Yeah, completely with you there. I'm fine with the anti-skeumorphic trend - it's silly to continue to make things look like now decidedly old-school real-life countparts for it's own sake. But why did color, gradients, gloss, and borders have to go as well?
Now we have flat, borderless, and ugly designs all over the place, and what's worse, I've found these UIs more difficult to use, not less, because you're often left guessing as to where buttons begin or end, or what even is clickable/pushable. A lot of the visual elements removed were important visual cues that simply got tossed out the window.
Mind telling me which one that was? I just watched "damsels in distress (part one)" and it seemed pretty reasonable, handing out a lot of criticism but also pointing out some positive examples as well. Did she get a lot more vitriolic in later videos or something?
What I don't understand is why we're down on the "Save the Princess" games when yeah, there's much worse stuff out there to be dealt with.
She tackles a lot of issues, but I started with her "damsel in distress" video, so that's what I commented on. I'd recommend watching the video if you haven't. You sort of have to put yourself in place of a young girl growing up as a videogamer. It would sort of suck to always be forced to play as a male hero rescuing a helpless princess, wouldn't it? She simply points out that it's a cheap and simple way to pander to adolescent male power fantasies, which is absolutely true. Note that she goes after this trope first because it's such an incredibly pervasive theme, even if it isn't the "worst" of the problems.
p.s. I don't agree that "save the princess" is inherently bad to the point that it should be eliminated entirely. Somebody needs to be saved, after all. It's more that it's generally lopsided in favour of helpless female "props" and male protagonists. Maybe we need more Princess Fiona types that can kick ass in their own right
Yep, and she pointed out some examples of games that did this better than others. For instance, Princess Zelda in Wind Waker was a strong and capable sidekick throughout most of the adventure. Of course, she also points out that three minutes after she's revealed to be the beautiful princess Zelda in the game, she reverts right back to the "helpless female trophy", and is captured and imprisoned exactly three minutes later. She gave props to the game for the fact that Zelda helped Link to defeat the final boss as well.
Essentially, the theme of her first video was simply demonstrating how the "damsel in distress" essential reduces the female role to one of a trophy to be won, fought over by protagonist and antagonist alike. It's hard to argue that such a critique is untrue, even if the intent wasn't overtly malicious in any way.
My take on the situation is not really about feminist issues, it's simply a matter of improving the quality of storytelling in games. I think active and engaging characters are much more entertaining than passive and objectified characters. Which character do people find more interesting: Princess Peach or Princess Fiona? Even if a female character is relegated to the role of supporting character, she can still be an interesting and engaging personality.
You don't want China deciding to flex their economic muscles by playing with the bond market next time America invades some random country, do you?
Oh, I don't know. Maybe that would be a nice object less as to why it's not healthy to be buried in so much debt. Or to be policing the entire damned world on our own dime, for that matter.
I'm a professional game developer and a life-long gamer, so perhaps it's fair to say that I've got as vested an interest in videogames as most. I've got fond memories of many "saving the princess" games, which of course she takes issue with. Is that really worth such outrage?
I'm fine with having our industry challenged from time to time. For example, there are worse things in gaming than a "save the princess" plot device, but let's face it, feminist issue aside, it's a horribly cliched trope that could stand to be re-examined. Even if you don't agree with her, I think she raises some interesting points of discussion. I'm watching some of her videos right now actually, and am actually finding them fairly interesting. A direct quote from her video:
This series will include critical analysis of many beloved games and characters, but remember that it's both possible and even necessary to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of it's more problematic or pernicious aspects.
It takes a certain moral fortitude to listen to criticism of something you care deeply about. Game developers deal with this all the time when a reviewer writes a scathing review of the game you just spent the last two years of your life working on, or when gamers casually dismiss the problems you've spilled blood and tears to solve. It's really hard to put your ego and indignity aside and ask how you could have improved your product rather than lashing out at the one criticizing your work.
It's not like I'm really expecting the general public to restrain from criticism and outright name calling, but I seriously wish it wouldn't devolve to the level of death threats.
Large government-sponsored programs have a notorious history of exploding far beyond predicted budgetary constraints. We'll see in another few years or so if that prediction, turns out to be accurate. History is on my side, unfortunately.
Even so, I'll go ahead and concede the point. Fine, let's say the new health care program has zero impact on the budget, or perhaps a negligible effect. I should also have not used the phrase "with no regard to how the government is going to pay for it", because obviously that's not true, as the budgetary effects were studied by the CBO. Better?
It's completely besides the point I was making, which is that the fact we've had record deficit spending for many years demonstrates we simply don't have excess money to waste. I don't believe the government's deficit spending is a partisan issue. It's pretty obvious that unless we eventually reign things in, we're going to be in real trouble later down the road. You don't agree?
Did you not even read my post? I'm agreeing with you about the military spending - it's a massive part of the federal budget. I'll even quote myself for your benefit, so you don't have to do all that pesky reading before typing up a reply.
The military budget is out of control. Yes, we live in a dangerous world, but we need to ask the rest of the civilized nations to help share the burden a bit (and this is coming from a somewhat conservative hawk), or perhaps scale back our overseas adventures.
