From reading slashdot, I know there are several technologies which have been "a couple of years away" for a while now which could (if people bothered with the expense) turn the most common problem in computer heat dissipation into "how do I prevent it from getting too cold and forming condensation on everything?"
Troll: Regardless of the content of the post, was made with the purpose of adding "noise", to break the forum, to generally make the place less-relevant to its purpose. This one should pretty much never be used, unless it's very obvious (like GNAA, CmdrTaco's penis, etc), since a truly well-crafted troll is generally indistinguishable from a very well-written post, while the only thing really distinguishing any other post from a troll post is Intent.
Flamebait: literally "baiting flames". Saying something with the intention of starting a flame-war. In some circles, this includes saying something which you should have known better than to. (even if abortion law is entirely relevant to the topic, some would consider it flamebait to mention it). If you don't take that line, however, this one is also entirely down to the intent of the poster, and so should never be used.
Off-topic: Any other post which is not relevant to the original topic, no matter the quality of writing.
The FCC, making a decision on its own and without direction from Congress, going after companies based on its own whims, basically completely ignoring the rule of law, is a "good guy", now?
If your cause is being approved-of by no one in government other than "that one guy who has a machine-gun and diplomatic immunity", you aren't winning.
Everyone knows the best way to solve crimes in London is simply:
1) Let the criminals go free
2) Wait 30-40 years
3) Hit a young detective with a car
4) Wacky hijinks ensue, resulting in ambiguous time travel and the prevention of the original crimes.
The problem I have with surveillance in general is that I don't trust the decision of who is labeled a "criminal" and what is labeled a "crime" to be sane. Sure, I can walk down the street today, minding my own business, and I know it's not a crime, but can I tomorrow?
I'd rather that anything involving "minding my own business" go unmonitored.
In exchange for no days off for one year of my life, I could be paid more money than my current prospects have me making (gross) for the next 40 years?
I'll agree you don't want to alienate your audience just because they're using a broken browser, but that is not what being a "good" web designer is about.
that would make the system self-enforcing among larger companies: people go out of their way to make sure that copyright holders are contacted as soon as possible, to either request their share or sign it away.
freedom is being able to have a camera around your neck no matter which country you visit, unless you don't want it there. Also, you get to choose where to point the camera.
It doesn't come from the association of "the big machine in the server room". If that were the case, we wouldn't ever have the confusion when running for normal single-machine desktop use. The confusion comes from the association of "provides a useful service". If the X protocol's client-server architecture was defined in the sane or useful way which everyone intuitively expects such a thing to be defined when they hear "X uses a client-server architecture", a Client would connect to a Server, send requests (mouse/keyboard events, etc) and receive replies (information about what to display). That is a client-server architecture.
X would be able to:
restart without stupidly losing all connected applications
easily share applications between different users, different devices, or (for fuck's sake) different monitors
keep an application open when you leave work, opening it up again from home, seamlessly picking up where you left off
Have security regarding what applications need to do in order to listen to "someone else's events"
Not technically need to run "the thing which applications with a GUI talk to" as root
just as a bonus: not confuse people with a backwards metaphor
all essentially for "free".
Instead, X is backwards, and things which should have been standard features decades ago can still only be gotten through ineffective hacks.
and why shouldn't Virtualization be deemed a necessity for "most home and office users"? Right now, it's just a tool for the informed, and is more-separated than it needs to be (awkwardly running in its own window, crudely running a full OS including window-manager, often as overhead to run a single program) but with 4GB on low-end machines, combined with multiple cores being the rule rather than the exception, there's no reason for virtualization to stay in its little niche. "You got a virus off the internet? You use a web browser that has access to your regular filesystem?! What's wrong with you?"
Signs of the coming apocalypse: chrome begets "chrome OS".
The idea of "Why should I bother being a monk, when a soldier can blow up mountains by sneezing?" being a bad thing is utterly stupid. If you want to blow up mountains by sneezing, you won't be a monk. If you don't want to, you'll be a monk. If you don't want to, and still want a sword, you'll play a different game.
It all comes down to the stupid enshrinement of a statistic: People want it so that "when these two numbers are near eachother, they should be able to do similar things", ie: a "level 80 shit-stormer" should be able to contribute as much to defeating a Monstrous Foo as a "level 80 shit-shoveler". This is ridiculous, and helps no one. Some things are more effective than other things, no matter how experienced you are with either of them. Some people want to run around pretending to be gods all day long, other people don't, and both of those styles of play are cast aside in game developers' endless quest to make everyone feel "just a little better than mediocre" at all times.
