Bah, fuck the drones -- they're cheap to replace. What this kind of forum would really be useful for is as a feedback mechanism to engineering -- in many companies the people developing the product never get to see what problems the customers actually have day-to-day with the product. Get the engineers to read what the call-center folks bitch about and you get an improved product.
(Sun Microsystems had this great scheme for a while where they forced their engineers to do phone support -- this way the people who got the calls were the ones who had both the greatest motivation to minimize the number of incoming support calls AND the ones who were actually responsible for making a product that did that.)
From what I understand, it all comes down to everyone believing that real-estate value wouldn't stop rising.
Which, of course, is absurd nonsense. Not only is it not true that "everyone" believed that -- nobody did. The housing bubble was always and by everybody recognized as a bubble. It was never called anything other than a bubble. Starting in '02 or there abouts, people were talking about "the housing bubble" and I've never seen or heard anybody refer to it any other way.
Why people would put their future economic well-being on top of something that was always clearly labelled as a bubble is beyon me.
Or, of course, voting day could simply be on a sunday -- like it is in many civilized nations: because that maximizes everybody's opportunity to go and vote. But of course we can't actually have that...
Yes, folks, the true reason that we invaded a sovereign country that posed no real threat to us, destabilized it to the brink of civil war, wasted the international good will we had after 9-11, fought a war that resulted in thousands of US dead (and even more Iraqi dead), and tied up our military resources so much that other tin-pot dictators feel they can thumb their noses at us is so we could get a bit closer to Iran to keep an eye on them.
Let me invite you to have a look at a map of the region one of these days for the first time in your life. First I'd like you to note the location of Saudi-Arabia [1], home of 19 out of 20 of the WTC perpetrators.
Then I'd like you to note the location of the TWO sovereign countries the US has attacked under GWB (namely Afghanistan [2] and Iraq [3]). THEN I'd like you to note the identity of the country between these two [4].
Then I'd like you to note that 9/11 keeps being floated for invading #2 and #3 but somehow #1 never gets mentioned.
Now reconsider -- is your friends suspicion that the US would like to lay its grubby fingers on #4 really as absurd as you were trying to make it out to be?
I never understood what the difference between "shock and awe" and "terror" really is. Isn't it the exact same thing? Trying to throw so much destruction at a populace that they abide by your demands? All in the employ of political ends? How is that not terrorism?
However, I've had some interviews where they were asking for specific, arcane crap that almost nobody would know off of the top of their head and were expecting everything to be perfect without the use of a compiler or docs.
I swear that I think some of them just flip to a random page of a nearby book and base the question off of something they find there.
Or maybe they have certain very specific uses for the person they're hiring and would rather have someone who can hit the ground running on some arcane thing than someone that needs to trained.
"IT" is an almost meaningless acronym -- there are so many different things that fall under it that it is entirely possible to interview someone with 10 years experience as "IT professional" who's never written a line of C++. Which is fine if you aren't looking for someone who's going to write a lot of C++. But it's bad if that's exactly what the job entails. Might as well test out the people who may well be wizards with SQL server but can't actually deliver what you need them for.
Being that our Sun is not visible by the Human Eye 10 light years away.
Uh, that can't be right. The absolute magnitude of the sun is something like +4.9 -- that's easily visible to the naked eye at 10pc ( >~30 light years) distance even through an atmosphere like the Earth's.
But of course really bright stars can be a million times brighter and if you ever compare the diameter of a decent telescope to the diameter of a person's pupil (and note that the light collected goes with the square of this diameter) this doesn't exactly mean a whole lot of anything.
If I buy a computer with no software, it isn't a problem. I'm plenty capable of installing thousands of dollars of pirated software on it - by my self.
Out of curiosity: what is there to pirate that doesn't have a free alternative for download somewhere? Like every self-respecting computer nerd I've committed my share of copyright violations in my time, but where it comes to software I really see no point in it any more.
I am suspecting the complaint is much more about things like movies and music than software...
Actually, it's not beneficial for large numbers of single men, who necessarily have no wife at all (for each man with two wives, there is one with none, since the sex ratio in humans is very close to 1:1).
