Unfortunately, I don't think there's a lot they can do about it, otherwise they probably would. Even when the game was new this was a big problem and they couldn't stop in when they probably had a larger support team looking at the game. The BNet system probably wasn't built to handle problems like that and Blizzard may not have anticipated that such a problem would exist.
They're running the D2 server software on pretty ancient hardware (at least by today's standards) so it's not as though they can easily upgrade it to code in new fixes. This much they mentioned when they released the latest content patch for the game and explained why certain changes couldn't be made.
The bots don't really destroy the economy, they just add more crap to it, which drives the price of almost everything downwards. That actually benefits the average person as they've better access to better weapons. Perhaps you consider that ruined, but from the average person's perspective, it's not exactly a bad thing. Also, since D2 has random stats on almost everything, the values of items can vary widely from essentially worthless to decently valuable. It seems to me that as of recently, most people were using bots to get to the top of the ladder.
Have them submit both versions that way it's easy to see how much of an impact spell-checking has on the results. Unless they're also doing a grammar check, it's not going to make the results significantly better.
There's something to be said for learning proper spelling and grammar, but I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a terribly great speller and that without Firefox's built-in spell-check, I'd probably end up with significantly more errors. I'd like to think of it as more of a useful tool than a crutch. Generally I try to delete and correctly spell the word, but sometimes I can't get it spelled right.
Realistically we need something to help compensate for the mangled, bastard language that is English. It's borrowed words and conventions from damn near everywhere on earth and people tend to adopt the slang and jargon it generates into common use. It's not wonder that people have difficulties with spelling.
Google should have deleted the data before they even publicly announced that they had accidentally collected it. Would have made the matter a whole lot simpler and would have left less room for political grandstanding.
I think it's more of a hardware problem than a OS issue. Samsung has shown that Android tablets can sell well, but they've used an ARM chip just like Apple has used. ARM chips get a hell of a lot more performance per watt than Atom has ever been able to get. Unless the amount of power they can offer is significantly better, I can't see a good reason why anyone would want to use one. Tablets require small sizes and light weights to be successful. Cramming a more power hungry chip in one is just going to make it burn through the battery more quickly or require a bigger battery.
I also wonder how many of these are going to end up being Windows 7 tablets because those haven't sold worth a damn and if the vast majority of these are Windows 7 devices, I wouldn't expect more than a few hundred thousand atom-based tablets to sell all year. That's hardly a praise-worthy figure when both Apple and Samsung can sell over one million ARM-based tablets in a month.
It's not an Apple thing. It's an unsuitable CPU thing.
If you're comparing an Ubuntu tablet to an iPad, there's already an open alternative: Android tablets. The GalaxyTab has already gotten some good reviews and there're more Android tablets trickling out every day. They might not all be good or similar to an iPad, but there are plenty of people who want different form factors and Android allows manufacturers to make that choice. I can't see Ubuntu being terribly much better than the tablets that have been running Windows 7. Sure, you get Linux instead of Windows, but it's still bolting a touch interface onto a desktop OS and running it on hardware no more powerful than a netbook. Maybe this is something that you want, but given how terrible the sales of Windows 7 tablets have been, I can't see Linux devices doing much better in the market.
Apple doesn't even make a tablet that uses a regular desktop OS. If you're comparing Ubuntu's app store to the OS X app store that doesn't even exist yet the comparison makes no sense since you can side load apps on OS X and it's been the only way to do so up until now. Ubuntu's app store will also be curated just like the major repositories (which honestly are pretty much app stores without a fancy graphical front end) or at least it had better be because if it's full of malware no one is going to want to use it. Regardless, it doesn't make a lot of sense to compare a desktop OS app store to a tablet OS app store. They run on different devices which have different histories.
I'm not really sure what it is you're looking for as you seem to be mixing two different ideas together while trying to treat them as though they are similar. Could you perhaps explain what you meant? I'm having a hard time trying to determine exactly what kind of product it is that you're looking for.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but most developers like to eat, which means that commercialization of software comes in at some point, whether that's advertising, support, or something else. Limiting the selection of software to only non-free (as in beer) software would result in a lot less software being available (or made in the future), which isn't exactly helpful for end users either. FOSS has gone a long way to make the world a better place, but it's not a be-all, end-all solution.