And how exactly is meme investigation "basic research"? I'd really like to know how cutting frivolous grants like this will damage future meme propagation on the internet. I'm perfectly fine with federal dollars being judiciously spent on science which may have a real impact on our society or fundamental technology, or even of our understanding of the universe. This isn't it.
A million dollars is a tiny percentage of our federal budget, but that doesn't mean we should be pissing it away when we don't have a lot of excess money floating around.
Cultural transmission is a very solid social science topic
"Social science" is an oxymoron. Science is not a field. It's a methodology, and social sciences fail miserably at applying that methodology. It's undoubtedly an interesting academic exercise, but let's not pretend it's something that it's not.
One could possibly make the argument for spending money on social research like this were we not currently in a long-term deficit spending pattern. As it is, we simply don't have the money to waste. Just because a million dollars is a tiny fraction of the federal budget doesn't mean I shouldn't care that the government just pissed away a million of our tax dollars on something that is virtually guaranteed to have zero real impact on the lives of the people that funded the research.
Oh, it's absolutely relevant. I don't care if I get modded off-topic. I've got plenty of karma.
Quite frankly, this sort of stuff is insane when we're continuously running a massive deficit. No one likes to hear this, but we really need to crank down the government spigot at so many levels it's no longer even funny. We simply don't have the money to be spending on what I'll generously term "discretionary" research. It's not just grants either, which admittedly take up a very small portion of the budget.
The military budget is out of control. Yes, we live in a dangerous world, but we need to ask the rest of the civilized nations to help share the burden a bit (and this is coming from a somewhat conservative hawk), or perhaps scale back our overseas adventures. Our social program expenditures and pensions are ballooning even worse than military spending. We just passed another hugely expensive entitlement (health care reform), but with no regard to how the government is going to pay for it without crippling increases in taxes, deficit spending, or inflationary money printing. The NSA is spending billions to harvest and process all the data on the internet passing through the US for questionable benefits and even more questionable legality.
The federal government has demonstrated time and time and time again that they can't be trusted to balance the budget in a fiscally responsible manner. It's always more politically expedient to pass the buck to the next generation, and when the time comes to really tackle the problem, it's going to be really painful for everyone. Federal spending money is power, and that power is apparently just too damned addictive to resist. It would be best to deal with it as soon as possible and in a responsible manner over time, just like with any debt incurred.
A few other nations have been hopping on the constitutional balanced budget requirement. Maybe it's time to join them? I haven't quite made up my mind, but I'm definitely leaning towards support right now. A number of Keynsian economists argue against it, saying that it's best to allow deficit spending in bad economic times, but seeing as we never seem to STOP deficit spending in recent years, it's hard to make that argument with a straight face.
I'm not sure how well you know C, but... you can't turn a pointer into something more than a raw memory pointer. This would flat-out destroy all sorts of code that relies on that behavior, both in C and C++, and not necessarily badly-written code. The behavior of memory pointers is a part of the language contract, and you can't change it without breaking the language. For systems programmers with large, legacy codebases, they'd never risk turning on such an intrusive feature because of the simply fact that it would break compatibility, nor would they wish to pay a global penalty to apply protection for some very specific vulnerabilities.
In my own code (which is C++, not C, but the point still applies), I'm actually performing my own low-level memory management in order to improve efficiency - it's pretty much standard practice in the videogame industry, at least for large projects. Anything the compiler tried to do in terms of mucking around with allocations, pointers, or arrays could very well break code, and wouldn't help in any case. For instance, it's pretty common to allocate a big block of memory and to pass off small chunks of it to structures instead of performing an OS-level heap allocation for each one. In this scenario, a pointer has no explicit type at all, and any inferred type can be malleable to such a degree that it could never really be analyzed either at compile time or runtime.
When discussing a "no-brainer" feature like this, I tend to assume that other people (compiler writers) have already thought of this idea and rejected it for very pragmatic reasons. I'd imagine no one wishes more than C programmers that they could flip a magic switch and have a lot more protection, but I just don't see how it could realistically happen.
There is no such thing as absolutely secure encryption. A good policy is to not have secrets. But secrets are a fact of life. Even then, security through obscurity is often better than off the shelf things.
High-strength industry standard encryption, properly implemented, is currently believed to be completely unbreakable. It's extremely unlikely any government agency can crack modern cryptography, as evidenced by the lengths they go to in order to try to regulate it (historically), or circumvent it at the source. You can't *prove* it's unbreakable, of course, but we've seen zero evidence to the contrary, with many, many people looking, so I won't be hypocritical and say "it's unbreakable", but "for all practical purposes, it's unbreakable".
I can't think of worse advice than "security through obscurity". You definitely want "off the shelf" solutions, because those solutions have been vetted by many experts - some friendly, some hostile - all trying very hard to break that security. The quickest way to create a security disaster is to roll your own security solution. Remember WEP?
I'm guessing the reason drives don't have multiple read-write heads is because that would significantly increase the cost of the drive and potential for mechanical failure, to the point where you're probably better off simply getting a second drive and using RAID as you indicated.
