Now, thanks to new University of Alberta research, the popular expression might become, 'sharp as a single atom tip formed by chemically assisted spatially controlled field evaporation.'
I can't imagine ever meeting anyone smart enough to warrant memorizing such a phrase.
Right because a publication named "Jawa News" isn't hate mongering or anything. Please respect your sources, those sites can't be seen as real news sources for a real news site. If hating people in the middle east is a "conservative" stance, then I wouldn't want "conservative" news anyway. Not including a site in Google News is hardly censorship. Now if you type in Jawa News in Google search and get zero results, that's becoming a tad-bit closer. The very fact that I'm pretty certain that Google News even contained the stories of the allegations that Google News was being censored goes to show you that people like to blow smoke up your ass when it comes to Google, because they have made themselves a target with the strange "do no evil" mantra. But that doesn't mean that they are always wrong either.
The winner doesn't scale properly when the window is shrunk. I know this may not seem important to a lot of people, but having to use a horizontal scrollbar when the window isn't really that small horizontally is awful. At least the old design scaled.
In my opinion what China has now is communism - not quite the thing Karl Marx described, but essentially the same. I personally think it is good, far better than what you have in the US. It is still far from perfect, but it is evolving and improving, which is what USA's system doesn't.
Oh yes, it's far better than the US! I really don't enjoy expressing my opinion of the government without being maimed, killed, or tortured! That's not a right I enjoy at all! Who needs public discourse or a free press! Yes, I'd much rather get killed for having an opinion! I think I'd fit in there perfectly! I should move to china right now!
Advertising in the US has subsidized or made free our entertainment. If Tivo goes the same direction, where their service is free or greatly reduced, I am all for it. But if I want to pay a premium price to avoid advertising, I should have that option as well.
Advertising hasn't subsidized most of cable TV to the point of cheap or freeness. Maybe network TV, sure, but cable TV? No way. When you pay 100 a month for basic channels and services, there's no way that you should have to see the staggering amount of advertising on basic cable. You might say well they offer a lot of channels, or that they aren't really making out that well on basic cable, I would argue that they are making out just fine, and that maybe they should offer less channels and more quality ones (how about a la carte?). The commercial free argument made sense for a little while on cable, then the commercials started sneaking in. Before anyone said anything about it, cable networks were just as bad as regular ones. Now they are trying to shove typical broadcast networks out the door and make everyone pay for digital access. At that point, all bets are off, commercials seriously need to be cut down both in number and in length. Tivo is just one thing that shows this fact.
These people need to realize that they've been getting far too fat for far too long at the customer's expense because nobody had an alternative. Welcome to the Internet age partners. Now it's cheap and easy to make, distribute and dispense large quantities of entertainment. If you continue to have your networks be corroded with crap, we'll find a way around it. Either by avoiding mainstream television altogether, or by downloading the episodes commercial free online or Tivoing. The entertainment market has changed. Time to change your ways.
I hate to reply to my own comment but this isn't really that off topic. Firstly, it was intended as a joke, maybe none of you mods got it: but here's the setup. Patent trolls are companies that produce nothing and research nothing, therefore there are no factories to worry about... Shutting down patent trolls does nothing negative to any worker because these companies are only composed of patent trolls. The intention was to make a joke on that. Maybe I was expecting a bit much for people to follow that train of thought and it wasn't funny. But regardless, it's hardly off-topic.
The problem that Sony doesn't get about this coming console is that it isn't that much better than the PS2 to the average consumer.
The fact is that some people that are even slightly technically inclined (e.g. my brother) already think that the PS2's graphics are HD, or that DVDs are HD, and probably wouldn't notice the difference even if you pointed it out.
The problem is one of diminishing returns. I'm sure some people will buy anything because they have become Sony fans, (how, I have no clue, because while PS systems have good games, there's nothing particularly inspiring about the system or the majority of its games) but most people will not.
The differences are becoming more and more subtle between generations of consoles. I played XBox 360 in the store upon release and couldn't see why anyone would prefer it that much over the original XBox, the differences seemed quite subtle, even graphically.
