I think it's slightly more accurate to say that there are 5 posts to every story stating how/.ers in general are horribly hypocritical (not as an individual force, but as an overriding perspective that colours each discussion - You know: Microsoft bad, Linux good, Google god, etc): A Google patent for something trivial is just rewards for great research, whereas a XYZ company patent (perhaps a new complex DRM technique for preventing the distribution of MP3s?) is a travesty for which the downfall of the USPO is the only recourse. It doesn't take a genius to recognize these. Call it a strawman if you will, but that's just burrowing your head in the sand.
I'm curious about what examples you have that don't comply with this theory? Is there some DirectX 5 games (which is quite a few DX games out there) that fail to run on a DX8 system? As far as I'm aware, the answer is no.
Any game that can't handle alt-tab, a screen saver kicking in, fast-user switching in XP Home, or ctrl-alt-del in WinNT/2k/XP was written by an idiot.
Yet I would say that it is the majority of DirectX applications. I am not anti-DirectX, but this is something that really irritates me. In the era of multimonitors and IM people often use several apps at once, yet quite a few games fail miserably if you alt-tab: If not all of the time, then at least some of the time. Again the benchmark by which I measure all other apps is Quake3, which remains the most impressive graphics app I've ever used.
The reason they are a moron if this doesn't work is because the exact same code that runs a resoloution change, refresh rate change, or changes anti-aliasion options, has to do a Reset to do it!. Same exact code, and it covers every case.
How many games let you change refresh rates, resolution, or anti-alias settings in the middle of play? Most require you to go to a configuration screen: Some even require you to run a separate application before even laucnhing the app their video code is so rudimentary. In these cases there is a specific "post configuration" video setup that occurs that doesn't get called during adhoc changes.
While hardly the same thing, at the binary level this reminds me of Detours, a very cool binary interception package from Microsoft Research: Without the sourcecode it allows you to target and intercept calls at the function level, useful, for instance, for timing the framerate of an OpenGL application for instance (I wanted to know the effects of various settings so I intercepted the flip/render command in the opengl system calls...voila I had an exact timing of every frame interval). Of course this is much less of a scope, but it is a tremendously useful little tool.
Indeed you are misunderstanding: I was pointing out that it's funny that I was refuting his FUD as the most well behaved, impressive game I have is a OpenGL game, while most of the DirectX games are pure garbage. However I realize that a lot of it has to do with the developers, developers who just decide that that they'll deal with a full screen flip-scenario and the world is theirs to control the PC. That is the problem with most DirectX games (for instance SimCity 4 would be a GREAT game to play in a window, doing odd things while programming...nope, can't do it. It insists upon taking over the PC).
It's like a combination of C and C++, using all the bad features of each. I've worked with DirectX 4, 5, and 6, over a year period, and the number of problems and quirks drove me to a stabler API. The next versions of DirectX aren't even compatible with previous versions!
Uh....what? Firstly no they aren't "compatible" from an interface perspective because each successive version retains the prior version interfaces (i.e. if you start asking for DX6 interfaces in your DX5 authored app, expect to change things, otherwise just keep asking for DX5 interfaces...it'll work just fine for someone with DX 8). DirectX is COM based meaning that in reality it is language neutral, though realistically it is usually used from C++.
Having a closed standard means a few guys in the corner office decide what flavor of API they want to turn out that month... Well, that's too bad, because 2.0 is no longer supported.
I am not a game programmer, though I have played around with DirectX just for fun, but I've noticed that the steep initial learning curve of it seems to make it enemies: People who just couldn't figure out COM who then forever become avowed enemies of all things DirectX.
You can always build on top of the OpenGL foundation, and use the hardware specific, cutting edge stuff on top of that.
Erm...if you're going to do that then be done with OpenGL all together and write to the GPU and video buffers directly, no? The whole point of a general API is that it encapsulates widely used features in a vendor neutral format. Calling vendor extensions hardly qualifies and at best could be a hack.
If you like having a tattered API that changes more often than your underwear, then go with DirectX
Yes, and if you want a car that doesn't progress as often as your underwear buy a East German Trabant...still the same car it was in 1960!
It's funny that I seem counter to your argument as personally I find that the most well behaved, powerful game that I ever play is Quake 3: Whether spanning windows, in a window, full screen, alt-tabbed 50 times, minimized/maximized-It goes through it all with absolute gusto. Other DirectX apps hog the whole machine rendering it into a single tasked PC, fall apart if I dare to alt-tab out of them, and just generally behave poorly.
