Maybe because when Microsoft releases a new version every technology site plus almost every other site including online book stores, online lingerie stores, online food delivery sites and gramma's blog run reviews, praisings and articles about it. Such an event is usually also covered by all newspapers, magazines, high-school student papers and church bulletins in the world. It is not like without Slashdot we would all be ignorant of Microsoft new releases...
"Website Optimization Guide for Would-be Slashdot FrontPagers"
I think no one knows what this means
on
More on Longhorn
·
· Score: 2
It sounds more like a marketing smoke-screen. Microsoft marketing people (and I have met dozens of them and worked for an MSP once) usually translate the strategic technical decisions into an unified speech. The problem is that many times the translation loses so much content that it loses most of its original meaning. The OLE/COM/DCOM transition was plagued by this sort of thing. The.Net innitiative made this division clear for anyone who cared to notice - as the internal MS technical people tried hard to define what.Net was without conflicting with Gates and Balmer vague words about it, marketing had already unified its speech - the only problem was that no one really knew what.Net was, so when you paid attention to what MS marketing people was saying you quickly notice they weren't really saying anything, just throwing nice slogans at you.
It was funnier when I thought about it reading the comment above mine - but I had to consider what you said, no one knows assembler anymore, and settle for ADD (one instruction I think is your average first example when you read an introduction to assembler).
Anyway, nevermind about moderation - it has been a long time since I posted here for karma, years really (I have an ID one order of magnitute lower than you, and my karma has been parked in the upper limit ever since there is an upper limit). I post to amuse or inform or even flame, but as difficult as it this in such a large site, I mostly post to see if meaningful conversation can start. Sometimes it does. But thanks for the pat and the grin..:)
This one goes on for more or less 10000 thousand lines. The guy tried to send me the DDT for the Graphic Subsystem, but my ISP said it could not handle a 500 Gigabytes attachment.
They could create a "Replay" section and whenever they feel like publishing the same story again they could put it there. This way they could even put it in the front page and nobody would have reason to complaim...
I believe my previous comment was too narow, and may have given the impression I am only seeing the subject as a religion against science problem. Not so. I am also concerned about the whole host of ethical problems stem cell and cloning must address. But as you, I also think that banning something is the fast way to lose any control on what you ban. It is true for drugs nowadays, for instance.
In my defense I would point that I was answering more specifically to a poster who "regreted" that the "civilized world" bans could be circunvented.
I thought the real point was, given the advances in our understanding of biology, nanotech and computer sciences, if we should build a better human (and let those concerned build better humantraps). A starting point would be deciding if we still are a part of Nature or if we have somehow risen above it. I favour the former and think that anything we do about enhancing the species is a natural part of Evolution (and if we mess up, it is also a natural part of Evolution, namely extinction). But I am well aware that some (or even most) people tend for the later, and think the humans are not (or never were) an integral part of Nature.
If you want to equate "pro-Life" with "American" and you feel your fellow Americans will agree with you, it is all right with me. And I believe you know that after repeating this for some time, it will be pretty easy, by associating "American" with "Patriot", to associate "Pro-Life" with "Patriot". From there it is ridiculously easy to equate "Abortion" with "un-Patriot" or "Traitor" and you already have the laws to deal with it in place.
Just be careful to keep your problems inside your borders. Just don't send armies of missionaries around the world to inform us ignorant savages about how your God will send all abortitionists to ethernal fire. Because as much as you would like to pretend it is not a religious problem, but some sort of "human rights" problems, your rethoric can deceive just so much. Equating "American" with "Human Rights Defender" will surely get you a lot of good laughs in the civilised parts of the world - little more. (or, to be fancy, we still remember, we who dwell, in this far lands beneath the trees, the flashlight of American guns...)
There is a lot of discussion about making specific laws about steem-cell, cloning and someother things. These laws wouldn't regulate these matters, just ban them out of existence.
Bush haven't cut the funds across thr board, he just limited the funding to some 60 existing stem cell lines. The development and use of new lines cannot be funded by the Federal Government.
