Simply reverse the email architecture on the 'net. Turn the current method of sending and receiving mail around. Instead of messages being immediately sent to the recipient's server, send the recipient a very tiny message saying that a message with this subject is waiting on the sender's computer for the recipient to pick up. (emphasis mine)
Well if it's that simple, what's stopping you? Go for it. I mean it, stop pontificating about how easy it is, and demonstrate.
There is no such thing as the "fact of evolution". You should really check your sources on that one. It's called a theory for a reason.
No one but trolls and "intelligent design" kooks throw out this canard any more. Actual scientists call it an actual observed phenomenom. Whether you want to call it a "fact" or a "theory backed up by emperical observation" is up to you. Technically YOU only "theoretically" exist unless you've got some kind of cosmic theorem prover that goes beyond A=A (wow I managed to insult both creationists AND randroids)....rest of obvious trolling deleted. Gee wiz, I guess we haven't invented test, observation, and measurement to come up with any numbers.
Ohio has an interesting way of discouraging drunk driving. Anybody caught driving drunk has to get yellow license plates, so everybody will know they have a DUI.
Ironically enough, New Mexico license plates are all yellow. Just to throw on my 2 pesos (Oh hey they use US currency in new mexico? I didn't know it was a state now! [folks who've lived there will get that]), assuming this bill had a chance in hell, no, a computer salesman's chance in Amish country or a logical thought's chance in a lawmaker's head, they may as well simply retitle it the "No New Cars Sold In New Mexico Act".
I've started an online business or two in my time, and carefully-target unsolicited email (aka spam) was an essential part of our business plan, and it brought real benefit to most recipients.
So were forgery, relay abuse, and viruses part of the curriculum, or was that an elective?
hm, shub-internet ate my post... should have been:
"It's not actually a massive amount of cash, but they get enough to leverage purchases of other IP or whole companies that are more profitable once they IPO. The investors are betting that google will manage their assets intelligently, whatever they are. Yahoo for example, never made a profit as a portal, but now seems to be able to keep a lot of balls in the air with its multitude of services and be profitable as a result. I expect that the market will want Google to remain more focused. Who knows, maybe there won't ever be a profit in that sector. It's enough that other people are willing to believe that there may, and it's still a bit more reasoned than the "give it all away for free and sell banner ads" mania of the dotcom craze".
They do a brisk business in appliance boxen. And ads. Those ads aren't just on google.com, they're syndicated to many outside sites. It's not actually a massive amount of cash, but they
And although you could make the case that IE won the war, how does IE being the most popular browser translate into money for MS when they give it away for free?
It never made money -- it sold windows. MS was deathly afraid that netscape's plans to make the desktop obsolete by making a middleware platform out of NSPR would actually succeed. Looking back, it's hard to imagine that godawful mess gaining any traction (XUL and XPCOM might have half a chance if they had any decent documentation and tools) but there you have it. Microsoft moves fast when it's afraid of something.
I've wondered for a while now, is one Unix like another Unix? I've used Linux in the past and am trying out FreeBSD now. Frankly, I don't notice the difference from an end-user perspective.
Basically, there isn't, especially between Linux and FreeBSD. If you were working on a commercial unix system a few years back, you'd be using CDE, which does feel different (usually clunkier, sometimes slicker, e.g. drag and drop onto the panel calendar to accept a meeting). It certainly looks different: it makes windows 3.1 look downright pretty. Nowadays, Solaris still has CDE but is pushing toward GNOME, and other unix vendors are also taking in KDE or GNOME. CDE will still be around for a while yet, but it's certainly no longer the popular choice for developers or users.
Linux has SMP support, so does FreeBSD, and so does Solaris. They all have process management functionality (which is what Solaris is introducing with N1 Containers in this release). What would possess me to use Solaris (which costs) instead of Linux or FreeBSD (which are free)?