Uh, what? In a country with six men and six women, there can be one man who has five wives and one woman who has five husbands. Polygamy. Why would anybody have to go single?
Either you're missing some basic math here somewhere or I am.
Nah.
With two wives I can tell #1 that I'll be spending the weekend with #2; I can tell #2 that I'll be spending the weekend with #1; and on the weekend I can go fishing.
I think maybe X bit Laboratories got the story wrong and it should have be VIA instad of NVIDIA.
Of course -- that's it.
They got the story mostly right, but mistook NVIDI for Sun microsystems, x86 for SPARC and an impending release with one that happened 15 years ago. But otherwise they nailed it. Way to go inquirer...
Depends. A high-end GPU can do certain tasks significantly faster than a CPU. For hand-picked tasks this can be hundreds of times faster, but if it is even just, say, ten times faster on average then I see no reason why a GPU-based processor couldn't emulate a CPU and be faster even given the emulation overhead.
But that's blue-sky rambling, of course.
I rarely do this, but this AC is making the only point that needs to be made here. My own home router could comfortably serve a block of my neighborhood including the nearby park (I tried) but I'm not going to open it up because under US law I will go to jail if someone uses my open WiFi to download childporn or some such.
The cost to me would be minimal and I'd set the QOs such that the freeloaders wouldn't interfere with my own activities -- and if everybody did that, we'd already have free ubiquitous wifi in all cities in the US. Because there's always some server around somewhere -- it's been forever since I truly got a "NO networks found". They're just all locked down like crazy because of the absurd US laws that hold a communications provider (me!) responsible for what clients do with the services they provide for free out of the goodness of their hearts...
In what way is 524 meters more sensible than 1,720 feet?
In that 95% of the world population have a good intuitive feel for "five hundred meters". They've all walked a kilometer so they know how far 1/2 of that is. They don't have an intuitive feel for "1700 feet". How much is that?
So if you're trying to talk to the world (by, say, posting something on the internet) then 524m is "more sensible" in exactly the way you described:
Sorry, can you tell me what a metric buttload is in imperial units? I don't know the conversion ratio.
Given the size of the average American butt, I am guessing that a metric buttload is at most 0.453 imperial buttloads. However I hear that there is some holdover historical British Empire buttload still in use in India and the Philippines which is probably at most 1/12 of that (I mean have you ever seen what a skinny butt Gandhi had?)
Without using a calculator, 6000 feet are how many miles?
Without using a calculator, 155 minutes are how many hours? How many days?
Neither "minutes" nor "hours" nor "days" are SI units of time.
Without a calculator: 155 seconds are how many milliseconds? How many nansoseconds? Turns out to be really easy, eh?
All information is physical and it's entrophy can be calculated. Sure entrophy can make it irretrievable from a practical point of view but you can't destroy it without destroying the matter/energy that holds the information.
This is absurd gibberish. There is no "hidden information" in any quantum systems - they contain as much information as can in principle be retrieved. And no more or less.
When an atom is hit by a photon and absorbs it by going into an excited state, the spatial information where the photon came from is lost. It is not contained in the universe any more. No process, known or unknown, will retrieve it. Spontaneous emission of another photon (when the excited state decays) will be in a random direction.
You are advised to learn a little science before you presume to lecture others about it.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but - according to SCIENCE - you're wrong.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you are advised not to talk about science when you don't understand any of it.
When an excited atomic state decays resulting in the emission of a photon, the information that the state existed is lost. No amount of analysis of the photon will reveal that it was emitted by this kind of atom in that kind of process such many seconds (or years) ago. Conversely if the photon hits another atom and is absorbed, the information which direction the original photon came from is lost. No further study of the atom under consideration can bring it back. Spontaneous re-emission of another photon will be in a random direction.
Look uo "spontaneous emission" in any decent undergrad atomic physics textbook.
(Pointing to wikipedia for science information is a clear sign that you don't know what you're talking about.)
to "destroy" it would imply you can destroy information./pedant
And that's problematic how? There's no law of conservation of information. Information is destroyed all around us all the time. Look up "second law of thermodynamics" one of these days.
This statement is confused at best, a bald-faced lie at worst.
