.
I've noticed this in other consumer goods as well. Whereas before, if a toaster broke, people would take it into a repair shop and have it looked at, now people just throw the old one away and buy a new model. I've seen this tendency on increasingly (mechanically) complex pieces of hardware - to the point where even lawnmowers are fair game for replacement rather than repair.
If you look at his voting record, you'll see that his record on supporting the war is mixed at best, and that he has supported the Patriot Act's reauthorization.
If you read the actual William Gibson short story, (and forget about the crappy movie) you'll know that it wasn't a "laser rope" it was a monomolecular filament, which makes a whole lot more sense than the movie rendition. I'm pretty sure the movie had it the way it did because one of the properties of the filament is that its thinness makes it invisible, and that just doesn't work as well in a visual medium.
Perhaps the source code does, but there's nothing stopping you from leaving out all the server-specific stuff from your desktop kernel when you compile it.
If I understand correctly, that's exactly what Ubuntu does with their "desktop" and "server" version. The desktop version have certain modules and patches that the server versions do not, and vice versa.
It does vary from model to model and even from revision to revision in the same model. I have an iPod Nano (1st gen). I find the scroll wheel to be hypersensitive. Its way too easy to skip past the song you want, or mis-adjust the volume. The scroll wheel on regular iPods, or even 2nd gen Nanos is much easier to control (IMHO).
Also, what is the 'Graphically intense' interface the NASDAQ has? Compared to MMO's it's nothing.
Yeah. I didn't get that either, considering that MMO servers aren't graphically intensive either. All of the graphically intensive work on MMOs was done on the client end, I thought.
If I had to compare, I think IBM's introduction of the PC to the masses was a far more reaching development than the OS. Just as the development of the Internet is far more reaching than a specific search engine tool
That's true. But you don't hear IBM executives saying, "Without us, Microsoft wouldn't exist," despite the fact that it would be a far more plausible statement than Microsoft saying the same about Google.
I think the point the GP is trying to make is that it didn't have to be Microsoft dominating the OS marketplace. If it wasn't Microsoft, it would have been Apple, IBM, Be, or someone else who would have made a usable operating system and browser. That's the entire beauty of the Google business model: it doesn't matter what operating system your visitor uses. As long as they have a HTTP compliant browser and a TCP/IP capable network stack, you can still serve them. And, given that both HTTP and TCP/IP are both open standards, there's no reason that the browser has to be Windows based.
If I throw out the trash they can search my trash because I have discarded the trash.
No they can't. Even after its in the garbage bin, they can't search it because its still your property.
So under your thinking my IT department at work should not be able to read my e-mail or this post before it lets the network traffic be sent to/.?
Your work can search your network traffic only because the courts have stated that there is a lowered expectation of privacy at work than at other times. The government does not have a right to search your mail. They do not have a right to listen in on your phone calls. They don't have a right to read your Internet traffic. The only reason they get away with these things is that no one calls them out on it.
Chemical weapons are powerful, but very difficult to disperse finely enough to affect a large population. Usually what happens is that a chemical warhead will go off, and deliver a superlethal dose to a particular area and leave the rest of the target pretty much unscathed. These weapons are also more problematic to store over the long term.
Nuclear devices on the other hand destroy with brute force, so you don't have to worry about designing fine dispersion mechanisms - the force of the blast will take care of spreading around radioactive fallout for you. Also, nukes "salt the field" by leaving medium to long term radioactivity in the area. Nukes are also more difficult to defend against, since they combine massive physical damage, EMP and radioactive fallout. Chemical weapons don't offer that kind of "triple threat".
What that does not mean, is that just because you cannot reduce risk to zero you should never do anything to try and reduce risk substantially when you can.
Not necessarily. Sometimes the cost of reducing risk is loss of the liberties that define us as a free society. For example, it would certainly improve security if an officer could enter your home and search it without requiring a warrant. It would certainly help security if an officer could arbitrarily ask you to submit to a strip search. But we don't allow these sorts of things, because they are too intrusive. That's what I meant in my original post: there is a balance, and I fear that we are moving off-balance towards paranoid security measures that restrict the rights that we take for granted.
I'm not in favor of this law, but this is a pretty stupid reason to oppose eavesdropping. Its like saying the police will only catch the dumb criminals, and let the smart ones get away, and therefore we shouldn't have police.