I am absolutely, positively convinced that spammers hold Slashdot accounts and come here to try to convince us all that it's no big deal, and we should all just live in peace with messages with forged headers, fraudulent subject lines, web bug images intentionally intending to circumvent processes to avoid them, criminal "removal" processes and activities, often pornographic content that could get one fired or put under surveillance (nothing like a big set of tits appearing on your screen when you open the "FW: Budget proposal" message. This ignores that these are sent out to anyone and everyone, including minors), a business that is almost entirely supported by pump-and-dump schemes, bogus snake oils, and outright illegal pyramid (or similar schemes), and a illegal use of other people's hardware and bandwidth resources. How else could someone be so unbelievably stupid to go running around ranting about how it's no big deal? No big deal indeed. Shall I bend over?
Hilarious "irony" alert: Isn't it funny when people specifically go into discussions ABOUT SPAM to complain about how they're sick of "hearing people complain about spam": Hell, you don't even have to "hit the delete key"-DON'T COME INTO THE BLOODY DISCUSSION. Unbelievable. Then again, I'm just sick of reading messages complaining about spam in discussions about spam...
The hard drive really is a major bottleneck on any modern computing system - it can take hundreds of milliseconds to retrieve a piece of data and have it transfered all the way into memory, where the processor operates in terms of nanoseconds. The thread waiting on the data is left waiting for thousands of cycles, where it could be getting on with some work.
Only really poor programs actually sit around waiting for the data to come back from the hard drive: Instead most good applications nowadays operate on a non-blocking IO (in Windows jargon it is "Overlapped IO") where an application informs the OS that it'd like a piece of data and it then proceeds to do whatever it was doing, eventually getting around to using that data. I say this having written several compression and encryption applications that did exactly that: I would only wait for the very first block, and from then on would initiate the next block read, start processing the current block, and by the time I was ready for it the next block was there. In the grand scheme of things "loading a word document" or what have you is trivial in the overall context of system speed (i.e. that 60ms loading a file that is then used for two hours is somewhat inconsequential).
Right on the money. Indeed, one thing that is fascinating about most people is their failure to understand that the only ones that can emotionally harm them are themselves, and the one's they love: Some random jerk can only make you emotionally scar yourself (i.e. You only get hurt by those you let hurt you). I was a definite loner during my school days (largely due to being from a very poor family), took party in absolutely no sports, and derived very little enjoyment out of the whole school experience, yet there is literally no one "villain" who I can recall because they weren't worth paying attention to. I don't run to Classmates.com to find out what they're all up to because honestly I couldn't care less what they're up to: This isn't a spiteful comment, but rather simple reality.
Perhaps my lack of animosity is due to the fact that I early on resigned myself to being an outsider, and that was, as Stuart Smiley would say, ok. The people who I think still go through life licking their wounds are those who really, really envied the people who they paradoxically belittle: They wish they could hang with the "cool" girls and be the football star, etc.
A significant amount of the basic research in Pharmacuticals is funded by tax dollars.
Would you mind backing this up with some facts? The last time I saw the R&D of the major drug companies was in the tens of billions of dollars annually, and while there is research at educational and public health labs, it is often sponsored by drug companies (i.e. when you hear about Somewhere U discovering a cure for something, it was likely in a program completely underwritten by a pharma company, basically doing a huge favour to the staff, students, and institution).
Why did we ever move to PC's from thin clients in the first place?
Because it was the right thing to do.
We have consoles for gaming, windows for PC gaming, and *nix for serious work (try doing something else under say Solaris, and posting to slashdot doesn't count.) now. Why all of the redundancy? Aren't we in an economic downturn?
Really, eh? And what's with all these different car models and types? Who needs Hondas, GMs, Chryslers, and Fords; Minivans, compacts, pickups and transports? We need one unified universal transport solution! Who needs competitive forces bringing the best solution from each vendor. I propose that we all drive transport trucks because that can encapsulate any need (ala a mainframe).
The bus speeds and improvements are nice, don't get me wrong... but in a PC? It removes the PCI bottleneck problem, but I don't see where it removes the HDD bottleneck in terms of raw speed.
The HDD bottleneck? When do you have a HDD bottleneck? While this misnomer is often repeated, repetition doesn't indicate a foundation of truth. My machine, XP, boots in about 15 seconds, and shortly after all my apps are running it barely ever touches the harddrive at all (a standard 7200RPM IDE), running virtually everything in the copious RAM. Even for things like video compression my CPU is currently the limiting factor, and of course where the harddrive is the limiting factor feel free to buy a high performance solution: You can set yourself up a 6 disk RAID 10 15,000RPM array today to eliminate all of your hard drive needs.
I really don't get how you scored 5 for this: This is an absolutely standard "bah humbug!" type of post that follows up absolutely any story regarding new hardware/technology.
