A couple years ago, if you opened a new savings account with my bank, they'd give you an iPod nano.
Now it's an eee. We're quickly getting there. As the technology gets better and cheaper, ubiquitous computing seems just around the corner, 100% penetration (tho we're pretty close to that, too).
At some point companies will do that purely out of cost saving.
Assuming current carbon sinks schemes are essentially bogus (the only sketchy part about carbon taxes/credit/markets; I'm surprised people dislike the concept so much, otherwise it makes sense, if we're so concerned with creating incentives for people to stop polluting), that's about the only good thing about >$100 oil. Current generations of less polluting energy tech are getting more cost effective by the day, which in turn will make them more popular choices.
"Now take a terrorism suspect, who likely is not that well educated and has a legitimate fear of being spied on, and tell him to speak clearly into the microphone."
Three quarters were from middle-class or upper-class families, two thirds went to college and two thirds were professionals or semi-professionals, often engineers, physicians, architects or scientists. The average age for making an active commitment to violent jihad was 26, and three quarters of the terrorists were married, most of them with children.
Of course some would argue (and this being slashdot, some will) that the real reason for the decline in numeracy is because we no longer have to work out weights in pounds and ounces, or distances in feet and miles, or money in pounds shillings and pence. Err yeah maybe I dunno. Discuss.
I'll bite:P. Yes, 'cos lord knows that all those people in other countries stuck on metric for the past hundred years just cannot do math. Damn Anglos.
Understand to boot that they have a professional aversion to saying "impossible".
Heh! There was a delightful article in the New Yorker last year on the LHC. My favourite part was,
"I know Frank Wilczek," Engelen told me. "He is an order of magnitude smarter than I am. But he was perhaps a bit naïve." Engelen said that CERN officials are now instructed, with respect to the L.H.C.'s world-destroying potential, "not to say that the probability is very small but that the probability is zero."
I think you're missing an important point, and that is that none of that really matters.
First and for all, you can't write about yourself, that's always been against the rules.
Secondly, if someone did care enough to write about it, why does it matter if it stays behind? It's not like Wikipedia isn't indexed and you have to perform a linear search on all the articles; or that those 100kb will ruin the site; I'm sure popular article's talk page history and respective archives occupy more CPU time and database space than the majority of small-articles-five-people-care about.
It's the encyclopedia anyone can edit! What difference does it make? Why shouldn't we record everything anyone is remotely interested in? You will never see these articles, never know they exist unless you know about the topic in the first place. If those articles can be interesting to someone, why should we prevent that from happening?
Wikipedia to me is a lot of what people were promising in the mid 90's about the Information Superhighway, the future of civilisation! A place where you can find out about anything. Who cares, I say, how many pokemons there are or how many memes people have bothered to catalogue? If someone else appreciates that information, it doesn't hurt to keep it around.
It's only recently that it has become cheap enough to do so. 10, 20, 30 years ago it wasn't as viable to have a camera at every street corner being watched and recorded by a central authority.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that 9/11 took away people's ability to think and fight for civil rights. The matter of the fact is, the vast majority of people can't be bothered to care, and never has. I mean, fully participating in a democratic society is a lot of work. Volunteering for a candidate's campaign is a lot of work, let organising one or actually running for office. Those are the people most likely to actually go to demonstrations and protests, and they are a tiny minority. Everyone else has bills to pay and kids to feed and 2-4 hours of tv/internet/hobbies before they go to bed and start the day again, and the only thing that has ever changed is that the amount of time to yourself and the average income have risen (in the West) in the last 60, 70 years or so. If it doesn't directly affect you, very few people have the drive or the incentive to care.
People in power were busy prosecuting cleaning ladies for being potential communist spies 50 years ago. Do you really think they wouldn't have installed cameras everywhere, or bumped up widespread surveillance, if they only had access to the technology? Not all segments of people in government want this, but the kind of people that do have always been around, and recently in our democracies they've been winning.
When regular people mean they say, "understand computers", what they actually mean is "them youngsters have an fair-to-intuitive understanding of the various metaphors employed in common user interfaces that we lack", meaning, they can use a computer. This is very hard to keep in mind once you've spent 6hrs/day in front of one for about a decade, like I have, but is immediately obvious if you've ever tried to educate that increasingly rare animal, someone who has never used a computer before. This new generation of people certainly has no clue how anything operates, but they're capable of browsing the internet and word processing and saving files to disk and installing video games. That's an incredible leap of computer literacy, if you ask me, compared to the average in the previous generation.
