It's not a money-making scheme, but it is prior-art.
Yeah, but we've seen how much the Patent Office cares. I hate to even say this "out loud", but can you imagine if a spammer patented various spam filters and threatened to sue anyone who implemented such a filter?
Good point. The question is then, why is speed such a low priority when the #1 argument to buy a new PC is that 'it's faster'
A faster processor optimizes everything, and (assuming Intel/AMD/Motorola/whoever has done their job right) does so without compromising stability. Intel et al can optimize for performance because they've otherwise solved the x86 problem, it works and it works well.
It's not that applications should never be optimized, it's just that it should be lower priority than other things, and an optimization that few can use without a particularly high upside should be especially low priority.
Re:Painful? Yes. Helps long term? I don't see it.
on
Giant Sucking Noise
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Trust me, this was never about economic stimulation in third-world countries.
That is not the motivation doing the outsourcing, but that still may be the practical effect. They can't hire the third-worlders without paying them more than what others would hire them for, so that does end up putting money in that economy.
The thing is, though, even if U.S. companies don't outsource (skipping the question of what exactly is a U.S. company), wouldn't someone else simply hire those same people to do that job for cheaper, and destroy the U.S. company? You talk about steel, but Bethlehem Steel didn't outsource, it went bankrupt. So stopping outsourcing doesn't eliminate the problem.
GreaT.. I can use this special player to weed out all the annoying sex scenes.
Why do I get the feeling that someone's going to implement a reverse algorithm, which *only* shows the bits in the deleted segments? It would be like copies of novels where the pages with the steamy bit have been folded for convenient access.
That's all well and good but the war on drugs is supposed to stop people preying on the weak and the feeble. e.g. selling drugs to kids, giving crack to the homeless.
Coors and Miller don't sell to kids, except kids who deliberately deceive their retailers. Most legalization advocates would be happy with laws similar to U.S. alcohol laws. Under the current system, selling to an adult will get you in jail just as quickly as selling to a kid, so there's no incentive not to sell to kids.
As for the homeless, they have no money, and drug-selling businesses would have no interest in targeting them.
Could it be that there's also an element of laziness on the programmers' part?
It's not laziness, it's priorities. Optimization is low priority in programming; if there's other things that need to be done, they need to be done first. And hardware optimization comes even lower on the priority meter, especially hardware that only a few users have, and especially hardware that will at most give you a 2x speed-up.
You remember correctly but it would indeed be strange for the liver to produce IgE. IgE is released by only mast cells, immunge cells that are not normally circulatory but that settle in tissues and do their thing in situ.
Is any progress being made in detecting these allergies (short of the person entering anaphylactic shock) and coming up with treatments that would at least allow the person to reduce their reaction to accidental exposure?
7. Enjoy player that now plays DVDs from any region.
Being region-free isn't enough, as there are DVDs that will refuse to run in that situation. You need one you can set to a particular region before you put the DVD in. (My Cyberhome 500 allows that, but they aren't being sold any more.)
If Apple left this input device choice up to people by not including a mouse at all with their systems, you trolls would be all over them for THAT, too.
Apple could end the whole issue by having multi-button mice as a purchase option. I'm sure Logitech would happily whip up an Apple logo mouse in a week. I'm using a Dell-branded Logitech mouse with my PowerMac G4 and it works great.
The idea that this is corporate greed rights all wrongs is really getting old....or perhaps Cringely is concerned about them suing him for libel. They've shown no reluctance to use lawyers, after all.
Da Comrade. The Capitalist Swine will fall any day now, overthrown by the will of the people.
Basil Exposition: Austin, the Cold War is over! Austin Powers: Finally those capitalist pigs will pay for their crimes, eh? Eh comrades? Eh? Basil Exposition: Austin... we won. Austin Powers: Oh, smashing, groovy, yay capitalism!
I also don't understand how a hard drive is better than a digital tape.