How is it a "joke"? The article specifically states that Duke Nukem Forever is basically a write off at this point: It materially relates to the story at hand.
In a related note, what a disaster DNF has been, and what a tremendous example of an incredible software project management failure. I mean using the "we're making it super, duper good!" excuse works for so long until pretty soon you're just perpetually fighting the natural curve of technology. I really feel sorry for that team, or anyone who works on it.
And your university used to run the back-end on Windows? Somehow I find that incredibly doubtful. Instead they likely ran on some other variant of UNIX, and it's basically switching from Valencia oranges to Sweet and Juicy Oranges. Linux has made huge inroads for sure, and it has a lot going for it, but the cold hard reality is that most of its progress is at the loss of other UNIXes, rather than Windows.
They thought of a way to improve upon an existing invention. They were the first to do it. They want to make money from their idea. It's only logical for them to seek a patent. I guess congratulations are in order!
I find it absolutely mind boggling how apologetic the Slashdot crowd is towards Google: Are many of you people card carrying Googolian cult members? It really just boggles the mind how if this same story were about Microsoft doing something a little different there would be endless flames and outrage about the incompetence of the patent office, but since it's Google it's all good though, right.
Firstly, many computer "inventions" are not inventions at all, they are merely applications when computing and networking abilities reach a certain point: At that point certain applications are obvious and inevitable. Additionally many "inventions" are merely parallels of other "inventions", again obvious to virtually anyone. When I read Usenet newsgroups I tend to read threads that have the most replies: Is Usenet not prior art for PageRank? It many not be literally, but it most certainly is practically. Hell Slashdot is a variation of PageRank if you read only posts which have been moderated up (consider linking a form of "moderation").
When PageRank first came out EVERYONE postulated that it was horribly weak in that it counted any votes as a vote of authority for all topics (i.e. a heavily linked XXX site could put up a site on Bullfrogs and suddenly be the premiere authority). I read, 5 or more years ago, several articles about authority rankings based upon topic of discussion ("web of authority"). This Google patent offers absolutely nothing over that, and is an obvious extrapolation of the weaknesses of PageRank, which itself is an obvious authority ranking system.
Now that they've been awarded a patent for page-rank, it's required for them to make it public so that people can license it
I had made this mistake before, confusing trade groups with patents. AFAIK patents do not force you to license it whatsoever. Instead they can be used to hunt down anyone who intrudes into your patent and sue them out of existence.
In any case this isn't about PageRank, but is about a revised search technique: In a nutshell it is PageRank by resultset -> i.e. Say you searched for "Scooby Doo" : It gets the result set of Scooby Doo hits, and THEN it derives a pagerank within that set of Scooby Doo hits (versus the basic PageRank which derives the ranking for the whole net). It's funny because I had actually investigated the initial steps of a patent several years ago for something which I called a "combined corpus" (which in a similar light groups items by topic of discussion-i.e. a page on Crickets would get a good score for cricket searches by being referenced by lots of Cricket pages : It wouldn't benefit them to put a nude picture of Britney Spears to get a lot of links and boost their generic pagerank) because of the general ridiculousness of something like the basic PageRank, but I knew that against a giant machine like Google I wouldn't stand a chance so I just forgot about it (which is the problem with patents: How many people think of a great idea but then let it rot because of the almost certain patent overlaps). I've had that same thought process with a lot of, in my opinion, great ideas.
People now have the opportunity to build new methods and innovate with Pagerank as a basis for that innovation. (Real innovation, not MS innovation.)
Ooooh, nice use of the obligatory MS slam for mod points (ignore the fact that MS has been a fantastic patent citizen and has never, to my knowledge, enforced dubious patents). In any case how is it "innovation" for others to now use something existing (if Google allowed it)? Sounds like counter-innovation because everyone who might possibly overlap with this patent will now just dump the project lest they cross paths with Google.
I think you thoroughly missed the humor of the post that you replied to. You see Slashdotters, as a general stereotype, fall over themselves to gush praise on Google and to assuage themselves that Google is a benevolent force that represents all that is good (despite several questionable practices. Anyone remember the competition where Google got kids across the land to give them new search techniques virtually for free?). These people seek out and fervently debate any post that casts anything but pure heavenly light on the forces that be at Google. On the flip side these same people spittle bile in a trembling rage at the mere mention of software patents, particularly about something as trivial as what we're talking about here. This is the sort of paradox that is causing heads to pop from the contrasting pressures like a giant whitehead bursting at its skinly bounds. Can you hear that? [pop!] [pop! pop!] [pop!] That's the sound of hypocrisy claiming some victims.
