What's better? PHP or Python? What's better Pepsi or Coke? The answer is always the same. It depends what your goals/needs/desires are. Neither is "better" in the all encompassing good or bad definition unless you qualify it. Which one's better for performance? Probably the monolithic kernel. Which one's better for security? Probably the micro-kernel. But even then, you have to qualify both of those. Performance of what? Security of what?
I'm sick of all these stupid "which is better?" religious wars that geeks are always so interested in having. What's better? C++ or Java? What's better? IE or Mozilla?
They're all better because the more there are, the more choices you have. There, is that a satisfactory answer?
That is an absolutely brilliant analysis and I have little doubt it would work. It would make all parties happy (except broadcasters of course, since they're no longer in the food chain). But that leaves happy producers, happy advertisers, and happy viewers.
So, what's left to see is whether the studios will adopt it. I doubt it will happen quickly because these old behemoth industries aren't used to change and it's a very big change in business models. On the other hand, it's something that they could certainly try without doing any harm to themselves and actually give it real-live testing. Simply pick a few select shows that targets the 18-25 market and test it out with a discount for the advertisers as part of the test. If it works, they make money and they eventually turn it into a regular distribution method.
It's too bad you can't do a similar thing with music. There's simply now way to put an advertisement in a song that can't be cut out. At least not without ruining the song. But for TV and movies, this model has excellent possibility of being viable.
The fact is, the entertainment industry is going to have to learn to adapt or die out and be replaced by people and companies who CAN adapt. Suing your customers isn't even a viable short-term economic model.
Evolution doesn't stop because we're not separated. We simply won't evolve differently. But evolution will continue in some form or another because genes are constantly altered and mutating and some of those mutations will have a tendency to propagate.
The ultimate purpose (and it is a purpose, whether intelligent or not) of evolution is to have us changes that help us survive long enough to reproduce. That's it. If anything threatens our survival to that age, any mutations that help extend our lives long enough to reproduce will be passed down.
If anything is slowing down natural evolution, it's modern medicine. By extending peoples lives beyond what they might normally survive, we're creating larger populations of weaker genes.
But you can also look at medicine as a form of artificial evolution in that evolution has given us the ability to adapt ourselves in a more pro-active manner.
Many people are claiming that the comments Dish has with the code suggests the code violates the spirit of the GPL. While it's possible (I haven't looked at the code), this is not necessarily the case, as others have already pointed out.
I suspect the dish runs on Linux and has a number of modules that work together much like other complex Linux applications. An good related examples is MythTV. MythTV isn't one module. It uses some existing applications and tools and then provides its own.
Whatever GPLed modules they modify, they're required to release their source changes to. But any completely custom modules they've written can remain proprietary without being released even if they interact with the GPL'ed modules.
What their comments suggest is that without their proprietary code, you cannot create a working Dish application.
On the other hand, if you want to take their code modifications and using other GPL'ed or even your own proprietary modules to create a DVR (probably using different hardware), you're free to do so.
This neither violates the spirit of the GPL nor the letter. As long as they're releasing the changes they've made to GPL'ed code back to the community and that code isn't obfuscated or otherwise rendered "unusable", they're completely within the letter and spirit. Now, keep in mind, usable doesn't necessarily mean usable on THEIR hardware. It just means that it is operating code.
Before scheduled release, Anonymous Coward, siting no evidence, no previous examples, claims it's vaporware.
Well gosh, that's certainly news to me. I mean come on. Sun is the one with its reputation on the line. Some idiot who doesn't even identify himself, provides no evidence whatsoever that Sun is being misleading, and that's a big deal? Who cares.
Everyone keeps bringing up the original Marvin's cameo. Did nobody notice that the recorded message from Magrathea was Simon Jones, the original Arthur Dent! I thought both were great additions though overall, I wasn't terribly thrilled with the movie.
I think I'm just a snob for the original BBC series.
What you need is the the right tool for your virus cleanings. Once you delete the virus properly, I don't suspect their computer be causing your network any more problems.
He wrote an published his own book ("available only in PDF"). Tell me he didn't steal his cover layout from O'Reilly: The Unix Guide to Defenestration. Oh and by the way, I in no way encourage anyone to actually purchase it for any purpose other than defenestrating the book.
Seriously, except for the minor grammar/spelling error with "observer" (which is just a typical miss for our dear old editors here), this was a quality post with quality information and no question, news for nerds! If Slashdot could maintain this sort of quality (and perhaps even correct the spelling and grammar errors), I would be a much happier reader.
But that won't keep you from the same article you posted on what was it, Friday? There goes the theory that duplicate posts were merely the results laziness. Clearly they're also a result of simply not giving a shit as well.
For some reason people seem to think that because it's an e-mail grammar, punctuation and spelling can go out of the window.
