Wait... wasn't the goverment supposed to be protecting the people from corporations?
No, corporations aren't inherently evil structures we should be protected from.
The government should basically put some rules where people and the organisations they create can have mutual interest, and create a predictable repeatable processes that aid for development of life standard, science advance and so on.
And people's part of the equation is to aid the government in this process and protect themselves from governments that don't do this by voting accordingly.
Governments rarely have proper priorities these days, but people also don't do anything about it. So you can say people deserve what they get.
Not so long ago, average people dying in masses for their beliefs and making a better future wasn't so abnormal, right now we're focused or being able to pay that house and car installment, and to hell with rights and beliefs.
I think it's a bad analogy. Numbers from the lottery are trully random. Evolution is based on random mutations, but the one mutations that will stay can be predicted, although we are unable to do so due to our lack of informations and knowledge.
Guess what, mutations are also truly random. They really are. I don't deny that many organisms have "smart" adapation mechanisms that can take effect even in the same generation, but that's no mutation.
The number of mutations possible in an organism like a cell are pretty huge, let alone mammals like us.
You can argue there are some rules, well some rules are found in the lottery too: you have numbers 1 to 49, and you can't have same number twice, and you have 6 numbers (example).
That's the beauty of evolution: no knowledge or advancement can cover everything in what is a truly random process. This is why nature "comes up" with truly remarkable solutions every day our human brains would never come up with on their own.
Random is in fact a so great power, it's used in plenty of computer algorithms as well, like pathfinding or rubic cube solving. The basic goal is you don't know any logic of how to find the right solution, but you can try plenty of random solution (or in some cases even all solutions, if that's viable) and see what they lead you to (i.e. how they satisfy your final goal).
No smarts can replace the ultimate power of random. Ever.
Example. Imagine than us, the humans, more or less suddenly find ourselves in an environnent where only the tall and hairless survive (random example)
That's a pretty bad example. Nature doesn't vote a new law where hairless tall man survive. Instead there's the environment and every mutation can try to see how it works.
Tall and hairless men can have a better chance of survival in environment X, but nature might come up with scale-shielded jumping tiny men that survive even better. You can't know in advance, because that's like guessing the lottery.
From TFA: "Can we predict how animals and plants evolve in response to changes in the environment? Maybe, according to preliminary research from Rice University."
Can we guess the numbers from the lottery? Maybe, says preliminar research I just did.
Evolution works by having random variations and mutations based on what is physically possible and better adapted to the environment.
You can never guess which mutation will be best fitting though. We can guess some mutations that might work somewhat better, but nature will surprise you with something you never thought of.
Let's not imagine we're that smart, we still barely know the details about our own species let alone make guesses for the entire nature.
But of course: if we put a cat and a catfish in deep water I think it's obvious which one the natural selection will prefer.
Must... resist... my karma... must live... You always knew the voices were real! Admit it! Submit to their evil will! Screw it. I don't have any karma to burn, but I don't care. One cannot resist bait such as that.
You sir are an idiot. How's that for a fitting label?
Character animation is very, very difficult. There's a reason why you have a whole brain center dedicated just into controlling your muscles; there's many of them. I don't think that current technology can really create a realistic animated human being
You're missing the point. I didn't say it's easy or I want it like a real human would move, but I don't want it like Pinocio after 3 bottles of vodka as well.
I've seen plenty of fan films with better animation, either stylized or going for realistic. Commercial features are also doing pretty well.
the Orange Project was found to make an open movie, and developed the script as they worked.
Analyze the facial features of what is a Da Vinci painting, make the skeletal structure of a painting, and analyze it to see how would a Da Vinci painting sound if it could say something?
That sound kinda farfetched to anyone?
Plus, why take on the easy job? Let'em try and analyze what a Picasso painting would sound like...
It was only a matter of time before Apple got pissed. If you didn't see this coming, it's time for new glasses.
Corporate entities don't act on getting pissed. They have a carefully selected strategy that's being discussed over and over by lots of people in suits (even in Apple..), and a decision is created.
However, of course, they don't mind exploiting the people's tendency of applying human characteristics to a company to make their decisions plausible.
"Thanks to pirates, or rather the fear of them, the Intel edition of Apple's OS X is now a proprietary operating system."
Apple's first attempt at comedy of epic scales. Let me rehash that one:
"Thanks to terrorists, or rather the fear of them, now NSA spies your phone calls".
Excuses, excuses...
By the way, let's hope closing the source will help, just like it helps Microsoft with Windows - noone is pirating or hacking Windows, right?.. Right..?