What utter claptrap: If someone has a philisophical difference in computing than you and your croonies, surely they must be an apologist/on the Microsoft payroll, etc. Of course on the opposing side anyone who fervently tries to twist everything into some anti-Microsoft tirade surely must be an advocate of all that is truth.
NTFS is not, by default, an encrypted filesystem (just as the Linux and FreeBSD standard filesystems aren't), though there are encryption features within the operating system for highly sensitive files. This fundamental fact renders this whole argument about the recovery console absolutely ridiculous (I thought the whole deal was a joke when I first read it): What if the recovery disk didn't drop you to a console? Well then you could mount the drive in Linux, or use a hexeditor in DOS, or... etc. If you are advocating that the filesystem should be encrypted, then I hope you carry that same advocacy through to every other operating system that doesn't use an encrypted filesystem (hint: All of them, at least within the mainstream sphere. Fully encrypted filesystems are very slow, and extremely volatile).
You must have configured Slashdot to give a +4 bonus to interesting posts as my post is currently ranked 2, with a +1 Interesting. I suggest some training courses.
I could go on all day and show you where Microsoft is anything but trustworthy.
Wow, talk about a weak case. You blather on factlessly about being able to "go on all day", when all you've shown is a short term academic technical exploit of what is currently the largest worldwide authentication technology. One would think that with your stunning ability to "go on all day" you could have found something a little more convincing than that: Show me where Microsoft sold user information, or collected information where it wasn't requested or technically required (a moronic addition to this story is that "MICROSOFT KNOWS WHAT DVDS YOU WATCH!" by downloading the play list for users who selected the option "Download media information" option. CRIMINY! CDBB KNOWS WHAT CDS I LISTEN TO WHEN I QUERY THEM FOR CD INFORMATION!)
How is this insightful? More like "Vehemently anti-Microsoft".
When it comes to Windows users, I really do blame the victim. There's a point where a reputation becomes so soiled, so repeated, and so publically, that it really is either dishonest or stupifyingly negligent for someone to say they didn't know. There just aren't any rocks in the world that are big enough for someone to live under and not hear about Microsoft.
Would you mind pointing out some of those instances where Microsoft abused the privacy of their customers? Given your claims of the prevalence of such information, I'm really eager to listen to the examples you surely will be able to give. Undercutting Netscape and extending Java don't count, by the way, and only the fervently anti-Microsoft can't see the grayness in those areas (i.e. Microsoft is hardly the villain).
For all of the "I told you so!" rhetoric in here (hardly surprizing), I personally find Microsoft to be one of the most trustworthy companies when it comes to privacy: They have gone far above and beyond the call of duty time and time again to put the privacy of their customers ahead of the value of the information. If, indeed, this is sending information on other products installed I would bet a pretty good penny (two pennies in fact!) that it is entirely unintentional.
You have _no_ right to "privacy" if you are patronizing someones store. Deal with it.
Well one issue I have with it is the cost (a cost which each and every one of us will bear. While people will say "Yeah, but it'll be made up in reduced shoplifting", realize that shoplifting generally is dramatically less of a economic hit for retailers than you've been led to believe. They lose far more to employees taking stock home or skimming the tills): Currently the RFID tags, for those who didn't read the NYT article (i.e. most of you), cost $0.30US a piece, with the price expected to drop to $0.05US. Add in the cost of the detection equipment (they're talking about every rack having a detector so it can monitor stock and "alert security" if several items are taken at once...hope you shop every week and don't dare buy multiple items at once), the IT infrastructure: These sorts of things end up cost tens or hundreds of billions of dollars.
This isnt meant to be a flame.. it is meant to point out that they track everything you buy anyway, and almost guaranteed, if you use credit or debit cards, there is a file SOMEWHERE that lists everything you bought, if you dont, like me, get that list on your statement every month
Your credit card or debit card company knows what you bought? Funny, but mine don't. They see that I spent $107 at Fortinos and $89 at Walmart, but they DON'T see that I bought Lays BBQ chips and a big tub of jellybeans, and Walmart doesn't see what I bought at Fortinos and vice versa.
Finally, even during the Cold War, one of the guys that worked in a sensitive area wore a hat with a KGB symbol on it.
I'm not quite sure what to make of this: What were they supposed to do? I hardly think that bonafide KGB spies would be wearing KGB hats as they infiltrate facilities, and it hardly seems reasonable that the security staff needs to be onguard for obvious covert operative logos. This just sounds like a "some dude is an smartass", and is a management issue far more than it's a security issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Brilliant troll. Kudos. I'm astounded that people are taking this seriously.