The big problem is that the tech industry moves so much faster than most other industries. By the time a patent on something has expired, it's likely fallen out of use or has been supplanted by something else. Either that or its a patent that covers something so vague that it can be applied to almost any product and it takes forever (by tech industry standards) for it to expire.
There's also a horrible feedback loop because a few people have been burned by patent suits over asinine patents. To prevent this, companies patent everything and anything just so they can avoid patent trolls. If the company starts to go belly up it can bust out its patent portfolio and become a patent troll itself and the vicious circle goes around once more.
I think that most of the/. community would agree that a patent system is a good thing, but that what we have now is horribly broken and badly in need of being fixed. Of course that's easier said than done.
Microsoft knew that they wouldn't win in court. They just made up a number that sounded scary and started making noise. Some good old-fashioned FUD-slinging. The worst they can do is appear menacing and make it appear there's a sword hanging over the head of Linux.
Even if they could somehow "own" Linux, it wouldn't stop the FOSS community from removing the offending parts and moving something new that can't be shutdown.
More interesting than the companies on the list is the company who isn't: Google.
Strange that almost everyone involved in the consortium has some kind of axe to grind with Google. Both Apple and Microsoft have been involved in lawsuits with phone manufacturers who make Android devices and Oracle is suing Google over their JVM. EMC has fingers in several pies and some of those pies are ones that Google could conceivably want to sink fingers into as well so it's not inconceivable that they might target Google in the near future.
Could just be a group of companies looking to ward off patent trolls, but I foresee that one or more of these companies will be bringing one or more of these newly acquired patents into the fray before too long.
I imagine that by the time the final hardware is ready, it's going to be a lot more locked down. There's always been some speculation that Google may subsidize the cost of these devices and make it up on ad revenue. If that's the case, they're not going to want people to supplant ChromeOS in favor of something else.
If they're unsubsidized, why bother buying a ChromeOS device? Just install ChromeOS on a netbook/notebook that you already have.
So what? At ever step of the way it still be open source. If you don't like what they're doing and want to change it, make a fork. If the community agrees with you, they'll gravitate towards your version. If not, you'll parish into obscurity. That's the beauty of open source, it let's you do what you want; but it also means you need to put up or shut up. You can't have open access and complete freedom to freely change things, but still whine about what someone else is doing with the project.
Individual participation in something like this hasn't existed on a big stage since the Athenians. Is it really shocking that the establishment doesn't seem to grok it? This is something that doesn't clearly fit into the D or R bags so no one really has a damned a clue what exactly to do with it. The party mentality permeates every aspect of their thinking. It's no wonder that they try to label it as just another group.
[I'll suppose that you were being facetious, but my sarcasm detector is in the shop---]
Nope, that merely gives you reason to question the outcomes and examine the experimental procedure in depth. It's a meta-level reputation system. If an entity has shown a lack of bias in the past, you can generally choose to accept their work. Otherwise you examine the experiment design and see if anyone was playing fast and loose with the statistics and analysis. Microsoft probably qualifies for most people.
The summery raised a few points. It may be that some older version of Chrome is crap in some aspect compared to the beta of Microsoft's latest and greatest. That's a simple fact that can be supported by some measurement. You can question whether what is being measured is actually useful, but let's assume that it is. Still doesn't change the fact that it's and old version of Chrome vs. a beta version of IE. The study is still perfectly valid, just utterly pointless. It would be like a study on carbon emissions that only looks at cars made during the 60's. Utterly pointless for the current situation.
Skepticism is fine, but be a good skeptic who evaluates the experimental methods and study conclusions. Don't call a club a spade just because it suits your black-and-red view of the world. Otherwise you're really no better than what you purport to despise.
They were stuck out of position on this one. Originally these cards were planned for a 32nm process, but TSMC cancelled it because it was having a lot of issues, so they had to make changes and shoehorn their design into a 40nm process again. To keep the die size down, things had to be cut.
A lot of AMD's lead came form Nvidia making mistakes. The 5000 series was a great step forward, but it looked even better because Nvidia looked so bad. You can't count on your competition to keep shooting themselves in the foot.