It's like the mainframe folks tell you: If you know what you need it for, you'll be on the phone ordering it. Of course it's this attitude that got windows in the door for folks that didn't need minis, let alone mainframes, and forced the thin end of the wedge in. If you're word processing, you stick with Linux. If you're tracking audit compliance for 10,000 brokers in realtime from live, and you're doing it with an async I/O package, your programmer should probably be writing to an API and library that isn't labelled "WARNING: LARKS VOMIT", with half the functions documented as "TODO" and the source marked "hm, it seems to panic whenever you have x readers on y sockets, but if we fiddle here i think it could be ok with only a 5% chance of locking up completely". There's your robustness example, and I picked async I/O because it's precisely one of those areas where a lot of the free unixen fall down (it's actually one of NT's strengths too, but let's not talk about where NT falls down shall we?) Other areas might be partitioning (MOSIX really might not be your bag, depending on your app) or just plain features you want (doors, STREAMS, etc). There may be linux analogues to all these, but sometimes it's just Solaris's implementation that does the job best, or at least in the most scaleable fashion.
In summary, the documentation is so bad, I can't even make a decent evaluation of whether the language is any good. The *first* thing the PHP crowd needs to fix is the documentation. It ought to be rewritten from scratch.
I have experience with both PHP and perl. I have a raging bias against PHP, but I'll try to tell it straight:
PHP's a lot easier to install than mod_perl, full stop. That is to say, mod_perl might be a package install away, but configuring it to get its features working takes some work with trial and error. By being essentially an embedded evaluator first and foremost and last, PHP doesn't confuse you by dealing with apacheisms like request handler objects. Of course it doesn't confuse you with having any real general-purpose functionality either (I'm told there's actually a gtk binding, but I can't seriously consider this as more than a toy).
PHP's syntax is more regular and reduced than perl's. It has only one sigil, $foo, as opposed to $foo @foo %foo and $foo. It lacks most of the line noise constructs like $#foo. References are managed internally (though you must explicitly pass by reference to functions) so there's no difference in syntax between an array and a reference to one. PHP5 will pass objects by reference by default. PHP4 always passes a copy unless you explicitly pass by reference. I found this to be really quite a misfeature in PHP4 that I'm happy to see fixed. I certainly hope the === operator has its extremely broken semantics fixed (it does the deepest of comparisons instead of the shallowest) but I'm not holding my breath.
PHP doesn't auto-splice lists. In fact it doesn't auto-create them from the various contexts perl does, you must use the "array" function to get a list. One gets used to this, and ultimately it's not much worse than lisp's list function. Arrays are much like lua arrays, and can have numeric or string keys, there is no separate "hash" type or hash syntax to go with them.
PHP4 has no structured exception handling at all. In fact there's no mechanism whatsoever to trap many errors that simply result in a dead stop of execution, with an error message if you're lucky, otherwise no response whatsoever, more akin to a killed CGI. Older PHP4 scripts are rife with uses of automatically populated global variables that make them targets for cross-site-scripting and sql injection. Don't trust a PHP script from before 2002 or so. PHP5 is supposed to address these issues.
If you want to be really extreme then write the tests first and then write the program that stops the tests from breaking.
Any consultant that said this to me would find themselves out on their ear. To reuse the stretched and often improbable bridge analogy, it's like building bridges until you get one that doesn't fall down.
Writing to the test is only as good as the test framework, and usually that's "enter this, expect that". Static, known inputs. All you're made to do is tweak the code until it makes the light turn green, but the stability of the rest of the system is still not necessarily sound. Heck, it might become worse, since XP encourages you to write code now now NOW and measure productivity by "velocity", so you may just throw something in to special-case something for that system just to make the damn light turn green.
Tests are great, they're pretty much the basis of the scientific method, but you have to have good tests, and good tests are something that are systemic, and built in to the compiler. Take HaskellDB for example: the type system won't LET you formulate an invalid query (e.g. joining on fields of different types). That's a test -- it's a pervasive test, done very early, and it's one you didn't even have to write. That's the sort of test that the XP crowd seems to disdain, because it's too much "bureacratic structure" and "overhead".
Hand-written tests are basically hand-waving, and most amount to regression tests which only ensure you won't make the same exact mistake twice.