On the other hand, such state-of-art knowledge is rarely able to keep pace with the private companies need to please Wall Street. So this decision alone may delay results for years or even decades.
Some reason (hopefully a good one)
on
Human-Mouse Hybrids?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
An instance of "civilized" country has been recently letting the religious right decide what can and what can not be researched. Steem-cell and cloning studies are being banned because some religious texts were interpreted as saying that this sort of thing is "unholy". As it is, people who does not share this view of the Universe will eventually find ways to keep studying these subjects somewhere else. I don't regret it, because after carefull consideration I find the maddest scientist far saner than the saner right-wing fundamentalist.
Also, moving services and "dirty" plants to unregulated countries and the subsequent pressure (mostly economic but sometimes even military) to keep these countries unregulated is caused mainly by the major corporations of "civilized" Western countries, not by mad scientists or WTO eco-freaks. You should ask yourself who is served by a cheaper oil tanker (or a cheaper Nike produce by Vietnamese semi-slaves).
C breaks the standard day-to-day math interpretation of "/". Arithmetic according to C: float x = 3.14159; int y = 1/2 * x; Value of y? zero.
Or is it you breaking the standard day-to-day math interpretations of "integer"?
Let us see. When you divide an integer number and require an integer as a result, two outcomes are possible: either the division is exact and yields another integer or it isn't and you must round the result to get a correct answer (correct by the rule requiring the answer to be an integer).
C rounds an inexact integer division down. So: int y= 1 / 2 * 3.14159 = 1 / 6.28 = 0.16 = 0
If memory serves, OSDN made them drop "We're smarter than you. Suck it" when they bought the whole thing. But if you Google for it you may find an older version of the FAQ stating that the whole point of the site is to lash out and prove your intellectual superiority.
I agree with you, I used the same package somewhere in between you two, and my son used it two years ago. Same results every time.
I heard the problem they are having is that the new versions of their software does not run with the present hardware. They hope the Coming Singularity will solve the problem and allow the new version to be launched.
Whoever modded the comment above Interesting or Insightful, shame on you. It is one of the funniest comment in the whole article!
The poster shows masterful command of the irony, satire and sarcasm.
In his first phrases he introduces us to the problem and to the ironical solution: "We have problem, the solution is to ship it somewhere else" (he is clearly aware that any of us here in Slashdot, bright sons and daughters of the information revolution, knows that in a closed system there is no somewhere else - he knows that when the king ships Hamlet to England the Bard is just using a dramatic device to make the play last a little bit longer).
Then he goes all the way to fine sarcasm: "The peasants over there will be HAPPY to have our junk" (we all know too that no one will be happy with heavy metal poisoning the drinking water and the soil for centuries - less obvious but still in context is the fact that the peasants over there may be poor but they are not stupid).
The he insults the reader calling him/her a no-good WTO anarchist - imagine interfering with such an act of christian charity. And making room for more laughs, he states that our poisonous junk is the mean of existence (albeit short) of someone else.
If I had to criticise something in the post, I would say he stopped too soon. He leaves untouched the whole matter of sending our nuclear waste to the same peasants, maybe telling showing them how to make fake jewelery that glows in the dark - wouldn't that be hilarious?
All things considered, the moderators lost a precious opportunity to give the poster his highly deserved Funny points. A real shame.
Temptation Island, the Candid Camera Edition: Follow a bunch of people with the best technology you can put your hands on, WITHOUT them knowing or consenting. Petty privacy invasion allowed, like hidden cameras and microphones in subjects homes, offices, etc. Broadcast from a server hidden somewhere in Central Asia or Eastern Europe. Each 3 or 4 days you let paying viewers vote for the participant with the most boring life. The most voted is dropped. Go on until there is only one person left.
I bet those guys at ECHELON play this game all the time.
I have a feeling that if we ever bought a product from a telemarketer, we'd be put on the 'sucker' list and get bombarded with even more telemarketing
I think that at this point in the development of capitalism, every inhabitant of the planet is born in the sucker list. And there are fewer ways out each day...