When you jump entire levels in graphical difference, you can expect an equivalent boost in price tag. But when you are talking about emulating the look of cloth better than the last console, that simply is not enough to entice most people to plunk down 600 dollars.
The price point is the saving feature of the Wii. It's something different, and it's cheap. While it might not be better graphically it at least has something to draw you in. I can't see buying a PS3 when I'm already bored with PS2 and the graphics aren't that much better... Most people have finally amassed DVD collections and you think they are going to change formats again? Please. I predict about the same amount of success with blu-ray as there was with PSP's disk video format. Nobody wants to have to buy the same movie over and over again. This is decidedly _not_ a selling feature for your console.
I must admit that my experience is limited in operating system design, however, I have noticed that modular design in every other type of software always seems to work better and results in stabler code which is more adaptive to change. With strict parameters on what parts can and cannot do, strict parameters on how one module interacts with another, code goes from spaghetti to whatever the opposite is: I guess well-designed.
It _is_ more work to design and implement these systems. But often, afterward the extra time and effort and CPU cycles are well worth it as you design a system in which components point out and catch their own errors on a regular basis.
Any malfunctioning behavior is easily traceable as one section of code doesn't purposefully stomp on the rest of it: everything has boundaries. When a value gets changed it's clear what part changed it and which part has an error, with or without a debugger. Sections are easily testable one part at a time, each module or object is clear and concise in purpose and the code is easily broken down to be developed by teams even. These are all the fundamental advantages of OOP. Anyone who has ever taken a class in the subject knows this.
Students and others may backspin and go back to making giant functions with unclear purposes that have side effects and all of this is easier to spit out than properly structured code, but to pretend that this is the best approach is ludicrous.
I understand that microkernels might not have widespread use, yet. But you must understand that stability is going to play more and more of a role as computers begin to take up every vital role in the information structure of our lives. This is the reason things like media center PCs still serve only a purpose for those on the technological edge. Nobody wants to have to "reboot their TV."
Linux is relatively stable, and this is fine. But to pretend like monolithic kernels are the way of the future just because your OS or your favorite OS is coded that way wreaks a little bit of bullshit IMO.
As hardware gets faster, the abstractions progress. We are now getting to a state with speed that we can stop worrying about performance as much. It's now more important that things work than that things use 100% capacity.
Every other sect of programming seems to be progressing toward OOP, and like Tanenbaum says in the article, it's insane to pretend like these lessons don't have merit.
The Sony PS3 is more like a cafeteria than the Wii is. The Sony is "the best" of everything, thrown together so that you only get a little of what you want. The Wii seems to be a very targeted product, like, say, fine italian food, designed for a specific purpose.
Could the PS3 experience even really be "amazing?" Maybe. But from the talk everyone who has a shot hands on with the PS3 simply isn't interested once they've encountered the Wii. Lines are around the block for the Wii and the PS3 display is easily reachable in 30 minutes.
But, suppose these 18th series rehashes of the same FPS, RPG, and racing series games provides an amazing experience...maybe it does to some people, fine. But an experience worth 600 dollars? For just the console? I highly doubt it.
I haven't bought a console since N64/PS1, and I'm considering buying the Wii and only the Wii. Because it provides something I don't have with the other systems, games that would be better played on a console than my PC.
...it's not a "security hole" if it was designed that way to begin with. It provides a great illusion of voting while maintaining the status quo, okay? Everyone's happy this way... Of course there's "security holes" everywhere, they weren't designed to be secure to begin with.
Why not just not have the user run as root all the time?
The main difference I've noticed between Linux and Windows is that Linux makes it abundantly easy to run under limited access using password prompting, while Windows tries to prevent you from securing it.
People say that "well you shouldn't run things you don't know." Well, that argument works for computer professionals and people that know what's going on. But to the average user, you should be able to tell what is and isn't going to hurt the system.