Sadly, many young people today things that some of this shorthand passes as acceptable writing. That's a serious problem. They need to learn to distinguish between what is real language and what is shorthand. Using "2" instead of "to" or "too" is unacceptable. Using "u" instead of "you" is unacceptable. Yet many students insert these shorthands into their essays in school.
Ask any junior high or high school teacher and I'd be surprised if they haven't seen this kind of writing in their class. So while many of us can distinguish and hell, I use this stuff in IMs and e-mail all the time, many cannot distinguish and therin lies the problem.
I also understand that it can be difficult to detect a dupe when such a large number of articles
Why is it so difficult? They post what, 20 articles a day? How hard is it to look over the past 100 topics to see if it was previously posted? I agree, though that a simple tool could provide them with the ability to detect these. I don't even think you'd need Bayesian techniques. A simple comparison of the less common words would probably bring 90% of them out pretty quickly.
But as I posted a while ago: Where's their incentive to improve their quality? What, are we all going to go somewhere else and stop reading Slashdot? I don't suspect that will happen anytime soon.
The fact is, Slashdot is an amateur operation that happens to make a little money. I doubt they make that much. When was the last time they updated the web site in any significant way? Let's face it, these guys aren't working for a living. That's cool. I'm sure a lot of people would in their situation. But they clearly don't follow their own site and they clearly could care less about what people think about it. If they did, the site would improve.
People who block spam would never buy from spammers even if they were unable to block it. The same goes for people that block ads on web sites. You're not violating any "social contract." The people that buy from ads on web sites are not going to be blocking them intentionally, because apparently there are some really strange people out there who aren't annoyed to death by all the crap on the net.
Income taxes began during the civil war which lasted until 1895 when the Supreme court found income taxes were "unconstitutional." To fix that, in 1913 the 16th ammendment was ratified.
Very contradictory: The title is "Moore's Law is Dead" but then the article states, "He helpfully explains, however, that the law will hold for a few years yet."
I guess "Moores Law will hold for a few years" isn't as much of an attention grabber, but at least it's honest.
My question is, why shove everyone into the ISS? Why not just dock with it, and share the life support supplies between the two systems, instead of cramming everyone into the station?
I'm sure there's some NASA engineer reading this right now slapping his forehead and thinking, "Geez, why didn't we think of that."
And if you think that's really happening, give me some of what you're smoking. It's NASA. They've come up with about 2 billion scenarios and talked it back and forth. I'm guessing this one came up at some point and was dismissed. Hey, maybe not, but if not, NASA has truely fallen from its glory days in more ways than one.
Re:If you REALLY want to know yourself,...
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 1
A movie playing in a theater plays just as well and just the same whether anybody's sitting in it or not.
Not really. It's both playing and it's not playing when there's nobody there. Google "schrodinger"
I think it's great how preoccupied so many people are about these completely obscure hypothetical apocalypse events.
I have to agree. First of all, the event would have to take place within 6000 light years of us for it to have a huge impact on the ozone layer. We're a good deal farther from the galactic core than 6000 light years. If an event were to happen anytime soon, it would be much more likely to happen near the galactic core. There just aren't as many neutron stars and black holes out this far. That's part of the reason that life has existed on this planet. Were we closer to the galactic core, it's unlikely life ever would have gotten very far.
Do the math. We detect one or so of these a month from other galaxies out of 125+ billion galaxies. Now you figure what are the chances of one happening in a less populous 6000 light year diameter area of our own galaxy. Not going to happen anytime soon, I'm sure.
You need to use "Google hacking" to find free porn? I know a lot of hacking techniques for all kinds of things, but I can't remember the last time I had to use any of them to find more free porn than I can possibly look at in a hundred lifetimes.
I completely agree with you, but what's their incentive to actually try to edit? I mean, afterall, people are still going to come to the site despite crappy editing. I doubt a significant number of new people will start coming if they improve it.
I mean, think about it, you gotta figure Taco and the boys have it pretty easy. Post a few stories a day have a sandwich, and call it a day. That's gotta be about the easiest money out there. When was the last time they really did anything significant to improve the site? Obviously "work ethic" isn't part of their vocabulary.
I'll grant that I'm no a math whiz, so I don't know the mathematics involved, but the reasons seem so obvious as to make me wonder how this could possibly challenge "cosmological theory." Most galaxies are pancake shaped. Most solar systems are pancake shaped. As you mentioned, nothing is really "gravitationally stable." I mean, if there's any movement at all, things are going to coalesce into a pancake shape eventually, unless all the movement is completely canceled out by opposite forces/movement, which is just statistically incredibly unlikely.
Slashdot Mirror
"Which design is better?"
What's better? PHP or Python? What's better Pepsi or Coke? The answer is always the same. It depends what your goals/needs/desires are. Neither is "better" in the all encompassing good or bad definition unless you qualify it. Which one's better for performance? Probably the monolithic kernel. Which one's better for security? Probably the micro-kernel. But even then, you have to qualify both of those. Performance of what? Security of what?
