We get it already, 30% of high school kids drop out, our President has an IQ of 60, and smart kids are beaten in the streets, what the hell do you expect?
War with Iran by the end of the year. Was this the right answer?
That's the tenth or eleventh time people bash me for driving a SUV and pointing me to suv hate sites where people explain how people that drive suvs are morons and so on.
Thing is, I don't drive a suv, maybe time for a nick change.
My sympathies to all people who drive a suv, however. Aparrently the hate towards suv drivers is ubiquitious.
Could you please speak in a language that's not dead yet.
A $20 million Formula One car, for instance, has a functional halflife of about 4 hours, because it is designed that way, much of that $20 million being spent to effectively shorten it's halflife compared to a street car.
They've sent a Formula One car over there?
You'll probably notice an F1 car returns its investment by braking down from excessive speeds. Could you say the same for a Mars Rover? Not that I can't imagine people being entertained from videos of the rover driving 200miles/hour through the Mars craters, but come on...
I think it gets repeated because NASA's failures and stupidity get repeated just as often. It is a counter balance to help point out that NASA isn't always doing crap.
Could be. I was never a fan of regurgitating NASA's failures either. Too much admirations or complaints just turn into extra noise.
AFAIR, it was only intended to run for a couple of months, yet it has now clocked up a couple of years
You can all stop repeating this, by the way. We're all impressed with it, it's amazing, and I cried like a little baby when I saw the first Mars photos sent by it and its companion, but it's time to get over it.:)
Plus, for a multi-million (billion?) piece of machinery, I'd expect it to work past my death (unless a major glitch occurs).
I wouldn't blame them if it suddenly failed or exploded due to unknown cause, but I wouldn't congratulate them every day for years for the fact it works:).
For me the most amazing job is that it landed in one piece and operational. Now that's it's there, let's git to work and find some one-eyed green martians.
I've inspected the web gadget, it seems useless. To see the quotes try this:
fragments.irrepressible.info/data/current/*-180.ht ml
where "*" is from 0 to 70.
It includes some quotes, but they are just few words, taken out of context, no author or place of origin is given, basically makes no sense. Some of them are Arabic as well.
Let's hope it's not some scam, otherwise you can expect those quotes to turn into cheap C1aL1s offers and affordable mortgage deals when they gain some mass;)
The paper did a lot of hand-optimization, which is irrelevent to most programmers. What gcc -O3 does is way more importent then what an assembly wizard can do for most projects.
Actually bullshit. We're talking scientific applications here, and it's not uncommon that programs written to run on supercomputers *are* optimized by an assembly wizard to squeeze every cycle out of it.
Heck, the desktop metaphor on the PC, ostensibly a device dedicated to the computing experience hasn't come close to perfection.
Just like you can't grab a rainbow or reach the horizon, you can't "reach perfection" with anything. But I don't see how this means it shouldn't exist.
Convergence is not a myth, we used to have pagers only capable of displaying phone number and a short text message. Would you get a pager today?
I own a SE K750. It has a very good consumer 2MP camera, great FM radio and MP3/MP4 player, can shoot small videos if need be, has a very decent HTML browser, and is a very good and light phone too.
Apparently it can be done.
The fact that devices become less and less reliable isn't because they have plenty of functions, it's because companies are competing each other and trying to push the products on the market before they are finished.
You can't make a 20-in-1 device without the additional test time and design considerations, but companies do that. When they start producing less models and give them more time to mature, things will fit in place.
XML has many benefits over binary files which far outway the detriment of excess CPU cycles
Such as? The huge benefits are a legend. Normally you'd reply with more or less those:
* it's an open extensible format: nothing prevents a binary format from being open and extensible. Check Flash for example, it uses super compact bit packing but still uses extensible tag structure, so that 3rd parties can extend it with their own structures, tags etc. (that's not popularly known, but here's something new)
* it's human readable: this is good only for very simple documents. A moderately complex (say regularly formatted document of 5 pages) document becomes hard for a human to read and edit in notepad, be it ODF or OXML.
* easy to create from programming stand point: false. While it's trye that if you just start concatenating strings, it's easier to use an XML dialect, binary formats are usually wrapped (just like XML anyway) in a library providing streamlined DOM where the complexity of the format is hidden from the programmer, and he can write and read it just as easy as it would be by using XML DOM (or easier).
So what is it? Maybe all believe it's that good since all say it's that good?