Amen to that. What people don't seem to get in this day and age is that there is no such thing as zero risk. No matter how thoroughly you screen, no matter how thoroughly you eavesdrop, eventually someone somehow will get through. Therefore we need to say, "What is an acceptable risk, taking into account the fact that the lower we set the threshold, the more civil liberties and conveniences we'll be giving up?"
The whole reason for the GPL3 is to stop companies like TiVO. Some people object to TiVO being able to base a product on Linux but then not let the Linux community pull it apart and play with it.
Oddly enough though, they GPL v3 may not stop TiVO. The GPL doesn't say anything about hypervisors, so its quite possible for TiVO to run their UI in a virtualized environment, with the hypervisor monitoring the application and locking out the user if any modifications are made.
I would note that millions of people who liked the USA in Vietnam were executed after you left wingers sold them out.
First, it was Nixon (hardly a left-winger) who finally got us out of that shit-hole. Second, that assertion handily ignores the fact that there was no reason for us to be in Vietnam in the first place. South Vietnam was not in a strategic location and it was hardly a paragon of representative democracy.
In the meantime, the USA has liberated Afghanistan from the Taliban, Iraq is on the upswing, and yes, the forces of Freedom are on the march.
Repetition does not make an untrue fact true. You and others on the right fringe have been saying that about Iraq for the last 4 years. If Iraq is really doing so well, why don't we pull out right now?
Given time, eventually, the truth will be revealed and they will see which side is really evil and which side is really good, and those people are going to choose to live for themselves, or to be enslaved by the very dictators that you left wing traitors continually support.
If that's the case, then why did we have to invade in the first place? Don't you trust the Iraqi's to know what's good for them and to try to overthrow Saddam (with our support, of course). No, of course not. You have to go in preemptively and put up a big show about freedom being on the march before withdrawing and replacing a bad situation with an absolutely terrible one.
I think AMD is getting desparate. Intel's Core and Core 2 line of chips have both been better performers than the equivalent AMD parts, and AMD doesn't want to be relegated to its old position of having to compete on price. I think this was AMD's attempt to generate some positive "buzz" around the company to create interest for current and potential shareholders. Something of a "Guys, we really are doing work and not screwing around with your money," sort of thing.
Re:If the journalist was stupid enough to sign it.
on
AMD NDA Scandal
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The journalist in question did not sign the aforementioned NDA. He was expressing his disappointment in the other journalists who did sign the agreement, either out of ignorance or apathy. He's also broadcasting the fact that the so called "independent media" of blogs and citizen journalists may not be as independent as it seems, thanks to agreements like this.
So, modern society is destined to only last a few hundred years, maybe a thousand?
Either that or we master controlled fusion.
The way I see it, there's an energy stepladder of sorts, with each step requiring more technology and expertise, but producing more output than the step before:
Car insurance will ensure that someone else is compensated if my car injures them, which is reasonably likely even if I'm a good driver.
Not just that, but your insurance also most likely covers property damage. If you crash into someone's house, your insurance will pay, not you.
My computer maiming someone else is not terribly plausible.
No, but if your computer is hijacked, it could very well crash my computer, easily causing me financial damage. This would be equivalent to your car crashing into my house while I am out. No one may have got hurt, but that doesn't mean that no damage was done.
Besides that, I can get car insurance in 10 minutes on the phone with a credit card, knowing nothing about cars or insurance.
That only occurred because users demanded easier sign up processes from insurers. Why did users demand easy and convenient insurance? Because it was required for them to carry insurance. We're dealing with a chicken and egg problem. Users won't demand insurance until they can get it easily. Companies won't offer insurance until users demand it. I'm proposing that the government work on the demand side, by creating regulations to encourage demand for protection, rather than on the supply side by mandating that ISPs offer protection that no one may buy.
In the end it comes down to personal responsibility. The user is responsible for their computer in the same way that they are responsible for their car, their house, and themselves. Its your stuff, keep it out of the way, or have it taken away. With the right to own a computer comes the responsibility to not use the computer for mischief, and to take reasonable precautions preventing others from doing the same.
Slashdot Mirror
If all you're doing is arithmetic, then why are you using this? Wouldn't a traditional spreadsheet be just as useful?
Right, but I'm saying that the quality of modern items has declined because no one bothers repairing thing. Why would I, as a manufacturer, spend money building to standards and spending time stocking spares for consumers when I know my buyers are going to throw the widget away when it breaks and buy a new one?