1) Anyone is allowed to share any infinitely-reproducible item which they are able to reproduce, for any price. 2) After any such distribution, the copyright holder has a length of time equal to the term of their copyright to request a share of the gross price charged. 3) Everyone making a claim gets an equal portion of the gross price. If three people make a claim, the gross price will be divided evenly four ways (one part to each making a claim, and one part to the distributor), etc. If someone makes a claim later, they will receive their share from all people involved. (equivalent to everyone putting what they've received from the item into a pot and re-dividing it equally) 4) No one has any inherent right to control the destiny of copies of their created works. You cannot deny anyone the right to distribute a copy of something.
*note that the "makes things slower, not faster", is just a consequence of the way memory tends to be allocated when doing things "by hand"- it is not a result of optimized abstractions
Workstations should be named after the person who primarily uses the system. Unlike servers, specifics like this are okay, because you generally do not have a lot of things set up to work for the machine as much as for the user of that machine- and you usually don't mind if those break when staff changes. Workstations are okay to change the name of. If you find yourself in a situation where you can't easily change the name of a workstation without breaking something, you're doing something seriously wrong.
Small and catchy names, like naming things after cities or animals or whatever, as others have suggested, is a horrible horrible stupid idea. Catchy names are only good for resources which are shared in a network environment- which workstations should not be.
even though I use my XBox for gaming a lot more than my PC lately, I still consider PC gaming superior. Modding will always be king, and until consoles open up and stop their ridiculous notion of content control, PCs will always be the superior option. And as PCs continue to be smaller, cheaper, and more connected, they'll eventually knock consoles right back where they belong- why have a console if you can send wireless video to your TV just as easily?
C gets its speed boost from having no abstraction. The things which are abstracted are trivial substitutions and do not provide a speed boost. C has no speed-optimizing abstractions.
When you define a variable in C, you very well CAN define the memory address for it, rather than telling something else to do it for you. But this makes things slower, not faster.
C does not provide any abstraction which says something like "This variable should have all of its possible values processed simultaneously", and only very primitive ways of defining what those values are (from which, as far as I am aware, no speed boost can be claimed, as it is only done to prevent error)
So, yes, C has no abstractions in the context of the sentence right above it.
There's another solution: Compiled software should have no copyright protection (just as houses have no copyright protection), but source-code _should_ (just as blueprints do).
How useful is software written 20 years ago? Just as useful as it ever was, if you have access to the source.
The value of books to society is not (at least not just) the story they tell, but the ideas they convey, and the language they invent which can influence culture. Those ideas are free, and copyright exists to encourage the creation of them.
So to is software not just "some program you run", but the ideas in the code, the individual pieces which can be re-used or learned from. Why should we give copyright protection at all to something which can't ever benefit society in that way?
Summary: The goal of copyright law is the creation of public-domain works. It just provides commercial entities with a clear path to follow in order to allow them to make money when doing so. If something will never usefully enter the public domain, copyright has no interest in protecting it.
most modern languages attempt to get speed boosts by abstracting-away low-level stuff and providing mechanisms to specify or ensure the exact constraints of a system, so that optimizations can be made.
C still gets all its speed boost from having no abstraction, forcing the programmer to hand-optimize everything, or to format code in such a way that the compiler can make a few sloppy guesses about when optimizations should be made (the "can be made" thing isn't really worth mentioning, since C doesn't allow enough type-constraints to let the compiler make anything resembling an intelligent decision, so all optimizations are pretty much "does this get used this way right here? No? Okay then, I can do this...", always lowest-common-denominator stuff- pretty much just glorified macros ("I've seen that pattern before, You seem to be looping through every element of an array and copying everything.. I'll just change that to a re-implementation of memcpy for you...")
Low-level optimizations and hand-optimizing things will only go so far- yeah, we can all just switch to assembly and get a minor speed-boost by hand-optimizing everything, but nobody does that (for speed) anymore. Eventually, being able to say "This loop is safe to run in parallel" or "just give me the first match, I don't care how you do it", is going to be faster than "loop through this. I've given you all the pointer offsets in advance, so you can skip a dereference step!" or "Let me tell you exactly how you should find a match...."
