Sony is playing the "Hay, it's new" card here and for an entire generation of young kids newer=better.
That's my point - they aren't thinking "hey, this must be good because it's for white people", they are thinking "hey, this must be good because it's new".
Yes, it deliberately uses the contrast of the women's races as a metaphor for the difference between the available colours of the PSP. And yes, the white woman is acting aggressively towards the black woman.
But acknowledging their races, even pointing it out deliberately and using it as a marketing gimmick, is a long way from racism. It's not as if people are supposed to walk away from that ad thinking that the white PSP is better because it's associated with white people. It's not using stereotypes or ridiculing the black woman in any way. It's just saying "hey, here comes the white PSP and it's going to take the world by storm, and here's a picture to grab your attention". With, of course, the added bonus that it gets lots of media attention for causing controversy.
Not everything involving race is racist. Too many people forget this and seem to want to make race a taboo subject. That's ignorant in itself.
...is like bailing out the Titanic with a thimble. There's so much that doesn't make sense and so many special exceptions that making it fractionally saner in one respect seems like a totally pointless exercise.
Constructed languages like Lojban start from the ground up and actually make sense in how they are put together. For instance, in Lojban's case, it's audio-visually isomorphic and it has an unambiguous grammar - words are spelt phonetically and a computer can parse sentences into their constituent parts without having to understand what is being said. There's none of this "X flies like a X" nonsense. And tense is achieved with particles - you don't have to remember the different words "flew"/"flies/"will fly" to express the same concept in a different tense - you just remember the one word "vofli" and apply the same tense particle that you use for every other word.
Natural languages are like the spaghetti code database your PHB handed you out of nowhere. It's so fundamentally broken that fixing it makes no sense, it's better to start from scratch.
Re:The allmighty dollar will win again.
on
Aussies Brace for DMCA
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· Score: 2, Informative
Australia is not an EU member nation. It's not even in Europe, it's on a completely different continent on the other side of the world. Perhaps you are thinking of Austria?
What is the "it" that you are referring to? I don't think anybody thinks it's legal for somebody to set up an AllOfMP3 in the UK that pays license fees in accordance with Russian law.
And, while the BPI have claimed otherwise to the press (and had their claims blindly repeated), it is not illegal for people in the UK to download from AllOfMP3.
So what, exactly, are they trying to prove is illegal? One thing nobody thinks is legal anyway, and one thing is actually legal.
If Google suppressed other search engines, they might have a point. But Google aren't suppressing other search engines, they simply aren't choosing to promote this particular one. The website still exists.
To use an analogy that people might be more familiar with, this isn't like when Netscape complained Microsoft included Internet Explorer with Windows, this would be like if Netscape demanded that Microsoft included Netscape Navigator with Windows.
And the whole idea that Google are doing this purposefully to kill other search engines is ludicrous, given that Google list plenty of real competitors when you search for "search engine". But somehow this tiny search engine nobody has heard of is worse competition than MSN, etc?
They actually claim that their First Amendment rights are being infringed. For those of you completely unfamiliar with the USA constitution, as their attorney apparently is, the First Amendment says:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Last time I checked, Google not including KinderStart in their index is substantially different from Congress making a law.
Remember: freedom of speech is not the freedom to force your speech on others.
KinderStart are either kooks or publicity-whoring barratry artists, the SCO of search engines.
It's just a word meaning "put something in place and get it ready".
I don't think people assumed the worst as much as his website implied the worst.
Well yes, it might have implied the worst, but people were still pretty damn stupid to believe it's for real. I'm pretty sure the next person to nuke the world isn't going to put a nice Flash countdown up on the web.
I did find the website horrifying. Not because I thought something bad was going to happen, but because it demonstrated just how dumb lots of people can be. If anybody thought this was the precursor to some kind of catastrophe, then they belong in a home being looked after by qualified professionals.
To be honest, virtualisation beats side-by-side installations for testing purposes anyway. You can set a bunch of virtual machines up, with varying resolutions, one with JavaScript disabled, one with images switched off, etc. Then just load them all up and tick them off the list as you test in each one.