I'm sick of all these stupid "which is better?" religious wars that geeks are always so interested in having. What's better? C++ or Java? What's better? IE or Mozilla?
They're all better because the more there are, the more choices you have. There, is that a satisfactory answer?
That is an absolutely brilliant analysis and I have little doubt it would work. It would make all parties happy (except broadcasters of course, since they're no longer in the food chain). But that leaves happy producers, happy advertisers, and happy viewers.
So, what's left to see is whether the studios will adopt it. I doubt it will happen quickly because these old behemoth industries aren't used to change and it's a very big change in business models. On the other hand, it's something that they could certainly try without doing any harm to themselves and actually give it real-live testing. Simply pick a few select shows that targets the 18-25 market and test it out with a discount for the advertisers as part of the test. If it works, they make money and they eventually turn it into a regular distribution method.
It's too bad you can't do a similar thing with music. There's simply now way to put an advertisement in a song that can't be cut out. At least not without ruining the song. But for TV and movies, this model has excellent possibility of being viable.
The fact is, the entertainment industry is going to have to learn to adapt or die out and be replaced by people and companies who CAN adapt. Suing your customers isn't even a viable short-term economic model.
Evolution doesn't stop because we're not separated. We simply won't evolve differently. But evolution will continue in some form or another because genes are constantly altered and mutating and some of those mutations will have a tendency to propagate.
The ultimate purpose (and it is a purpose, whether intelligent or not) of evolution is to have us changes that help us survive long enough to reproduce. That's it. If anything threatens our survival to that age, any mutations that help extend our lives long enough to reproduce will be passed down.
If anything is slowing down natural evolution, it's modern medicine. By extending peoples lives beyond what they might normally survive, we're creating larger populations of weaker genes.
But you can also look at medicine as a form of artificial evolution in that evolution has given us the ability to adapt ourselves in a more pro-active manner.
Many people are claiming that the comments Dish has with the code suggests the code violates the spirit of the GPL. While it's possible (I haven't looked at the code), this is not necessarily the case, as others have already pointed out.
I suspect the dish runs on Linux and has a number of modules that work together much like other complex Linux applications. An good related examples is MythTV. MythTV isn't one module. It uses some existing applications and tools and then provides its own.
Whatever GPLed modules they modify, they're required to release their source changes to. But any completely custom modules they've written can remain proprietary without being released even if they interact with the GPL'ed modules.
What their comments suggest is that without their proprietary code, you cannot create a working Dish application.
On the other hand, if you want to take their code modifications and using other GPL'ed or even your own proprietary modules to create a DVR (probably using different hardware), you're free to do so.
This neither violates the spirit of the GPL nor the letter. As long as they're releasing the changes they've made to GPL'ed code back to the community and that code isn't obfuscated or otherwise rendered "unusable", they're completely within the letter and spirit. Now, keep in mind, usable doesn't necessarily mean usable on THEIR hardware. It just means that it is operating code.
I'm just glad I'm running Firefox under Windows. No need for me to worry about nefarious web sites.
Sun announces Open Solaris
Before scheduled release, Anonymous Coward, siting no evidence, no previous examples, claims it's vaporware.
Well gosh, that's certainly news to me. I mean come on. Sun is the one with its reputation on the line. Some idiot who doesn't even identify himself, provides no evidence whatsoever that Sun is being misleading, and that's a big deal? Who cares.
Everyone keeps bringing up the original Marvin's cameo. Did nobody notice that the recorded message from Magrathea was Simon Jones, the original Arthur Dent! I thought both were great additions though overall, I wasn't terribly thrilled with the movie.
I think I'm just a snob for the original BBC series.
What you need is the the right tool for your virus cleanings. Once you delete the virus properly, I don't suspect their computer be causing your network any more problems.
He wrote an published his own book ("available only in PDF"). Tell me he didn't steal his cover layout from O'Reilly: The Unix Guide to Defenestration. Oh and by the way, I in no way encourage anyone to actually purchase it for any purpose other than defenestrating the book.
Seriously, except for the minor grammar/spelling error with "observer" (which is just a typical miss for our dear old editors here), this was a quality post with quality information and no question, news for nerds! If Slashdot could maintain this sort of quality (and perhaps even correct the spelling and grammar errors), I would be a much happier reader.
We've covered this previously.
But that won't keep you from the same article you posted on what was it, Friday? There goes the theory that duplicate posts were merely the results laziness. Clearly they're also a result of simply not giving a shit as well.
For some reason people seem to think that because it's an e-mail grammar, punctuation and spelling can go out of the window.