The row of read heads probably wouldn't work - at least for simultaneous reads - because the distance between them wouldn't properly align at different angles of the arm as it swung across the platter. You'd need to design an arm that tracked linearly across the drive, adding weight and complexity. Even if you could do that, the real benefit would be if you could get them to read parallel tracks. I'd imagine that the multiple magnetic heads would tend to interfere with each other if placed that close (you couldn't stagger them or you'd have alignment problems again). If they're placed far apart to not interfere with each other magnetically, then they have little benefit, because the odds of them aligning on multiple chunks of data across the drive that a client wishes to access would be much lower then, largely negating the advantage.
In theory, I guess that creating an array of read heads spread out across the arm but activating only one at a time (whichever is closest to the cylinder being read next) might be a way to improve latency. I can't think of a reason offhand why this wouldn't have been tried except that the added complexity might have a negative impact on reliability, or perhaps the increased weight of the arm would tend to negate this advantage. Or, it might be difficult to re-align the arm to arbitrary positions as opposed to the predictability of a single read head.
Generally speaking, in such a mature industry that's obsessed with squeezing more performance out of their hardware, it's probably safe to assume that engineers have already thought of and rejected such ideas as being impractical for some reason or another.
Personally, I never worry about code not executing [quickly] enough.
You know, people say stuff like that all the time, but all it proves is you're not a programmer that developers speed-critical applications. Guess what? There are lots of people who are. Game programmers (me). Simulations programmers. OS / Kernel developers. There are some situations where fast is never fast enough. You're thinking like a desktop developer who writes business applications that are probably not that demanding of the CPU. Get a faster processor? I wish! Not possible for console developers, or when you're running software in data centers with thousands of machines. Those are real problems, and they require highly optimized code, not more hardware. Most programmers have no idea how much the constant push for efficiency colors everything we do.
Just today the other day I was looking at a test case where a complicated pathfinding test scenario bogs pegs my 8 core CPU when a lot of units are on-screen at once. That's not some theoretical problem, and telling users they need some uber-machine to play the game is a non-starter. I either need to ensure my game design avoids those scenarios or I'll need to further optimize the pathfinding systems to allow for more units in the game.
That being said, I agree with your complain about C's fundamental insecurity, but it's not so simple as adding in a compilers switch. For the most common and checkable types of bounds problems, or library functions that can cause problems, Microsoft's C/C++ compiler already does what you've suggested to a degree (not as certain about GCC). The big problem with bounds checking in C is that arrays are simple pointers to memory. The compiler doesn't always know how big that free space is, because there's no type or size associated with it. It's possible in some cases to do bounds-checking, but not in many others. It's a fundamental difficulty with the language, and it's impossible for the compiler to check all those bounds without help from the language or the programmer.
If it were just about being good software, Lotus, Wordperfect and others would still be around. Make no mistake, if Linux were a regular closed software vendor, it would have become a vague memory long ago.
You know, I was around during the transition from WordPerfect to Word, and from Lotus 123 to Excel. Both of those products were held back by their legacy DOS codebases, and were extremely slow to transition to Windows, which is where everyone started moving, of course. When they finally did release Windows products, they were horrible. So, no, WordPerfect and 123 just lost out to competitors because they couldn't keep up with advances in technology - simple as that.
I'm not sure what what had to do with Linux being a closed software vendor, though...? I agree that being open source is certainly one of it's strengths.
We'll have no way of really knowing how reliable these things are until they're field tested by a few hundred thousand people in real-life situations for a few years. I wholeheartedly agree that the driver should be allowed to take control, because there's no way this could make things any less safe then they already are right now. That seems like a very logical decision to me. Once the first few generation of cars have demonstrated that there's no practical need ever for a manual override, then we can consider removing it. Laws and regulations can be changed, after all.
Software people are used to rapid innovation and giant leaps forward, because if the software crashes, it's annoying, but it's not like anyone dies, right? For other types of engineering (aeronautical, automotive, structural, civil), it's best to move forward incrementally and cautiously, because the established rules and lessons are often learned at the cost of human lives.
It's not that I don't like change. Nearly every version of Windows improved the usability in some way. After I upgraded from Windows XP to 7, it only took me a few days to get used to the new interface. It was a usability upgrade. I'll take that sort of change any day. Hell, I'm apparently one of the few who will admit that I like MS Office's ribbon UI.
Windows 8 suffered from designer-imposed tunnel vision, trying to force desktop PCs to use touch-screen gestures and full screen interfaces, which just makes no sense at all. It's simply a worse paradigm for keyboard and mouse users, and was just a half-assed design compromise from the start. Sure, I could get used to it if I really wanted to, but why would I want to when I really love the way Windows 7 works?
Windows 9 might be worth a look, because it seems like they've taken the criticisms to heart and are actually listening to their customers again. Honestly, it's what Windows 8 should have been all along. Change is fine, so long as it's an actual improvement.
It has little to do with "indoctrination" of people, but familiarity is something of a factor, of course.
