Lawyers are hired to win cases. Lawyers frequently champion causes they don't personally support. It's their job to win their clients' cases. The job of a lawyer is not to be impartial or fair minded. You can't fault her for doing her job.
What concerns me more is that she has no experience being a judge so there's nothing really to base a judgement of how impartial or fair minded she would be as judge. You can't really know how she'll interpret the law until she's judged cases.
This goes back, in my opinion, to Bush hiring completely unqualified people for important positions, like Mike Brown at FEMA, only the consequences of this choice will reach much further into the future.
While his particular argument may not be quite correct, there's really no reason that human lifespan can't be extended to the point where people would only die of accidents.
Being able to repair damaged cells is probably not that far off, whether it be from nanotechnology or some sort of medical advancement. There are several levels of repair that can be done to cells, assuming that we can at some point (and I see no reason to think that we won't be able to) repair cells at thos various levels, we would pretty much eliminate cancer and aging. Aging is basically just the slowly accumulated "damage" to cells and DNA (in particular, the shortening of telomeres). If you can repair that damage, then you can essentially prevent aging and many aging related illnesses. There would still be other illnesses, but I suspect by the time we've reached this level, most other illnesses will be fairly treatable.
I don't think this stuff will happen tomorrow, but I think it'll happen sooner than we expect.
It would seem that nothing these days is "non-protectible" if RIAA, MPPA or SCO have anything to say about it.
Well, first of all, the SCO issue is completely different. IBM isn't arguing that their copying was protected. Their arguign that no copying happened in the first place.
Second of fall, an MPAA representative has stated (though this may have been a case of 'foot in mouth') that there are legitimate fair use rights for copying music CDs, no doubt the RIAA's chagrin. (sorry, can't find the quote off hand, but it came up in a Slashdot post a while back).
This just means you can kiss all your "fair use" rights goodbye. No mater what they try, it will certainly hobble my fair use rights to make copies of my disks so the kids cannot ruin the originals....
You mean like, kinda how DVD encryption hobbled our fair rights? Yeah, whatever. They might hobble our fair rights for a time, but nothing like that will last. There's always someone out there who's smarter than whoever they hire.
As others have said, programmers, at least decent ones, can adapt. Hell, I started off working on IBM mainframes PL/I, Rexx, 370 Assembly, and even some SAS. I've done Pascal on early PCs, then C, later C++, lately C#, and soon will be doing Java.
I mean hell, they're just programming languages. I even jumped in for 3 days and provided some help doing bug fixes on a VB project without any previous VB experience and the only real problem I had was figuring out how to use the IDE.
Any decent programmer can take these small detours in their career. The ideas are all more or less the same. The difference is largely syntax. Sure, there are some paradigm differences as well. You don't write OO apps the same way you write functonal apps, but you don't write OO apps without functional aspects and it's not uncommon to use some OO ideas in functional programming.
At the end of the day, it's all more or less the same. Sure, a windows environment and a 3270 terminal emulator provide a completely different environment, but still, easy enough to manage for all but the most severely stupid.
The articles seems like a lot of worry about nothing. The real question isn't, "Can programmers use these environments," but "Can they attract programmers to those backward-ass environments?" Just gotta make the carrot tasty enough.
Whenever a robot team wants to build an autonomous robot they look at sonar first, but they quickly run into problems due to the simple nature of commercial sonar systems
What do they base that on? That's just ridiculous. I admit, sonar is a very common choice, but he says it as if robot builders blindly go into sonar first thing always.
I think maybe he went into it without doing any research because he's clearly not aware of some of the impressive prior work done in the field. He's not the first to use ultrasonic imaging. There's been really impressive work going back to the mid to late 90s. This guy, living in his own world, clearly thinks he invented the field.
I mean, they've done some new stuff here, but the field wasn't nearly as primitive as he made it out to be. Hell, back in the mid-90's, 3 other hobbyists and I built a pretty decent 3-d imaging system from slightly modified Polaroid 6500 ranging modules. And we were just hobbyists. I know much more impressive stuff has been done by others in the past 10 years. Hell, back in the early 90s, there was a group doing facial recongition with ultrasonics and neural nets.