It's not "beta" like this half-baked "me-too" from google
Yea it's not half-baked just the example applications both ended up with fatal JavaScript errors that halted the whole Demo browser in both Firefox and IE.
you must have a different definition of cross-platform friendly to me then... I don't want to use ms windows in any form at all, so I can't develop this Microsoft Atlas stuff on my platform of choice.
I'm in the same situation: I don't want to hear nonsense rants pointed towards Microsoft all the time (it was obvious he means the resulting product, not the coding environment), but do I have the choice?
No.
There's still no "Nonsense rant towards Microsoft, Sony or cliche about overlords, Soviet Russia, obligatory cartoon quotes etc." rating on Slashdot.
When my copy of Windows fails...... it is generally the result of a badly written 3rd party device driver, and the inability of the OS to protect itself from that driver.
When Linux simply doesn't want to work with a device that's missing device support in the kernel. Which is better? You can opt not to install a bad driver, but if you can't have a driver, your don't have the option in the first place.
The terrorists have won. Our freedoms and privacy are being stripped away. Those in power a pissing away billions of tax payer dollars (our money) to their buddies in the corporate world. It is time to become a freedom fighter in a police state. Never surrender.
Thing is, terrorists are attacking US because of their religious beliefs, and as a revenge to US actions on their home countries.
Who have won is the government, which first attacked foreign countries because of "terrorism" and "weapons of mass destruction" (they never found), then said "shit, we're in war" and went to spy on its own citizens in the name of national security.
So the terrorists are the excuse. Excuses change: it can be communists, it can be child porn or terrorism, what doesn't change is the goal of the government: ultimate control.
I read in a article that cited Microsoft sources that IE7 will be removing old things from Internet Explorer, things from the HTML1 spec such as pre tags etc.
The article mislead you. Backwards compatibility is more crucial to IE than even the new CSS fixes. If something is used on even less than 1% of the sites out there it'll be in. Microsoft repeatedly repeated that backwards compatibility is paramount for them in IE7 as a project, and that the any CSS/HTML fixes ansd changes towards better standards support will only affect sites with full DOCTYPE (as always).
They believe that they should unconditionally comply with the W3C (and the other) validators and this means they did a good page.
They compare the validators to the compiler syntax checks other languages do before compilation. Of course, no compilator in the world will stop you from writing buggy crappy useless programs, but they don't like to talk about that.
Another thing many of them don't assess, is that validators are just a guide, not God, and like any software tool, they have bugs and can miss plenty of code flaw types, or print code warnings or even code errors where there are none.
An advice to validation fanatics: your web page won't be seen in a validator, it'll be seen in a browser.
XHTML fanatics:
Anything less than XHTML 1.1 Strict is crap. In certain cases they might do a great compromise and go for 1.0.
XHTML is just a rehash of HTML4 as an XML dialect. Unless you need to take advantage of your code being XML, there's no big advantage to using XHTML now* . All of the talk about future compatibility or how HTML 4 is obsolete is nonsense. Browsers will render HTML 1 for ages to come, same can be said for HTML 4.1, which still a nice, valid standard.
*exception: mobile browsers strictly requiring XHTML Mobile Profile this is still no XHTML 1.1 support, like many XHTML fanatics believe.
What XHTML fanatics forget is, it's not easy to write a real XHTML page nowadays, that would run in both existing and old HTML browsers (that actually includes IE6: over 85% market dominance) and XHTML browsers.
XHTML fanatics sometimes make basic mistakes, like putting contents of [style] or [script] blocks in comments, or forgetting to put them in CDATA blocks, in both cases, the resulting code is a broken XHTML page if it runs in strict mode. The reason they don't see it, is that XHTML browsers interpret XHTML like HTML, since it's served with the HTML MIME Type (if served with Application/XML, it'll break IE).
"No tables for layout" fanatics
So yes, W3C said it's not recommended to use tables for layout. And it's indeed not nice: the classic usage of tables for layot is a huge mess of plenty of table cells, 4-5 nested tables in one another, the code is unreadable and unmanagable without a WYSIWYG editor (and that in itself, spells trouble if the web dev/designer has no clue).
However, fanatics go further: they open the source of most site they visit, looking for "clues": if you do use tables for layout the site is marked invalid, the site author an idiot, and the site's actual contents discarded.
If you ask a "No tables for layot" fanatic for help and he sees you use a table, you can be laughed at, insulted, bashed on and so on.
The funny reality: CSS is still defficient as a layout tool for some pretty basic layout schemes. The workarounds include laughable stunts like 4-5 nested [div]-s or more (i.e. table tag mess in its new form), 3000px wide bitmaps with transparent areas and so on and so on.