And mind you, speed and size does matter, maybe it doesn't matter to a single user downloading an ODF from a site, but put it in perspective for all machines, the entire Internet, and all applications that have started using XML whether appropriate or not, and all it really starts to matter.
I'm not an XML hater: when I want to quickly wip out a storage for some settings in an app or server script, I do use XML. Why? Because the tools are there, the popularity is there and hence it's less pain for me to use it than a compact binary format.
However for the same reason one could claim Windows is teh bestest OS ever: it having huge popularity and ubiquity.
I'm afraid better reasons are needed to call something better than something else.
Trail and error would be : a lot of people eat the poisonous chemical , they get sick and die , and there's is a huge investigation to determine what killed them.
Except if the symptoms are commonly misidagnosed and hardly traced back to the original cause. Really the issue is highly complicated, and getting kinda OT.
When a chemical flagged as poisonous by the state based on solid scientific research is later flagged as "ok to eat and drink every day" because of corporate pressure, I don't call it trial and error.
Funny thing is this happens for a lot of what we use, eat, live in in the present days. It's called greed dude.
You eat toxic foods? How are you still alive? What are all the toxins anyway? Can you give me a list? No? Huh...
Why would you say "No" before I get a chance to answer. I've in fact researched this in great detail, and I could give you a list of food that have adverse affect on health you eat every day: fuzzy drinks an chewing gums with aspartame, snacks with sodium glutamate, preservatives, margarine (aka plastic butter) and so on and so on.
We're playing with chemicals, eating toxic foods, messing with nature's balance, wasting or restoring ozone layer beyond our comprehension, using electronics that cause tumors and other illnesses... and in this mess somewhere, the bare truth shines:
If they can't secure machines under their control, and they insist on connecting it to the network, they deserve whatever consequences they get. And if a law like this eventually gets people who refuse to patch out of society, more power to it!
If you believe using Firefox, installing the patches and running a firewall is sufficient to protect you from exploits and worms, I wouldn't be susprised that you're in that group.
I am surprised that Packard Bell didn't make the list. They made some pretty crappy computers in the late 80s.
It didn't make it since the entire "list of 25 worst tech product" is just a random description of various products the author was mildly or moderately annoyed with.
The products in there are far from the worst product (let alone with worst impact), neither are they even in a correct order.
All that counts is the banner ad impressions... and they needed a catchy title.
However Capone was tossed in Jail for Tax Evasion so passing a law that taxes those who send emails will hit exactly that part of the spammer world that needs to be hit - and hard!
With the exception that spam doesn't come from spammers, it comes from millions of innocent zombie machines sending them out.
They can tax SMS, this is because mobile operators are few, offer limited services and SMS traffic is easy to follow and always passes through their central.
But i wanna see them try taxing e-mail. E-mail is basically a piece of electronic information in a huge sea of information on the Internet, travels point to point and isn't guaranteed to pass through some "registration" server at EU, so basically it's undetectable from one central place.
An e-mail can happen at any point at any time, and the source can also easily be fake.
Politicians apparently believe that law means something they voted and it happens. But it should be possible to happen in first place, and taxing e-mail isn't one of those.
Ah... now we get back to the other point. In 20 years, anyone will be able to write an optimized C++ class that creates an ODF document, as anyone can become familiar with the format. The same cannot be said of DOC (although due to its pervasiveness, most people writing such software understand how to generate the basic elements of a DOC file).
That point doesn't exist. I never defended DOC in particular.
I just said XML is a lot less efficient than a binary format, and I wish Microsoft wouldn't offer OpenXML but a truely open, unpatented, compact binary format to compete with ODF.
So basically I'm not sure what you're reacting to.
However, that's largely moot - PNG is lossless and often compresses better than JPEG, but JPEG is still the format of choice for, say, digital camera makers and websites.
In "magic bits" maybe PNG compresses complex images better than JPG, but otherwise I'll have to disagree completely.
Slashdot Mirror
We get it already, 30% of high school kids drop out, our President has an IQ of 60, and smart kids are beaten in the streets, what the hell do you expect?
War with Iran by the end of the year. Was this the right answer?
(what do I win btw?)
That's the tenth or eleventh time people bash me for driving a SUV and pointing me to suv hate sites where people explain how people that drive suvs are morons and so on.
Thing is, I don't drive a suv, maybe time for a nick change.
My sympathies to all people who drive a suv, however. Aparrently the hate towards suv drivers is ubiquitious.