More critically, I think, Microsoft established a very large software ecosystem that Linux was never able to match as a relative late-comer, and catching up was nearly impossible without a critical mass that Windows enjoys. The simple reason people use Windows is because of the massive ecosystem of products available for the platform. Linux has some fine software, but there are many, many times the number of applications available for Windows, some of which are pretty damned specialized and are simply not available on other platforms.
There's a reason Linux is able to complete so well in other areas. In the server market, for example, the job is largely about serving up standard internet protocols, and so a free product is a huge win with no compatibility-related downsides. In the small-form device market, the open and free nature is also a big win, where margins are very tight, and vendors want to be able to customize their offering.
But the desktop relies on software written for specific platforms, so the ecosystem is everything. Microsoft has been extremely effective at courting third-party developers with excellent tools, services, and documentation. Windows has also enjoyed excellent long-term binary backward compatibility, which is hugely important for business software and the businesses that use them. So, to me, it's not hard to see why they've maintained their domination on the desktop.
Growing to adult size by age 7 might be detrimental to survival.
Really? That hypothesis doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Larger and stronger at a younger age would seem to be a good survival trait, not a bad one. It doesn't seem like the benefits of parental protection instincts for young children would outweigh the negatives of being weaker and smaller, purely on the basis of survival traits. Besides which, I don't think parental protection instincts necessarily disappear when a child reaches adulthood. Talk to my mother if you're not convinced.
Still, it doesn't seem as simple as the brain using up too many nutrients either, for the obvious reasons you describe. If it was regulated by diet, then it seems we should be able to adjust growth in the same way, and that doesn't happen - although long-term growth is certainly affected by diet. It's certainly true the brain is an "expensive" organ in terms of nutrient consumption, but I think there are other regulating factors as well which we just don't understand yet.
The use of.doc or.docx for that purpose shows a lack of understanding of how the file file formats work or what purpose. The proper file format for that purpose is usually PDF.
Good luck telling your customers that they're sending you the wrong type of documents. I'm sure your competitors will be more than happy to accept documents in any type of format.
Why? What compelling features does Windows offer that I don't already have? I want to know about Window's value proposition.
The value of Windows isn't really Windows the OS, but the Windows ecosystem. Essentially, the vast majority of the world's desktop software runs on Windows. There are a lot of fine Linux applications out there, but don't kid yourself into thinking there are replacements for everything people want or need by any stretch of the imagination. Some of it can run under WINE, but that's not always a practical or convenient solution.
If you have all the software you want on Linux and are happy with the OS itself, then there's zero reason to switch. I say use the best tool for the job. For me, it happens to be Windows, because I'm comfortable with it and the software I want to use is available for it. For you, it's Linux.
Ugh, I knew someone was going to completely misunderstand me. Probably my fault for being overly analytical about what is obviously a very emotional issue. I don't mean to sound unsympathetic to anyone who had this happen to them, nor would I speak personally to someone like this who had suffered from an attack like that.
I hope you can see the difference between "blaming the victim" and acknowledging that people are going to engage in risky behavior which such a product won't necessarily solve. I'm not saying this product shouldn't be available by any means. I'm simply suggesting that I believe the most effective deterrent is for women to be extremely careful about getting into a situation where they are vulnerable to this sort of assault. It doesn't mean they can't or shouldn't go out drinking and having a good time, but do so smartly. That means watching your drink and friends looking out for each other. Sure, it's great if we have this sort of product in case it does help someone protect themselves - don't misunderstand me there. But color-changing nails won't help a woman if she's alone with a predator and already semi-conscious on a couch.
I just think we need to be realistic about how much a simple product like is going to do to really improve the situation. Maybe a few women might actually find someone attempting to drug them and alert her to the danger, and that would be awesome if it happened. It's great having better tools at your disposal. However, I think that, more than anything, it will probably help mostly by alerting women to potential dangers they face, and so encourage them to think proactively about their safety.
I'm just in favor of real solutions rather than feel-good, high-tech solutions when it comes to an issue this serious. Hopefully that clarifies my point a bit.
Oh, I'd wager they're almost certainly in the US, or at least another relatively wealthy country with an extradition treaty. They're also probably a bunch of teenage males from moderately well-off families, and who have far more free time and impotent angst than good sense. Anyone living in an area with lots of real-world problems as opposed to first-world problems wouldn't bother targeting videogame companies or Sony executives.
Oops. You were actually doing quite well until you screwed-up by blurting-out the above load of nonsense: as gullible and dumb as most of the population is, Uncle Sam hardly has "tremendous credibility with most of them."
Slashdot is probably not a typical sampling of the US population and their feelings of the government, and "Credibility" doesn't necessarily mean "blind trust" or "unwavering devotion to".
Nor do, I feel, most people view "the government" as a single, monolithic entity, even though it's often referred to as such. For example: would you say that most people feel rather differently about the NSA versus the US Postal Service? How about the National Guard versus the US Congress? The CIA versus the Census Bureau?
In general, when the FBI or DHS goes after guys like these, I'd posit that the typical American has exactly zero problems with those efforts, and I think that's what GP was indicating.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, completely with you there. I'm fine with the anti-skeumorphic trend - it's silly to continue to make things look like now decidedly old-school real-life countparts for it's own sake. But why did color, gradients, gloss, and borders have to go as well?