If anything the 6900 series is a good indication of the types of things that will be coming in the 7000 series. There are some big architectural changes that were made and others that still have yet to be made. Couple that with a 28nm process and they can provide a similar level of performance at half the die size.
Could be the far left of the American political spectrum. Here's the political compass map for all the US states based on Senators which should give you a fairly good idea about the range we're looking at. Everything falls right of center and above the mid-line for authoritarian/libertarian.
The candidates that tend to become President in the US tend to fall along that line. Too much deviation from it and doesn't work for whatever reason. America is for the most part a pretty centrist country. Might be why politicians accuse each other of being far-left or far-right. It makes them appear closer to the center, which is what the majority of the population seems to want.
Another funny story; The majority of European governments fall into that same band as well. I always hear Europeans posting comments about how they're actually a real indication of the political left, but even the most politically left-leaning countries in Europe are still to the right of the center line.
Would be interesting if the site ranked countries from other parts of the world as well and had a longer time-line. Maybe things really have changed since the 60's, but I somehow doubt it.
Hard to tell without being able to hear a voice or see a face. Have you considered that you're the one who has to parse it for emotion and that it might just be you who's bitter?
Microsoft live and die on Windows and Office, nothing else really makes them any significant amounts of money.
Probably why they're willing to throw a lot of money to expand into something else. Their stranglehold of the PC and Office market may last for several more decades, but they realize that they've already saturated both markets and there isn't much room for growth in either. They're trying to find the next thing that will make them significant amounts of money so they can live and die on X, Y, and Z instead of just X and Y. It's a little like how Apple lived on died by the Mac. Then the Mac and the iPod. Then the Mac, the iPod, and the iPhone. Now the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPod. More legs to stand on.
But, if I remember correctly, isn't it just some product they bought in and re-labelled?
Microsoft has had a tablet strategy for almost a decade. Unfortunately it's an absolute crap strategy that isn't going to catch on in the marketplace. Before you might have been able to argue that their vision was ahead of its time, but now that Apple has had a lot of success with the iPad and Samsung has been able to duplicate much of that success with an Android tablet, Microsoft has no excuse.
You can tell how much they missed the boat on this by looking at their new phone OS, or at least what they named it. I wouldn't be surprised to see them use it for future tablets and stop trying to put Windows 7 and its successors on tablet devices. The funny part is that they called it Windows Phone 7, which (at least to me) indicates that they had no thought at all of using it for tablet devices, even after watching Apple port their iOS to tablets.
It's pretty clear that they intent to pound their heads into the wall and continue pushing their failed strategy. It's starting to look sad.
I absolutely love Moore's law. Think that this is an insanely awesome amount of computational power? Just wait around for 10-15 years and we'll likely have that same order of magnitude in our personal computers. Just look back at the supercomputer list from a decade ago and notice that right now we have hardware capable of getting similar performance. The best Intel processors can put out over 100 GFLOPS. Graphics cards are closer to 1TFLOPS.
Another way of looking at it is that we'll have a similar amount of power in our phones, tablets, etc. that we have in our desktops right now. Super computers are going to get even more super and the types of problems that are expensive to solve today continue to get cheaper. I'm still a young man, but given how far things have come since I was born, I can't help but wonder what the world will be like when I'm many years further along the road. If for no other reason than the vast amount of computational power that's available to us.
Out of the box, the Cr-48 conjures images of the Black Apple MacBook, from the plain, rubberized chassis to what looks like the same chiclet-style keyboard. The 12-inch notebook weighs about 3.8lbs and comes with a clickpad which recognizes one finger as a left click, while a two-finger tap triggers a right-click function.
From what I've seen, the design of this prototype is quite nice and does conjure thoughts of other elegant notebook designs such as the MacBook or ThinkPad. However, by the time this thing reaches production it will be marred by horrible beveled designs in cheap plastic, substandard parts, and a plethora of ugly stickers announcing the system internals. I understand that the need to cut costs means that not every notebook can be visually pleasing to the eye, but is there such a need to make them ass ugly?