I dunno, I'm just not terribly impressed by their work, though I'm jaded a lot by the guy's arrogant "we invented the field" kind of attitude.
He's not charging all that much for use of the trademark. I don't usually see monetary figures in hex, though. I guess that's just a Linus thing. But $41,472 - $42,240 seems pretty reasonable.
As someone else said, plugging it in doesn't count. That electricity may or may not come from environmentally friendly sources. Most likely, environmentally hostile sources like coal.
Furthermore, there's a lot more to it than simply sticking a bunch of batteries in the trunk. Some consumers use their trunks. Why do you think they put them in cars? Because they just happen to have a lot of extra room when they're done building the car?
Also, by adding all that weight, you're changing the dynamics of the car. For a dealer to sell a car modified like that, it now needs to go through safety tests.
There are a lot of people that think, "Oh geez, all the car manufacturers need to do is XYZ and we won't need gas anymore." I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's a lot more complex a problem than most people make it out to be. You have to build a car that's safe and a car consumers want to buy. Those aren't always easy things to accomplish when the source of power isn't in question. When you're trying a new source of power, it's a big additional question.
Sure, everyone could rely on hydrogen, except we don't have enough hydrogen fuel pumps yet. Not to mention, hydrogen is pretty expensive to produce right now and certainly there isn't infrastructure to produce it in the quantities necessary for a mass market.
It's not a simple problem and there isn't a simple solution.
Stargate SG1, while being sci-fi, does try to adhere to real science and real scientific theory in many ways. Granted, some aspects can't simply to maintain the story. But a lot of the stuff they discuss and use is based in real theory. If more sci-fi shows would at least try to do that, I think it would be helpful.
The thing is, I don't know that this kind of stuff really brings kids into science, no matter how much real theory they use. And frankly, when it comes to higher degrees, where the money is can be a big driver. During the.com boom, tons of kids where going into computer science programs and there was a sudden overflow of programmers, right around the time it went bust.
I was a chemistry major my freshman year. Certainly not because of the money. The reason I left it was I had this sudden vision of what life would be like as a chemist and I thought, "Oh God, how boring." And that was the end of it for me.
My girlfriend in college went into comp. sci. because of the money. When she graduated and got her first job doing it, the first thing she said was, "God, this is so boring." I said, "Well, didn't you like it in school?" She said, "No." I said, "Well what made you think doing it for a living was going to be any more fun?"
Needless to say, her career as a programmer was short-lived.
So I guess my point is, money will attract people, but it's the interest that keeps them. I think glamorizing it might bring some kids to find interest in it, but the fact is, most science jobs aren't all that glamourous and getting hit by the reality of that may make careers short-lived.
My question is: How much will downloading stuff via P2P, instead of from web sites, save me as a consumer. After all, the delivery method takes advantage of the bandwidth I pay for instead of the bandwidth they were previously paying for and to some degree, charging me for.
Now, I'll grant, compared to the cost of making a movie or software, the cost of bandwidth for distributing it is pretty minimal. That said, I don't really see an advantage to me to use P2P unless I'm getting something in return. Otherwise it's just plain easier to download it from a web site. And knocking off $0.05 in the price certainly isn't going to be much of an incentive for me, even if that's more than the actual cost of my share of the bandwidth.
Of course, we're just the lowly consumers, so I doubt they'll offer a "choice."
What is the fixation with sex? Why would a child seeing two consenting adults having sex "corrupt" them. Sex is a natural thing that happens between two people who like each other a lot.
Actually, this is an incredibly simplistic view. The truth is, the easy availability of hardcore pornography on the interenet has caused some serious problems for children and their understandings (or more accurately, misunderstandings) of sexual relationships and love. It certainly hasn't reached epidemic proportions, but I for one, as a soon to be parent, am VERY concerned about how to prevent my child form having easy access to hardcore pornorgraphy in their early teens or younger, and I believe most parents who are aware of how easy it is to get are just as worried.
I agree this law will do nothing to protect children from online pornography. Most kids don't get on to pornography web sites that require a credit card. Hell, get eMule and you have access to all the pornography you could ever want. Or hell, just use Google.