Why bother then? If Apple, with far less resources of any kind whatsoever, managed to plug a decent user interface on the top of a free UNIX-like layer, Microsoft could certainly do the same, only better and faster.
Evil computers manned by even more evil hackers (who else use computers to inform?) are somehow involved. One of the most idiotic laws ever written, style and contentwise, is also involved. And then you have big corporations with hundreds of lawyers ready to file frivolous suits against the said evil hackers using the said idiotic law until they are bankrupt to the fourth generation.
So, as you see, it a completely different situation. If we dig deeper we may even find some threat to national security here.
I can see all sorts of applications. Diet carts that will ring a bell each time you buy something not in your "allowed list", exposing you to fellowbuyers disapproving stares. Kid carts that will guide any K-12 through the most expensive and/or less healthy section of a supermarket. Spounsored carts, that will talk you to death into buying some products. The last idea can even be enhanced by having paid, add-free carts and free annoying talkative carts (think about many sites we all know). The possibilities are endless. The patience of the general public with novell ways to make them buy more, unfortunatelly, is also endless.
I stated clearly that I was talking about an asteroid of a "significant" size, large enough to ensure the rest of my comment holds its water. The "small" pieces would still be large enough to send us to the same evolutionary dustbin the dinossaurs went (basically for failing to install the space object warning and destruction systems we are talking about here).
For what you suggest to work, the asteroid must be broken in a number of smaller pieces in such a way that enough mass of each piece will burn during planet-entry to reduce it to a definite point. This point is that where the impact of all pieces combined will not be enough to cause one of the many things that would destroy most life (or just human civilisation) in the planet.
Now, that would depend on a huge number of variables: composition of the asteroid matter, its velocity, the number of pieces you manage to divert enterely, the points of impact and, naturally, the asteroid size. This last factor may well make any breaking effort useless (a large enough asteroid will generate pieces large enough to kill us all anyway).
As it is, I don't know if it is possible to predict the outcome of the experiment without sending Bruce Willis up there to make sure the end will be happy.
Slashdot Mirror
That is the worst pun I've seen on ./ in a long time
Making for a "+5, Funny" moderation probability of almost 100%.
Maybe because when Microsoft releases a new version every technology site plus almost every other site including online book stores, online lingerie stores, online food delivery sites and gramma's blog run reviews, praisings and articles about it. Such an event is usually also covered by all newspapers, magazines, high-school student papers and church bulletins in the world. It is not like without Slashdot we would all be ignorant of Microsoft new releases...
"Website Optimization Guide for Would-be Slashdot FrontPagers"
It sounds more like a marketing smoke-screen. Microsoft marketing people (and I have met dozens of them and worked for an MSP once) usually translate the strategic technical decisions into an unified speech. The problem is that many times the translation loses so much content that it loses most of its original meaning. The OLE/COM/DCOM transition was plagued by this sort of thing. The .Net innitiative made this division clear for anyone who cared to notice - as the internal MS technical people tried hard to define what .Net was without conflicting with Gates and Balmer vague words about it, marketing had already unified its speech - the only problem was that no one really knew what .Net was, so when you paid attention to what MS marketing people was saying you quickly notice they weren't really saying anything, just throwing nice slogans at you.
It was funnier when I thought about it reading the comment above mine - but I had to consider what you said, no one knows assembler anymore, and settle for ADD (one instruction I think is your average first example when you read an introduction to assembler).
:)
Anyway, nevermind about moderation - it has been a long time since I posted here for karma, years really (I have an ID one order of magnitute lower than you, and my karma has been parked in the upper limit ever since there is an upper limit). I post to amuse or inform or even flame, but as difficult as it this in such a large site, I mostly post to see if meaningful conversation can start. Sometimes it does. But thanks for the pat and the grin..
They could create a "Replay" section and whenever they feel like publishing the same story again they could put it there. This way they could even put it in the front page and nobody would have reason to complaim...
I believe my previous comment was too narow, and may have given the impression I am only seeing the subject as a religion against science problem. Not so. I am also concerned about the whole host of ethical problems stem cell and cloning must address. But as you, I also think that banning something is the fast way to lose any control on what you ban. It is true for drugs nowadays, for instance.