I think you've inadvertently stumbled upon the difficulties of fighting DDoS attacks. Sometimes it's just a flood of legitimate traffic with no malicious intent behind it at all.
A lesson in how trivial it is for anyone to get your email address and other information when you provide it to third parties who may become compromised. I hope it gets voted to +5 just so it sinks in for a few people and they aren't so careless with their personal information in the future.
Gawker honestly shouldn't even store the emails. If someone loses a password they can just make a new account. I don't want to sound mean, but if you can't be a good example you might as well serve as a horrible warning.
Doesn't really change the fact that you should never provide these people with your real email address. Hulu obtaining your email address in no way proves that you're over 18 and anyone under 18 is most likely sophisticated enough to lie about their age if they want to see a nipple or hear some foul language. So if one needs to sign in because there's some type of wall for unauthenticated users, I don't see how that precludes the use of throwaway email accounts.
I can't see a good reason to give out your email address unless you want to receive emails from the site. Otherwise you're just exposing yourself to needless grief. Honestly, I don't even know why you display your email address on Slashdot. Anyone who becomes sufficiently annoyed with you or merely bored could send massive amounts of spam towards it.
I didn't even notice it until someone called attention to it. Even before reading your reply I just figured it for a little alliteration and not some sexist attack. Hell, there are plenty of other colloquialisms such as "boys' night out" or "boy toy" that aren't considered offensive for their use of the word boy. The second might offend a person, but not for the reason's SuperBanana pointed out.
There's malicious intent and there's loose English. Unless there's some reason to suspect that the wording is intentional, let's leave the political correctness in a box.
Not sure why anyone would register with any of the Gawker sites, but why on earth you would ever give your actual email address to half of these websites is beyond me. If they require you to provide an email address to register, use a throwaway address from something like mailinator or the other sites like it. Yes, someone could take over the account if the email address is posted, but for almost all of those sites the account serves no purpose outside of being able to post.
I'm not even sure why they require email addresses. Reddit is one of the few sites I've seen get it right. They don't require an email address to register, but warn you that if you don't include one there is no way to recover the password for the account.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, I don't think there's a lot they can do about it, otherwise they probably would. Even when the game was new this was a big problem and they couldn't stop in when they probably had a larger support team looking at the game. The BNet system probably wasn't built to handle problems like that and Blizzard may not have anticipated that such a problem would exist.
They're running the D2 server software on pretty ancient hardware (at least by today's standards) so it's not as though they can easily upgrade it to code in new fixes. This much they mentioned when they released the latest content patch for the game and explained why certain changes couldn't be made.
The bots don't really destroy the economy, they just add more crap to it, which drives the price of almost everything downwards. That actually benefits the average person as they've better access to better weapons. Perhaps you consider that ruined, but from the average person's perspective, it's not exactly a bad thing. Also, since D2 has random stats on almost everything, the values of items can vary widely from essentially worthless to decently valuable. It seems to me that as of recently, most people were using bots to get to the top of the ladder.
Have them submit both versions that way it's easy to see how much of an impact spell-checking has on the results. Unless they're also doing a grammar check, it's not going to make the results significantly better.
There's something to be said for learning proper spelling and grammar, but I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a terribly great speller and that without Firefox's built-in spell-check, I'd probably end up with significantly more errors. I'd like to think of it as more of a useful tool than a crutch. Generally I try to delete and correctly spell the word, but sometimes I can't get it spelled right.
Realistically we need something to help compensate for the mangled, bastard language that is English. It's borrowed words and conventions from damn near everywhere on earth and people tend to adopt the slang and jargon it generates into common use. It's not wonder that people have difficulties with spelling.
Google should have deleted the data before they even publicly announced that they had accidentally collected it. Would have made the matter a whole lot simpler and would have left less room for political grandstanding.
I think it's more of a hardware problem than a OS issue. Samsung has shown that Android tablets can sell well, but they've used an ARM chip just like Apple has used. ARM chips get a hell of a lot more performance per watt than Atom has ever been able to get. Unless the amount of power they can offer is significantly better, I can't see a good reason why anyone would want to use one. Tablets require small sizes and light weights to be successful. Cramming a more power hungry chip in one is just going to make it burn through the battery more quickly or require a bigger battery.