The problem, from a parent's point of view, is that there is simply no way to block it all. There's just far too much for them to see. The only possible approach I see is to block what I can and to monitor where my children have been via my proxy logs, and then talk to them about it and try to dissuade them from doing it. I have serious doubts about how effective that will be, however.
I don't think you're speaking from the point of view of a parent. Most parents I know (and there are no Republicans among my friends and family) are pretty concerned about the easy availability of hardcore pornography.
I'm not talking looking through your dad's old Playboys and stuff that every kid has been doing since the first published nude photos. I'm talking about hardcore stuff where the men generally treat the women like crap (no point in providing sample phrases as I'm sure you're quite aware of the crap I'm talking about). The kind of stuff that's a very poor model for real relationships. This is the stuff children need to be protected from.
That's the Serenity "Prayer", not "Poem." The Serenity Prayer originated in an obituary in 1942 and was later adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous (and later, other twelve-step programs) as a part of the program.
I have to agree with the VSDA on this. It just makes far more sense from a media vendor's point of view to have only one format. Look at VHS vs. Beta. The market wouldn't sustain them both. Eventually the public went with the more popular, but lower quality alternative. The fact is, one would become more popular than the other for whatever reason and people would end up going with what their friends have so that they can share.
Additionally, as mentioned, the confusion would cause a delay before a lot of people bought in because they'd want to see which one became more popular. All-in-all, I think the format war is pretty stupid and it's a war everyone would lose. They should select the one that will satisfy the most people and go with that.
I've had problems both ways developping.NET apps. The.NET multiline text boxdoesn't display properly in FireFox (but fixable with a replacement textbox control).
On the other hand, I've got a CSS layout that works beautifully in Firefox but looks like complete crap in IE and I've struggled and struggled with it and still haven't found a solution. IE doesn't honor the "min-width" attribute and every "workaround" I've seen posted, for some reason, doesn't want to work on my site. It's driving me nuts. The idea of going to tables doesn't appeal to me at all, but I'm running out of ideas.
So it can record BBC One, Two, Three AND Four. That's pretty impressive.
I have a DirecTV TiVo with 2 tuners. I can't possibly watch everything it records as it is. Not to mention, just about anything worth watching is probably available on the various P2P networks.
If I had the space for every TV show played over a month on all channels, that's not what I'd use that space for. Instead, I'd record everything that might interest me over the next 5 years and I'd probably have some room to spare.
We have enough storage. I don't need 500GB I want good latency.
We who? Speak for yourself, but I could personally use another 500GB. Ever since I got my Hauppauge TV capture card and started recording every single movie I can get my hands on with my dual-receiver/recorder TiVo, I can barely write DVDs fast enough, and that's after re-encoding everything in mpeg-4.
I think you guys are misunderstanding me. I'm not complaining that it can't do better than a person. I'm simply saying, your average idiot can sort e-mail better than a bayesian filter, so I'd suspect it's not going to be able to play chess any better than your average idiot. That's all.
SpamBayes definitely reduces the spam count, but a human could definitely do a lot better (though a bit slower). If it can't learn to play chess better than it filter's e-mail, it probably wouldn't be much of a match.
It is clear you haven't used Linux in years. why on earth you are compiling applications I don't know.
I use Linux daily and several of the apps I've recently downloaded were only available in source. I use some fringe apps. But mplayer and mencoder, for example. You can get the RPM for it, but there are constant bug fixes and if you want them, you can sit around and wait a few months or you can get the code and compile. There are features in mencoder right now that only work properly in the latest CVS build (edit lists, for example).
Several of the video editing tools I've found are only available as source.
Secondly, why are you doing using redhat's experimental, sandbox OS...
Well, the last thing I used before this was RedHat 6. What would you suggest I use from RedHat? Don't recommend another distro because I don't want to deal with another distro. FC is the closest to RedHat 6 I could find. And frankly, my problem isn't RedHat or Fedora specific anyway. My problem is that even with RPMs, you can't always just download and install the RPM. Many times you have to track down dependencies and install those first. Again, not a RedHat specific thing.
The points I raised are not RedHat or Fedora specific. They're endemic of all Linux distributions.