Concepts like "windowing" and "double clicking" aren't obvious. I remember explaining to my father what a context menu was, and carefully showing him that he possessed enough dexterity to double click using his middle finger, instead of pausing and shifting fingers. It's... very interesting, actually, because by now I've internalized scores of different windowing environments and concepts (OS9, OSX, Windows across the ages, Linux across the ages).
I hate "the old days were so much better!" comments, especially when it comes to computing.
20 years ago, no one was connected to a 3mbps line, listening to music, with a mail and an IM client constantly pinging back, watching a video on youtube in one of twenty tabs in my firefox, with vim/emacs/eclipse open, azureus plugging away at some torrents as fast as it could, on two 1280x1024 screens in real colour, all simultaneously, on a single core I bought years ago. I still don't notice significant slowdowns.
Remember when emacs used to be slow? I don't, I wasn't computer literate back when 8 megs of swap was a huge deal. Does anyone seriously miss the days when 512 × 384 pixels were an improvement and you couldn't run more than one app at once?
You know, I'd be surprised if it runs on XP, let alone Linux.
I'm the "Microsoft Visual Experience Engine" has some core dependency like DirectX 10, or whatever, that is a big pain in the ass to port. (Not to mention, corporate strategies behind Vista and all that).
You'll find in one of the comments, an Apple dev addresses that properly; I don't actually believe that they're doing something evil, just holding up what that undocumented APIs count as being the same as secret.
If the only way to find and use an API is to troll through a hundred thousand lines of code, looking at specific regions, and then reverse-engineer what it does, in my book it's not unfair to call it a "secret".
Uncommented header files shouldn't count as a standard for "public" documentation, you know.
Microsoft doesn't have any significant marketshare of devices that accept touch input. Outside of tablets, I can't think of any serious product that currently exists that accepts that interface. It's not like new computers come with a Wacom tablet by default, or some other "touch-interface".
The iPhone and the Touch will be popular devices for years to come; I'd be very surprised if they don't significantly oversell tablet laptops, if only because they're cheaper, if they aren't already in that position. This is all reminiscent of the iPod's UI patents.
Watch for gestures to be supported big time in new Apple laptops.
Honestly, it seems to me that parsing XML in C++/Java feels a lot like voodoo, at least based on what I had to write this summer. I'm open to the idea that I failed catastrophically at researching the problem, but the best I could find in Java was an event-based SAX parser which is frankly a pain in the ass to use compared with say, Ruby's rexml (I'm quite aware which one is likely to be more efficient, mind you).
Maybe things have changed in the Java API since 1.4.2 (what my company standardized on), but from what I can tell, things are much more complicated than just providing xpaths.
Seeing people recommending regexes to parse XML leads me to believe that most other people haven't found any good solutions, either, or at least aren't terribly worried with parsing correctness.
First of all, GNOME is not a window manager. It is a complete desktop environment. When last I used GNOME, Sawfish was the default GNOME window manager. Before that, it was Enlightenment. I haven't followed GNOME for a while, maybe they've changed the WM again. The point being, you can use a number of WMs with GNOME; it is not, itself, a window manager.
Holy fuck, dude. Metacity has been the default client for almost five years now. The last time anyone had this conversation, in a serious manner, was also debating the merits of Red Hat 9, the average computer was probably a Pentium 2 or a Pentium 3, and we were ALL using 2.4 because 2.6 would only come out in December.
Today, the cheapest computer you can buy from Dell will almost certainly run the latest Ubuntu without a hitch. Nothing against fluxbox users, it's just, well, Desktop Environments are way more useful than they used to be, and Moore's Law finally caught up with us. On my dual-core, how well my GUI layer performs is just about my last concern, and it multiplexes all the terminals I want either way, thank you very much.
I would *love* it if you were still running some similarly ancient distro, tho. That's hardcore.
Sigs almost always change my perception of the commenter's opinion for the worse.
I usually give most posts the benefit of the doubt, until their sigs point out their raging libertarianism, or support for { intelligent design, global climate change denialism, etc } upon which I examine the post more critically.
If you put it through canada post, which requires no stamps, they actually have to respond to you. I can't remember if this only applies to your MP, but either way you force their aides to look through it and type some form of response.
It's up there in the most effective way to reach'em.