Objective C can be, well, Objectionable C sometimes. There's a nice little language called Io that's similar to Self or NewtonScript, that is developed primarily on OSX, and includes an Objective C FFI. This means you can develop the low-level bits in Objective C, then script messages to it in Io. I'm told it does work with GNUStep as well.
Io won't give you bug free software any more than ObjC will, but it will make writing software, bugs and all, a lot more fun:)
I'm probably going to be -1 trolled into oblivion, but why don't all the people complaining about the NYT simply register and forget about it??
Or use the slashdot affiliate link? I guess the big question is, why can't the slashdot editors be bothered to check or fix links? Running everything verbatim is not journalism, it's usenet with a very narrow moderation accept rate.
> and what's this bit about the MPAA having BitTorrent on their radar screen???
They might as well have GetRight on their screen too then, because it was doing swarmed downloads with discovery via filemirrors.com long before bittorrent. BT is basically an evolutionary step from that by making discovery more automatic, without the requirement to have the whole file. Not to say that it's totally unoriginal, just that the RIAA hardly faces a singular "threat" there.
I use simply because it's a nice mirroring system with load balancing built in. I sure could have used a torrent for mozilla firefox a couple days ago when even the mirror listing page was swamped (no need, I have it now).
> With the tab-based browsing in Mozilla (along with other features), IE is painful to use IMHO
Honestly, there's got to be about 3852985 different tab browsers for IE. This one happens to not suck: Here you go. Maybe the dev folks can mine some ideas from there.
Those "wordgames" are an entertaining way to describe and demonstrate some very deep things - paradoxes, recursion, and Godel's theorems
Oh they're clever all right -- some of them are bits of genius that outdo Lewis Carroll. But after a while it gets to feel like socratic gimmickry, using character dialogues that bludgeon you with allegories that are stretched so thin they're transparent. It's not so much the cleverness that gets to me, it's his attachmentment to his own cleverness that comes out in the style. I still recommend everyone read him, but he's really hard to take more than a couple chapters at a time.
Maybe it's just the puns. Having been subjected to Madeline L'Engle and Piers Anthony in my youth, I've affected a sort of visceral distaste for puns.
Case in point illustration, my off the cuff remarks about a couple authors I didn't like. Got modded down as a troll, and yep, I probably deserved it, even if I really believed what I was saying. Sometimes the moderators are doing you a favor by taking posts out of circulation that you probably shouldn't have written (there's the problem here that you can't delete your own posts, which I think half-empty came up with an elegant solution for, but that's _also_ another story).
I read it. It looked like a troll. Not a really acrimonious flamebait kind of troll, more like the classic humorous kind of troll that nonetheless people are really kind of tired of seeing (if it was modded flamebait, chalk it up to the people who don't know what the fine distinctions are). If it wasn't a troll, it was an honest mistake to mistake it as one. It read like you were playing dumb, basically, saying "gee you already know how it's going to come out, why bother seeing it?"... I'm not going to debate you on the merit of the point (that'd be offtopic), I'm just saying that it wasn't really a font of insight in the particular context it was in.
Moderation is often a matter of who gets to it first. Moderators often still read at +2 because they're tired of seeing the putrid infantile dreck at score zero (I personally read at +2, though I rarely moderate). If something sinks below the threshold, it's rarely going to be lifted back up. If a couple of rabid penguinista moderators see a pro-microsoft rant and mod it down, the total moderation will reflect their viewpoint, and they probably won't get dinged in metamod either. It's sort of a roll of the dice there. In large part though, any sufficiently intelligent and reasoned point from any view tends to get modded up (and often any _verbose_ point, but that's a different complaint) as long as it didn't get modded down early.
The main problem I have with slashdot has to do with editorial policy, and the lack thereof. I stick around here because of the people, but I've long tired of the "link farm" feel of most of the articles.
Relic recently released the source to HomeWorld 1, and i know many people (including myself to a small extent) have been pouring through it to implement the features that we thought should be in the game. Right click movement, better combat, simpler camera control, better UI, ect.
