The Spice extends life. The Spice expands consciousness. The Spice is vital to space travel. The Spacing Guild and its navigators, who the Spice has mutated over 4000 years, use the orange Spice gas, which gives them the ability to fold space.
Somebody really was drinking too much coffee when they wrote that shit.
Don't really care whether you call Fringe sci-fi or not, I find it an enjoyable watch. It has replaced Heroes in my Tivo Season Pass Manager, since Heroes jumped the shark at the beginning of Season 3.
Yes, but the boom in credit and the expansion of the money supply was largely driven by the ease of packaging and re-selling credit through the magic of securitization and tranching (i.e. CMOs and CDOs).
The insurance of debt through credit default swaps helped a lot too.
You combine these two relatively new secondary markets, and banks were able to effectively multiply available capital in the system and cause a massive bubble in asset prices.
Cancer cells that aren't the patients cells are highly, highly unlikely to result in a cancerous growth unless a patient is highly immunocompromised. An even marginal functional immune system can recognize cells that are not of the host organism and attack them. The reason cancer is dangerous is that the cells are your own and thus the immune system doesn't recognize them as "other" and attack them.
Thus the fact that cancer, in general, is not contagious. There are certain very rare exceptions that have been observed in dogs and Tazmanian devils, but as far as I know, never in humans.
In my current role, I have to hire management and non-management personnel for a variety of different roles. I just hired an accountant for our company. And you know what? I made them demonstrate skill competency for me - I sat them down in front of Quickbooks and asked them to familiarize themselves with our accounts and show me how to make journal entries for a variety of situations, and to go through some of our standard paperwork and show me how they'd record the transactions.
When I hire a lawyer, I want to hear a run-down of how they approach a legal problem in their area of specialization. I want to know what their skill level and depth-of-knowledge is. Of course, I am an MBA/CFA so the level of grilling I can give to an accounting candidate is probably more detailed than what I can give to a lawyer, but I still do my best.
Any professional should expect that their knowledge of their field may very well be tested as part of getting a job in that field. The more creative and brain intensive the job, the more useful in-depth testing is going to be, and the less informative your basic standardized professional credentials/certifications or performance in your average educational institution will be.
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
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· Score: 1
Well, Javascript performance may be faster, and definitely the initial rendering of a website is faster than in Firefox, but scrolling and navigating (the stuff that involves incremental rendering) of a site like Slashdot is waaaay slower in Chrome than in Firefox. To the point that I would find it very frustrating to use as my primary browser.
I don't recall seeing those issues on Safari for Mac, so it must have something to do with the way Chrome works.
Also a very strange issue - when Firefox is just sitting here, it doesn't use any CPU. When Chrome is just sitting here, it can still be eating 8-10% of my CPU for 10-15 seconds until it "settles down". That's strange.
Agreed - FF3 hasn't crashed for me yet, in about a month of heavy browsing usage. FF2 was pretty stable too, but definitely occasionally went down for the count (every week or two).
I use Windows for my primary desktop usage, and have a Macbook as my laptop.
If FF (2.0 or 3.0) is crashing more than once every few days, the original poster should wipe the FF install directory clean and re-install it. If that doesn't fix the problem, there's a shared library problem of some sort on his machine that has nothing to do with Firefox.
I dunno, sounds like the wussification of the MIT undergrad curriculum to me. Back in the day, my friends at MIT used to bat me over the head with how my Harvard education sucked because I didn't have to suffer through a manly class like 6.001. While our intro CS 50/51 classes may have been a modest step down, CS 121 (Theory of Computation) kicked their equivalent class' ass.:)
I knew that $199 HD-DVD player with 10 free HD-DVDs from Amazon.com was too good a deal to be true. But I got suckered into it anyway and bought myself one for the holidays. Betamax all over again.
I figured with HD-DVD players so cheap, they couldn't help but beat Bluray, with their absurdly overpriced players. Apparently I was duped by a dumping strategy - clearly they knew their market position was about to slip off a cliff and they decided to flood the market with cheap players.
I am boycotting further purchases of any high def DVD products for the next few years. This experience has left me utterly disgusted. Move piracy, here I come.
Expressiveness is not the same as readability, to me, in fact it's almost antithetical to it. Perl is very "expressive" in that you can accomplish a huge amount in a very terse chunk of code, but it's highly unreadable if you do so.