Slashdot Mirror
From reading slashdot, I know there are several technologies which have been "a couple of years away" for a while now which could (if people bothered with the expense) turn the most common problem in computer heat dissipation into "how do I prevent it from getting too cold and forming condensation on everything?"
No, that's what "Flamebait" is for.
Troll: Regardless of the content of the post, was made with the purpose of adding "noise", to break the forum, to generally make the place less-relevant to its purpose. This one should pretty much never be used, unless it's very obvious (like GNAA, CmdrTaco's penis, etc), since a truly well-crafted troll is generally indistinguishable from a very well-written post, while the only thing really distinguishing any other post from a troll post is Intent.
Flamebait: literally "baiting flames". Saying something with the intention of starting a flame-war. In some circles, this includes saying something which you should have known better than to. (even if abortion law is entirely relevant to the topic, some would consider it flamebait to mention it). If you don't take that line, however, this one is also entirely down to the intent of the poster, and so should never be used.
Off-topic: Any other post which is not relevant to the original topic, no matter the quality of writing.
The FCC, making a decision on its own and without direction from Congress, going after companies based on its own whims, basically completely ignoring the rule of law, is a "good guy", now?
If your cause is being approved-of by no one in government other than "that one guy who has a machine-gun and diplomatic immunity", you aren't winning.
He's still awesome.
Everyone knows the best way to solve crimes in London is simply:
1) Let the criminals go free
2) Wait 30-40 years
3) Hit a young detective with a car
4) Wacky hijinks ensue, resulting in ambiguous time travel and the prevention of the original crimes.
The problem I have with surveillance in general is that I don't trust the decision of who is labeled a "criminal" and what is labeled a "crime" to be sane. Sure, I can walk down the street today, minding my own business, and I know it's not a crime, but can I tomorrow?
I'd rather that anything involving "minding my own business" go unmonitored.
There are three CCTV cameras visible from my bedroom window. There are many more idiots visible from there.
maybe he used sftp instead of ftp. I know that's how I copy my .bashrc when I'm leaving a company
That is not how the GPL works.
In exchange for no days off for one year of my life, I could be paid more money than my current prospects have me making (gross) for the next 40 years?
I'll call it worth it. Where do I sign?
Wow! A real life time-traveler! Well, allow me to be the first to welcome you to 2008. You may find it strange, here- a lot has changed since 1806!
I'll agree you don't want to alienate your audience just because they're using a broken browser, but that is not what being a "good" web designer is about.
that would make the system self-enforcing among larger companies: people go out of their way to make sure that copyright holders are contacted as soon as possible, to either request their share or sign it away.
freedom is being able to have a camera around your neck no matter which country you visit, unless you don't want it there. Also, you get to choose where to point the camera.
It doesn't come from the association of "the big machine in the server room". If that were the case, we wouldn't ever have the confusion when running for normal single-machine desktop use. The confusion comes from the association of "provides a useful service". If the X protocol's client-server architecture was defined in the sane or useful way which everyone intuitively expects such a thing to be defined when they hear "X uses a client-server architecture", a Client would connect to a Server, send requests (mouse/keyboard events, etc) and receive replies (information about what to display). That is a client-server architecture.
X would be able to:
all essentially for "free".
Instead, X is backwards, and things which should have been standard features decades ago can still only be gotten through ineffective hacks.
and why shouldn't Virtualization be deemed a necessity for "most home and office users"? Right now, it's just a tool for the informed, and is more-separated than it needs to be (awkwardly running in its own window, crudely running a full OS including window-manager, often as overhead to run a single program) but with 4GB on low-end machines, combined with multiple cores being the rule rather than the exception, there's no reason for virtualization to stay in its little niche. "You got a virus off the internet? You use a web browser that has access to your regular filesystem?! What's wrong with you?"
Signs of the coming apocalypse: chrome begets "chrome OS".
The idea of "Why should I bother being a monk, when a soldier can blow up mountains by sneezing?" being a bad thing is utterly stupid. If you want to blow up mountains by sneezing, you won't be a monk. If you don't want to, you'll be a monk. If you don't want to, and still want a sword, you'll play a different game.
It all comes down to the stupid enshrinement of a statistic: People want it so that "when these two numbers are near eachother, they should be able to do similar things", ie: a "level 80 shit-stormer" should be able to contribute as much to defeating a Monstrous Foo as a "level 80 shit-shoveler". This is ridiculous, and helps no one. Some things are more effective than other things, no matter how experienced you are with either of them. Some people want to run around pretending to be gods all day long, other people don't, and both of those styles of play are cast aside in game developers' endless quest to make everyone feel "just a little better than mediocre" at all times.
it's small and expensive. That beats "feature-rich" any day of the week.