So these types of fanatics will advise you to either go for display-type:table (not working in IE), go for the ugly hacks, or change your layout. The irony you need display-type:table in CSS is worth a separate post on its own.
Truth is, there's no drawback to using very simple tables styled with CSS for your layout, if there's no simple way to do it with CSS. No modern search engine or browser in the world has a problem with tables. No modern screen reader has problems with tables. No modern mobile browser has problems with tables. Try it in Opera (SHIFT+F11) and see how horizontal layouts made in tables are properly broken up vertically to allow for easy reading on a mobile device.
"Don't use crappy browser" fanatics
These guys believe it's their mission to talk, enforce, advice and so on their visitors to switch from their "crappy" browser (usually IE), to a better browser like Firefox. They also don't mind l
We already have Google popping up in every 3rd article, now we have Wii.
HA-HA-HA! This is what you Americans get! You laugh at Wii name, but now Wii will Wii on all bad articles! This one elaborate marketing campaign from Japan, now you learn how Japan people do business: like tiger, not like you, like a pig, afraid of little Wii.
Yawn inducing? You can't tell me you're not excited about all the great new DRM options...I hear it can actually keep you from playing anything on it at all!
Ha ha ha! Funny joke! And thanks for the misinformation as always, which will keep the trolls posting bullshit for the next few years.
DRM *support* doesn't prevent you from running non-DRM files, just like, say, OGG support in Winamp doesn't prevent you from playing MP3-s.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait... wasn't the goverment supposed to be protecting the people from corporations?
No, corporations aren't inherently evil structures we should be protected from.
The government should basically put some rules where people and the organisations they create can have mutual interest, and create a predictable repeatable processes that aid for development of life standard, science advance and so on.
And people's part of the equation is to aid the government in this process and protect themselves from governments that don't do this by voting accordingly.
Governments rarely have proper priorities these days, but people also don't do anything about it. So you can say people deserve what they get.
Not so long ago, average people dying in masses for their beliefs and making a better future wasn't so abnormal, right now we're focused or being able to pay that house and car installment, and to hell with rights and beliefs.
I think it's a bad analogy. Numbers from the lottery are trully random. Evolution is based on random mutations, but the one mutations that will stay can be predicted, although we are unable to do so due to our lack of informations and knowledge.
Guess what, mutations are also truly random. They really are. I don't deny that many organisms have "smart" adapation mechanisms that can take effect even in the same generation, but that's no mutation.
The number of mutations possible in an organism like a cell are pretty huge, let alone mammals like us.
You can argue there are some rules, well some rules are found in the lottery too: you have numbers 1 to 49, and you can't have same number twice, and you have 6 numbers (example).
That's the beauty of evolution: no knowledge or advancement can cover everything in what is a truly random process. This is why nature "comes up" with truly remarkable solutions every day our human brains would never come up with on their own.
Random is in fact a so great power, it's used in plenty of computer algorithms as well, like pathfinding or rubic cube solving. The basic goal is you don't know any logic of how to find the right solution, but you can try plenty of random solution (or in some cases even all solutions, if that's viable) and see what they lead you to (i.e. how they satisfy your final goal).
No smarts can replace the ultimate power of random. Ever.
Example. Imagine than us, the humans, more or less suddenly find ourselves in an environnent where only the tall and hairless survive (random example)
That's a pretty bad example. Nature doesn't vote a new law where hairless tall man survive. Instead there's the environment and every mutation can try to see how it works.
Tall and hairless men can have a better chance of survival in environment X, but nature might come up with scale-shielded jumping tiny men that survive even better. You can't know in advance, because that's like guessing the lottery.
From TFA: "Can we predict how animals and plants evolve in response to changes in the environment? Maybe, according to preliminary research from Rice University."
Can we guess the numbers from the lottery? Maybe, says preliminar research I just did.
Evolution works by having random variations and mutations based on what is physically possible and better adapted to the environment.
You can never guess which mutation will be best fitting though. We can guess some mutations that might work somewhat better, but nature will surprise you with something you never thought of.
Let's not imagine we're that smart, we still barely know the details about our own species let alone make guesses for the entire nature.
But of course: if we put a cat and a catfish in deep water I think it's obvious which one the natural selection will prefer.
Must... resist... my karma... must live... You always knew the voices were real! Admit it! Submit to their evil will! Screw it. I don't have any karma to burn, but I don't care. One cannot resist bait such as that.
You sir are an idiot. How's that for a fitting label?
Character animation is very, very difficult. There's a reason why you have a whole brain center dedicated just into controlling your muscles; there's many of them. I don't think that current technology can really create a realistic animated human being
You're missing the point. I didn't say it's easy or I want it like a real human would move, but I don't want it like Pinocio after 3 bottles of vodka as well.