In my defense I would point that I was answering more specifically to a poster who "regreted" that the "civilized world" bans could be circunvented.
I thought the real point was, given the advances in our understanding of biology, nanotech and computer sciences, if we should build a better human (and let those concerned build better humantraps). A starting point would be deciding if we still are a part of Nature or if we have somehow risen above it. I favour the former and think that anything we do about enhancing the species is a natural part of Evolution (and if we mess up, it is also a natural part of Evolution, namely extinction). But I am well aware that some (or even most) people tend for the later, and think the humans are not (or never were) an integral part of Nature.
If you want to equate "pro-Life" with "American" and you feel your fellow Americans will agree with you, it is all right with me. And I believe you know that after repeating this for some time, it will be pretty easy, by associating "American" with "Patriot", to associate "Pro-Life" with "Patriot". From there it is ridiculously easy to equate "Abortion" with "un-Patriot" or "Traitor" and you already have the laws to deal with it in place.
Just be careful to keep your problems inside your borders. Just don't send armies of missionaries around the world to inform us ignorant savages about how your God will send all abortitionists to ethernal fire. Because as much as you would like to pretend it is not a religious problem, but some sort of "human rights" problems, your rethoric can deceive just so much. Equating "American" with "Human Rights Defender" will surely get you a lot of good laughs in the civilised parts of the world - little more. (or, to be fancy, we still remember, we who dwell, in this far lands beneath the trees, the flashlight of American guns...)
sorry sorry sorry You are Welcome (just a little less than a spellchecker would be)
There is a lot of discussion about making specific laws about steem-cell, cloning and someother things. These laws wouldn't regulate these matters, just ban them out of existence.
Bush haven't cut the funds across thr board, he just limited the funding to some 60 existing stem cell lines. The development and use of new lines cannot be funded by the Federal Government.
On the other hand, such state-of-art knowledge is rarely able to keep pace with the private companies need to please Wall Street. So this decision alone may delay results for years or even decades.
An instance of "civilized" country has been recently letting the religious right decide what can and what can not be researched. Steem-cell and cloning studies are being banned because some religious texts were interpreted as saying that this sort of thing is "unholy". As it is, people who does not share this view of the Universe will eventually find ways to keep studying these subjects somewhere else. I don't regret it, because after carefull consideration I find the maddest scientist far saner than the saner right-wing fundamentalist.
Also, moving services and "dirty" plants to unregulated countries and the subsequent pressure (mostly economic but sometimes even military) to keep these countries unregulated is caused mainly by the major corporations of "civilized" Western countries, not by mad scientists or WTO eco-freaks. You should ask yourself who is served by a cheaper oil tanker (or a cheaper Nike produce by Vietnamese semi-slaves).
Division and multiplication precedence here are pretty irrelevant, both int y= (1 / 2) * 3.14159 and int y= 1 / (2 * 3.14159) will result in y=0.
C breaks the standard day-to-day math interpretation of "/".
Arithmetic according to C: float x = 3.14159; int y = 1/2 * x; Value of y? zero.
Or is it you breaking the standard day-to-day math interpretations of "integer"?
Let us see. When you divide an integer number and require an integer as a result, two outcomes are possible: either the division is exact and yields another integer or it isn't and you must round the result to get a correct answer (correct by the rule requiring the answer to be an integer).
C rounds an inexact integer division down. So:
int y= 1 / 2 * 3.14159 = 1 / 6.28 = 0.16 = 0
What would your doubt be again?
If memory serves, OSDN made them drop "We're smarter than you. Suck it" when they bought the whole thing. But if you Google for it you may find an older version of the FAQ stating that the whole point of the site is to lash out and prove your intellectual superiority.
I agree with you, I used the same package somewhere in between you two, and my son used it two years ago. Same results every time.
I heard the problem they are having is that the new versions of their software does not run with the present hardware. They hope the Coming Singularity will solve the problem and allow the new version to be launched.