1) Anyone is allowed to share any infinitely-reproducible item which they are able to reproduce, for any price.
2) After any such distribution, the copyright holder has a length of time equal to the term of their copyright to request a share of the gross price charged.
3) Everyone making a claim gets an equal portion of the gross price. If three people make a claim, the gross price will be divided evenly four ways (one part to each making a claim, and one part to the distributor), etc. If someone makes a claim later, they will receive their share from all people involved. (equivalent to everyone putting what they've received from the item into a pot and re-dividing it equally)
4) No one has any inherent right to control the destiny of copies of their created works. You cannot deny anyone the right to distribute a copy of something.
*note that the "makes things slower, not faster", is just a consequence of the way memory tends to be allocated when doing things "by hand"- it is not a result of optimized abstractions
Workstations should be named after the person who primarily uses the system. Unlike servers, specifics like this are okay, because you generally do not have a lot of things set up to work for the machine as much as for the user of that machine- and you usually don't mind if those break when staff changes. Workstations are okay to change the name of. If you find yourself in a situation where you can't easily change the name of a workstation without breaking something, you're doing something seriously wrong.
Small and catchy names, like naming things after cities or animals or whatever, as others have suggested, is a horrible horrible stupid idea. Catchy names are only good for resources which are shared in a network environment- which workstations should not be.
even though I use my XBox for gaming a lot more than my PC lately, I still consider PC gaming superior.
Modding will always be king, and until consoles open up and stop their ridiculous notion of content control, PCs will always be the superior option. And as PCs continue to be smaller, cheaper, and more connected, they'll eventually knock consoles right back where they belong- why have a console if you can send wireless video to your TV just as easily?
C gets its speed boost from having no abstraction. The things which are abstracted are trivial substitutions and do not provide a speed boost. C has no speed-optimizing abstractions.
When you define a variable in C, you very well CAN define the memory address for it, rather than telling something else to do it for you. But this makes things slower, not faster.
C does not provide any abstraction which says something like "This variable should have all of its possible values processed simultaneously", and only very primitive ways of defining what those values are (from which, as far as I am aware, no speed boost can be claimed, as it is only done to prevent error)
So, yes, C has no abstractions in the context of the sentence right above it.
There's another solution: Compiled software should have no copyright protection (just as houses have no copyright protection), but source-code _should_ (just as blueprints do).
How useful is software written 20 years ago? Just as useful as it ever was, if you have access to the source.
The value of books to society is not (at least not just) the story they tell, but the ideas they convey, and the language they invent which can influence culture. Those ideas are free, and copyright exists to encourage the creation of them.
So to is software not just "some program you run", but the ideas in the code, the individual pieces which can be re-used or learned from. Why should we give copyright protection at all to something which can't ever benefit society in that way?
Summary:
The goal of copyright law is the creation of public-domain works. It just provides commercial entities with a clear path to follow in order to allow them to make money when doing so. If something will never usefully enter the public domain, copyright has no interest in protecting it.
most modern languages attempt to get speed boosts by abstracting-away low-level stuff and providing mechanisms to specify or ensure the exact constraints of a system, so that optimizations can be made.
C still gets all its speed boost from having no abstraction, forcing the programmer to hand-optimize everything, or to format code in such a way that the compiler can make a few sloppy guesses about when optimizations should be made (the "can be made" thing isn't really worth mentioning, since C doesn't allow enough type-constraints to let the compiler make anything resembling an intelligent decision, so all optimizations are pretty much "does this get used this way right here? No? Okay then, I can do this...", always lowest-common-denominator stuff- pretty much just glorified macros ("I've seen that pattern before, You seem to be looping through every element of an array and copying everything.. I'll just change that to a re-implementation of memcpy for you...")
Low-level optimizations and hand-optimizing things will only go so far- yeah, we can all just switch to assembly and get a minor speed-boost by hand-optimizing everything, but nobody does that (for speed) anymore. Eventually, being able to say "This loop is safe to run in parallel" or "just give me the first match, I don't care how you do it", is going to be faster than "loop through this. I've given you all the pointer offsets in advance, so you can skip a dereference step!" or "Let me tell you exactly how you should find a match...."