Since when have computers not been about learning something.
For you, maybe that's what computers are "about." For most people, however, computers are "about" making their jobs and their lives easier. And frankly, Linux doesn't do that, at least from my point of view.
A friend of mine e-mailed me this link early this morning and I thought it was a damn cool idea (and I think that's all it is at this point).
As a software developer, I can see a lot of ways this could be integrated into every day software. For example, hit the Alt key and suddenly the shortcut keys all have little labels saying what they do. Or for languages that use key combinations to do special characters, hitting the first key in the combination would then show you what keys are available for the second key.
I could definitely find uses for it in my code if it ever became widespread. Alas, I doubt it will anytime soon.
``The second problem that blocks massive Linux Desktop growth is stability.'' (The use of "stability" is confusing. What he means is: you can go to a website, download an application, and expect it to run, i.e. binary compatibility)
This is the Windows Way. Linux has a better alternative: packaging. Applications packaged, tailored, and tested for your distribution. Try Debian. Go through a number of installs, uninstalls, upgrades, and dist-upgrades. Then tell me if you like the Windows Way better.
Sorry, but no, the Linux alternative is NOT better, from a user's point of view. The Linux way, frequently is:
1: Download
2: Decompress
3: de-tar
4: cd source directory
5:./configure
6: make
7: figure out which packages are missing and go back to step 1 for each of those
8: make install
It seems more often than not, this is the crap I have to go through to install Linux apps. It's a nightmare and if you think mom, pop and grandma Bootsie will be willing to figure this out, you're out of your mind.
And you think packaging is better? First I have to figure out which package is right for my system (FC3). This isn't so much a Linux problem as simply a difference in distros and versions of distros, but in the end, mom, pop, and grandma Bootsie could care less. But frequently the labels on web sites of which package goes with which distro are even hard for me to decipher.
Let's say I manage to find my FC3 RPM. Then I try to install it, but there are required packages missing. I now have to go track those down and install those. Users don't give a shit. They want to download and install, and I count myself among them. I can go through all this crap with Linux, but I don't want to. I have to because that's what Linux gives me.
Sorry, but the Linux alternative sucks and it will never be adopted by the average person if they have to go through this crap every time they want to install some nifty new app they've found.
In Windows, I create an installer for my app. With only minor direction from me, the developer, I can tell it which dependencies are part of every system and which need to be distributed with my install. Then the installer, when run, automatically figures out if the user has the necessary dependencies. If they don't, it installs whatever is missing. And assuming the app was well written and the installer well built, the app just works. 99% of the time, this is the case.
This is the Windows Way and I don't care what you say, it's WAY better.
I lived in Mexico for 3 years and the keyboard layout is REALLY similar for regular typing (though different for the kind of stuff that comes up a lot in programming, like brackets, parenthesis, and punctuation marks). And even for just typing e-mails, I found it to be a huge pain switching from my American keyboard at home to the Mexican keyboard I used at the internet cafes that I worked in. Eventually I switched to the Mexican keyboard full time because the switching caused so many typos.
Much like you, I've been using computers since I was 10 or so and am now 36. I've been typing that entire time and never had any sort of wrist or hand problems.
The only problem I've had, actually, was in my shoulder from using a mouse. I ended up switching to a thumb-trackball and haven't had a problem since.
Since you began typing at 8, I suspect you don't type "properly", and by that, I mean like you'd learn in a typing class. If that's the case, you're probably fine because you probably type as is comfortable for you and not in some awkward, unnatural, but possibly slightly more accurate and faster, position.
Actually, I'd like to see a study of people with wrist injuries due to typing and see how the percentage of people who learned to type properly compares to self-taught typists. My guess is there'd be a big difference, but maybe I just say that from my own experience.
I friend tried to "correct" my typing once and all I could think is, "God, this isn't natural at all."
Anyway, just my very humble opinion and probably doesn't mean much. But I think you're going to be causing yourself more problems than you're fixing.
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Lawyers are hired to win cases. Lawyers frequently champion causes they don't personally support. It's their job to win their clients' cases. The job of a lawyer is not to be impartial or fair minded. You can't fault her for doing her job.