Now we have flat, borderless, and ugly designs all over the place, and what's worse, I've found these UIs more difficult to use, not less, because you're often left guessing as to where buttons begin or end, or what even is clickable/pushable. A lot of the visual elements removed were important visual cues that simply got tossed out the window.
Mind telling me which one that was? I just watched "damsels in distress (part one)" and it seemed pretty reasonable, handing out a lot of criticism but also pointing out some positive examples as well. Did she get a lot more vitriolic in later videos or something?
What I don't understand is why we're down on the "Save the Princess" games when yeah, there's much worse stuff out there to be dealt with.
She tackles a lot of issues, but I started with her "damsel in distress" video, so that's what I commented on. I'd recommend watching the video if you haven't. You sort of have to put yourself in place of a young girl growing up as a videogamer. It would sort of suck to always be forced to play as a male hero rescuing a helpless princess, wouldn't it? She simply points out that it's a cheap and simple way to pander to adolescent male power fantasies, which is absolutely true. Note that she goes after this trope first because it's such an incredibly pervasive theme, even if it isn't the "worst" of the problems.
p.s. I don't agree that "save the princess" is inherently bad to the point that it should be eliminated entirely. Somebody needs to be saved, after all. It's more that it's generally lopsided in favour of helpless female "props" and male protagonists. Maybe we need more Princess Fiona types that can kick ass in their own right
Yep, and she pointed out some examples of games that did this better than others. For instance, Princess Zelda in Wind Waker was a strong and capable sidekick throughout most of the adventure. Of course, she also points out that three minutes after she's revealed to be the beautiful princess Zelda in the game, she reverts right back to the "helpless female trophy", and is captured and imprisoned exactly three minutes later. She gave props to the game for the fact that Zelda helped Link to defeat the final boss as well.
Essentially, the theme of her first video was simply demonstrating how the "damsel in distress" essential reduces the female role to one of a trophy to be won, fought over by protagonist and antagonist alike. It's hard to argue that such a critique is untrue, even if the intent wasn't overtly malicious in any way.
My take on the situation is not really about feminist issues, it's simply a matter of improving the quality of storytelling in games. I think active and engaging characters are much more entertaining than passive and objectified characters. Which character do people find more interesting: Princess Peach or Princess
Fiona? Even if a female character is relegated to the role of supporting character, she can still be an interesting and engaging personality.
You don't want China deciding to flex their economic muscles by playing with the bond market next time America invades some random country, do you?
Oh, I don't know. Maybe that would be a nice object less as to why it's not healthy to be buried in so much debt. Or to be policing the entire damned world on our own dime, for that matter.
Tomorrow it'll be competitors.
What are you talking about? Microsoft has a long and glorious history of shutting out competitors with shady practices. You're making it sound like this would be a new thing.
It won't harm meme propagation, and if you believe that you seriously misunderstand the research
Whoosh? Just trying to be funny and failing as usual.
I'm a professional game developer and a life-long gamer, so perhaps it's fair to say that I've got as vested an interest in videogames as most. I've got fond memories of many "saving the princess" games, which of course she takes issue with. Is that really worth such outrage?
I'm fine with having our industry challenged from time to time. For example, there are worse things in gaming than a "save the princess" plot device, but let's face it, feminist issue aside, it's a horribly cliched trope that could stand to be re-examined. Even if you don't agree with her, I think she raises some interesting points of discussion. I'm watching some of her videos right now actually, and am actually finding them fairly interesting. A direct quote from her video:
This series will include critical analysis of many beloved games and characters, but remember that it's both possible and even necessary to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of it's more problematic or pernicious aspects.
It takes a certain moral fortitude to listen to criticism of something you care deeply about. Game developers deal with this all the time when a reviewer writes a scathing review of the game you just spent the last two years of your life working on, or when gamers casually dismiss the problems you've spilled blood and tears to solve. It's really hard to put your ego and indignity aside and ask how you could have improved your product rather than lashing out at the one criticizing your work.
It's not like I'm really expecting the general public to restrain from criticism and outright name calling, but I seriously wish it wouldn't devolve to the level of death threats.
Large government-sponsored programs have a notorious history of exploding far beyond predicted budgetary constraints. We'll see in another few years or so if that prediction, turns out to be accurate. History is on my side, unfortunately.
Even so, I'll go ahead and concede the point. Fine, let's say the new health care program has zero impact on the budget, or perhaps a negligible effect. I should also have not used the phrase "with no regard to how the government is going to pay for it", because obviously that's not true, as the budgetary effects were studied by the CBO. Better?
It's completely besides the point I was making, which is that the fact we've had record deficit spending for many years demonstrates we simply don't have excess money to waste. I don't believe the government's deficit spending is a partisan issue. It's pretty obvious that unless we eventually reign things in, we're going to be in real trouble later down the road. You don't agree?
Did you not even read my post? I'm agreeing with you about the military spending - it's a massive part of the federal budget. I'll even quote myself for your benefit, so you don't have to do all that pesky reading before typing up a reply.