Are they getting rid of the arbitrary plane that sets the camera movement stops at a 90 degree pole and that all ships level to? I understand you might need to define a plane when executing movement commands, and I accept the space opera conventions of the "space sea" (lots of 2d conventions, sound from beam weapons, constant thrust = constant velocity) that homeworld is set in, but the reference plane should only be something that gets set by the user and not some global constant. The game really felt like "two dimensions plus depth" instead of truly 3d thanks to that plane, because it gave you a feeling of "up" and "down" at all times.
> Well I got news for you: most of you also said Einstein was full of it and then said the same of Heisenberg
Most of us here weren't alive when they were alive, let alone publishing. Were you? And Einstein was pretty well accepted right off the bat (Heisenberg had a bit of an uphill climb). Both of them accepted, nay, demanded peer review for their work. Wolfram has refused peer review.
There are scientific underdogs who deserve a lot more credit than Wolfram.
Penrose's spinor group has been working on similar foundations for 30 years, and they've actually produced some interesting results
Is Penrose still blathering about how human minds are somehow magically transcendant due to quantum bogodynamic handwaving, and therefore not subject to any form of simulation? I really just couldn't hold any respect for him after reading The Emperor's New Mind, which is too bad since it's one of those "tour de force" books ala hofstadter that's actually educational unlike hofstadter and his stupid little achilles tortoise whatever and their wordgames...
I'm terrible with math, really, so I can't get myself into "real" science (when penrose started going into tensor calculus, i sort of went flipflipflip next chapter), but I do enjoy those laymans science books. Any you might recommend?
Yes, but you have to have the key in the first place. If you have the wrong key, it looks like the port isn't listening at all. You don't know there's a door, let alone the secret doorbell.
Slashdot Mirror
If I had to pick which space program to fund, I would choose planning for war in space before I would put a man on Mars. Mars is a big dead rock.
And if people like Bush and Cheney stay in charge, Mars will have company.
Simply reverse the email architecture on the 'net. Turn the current method of sending and receiving mail around. Instead of messages being immediately sent to the recipient's server, send the recipient a very tiny message saying that a message with this subject is waiting on the sender's computer for the recipient to pick up. (emphasis mine)
Well if it's that simple, what's stopping you? Go for it. I mean it, stop pontificating about how easy it is, and demonstrate.
There is no such thing as the "fact of evolution". You should really check your sources on that one. It's called a theory for a reason.
...rest of obvious trolling deleted. Gee wiz, I guess we haven't invented test, observation, and measurement to come up with any numbers.
No one but trolls and "intelligent design" kooks throw out this canard any more. Actual scientists call it an actual observed phenomenom. Whether you want to call it a "fact" or a "theory backed up by emperical observation" is up to you. Technically YOU only "theoretically" exist unless you've got some kind of cosmic theorem prover that goes beyond A=A (wow I managed to insult both creationists AND randroids).
Ohio has an interesting way of discouraging drunk driving. Anybody caught driving drunk has to get yellow license plates, so everybody will know they have a DUI.
Ironically enough, New Mexico license plates are all yellow. Just to throw on my 2 pesos (Oh hey they use US currency in new mexico? I didn't know it was a state now! [folks who've lived there will get that]), assuming this bill had a chance in hell, no, a computer salesman's chance in Amish country or a logical thought's chance in a lawmaker's head, they may as well simply retitle it the "No New Cars Sold In New Mexico Act".
I've started an online business or two in my time, and carefully-target unsolicited email (aka spam) was an essential part of our business plan, and it brought real benefit to most recipients.
So were forgery, relay abuse, and viruses part of the curriculum, or was that an elective?
hm, shub-internet ate my post... should have been:
"It's not actually a massive amount of cash, but they get enough to leverage purchases of other IP or whole companies that are more profitable once they IPO. The investors are betting that google will manage their assets intelligently, whatever they are. Yahoo for example, never made a profit as a portal, but now seems to be able to keep a lot of balls in the air with its multitude of services and be profitable as a result. I expect that the market will want Google to remain more focused. Who knows, maybe there won't ever be a profit in that sector. It's enough that other people are willing to believe that there may, and it's still a bit more reasoned than the "give it all away for free and sell banner ads" mania of the dotcom craze".
how does Google make money?