It's generally more flexible; aside from random access -- and associated ideas, like being able to mark key points so you can quickly display them shortly after you've filmed ("I missed that goal! Did you get it on 'tape'?") and then return to filming -- you could use the HD also to store still frames, MP3s, or whatever else you might put on a portable hard drive.
Also, it's my understanding that the biggest problem with a road in Antarctica wouldn't be melting, but the continual accumulation of snow.
Antarctica is actually a desert, with little annual accumulation. It's only the eons that have caused mile-thick ice to accumulate. The real issue would be crevasses created by the slow movement of the ice.
Nintendo is notorious for hating to develop new consoles
Well of course. They love the licensing fees they get from people developing games for their consoles. It's having to produce a new one -- instead of raking in the dough from the old one -- that they hate.
And on the day after the copywright runs out when you release your own Mario game
But my Nunzio the electrician game will rock!
"It's a-me, Nunzio!"
Re:We are behind the rest of the world on this one
on
PC Baangs In America
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· Score: 1
That's because we can sit in our homes where we have new computers and high speed internet....and not have any real interaction with anyone...
At least in a parlor setting, you actually meet the people you game with. Do any online services ever give any indication of where the other players are, or could you spend hours playing the guy down the street from you and never know it?
"There may have been driver problems in the first test-prints of Creation, bugs in the software that make the printer work, that God may have overlooked,"
In related news, Richard Stallman has blamed the problems with the printer driver on it not being free software, and declared the start of the GNU/earth project.
I assume that by infantry you mean those soldiers actually on the battle front?
That's what I've inferred from reports on this report, although you would have to find Mr. Marshall's original report to find out his actual methodology.
Fear keeps soldiers alive, and keeps them shooting.
Actually, soldiers who are afraid often don't fire their guns. That would require exposing oneself to the enemy.
"Samuel Lyman Atwood (S. L. A.) Marshall developed a method of analyzing the actions of infantrymen in battle during World War II, and his findings and methodology have become controversial, especially during the past decade. According to Marshall, only about 15 percent of United States infantry soldiers fired their weapons in combat during World War II, and this number never increased to much higher than 25 percent for even the best of American units."
I found this to be a big pain until I got in the habit of initializing variables in which being undefined doesn't matter.
So to deal with variables that have an undefined state, you give them a defined state, even when their current value is in fact undefined? That's not a ringing endorsement for using variables that have an undefined state like these erzatz VB booleans.
No insult was intended regarding variables having to be finite. The point is that any variable has a finite number of states, one of which could be defined to be the "undefined" value, such as -1 (or ULONG_MAX or whatever that #define is.)
But back to the main idea here. If a language has VB-style booleans, then anyone writing a function must anticipate that any boolean arguments might be passed as Undefined. That's creating significant work and increased complexity. For what gain?
And because certain keyboard jockies are stupid, we should restrict the language?
A) at one time or another, we're all stupid.
2) We're not restricting the language, we're making sure our constructs actually represent what they purport to be. Having true booleans, and having to use enumerations or the like for more complex cases, does not restrict anything. Moreover, an enumerated type better documents what is going on; where I work, we often use enumerations rather than (C++) booleans for that reason.
Examples are global vars and goto statements; if you think these aren't useful
Wrongly used global variables are the bane of my existence. Ok, not quite that bad, but I've seen them misused far more frequently than I've seen them used wisely. Much of my time is spent properly factoring out what should have been parametric but was global instead.
I don't think I've used a goto since the early 80's, so I don't exactly see much need for them.
ISPs provide a service that can facilitate criminal activities. The courts will almost certainly rule that they are required to keep some records.
No, the courts would not rule on that, unless they're being particularly activist. What could happen is specific laws could be passed that require ISP record-keeping, just as laws regulate pawn shops. I don't believe such laws exist for ISPs in most areas, however, and the courts are not expected to decide whether they should -- it's a job for the legislatures.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a money-making scheme, but it is prior-art.
Yeah, but we've seen how much the Patent Office cares. I hate to even say this "out loud", but can you imagine if a spammer patented various spam filters and threatened to sue anyone who implemented such a filter?