If an application needs to access any critical areas of the OS, the running threads, the registry, or anything else deemed critical or potentially harmful, it should prompt for password. This would give IT people a clear message to send to users "If it asks you for your password, make sure you trust the program." While it might be easy to click "yes" or "ok" to everything, because windows is user prompt hell to begin with, typing in and remembering a password takes considerably more work.
Why you would continue to try to patch the holes in the Titantic this way is beyond me. Unless now MS just wants to sell insecure products and then sell you repair kits to fix them.
The market will decide, that it doesn't care what you think. Because you are already a monopolized customer.
The reality is that we don't live in laissez faire capitalism. We can pretend that we do, and that if we did everything would run smoothly. But the reality is that we don't. If you look at other places where we let the market decide important decisions (eg. health care) we can see that the market usually decides to cut the customer the worst deal possible.
Hasn't the rise and fall of communism taught us anything? Being idealistics is no better whether you are a capitalist idealist, or a communist one. The greed that drives communism also makes it destroy other things. Don't be so simple minded.
I think a 'tiered' internet is trouble from the start, but what about this scenerio: Your VOIP provider starts providing 911 service, and your 911 call gets squashed by your neighbor's video download. Under strict 'net neutrality', it is possible for this to happen, if unlikely.
The bill includes language which allows for reasonable exceptions, 911 calls would obviously be of this nature and I think the bill even calls out "emergency services" by name.
How about the people who connect from behind a router and have the same public IP, wouldn't that have the opposite effect. Sure these people _look_ like the same user, but could easily be a lot more than that.
If I send my sister a link on our home network, she could go to the site and it looks like the same visitor, etc. Everyone forgets about this too. Surely unique IPs != unique visitors, but it is somewhat close.
This might be a tangent, but if people continue to pirate instead of buying the CDs maybe the RIAA and the rest of these music industry people will for once have to cut another notch in their belt. And I say so what to this. So what if they have to charge less and cut some of the flack out of the system? Everyone else had to do it, and everything else has been cut to minimums to insure walmart profitability at the cost of outsourcing and cheaper components, why not this too? CDs are the only thing I see that continue to try to sell at a price point where they are too expensive to really be worth it. That takes some gall in a time where you can get music for free anywhere.
You don't have to hunt maybe, sure. But it's not as if WinXP usually boots the first time with an even close to full set of drivers. Now the computer might ship with a driver disk, and if not each component definitely has a disk, but this doesn't change the fact that WinXP doesn't natively support most things at all. The fact that you can easily find the drivers for Windows is just a part of the fact that Windows needs to be supported for the hardware maker to have any market whatsoever in most cases. If they feel extra nice, you might get linux support.
I don't think most people use the search box even when one exists on their browser. I know even as an intermediate->advanced computer user I sometimes forget and type google in the bar. Also, if MSN is the only option I don't know how many people will even use it, they might just resume googling like they did before.
Yeah but they are also more likely to try to figure out how to crack the security system that is most popular.
What a piss poor analogy.
Honda Accords, for instance, were among the most stolen cars for a while. Not because they were inherently insecure, but because they were available and known.
...that this article was featured on digg, got like 1900 diggs and then mysteriously vanished in just a few minutes. They had a link to a torrent with the entire c-span show, which I happened to be able to get before losing the link. But I was wondering how a story with so many diggs got lost so quickly.
I watched the whole thing and let me tell you, you could almost sense that he was really trying to make a point when saying things like "guys like us, we get it, right Mr. President?"
To see a person stand there and do an ironic inpersonation of one of the president's supporters so obvious so poignently while the President was in the same room was almost overpowering. My question is: did the administration think that he was going to tone his act down, or did they really not get the joke of the show to begin with? I couldn't help but think someone was going to catch hell for letting Colbert host the show.
This performance coupled with the one from Jon Stewart on Crossfire make up the two best live TV moments I've seen in the last few years.
I'm becoming convinced that Jon Stewart and associates are the last people remaining with balls in the TV/media realm.
Everyone makes comparisons as if there's only two companies to buy from.
You can choose between google, MS, yahoo and a whole lot of other companies. Just because these are the most popular doesn't make them the only choices. And the same thing, if you haven't figured it out yet, goes for 3rd party candidates.