They do a brisk business in appliance boxen. And ads. Those ads aren't just on google.com, they're syndicated to many outside sites. It's not actually a massive amount of cash, but they
And although you could make the case that IE won the war, how does IE being the most popular browser translate into money for MS when they give it away for free?
It never made money -- it sold windows. MS was deathly afraid that netscape's plans to make the desktop obsolete by making a middleware platform out of NSPR would actually succeed. Looking back, it's hard to imagine that godawful mess gaining any traction (XUL and XPCOM might have half a chance if they had any decent documentation and tools) but there you have it. Microsoft moves fast when it's afraid of something.
I've wondered for a while now, is one Unix like another Unix? I've used Linux in the past and am trying out FreeBSD now. Frankly, I don't notice the difference from an end-user perspective.
Basically, there isn't, especially between Linux and FreeBSD. If you were working on a commercial unix system a few years back, you'd be using CDE, which does feel different (usually clunkier, sometimes slicker, e.g. drag and drop onto the panel calendar to accept a meeting). It certainly looks different: it makes windows 3.1 look downright pretty. Nowadays, Solaris still has CDE but is pushing toward GNOME, and other unix vendors are also taking in KDE or GNOME. CDE will still be around for a while yet, but it's certainly no longer the popular choice for developers or users.
Linux has SMP support, so does FreeBSD, and so does Solaris. They all have process management functionality (which is what Solaris is introducing with N1 Containers in this release). What would possess me to use Solaris (which costs) instead of Linux or FreeBSD (which are free)?
It's like the mainframe folks tell you: If you know what you need it for, you'll be on the phone ordering it. Of course it's this attitude that got windows in the door for folks that didn't need minis, let alone mainframes, and forced the thin end of the wedge in. If you're word processing, you stick with Linux. If you're tracking audit compliance for 10,000 brokers in realtime from live, and you're doing it with an async I/O package, your programmer should probably be writing to an API and library that isn't labelled "WARNING: LARKS VOMIT", with half the functions documented as "TODO" and the source marked "hm, it seems to panic whenever you have x readers on y sockets, but if we fiddle here i think it could be ok with only a 5% chance of locking up completely". There's your robustness example, and I picked async I/O because it's precisely one of those areas where a lot of the free unixen fall down (it's actually one of NT's strengths too, but let's not talk about where NT falls down shall we?) Other areas might be partitioning (MOSIX really might not be your bag, depending on your app) or just plain features you want (doors, STREAMS, etc). There may be linux analogues to all these, but sometimes it's just Solaris's implementation that does the job best, or at least in the most scaleable fashion.
In summary, the documentation is so bad, I can't even make a decent evaluation of whether the language is any good. The *first* thing the PHP crowd needs to fix is the documentation. It ought to be rewritten from scratch.
I have experience with both PHP and perl. I have a raging bias against PHP, but I'll try to tell it straight:
PHP's a lot easier to install than mod_perl, full stop. That is to say, mod_perl might be a package install away, but configuring it to get its features working takes some work with trial and error. By being essentially an embedded evaluator first and foremost and last, PHP doesn't confuse you by dealing with apacheisms like request handler objects. Of course it doesn't confuse you with having any real general-purpose functionality either (I'm told there's actually a gtk binding, but I can't seriously consider this as more than a toy).
PHP's syntax is more regular and reduced than perl's. It has only one sigil, $foo, as opposed to $foo @foo %foo and $foo. It lacks most of the line noise constructs like $#foo. References are managed internally (though you must explicitly pass by reference to functions) so there's no difference in syntax between an array and a reference to one. PHP5 will pass objects by reference by default. PHP4 always passes a copy unless you explicitly pass by reference. I found this to be really quite a misfeature in PHP4 that I'm happy to see fixed. I certainly hope the === operator has its extremely broken semantics fixed (it does the deepest of comparisons instead of the shallowest) but I'm not holding my breath.