In general, @-signs make me want to puke. I don't like sigil-weirdy things in front of variable names. What's wrong with just using "this" if you really need to clarify scope? Frankly, you should be writing code that *doesn't need* scope clarification so often that shortening scope-resolution to a single character seems like a good idea.
Basically, I just prefer Python or PHP aesthetically to Ruby, especially if I have to read somebody else's code. Or Java, which while often overly verbose, is very readable, though not terribly expressive. The upside of that is I've almost never seen Java source code that I couldn't pick apart pretty quickly, or a Java library that I couldn't pick up and use immediately, because the language just is not terribly dense in information content.
I've only given Ruby a cursory look-over, so I might feel differently if I spent some time with it, but it just doesn't "look" right to me.
The Russians who post here on Slashdot in favor of Putin and tag stories like this "sternbutfair" absolutely disgust me. Now I understand why my ancestors fled Russia 100 years ago. There is a terribly broken, retrograde cultural mindset there, despite the country being the source of so many brilliant thinkers, scientists and engineers. It's like they forgot to teach their children basic philosophy, civics, or history.
Those who invite tyranny upon themselves deserve the death and destruction that inevitably follows. They are just as bad as the people who voted for George W. Bush in the second election.
Sometimes I am just embarrassed to be a human being at all.
Maybe I should move to Canada. I think they still believe in basic human freedoms there.
We supported Putin when he seemed to be a supporter of an open, democratic society for Russia. Over the years, he has been slowly tightening his grip and becoming more and more authoritarian. The mysterious part is that he has gained rather than lost popularity with the Russians as he has become more authoritarian.
My theory is that if you were an intelligent, freedom-loving Russian, you probably left the country years ago - the ones left are the idiots that actually miss the bad old days of autocratic pseudo-Communist rule.
Acually 1.1.2 was unlocked within two or three days of making a public showing on the upgrade servers. It's only phones with the new baseband bootloader, i.e. those that come shipped with 1.1.2 out of the box, that can't yet be unlocked.
Well, Apple does already know the IMEI numbers of all the phones that have been shipped to stores. And if they wanted to, they could make a pretty good estimate of which IMEI numbers have already gotten into consumer hands by looking at when those stores have re-ordered phones. And they presumably have access to information about which IMEI numbers have been activated with AT&T, though I'm not sure if they have that information in real time.
So essentially all this does is confirm that yes, indeed, the IMEI number they figured was in use, is in fact in use. And if you want to be really paranoid, they can look at the IP address and figure out which carrier you are using if its not AT&T.
What you think they are going to do with this information is a mystery to me. Sure, they could shut off access to these apps to non-whitelisted IMEIs, but the same people running unlocked/jailbroken/activated phones can trivially apply a patch that substitutes Apple's little XML web service URL with an alternative XML web service URL. This would be just about the simplest part of the iPhone hacking process.
I'm more concerned about the fact that Apple has fixed the baseband bootloader bug in their newly shipping iPhones now that makes them, at least until a new exploit is found, non-unlockable. Apple's general "us-vs-them" attitude towards the people figuring out how to make their useless phones do all sorts of cool things has already resulted in a significant decrease in cool third party app development. Nobody wants to spend the time writing apps for a platform that may get totally locked down again at any moment, and where there will be an "official" SDK in 4 or 5 months. It's maddening.
I can't wait for the GPhone platform to materialize. I will dump this piece of locked-down Apple junk faster than you can say "Android".
In Chicago it's ComEd, for Commonwealth Edison. In New York, it's Con Ed for Consolidated Edison. I think Massachusetts used to have a ComEd, though not sure if that was the same company as in Chicago, it stood for Commonwealth Edison (but these days it's called NSTAR in Mass).
I don't know who you seem to think the iPhone user base is, but I know more than half a dozen iPhone users, and every single one of them is a former Treo or other smartphone user, and they are all professionals.
While I do have a greater raw error rate with the screen keyboard, the iPhone correction is pretty good, and the errors it doesn't catch, I catch.
Basically, I find the assumptions behind your email to be incredibly offensive. It's one thing to say the screen keyboard is ergonomically inferior, it's another to say that iPhone users are dumb kids who don't know how to spell.
The "spending all of engineering's resources fighting unlockers" is also a foolish claim, unless you have some insider knowledge to back it up.
If you were an active member of the iPhone hacking community, hung out on Hackint0sh forums and Dev Team IRC you would see that most of the work that went into the 1.1.1 "update" was trying to lock the damned thing down harder. And the 1.1.2 update, as far as I can tell, was mainly released to patch the TIFF exploit that was used to jailbreak 1.1.1.