If you don't like democrats or republicans, don't vote for either. The constitution doesn't have 2 party system in it, I blame Americans for that.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't imagine ever meeting anyone smart enough to warrant memorizing such a phrase.
Get contacts.
No flaps involved.
dahurr
Right because a publication named "Jawa News" isn't hate mongering or anything. Please respect your sources, those sites can't be seen as real news sources for a real news site. If hating people in the middle east is a "conservative" stance, then I wouldn't want "conservative" news anyway. Not including a site in Google News is hardly censorship. Now if you type in Jawa News in Google search and get zero results, that's becoming a tad-bit closer. The very fact that I'm pretty certain that Google News even contained the stories of the allegations that Google News was being censored goes to show you that people like to blow smoke up your ass when it comes to Google, because they have made themselves a target with the strange "do no evil" mantra. But that doesn't mean that they are always wrong either.
The winner doesn't scale properly when the window is shrunk. I know this may not seem important to a lot of people, but having to use a horizontal scrollbar when the window isn't really that small horizontally is awful. At least the old design scaled.
Oh yes, it's far better than the US! I really don't enjoy expressing my opinion of the government without being maimed, killed, or tortured! That's not a right I enjoy at all! Who needs public discourse or a free press! Yes, I'd much rather get killed for having an opinion! I think I'd fit in there perfectly! I should move to china right now!
Are you in reality AT ALL?
Ah yes, but if I were to trust you I wouldn't take stock tips from the Internet, including your own...
Just another paradox.
Advertising hasn't subsidized most of cable TV to the point of cheap or freeness. Maybe network TV, sure, but cable TV? No way. When you pay 100 a month for basic channels and services, there's no way that you should have to see the staggering amount of advertising on basic cable. You might say well they offer a lot of channels, or that they aren't really making out that well on basic cable, I would argue that they are making out just fine, and that maybe they should offer less channels and more quality ones (how about a la carte?). The commercial free argument made sense for a little while on cable, then the commercials started sneaking in. Before anyone said anything about it, cable networks were just as bad as regular ones. Now they are trying to shove typical broadcast networks out the door and make everyone pay for digital access. At that point, all bets are off, commercials seriously need to be cut down both in number and in length. Tivo is just one thing that shows this fact.
These people need to realize that they've been getting far too fat for far too long at the customer's expense because nobody had an alternative. Welcome to the Internet age partners. Now it's cheap and easy to make, distribute and dispense large quantities of entertainment. If you continue to have your networks be corroded with crap, we'll find a way around it. Either by avoiding mainstream television altogether, or by downloading the episodes commercial free online or Tivoing. The entertainment market has changed. Time to change your ways.
I hate to reply to my own comment but this isn't really that off topic. Firstly, it was intended as a joke, maybe none of you mods got it: but here's the setup. Patent trolls are companies that produce nothing and research nothing, therefore there are no factories to worry about... Shutting down patent trolls does nothing negative to any worker because these companies are only composed of patent trolls. The intention was to make a joke on that. Maybe I was expecting a bit much for people to follow that train of thought and it wasn't funny. But regardless, it's hardly off-topic.
...think of all the workers in the factories that will be affected...
Oh wait.
The problem that Sony doesn't get about this coming console is that it isn't that much better than the PS2 to the average consumer. The fact is that some people that are even slightly technically inclined (e.g. my brother) already think that the PS2's graphics are HD, or that DVDs are HD, and probably wouldn't notice the difference even if you pointed it out. The problem is one of diminishing returns. I'm sure some people will buy anything because they have become Sony fans, (how, I have no clue, because while PS systems have good games, there's nothing particularly inspiring about the system or the majority of its games) but most people will not. The differences are becoming more and more subtle between generations of consoles. I played XBox 360 in the store upon release and couldn't see why anyone would prefer it that much over the original XBox, the differences seemed quite subtle, even graphically. When you jump entire levels in graphical difference, you can expect an equivalent boost in price tag. But when you are talking about emulating the look of cloth better than the last console, that simply is not enough to entice most people to plunk down 600 dollars. The price point is the saving feature of the Wii. It's something different, and it's cheap. While it might not be better graphically it at least has something to draw you in. I can't see buying a PS3 when I'm already bored with PS2 and the graphics aren't that much better... Most people have finally amassed DVD collections and you think they are going to change formats again? Please. I predict about the same amount of success with blu-ray as there was with PSP's disk video format. Nobody wants to have to buy the same movie over and over again. This is decidedly _not_ a selling feature for your console.