At any moment, there was another moment in the past at which oil production has peaked. That was peak oil. We won't know whether it was THE peak until we either exceed that past peak or until we've waited... how long? How many years do we have to go past a peak in oil production until you people will admit that this was THE peak oil?
Crude prices have exploded over the last couple years and yet the production peak of May 2005 has never been exceeded. If we can not increase production at $140 per barrel over that when it was $50 then I'm puzzled where anybody gets the sheer pigheaded ignorance to claim that we haven't hit peak oil yet (or mod such a claim "insightful").
There's always the chance that we haven't. There's always the possibility that something completely unforseen happens in the future -- that's why it's the future. But to look at the flat line in that graph and pretend that it is magically going to go up at some time in the future betrays a confidence born exactly out of putting one's head into the sand.
But seriously, its cool to see progress from all these small/private space companies..
Correction: it would be nice to see some actual progress from these companies. So far all we've seen is "concept drawings" and announcement after announcement of what they're planning to do in the future. Paper and vapor.
I wish them all luck and such, but I'll get excited when any of them actually puts people into LEO. Repeatably. Cheaper and safer then what we have now.
I think Elon Musk is the prime example of a "space entrepreneur" who's been forced to eat humble pie after repeated failure of his grandly announced space ventures. I hope he'll succeed in the end, but he's currently learning what these other wannabee upstarts keep missing: it is rocket science.
1) lack of hardware drivers, rendering many machines obsolete
...which is a problem with the hardware and/or the hardware manufacturer who decided not to support their hardware in Vista. It is NOT a problem of Vista any more than some hardware without a working Linux driver is a problem of Linux.
2) lack of support for legacy apps (although arguably, some of those apps were badly written)
every single one of which was badly written. MS had been spending years and uncounted dollars telling people how to write their apps so that they will remain compatible with future versions of Windows. If people insist on circumventing the Windows API and writing their own little gizmos to implement some functionality then they shouldn't be surprised when this functionality ceases to function when the underlying OS structure changes.
This, too, is not a problem with Vista, but with retarded children who imagine they're "programmers" because they get one kind of function working in one version of one OS and fantasize that from there on all OS progress must be halted so as to not break their crummy little hack.
3) intensive hassling of the user because of inept prior version code that make user root/admin
And you're pointing out yourself that this is ALSO not a problem with Vista. It's a problem with lazy and inept 3rd-party programmers who insisted on making everybody root. Which is decidedly a BAD idea. Which MS correctly identified and put a halt on. MS did every single thing right here and you call it "buggy".
That's why you're a Troll.
4) truly piggish DRM
Yeah - let's round it out with a statement that's not measurable or quantifiable. "piggish". Hum.
You have failed to name one single of the "enormous and embarrassing mistakes found in Vista" you claimed before. Not one. Because there are no particular mistakes in Vista. The usual slew of a little bug here and a minor annoyance there; but as I said, certainly no more of them than XP ever had.
That's why I call you a troll. Because you make an assertion of "enormous and embarrassing mistakes found in Vista" and yet you are completely incapable when it comes to naming some of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Bah, fuck the drones -- they're cheap to replace. What this kind of forum would really be useful for is as a feedback mechanism to engineering -- in many companies the people developing the product never get to see what problems the customers actually have day-to-day with the product. Get the engineers to read what the call-center folks bitch about and you get an improved product. (Sun Microsystems had this great scheme for a while where they forced their engineers to do phone support -- this way the people who got the calls were the ones who had both the greatest motivation to minimize the number of incoming support calls AND the ones who were actually responsible for making a product that did that.)
From what I understand, it all comes down to everyone believing that real-estate value wouldn't stop rising.
Which, of course, is absurd nonsense. Not only is it not true that "everyone" believed that -- nobody did. The housing bubble was always and by everybody recognized as a bubble. It was never called anything other than a bubble. Starting in '02 or there abouts, people were talking about "the housing bubble" and I've never seen or heard anybody refer to it any other way.
Why people would put their future economic well-being on top of something that was always clearly labelled as a bubble is beyon me.
Or, of course, voting day could simply be on a sunday -- like it is in many civilized nations: because that maximizes everybody's opportunity to go and vote. But of course we can't actually have that...
