Oh there's lots of research being done on batteries. Companies realize that a longer lasting battery equals more sales, it just doesn't get reported as much because... a) battery research is not sexy... and b) not many dramatic developments have been made atm.
People have no "soul" anymore, they want fluff with no real substance, typical disposable society.
This is a typical wrong conclusion people make when they try to compare the past with the present.
The past as its share of fluff or "souless" garbage too, but only the more meaningful stuff tends to get remembered. This creates a perception that things are more different than they actually are.
A more honest comparison would involve reasearch, i.e. actual work instead of the pompous morality preaching most people resort to.
That was my honest opinion, one which I'd like to think I argued well. If you don't agree with me then at least post a different opinion, instead of effectively censoring me.
Yes, the administration was stupid for taping the passwords and someone in their office definetly needs to be punished, but what happened to the value of honesty?
We all love to complain about crooked politicians and evil corporations, and yet when an individual's honesty is tested we give them a pass... "it's the school's fault that the students hacked into their lent laptops"...bullshit!
These students came to a diverging path... and instead of taking the high road and telling someone about fixing the security hole, they chose to abuse it.
So his salary was somewhere in the ballpark of 28 to 30k per year. Dude was poor. Particularly for a software engineer. Why else do you think he made a grab at all those screen names for a measly 28k? So he could come up a little bit or pay off his student loans (assuming he had any). Maybe his grandpa had cancer and he was trying to help. You never know about people's motives in harmless crimes like this.
Or, as described in the indictment to pay for a 9-day vacation to Scandinavia.
Plus Smathers even admitted he was an "outlaw", and never mentions any selfless motives in all his court statements.
This is a typical story of the little guy getting the shaft.
True, soon enough... with a soft body molded by years of being infront of computers, I suspect he'll be getting plenty of shaft while serving his prison sentence.
Not to gang up on wikipedia but as anyone else spent time doing random page jumps? I was surprised how many self-serving pages are out there, often looking like resumes for people of seemingly little fame or encyclopedic value... not to mention the suspiciously POV pages authored mainly by one author.
Seems like there's a larger problem out there that wikipedia needs to address. Certain aspects of human nature (coupled with the security of relative anonimity) are going to be tough to filter out from such an open project like theirs.
Let's face it, fantasies can be far better than the reality of most people's lives.
Being a level 10 warlock or clan leader beats being a oft-lonely corporate slave.
Why though, are some online pursuits (such as the above) looked down on? History if full of celebrated poets and prophets that dealt with the fantasies of what life might be.
The point isn't exactly what the number means (80 000 000 unique downloads vs. 80 000 000 downloads by a crazed fan), but that the number is increasing, and therefore so much Firefox use to some extent.
If nobody knows what the numbers mean then parading the numbers around is meaningless! (duh) Seems almost silly having to point that out...
Now before anyone mods me down as a troll, let me explain my side... I use firefox on both my windows and linux boxes, ever since 0.9x, so I'd honestly be happy to hear it's popularity is increasing but these "numbers" are suspicious as hell. I know that, personally, I've had to download a full ff with each version. So that's at least 10 full downloads for me, plus I've downloaded it on 2 boxes at work.
The bottom line, I love Firefox... the adblock and web developer plugins make it far superior to IE or Konqueror... but I'd rather be disapointed by the truth then fooled by deceptive reporting.
This topic has been discussed a good dozen times already on slashdot. The same conclusion is reached every time.
How can you say that if valid questions regarding these "numbers" are still being brought up? Clearly no definite conclusion as been reached yet. My question to you is why, if your confidence on Firefox's success is solid, would you not care about "what the numbers mean"?
This whole debate smells of people willing to give up their respect for the truth if it means their side wins.
In europe, its extremely common for people to have MSN, whilst the trend stateside seems to be more toward AIM (with MSN still significant there too).
or you can get an awesome open-source program like miranda which supports ICQ, AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, Gadu-Gadu, Tlen, Netsend and tons more... all in a ~3meg memory footprint.
It's a great way to let people hear your music if you don't have the thousand$ to pay for play on the radio...or enough talent to please a larger radio audience.
This seems in line with what MS normally does. They've been trying to snuff out OpenGL (so far as I can see) and keep everyone in proprietary DirectX technologies.
What a shocker, speculative garbage based on no historical context gets a high informative score on/.
For the real (and proud) nerds that appreciate the truth...
DirectX was initially developed for the sole purpose of giving game developers an easy platform to develop with. It went beyond the scope of just graphics by including sound, input, and network APIs. In fact it was some other company that created it, and only later bought by Microsoft. Because of it's many game-related features and increasing ease of use, it became popular with game developers and it's that increasing popularity that further drove the development of DirectX (not this paranoid dillusion that it was to snuff out OpenGL). Furthermore, because Microsoft was solely in charge of it's development, DirectX's graphics components where able to evolve at a pace matching the advancing technologies of video cards. This is in sharp contrast to OpenGL, whose governing body painfully drug its feet for what seemed like forever before standardizing 2.0, making it only relatively recently comparable to Direct3D's capabilities.