I also wonder how many of these are going to end up being Windows 7 tablets because those haven't sold worth a damn and if the vast majority of these are Windows 7 devices, I wouldn't expect more than a few hundred thousand atom-based tablets to sell all year. That's hardly a praise-worthy figure when both Apple and Samsung can sell over one million ARM-based tablets in a month.
It's not an Apple thing. It's an unsuitable CPU thing.
If you're comparing an Ubuntu tablet to an iPad, there's already an open alternative: Android tablets. The GalaxyTab has already gotten some good reviews and there're more Android tablets trickling out every day. They might not all be good or similar to an iPad, but there are plenty of people who want different form factors and Android allows manufacturers to make that choice. I can't see Ubuntu being terribly much better than the tablets that have been running Windows 7. Sure, you get Linux instead of Windows, but it's still bolting a touch interface onto a desktop OS and running it on hardware no more powerful than a netbook. Maybe this is something that you want, but given how terrible the sales of Windows 7 tablets have been, I can't see Linux devices doing much better in the market.
Apple doesn't even make a tablet that uses a regular desktop OS. If you're comparing Ubuntu's app store to the OS X app store that doesn't even exist yet the comparison makes no sense since you can side load apps on OS X and it's been the only way to do so up until now. Ubuntu's app store will also be curated just like the major repositories (which honestly are pretty much app stores without a fancy graphical front end) or at least it had better be because if it's full of malware no one is going to want to use it. Regardless, it doesn't make a lot of sense to compare a desktop OS app store to a tablet OS app store. They run on different devices which have different histories.
I'm not really sure what it is you're looking for as you seem to be mixing two different ideas together while trying to treat them as though they are similar. Could you perhaps explain what you meant? I'm having a hard time trying to determine exactly what kind of product it is that you're looking for.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but most developers like to eat, which means that commercialization of software comes in at some point, whether that's advertising, support, or something else. Limiting the selection of software to only non-free (as in beer) software would result in a lot less software being available (or made in the future), which isn't exactly helpful for end users either. FOSS has gone a long way to make the world a better place, but it's not a be-all, end-all solution.
The big problem is that the tech industry moves so much faster than most other industries. By the time a patent on something has expired, it's likely fallen out of use or has been supplanted by something else. Either that or its a patent that covers something so vague that it can be applied to almost any product and it takes forever (by tech industry standards) for it to expire.
/. community would agree that a patent system is a good thing, but that what we have now is horribly broken and badly in need of being fixed. Of course that's easier said than done.
There's also a horrible feedback loop because a few people have been burned by patent suits over asinine patents. To prevent this, companies patent everything and anything just so they can avoid patent trolls. If the company starts to go belly up it can bust out its patent portfolio and become a patent troll itself and the vicious circle goes around once more.
I think that most of the
Microsoft knew that they wouldn't win in court. They just made up a number that sounded scary and started making noise. Some good old-fashioned FUD-slinging. The worst they can do is appear menacing and make it appear there's a sword hanging over the head of Linux.
Even if they could somehow "own" Linux, it wouldn't stop the FOSS community from removing the offending parts and moving something new that can't be shutdown.
More interesting than the companies on the list is the company who isn't: Google.
Strange that almost everyone involved in the consortium has some kind of axe to grind with Google. Both Apple and Microsoft have been involved in lawsuits with phone manufacturers who make Android devices and Oracle is suing Google over their JVM. EMC has fingers in several pies and some of those pies are ones that Google could conceivably want to sink fingers into as well so it's not inconceivable that they might target Google in the near future.
Could just be a group of companies looking to ward off patent trolls, but I foresee that one or more of these companies will be bringing one or more of these newly acquired patents into the fray before too long.
I imagine that by the time the final hardware is ready, it's going to be a lot more locked down. There's always been some speculation that Google may subsidize the cost of these devices and make it up on ad revenue. If that's the case, they're not going to want people to supplant ChromeOS in favor of something else.
If they're unsubsidized, why bother buying a ChromeOS device? Just install ChromeOS on a netbook/notebook that you already have.