Or, to put it another way, as long as there was viable competition, Microsoft continually improved their browser. When Internet Explorer achieved its objective of killing the competition, Microsoft cancelled development and left it to rot. Now there is viable competition again, Microsoft is scrambling to get back in the game.
This is precisely why monopolies abusing their position to kill the competition is so harmful and why "it's a better product" is no defence.
Re:Modularizable filesystem
on
EXT4 Is Coming
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· Score: 4, Insightful
the premise that Reiser is more stable than ext3 "because it has been out longer"
It's dishonest to put something in quotes when it's not a direct quote. The exact quote is:
"We don't touch the V3 code except to fix a bug, and as a result we don't get bug reports for the current mainstream kernel version. It shipped before the other journaling filesystems for Linux, and is the most stable of them as a result of having been out the longest. We must caution that just as Linux 2.6 is not yet as stable as Linux 2.4, it will also be some substantial time before V4 is as stable as V3."
There's a substantial difference between saying that something is more stable "as a result" of something and more stable "because" of something. He's not claiming that being out longer intrinsically makes it more stable as your misquote suggests, he's claiming that it led to reiserfs becoming more stable - because of the practices he mentioned.
In short - something being out longer == more stable? No. Something being exposed to lots of real-world use and receiving only bugfixes == more stable? Yes.
the quote from Adam Smith
He didn't quote Adam Smith, he drew an analogy between what he was saying and the network effect. It's an entirely reasonable analogy.
the ridicule of the unix approach of everything as a file
What ridicule? He's actually supporting that approach. For example:
Can we do everything that can be done with {files, directories, attributes, streams} using just {files, directories}? I say yes--if we make files and directories more powerful and flexible. I hope that by the end of reading this you will agree.
Would you care to point out where you thought he was ridiculing the UNIX approach?
all the naked people covered in newsprint
Yeah, they look dumb, don't they?
Anyone have a "more technical" link
I can only assume you mean something other than "technical".
without dancing trees
Dancing trees are a fundamental part of the design. How are you meant to understand the filesystem without understanding dancing trees?
and with a bit about how to recover your filesystem when something goes weird with the hardware even if the filesystem is perfect?
Ah, you don't mean technical at all, you mean practical for somebody who is entirely uninterested in the way the filesystem works. Perhaps Reiser4 Transaction Design Document is what you are after, but I doubt it.
It's worth pointing out, though, that although it's a seven year-old bug, at the time it was filed, it was an emulation of an Internet Explorer proprietary property, so it wasn't given much priority.
It's been added to CSS 2.1 drafts, but CSS 2.1 isn't yet a recommendation (it was a candidate recommendation for a while, but there were still problems with it, so it was moved back to working draft status).
If you want a bug you can legitimately moan about being old, try the seven year-old soft hyphen bug. Soft hyphens have actually been in HTML since 1995's HTML 2.0.
All I really meant by it is that ACID2 (mis)uses obscure techniques to deliberately break browsers.
But the only reason that the techniques are obscure is that nobody uses them because browsers don't support them. The whole point is to encourage browsers to support them, so people can use them, and then they won't be obscure.
And there's no misuse. Are you one of the people that thinks the Acid2 test is all about error correction? That's a myth.
It has no bearing on how people actually make webpages, and the techniques it does use are so out of line with the norm that we don't even need them.
We don't need them because we either find workarounds or simply create designs that don't include everything we want. For example, how many people have you heard complaining that equal-height columns in CSS are difficult? CSS has had the functionality to do them easily since 1998, but they remain an "obscure technique", and they remain "out of line with the norm" because Internet Explorer doesn't support them. That doesn't mean they wouldn't be a really useful thing to have though, does it?
IE 7 still did not correctly implement the box model, positioning, all CSS1, all CSS2, or any CSS3. The same IE-specific parsing bugs for CSS are in place in IE 7.