I think it's slightly more accurate to say that there are 5 posts to every story stating how /.ers in general are horribly hypocritical (not as an individual force, but as an overriding perspective that colours each discussion - You know: Microsoft bad, Linux good, Google god, etc): A Google patent for something trivial is just rewards for great research, whereas a XYZ company patent (perhaps a new complex DRM technique for preventing the distribution of MP3s?) is a travesty for which the downfall of the USPO is the only recourse. It doesn't take a genius to recognize these. Call it a strawman if you will, but that's just burrowing your head in the sand.
That's the theory. Pity about the practice
I'm curious about what examples you have that don't comply with this theory? Is there some DirectX 5 games (which is quite a few DX games out there) that fail to run on a DX8 system? As far as I'm aware, the answer is no.
Any game that can't handle alt-tab, a screen saver kicking in, fast-user switching in XP Home, or ctrl-alt-del in WinNT/2k/XP was written by an idiot.
Yet I would say that it is the majority of DirectX applications. I am not anti-DirectX, but this is something that really irritates me. In the era of multimonitors and IM people often use several apps at once, yet quite a few games fail miserably if you alt-tab: If not all of the time, then at least some of the time. Again the benchmark by which I measure all other apps is Quake3, which remains the most impressive graphics app I've ever used.
The reason they are a moron if this doesn't work is because the exact same code that runs a resoloution change, refresh rate change, or changes anti-aliasion options, has to do a Reset to do it!. Same exact code, and it covers every case.
How many games let you change refresh rates, resolution, or anti-alias settings in the middle of play? Most require you to go to a configuration screen: Some even require you to run a separate application before even laucnhing the app their video code is so rudimentary. In these cases there is a specific "post configuration" video setup that occurs that doesn't get called during adhoc changes.
While hardly the same thing, at the binary level this reminds me of Detours, a very cool binary interception package from Microsoft Research: Without the sourcecode it allows you to target and intercept calls at the function level, useful, for instance, for timing the framerate of an OpenGL application for instance (I wanted to know the effects of various settings so I intercepted the flip/render command in the opengl system calls...voila I had an exact timing of every frame interval). Of course this is much less of a scope, but it is a tremendously useful little tool.
NT 4 used DirectX 3. There was no DirectX 4.0, probably because there was a considerable delay between 3 and 5.
Indeed you are misunderstanding: I was pointing out that it's funny that I was refuting his FUD as the most well behaved, impressive game I have is a OpenGL game, while most of the DirectX games are pure garbage. However I realize that a lot of it has to do with the developers, developers who just decide that that they'll deal with a full screen flip-scenario and the world is theirs to control the PC. That is the problem with most DirectX games (for instance SimCity 4 would be a GREAT game to play in a window, doing odd things while programming...nope, can't do it. It insists upon taking over the PC).
It's like a combination of C and C++, using all the bad features of each. I've worked with DirectX 4, 5, and 6, over a year period, and the number of problems and quirks drove me to a stabler API. The next versions of DirectX aren't even compatible with previous versions!
Uh....what? Firstly no they aren't "compatible" from an interface perspective because each successive version retains the prior version interfaces (i.e. if you start asking for DX6 interfaces in your DX5 authored app, expect to change things, otherwise just keep asking for DX5 interfaces...it'll work just fine for someone with DX 8). DirectX is COM based meaning that in reality it is language neutral, though realistically it is usually used from C++.
Having a closed standard means a few guys in the corner office decide what flavor of API they want to turn out that month... Well, that's too bad, because 2.0 is no longer supported.
I am not a game programmer, though I have played around with DirectX just for fun, but I've noticed that the steep initial learning curve of it seems to make it enemies: People who just couldn't figure out COM who then forever become avowed enemies of all things DirectX.
You can always build on top of the OpenGL foundation, and use the hardware specific, cutting edge stuff on top of that.
Erm...if you're going to do that then be done with OpenGL all together and write to the GPU and video buffers directly, no? The whole point of a general API is that it encapsulates widely used features in a vendor neutral format. Calling vendor extensions hardly qualifies and at best could be a hack.
If you like having a tattered API that changes more often than your underwear, then go with DirectX
Yes, and if you want a car that doesn't progress as often as your underwear buy a East German Trabant...still the same car it was in 1960!
It's funny that I seem counter to your argument as personally I find that the most well behaved, powerful game that I ever play is Quake 3: Whether spanning windows, in a window, full screen, alt-tabbed 50 times, minimized/maximized-It goes through it all with absolute gusto. Other DirectX apps hog the whole machine rendering it into a single tasked PC, fall apart if I dare to alt-tab out of them, and just generally behave poorly.