SQL databases have become much lighter and more efficient these days. Why should I use this store data over a lightweight SQL database?
Ok, replace "adequate" with "functional". His point still stands - Americans have an awful tendency of throwing out perfectly functional hardware to deal with software problems. I personally know people who threw (or were about to throw) out laptops because they were infested with spyware, or because Windows had become slow and unusable. In one of the cases, I was able to make the machine adequate simply by backing up, reformatting and reinstalling.
I've noticed this in other consumer goods as well. Whereas before, if a toaster broke, people would take it into a repair shop and have it looked at, now people just throw the old one away and buy a new model. I've seen this tendency on increasingly (mechanically) complex pieces of hardware - to the point where even lawnmowers are fair game for replacement rather than repair.
If you look at his voting record, you'll see that his record on supporting the war is mixed at best, and that he has supported the Patriot Act's reauthorization.
If you read the actual William Gibson short story, (and forget about the crappy movie) you'll know that it wasn't a "laser rope" it was a monomolecular filament, which makes a whole lot more sense than the movie rendition. I'm pretty sure the movie had it the way it did because one of the properties of the filament is that its thinness makes it invisible, and that just doesn't work as well in a visual medium.
If I understand correctly, that's exactly what Ubuntu does with their "desktop" and "server" version. The desktop version have certain modules and patches that the server versions do not, and vice versa.
It does vary from model to model and even from revision to revision in the same model. I have an iPod Nano (1st gen). I find the scroll wheel to be hypersensitive. Its way too easy to skip past the song you want, or mis-adjust the volume. The scroll wheel on regular iPods, or even 2nd gen Nanos is much easier to control (IMHO).
Also, what is the 'Graphically intense' interface the NASDAQ has? Compared to MMO's it's nothing.
Yeah. I didn't get that either, considering that MMO servers aren't graphically intensive either. All of the graphically intensive work on MMOs was done on the client end, I thought.
If I had to compare, I think IBM's introduction of the PC to the masses was a far more reaching development than the OS. Just as the development of the Internet is far more reaching than a specific search engine tool
That's true. But you don't hear IBM executives saying, "Without us, Microsoft wouldn't exist," despite the fact that it would be a far more plausible statement than Microsoft saying the same about Google.
I think the point the GP is trying to make is that it didn't have to be Microsoft dominating the OS marketplace. If it wasn't Microsoft, it would have been Apple, IBM, Be, or someone else who would have made a usable operating system and browser. That's the entire beauty of the Google business model: it doesn't matter what operating system your visitor uses. As long as they have a HTTP compliant browser and a TCP/IP capable network stack, you can still serve them. And, given that both HTTP and TCP/IP are both open standards, there's no reason that the browser has to be Windows based.
No they can't. Even after its in the garbage bin, they can't search it because its still your property.
Your work can search your network traffic only because the courts have stated that there is a lowered expectation of privacy at work than at other times. The government does not have a right to search your mail. They do not have a right to listen in on your phone calls. They don't have a right to read your Internet traffic. The only reason they get away with these things is that no one calls them out on it.
Chemical weapons are powerful, but very difficult to disperse finely enough to affect a large population. Usually what happens is that a chemical warhead will go off, and deliver a superlethal dose to a particular area and leave the rest of the target pretty much unscathed. These weapons are also more problematic to store over the long term.
Nuclear devices on the other hand destroy with brute force, so you don't have to worry about designing fine dispersion mechanisms - the force of the blast will take care of spreading around radioactive fallout for you. Also, nukes "salt the field" by leaving medium to long term radioactivity in the area. Nukes are also more difficult to defend against, since they combine massive physical damage, EMP and radioactive fallout. Chemical weapons don't offer that kind of "triple threat".
What that does not mean, is that just because you cannot reduce risk to zero you should never do anything to try and reduce risk substantially when you can.
Not necessarily. Sometimes the cost of reducing risk is loss of the liberties that define us as a free society. For example, it would certainly improve security if an officer could enter your home and search it without requiring a warrant. It would certainly help security if an officer could arbitrarily ask you to submit to a strip search. But we don't allow these sorts of things, because they are too intrusive. That's what I meant in my original post: there is a balance, and I fear that we are moving off-balance towards paranoid security measures that restrict the rights that we take for granted.
I'm not in favor of this law, but this is a pretty stupid reason to oppose eavesdropping. Its like saying the police will only catch the dumb criminals, and let the smart ones get away, and therefore we shouldn't have police.