Good point. The question is then, why is speed such a low priority when the #1 argument to buy a new PC is that 'it's faster'
A faster processor optimizes everything, and (assuming Intel/AMD/Motorola/whoever has done their job right) does so without compromising stability. Intel et al can optimize for performance because they've otherwise solved the x86 problem, it works and it works well.
It's not that applications should never be optimized, it's just that it should be lower priority than other things, and an optimization that few can use without a particularly high upside should be especially low priority.
Trust me, this was never about economic stimulation in third-world countries.
That is not the motivation doing the outsourcing, but that still may be the practical effect. They can't hire the third-worlders without paying them more than what others would hire them for, so that does end up putting money in that economy.
The thing is, though, even if U.S. companies don't outsource (skipping the question of what exactly is a U.S. company), wouldn't someone else simply hire those same people to do that job for cheaper, and destroy the U.S. company? You talk about steel, but Bethlehem Steel didn't outsource, it went bankrupt. So stopping outsourcing doesn't eliminate the problem.
GreaT.. I can use this special player to weed out all the annoying sex scenes.
Why do I get the feeling that someone's going to implement a reverse algorithm, which *only* shows the bits in the deleted segments? It would be like copies of novels where the pages with the steamy bit have been folded for convenient access.
That's all well and good but the war on drugs is supposed to stop people preying on the weak and the feeble. e.g. selling drugs to kids, giving crack to the homeless.
Coors and Miller don't sell to kids, except kids who deliberately deceive their retailers. Most legalization advocates would be happy with laws similar to U.S. alcohol laws. Under the current system, selling to an adult will get you in jail just as quickly as selling to a kid, so there's no incentive not to sell to kids.
As for the homeless, they have no money, and drug-selling businesses would have no interest in targeting them.
Could it be that there's also an element of laziness on the programmers' part?
It's not laziness, it's priorities. Optimization is low priority in programming; if there's other things that need to be done, they need to be done first. And hardware optimization comes even lower on the priority meter, especially hardware that only a few users have, and especially hardware that will at most give you a 2x speed-up.
You remember correctly but it would indeed be strange for the liver to produce IgE. IgE is released by only mast cells, immunge cells that are not normally circulatory but that settle in tissues and do their thing in situ.
Is any progress being made in detecting these allergies (short of the person entering anaphylactic shock) and coming up with treatments that would at least allow the person to reduce their reaction to accidental exposure?
7. Enjoy player that now plays DVDs from any region.
Being region-free isn't enough, as there are DVDs that will refuse to run in that situation. You need one you can set to a particular region before you put the DVD in. (My Cyberhome 500 allows that, but they aren't being sold any more.)
If Apple left this input device choice up to people by not including a mouse at all with their systems, you trolls would be all over them for THAT, too.
Apple could end the whole issue by having multi-button mice as a purchase option. I'm sure Logitech would happily whip up an Apple logo mouse in a week. I'm using a Dell-branded Logitech mouse with my PowerMac G4 and it works great.
Amusingly, Jaguar quality went way up when they were bought by Ford.
There was an article not long ago in USA Today where Jaguar was listed as one of the most reliable brands. I almost fainted on reading that.
Surely no sensible patent system would allow the patenting of ideas that are *so* simple.
They do, and don't call me "Shirley."
The idea that this is corporate greed rights all wrongs is really getting old. ...or perhaps Cringely is concerned about them suing him for libel. They've shown no reluctance to use lawyers, after all.
Da Comrade. The Capitalist Swine will fall any day now, overthrown by the will of the people.
Basil Exposition: Austin, the Cold War is over!
Austin Powers: Finally those capitalist pigs will pay for their crimes, eh? Eh comrades? Eh?
Basil Exposition: Austin... we won.
Austin Powers: Oh, smashing, groovy, yay capitalism!
I also don't understand how a hard drive is better than a digital tape.
It's generally more flexible; aside from random access -- and associated ideas, like being able to mark key points so you can quickly display them shortly after you've filmed ("I missed that goal! Did you get it on 'tape'?") and then return to filming -- you could use the HD also to store still frames, MP3s, or whatever else you might put on a portable hard drive.