I am absolutely, positively convinced that spammers hold Slashdot accounts and come here to try to convince us all that it's no big deal, and we should all just live in peace with messages with forged headers, fraudulent subject lines, web bug images intentionally intending to circumvent processes to avoid them, criminal "removal" processes and activities, often pornographic content that could get one fired or put under surveillance (nothing like a big set of tits appearing on your screen when you open the "FW: Budget proposal" message. This ignores that these are sent out to anyone and everyone, including minors), a business that is almost entirely supported by pump-and-dump schemes, bogus snake oils, and outright illegal pyramid (or similar schemes), and a illegal use of other people's hardware and bandwidth resources. How else could someone be so unbelievably stupid to go running around ranting about how it's no big deal? No big deal indeed. Shall I bend over?
Hilarious "irony" alert: Isn't it funny when people specifically go into discussions ABOUT SPAM to complain about how they're sick of "hearing people complain about spam": Hell, you don't even have to "hit the delete key"-DON'T COME INTO THE BLOODY DISCUSSION. Unbelievable. Then again, I'm just sick of reading messages complaining about spam in discussions about spam...
The hard drive really is a major bottleneck on any modern computing system - it can take hundreds of milliseconds to retrieve a piece of data and have it transfered all the way into memory, where the processor operates in terms of nanoseconds. The thread waiting on the data is left waiting for thousands of cycles, where it could be getting on with some work.
Only really poor programs actually sit around waiting for the data to come back from the hard drive: Instead most good applications nowadays operate on a non-blocking IO (in Windows jargon it is "Overlapped IO") where an application informs the OS that it'd like a piece of data and it then proceeds to do whatever it was doing, eventually getting around to using that data. I say this having written several compression and encryption applications that did exactly that: I would only wait for the very first block, and from then on would initiate the next block read, start processing the current block, and by the time I was ready for it the next block was there. In the grand scheme of things "loading a word document" or what have you is trivial in the overall context of system speed (i.e. that 60ms loading a file that is then used for two hours is somewhat inconsequential).
Right on the money. Indeed, one thing that is fascinating about most people is their failure to understand that the only ones that can emotionally harm them are themselves, and the one's they love: Some random jerk can only make you emotionally scar yourself (i.e. You only get hurt by those you let hurt you). I was a definite loner during my school days (largely due to being from a very poor family), took party in absolutely no sports, and derived very little enjoyment out of the whole school experience, yet there is literally no one "villain" who I can recall because they weren't worth paying attention to. I don't run to Classmates.com to find out what they're all up to because honestly I couldn't care less what they're up to: This isn't a spiteful comment, but rather simple reality.
Perhaps my lack of animosity is due to the fact that I early on resigned myself to being an outsider, and that was, as Stuart Smiley would say, ok. The people who I think still go through life licking their wounds are those who really, really envied the people who they paradoxically belittle: They wish they could hang with the "cool" girls and be the football star, etc.
A significant amount of the basic research in Pharmacuticals is funded by tax dollars.
Would you mind backing this up with some facts? The last time I saw the R&D of the major drug companies was in the tens of billions of dollars annually, and while there is research at educational and public health labs, it is often sponsored by drug companies (i.e. when you hear about Somewhere U discovering a cure for something, it was likely in a program completely underwritten by a pharma company, basically doing a huge favour to the staff, students, and institution).
Why did we ever move to PC's from thin clients in the first place?
Because it was the right thing to do.
We have consoles for gaming, windows for PC gaming, and *nix for serious work (try doing something else under say Solaris, and posting to slashdot doesn't count.) now. Why all of the redundancy? Aren't we in an economic downturn?
Really, eh? And what's with all these different car models and types? Who needs Hondas, GMs, Chryslers, and Fords; Minivans, compacts, pickups and transports? We need one unified universal transport solution! Who needs competitive forces bringing the best solution from each vendor. I propose that we all drive transport trucks because that can encapsulate any need (ala a mainframe).
The bus speeds and improvements are nice, don't get me wrong... but in a PC? It removes the PCI bottleneck problem, but I don't see where it removes the HDD bottleneck in terms of raw speed.
The HDD bottleneck? When do you have a HDD bottleneck? While this misnomer is often repeated, repetition doesn't indicate a foundation of truth. My machine, XP, boots in about 15 seconds, and shortly after all my apps are running it barely ever touches the harddrive at all (a standard 7200RPM IDE), running virtually everything in the copious RAM. Even for things like video compression my CPU is currently the limiting factor, and of course where the harddrive is the limiting factor feel free to buy a high performance solution: You can set yourself up a 6 disk RAID 10 15,000RPM array today to eliminate all of your hard drive needs.
I really don't get how you scored 5 for this: This is an absolutely standard "bah humbug!" type of post that follows up absolutely any story regarding new hardware/technology.