One of the main problems with the creationism/evolution debate is how the two sides are painted as opposing answers to the same question... that question being why are we here, what is the meaning of life?
Creationism attempts to answer that with faith, whereas evolution does not really answer that but rather tries explaining why some observable things happen.
But regardless of the loftier "meaning of life" issues, evolution is backed by a valid scientific (and mathematically backed) mechanism describing how an entity changes to "survive" in a changing environment its contained in.
Perhaps it's just the principles behind this scientific/mathematical mechanism that should be taught in schools, instead of trying to apply it (or any other idea like creationism) to the more contentious "meaning of life" issue which should be beyond the scope of schools to begin with.
I work in a large group of programmers of varying ages and backgrounds. I believe you can categorize programmers into 2 main groups.
The first, and the majority at our company, are school trained programmers. These are people whose main experience with coding has been either class related (where the emphasis is usually on theoretical applications) or employement related (where the emphasis is usually along the lines of "just get it done").
The second group of programmers, which I'm in, is the hobbyist turned professional. We are people that began programming for fun, and often program on weekends on side-projects. Data structures and interface definitions become part of our regular vocabulary, and it's often hard to talk to programmers in the first group regarding projects.
Also, from my own experiences at work, I can say that it's the smaller second group of programmers that end up carrying most of a software project, both in code output and internal design. Although the first group of programmers tend to do a better job at testing.
A more important question is why do so many of today's news stories depend on anonymous sources? I understand there might be times where anonimity is necessary for safety reasons, but what the recent CBS bogus documents scandal and the Rove/Plume story show is that many of these anonymous sources have doubious credibility and/or self-serving motives for what they say. How is keeping these sources secret providing any kind of quality news? Facts and their sources should be as disclosed as possible to let the public decide what is going on. This concern over wanting to protect sources from prosecution is just a ruse from the New York Times to draw attention away from their lazy hush-hush gossip style journalism.
No, it's just that FireFox is not acid2 compliant either atm. All the recent crying about compliance is because Microsoft has no plans to be acid2 compliant in IE7, whereas FireFox does.
What is Microsoft's general position on the open-source projects that are porting.NET to Linux (and other platforms)? Are there any plans to restrict parts of the.NET framework (e.g. WinForms) from being ported?
Basically, I'm a fan of.NET and would like to hear something reassuring from Microsoft that they won't hinder in any way the development and use of.NET on other platforms. We all know what happened to DR.DOS...
With the Patriot Act and the powers that be more than willing to name anyone a terrorist, I am truthfully too scared half the time to even think of testing out anything anymore.
How's today any different from the communist/german/(insert super power here) scare of last century? or withcraft-hunting/inquisitions of centuries ago? or Roman/Mongol/Turks invasions of recent history?
Face it buddy, the threat of oppression from exclusive groups today is no different from any other day in human history. It's the few that stand up against them, standing up against all odds, that end up changing history... changing it ever slowly for the better.
Progress was never made by conformist cowards, never.
In a perfect world, they would conform to the standards that everyone else is striving to hit. But MS knows they own the market. They know that there are a bazillion web pages written specifically for IE.
So everyone is striving for one standard, while at the same time a bazillion web pages are written specifically for IE? huh?
Standards aren't laws of physics, they only work if the majority decides to apply them. By writing specifically for IE all these years, web site makers have essentially been supporting the IE standard, which gave Microsoft very little incentive to change. In fact they couldn't change without breaking a lot of sites. Now we're in 2005, and alternative browsers are becoming more popular, and everyone's crying about Microsoft holding back "standards"... paaaleeeez.
This doesn't excuse Microsoft's role in this mess, they should of put more effort into following the (albeit still developing) standards back then, but the blame is on everyone's shoulders.
Finally, as if this comment hadn't been dumb enough, he tells us that linux has to become more user-friendly in order to gain more market share, so that more games will be available for linux.
That's not dumb at all.
I use Linux at work and would love to switch my home PC to it as well, but I mainly play games at home so that's just not currently possible. The truth is that simple.
Slashdot Mirror
You can always download the DVD. After 30+ years, and the death of its creator, it should be public domain anyways.
here come a bunch of overrated "+5 funny" jokes to prove the study wrong
isn't it time to look at the batteries?
Oh there's lots of research being done on batteries. Companies realize that a longer lasting battery equals more sales, it just doesn't get reported as much because... a) battery research is not sexy... and b) not many dramatic developments have been made atm.