Sadly, many young people today things that some of this shorthand passes as acceptable writing. That's a serious problem. They need to learn to distinguish between what is real language and what is shorthand. Using "2" instead of "to" or "too" is unacceptable. Using "u" instead of "you" is unacceptable. Yet many students insert these shorthands into their essays in school.
Ask any junior high or high school teacher and I'd be surprised if they haven't seen this kind of writing in their class. So while many of us can distinguish and hell, I use this stuff in IMs and e-mail all the time, many cannot distinguish and therin lies the problem.
I also understand that it can be difficult to detect a dupe when such a large number of articles
Why is it so difficult? They post what, 20 articles a day? How hard is it to look over the past 100 topics to see if it was previously posted? I agree, though that a simple tool could provide them with the ability to detect these. I don't even think you'd need Bayesian techniques. A simple comparison of the less common words would probably bring 90% of them out pretty quickly.
But as I posted a while ago: Where's their incentive to improve their quality? What, are we all going to go somewhere else and stop reading Slashdot? I don't suspect that will happen anytime soon.
The fact is, Slashdot is an amateur operation that happens to make a little money. I doubt they make that much. When was the last time they updated the web site in any significant way? Let's face it, these guys aren't working for a living. That's cool. I'm sure a lot of people would in their situation. But they clearly don't follow their own site and they clearly could care less about what people think about it. If they did, the site would improve.
...the quarks and gluons behaved as a liquid - in fact an almost perfect liquid.
So what are you saying? It got them drunk? I mean, it's like beer or something, but no hangover? Cool.
People who block spam would never buy from spammers even if they were unable to block it. The same goes for people that block ads on web sites. You're not violating any "social contract." The people that buy from ads on web sites are not going to be blocking them intentionally, because apparently there are some really strange people out there who aren't annoyed to death by all the crap on the net.
Income taxes began during the civil war which lasted until 1895 when the Supreme court found income taxes were "unconstitutional." To fix that, in 1913 the 16th ammendment was ratified.
The server is based on BlogTorrent not BattleTorrent.
Very contradictory: The title is "Moore's Law is Dead" but then the article states, "He helpfully explains, however, that the law will hold for a few years yet."
I guess "Moores Law will hold for a few years" isn't as much of an attention grabber, but at least it's honest.
My question is, why shove everyone into the ISS? Why not just dock with it, and share the life support supplies between the two systems, instead of cramming everyone into the station?
I'm sure there's some NASA engineer reading this right now slapping his forehead and thinking, "Geez, why didn't we think of that."
And if you think that's really happening, give me some of what you're smoking. It's NASA. They've come up with about 2 billion scenarios and talked it back and forth. I'm guessing this one came up at some point and was dismissed. Hey, maybe not, but if not, NASA has truely fallen from its glory days in more ways than one.
A movie playing in a theater plays just as well and just the same whether anybody's sitting in it or not.
Not really. It's both playing and it's not playing when there's nobody there. Google "schrodinger"
From the article: France's ISPs seemed to have rolled over already.
Kind of reminds me of the old joke, "What's the first thing you learn in the French army?" "How to say, 'I surrender' in German."
I think it's great how preoccupied so many people are about these completely obscure hypothetical apocalypse events.
I have to agree. First of all, the event would have to take place within 6000 light years of us for it to have a huge impact on the ozone layer. We're a good deal farther from the galactic core than 6000 light years. If an event were to happen anytime soon, it would be much more likely to happen near the galactic core. There just aren't as many neutron stars and black holes out this far. That's part of the reason that life has existed on this planet. Were we closer to the galactic core, it's unlikely life ever would have gotten very far.
Do the math. We detect one or so of these a month from other galaxies out of 125+ billion galaxies. Now you figure what are the chances of one happening in a less populous 6000 light year diameter area of our own galaxy. Not going to happen anytime soon, I'm sure.
You need to use "Google hacking" to find free porn? I know a lot of hacking techniques for all kinds of things, but I can't remember the last time I had to use any of them to find more free porn than I can possibly look at in a hundred lifetimes.
That's some amazing editing!
I completely agree with you, but what's their incentive to actually try to edit? I mean, afterall, people are still going to come to the site despite crappy editing. I doubt a significant number of new people will start coming if they improve it.
I mean, think about it, you gotta figure Taco and the boys have it pretty easy. Post a few stories a day have a sandwich, and call it a day. That's gotta be about the easiest money out there. When was the last time they really did anything significant to improve the site? Obviously "work ethic" isn't part of their vocabulary.
I'll grant that I'm no a math whiz, so I don't know the mathematics involved, but the reasons seem so obvious as to make me wonder how this could possibly challenge "cosmological theory." Most galaxies are pancake shaped. Most solar systems are pancake shaped. As you mentioned, nothing is really "gravitationally stable." I mean, if there's any movement at all, things are going to coalesce into a pancake shape eventually, unless all the movement is completely canceled out by opposite forces/movement, which is just statistically incredibly unlikely.