What concerns me more is that she has no experience being a judge so there's nothing really to base a judgement of how impartial or fair minded she would be as judge. You can't really know how she'll interpret the law until she's judged cases.
This goes back, in my opinion, to Bush hiring completely unqualified people for important positions, like Mike Brown at FEMA, only the consequences of this choice will reach much further into the future.
While his particular argument may not be quite correct, there's really no reason that human lifespan can't be extended to the point where people would only die of accidents.
Being able to repair damaged cells is probably not that far off, whether it be from nanotechnology or some sort of medical advancement. There are several levels of repair that can be done to cells, assuming that we can at some point (and I see no reason to think that we won't be able to) repair cells at thos various levels, we would pretty much eliminate cancer and aging. Aging is basically just the slowly accumulated "damage" to cells and DNA (in particular, the shortening of telomeres). If you can repair that damage, then you can essentially prevent aging and many aging related illnesses. There would still be other illnesses, but I suspect by the time we've reached this level, most other illnesses will be fairly treatable.
I don't think this stuff will happen tomorrow, but I think it'll happen sooner than we expect.
It would seem that nothing these days is "non-protectible" if RIAA, MPPA or SCO have anything to say about it.
Well, first of all, the SCO issue is completely different. IBM isn't arguing that their copying was protected. Their arguign that no copying happened in the first place.
Second of fall, an MPAA representative has stated (though this may have been a case of 'foot in mouth') that there are legitimate fair use rights for copying music CDs, no doubt the RIAA's chagrin. (sorry, can't find the quote off hand, but it came up in a Slashdot post a while back).
This just means you can kiss all your "fair use" rights goodbye. No mater what they try, it will certainly hobble my fair use rights to make copies of my disks so the kids cannot ruin the originals....
You mean like, kinda how DVD encryption hobbled our fair rights? Yeah, whatever. They might hobble our fair rights for a time, but nothing like that will last. There's always someone out there who's smarter than whoever they hire.
Kind of like this article from 5 years ago, or this one from 3 years ago, or this one from Dec. 2000.
In 5 years, there will be an in every garage. Yawn...
As others have said, programmers, at least decent ones, can adapt. Hell, I started off working on IBM mainframes PL/I, Rexx, 370 Assembly, and even some SAS. I've done Pascal on early PCs, then C, later C++, lately C#, and soon will be doing Java.
I mean hell, they're just programming languages. I even jumped in for 3 days and provided some help doing bug fixes on a VB project without any previous VB experience and the only real problem I had was figuring out how to use the IDE.
Any decent programmer can take these small detours in their career. The ideas are all more or less the same. The difference is largely syntax. Sure, there are some paradigm differences as well. You don't write OO apps the same way you write functonal apps, but you don't write OO apps without functional aspects and it's not uncommon to use some OO ideas in functional programming.
At the end of the day, it's all more or less the same. Sure, a windows environment and a 3270 terminal emulator provide a completely different environment, but still, easy enough to manage for all but the most severely stupid.
The articles seems like a lot of worry about nothing. The real question isn't, "Can programmers use these environments," but "Can they attract programmers to those backward-ass environments?" Just gotta make the carrot tasty enough.
Whenever a robot team wants to build an autonomous robot they look at sonar first, but they quickly run into problems due to the simple nature of commercial sonar systems
What do they base that on? That's just ridiculous. I admit, sonar is a very common choice, but he says it as if robot builders blindly go into sonar first thing always.
I think maybe he went into it without doing any research because he's clearly not aware of some of the impressive prior work done in the field. He's not the first to use ultrasonic imaging. There's been really impressive work going back to the mid to late 90s. This guy, living in his own world, clearly thinks he invented the field.
I mean, they've done some new stuff here, but the field wasn't nearly as primitive as he made it out to be. Hell, back in the mid-90's, 3 other hobbyists and I built a pretty decent 3-d imaging system from slightly modified Polaroid 6500 ranging modules. And we were just hobbyists. I know much more impressive stuff has been done by others in the past 10 years. Hell, back in the early 90s, there was a group doing facial recongition with ultrasonics and neural nets.
I dunno, I'm just not terribly impressed by their work, though I'm jaded a lot by the guy's arrogant "we invented the field" kind of attitude.