Compare the number of functional improvements that have come from the hacking and dev community vs. those that have come from Apple since the release of the iPhone and you'll see what I mean.
I like Apple hardware too, but don't be a drooling fan boy - all of us in the iPhone hacking/development community have been frustrated and annoyed by Apple's hardball tactics. I know I will jump ship as soon as anything remotely comparable (NOT Windows Mobile - I would never use that turd) is available.
Spending $750 a person for a short vacation for top line employees (what this is - not a management perk) who work their asses off to make sure that the hugely complicated space shuttle program launches happen safely? This doesn't sound unreasonable to me. NASA is the last place I want to cut back federal budget.
His rant is completely out of date and reflects usability issues with previous generation smartphones. I Google for addresses of restaurants and other stores on my iPhone several times a week. And if I'm in an unfamiliar neighborhood, pull up directions with Google Maps. I very rarely was able to do all of that on my old Treo, since web browsing was such an atrociously clunky experience, but Apple got that part right.
Fortunately for Google, Apple got a lot of other shit terribly wrong with the iPhone (lack of openness, lack of SDK, getting deeply in bed with carrier and offering no premium price unlocked phone, spending all of engineering's resources fighting unlockers rather than developing the features and applications people actually want for their phones). This is the only reason Google has such a big opportunity here.
Time limits aside, VISA and Mastercard are consumer-friendly to the point of being idiotic when it comes to chargebacks, for non-card-present transactions. My company wins *every* chargeback with Amex - we record inbound calls and just play back the audio where the cardholder agreed to a certain charge/policy when people contest the charges (they are always legitimate charges, we just deal in big ticket items, and it turns out we have a lot of scumbag customers who take advantage of the system). We also win every VISA/Mastercard chargeback where we have a signature on a credit card slip for the appropriate amount, and we lose *every* VISA/Mastercard chargeback that we don't have that slip for.
Of course, since we deal in big ticket items, we just hand people over to a collections agency when they play this game with us.
Slashdot Mirror
The Spice extends life. The Spice expands consciousness. The Spice is vital to space travel. The Spacing Guild and its navigators, who the Spice has mutated over 4000 years, use the orange Spice gas, which gives them the ability to fold space.
Somebody really was drinking too much coffee when they wrote that shit.
Don't really care whether you call Fringe sci-fi or not, I find it an enjoyable watch. It has replaced Heroes in my Tivo Season Pass Manager, since Heroes jumped the shark at the beginning of Season 3.
Yes, but the boom in credit and the expansion of the money supply was largely driven by the ease of packaging and re-selling credit through the magic of securitization and tranching (i.e. CMOs and CDOs).
The insurance of debt through credit default swaps helped a lot too.
You combine these two relatively new secondary markets, and banks were able to effectively multiply available capital in the system and cause a massive bubble in asset prices.
Cancer cells that aren't the patients cells are highly, highly unlikely to result in a cancerous growth unless a patient is highly immunocompromised. An even marginal functional immune system can recognize cells that are not of the host organism and attack them. The reason cancer is dangerous is that the cells are your own and thus the immune system doesn't recognize them as "other" and attack them.
Thus the fact that cancer, in general, is not contagious. There are certain very rare exceptions that have been observed in dogs and Tazmanian devils, but as far as I know, never in humans.
In my current role, I have to hire management and non-management personnel for a variety of different roles. I just hired an accountant for our company. And you know what? I made them demonstrate skill competency for me - I sat them down in front of Quickbooks and asked them to familiarize themselves with our accounts and show me how to make journal entries for a variety of situations, and to go through some of our standard paperwork and show me how they'd record the transactions.
When I hire a lawyer, I want to hear a run-down of how they approach a legal problem in their area of specialization. I want to know what their skill level and depth-of-knowledge is. Of course, I am an MBA/CFA so the level of grilling I can give to an accounting candidate is probably more detailed than what I can give to a lawyer, but I still do my best.
Any professional should expect that their knowledge of their field may very well be tested as part of getting a job in that field. The more creative and brain intensive the job, the more useful in-depth testing is going to be, and the less informative your basic standardized professional credentials/certifications or performance in your average educational institution will be.
Well, Javascript performance may be faster, and definitely the initial rendering of a website is faster than in Firefox, but scrolling and navigating (the stuff that involves incremental rendering) of a site like Slashdot is waaaay slower in Chrome than in Firefox. To the point that I would find it very frustrating to use as my primary browser.