PHP doesn't auto-splice lists. In fact it doesn't auto-create them from the various contexts perl does, you must use the "array" function to get a list. One gets used to this, and ultimately it's not much worse than lisp's list function. Arrays are much like lua arrays, and can have numeric or string keys, there is no separate "hash" type or hash syntax to go with them.
PHP4 has no structured exception handling at all. In fact there's no mechanism whatsoever to trap many errors that simply result in a dead stop of execution, with an error message if you're lucky, otherwise no response whatsoever, more akin to a killed CGI. Older PHP4 scripts are rife with uses of automatically populated global variables that make them targets for cross-site-scripting and sql injection. Don't trust a PHP script from before 2002 or so. PHP5 is supposed to address these issues.
The question is, does PHP have tailcall elimination, or does jack blow the stack?
If you want to be really extreme then write the tests first and then write the program that stops the tests from breaking.
Any consultant that said this to me would find themselves out on their ear. To reuse the stretched and often improbable bridge analogy, it's like building bridges until you get one that doesn't fall down.
Writing to the test is only as good as the test framework, and usually that's "enter this, expect that". Static, known inputs. All you're made to do is tweak the code until it makes the light turn green, but the stability of the rest of the system is still not necessarily sound. Heck, it might become worse, since XP encourages you to write code now now NOW and measure productivity by "velocity", so you may just throw something in to special-case something for that system just to make the damn light turn green.
Tests are great, they're pretty much the basis of the scientific method, but you have to have good tests, and good tests are something that are systemic, and built in to the compiler. Take HaskellDB for example: the type system won't LET you formulate an invalid query (e.g. joining on fields of different types). That's a test -- it's a pervasive test, done very early, and it's one you didn't even have to write. That's the sort of test that the XP crowd seems to disdain, because it's too much "bureacratic structure" and "overhead".
Hand-written tests are basically hand-waving, and most amount to regression tests which only ensure you won't make the same exact mistake twice.
Hm, that seems to need the "www" in front of it, or it gives you the author's homepage. fixed link here.
Objective C can be, well, Objectionable C sometimes. There's a nice little language called Io that's similar to Self or NewtonScript, that is developed primarily on OSX, and includes an Objective C FFI. This means you can develop the low-level bits in Objective C, then script messages to it in Io. I'm told it does work with GNUStep as well.
:)
Io won't give you bug free software any more than ObjC will, but it will make writing software, bugs and all, a lot more fun
I'm probably going to be -1 trolled into oblivion, but why don't all the people complaining about the NYT simply register and forget about it??
Or use the slashdot affiliate link? I guess the big question is, why can't the slashdot editors be bothered to check or fix links? Running everything verbatim is not journalism, it's usenet with a very narrow moderation accept rate.
> and what's this bit about the MPAA having BitTorrent on their radar screen???
They might as well have GetRight on their screen too then, because it was doing swarmed downloads with discovery via filemirrors.com long before bittorrent. BT is basically an evolutionary step from that by making discovery more automatic, without the requirement to have the whole file. Not to say that it's totally unoriginal, just that the RIAA hardly faces a singular "threat" there.
I use simply because it's a nice mirroring system with load balancing built in. I sure could have used a torrent for mozilla firefox a couple days ago when even the mirror listing page was swamped (no need, I have it now).
> You don't hear people complaining when their waitress remembers what they like to drink...
I would if she wrote it down and faxed it to every other store that paid her a buck for the info.
> With the tab-based browsing in Mozilla (along with other features), IE is painful to use IMHO
Honestly, there's got to be about 3852985 different tab browsers for IE. This one happens to not suck: Here you go. Maybe the dev folks can mine some ideas from there.
Still having problems? Contact the PRESIDENT of the company or the highest accessible executive.
I'm currently having problems with Outlook. Still think that'll work?