He's not charging all that much for use of the trademark. I don't usually see monetary figures in hex, though. I guess that's just a Linus thing. But $41,472 - $42,240 seems pretty reasonable.
Hemp, however, can be processed to produce 50% of it's mass in fuel.
But you know everyone would be running a hose from the exhaust to the inside of the car and then where would you be. Stoned drivers everywhere.
As someone else said, plugging it in doesn't count. That electricity may or may not come from environmentally friendly sources. Most likely, environmentally hostile sources like coal.
Furthermore, there's a lot more to it than simply sticking a bunch of batteries in the trunk. Some consumers use their trunks. Why do you think they put them in cars? Because they just happen to have a lot of extra room when they're done building the car?
Also, by adding all that weight, you're changing the dynamics of the car. For a dealer to sell a car modified like that, it now needs to go through safety tests.
There are a lot of people that think, "Oh geez, all the car manufacturers need to do is XYZ and we won't need gas anymore." I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's a lot more complex a problem than most people make it out to be. You have to build a car that's safe and a car consumers want to buy. Those aren't always easy things to accomplish when the source of power isn't in question. When you're trying a new source of power, it's a big additional question.
Sure, everyone could rely on hydrogen, except we don't have enough hydrogen fuel pumps yet. Not to mention, hydrogen is pretty expensive to produce right now and certainly there isn't infrastructure to produce it in the quantities necessary for a mass market.
It's not a simple problem and there isn't a simple solution.
Okay, that's it, I'm going to create a computer case out of fed-ex boxes and post it on my web site!
Stargate SG1, while being sci-fi, does try to adhere to real science and real scientific theory in many ways. Granted, some aspects can't simply to maintain the story. But a lot of the stuff they discuss and use is based in real theory. If more sci-fi shows would at least try to do that, I think it would be helpful.
.com boom, tons of kids where going into computer science programs and there was a sudden overflow of programmers, right around the time it went bust.
The thing is, I don't know that this kind of stuff really brings kids into science, no matter how much real theory they use. And frankly, when it comes to higher degrees, where the money is can be a big driver. During the
I was a chemistry major my freshman year. Certainly not because of the money. The reason I left it was I had this sudden vision of what life would be like as a chemist and I thought, "Oh God, how boring." And that was the end of it for me.
My girlfriend in college went into comp. sci. because of the money. When she graduated and got her first job doing it, the first thing she said was, "God, this is so boring." I said, "Well, didn't you like it in school?" She said, "No." I said, "Well what made you think doing it for a living was going to be any more fun?"
Needless to say, her career as a programmer was short-lived.
So I guess my point is, money will attract people, but it's the interest that keeps them. I think glamorizing it might bring some kids to find interest in it, but the fact is, most science jobs aren't all that glamourous and getting hit by the reality of that may make careers short-lived.
My question is: How much will downloading stuff via P2P, instead of from web sites, save me as a consumer. After all, the delivery method takes advantage of the bandwidth I pay for instead of the bandwidth they were previously paying for and to some degree, charging me for.
Now, I'll grant, compared to the cost of making a movie or software, the cost of bandwidth for distributing it is pretty minimal. That said, I don't really see an advantage to me to use P2P unless I'm getting something in return. Otherwise it's just plain easier to download it from a web site. And knocking off $0.05 in the price certainly isn't going to be much of an incentive for me, even if that's more than the actual cost of my share of the bandwidth.
Of course, we're just the lowly consumers, so I doubt they'll offer a "choice."
What is the fixation with sex? Why would a child seeing two consenting adults having sex "corrupt" them. Sex is a natural thing that happens between two people who like each other a lot.
Actually, this is an incredibly simplistic view. The truth is, the easy availability of hardcore pornography on the interenet has caused some serious problems for children and their understandings (or more accurately, misunderstandings) of sexual relationships and love. It certainly hasn't reached epidemic proportions, but I for one, as a soon to be parent, am VERY concerned about how to prevent my child form having easy access to hardcore pornorgraphy in their early teens or younger, and I believe most parents who are aware of how easy it is to get are just as worried.