How is it a "joke"? The article specifically states that Duke Nukem Forever is basically a write off at this point: It materially relates to the story at hand.
In a related note, what a disaster DNF has been, and what a tremendous example of an incredible software project management failure. I mean using the "we're making it super, duper good!" excuse works for so long until pretty soon you're just perpetually fighting the natural curve of technology. I really feel sorry for that team, or anyone who works on it.
And your university used to run the back-end on Windows? Somehow I find that incredibly doubtful. Instead they likely ran on some other variant of UNIX, and it's basically switching from Valencia oranges to Sweet and Juicy Oranges. Linux has made huge inroads for sure, and it has a lot going for it, but the cold hard reality is that most of its progress is at the loss of other UNIXes, rather than Windows.
They thought of a way to improve upon an existing invention. They were the first to do it. They want to make money from their idea. It's only logical for them to seek a patent. I guess congratulations are in order!
I find it absolutely mind boggling how apologetic the Slashdot crowd is towards Google: Are many of you people card carrying Googolian cult members? It really just boggles the mind how if this same story were about Microsoft doing something a little different there would be endless flames and outrage about the incompetence of the patent office, but since it's Google it's all good though, right.
Firstly, many computer "inventions" are not inventions at all, they are merely applications when computing and networking abilities reach a certain point: At that point certain applications are obvious and inevitable. Additionally many "inventions" are merely parallels of other "inventions", again obvious to virtually anyone. When I read Usenet newsgroups I tend to read threads that have the most replies: Is Usenet not prior art for PageRank? It many not be literally, but it most certainly is practically. Hell Slashdot is a variation of PageRank if you read only posts which have been moderated up (consider linking a form of "moderation").
When PageRank first came out EVERYONE postulated that it was horribly weak in that it counted any votes as a vote of authority for all topics (i.e. a heavily linked XXX site could put up a site on Bullfrogs and suddenly be the premiere authority). I read, 5 or more years ago, several articles about authority rankings based upon topic of discussion ("web of authority"). This Google patent offers absolutely nothing over that, and is an obvious extrapolation of the weaknesses of PageRank, which itself is an obvious authority ranking system.
Now that they've been awarded a patent for page-rank, it's required for them to make it public so that people can license it
I had made this mistake before, confusing trade groups with patents. AFAIK patents do not force you to license it whatsoever. Instead they can be used to hunt down anyone who intrudes into your patent and sue them out of existence.
In any case this isn't about PageRank, but is about a revised search technique: In a nutshell it is PageRank by resultset -> i.e. Say you searched for "Scooby Doo" : It gets the result set of Scooby Doo hits, and THEN it derives a pagerank within that set of Scooby Doo hits (versus the basic PageRank which derives the ranking for the whole net). It's funny because I had actually investigated the initial steps of a patent several years ago for something which I called a "combined corpus" (which in a similar light groups items by topic of discussion-i.e. a page on Crickets would get a good score for cricket searches by being referenced by lots of Cricket pages : It wouldn't benefit them to put a nude picture of Britney Spears to get a lot of links and boost their generic pagerank) because of the general ridiculousness of something like the basic PageRank, but I knew that against a giant machine like Google I wouldn't stand a chance so I just forgot about it (which is the problem with patents: How many people think of a great idea but then let it rot because of the almost certain patent overlaps). I've had that same thought process with a lot of, in my opinion, great ideas.
People now have the opportunity to build new methods and innovate with Pagerank as a basis for that innovation. (Real innovation, not MS innovation.)
Ooooh, nice use of the obligatory MS slam for mod points (ignore the fact that MS has been a fantastic patent citizen and has never, to my knowledge, enforced dubious patents). In any case how is it "innovation" for others to now use something existing (if Google allowed it)? Sounds like counter-innovation because everyone who might possibly overlap with this patent will now just dump the project lest they cross paths with Google.
I think you thoroughly missed the humor of the post that you replied to. You see Slashdotters, as a general stereotype, fall over themselves to gush praise on Google and to assuage themselves that Google is a benevolent force that represents all that is good (despite several questionable practices. Anyone remember the competition where Google got kids across the land to give them new search techniques virtually for free?). These people seek out and fervently debate any post that casts anything but pure heavenly light on the forces that be at Google. On the flip side these same people spittle bile in a trembling rage at the mere mention of software patents, particularly about something as trivial as what we're talking about here. This is the sort of paradox that is causing heads to pop from the contrasting pressures like a giant whitehead bursting at its skinly bounds. Can you hear that? [pop!] [pop! pop!] [pop!] That's the sound of hypocrisy claiming some victims.
Note: I like Google. Neigh, I love Google.