Whoever modded the comment above Interesting or Insightful, shame on you. It is one of the funniest comment in the whole article!
The poster shows masterful command of the irony, satire and sarcasm.
In his first phrases he introduces us to the problem and to the ironical solution: "We have problem, the solution is to ship it somewhere else" (he is clearly aware that any of us here in Slashdot, bright sons and daughters of the information revolution, knows that in a closed system there is no somewhere else - he knows that when the king ships Hamlet to England the Bard is just using a dramatic device to make the play last a little bit longer).
Then he goes all the way to fine sarcasm: "The peasants over there will be HAPPY to have our junk" (we all know too that no one will be happy with heavy metal poisoning the drinking water and the soil for centuries - less obvious but still in context is the fact that the peasants over there may be poor but they are not stupid).
The he insults the reader calling him/her a no-good WTO anarchist - imagine interfering with such an act of christian charity. And making room for more laughs, he states that our poisonous junk is the mean of existence (albeit short) of someone else.
If I had to criticise something in the post, I would say he stopped too soon. He leaves untouched the whole matter of sending our nuclear waste to the same peasants, maybe telling showing them how to make fake jewelery that glows in the dark - wouldn't that be hilarious?
All things considered, the moderators lost a precious opportunity to give the poster his highly deserved Funny points. A real shame.
Temptation Island, the Candid Camera Edition: Follow a bunch of people with the best technology you can put your hands on, WITHOUT them knowing or consenting. Petty privacy invasion allowed, like hidden cameras and microphones in subjects homes, offices, etc. Broadcast from a server hidden somewhere in Central Asia or Eastern Europe. Each 3 or 4 days you let paying viewers vote for the participant with the most boring life. The most voted is dropped. Go on until there is only one person left.
I bet those guys at ECHELON play this game all the time.
I have a feeling that if we ever bought a product from a telemarketer, we'd be put on the 'sucker' list and get bombarded with even more telemarketing
I think that at this point in the development of capitalism, every inhabitant of the planet is born in the sucker list. And there are fewer ways out each day...
Why bother then? If Apple, with far less resources of any kind whatsoever, managed to plug a decent user interface on the top of a free UNIX-like layer, Microsoft could certainly do the same, only better and faster.
Evil computers manned by even more evil hackers (who else use computers to inform?) are somehow involved. One of the most idiotic laws ever written, style and contentwise, is also involved. And then you have big corporations with hundreds of lawyers ready to file frivolous suits against the said evil hackers using the said idiotic law until they are bankrupt to the fourth generation.
So, as you see, it a completely different situation. If we dig deeper we may even find some threat to national security here.
I can see all sorts of applications. Diet carts that will ring a bell each time you buy something not in your "allowed list", exposing you to fellowbuyers disapproving stares. Kid carts that will guide any K-12 through the most expensive and/or less healthy section of a supermarket. Spounsored carts, that will talk you to death into buying some products. The last idea can even be enhanced by having paid, add-free carts and free annoying talkative carts (think about many sites we all know). The possibilities are endless. The patience of the general public with novell ways to make them buy more, unfortunatelly, is also endless.
I stated clearly that I was talking about an asteroid of a "significant" size, large enough to ensure the rest of my comment holds its water. The "small" pieces would still be large enough to send us to the same evolutionary dustbin the dinossaurs went (basically for failing to install the space object warning and destruction systems we are talking about here).
For what you suggest to work, the asteroid must be broken in a number of smaller pieces in such a way that enough mass of each piece will burn during planet-entry to reduce it to a definite point. This point is that where the impact of all pieces combined will not be enough to cause one of the many things that would destroy most life (or just human civilisation) in the planet.
Now, that would depend on a huge number of variables: composition of the asteroid matter, its velocity, the number of pieces you manage to divert enterely, the points of impact and, naturally, the asteroid size. This last factor may well make any breaking effort useless (a large enough asteroid will generate pieces large enough to kill us all anyway).
As it is, I don't know if it is possible to predict the outcome of the experiment without sending Bruce Willis up there to make sure the end will be happy.