I don't recall seeing those issues on Safari for Mac, so it must have something to do with the way Chrome works.
Also a very strange issue - when Firefox is just sitting here, it doesn't use any CPU. When Chrome is just sitting here, it can still be eating 8-10% of my CPU for 10-15 seconds until it "settles down". That's strange.
Agreed - FF3 hasn't crashed for me yet, in about a month of heavy browsing usage. FF2 was pretty stable too, but definitely occasionally went down for the count (every week or two).
I use Windows for my primary desktop usage, and have a Macbook as my laptop.
If FF (2.0 or 3.0) is crashing more than once every few days, the original poster should wipe the FF install directory clean and re-install it. If that doesn't fix the problem, there's a shared library problem of some sort on his machine that has nothing to do with Firefox.
95% supported - is that sort of like 95% pregnant?
I dunno, sounds like the wussification of the MIT undergrad curriculum to me. Back in the day, my friends at MIT used to bat me over the head with how my Harvard education sucked because I didn't have to suffer through a manly class like 6.001. While our intro CS 50/51 classes may have been a modest step down, CS 121 (Theory of Computation) kicked their equivalent class' ass. :)
Oops, "Movie", not "Move"
I knew that $199 HD-DVD player with 10 free HD-DVDs from Amazon.com was too good a deal to be true. But I got suckered into it anyway and bought myself one for the holidays. Betamax all over again.
I figured with HD-DVD players so cheap, they couldn't help but beat Bluray, with their absurdly overpriced players. Apparently I was duped by a dumping strategy - clearly they knew their market position was about to slip off a cliff and they decided to flood the market with cheap players.
I am boycotting further purchases of any high def DVD products for the next few years. This experience has left me utterly disgusted. Move piracy, here I come.
Expressiveness is not the same as readability, to me, in fact it's almost antithetical to it. Perl is very "expressive" in that you can accomplish a huge amount in a very terse chunk of code, but it's highly unreadable if you do so.
In general, @-signs make me want to puke. I don't like sigil-weirdy things in front of variable names. What's wrong with just using "this" if you really need to clarify scope? Frankly, you should be writing code that *doesn't need* scope clarification so often that shortening scope-resolution to a single character seems like a good idea.
Basically, I just prefer Python or PHP aesthetically to Ruby, especially if I have to read somebody else's code. Or Java, which while often overly verbose, is very readable, though not terribly expressive. The upside of that is I've almost never seen Java source code that I couldn't pick apart pretty quickly, or a Java library that I couldn't pick up and use immediately, because the language just is not terribly dense in information content.
I've only given Ruby a cursory look-over, so I might feel differently if I spent some time with it, but it just doesn't "look" right to me.
Ruby makes me wanna poke my eyes out. J2EE is the abortion of the Java universe, unfortunately.
Weird, I'm not much of one for Buffy and think I watched one episode of Angel, but I loved Firefly.
The Russians who post here on Slashdot in favor of Putin and tag stories like this "sternbutfair" absolutely disgust me. Now I understand why my ancestors fled Russia 100 years ago. There is a terribly broken, retrograde cultural mindset there, despite the country being the source of so many brilliant thinkers, scientists and engineers. It's like they forgot to teach their children basic philosophy, civics, or history.
Those who invite tyranny upon themselves deserve the death and destruction that inevitably follows. They are just as bad as the people who voted for George W. Bush in the second election.
Sometimes I am just embarrassed to be a human being at all.
Maybe I should move to Canada. I think they still believe in basic human freedoms there.
We supported Putin when he seemed to be a supporter of an open, democratic society for Russia. Over the years, he has been slowly tightening his grip and becoming more and more authoritarian. The mysterious part is that he has gained rather than lost popularity with the Russians as he has become more authoritarian.
My theory is that if you were an intelligent, freedom-loving Russian, you probably left the country years ago - the ones left are the idiots that actually miss the bad old days of autocratic pseudo-Communist rule.
Acually 1.1.2 was unlocked within two or three days of making a public showing on the upgrade servers. It's only phones with the new baseband bootloader, i.e. those that come shipped with 1.1.2 out of the box, that can't yet be unlocked.
Well, Apple does already know the IMEI numbers of all the phones that have been shipped to stores. And if they wanted to, they could make a pretty good estimate of which IMEI numbers have already gotten into consumer hands by looking at when those stores have re-ordered phones. And they presumably have access to information about which IMEI numbers have been activated with AT&T, though I'm not sure if they have that information in real time.