I must admit that my experience is limited in operating system design, however, I have noticed that modular design in every other type of software always seems to work better and results in stabler code which is more adaptive to change. With strict parameters on what parts can and cannot do, strict parameters on how one module interacts with another, code goes from spaghetti to whatever the opposite is: I guess well-designed.
It _is_ more work to design and implement these systems. But often, afterward the extra time and effort and CPU cycles are well worth it as you design a system in which components point out and catch their own errors on a regular basis.
Any malfunctioning behavior is easily traceable as one section of code doesn't purposefully stomp on the rest of it: everything has boundaries. When a value gets changed it's clear what part changed it and which part has an error, with or without a debugger. Sections are easily testable one part at a time, each module or object is clear and concise in purpose and the code is easily broken down to be developed by teams even. These are all the fundamental advantages of OOP. Anyone who has ever taken a class in the subject knows this.
Students and others may backspin and go back to making giant functions with unclear purposes that have side effects and all of this is easier to spit out than properly structured code, but to pretend that this is the best approach is ludicrous.
I understand that microkernels might not have widespread use, yet. But you must understand that stability is going to play more and more of a role as computers begin to take up every vital role in the information structure of our lives. This is the reason things like media center PCs still serve only a purpose for those on the technological edge. Nobody wants to have to "reboot their TV."
Linux is relatively stable, and this is fine. But to pretend like monolithic kernels are the way of the future just because your OS or your favorite OS is coded that way wreaks a little bit of bullshit IMO.
As hardware gets faster, the abstractions progress. We are now getting to a state with speed that we can stop worrying about performance as much. It's now more important that things work than that things use 100% capacity.
Every other sect of programming seems to be progressing toward OOP, and like Tanenbaum says in the article, it's insane to pretend like these lessons don't have merit.
The Sony PS3 is more like a cafeteria than the Wii is. The Sony is "the best" of everything, thrown together so that you only get a little of what you want. The Wii seems to be a very targeted product, like, say, fine italian food, designed for a specific purpose.
Could the PS3 experience even really be "amazing?" Maybe. But from the talk everyone who has a shot hands on with the PS3 simply isn't interested once they've encountered the Wii. Lines are around the block for the Wii and the PS3 display is easily reachable in 30 minutes.
But, suppose these 18th series rehashes of the same FPS, RPG, and racing series games provides an amazing experience...maybe it does to some people, fine. But an experience worth 600 dollars? For just the console? I highly doubt it.
I haven't bought a console since N64/PS1, and I'm considering buying the Wii and only the Wii. Because it provides something I don't have with the other systems, games that would be better played on a console than my PC.
...it's not a "security hole" if it was designed that way to begin with. It provides a great illusion of voting while maintaining the status quo, okay? Everyone's happy this way... Of course there's "security holes" everywhere, they weren't designed to be secure to begin with.
...all those asshats you see that act as if their phone is an extension of their ear will soon be coming to a cancer ward near you.
Why not just not have the user run as root all the time?
The main difference I've noticed between Linux and Windows is that Linux makes it abundantly easy to run under limited access using password prompting, while Windows tries to prevent you from securing it.
People say that "well you shouldn't run things you don't know." Well, that argument works for computer professionals and people that know what's going on. But to the average user, you should be able to tell what is and isn't going to hurt the system.