The military budget is out of control. Yes, we live in a dangerous world, but we need to ask the rest of the civilized nations to help share the burden a bit (and this is coming from a somewhat conservative hawk), or perhaps scale back our overseas adventures.
And how exactly is meme investigation "basic research"? I'd really like to know how cutting frivolous grants like this will damage future meme propagation on the internet. I'm perfectly fine with federal dollars being judiciously spent on science which may have a real impact on our society or fundamental technology, or even of our understanding of the universe. This isn't it.
A million dollars is a tiny percentage of our federal budget, but that doesn't mean we should be pissing it away when we don't have a lot of excess money floating around.
Cultural transmission is a very solid social science topic
"Social science" is an oxymoron. Science is not a field. It's a methodology, and social sciences fail miserably at applying that methodology. It's undoubtedly an interesting academic exercise, but let's not pretend it's something that it's not.
One could possibly make the argument for spending money on social research like this were we not currently in a long-term deficit spending pattern. As it is, we simply don't have the money to waste. Just because a million dollars is a tiny fraction of the federal budget doesn't mean I shouldn't care that the government just pissed away a million of our tax dollars on something that is virtually guaranteed to have zero real impact on the lives of the people that funded the research.
Oh, it's absolutely relevant. I don't care if I get modded off-topic. I've got plenty of karma.
Quite frankly, this sort of stuff is insane when we're continuously running a massive deficit. No one likes to hear this, but we really need to crank down the government spigot at so many levels it's no longer even funny. We simply don't have the money to be spending on what I'll generously term "discretionary" research. It's not just grants either, which admittedly take up a very small portion of the budget.
The military budget is out of control. Yes, we live in a dangerous world, but we need to ask the rest of the civilized nations to help share the burden a bit (and this is coming from a somewhat conservative hawk), or perhaps scale back our overseas adventures. Our social program expenditures and pensions are ballooning even worse than military spending. We just passed another hugely expensive entitlement (health care reform), but with no regard to how the government is going to pay for it without crippling increases in taxes, deficit spending, or inflationary money printing. The NSA is spending billions to harvest and process all the data on the internet passing through the US for questionable benefits and even more questionable legality.
The federal government has demonstrated time and time and time again that they can't be trusted to balance the budget in a fiscally responsible manner. It's always more politically expedient to pass the buck to the next generation, and when the time comes to really tackle the problem, it's going to be really painful for everyone. Federal spending money is power, and that power is apparently just too damned addictive to resist. It would be best to deal with it as soon as possible and in a responsible manner over time, just like with any debt incurred.
A few other nations have been hopping on the constitutional balanced budget requirement. Maybe it's time to join them? I haven't quite made up my mind, but I'm definitely leaning towards support right now. A number of Keynsian economists argue against it, saying that it's best to allow deficit spending in bad economic times, but seeing as we never seem to STOP deficit spending in recent years, it's hard to make that argument with a straight face.
I'm not sure how well you know C, but... you can't turn a pointer into something more than a raw memory pointer. This would flat-out destroy all sorts of code that relies on that behavior, both in C and C++, and not necessarily badly-written code. The behavior of memory pointers is a part of the language contract, and you can't change it without breaking the language. For systems programmers with large, legacy codebases, they'd never risk turning on such an intrusive feature because of the simply fact that it would break compatibility, nor would they wish to pay a global penalty to apply protection for some very specific vulnerabilities.
In my own code (which is C++, not C, but the point still applies), I'm actually performing my own low-level memory management in order to improve efficiency - it's pretty much standard practice in the videogame industry, at least for large projects. Anything the compiler tried to do in terms of mucking around with allocations, pointers, or arrays could very well break code, and wouldn't help in any case. For instance, it's pretty common to allocate a big block of memory and to pass off small chunks of it to structures instead of performing an OS-level heap allocation for each one. In this scenario, a pointer has no explicit type at all, and any inferred type can be malleable to such a degree that it could never really be analyzed either at compile time or runtime.
When discussing a "no-brainer" feature like this, I tend to assume that other people (compiler writers) have already thought of this idea and rejected it for very pragmatic reasons. I'd imagine no one wishes more than C programmers that they could flip a magic switch and have a lot more protection, but I just don't see how it could realistically happen.
There is no such thing as absolutely secure encryption. A good policy is to not have secrets. But secrets are a fact of life. Even then, security through obscurity is often better than off the shelf things.
High-strength industry standard encryption, properly implemented, is currently believed to be completely unbreakable. It's extremely unlikely any government agency can crack modern cryptography, as evidenced by the lengths they go to in order to try to regulate it (historically), or circumvent it at the source. You can't *prove* it's unbreakable, of course, but we've seen zero evidence to the contrary, with many, many people looking, so I won't be hypocritical and say "it's unbreakable", but "for all practical purposes, it's unbreakable".
I can't think of worse advice than "security through obscurity". You definitely want "off the shelf" solutions, because those solutions have been vetted by many experts - some friendly, some hostile - all trying very hard to break that security. The quickest way to create a security disaster is to roll your own security solution. Remember WEP?