People have no "soul" anymore, they want fluff with no real substance, typical disposable society.
This is a typical wrong conclusion people make when they try to compare the past with the present.
The past as its share of fluff or "souless" garbage too, but only the more meaningful stuff tends to get remembered. This creates a perception that things are more different than they actually are.
A more honest comparison would involve reasearch, i.e. actual work instead of the pompous morality preaching most people resort to.
Not to sound like a miserable bastard, but exactly which of these are supposed to be funny?
One only needs to look at the lame stuff here that gets mod'd +5 funny to realize that nerds have absolutely no sense of humor.
why was my post labeled "troll"?
That was my honest opinion, one which I'd like to think I argued well. If you don't agree with me then at least post a different opinion, instead of effectively censoring me.
Yes, the administration was stupid for taping the passwords and someone in their office definetly needs to be punished, but what happened to the value of honesty?
...bullshit!
We all love to complain about crooked politicians and evil corporations, and yet when an individual's honesty is tested we give them a pass... "it's the school's fault that the students hacked into their lent laptops"
These students came to a diverging path... and instead of taking the high road and telling someone about fixing the security hole, they chose to abuse it.
Fuck 'em.
So his salary was somewhere in the ballpark of 28 to 30k per year. Dude was poor. Particularly for a software engineer. Why else do you think he made a grab at all those screen names for a measly 28k? So he could come up a little bit or pay off his student loans (assuming he had any). Maybe his grandpa had cancer and he was trying to help. You never know about people's motives in harmless crimes like this.
Or, as described in the indictment to pay for a 9-day vacation to Scandinavia.
Plus Smathers even admitted he was an "outlaw", and never mentions any selfless motives in all his court statements.
This is a typical story of the little guy getting the shaft.
True, soon enough... with a soft body molded by years of being infront of computers, I suspect he'll be getting plenty of shaft while serving his prison sentence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_DiDio
Not only is that article highly POV, but I question this person's encyclopedic importance.
Not to gang up on wikipedia but as anyone else spent time doing random page jumps? I was surprised how many self-serving pages are out there, often looking like resumes for people of seemingly little fame or encyclopedic value... not to mention the suspiciously POV pages authored mainly by one author.
Seems like there's a larger problem out there that wikipedia needs to address. Certain aspects of human nature (coupled with the security of relative anonimity) are going to be tough to filter out from such an open project like theirs.
Let's face it, fantasies can be far better than the reality of most people's lives.
Being a level 10 warlock or clan leader beats being a oft-lonely corporate slave.
Why though, are some online pursuits (such as the above) looked down on? History if full of celebrated poets and prophets that dealt with the fantasies of what life might be.
The point isn't exactly what the number means (80 000 000 unique downloads vs. 80 000 000 downloads by a crazed fan), but that the number is increasing, and therefore so much Firefox use to some extent.
If nobody knows what the numbers mean then parading the numbers around is meaningless! (duh) Seems almost silly having to point that out...
Now before anyone mods me down as a troll, let me explain my side... I use firefox on both my windows and linux boxes, ever since 0.9x, so I'd honestly be happy to hear it's popularity is increasing but these "numbers" are suspicious as hell. I know that, personally, I've had to download a full ff with each version. So that's at least 10 full downloads for me, plus I've downloaded it on 2 boxes at work.
The bottom line, I love Firefox... the adblock and web developer plugins make it far superior to IE or Konqueror... but I'd rather be disapointed by the truth then fooled by deceptive reporting.
This topic has been discussed a good dozen times already on slashdot. The same conclusion is reached every time.
How can you say that if valid questions regarding these "numbers" are still being brought up? Clearly no definite conclusion as been reached yet. My question to you is why, if your confidence on Firefox's success is solid, would you not care about "what the numbers mean"?
This whole debate smells of people willing to give up their respect for the truth if it means their side wins.
In europe, its extremely common for people to have MSN, whilst the trend stateside seems to be more toward AIM (with MSN still significant there too).
or you can get an awesome open-source program like miranda which supports ICQ, AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, Gadu-Gadu, Tlen, Netsend and tons more... all in a ~3meg memory footprint.
What a stupid post... names are supposed to be unique to some degree. It defeats their purpose if everyone was named John Smith.
It's a great way to let people hear your music if you don't have the thousand$ to pay for play on the radio ...or enough talent to please a larger radio audience.
Maybe they could start by hiring back the many competent translators they used to have but dumped because they were gay or lesbian?
someone's still sour...
This seems in line with what MS normally does. They've been trying to snuff out OpenGL (so far as I can see) and keep everyone in proprietary DirectX technologies.
/.
What a shocker, speculative garbage based on no historical context gets a high informative score on
For the real (and proud) nerds that appreciate the truth...