Bah. So, I run a search engine that's AGPL'd. Cool. Folk can search my site. Then I find a bug, and fix it on my copy of the search engine. Now, I'm in breach of license unless I add some stupid 'download my forked version source code here' link to my site. And I have to keep that link there until the main branch accept my bug fix and release a new version, whereupon I must upgrade to the new version (possibly including other stuff I don't want) until I can get rid of the link. Keep your changes in a diff patch against a specific release of whatever you forked (SVN does this for you iirc) and whammo!, you're done. Anyone wanting your changes can get them. Not any different from your obligations if you were distributing a forked copy of any regular GPL non-webapp, come to think about it.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, iirc the main thing about socialism is leveling the playing field :).
A couple years ago, if you opened a new savings account with my bank, they'd give you an iPod nano.
Now it's an eee. We're quickly getting there. As the technology gets better and cheaper, ubiquitous computing seems just around the corner, 100% penetration (tho we're pretty close to that, too).
*shrug
maybe it's psychosomatic but my elbows stopped hurting after I started using the ms natural 4000. It's the only keyboard I use, whenever possible.
I downloaded but never inha^Winstalled!
At some point companies will do that purely out of cost saving.
Assuming current carbon sinks schemes are essentially bogus (the only sketchy part about carbon taxes/credit/markets; I'm surprised people dislike the concept so much, otherwise it makes sense, if we're so concerned with creating incentives for people to stop polluting), that's about the only good thing about >$100 oil. Current generations of less polluting energy tech are getting more cost effective by the day, which in turn will make them more popular choices.
That's the word on the street, at least.
Might not apply for mujahideen in Afghanistan.
I'll bite
Yes, 'cos lord knows that all those people in other countries stuck on metric for the past hundred years just cannot do math.
Damn Anglos.
Heh!
There was a delightful article in the New Yorker last year on the LHC. My favourite part was,
As much as I hate the term, it seems nothing will ever get done as quickly as daring geeks to do it, or stating that something is impossible.
Can't we all just agree that it's reeeaaally complicated?
No man, bitching about Java memory consumption is so 1990's.
Nowadays, we complain that Ruby is too slow. Get with the times.
I think you're missing an important point, and that is that none of that really matters.
First and for all, you can't write about yourself, that's always been against the rules.
Secondly, if someone did care enough to write about it, why does it matter if it stays behind?
It's not like Wikipedia isn't indexed and you have to perform a linear search on all the articles; or that those 100kb will ruin the site; I'm sure popular article's talk page history and respective archives occupy more CPU time and database space than the majority of small-articles-five-people-care about.
It's the encyclopedia anyone can edit! What difference does it make? Why shouldn't we record everything anyone is remotely interested in? You will never see these articles, never know they exist unless you know about the topic in the first place. If those articles can be interesting to someone, why should we prevent that from happening?
Wikipedia to me is a lot of what people were promising in the mid 90's about the Information Superhighway, the future of civilisation! A place where you can find out about anything. Who cares, I say, how many pokemons there are or how many memes people have bothered to catalogue? If someone else appreciates that information, it doesn't hurt to keep it around.
Oh, that's quite easy to answer.
It's only recently that it has become cheap enough to do so. 10, 20, 30 years ago it wasn't as viable to have a camera at every street corner being watched and recorded by a central authority.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that 9/11 took away people's ability to think and fight for civil rights. The matter of the fact is, the vast majority of people can't be bothered to care, and never has. I mean, fully participating in a democratic society is a lot of work. Volunteering for a candidate's campaign is a lot of work, let organising one or actually running for office. Those are the people most likely to actually go to demonstrations and protests, and they are a tiny minority. Everyone else has bills to pay and kids to feed and 2-4 hours of tv/internet/hobbies before they go to bed and start the day again, and the only thing that has ever changed is that the amount of time to yourself and the average income have risen (in the West) in the last 60, 70 years or so. If it doesn't directly affect you, very few people have the drive or the incentive to care.
People in power were busy prosecuting cleaning ladies for being potential communist spies 50 years ago. Do you really think they wouldn't have installed cameras everywhere, or bumped up widespread surveillance, if they only had access to the technology? Not all segments of people in government want this, but the kind of people that do have always been around, and recently in our democracies they've been winning.
Well, put things into perspective here.