I've seen plenty of fan films with better animation, either stylized or going for realistic. Commercial features are also doing pretty well.
the Orange Project was found to make an open movie, and developed the script as they worked.
it shows
Script writers shouldn't render 3D demos, and geeks shouldn't write scripts. That's the moral of the story.
While the scenery, effects and character modeling were intriguing and really really well done, the character animation was odd and crude.
The voice acting and dialog not just lack any logic or consistency but were flat out annoying.
One would wonder why they spent all those resources and time on creating this animation but didn't care to get a decent screenplay at first.
All in all, it may've used OSS tools, but they followed the good ol' Hollywood paradigm: all effects and the story sucks.
My application emulates a huge amount of monkeys on a Grid terminal, writing the winning application.
Now that I've started it, it's only a matter of time, *evil grin* muahahaha.
Analyze the facial features of what is a Da Vinci painting, make the skeletal structure of a painting, and analyze it to see how would a Da Vinci painting sound if it could say something?
That sound kinda farfetched to anyone?
Plus, why take on the easy job? Let'em try and analyze what a Picasso painting would sound like...
dude what's with the signature.... is someone paying you for this?
:)?
You're comparing phone sex link with a link to an open non-profit script
dude what's with the signature... is someone paying you for this?
It was only a matter of time before Apple got pissed. If you didn't see this coming, it's time for new glasses.
Corporate entities don't act on getting pissed. They have a carefully selected strategy that's being discussed over and over by lots of people in suits (even in Apple..), and a decision is created.
However, of course, they don't mind exploiting the people's tendency of applying human characteristics to a company to make their decisions plausible.
"Thanks to pirates, or rather the fear of them, the Intel edition of Apple's OS X is now a proprietary operating system."
.. Right..?
Apple's first attempt at comedy of epic scales. Let me rehash that one:
"Thanks to terrorists, or rather the fear of them, now NSA spies your phone calls".
Excuses, excuses...
By the way, let's hope closing the source will help, just like it helps Microsoft with Windows - noone is pirating or hacking Windows, right?
It's not "beta" like this half-baked "me-too" from google
Yea it's not half-baked just the example applications both ended up with fatal JavaScript errors that halted the whole Demo browser in both Firefox and IE.
How.. now half-baked and non beta.
you must have a different definition of cross-platform friendly to me then... I don't want to use ms windows in any form at all, so I can't develop this Microsoft Atlas stuff on my platform of choice.
I'm in the same situation: I don't want to hear nonsense rants pointed towards Microsoft all the time (it was obvious he means the resulting product, not the coding environment), but do I have the choice?
No.
There's still no "Nonsense rant towards Microsoft, Sony or cliche about overlords, Soviet Russia, obligatory cartoon quotes etc." rating on Slashdot.
When my copy of Windows fails... ... it is generally the result of a badly written 3rd party device driver, and the inability of the OS to protect itself from that driver.
When Linux simply doesn't want to work with a device that's missing device support in the kernel. Which is better? You can opt not to install a bad driver, but if you can't have a driver, your don't have the option in the first place.
The terrorists have won. Our freedoms and privacy are being stripped away. Those in power a pissing away billions of tax payer dollars (our money) to their buddies in the corporate world. It is time to become a freedom fighter in a police state. Never surrender.
Thing is, terrorists are attacking US because of their religious beliefs, and as a revenge to US actions on their home countries.
Who have won is the government, which first attacked foreign countries because of "terrorism" and "weapons of mass destruction" (they never found), then said "shit, we're in war" and went to spy on its own citizens in the name of national security.
So the terrorists are the excuse. Excuses change: it can be communists, it can be child porn or terrorism, what doesn't change is the goal of the government: ultimate control.
I read in a article that cited Microsoft sources that IE7 will be removing old things from Internet Explorer, things from the HTML1 spec such as pre tags etc.
The article mislead you. Backwards compatibility is more crucial to IE than even the new CSS fixes. If something is used on even less than 1% of the sites out there it'll be in. Microsoft repeatedly repeated that backwards compatibility is paramount for them in IE7 as a project, and that the any CSS/HTML fixes ansd changes towards better standards support will only affect sites with full DOCTYPE (as always).
Except IE7.
And what the hell do you mean?
There are several types of them:
Validation fanatics:
They believe that they should unconditionally comply with the W3C (and the other) validators and this means they did a good page.
They compare the validators to the compiler syntax checks other languages do before compilation. Of course, no compilator in the world will stop you from writing buggy crappy useless programs, but they don't like to talk about that.