I agree this law will do nothing to protect children from online pornography. Most kids don't get on to pornography web sites that require a credit card. Hell, get eMule and you have access to all the pornography you could ever want. Or hell, just use Google.
The problem, from a parent's point of view, is that there is simply no way to block it all. There's just far too much for them to see. The only possible approach I see is to block what I can and to monitor where my children have been via my proxy logs, and then talk to them about it and try to dissuade them from doing it. I have serious doubts about how effective that will be, however.
I don't think you're speaking from the point of view of a parent. Most parents I know (and there are no Republicans among my friends and family) are pretty concerned about the easy availability of hardcore pornography.
I'm not talking looking through your dad's old Playboys and stuff that every kid has been doing since the first published nude photos. I'm talking about hardcore stuff where the men generally treat the women like crap (no point in providing sample phrases as I'm sure you're quite aware of the crap I'm talking about). The kind of stuff that's a very poor model for real relationships. This is the stuff children need to be protected from.
That's the Serenity "Prayer", not "Poem." The Serenity Prayer originated in an obituary in 1942 and was later adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous (and later, other twelve-step programs) as a part of the program.
I have to agree with the VSDA on this. It just makes far more sense from a media vendor's point of view to have only one format. Look at VHS vs. Beta. The market wouldn't sustain them both. Eventually the public went with the more popular, but lower quality alternative. The fact is, one would become more popular than the other for whatever reason and people would end up going with what their friends have so that they can share.
Additionally, as mentioned, the confusion would cause a delay before a lot of people bought in because they'd want to see which one became more popular. All-in-all, I think the format war is pretty stupid and it's a war everyone would lose. They should select the one that will satisfy the most people and go with that.
I've had problems both ways developping .NET apps. The .NET multiline text boxdoesn't display properly in FireFox (but fixable with a replacement textbox control).
On the other hand, I've got a CSS layout that works beautifully in Firefox but looks like complete crap in IE and I've struggled and struggled with it and still haven't found a solution. IE doesn't honor the "min-width" attribute and every "workaround" I've seen posted, for some reason, doesn't want to work on my site. It's driving me nuts. The idea of going to tables doesn't appeal to me at all, but I'm running out of ideas.
So it can record BBC One, Two, Three AND Four. That's pretty impressive.
I have a DirecTV TiVo with 2 tuners. I can't possibly watch everything it records as it is. Not to mention, just about anything worth watching is probably available on the various P2P networks.
If I had the space for every TV show played over a month on all channels, that's not what I'd use that space for. Instead, I'd record everything that might interest me over the next 5 years and I'd probably have some room to spare.
We have enough storage. I don't need 500GB I want good latency.
We who? Speak for yourself, but I could personally use another 500GB. Ever since I got my Hauppauge TV capture card and started recording every single movie I can get my hands on with my dual-receiver/recorder TiVo, I can barely write DVDs fast enough, and that's after re-encoding everything in mpeg-4.
Another 500GB would go a long way for me!
I think you guys are misunderstanding me. I'm not complaining that it can't do better than a person. I'm simply saying, your average idiot can sort e-mail better than a bayesian filter, so I'd suspect it's not going to be able to play chess any better than your average idiot. That's all.
SpamBayes definitely reduces the spam count, but a human could definitely do a lot better (though a bit slower). If it can't learn to play chess better than it filter's e-mail, it probably wouldn't be much of a match.
It is clear you haven't used Linux in years. why on earth you are compiling applications I don't know.
I use Linux daily and several of the apps I've recently downloaded were only available in source. I use some fringe apps. But mplayer and mencoder, for example. You can get the RPM for it, but there are constant bug fixes and if you want them, you can sit around and wait a few months or you can get the code and compile. There are features in mencoder right now that only work properly in the latest CVS build (edit lists, for example).
Several of the video editing tools I've found are only available as source.
Secondly, why are you doing using redhat's experimental, sandbox OS...
Well, the last thing I used before this was RedHat 6. What would you suggest I use from RedHat? Don't recommend another distro because I don't want to deal with another distro. FC is the closest to RedHat 6 I could find. And frankly, my problem isn't RedHat or Fedora specific anyway. My problem is that even with RPMs, you can't always just download and install the RPM. Many times you have to track down dependencies and install those first. Again, not a RedHat specific thing.