So essentially all this does is confirm that yes, indeed, the IMEI number they figured was in use, is in fact in use. And if you want to be really paranoid, they can look at the IP address and figure out which carrier you are using if its not AT&T.
What you think they are going to do with this information is a mystery to me. Sure, they could shut off access to these apps to non-whitelisted IMEIs, but the same people running unlocked/jailbroken/activated phones can trivially apply a patch that substitutes Apple's little XML web service URL with an alternative XML web service URL. This would be just about the simplest part of the iPhone hacking process.
I'm more concerned about the fact that Apple has fixed the baseband bootloader bug in their newly shipping iPhones now that makes them, at least until a new exploit is found, non-unlockable. Apple's general "us-vs-them" attitude towards the people figuring out how to make their useless phones do all sorts of cool things has already resulted in a significant decrease in cool third party app development. Nobody wants to spend the time writing apps for a platform that may get totally locked down again at any moment, and where there will be an "official" SDK in 4 or 5 months. It's maddening.
I can't wait for the GPhone platform to materialize. I will dump this piece of locked-down Apple junk faster than you can say "Android".
Mod up. A soldier with a broken ankle from jumping out the back of a truck isn't going to waste very many bad guys.
In Chicago it's ComEd, for Commonwealth Edison. In New York, it's Con Ed for Consolidated Edison. I think Massachusetts used to have a ComEd, though not sure if that was the same company as in Chicago, it stood for Commonwealth Edison (but these days it's called NSTAR in Mass).
I don't know who you seem to think the iPhone user base is, but I know more than half a dozen iPhone users, and every single one of them is a former Treo or other smartphone user, and they are all professionals.
While I do have a greater raw error rate with the screen keyboard, the iPhone correction is pretty good, and the errors it doesn't catch, I catch.
Basically, I find the assumptions behind your email to be incredibly offensive. It's one thing to say the screen keyboard is ergonomically inferior, it's another to say that iPhone users are dumb kids who don't know how to spell.
The "spending all of engineering's resources fighting unlockers" is also a foolish claim, unless you have some insider knowledge to back it up.
If you were an active member of the iPhone hacking community, hung out on Hackint0sh forums and Dev Team IRC you would see that most of the work that went into the 1.1.1 "update" was trying to lock the damned thing down harder. And the 1.1.2 update, as far as I can tell, was mainly released to patch the TIFF exploit that was used to jailbreak 1.1.1.
Compare the number of functional improvements that have come from the hacking and dev community vs. those that have come from Apple since the release of the iPhone and you'll see what I mean.
I like Apple hardware too, but don't be a drooling fan boy - all of us in the iPhone hacking/development community have been frustrated and annoyed by Apple's hardball tactics. I know I will jump ship as soon as anything remotely comparable (NOT Windows Mobile - I would never use that turd) is available.
Spending $750 a person for a short vacation for top line employees (what this is - not a management perk) who work their asses off to make sure that the hugely complicated space shuttle program launches happen safely? This doesn't sound unreasonable to me. NASA is the last place I want to cut back federal budget.
His rant is completely out of date and reflects usability issues with previous generation smartphones. I Google for addresses of restaurants and other stores on my iPhone several times a week. And if I'm in an unfamiliar neighborhood, pull up directions with Google Maps. I very rarely was able to do all of that on my old Treo, since web browsing was such an atrociously clunky experience, but Apple got that part right.
Fortunately for Google, Apple got a lot of other shit terribly wrong with the iPhone (lack of openness, lack of SDK, getting deeply in bed with carrier and offering no premium price unlocked phone, spending all of engineering's resources fighting unlockers rather than developing the features and applications people actually want for their phones). This is the only reason Google has such a big opportunity here.
Time limits aside, VISA and Mastercard are consumer-friendly to the point of being idiotic when it comes to chargebacks, for non-card-present transactions. My company wins *every* chargeback with Amex - we record inbound calls and just play back the audio where the cardholder agreed to a certain charge/policy when people contest the charges (they are always legitimate charges, we just deal in big ticket items, and it turns out we have a lot of scumbag customers who take advantage of the system). We also win every VISA/Mastercard chargeback where we have a signature on a credit card slip for the appropriate amount, and we lose *every* VISA/Mastercard chargeback that we don't have that slip for.
Of course, since we deal in big ticket items, we just hand people over to a collections agency when they play this game with us.