Another thing many of them don't assess, is that validators are just a guide, not God, and like any software tool, they have bugs and can miss plenty of code flaw types, or print code warnings or even code errors where there are none.
An advice to validation fanatics: your web page won't be seen in a validator, it'll be seen in a browser.
XHTML fanatics:
Anything less than XHTML 1.1 Strict is crap. In certain cases they might do a great compromise and go for 1.0.
XHTML is just a rehash of HTML4 as an XML dialect. Unless you need to take advantage of your code being XML, there's no big advantage to using XHTML now* . All of the talk about future compatibility or how HTML 4 is obsolete is nonsense. Browsers will render HTML 1 for ages to come, same can be said for HTML 4.1, which still a nice, valid standard.
*exception: mobile browsers strictly requiring XHTML Mobile Profile this is still no XHTML 1.1 support, like many XHTML fanatics believe.
What XHTML fanatics forget is, it's not easy to write a real XHTML page nowadays, that would run in both existing and old HTML browsers (that actually includes IE6: over 85% market dominance) and XHTML browsers.
XHTML fanatics sometimes make basic mistakes, like putting contents of [style] or [script] blocks in comments, or forgetting to put them in CDATA blocks, in both cases, the resulting code is a broken XHTML page if it runs in strict mode. The reason they don't see it, is that XHTML browsers interpret XHTML like HTML, since it's served with the HTML MIME Type (if served with Application/XML, it'll break IE).
"No tables for layout" fanatics
So yes, W3C said it's not recommended to use tables for layout. And it's indeed not nice: the classic usage of tables for layot is a huge mess of plenty of table cells, 4-5 nested tables in one another, the code is unreadable and unmanagable without a WYSIWYG editor (and that in itself, spells trouble if the web dev/designer has no clue).
However, fanatics go further: they open the source of most site they visit, looking for "clues": if you do use tables for layout the site is marked invalid, the site author an idiot, and the site's actual contents discarded.
If you ask a "No tables for layot" fanatic for help and he sees you use a table, you can be laughed at, insulted, bashed on and so on.
The funny reality: CSS is still defficient as a layout tool for some pretty basic layout schemes. The workarounds include laughable stunts like 4-5 nested [div]-s or more (i.e. table tag mess in its new form), 3000px wide bitmaps with transparent areas and so on and so on.
So these types of fanatics will advise you to either go for display-type:table (not working in IE), go for the ugly hacks, or change your layout. The irony you need display-type:table in CSS is worth a separate post on its own.
Truth is, there's no drawback to using very simple tables styled with CSS for your layout, if there's no simple way to do it with CSS. No modern search engine or browser in the world has a problem with tables. No modern screen reader has problems with tables. No modern mobile browser has problems with tables. Try it in Opera (SHIFT+F11) and see how horizontal layouts made in tables are properly broken up vertically to allow for easy reading on a mobile device.
"Don't use crappy browser" fanatics
These guys believe it's their mission to talk, enforce, advice and so on their visitors to switch from their "crappy" browser (usually IE), to a better browser like Firefox. They also don't mind l
I think the people at Nintendo deserve a raise for this revolutionary product (pun intended)!
:D
Yes but is the pun in "raise" because their console is called Wii, or is the pun in "revolutionary" because their console was called "Revolution"
We already have Google popping up in every 3rd article, now we have Wii.
HA-HA-HA! This is what you Americans get! You laugh at Wii name, but now Wii will Wii on all bad articles!
This one elaborate marketing campaign from Japan, now you learn how Japan people do business: like tiger, not like you, like a pig, afraid of little Wii.
Even if no one buys the PS3 and it's a complete flop, Sony is not Sony Computer Entertainment alone.
PS3 is not gaming alone as well, if PS3 fails, they'll fail to push Blu-Ray in the mainstram, and if Blu-Ray fails...
I dont have to worry about leaving firefox running for a few days and having it crash!
I don't have to worry about it crashing to, but it still keeps crashing. Only difference is I'm not worrying.
Yawn inducing? You can't tell me you're not excited about all the great new DRM options...I hear it can actually keep you from playing anything on it at all!
Ha ha ha! Funny joke! And thanks for the misinformation as always, which will keep the trolls posting bullshit for the next few years.
DRM *support* doesn't prevent you from running non-DRM files, just like, say, OGG support in Winamp doesn't prevent you from playing MP3-s.
but WMP 11 was prominently displayed, along with a promised new buy-your-music-online program... the partner's name escapes me at the moment.
spur? goad? push? thump? splash? stop?
By the way did you know one of the slang meanings of "urge" is "hype"?