I'm guessing the reason drives don't have multiple read-write heads is because that would significantly increase the cost of the drive and potential for mechanical failure, to the point where you're probably better off simply getting a second drive and using RAID as you indicated.
The row of read heads probably wouldn't work - at least for simultaneous reads - because the distance between them wouldn't properly align at different angles of the arm as it swung across the platter. You'd need to design an arm that tracked linearly across the drive, adding weight and complexity. Even if you could do that, the real benefit would be if you could get them to read parallel tracks. I'd imagine that the multiple magnetic heads would tend to interfere with each other if placed that close (you couldn't stagger them or you'd have alignment problems again). If they're placed far apart to not interfere with each other magnetically, then they have little benefit, because the odds of them aligning on multiple chunks of data across the drive that a client wishes to access would be much lower then, largely negating the advantage.
In theory, I guess that creating an array of read heads spread out across the arm but activating only one at a time (whichever is closest to the cylinder being read next) might be a way to improve latency. I can't think of a reason offhand why this wouldn't have been tried except that the added complexity might have a negative impact on reliability, or perhaps the increased weight of the arm would tend to negate this advantage. Or, it might be difficult to re-align the arm to arbitrary positions as opposed to the predictability of a single read head.
Generally speaking, in such a mature industry that's obsessed with squeezing more performance out of their hardware, it's probably safe to assume that engineers have already thought of and rejected such ideas as being impractical for some reason or another.
Personally, I never worry about code not executing [quickly] enough.
You know, people say stuff like that all the time, but all it proves is you're not a programmer that developers speed-critical applications. Guess what? There are lots of people who are. Game programmers (me). Simulations programmers. OS / Kernel developers. There are some situations where fast is never fast enough. You're thinking like a desktop developer who writes business applications that are probably not that demanding of the CPU. Get a faster processor? I wish! Not possible for console developers, or when you're running software in data centers with thousands of machines. Those are real problems, and they require highly optimized code, not more hardware. Most programmers have no idea how much the constant push for efficiency colors everything we do.
Just today the other day I was looking at a test case where a complicated pathfinding test scenario bogs pegs my 8 core CPU when a lot of units are on-screen at once. That's not some theoretical problem, and telling users they need some uber-machine to play the game is a non-starter. I either need to ensure my game design avoids those scenarios or I'll need to further optimize the pathfinding systems to allow for more units in the game.
That being said, I agree with your complain about C's fundamental insecurity, but it's not so simple as adding in a compilers switch. For the most common and checkable types of bounds problems, or library functions that can cause problems, Microsoft's C/C++ compiler already does what you've suggested to a degree (not as certain about GCC). The big problem with bounds checking in C is that arrays are simple pointers to memory. The compiler doesn't always know how big that free space is, because there's no type or size associated with it. It's possible in some cases to do bounds-checking, but not in many others. It's a fundamental difficulty with the language, and it's impossible for the compiler to check all those bounds without help from the language or the programmer.
If it were just about being good software, Lotus, Wordperfect and others would still be around. Make no mistake, if Linux were a regular closed software vendor, it would have become a vague memory long ago.
You know, I was around during the transition from WordPerfect to Word, and from Lotus 123 to Excel. Both of those products were held back by their legacy DOS codebases, and were extremely slow to transition to Windows, which is where everyone started moving, of course. When they finally did release Windows products, they were horrible. So, no, WordPerfect and 123 just lost out to competitors because they couldn't keep up with advances in technology - simple as that.
I'm not sure what what had to do with Linux being a closed software vendor, though...? I agree that being open source is certainly one of it's strengths.
We'll have no way of really knowing how reliable these things are until they're field tested by a few hundred thousand people in real-life situations for a few years. I wholeheartedly agree that the driver should be allowed to take control, because there's no way this could make things any less safe then they already are right now. That seems like a very logical decision to me. Once the first few generation of cars have demonstrated that there's no practical need ever for a manual override, then we can consider removing it. Laws and regulations can be changed, after all.
Software people are used to rapid innovation and giant leaps forward, because if the software crashes, it's annoying, but it's not like anyone dies, right? For other types of engineering (aeronautical, automotive, structural, civil), it's best to move forward incrementally and cautiously, because the established rules and lessons are often learned at the cost of human lives.
It's not that I don't like change. Nearly every version of Windows improved the usability in some way. After I upgraded from Windows XP to 7, it only took me a few days to get used to the new interface. It was a usability upgrade. I'll take that sort of change any day. Hell, I'm apparently one of the few who will admit that I like MS Office's ribbon UI.
Windows 8 suffered from designer-imposed tunnel vision, trying to force desktop PCs to use touch-screen gestures and full screen interfaces, which just makes no sense at all. It's simply a worse paradigm for keyboard and mouse users, and was just a half-assed design compromise from the start. Sure, I could get used to it if I really wanted to, but why would I want to when I really love the way Windows 7 works?
Windows 9 might be worth a look, because it seems like they've taken the criticisms to heart and are actually listening to their customers again. Honestly, it's what Windows 8 should have been all along. Change is fine, so long as it's an actual improvement.
It has little to do with "indoctrination" of people, but familiarity is something of a factor, of course.