Exactly which box model bugs are you talking about? The most common one that people complain about is whether width includes padding or not. Unfortunately, despite everybody still complaining about it, Microsoft fixed that bug in 2001 when they released Internet Explorer 6.
I believe they still get error-handling wrong, which means they don't conform to CSS 1, however they have implemented the last remaining functionality of CSS 1 with Internet Explorer 7, so if you write valid CSS 1 that shouldn't be a problem.
You are wrong when you claim that Internet Explorer 7 has the same parsing bugs; for instance, they've fixed the * html and _property hacks.
is it that the people at Microsoft are incapable of producing a specs-compliant rendering engine (when every one else in the world can?)
None of the browsers you point to even implement HTML properly. Compliancy is obviously too much to expect from anybody.
I agree that Internet Explorer is miles behind other browsers, and I agree that it's really frustrating, but the specific claims you are making are false.
Strangely though, Windows is still only using about 10% of the cable's 400mbps bandwidth.
Are you sure you aren't confusing mbps with MBps? 400mbps is equal to 50 megabytes per second, and "12.5% of the cable's bandwidth" sounds suspiciously like your description of the problem, "about 10% of the cable's bandwidth".
I, for one, almost never go past the first page of comments because you just get lost in the maze. So even with the mod system, I retrospective on the discussion itself - as long as it's not over done and the comments are chosen with some talent - makes a lot of sense to me.
What do you mean, "past the first page of comments"? Do you realise that you can change the threshold to +5 and read only the most highly moderated comments? There's hardly ever more than one page when you do that.
Besides, I'd definitely rather have Slashdot try out new ideas from time to time and have them fail rather than just never try new ideas at all.
But I wasn't suggesting that they don't try out new ideas. I was saying that the ideas they have about generating original content aren't what Slashdot does best and always turn out like crap. That's not a criticism of new ideas, that's a criticism of bad ideas.
Yes, we already have a moderation system, but even moderating at +5 you often have to wade through repeats, jokes, etc.
So let moderation go up to +10 instead of paying somebody to copy & paste comments from one article to another.
I've noticed Slashdot trying out some new ideas for their articles lately - original gaming content, linking to random weblogs, and now this inane copy & pasting. They all pretty much suck. Slashdot has never been good with original content, even back when JonKatz was doing it. The thing Slashdot does best is put a mechanism in place for discussion and then get the hell out of the way. I think if Slashdot is going to improve anywhere, it should be in the mechanisms rather than trying to be some kind of magazine.
if i was MS i would have said fuck it by now.. and pull out of the EU completely..
Then you are an idiot. Not only is the EU market as large as the American market, but the consequence of the EU switching to Linux en masse would mean that Linux would get a huge boost in quality and features as its userbase and developerbase would grow drastically. You wouldn't just lose the EU market, you'd be giving your competititors a massive advantage across the entire world.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. You can get a pre-made filterlist here.
That doesn't matter. Them breaking the school rules does not give you the right to break the law.
The Computer Misuse Act 1990 says:
What better way to indoctrinate the adults of tomorrow? They won't miss what they never had.
That's my point - they aren't thinking "hey, this must be good because it's for white people", they are thinking "hey, this must be good because it's new".
Yes, it deliberately uses the contrast of the women's races as a metaphor for the difference between the available colours of the PSP. And yes, the white woman is acting aggressively towards the black woman.
But acknowledging their races, even pointing it out deliberately and using it as a marketing gimmick, is a long way from racism. It's not as if people are supposed to walk away from that ad thinking that the white PSP is better because it's associated with white people. It's not using stereotypes or ridiculing the black woman in any way. It's just saying "hey, here comes the white PSP and it's going to take the world by storm, and here's a picture to grab your attention". With, of course, the added bonus that it gets lots of media attention for causing controversy.
Not everything involving race is racist. Too many people forget this and seem to want to make race a taboo subject. That's ignorant in itself.
How long until gangbangr.com 2.0 websites talking about the gangosphere?