DirectX was initially developed for the sole purpose of giving game developers an easy platform to develop with. It went beyond the scope of just graphics by including sound, input, and network APIs. In fact it was some other company that created it, and only later bought by Microsoft. Because of it's many game-related features and increasing ease of use, it became popular with game developers and it's that increasing popularity that further drove the development of DirectX (not this paranoid dillusion that it was to snuff out OpenGL). Furthermore, because Microsoft was solely in charge of it's development, DirectX's graphics components where able to evolve at a pace matching the advancing technologies of video cards. This is in sharp contrast to OpenGL, whose governing body painfully drug its feet for what seemed like forever before standardizing 2.0, making it only relatively recently comparable to Direct3D's capabilities.
One of the main problems with the creationism/evolution debate is how the two sides are painted as opposing answers to the same question... that question being why are we here, what is the meaning of life?
Creationism attempts to answer that with faith, whereas evolution does not really answer that but rather tries explaining why some observable things happen.
But regardless of the loftier "meaning of life" issues, evolution is backed by a valid scientific (and mathematically backed) mechanism describing how an entity changes to "survive" in a changing environment its contained in.
Perhaps it's just the principles behind this scientific/mathematical mechanism that should be taught in schools, instead of trying to apply it (or any other idea like creationism) to the more contentious "meaning of life" issue which should be beyond the scope of schools to begin with.
I work in a large group of programmers of varying ages and backgrounds. I believe you can categorize programmers into 2 main groups.
The first, and the majority at our company, are school trained programmers. These are people whose main experience with coding has been either class related (where the emphasis is usually on theoretical applications) or employement related (where the emphasis is usually along the lines of "just get it done").
The second group of programmers, which I'm in, is the hobbyist turned professional. We are people that began programming for fun, and often program on weekends on side-projects. Data structures and interface definitions become part of our regular vocabulary, and it's often hard to talk to programmers in the first group regarding projects.
Also, from my own experiences at work, I can say that it's the smaller second group of programmers that end up carrying most of a software project, both in code output and internal design. Although the first group of programmers tend to do a better job at testing.
A more important question is why do so many of today's news stories depend on anonymous sources? I understand there might be times where anonimity is necessary for safety reasons, but what the recent CBS bogus documents scandal and the Rove/Plume story show is that many of these anonymous sources have doubious credibility and/or self-serving motives for what they say. How is keeping these sources secret providing any kind of quality news? Facts and their sources should be as disclosed as possible to let the public decide what is going on. This concern over wanting to protect sources from prosecution is just a ruse from the New York Times to draw attention away from their lazy hush-hush gossip style journalism.
Am I doing something wrong?
No, it's just that FireFox is not acid2 compliant either atm. All the recent crying about compliance is because Microsoft has no plans to be acid2 compliant in IE7, whereas FireFox does.
What is Microsoft's general position on the open-source projects that are porting .NET to Linux (and other platforms)? Are there any plans to restrict parts of the .NET framework (e.g. WinForms) from being ported?
.NET and would like to hear something reassuring from Microsoft that they won't hinder in any way the development and use of .NET on other platforms. We all know what happened to DR.DOS...
Basically, I'm a fan of
With the Patriot Act and the powers that be more than willing to name anyone a terrorist, I am truthfully too scared half the time to even think of testing out anything anymore.
How's today any different from the communist/german/(insert super power here) scare of last century? or withcraft-hunting/inquisitions of centuries ago? or Roman/Mongol/Turks invasions of recent history?
Face it buddy, the threat of oppression from exclusive groups today is no different from any other day in human history. It's the few that stand up against them, standing up against all odds, that end up changing history... changing it ever slowly for the better.
Progress was never made by conformist cowards, never.
In a perfect world, they would conform to the standards that everyone else is striving to hit. But MS knows they own the market. They know that there are a bazillion web pages written specifically for IE.
So everyone is striving for one standard, while at the same time a bazillion web pages are written specifically for IE? huh?
Standards aren't laws of physics, they only work if the majority decides to apply them. By writing specifically for IE all these years, web site makers have essentially been supporting the IE standard, which gave Microsoft very little incentive to change. In fact they couldn't change without breaking a lot of sites. Now we're in 2005, and alternative browsers are becoming more popular, and everyone's crying about Microsoft holding back "standards"... paaaleeeez.
This doesn't excuse Microsoft's role in this mess, they should of put more effort into following the (albeit still developing) standards back then, but the blame is on everyone's shoulders.
Finally, as if this comment hadn't been dumb enough, he tells us that linux has to become more user-friendly in order to gain more market share, so that more games will be available for linux.
That's not dumb at all.
I use Linux at work and would love to switch my home PC to it as well, but I mainly play games at home so that's just not currently possible. The truth is that simple.