So what? At ever step of the way it still be open source. If you don't like what they're doing and want to change it, make a fork. If the community agrees with you, they'll gravitate towards your version. If not, you'll parish into obscurity. That's the beauty of open source, it let's you do what you want; but it also means you need to put up or shut up. You can't have open access and complete freedom to freely change things, but still whine about what someone else is doing with the project.
Individual participation in something like this hasn't existed on a big stage since the Athenians. Is it really shocking that the establishment doesn't seem to grok it? This is something that doesn't clearly fit into the D or R bags so no one really has a damned a clue what exactly to do with it. The party mentality permeates every aspect of their thinking. It's no wonder that they try to label it as just another group.
[I'll suppose that you were being facetious, but my sarcasm detector is in the shop---]
Nope, that merely gives you reason to question the outcomes and examine the experimental procedure in depth. It's a meta-level reputation system. If an entity has shown a lack of bias in the past, you can generally choose to accept their work. Otherwise you examine the experiment design and see if anyone was playing fast and loose with the statistics and analysis. Microsoft probably qualifies for most people.
The summery raised a few points. It may be that some older version of Chrome is crap in some aspect compared to the beta of Microsoft's latest and greatest. That's a simple fact that can be supported by some measurement. You can question whether what is being measured is actually useful, but let's assume that it is. Still doesn't change the fact that it's and old version of Chrome vs. a beta version of IE. The study is still perfectly valid, just utterly pointless. It would be like a study on carbon emissions that only looks at cars made during the 60's. Utterly pointless for the current situation.
Skepticism is fine, but be a good skeptic who evaluates the experimental methods and study conclusions. Don't call a club a spade just because it suits your black-and-red view of the world. Otherwise you're really no better than what you purport to despise.
They were stuck out of position on this one. Originally these cards were planned for a 32nm process, but TSMC cancelled it because it was having a lot of issues, so they had to make changes and shoehorn their design into a 40nm process again. To keep the die size down, things had to be cut.
A lot of AMD's lead came form Nvidia making mistakes. The 5000 series was a great step forward, but it looked even better because Nvidia looked so bad. You can't count on your competition to keep shooting themselves in the foot.
If anything the 6900 series is a good indication of the types of things that will be coming in the 7000 series. There are some big architectural changes that were made and others that still have yet to be made. Couple that with a 28nm process and they can provide a similar level of performance at half the die size.
Could be the far left of the American political spectrum. Here's the political compass map for all the US states based on Senators which should give you a fairly good idea about the range we're looking at. Everything falls right of center and above the mid-line for authoritarian/libertarian.
The candidates that tend to become President in the US tend to fall along that line. Too much deviation from it and doesn't work for whatever reason. America is for the most part a pretty centrist country. Might be why politicians accuse each other of being far-left or far-right. It makes them appear closer to the center, which is what the majority of the population seems to want.
Another funny story; The majority of European governments fall into that same band as well. I always hear Europeans posting comments about how they're actually a real indication of the political left, but even the most politically left-leaning countries in Europe are still to the right of the center line.
Would be interesting if the site ranked countries from other parts of the world as well and had a longer time-line. Maybe things really have changed since the 60's, but I somehow doubt it.
Or trying to be funny.
Hard to tell without being able to hear a voice or see a face. Have you considered that you're the one who has to parse it for emotion and that it might just be you who's bitter?
Nah, he's probably just a sourpuss.
Microsoft live and die on Windows and Office, nothing else really makes them any significant amounts of money.
Probably why they're willing to throw a lot of money to expand into something else. Their stranglehold of the PC and Office market may last for several more decades, but they realize that they've already saturated both markets and there isn't much room for growth in either. They're trying to find the next thing that will make them significant amounts of money so they can live and die on X, Y, and Z instead of just X and Y. It's a little like how Apple lived on died by the Mac. Then the Mac and the iPod. Then the Mac, the iPod, and the iPhone. Now the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPod. More legs to stand on.
But, if I remember correctly, isn't it just some product they bought in and re-labelled?
You're thinking about DOS. Ba-zing!
Microsoft has had a tablet strategy for almost a decade. Unfortunately it's an absolute crap strategy that isn't going to catch on in the marketplace. Before you might have been able to argue that their vision was ahead of its time, but now that Apple has had a lot of success with the iPad and Samsung has been able to duplicate much of that success with an Android tablet, Microsoft has no excuse.