Argument Ad Crumenam.
Could you please speak in a language that's not dead yet.
A $20 million Formula One car, for instance, has a functional halflife of about 4 hours, because it is designed that way, much of that $20 million being spent to effectively shorten it's halflife compared to a street car.
They've sent a Formula One car over there?
You'll probably notice an F1 car returns its investment by braking down from excessive speeds.
Could you say the same for a Mars Rover?
Not that I can't imagine people being entertained from videos of the rover driving 200miles/hour through the Mars craters, but come on...
I think it gets repeated because NASA's failures and stupidity get repeated just as often. It is a counter balance to help point out that NASA isn't always doing crap.
Could be. I was never a fan of regurgitating NASA's failures either. Too much admirations or complaints just turn into extra noise.
AFAIR, it was only intended to run for a couple of months, yet it has now clocked up a couple of years
:)
:).
You can all stop repeating this, by the way. We're all impressed with it, it's amazing, and I cried like a little baby when I saw the first Mars photos sent by it and its companion, but it's time to get over it.
Plus, for a multi-million (billion?) piece of machinery, I'd expect it to work past my death (unless a major glitch occurs).
I wouldn't blame them if it suddenly failed or exploded due to unknown cause, but I wouldn't congratulate them every day for years for the fact it works
For me the most amazing job is that it landed in one piece and operational. Now that's it's there, let's git to work and find some one-eyed green martians.
I've inspected the web gadget, it seems useless. To see the quotes try this:
t ml
;)
fragments.irrepressible.info/data/current/*-180.h
where "*" is from 0 to 70.
It includes some quotes, but they are just few words, taken out of context, no author or place of origin is given, basically makes no sense. Some of them are Arabic as well.
Let's hope it's not some scam, otherwise you can expect those quotes to turn into cheap C1aL1s offers and affordable mortgage deals when they gain some mass
The paper did a lot of hand-optimization, which is irrelevent to most programmers. What gcc -O3 does is way more importent then what an assembly wizard can do for most projects.
Actually bullshit. We're talking scientific applications here, and it's not uncommon that programs written to run on supercomputers *are* optimized by an assembly wizard to squeeze every cycle out of it.
Heck, the desktop metaphor on the PC, ostensibly a device dedicated to the computing experience hasn't come close to perfection.
Just like you can't grab a rainbow or reach the horizon, you can't "reach perfection" with anything. But I don't see how this means it shouldn't exist.
Convergence is not a myth, we used to have pagers only capable of displaying phone number and a short text message. Would you get a pager today?
I own a SE K750. It has a very good consumer 2MP camera, great FM radio and MP3/MP4 player, can shoot small videos if need be, has a very decent HTML browser, and is a very good and light phone too.
Apparently it can be done.
The fact that devices become less and less reliable isn't because they have plenty of functions, it's because companies are competing each other and trying to push the products on the market before they are finished.
You can't make a 20-in-1 device without the additional test time and design considerations, but companies do that. When they start producing less models and give them more time to mature, things will fit in place.
XML has many benefits over binary files which far outway the detriment of excess CPU cycles
Such as? The huge benefits are a legend. Normally you'd reply with more or less those:
* it's an open extensible format: nothing prevents a binary format from being open and extensible. Check Flash for example, it uses super compact bit packing but still uses extensible tag structure, so that 3rd parties can extend it with their own structures, tags etc. (that's not popularly known, but here's something new)
* it's human readable: this is good only for very simple documents. A moderately complex (say regularly formatted document of 5 pages) document becomes hard for a human to read and edit in notepad, be it ODF or OXML.
* easy to create from programming stand point: false. While it's trye that if you just start concatenating strings, it's easier to use an XML dialect, binary formats are usually wrapped (just like XML anyway) in a library providing streamlined DOM where the complexity of the format is hidden from the programmer, and he can write and read it just as easy as it would be by using XML DOM (or easier).
So what is it? Maybe all believe it's that good since all say it's that good?
And mind you, speed and size does matter, maybe it doesn't matter to a single user downloading an ODF from a site, but put it in perspective for all machines, the entire Internet, and all applications that have started using XML whether appropriate or not, and all it really starts to matter.
I'm not an XML hater: when I want to quickly wip out a storage for some settings in an app or server script, I do use XML. Why? Because the tools are there, the popularity is there and hence it's less pain for me to use it than a compact binary format.
However for the same reason one could claim Windows is teh bestest OS ever: it having huge popularity and ubiquity.