Constructed languages like Lojban start from the ground up and actually make sense in how they are put together. For instance, in Lojban's case, it's audio-visually isomorphic and it has an unambiguous grammar - words are spelt phonetically and a computer can parse sentences into their constituent parts without having to understand what is being said. There's none of this "X flies like a X" nonsense. And tense is achieved with particles - you don't have to remember the different words "flew"/"flies/"will fly" to express the same concept in a different tense - you just remember the one word "vofli" and apply the same tense particle that you use for every other word.
Natural languages are like the spaghetti code database your PHB handed you out of nowhere. It's so fundamentally broken that fixing it makes no sense, it's better to start from scratch.
Australia is not an EU member nation. It's not even in Europe, it's on a completely different continent on the other side of the world. Perhaps you are thinking of Austria?
What is the "it" that you are referring to? I don't think anybody thinks it's legal for somebody to set up an AllOfMP3 in the UK that pays license fees in accordance with Russian law.
And, while the BPI have claimed otherwise to the press (and had their claims blindly repeated), it is not illegal for people in the UK to download from AllOfMP3.
So what, exactly, are they trying to prove is illegal? One thing nobody thinks is legal anyway, and one thing is actually legal.
If Google suppressed other search engines, they might have a point. But Google aren't suppressing other search engines, they simply aren't choosing to promote this particular one. The website still exists.
To use an analogy that people might be more familiar with, this isn't like when Netscape complained Microsoft included Internet Explorer with Windows, this would be like if Netscape demanded that Microsoft included Netscape Navigator with Windows.
And the whole idea that Google are doing this purposefully to kill other search engines is ludicrous, given that Google list plenty of real competitors when you search for "search engine". But somehow this tiny search engine nobody has heard of is worse competition than MSN, etc?
They actually claim that their First Amendment rights are being infringed. For those of you completely unfamiliar with the USA constitution, as their attorney apparently is, the First Amendment says:
Last time I checked, Google not including KinderStart in their index is substantially different from Congress making a law.
Remember: freedom of speech is not the freedom to force your speech on others.
KinderStart are either kooks or publicity-whoring barratry artists, the SCO of search engines.
Er, all sorts of people. Even web developers and software engineers.
It's just a word meaning "put something in place and get it ready".
Well yes, it might have implied the worst, but people were still pretty damn stupid to believe it's for real. I'm pretty sure the next person to nuke the world isn't going to put a nice Flash countdown up on the web.
I did find the website horrifying. Not because I thought something bad was going to happen, but because it demonstrated just how dumb lots of people can be. If anybody thought this was the precursor to some kind of catastrophe, then they belong in a home being looked after by qualified professionals.
To be honest, virtualisation beats side-by-side installations for testing purposes anyway. You can set a bunch of virtual machines up, with varying resolutions, one with JavaScript disabled, one with images switched off, etc. Then just load them all up and tick them off the list as you test in each one.
Or, to put it another way, as long as there was viable competition, Microsoft continually improved their browser. When Internet Explorer achieved its objective of killing the competition, Microsoft cancelled development and left it to rot. Now there is viable competition again, Microsoft is scrambling to get back in the game.
This is precisely why monopolies abusing their position to kill the competition is so harmful and why "it's a better product" is no defence.
It's dishonest to put something in quotes when it's not a direct quote. The exact quote is:
There's a substantial difference between saying that something is more stable "as a result" of something and more stable "because" of something. He's not claiming that being out longer intrinsically makes it more stable as your misquote suggests, he's claiming that it led to reiserfs becoming more stable - because of the practices he mentioned.
In short - something being out longer == more stable? No. Something being exposed to lots of real-world use and receiving only bugfixes == more stable? Yes.
He didn't quote Adam Smith, he drew an analogy between what he was saying and the network effect. It's an entirely reasonable analogy.
What ridicule? He's actually supporting that approach. For example:
Would you care to point out where you thought he was ridiculing the UNIX approach?