When regular people mean they say, "understand computers", what they actually mean is "them youngsters have an fair-to-intuitive understanding of the various metaphors employed in common user interfaces that we lack", meaning, they can use a computer. This is very hard to keep in mind once you've spent 6hrs/day in front of one for about a decade, like I have, but is immediately obvious if you've ever tried to educate that increasingly rare animal, someone who has never used a computer before. This new generation of people certainly has no clue how anything operates, but they're capable of browsing the internet and word processing and saving files to disk and installing video games. That's an incredible leap of computer literacy, if you ask me, compared to the average in the previous generation.
Concepts like "windowing" and "double clicking" aren't obvious. I remember explaining to my father what a context menu was, and carefully showing him that he possessed enough dexterity to double click using his middle finger, instead of pausing and shifting fingers. It's... very interesting, actually, because by now I've internalized scores of different windowing environments and concepts (OS9, OSX, Windows across the ages, Linux across the ages).
I think everyone tends to forget how close JFK's race was.
I hate "the old days were so much better!" comments, especially when it comes to computing.
20 years ago, no one was connected to a 3mbps line, listening to music, with a mail and an IM client constantly pinging back, watching a video on youtube in one of twenty tabs in my firefox, with vim/emacs/eclipse open, azureus plugging away at some torrents as fast as it could, on two 1280x1024 screens in real colour, all simultaneously, on a single core I bought years ago. I still don't notice significant slowdowns.
Remember when emacs used to be slow? I don't, I wasn't computer literate back when 8 megs of swap was a huge deal.
Does anyone seriously miss the days when 512 × 384 pixels were an improvement and you couldn't run more than one app at once?
You know, I'd be surprised if it runs on XP, let alone Linux.
I'm the "Microsoft Visual Experience Engine" has some core dependency like DirectX 10, or whatever, that is a big pain in the ass to port. (Not to mention, corporate strategies behind Vista and all that).
You'll find in one of the comments, an Apple dev addresses that properly; I don't actually believe that they're doing something evil, just holding up what that undocumented APIs count as being the same as secret.
If the only way to find and use an API is to troll through a hundred thousand lines of code, looking at specific regions, and then reverse-engineer what it does, in my book it's not unfair to call it a "secret".
Uncommented header files shouldn't count as a standard for "public" documentation, you know.
I don't think so.
Microsoft doesn't have any significant marketshare of devices that accept touch input. Outside of tablets, I can't think of any serious product that currently exists that accepts that interface. It's not like new computers come with a Wacom tablet by default, or some other "touch-interface".
The iPhone and the Touch will be popular devices for years to come; I'd be very surprised if they don't significantly oversell tablet laptops, if only because they're cheaper, if they aren't already in that position. This is all reminiscent of the iPod's UI patents.
Watch for gestures to be supported big time in new Apple laptops.
Honestly, it seems to me that parsing XML in C++/Java feels a lot like voodoo, at least based on what I had to write this summer.
I'm open to the idea that I failed catastrophically at researching the problem, but the best I could find in Java was an event-based SAX parser which is frankly a pain in the ass to use compared with say, Ruby's rexml (I'm quite aware which one is likely to be more efficient, mind you).
Maybe things have changed in the Java API since 1.4.2 (what my company standardized on), but from what I can tell, things are much more complicated than just providing xpaths.
Seeing people recommending regexes to parse XML leads me to believe that most other people haven't found any good solutions, either, or at least aren't terribly worried with parsing correctness.
Holy fuck, dude. Metacity has been the default client for almost five years now. The last time anyone had this conversation, in a serious manner, was also debating the merits of Red Hat 9, the average computer was probably a Pentium 2 or a Pentium 3, and we were ALL using 2.4 because 2.6 would only come out in December.
Today, the cheapest computer you can buy from Dell will almost certainly run the latest Ubuntu without a hitch.
Nothing against fluxbox users, it's just, well, Desktop Environments are way more useful than they used to be, and Moore's Law finally caught up with us. On my dual-core, how well my GUI layer performs is just about my last concern, and it multiplexes all the terminals I want either way, thank you very much.
I would *love* it if you were still running some similarly ancient distro, tho. That's hardcore.
Sigs almost always change my perception of the commenter's opinion for the worse.
I usually give most posts the benefit of the doubt, until their sigs point out their raging libertarianism, or support for { intelligent design, global climate change denialism, etc } upon which I examine the post more critically.
I'm still not sure whether that's a bad thing.
If you put it through canada post, which requires no stamps, they actually have to respond to you. I can't remember if this only applies to your MP, but either way you force their aides to look through it and type some form of response.
It's up there in the most effective way to reach'em.