You can tell how much they missed the boat on this by looking at their new phone OS, or at least what they named it. I wouldn't be surprised to see them use it for future tablets and stop trying to put Windows 7 and its successors on tablet devices. The funny part is that they called it Windows Phone 7, which (at least to me) indicates that they had no thought at all of using it for tablet devices, even after watching Apple port their iOS to tablets.
It's pretty clear that they intent to pound their heads into the wall and continue pushing their failed strategy. It's starting to look sad.
I absolutely love Moore's law. Think that this is an insanely awesome amount of computational power? Just wait around for 10-15 years and we'll likely have that same order of magnitude in our personal computers. Just look back at the supercomputer list from a decade ago and notice that right now we have hardware capable of getting similar performance. The best Intel processors can put out over 100 GFLOPS. Graphics cards are closer to 1TFLOPS.
Another way of looking at it is that we'll have a similar amount of power in our phones, tablets, etc. that we have in our desktops right now. Super computers are going to get even more super and the types of problems that are expensive to solve today continue to get cheaper. I'm still a young man, but given how far things have come since I was born, I can't help but wonder what the world will be like when I'm many years further along the road. If for no other reason than the vast amount of computational power that's available to us.
Out of the box, the Cr-48 conjures images of the Black Apple MacBook, from the plain, rubberized chassis to what looks like the same chiclet-style keyboard. The 12-inch notebook weighs about 3.8lbs and comes with a clickpad which recognizes one finger as a left click, while a two-finger tap triggers a right-click function.
From what I've seen, the design of this prototype is quite nice and does conjure thoughts of other elegant notebook designs such as the MacBook or ThinkPad. However, by the time this thing reaches production it will be marred by horrible beveled designs in cheap plastic, substandard parts, and a plethora of ugly stickers announcing the system internals. I understand that the need to cut costs means that not every notebook can be visually pleasing to the eye, but is there such a need to make them ass ugly?
I think you've inadvertently stumbled upon the difficulties of fighting DDoS attacks. Sometimes it's just a flood of legitimate traffic with no malicious intent behind it at all.
A lesson in how trivial it is for anyone to get your email address and other information when you provide it to third parties who may become compromised. I hope it gets voted to +5 just so it sinks in for a few people and they aren't so careless with their personal information in the future.
Gawker honestly shouldn't even store the emails. If someone loses a password they can just make a new account. I don't want to sound mean, but if you can't be a good example you might as well serve as a horrible warning.
Doesn't really change the fact that you should never provide these people with your real email address. Hulu obtaining your email address in no way proves that you're over 18 and anyone under 18 is most likely sophisticated enough to lie about their age if they want to see a nipple or hear some foul language. So if one needs to sign in because there's some type of wall for unauthenticated users, I don't see how that precludes the use of throwaway email accounts.
I can't see a good reason to give out your email address unless you want to receive emails from the site. Otherwise you're just exposing yourself to needless grief. Honestly, I don't even know why you display your email address on Slashdot. Anyone who becomes sufficiently annoyed with you or merely bored could send massive amounts of spam towards it.
I didn't even notice it until someone called attention to it. Even before reading your reply I just figured it for a little alliteration and not some sexist attack. Hell, there are plenty of other colloquialisms such as "boys' night out" or "boy toy" that aren't considered offensive for their use of the word boy. The second might offend a person, but not for the reason's SuperBanana pointed out.
There's malicious intent and there's loose English. Unless there's some reason to suspect that the wording is intentional, let's leave the political correctness in a box.
Not sure why anyone would register with any of the Gawker sites, but why on earth you would ever give your actual email address to half of these websites is beyond me. If they require you to provide an email address to register, use a throwaway address from something like mailinator or the other sites like it. Yes, someone could take over the account if the email address is posted, but for almost all of those sites the account serves no purpose outside of being able to post.
I'm not even sure why they require email addresses. Reddit is one of the few sites I've seen get it right. They don't require an email address to register, but warn you that if you don't include one there is no way to recover the password for the account.