Aren't we still hating Blizzard?
Yep, you'n'me both! As for everyone else, they made it one of the best-selling titles ever, so I think that was a pretty darned ineffective boycott...
I'm sorry, but somebody has brainwashed you into believing that a GUI is easier to use than the command-line.
My five-year-old can use a GUI, yet she's still illiterate. I'd say a GUI is easier to use.
Also, it's my understanding that the biggest problem with a road in Antarctica wouldn't be melting, but the continual accumulation of snow.
Antarctica is actually a desert, with little annual accumulation. It's only the eons that have caused mile-thick ice to accumulate. The real issue would be crevasses created by the slow movement of the ice.
Nintendo is notorious for hating to develop new consoles
Well of course. They love the licensing fees they get from people developing games for their consoles. It's having to produce a new one -- instead of raking in the dough from the old one -- that they hate.
And on the day after the copywright runs out when you release your own Mario game
But my Nunzio the electrician game will rock!
"It's a-me, Nunzio!"
That's because we can sit in our homes where we have new computers and high speed internet. ...and not have any real interaction with anyone...
At least in a parlor setting, you actually meet the people you game with. Do any online services ever give any indication of where the other players are, or could you spend hours playing the guy down the street from you and never know it?
"There may have been driver problems in the first test-prints of Creation, bugs in the software that make the printer work, that God may have overlooked,"
In related news, Richard Stallman has blamed the problems with the printer driver on it not being free software, and declared the start of the GNU/earth project.
I assume that by infantry you mean those soldiers actually on the battle front?
That's what I've inferred from reports on this report, although you would have to find Mr. Marshall's original report to find out his actual methodology.
Fear keeps soldiers alive, and keeps them shooting.
Actually, soldiers who are afraid often don't fire their guns. That would require exposing oneself to the enemy.
"Samuel Lyman Atwood (S. L. A.) Marshall developed a method of analyzing the actions of infantrymen in battle during World War II, and his findings and methodology have become controversial, especially during the past decade. According to Marshall, only about 15 percent of United States infantry soldiers fired their weapons in combat during World War II, and this number never increased to much higher than 25 percent for even the best of American units."
I found this to be a big pain until I got in the habit of initializing variables in which being undefined doesn't matter.
So to deal with variables that have an undefined state, you give them a defined state, even when their current value is in fact undefined? That's not a ringing endorsement for using variables that have an undefined state like these erzatz VB booleans.
No insult was intended regarding variables having to be finite. The point is that any variable has a finite number of states, one of which could be defined to be the "undefined" value, such as -1 (or ULONG_MAX or whatever that #define is.)
But back to the main idea here. If a language has VB-style booleans, then anyone writing a function must anticipate that any boolean arguments might be passed as Undefined. That's creating significant work and increased complexity. For what gain?
And because certain keyboard jockies are stupid, we should restrict the language?
A) at one time or another, we're all stupid.
2) We're not restricting the language, we're making sure our constructs actually represent what they purport to be. Having true booleans, and having to use enumerations or the like for more complex cases, does not restrict anything. Moreover, an enumerated type better documents what is going on; where I work, we often use enumerations rather than (C++) booleans for that reason.
Examples are global vars and goto statements; if you think these aren't useful
Wrongly used global variables are the bane of my existence. Ok, not quite that bad, but I've seen them misused far more frequently than I've seen them used wisely. Much of my time is spent properly factoring out what should have been parametric but was global instead.
I don't think I've used a goto since the early 80's, so I don't exactly see much need for them.
ISPs provide a service that can facilitate criminal activities. The courts will almost certainly rule that they are required to keep some records.
No, the courts would not rule on that, unless they're being particularly activist. What could happen is specific laws could be passed that require ISP record-keeping, just as laws regulate pawn shops. I don't believe such laws exist for ISPs in most areas, however, and the courts are not expected to decide whether they should -- it's a job for the legislatures.