I'm afraid better reasons are needed to call something better than something else.
You do know the CEO of eBay is a woman right?
Could be, but let that not get in the way of a nice reference.
eBay's CEO: You can suck my tiny red-blue-yellow-green balls, Mr. Ballmer!
Silly me!
Indeed
Trail and error would be : a lot of people eat the poisonous chemical , they get sick and die , and there's is a huge investigation to determine what killed them .
Except if the symptoms are commonly misidagnosed and hardly traced back to the original cause. Really the issue is highly complicated, and getting kinda OT.
The GP is clearly either making fun of us, or he's one of the paranoid tinfoil hat prone enviromentalists.
If there's one thing I certainly don't like, that's labels.
This is called trial and error.
When a chemical flagged as poisonous by the state based on solid scientific research is later flagged as "ok to eat and drink every day" because of corporate pressure, I don't call it trial and error.
Funny thing is this happens for a lot of what we use, eat, live in in the present days. It's called greed dude.
You eat toxic foods? How are you still alive? What are all the toxins anyway? Can you give me a list? No? Huh...
Why would you say "No" before I get a chance to answer. I've in fact researched this in great detail, and I could give you a list of food that have adverse affect on health you eat every day: fuzzy drinks an chewing gums with aspartame, snacks with sodium glutamate, preservatives, margarine (aka plastic butter) and so on and so on.
We're playing with chemicals, eating toxic foods, messing with nature's balance, wasting or restoring ozone layer beyond our comprehension, using electronics that cause tumors and other illnesses... and in this mess somewhere, the bare truth shines:
we know shit
They can't be unaware that "Infinium" and "Phantom" have become brand for vaporware "phantom" products that take "infinium" to reach the market.
Phantom is in fact more popular as a vaporware brand, why would they want to call their company that?
It's as if they try to rub it on: "we've wasted millions of dollars and still got just phantoms to offer"...
None of this makes any sense, is the business system so flawed?
Good. Fuck 'em. They're part of the problem.
If they can't secure machines under their control, and they insist on connecting it to the network, they deserve whatever consequences they get. And if a law like this eventually gets people who refuse to patch out of society, more power to it!
If you believe using Firefox, installing the patches and running a firewall is sufficient to protect you from exploits and worms, I wouldn't be susprised that you're in that group.
I am surprised that Packard Bell didn't make the list. They made some pretty crappy computers in the late 80s.
It didn't make it since the entire "list of 25 worst tech product" is just a random description of various products the author was mildly or moderately annoyed with.
The products in there are far from the worst product (let alone with worst impact), neither are they even in a correct order.
All that counts is the banner ad impressions... and they needed a catchy title.
and that's a bad thing?
Yes, why you think zombifying PC-s for sending spam is good? In this case, you can stop sending me spam cuz I'm not buying your c1al3s.
However Capone was tossed in Jail for Tax Evasion so passing a law that taxes those who send emails will hit exactly that part of the spammer world that needs to be hit - and hard!
With the exception that spam doesn't come from spammers, it comes from millions of innocent zombie machines sending them out.
They can tax SMS, this is because mobile operators are few, offer limited services and SMS traffic is easy to follow and always passes through their central.
But i wanna see them try taxing e-mail. E-mail is basically a piece of electronic information in a huge sea of information on the Internet, travels point to point and isn't guaranteed to pass through some "registration" server at EU, so basically it's undetectable from one central place.
An e-mail can happen at any point at any time, and the source can also easily be fake.
Politicians apparently believe that law means something they voted and it happens. But it should be possible to happen in first place, and taxing e-mail isn't one of those.
Ah... now we get back to the other point. In 20 years, anyone will be able to write an optimized C++ class that creates an ODF document, as anyone can become familiar with the format. The same cannot be said of DOC (although due to its pervasiveness, most people writing such software understand how to generate the basic elements of a DOC file).
That point doesn't exist. I never defended DOC in particular.
I just said XML is a lot less efficient than a binary format, and I wish Microsoft wouldn't offer OpenXML but a truely open, unpatented, compact binary format to compete with ODF.
So basically I'm not sure what you're reacting to.
However, that's largely moot - PNG is lossless and often compresses better than JPEG, but JPEG is still the format of choice for, say, digital camera makers and websites.
In "magic bits" maybe PNG compresses complex images better than JPG, but otherwise I'll have to disagree completely.
I love PNG otherwise.