More critically, I think, Microsoft established a very large software ecosystem that Linux was never able to match as a relative late-comer, and catching up was nearly impossible without a critical mass that Windows enjoys. The simple reason people use Windows is because of the massive ecosystem of products available for the platform. Linux has some fine software, but there are many, many times the number of applications available for Windows, some of which are pretty damned specialized and are simply not available on other platforms.
There's a reason Linux is able to complete so well in other areas. In the server market, for example, the job is largely about serving up standard internet protocols, and so a free product is a huge win with no compatibility-related downsides. In the small-form device market, the open and free nature is also a big win, where margins are very tight, and vendors want to be able to customize their offering.
But the desktop relies on software written for specific platforms, so the ecosystem is everything. Microsoft has been extremely effective at courting third-party developers with excellent tools, services, and documentation. Windows has also enjoyed excellent long-term binary backward compatibility, which is hugely important for business software and the businesses that use them. So, to me, it's not hard to see why they've maintained their domination on the desktop.
Growing to adult size by age 7 might be detrimental to survival.
Really? That hypothesis doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Larger and stronger at a younger age would seem to be a good survival trait, not a bad one. It doesn't seem like the benefits of parental protection instincts for young children would outweigh the negatives of being weaker and smaller, purely on the basis of survival traits. Besides which, I don't think parental protection instincts necessarily disappear when a child reaches adulthood. Talk to my mother if you're not convinced.
Still, it doesn't seem as simple as the brain using up too many nutrients either, for the obvious reasons you describe. If it was regulated by diet, then it seems we should be able to adjust growth in the same way, and that doesn't happen - although long-term growth is certainly affected by diet. It's certainly true the brain is an "expensive" organ in terms of nutrient consumption, but I think there are other regulating factors as well which we just don't understand yet.
The use of .doc or .docx for that purpose shows a lack of understanding of how the file file formats work or what purpose. The proper file format for that purpose is usually PDF.
Good luck telling your customers that they're sending you the wrong type of documents. I'm sure your competitors will be more than happy to accept documents in any type of format.
Why? What compelling features does Windows offer that I don't already have? I want to know about Window's value proposition.
The value of Windows isn't really Windows the OS, but the Windows ecosystem. Essentially, the vast majority of the world's desktop software runs on Windows. There are a lot of fine Linux applications out there, but don't kid yourself into thinking there are replacements for everything people want or need by any stretch of the imagination. Some of it can run under WINE, but that's not always a practical or convenient solution.
If you have all the software you want on Linux and are happy with the OS itself, then there's zero reason to switch. I say use the best tool for the job. For me, it happens to be Windows, because I'm comfortable with it and the software I want to use is available for it. For you, it's Linux.
Ugh, I knew someone was going to completely misunderstand me. Probably my fault for being overly analytical about what is obviously a very emotional issue. I don't mean to sound unsympathetic to anyone who had this happen to them, nor would I speak personally to someone like this who had suffered from an attack like that.
I hope you can see the difference between "blaming the victim" and acknowledging that people are going to engage in risky behavior which such a product won't necessarily solve. I'm not saying this product shouldn't be available by any means. I'm simply suggesting that I believe the most effective deterrent is for women to be extremely careful about getting into a situation where they are vulnerable to this sort of assault. It doesn't mean they can't or shouldn't go out drinking and having a good time, but do so smartly. That means watching your drink and friends looking out for each other. Sure, it's great if we have this sort of product in case it does help someone protect themselves - don't misunderstand me there. But color-changing nails won't help a woman if she's alone with a predator and already semi-conscious on a couch.
I just think we need to be realistic about how much a simple product like is going to do to really improve the situation. Maybe a few women might actually find someone attempting to drug them and alert her to the danger, and that would be awesome if it happened. It's great having better tools at your disposal. However, I think that, more than anything, it will probably help mostly by alerting women to potential dangers they face, and so encourage them to think proactively about their safety.
I'm just in favor of real solutions rather than feel-good, high-tech solutions when it comes to an issue this serious. Hopefully that clarifies my point a bit.
Oh, I'd wager they're almost certainly in the US, or at least another relatively wealthy country with an extradition treaty. They're also probably a bunch of teenage males from moderately well-off families, and who have far more free time and impotent angst than good sense. Anyone living in an area with lots of real-world problems as opposed to first-world problems wouldn't bother targeting videogame companies or Sony executives.
Oops. You were actually doing quite well until you screwed-up by blurting-out the above load of nonsense: as gullible and dumb as most of the population is, Uncle Sam hardly has "tremendous credibility with most of them."
Slashdot is probably not a typical sampling of the US population and their feelings of the government, and "Credibility" doesn't necessarily mean "blind trust" or "unwavering devotion to".
Nor do, I feel, most people view "the government" as a single, monolithic entity, even though it's often referred to as such. For example: would you say that most people feel rather differently about the NSA versus the US Postal Service? How about the National Guard versus the US Congress? The CIA versus the Census Bureau?
In general, when the FBI or DHS goes after guys like these, I'd posit that the typical American has exactly zero problems with those efforts, and I think that's what GP was indicating.