Those "wordgames" are an entertaining way to describe and demonstrate some very deep things - paradoxes, recursion, and Godel's theorems
Oh they're clever all right -- some of them are bits of genius that outdo Lewis Carroll. But after a while it gets to feel like socratic gimmickry, using character dialogues that bludgeon you with allegories that are stretched so thin they're transparent. It's not so much the cleverness that gets to me, it's his attachmentment to his own cleverness that comes out in the style. I still recommend everyone read him, but he's really hard to take more than a couple chapters at a time.
Maybe it's just the puns. Having been subjected to Madeline L'Engle and Piers Anthony in my youth, I've affected a sort of visceral distaste for puns.
Case in point illustration, my off the cuff remarks about a couple authors I didn't like. Got modded down as a troll, and yep, I probably deserved it, even if I really believed what I was saying. Sometimes the moderators are doing you a favor by taking posts out of circulation that you probably shouldn't have written (there's the problem here that you can't delete your own posts, which I think half-empty came up with an elegant solution for, but that's _also_ another story).
I read it. It looked like a troll. Not a really acrimonious flamebait kind of troll, more like the classic humorous kind of troll that nonetheless people are really kind of tired of seeing (if it was modded flamebait, chalk it up to the people who don't know what the fine distinctions are). If it wasn't a troll, it was an honest mistake to mistake it as one. It read like you were playing dumb, basically, saying "gee you already know how it's going to come out, why bother seeing it?" ... I'm not going to debate you on the merit of the point (that'd be offtopic), I'm just saying that it wasn't really a font of insight in the particular context it was in.
Moderation is often a matter of who gets to it first. Moderators often still read at +2 because they're tired of seeing the putrid infantile dreck at score zero (I personally read at +2, though I rarely moderate). If something sinks below the threshold, it's rarely going to be lifted back up. If a couple of rabid penguinista moderators see a pro-microsoft rant and mod it down, the total moderation will reflect their viewpoint, and they probably won't get dinged in metamod either. It's sort of a roll of the dice there. In large part though, any sufficiently intelligent and reasoned point from any view tends to get modded up (and often any _verbose_ point, but that's a different complaint) as long as it didn't get modded down early.
The main problem I have with slashdot has to do with editorial policy, and the lack thereof. I stick around here because of the people, but I've long tired of the "link farm" feel of most of the articles.
Relic recently released the source to HomeWorld 1, and i know many people (including myself to a small extent) have been pouring through it to implement the features that we thought should be in the game. Right click movement, better combat, simpler camera control, better UI, ect.
Are they getting rid of the arbitrary plane that sets the camera movement stops at a 90 degree pole and that all ships level to? I understand you might need to define a plane when executing movement commands, and I accept the space opera conventions of the "space sea" (lots of 2d conventions, sound from beam weapons, constant thrust = constant velocity) that homeworld is set in, but the reference plane should only be something that gets set by the user and not some global constant. The game really felt like "two dimensions plus depth" instead of truly 3d thanks to that plane, because it gave you a feeling of "up" and "down" at all times.
> Well I got news for you: most of you also said Einstein was full of it and then said the same of Heisenberg
Most of us here weren't alive when they were alive, let alone publishing. Were you? And Einstein was pretty well accepted right off the bat (Heisenberg had a bit of an uphill climb). Both of them accepted, nay, demanded peer review for their work. Wolfram has refused peer review.
There are scientific underdogs who deserve a lot more credit than Wolfram.
Penrose's spinor group has been working on similar foundations for 30 years, and they've actually produced some interesting results
Is Penrose still blathering about how human minds are somehow magically transcendant due to quantum bogodynamic handwaving, and therefore not subject to any form of simulation? I really just couldn't hold any respect for him after reading The Emperor's New Mind, which is too bad since it's one of those "tour de force" books ala hofstadter that's actually educational unlike hofstadter and his stupid little achilles tortoise whatever and their wordgames...
I'm terrible with math, really, so I can't get myself into "real" science (when penrose started going into tensor calculus, i sort of went flipflipflip next chapter), but I do enjoy those laymans science books. Any you might recommend?
> Putting the key in a SYN packet, you can snoop
Yes, but you have to have the key in the first place. If you have the wrong key, it looks like the port isn't listening at all. You don't know there's a door, let alone the secret doorbell.