Yeah, they look dumb, don't they?
I can only assume you mean something other than "technical".
Dancing trees are a fundamental part of the design. How are you meant to understand the filesystem without understanding dancing trees?
Ah, you don't mean technical at all, you mean practical for somebody who is entirely uninterested in the way the filesystem works. Perhaps Reiser4 Transaction Design Document is what you are after, but I doubt it.
Right. It's implemented in Firefox 1.5, but only on Windows.
I just tried Safari 2.0.3 and it doesn't support font-size-adjust.
Reiser4 does this.
It's worth pointing out, though, that although it's a seven year-old bug, at the time it was filed, it was an emulation of an Internet Explorer proprietary property, so it wasn't given much priority.
It's been added to CSS 2.1 drafts, but CSS 2.1 isn't yet a recommendation (it was a candidate recommendation for a while, but there were still problems with it, so it was moved back to working draft status).
If you want a bug you can legitimately moan about being old, try the seven year-old soft hyphen bug. Soft hyphens have actually been in HTML since 1995's HTML 2.0.
But the only reason that the techniques are obscure is that nobody uses them because browsers don't support them. The whole point is to encourage browsers to support them, so people can use them, and then they won't be obscure.
And there's no misuse. Are you one of the people that thinks the Acid2 test is all about error correction? That's a myth.
We don't need them because we either find workarounds or simply create designs that don't include everything we want. For example, how many people have you heard complaining that equal-height columns in CSS are difficult? CSS has had the functionality to do them easily since 1998, but they remain an "obscure technique", and they remain "out of line with the norm" because Internet Explorer doesn't support them. That doesn't mean they wouldn't be a really useful thing to have though, does it?
Exactly which box model bugs are you talking about? The most common one that people complain about is whether width includes padding or not. Unfortunately, despite everybody still complaining about it, Microsoft fixed that bug in 2001 when they released Internet Explorer 6.
I believe they still get error-handling wrong, which means they don't conform to CSS 1, however they have implemented the last remaining functionality of CSS 1 with Internet Explorer 7, so if you write valid CSS 1 that shouldn't be a problem.
As for CSS 3, they've added a few CSS 3 selectors.
You are wrong when you claim that Internet Explorer 7 has the same parsing bugs; for instance, they've fixed the * html and _property hacks.
None of the browsers you point to even implement HTML properly. Compliancy is obviously too much to expect from anybody.
I agree that Internet Explorer is miles behind other browsers, and I agree that it's really frustrating, but the specific claims you are making are false.
Konqueror doesn't support XHTML.
Are you sure you aren't confusing mbps with MBps? 400mbps is equal to 50 megabytes per second, and "12.5% of the cable's bandwidth" sounds suspiciously like your description of the problem, "about 10% of the cable's bandwidth".
What do you mean, "past the first page of comments"? Do you realise that you can change the threshold to +5 and read only the most highly moderated comments? There's hardly ever more than one page when you do that.
But I wasn't suggesting that they don't try out new ideas. I was saying that the ideas they have about generating original content aren't what Slashdot does best and always turn out like crap. That's not a criticism of new ideas, that's a criticism of bad ideas.
So let moderation go up to +10 instead of paying somebody to copy & paste comments from one article to another.
I've noticed Slashdot trying out some new ideas for their articles lately - original gaming content, linking to random weblogs, and now this inane copy & pasting. They all pretty much suck. Slashdot has never been good with original content, even back when JonKatz was doing it. The thing Slashdot does best is put a mechanism in place for discussion and then get the hell out of the way. I think if Slashdot is going to improve anywhere, it should be in the mechanisms rather than trying to be some kind of magazine.
One overenthusiastic manager and a copy of Powerpoint.
Then you are an idiot. Not only is the EU market as large as the American market, but the consequence of the EU switching to Linux en masse would mean that Linux would get a huge boost in quality and features as its userbase and developerbase would grow drastically. You wouldn't just lose the EU market, you'd be giving your competititors a massive advantage across the entire world.