Amen to that. What people don't seem to get in this day and age is that there is no such thing as zero risk. No matter how thoroughly you screen, no matter how thoroughly you eavesdrop, eventually someone somehow will get through. Therefore we need to say, "What is an acceptable risk, taking into account the fact that the lower we set the threshold, the more civil liberties and conveniences we'll be giving up?"
The whole reason for the GPL3 is to stop companies like TiVO. Some people object to TiVO being able to base a product on Linux but then not let the Linux community pull it apart and play with it.
Oddly enough though, they GPL v3 may not stop TiVO. The GPL doesn't say anything about hypervisors, so its quite possible for TiVO to run their UI in a virtualized environment, with the hypervisor monitoring the application and locking out the user if any modifications are made.
I would note that millions of people who liked the USA in Vietnam were executed after you left wingers sold them out.
First, it was Nixon (hardly a left-winger) who finally got us out of that shit-hole. Second, that assertion handily ignores the fact that there was no reason for us to be in Vietnam in the first place. South Vietnam was not in a strategic location and it was hardly a paragon of representative democracy.
In the meantime, the USA has liberated Afghanistan from the Taliban, Iraq is on the upswing, and yes, the forces of Freedom are on the march.
Repetition does not make an untrue fact true. You and others on the right fringe have been saying that about Iraq for the last 4 years. If Iraq is really doing so well, why don't we pull out right now?
Given time, eventually, the truth will be revealed and they will see which side is really evil and which side is really good, and those people are going to choose to live for themselves, or to be enslaved by the very dictators that you left wing traitors continually support.
If that's the case, then why did we have to invade in the first place? Don't you trust the Iraqi's to know what's good for them and to try to overthrow Saddam (with our support, of course). No, of course not. You have to go in preemptively and put up a big show about freedom being on the march before withdrawing and replacing a bad situation with an absolutely terrible one.
Yes, and to further drive home the distinction, they could even place it under a different domain. Something like, Fark.com perhaps...
/kidding
//this is probably too irrelevant even for Fark
///slashies on Slashdot
s/Dark Energy/Vacuum Energy or Antimatter
No kidding. This is like the stories about scams and drama in EVE Online, but even more irrelevant.
I think AMD is getting desparate. Intel's Core and Core 2 line of chips have both been better performers than the equivalent AMD parts, and AMD doesn't want to be relegated to its old position of having to compete on price. I think this was AMD's attempt to generate some positive "buzz" around the company to create interest for current and potential shareholders. Something of a "Guys, we really are doing work and not screwing around with your money," sort of thing.
The journalist in question did not sign the aforementioned NDA. He was expressing his disappointment in the other journalists who did sign the agreement, either out of ignorance or apathy. He's also broadcasting the fact that the so called "independent media" of blogs and citizen journalists may not be as independent as it seems, thanks to agreements like this.
So, modern society is destined to only last a few hundred years, maybe a thousand?
Either that or we master controlled fusion.
The way I see it, there's an energy stepladder of sorts, with each step requiring more technology and expertise, but producing more output than the step before:
Car insurance will ensure that someone else is compensated if my car injures them, which is reasonably likely even if I'm a good driver.
Not just that, but your insurance also most likely covers property damage. If you crash into someone's house, your insurance will pay, not you.
My computer maiming someone else is not terribly plausible.
No, but if your computer is hijacked, it could very well crash my computer, easily causing me financial damage. This would be equivalent to your car crashing into my house while I am out. No one may have got hurt, but that doesn't mean that no damage was done.
Besides that, I can get car insurance in 10 minutes on the phone with a credit card, knowing nothing about cars or insurance.
That only occurred because users demanded easier sign up processes from insurers. Why did users demand easy and convenient insurance? Because it was required for them to carry insurance. We're dealing with a chicken and egg problem. Users won't demand insurance until they can get it easily. Companies won't offer insurance until users demand it. I'm proposing that the government work on the demand side, by creating regulations to encourage demand for protection, rather than on the supply side by mandating that ISPs offer protection that no one may buy.
In the end it comes down to personal responsibility. The user is responsible for their computer in the same way that they are responsible for their car, their house, and themselves. Its your stuff, keep it out of the way, or have it taken away. With the right to own a computer comes the responsibility to not use the computer for mischief, and to take reasonable precautions preventing others from doing the same.