If an application needs to access any critical areas of the OS, the running threads, the registry, or anything else deemed critical or potentially harmful, it should prompt for password. This would give IT people a clear message to send to users "If it asks you for your password, make sure you trust the program." While it might be easy to click "yes" or "ok" to everything, because windows is user prompt hell to begin with, typing in and remembering a password takes considerably more work.
Why you would continue to try to patch the holes in the Titantic this way is beyond me. Unless now MS just wants to sell insecure products and then sell you repair kits to fix them.
...the wikipedia edits you!
The market will decide, that it doesn't care what you think. Because you are already a monopolized customer.
The reality is that we don't live in laissez faire capitalism. We can pretend that we do, and that if we did everything would run smoothly. But the reality is that we don't. If you look at other places where we let the market decide important decisions (eg. health care) we can see that the market usually decides to cut the customer the worst deal possible.
Hasn't the rise and fall of communism taught us anything? Being idealistics is no better whether you are a capitalist idealist, or a communist one. The greed that drives communism also makes it destroy other things. Don't be so simple minded.
The bill includes language which allows for reasonable exceptions, 911 calls would obviously be of this nature and I think the bill even calls out "emergency services" by name.
Next in line please.
How about the people who connect from behind a router and have the same public IP, wouldn't that have the opposite effect. Sure these people _look_ like the same user, but could easily be a lot more than that.
If I send my sister a link on our home network, she could go to the site and it looks like the same visitor, etc. Everyone forgets about this too. Surely unique IPs != unique visitors, but it is somewhat close.
This might be a tangent, but if people continue to pirate instead of buying the CDs maybe the RIAA and the rest of these music industry people will for once have to cut another notch in their belt. And I say so what to this. So what if they have to charge less and cut some of the flack out of the system? Everyone else had to do it, and everything else has been cut to minimums to insure walmart profitability at the cost of outsourcing and cheaper components, why not this too? CDs are the only thing I see that continue to try to sell at a price point where they are too expensive to really be worth it. That takes some gall in a time where you can get music for free anywhere.
You don't have to hunt maybe, sure. But it's not as if WinXP usually boots the first time with an even close to full set of drivers. Now the computer might ship with a driver disk, and if not each component definitely has a disk, but this doesn't change the fact that WinXP doesn't natively support most things at all. The fact that you can easily find the drivers for Windows is just a part of the fact that Windows needs to be supported for the hardware maker to have any market whatsoever in most cases. If they feel extra nice, you might get linux support.
But this is hardly the fault of OSS...
I don't think most people use the search box even when one exists on their browser. I know even as an intermediate->advanced computer user I sometimes forget and type google in the bar. Also, if MSN is the only option I don't know how many people will even use it, they might just resume googling like they did before.
Yeah but they are also more likely to try to figure out how to crack the security system that is most popular.
What a piss poor analogy.
Honda Accords, for instance, were among the most stolen cars for a while. Not because they were inherently insecure, but because they were available and known.
...that this article was featured on digg, got like 1900 diggs and then mysteriously vanished in just a few minutes. They had a link to a torrent with the entire c-span show, which I happened to be able to get before losing the link. But I was wondering how a story with so many diggs got lost so quickly.
I watched the whole thing and let me tell you, you could almost sense that he was really trying to make a point when saying things like "guys like us, we get it, right Mr. President?"
To see a person stand there and do an ironic inpersonation of one of the president's supporters so obvious so poignently while the President was in the same room was almost overpowering. My question is: did the administration think that he was going to tone his act down, or did they really not get the joke of the show to begin with? I couldn't help but think someone was going to catch hell for letting Colbert host the show.
This performance coupled with the one from Jon Stewart on Crossfire make up the two best live TV moments I've seen in the last few years.
I'm becoming convinced that Jon Stewart and associates are the last people remaining with balls in the TV/media realm.
Everyone makes comparisons as if there's only two companies to buy from. You can choose between google, MS, yahoo and a whole lot of other companies. Just because these are the most popular doesn't make them the only choices. And the same thing, if you haven't figured it out yet, goes for 3rd party candidates. If you don't like democrats or republicans, don't vote for either. The constitution doesn't have 2 party system in it, I blame Americans for that.