The points I raised are not RedHat or Fedora specific. They're endemic of all Linux distributions.
Since when have computers not been about learning something.
For you, maybe that's what computers are "about." For most people, however, computers are "about" making their jobs and their lives easier. And frankly, Linux doesn't do that, at least from my point of view.
A friend of mine e-mailed me this link early this morning and I thought it was a damn cool idea (and I think that's all it is at this point).
As a software developer, I can see a lot of ways this could be integrated into every day software. For example, hit the Alt key and suddenly the shortcut keys all have little labels saying what they do. Or for languages that use key combinations to do special characters, hitting the first key in the combination would then show you what keys are available for the second key.
I could definitely find uses for it in my code if it ever became widespread. Alas, I doubt it will anytime soon.
``The second problem that blocks massive Linux Desktop growth is stability.'' (The use of "stability" is confusing. What he means is: you can go to a website, download an application, and expect it to run, i.e. binary compatibility)
./configure
This is the Windows Way. Linux has a better alternative: packaging. Applications packaged, tailored, and tested for your distribution. Try Debian. Go through a number of installs, uninstalls, upgrades, and dist-upgrades. Then tell me if you like the Windows Way better.
Sorry, but no, the Linux alternative is NOT better, from a user's point of view. The Linux way, frequently is:
1: Download
2: Decompress
3: de-tar
4: cd source directory
5:
6: make
7: figure out which packages are missing and go back to step 1 for each of those
8: make install
It seems more often than not, this is the crap I have to go through to install Linux apps. It's a nightmare and if you think mom, pop and grandma Bootsie will be willing to figure this out, you're out of your mind.
And you think packaging is better? First I have to figure out which package is right for my system (FC3). This isn't so much a Linux problem as simply a difference in distros and versions of distros, but in the end, mom, pop, and grandma Bootsie could care less. But frequently the labels on web sites of which package goes with which distro are even hard for me to decipher.
Let's say I manage to find my FC3 RPM. Then I try to install it, but there are required packages missing. I now have to go track those down and install those. Users don't give a shit. They want to download and install, and I count myself among them. I can go through all this crap with Linux, but I don't want to. I have to because that's what Linux gives me.
Sorry, but the Linux alternative sucks and it will never be adopted by the average person if they have to go through this crap every time they want to install some nifty new app they've found.
In Windows, I create an installer for my app. With only minor direction from me, the developer, I can tell it which dependencies are part of every system and which need to be distributed with my install. Then the installer, when run, automatically figures out if the user has the necessary dependencies. If they don't, it installs whatever is missing. And assuming the app was well written and the installer well built, the app just works. 99% of the time, this is the case.
This is the Windows Way and I don't care what you say, it's WAY better.
I lived in Mexico for 3 years and the keyboard layout is REALLY similar for regular typing (though different for the kind of stuff that comes up a lot in programming, like brackets, parenthesis, and punctuation marks). And even for just typing e-mails, I found it to be a huge pain switching from my American keyboard at home to the Mexican keyboard I used at the internet cafes that I worked in. Eventually I switched to the Mexican keyboard full time because the switching caused so many typos.
Much like you, I've been using computers since I was 10 or so and am now 36. I've been typing that entire time and never had any sort of wrist or hand problems.
The only problem I've had, actually, was in my shoulder from using a mouse. I ended up switching to a thumb-trackball and haven't had a problem since.
Since you began typing at 8, I suspect you don't type "properly", and by that, I mean like you'd learn in a typing class. If that's the case, you're probably fine because you probably type as is comfortable for you and not in some awkward, unnatural, but possibly slightly more accurate and faster, position.
Actually, I'd like to see a study of people with wrist injuries due to typing and see how the percentage of people who learned to type properly compares to self-taught typists. My guess is there'd be a big difference, but maybe I just say that from my own experience.
I friend tried to "correct" my typing once and all I could think is, "God, this isn't natural at all."
Anyway, just my very humble opinion and probably doesn't mean much. But I think you're going to be causing yourself more problems than you're fixing.