What utter claptrap: If someone has a philisophical difference in computing than you and your croonies, surely they must be an apologist/on the Microsoft payroll, etc. Of course on the opposing side anyone who fervently tries to twist everything into some anti-Microsoft tirade surely must be an advocate of all that is truth.
NTFS is not, by default, an encrypted filesystem (just as the Linux and FreeBSD standard filesystems aren't), though there are encryption features within the operating system for highly sensitive files. This fundamental fact renders this whole argument about the recovery console absolutely ridiculous (I thought the whole deal was a joke when I first read it): What if the recovery disk didn't drop you to a console? Well then you could mount the drive in Linux, or use a hexeditor in DOS, or... etc. If you are advocating that the filesystem should be encrypted, then I hope you carry that same advocacy through to every other operating system that doesn't use an encrypted filesystem (hint: All of them, at least within the mainstream sphere. Fully encrypted filesystems are very slow, and extremely volatile).
How do you change the user's password from a console without having admin access, and therefore without having SAM access?
Unfortunately many of them totally fubar your SAM, rendering the machine a candidate for a rebuilt.
How does this rate a +5 interesting?
How are you allowed near computers?
You must have configured Slashdot to give a +4 bonus to interesting posts as my post is currently ranked 2, with a +1 Interesting. I suggest some training courses.
I could go on all day and show you where Microsoft is anything but trustworthy.
Wow, talk about a weak case. You blather on factlessly about being able to "go on all day", when all you've shown is a short term academic technical exploit of what is currently the largest worldwide authentication technology. One would think that with your stunning ability to "go on all day" you could have found something a little more convincing than that: Show me where Microsoft sold user information, or collected information where it wasn't requested or technically required (a moronic addition to this story is that "MICROSOFT KNOWS WHAT DVDS YOU WATCH!" by downloading the play list for users who selected the option "Download media information" option. CRIMINY! CDBB KNOWS WHAT CDS I LISTEN TO WHEN I QUERY THEM FOR CD INFORMATION!)
How is this insightful? More like "Vehemently anti-Microsoft".
When it comes to Windows users, I really do blame the victim. There's a point where a reputation becomes so soiled, so repeated, and so publically, that it really is either dishonest or stupifyingly negligent for someone to say they didn't know. There just aren't any rocks in the world that are big enough for someone to live under and not hear about Microsoft.
Would you mind pointing out some of those instances where Microsoft abused the privacy of their customers? Given your claims of the prevalence of such information, I'm really eager to listen to the examples you surely will be able to give. Undercutting Netscape and extending Java don't count, by the way, and only the fervently anti-Microsoft can't see the grayness in those areas (i.e. Microsoft is hardly the villain).
For all of the "I told you so!" rhetoric in here (hardly surprizing), I personally find Microsoft to be one of the most trustworthy companies when it comes to privacy: They have gone far above and beyond the call of duty time and time again to put the privacy of their customers ahead of the value of the information. If, indeed, this is sending information on other products installed I would bet a pretty good penny (two pennies in fact!) that it is entirely unintentional.
You have _no_ right to "privacy" if you are patronizing someones store. Deal with it.
Well one issue I have with it is the cost (a cost which each and every one of us will bear. While people will say "Yeah, but it'll be made up in reduced shoplifting", realize that shoplifting generally is dramatically less of a economic hit for retailers than you've been led to believe. They lose far more to employees taking stock home or skimming the tills): Currently the RFID tags, for those who didn't read the NYT article (i.e. most of you), cost $0.30US a piece, with the price expected to drop to $0.05US. Add in the cost of the detection equipment (they're talking about every rack having a detector so it can monitor stock and "alert security" if several items are taken at once...hope you shop every week and don't dare buy multiple items at once), the IT infrastructure: These sorts of things end up cost tens or hundreds of billions of dollars.
This isnt meant to be a flame.. it is meant to point out that they track everything you buy anyway, and almost guaranteed, if you use credit or debit cards, there is a file SOMEWHERE that lists everything you bought, if you dont, like me, get that list on your statement every month
Your credit card or debit card company knows what you bought? Funny, but mine don't. They see that I spent $107 at Fortinos and $89 at Walmart, but they DON'T see that I bought Lays BBQ chips and a big tub of jellybeans, and Walmart doesn't see what I bought at Fortinos and vice versa.
Finally, even during the Cold War, one of the guys that worked in a sensitive area wore a hat with a KGB symbol on it.
I'm not quite sure what to make of this: What were they supposed to do? I hardly think that bonafide KGB spies would be wearing KGB hats as they infiltrate facilities, and it hardly seems reasonable that the security staff needs to be onguard for obvious covert operative logos. This just sounds like a "some dude is an smartass", and is a management issue far more than it's a security issue.