Yes, folks, the true reason that we invaded a sovereign country that posed no real threat to us, destabilized it to the brink of civil war, wasted the international good will we had after 9-11, fought a war that resulted in thousands of US dead (and even more Iraqi dead), and tied up our military resources so much that other tin-pot dictators feel they can thumb their noses at us is so we could get a bit closer to Iran to keep an eye on them.
Let me invite you to have a look at a map of the region one of these days for the first time in your life. First I'd like you to note the location of Saudi-Arabia [1], home of 19 out of 20 of the WTC perpetrators.
Then I'd like you to note the location of the TWO sovereign countries the US has attacked under GWB (namely Afghanistan [2] and Iraq [3]). THEN I'd like you to note the identity of the country between these two [4].
Then I'd like you to note that 9/11 keeps being floated for invading #2 and #3 but somehow #1 never gets mentioned.
Now reconsider -- is your friends suspicion that the US would like to lay its grubby fingers on #4 really as absurd as you were trying to make it out to be?
In the openning days we shaw "shock and awe".
I never understood what the difference between "shock and awe" and "terror" really is. Isn't it the exact same thing? Trying to throw so much destruction at a populace that they abide by your demands? All in the employ of political ends? How is that not terrorism?
However, I've had some interviews where they were asking for specific, arcane crap that almost nobody would know off of the top of their head and were expecting everything to be perfect without the use of a compiler or docs.
I swear that I think some of them just flip to a random page of a nearby book and base the question off of something they find there.
Or maybe they have certain very specific uses for the person they're hiring and would rather have someone who can hit the ground running on some arcane thing than someone that needs to trained.
"IT" is an almost meaningless acronym -- there are so many different things that fall under it that it is entirely possible to interview someone with 10 years experience as "IT professional" who's never written a line of C++. Which is fine if you aren't looking for someone who's going to write a lot of C++. But it's bad if that's exactly what the job entails. Might as well test out the people who may well be wizards with SQL server but can't actually deliver what you need them for.
Being that our Sun is not visible by the Human Eye 10 light years away.
Uh, that can't be right. The absolute magnitude of the sun is something like +4.9 -- that's easily visible to the naked eye at 10pc ( >~30 light years) distance even through an atmosphere like the Earth's.
But of course really bright stars can be a million times brighter and if you ever compare the diameter of a decent telescope to the diameter of a person's pupil (and note that the light collected goes with the square of this diameter) this doesn't exactly mean a whole lot of anything.
I always figured HURD will be ready about the same time Linux finally becomes unmaintainable.
And then we'll use it to play Duke Nukem ...
If I buy a computer with no software, it isn't a problem. I'm plenty capable of installing thousands of dollars of pirated software on it - by my self.
Out of curiosity: what is there to pirate that doesn't have a free alternative for download somewhere? Like every self-respecting computer nerd I've committed my share of copyright violations in my time, but where it comes to software I really see no point in it any more.
I am suspecting the complaint is much more about things like movies and music than software...
Actually, it's not beneficial for large numbers of single men, who necessarily have no wife at all (for each man with two wives, there is one with none, since the sex ratio in humans is very close to 1:1).
Uh, what? In a country with six men and six women, there can be one man who has five wives and one woman who has five husbands. Polygamy. Why would anybody have to go single?
Either you're missing some basic math here somewhere or I am.
Nah. With two wives I can tell #1 that I'll be spending the weekend with #2; I can tell #2 that I'll be spending the weekend with #1; and on the weekend I can go fishing.
I think maybe X bit Laboratories got the story wrong and it should have be VIA instad of NVIDIA.
Of course -- that's it. They got the story mostly right, but mistook NVIDI for Sun microsystems, x86 for SPARC and an impending release with one that happened 15 years ago. But otherwise they nailed it. Way to go inquirer...
Depends. A high-end GPU can do certain tasks significantly faster than a CPU. For hand-picked tasks this can be hundreds of times faster, but if it is even just, say, ten times faster on average then I see no reason why a GPU-based processor couldn't emulate a CPU and be faster even given the emulation overhead. But that's blue-sky rambling, of course.
but the system needed a number so they would set it to 123456.
Wow -- that the same number I use on my luggage.
I rarely do this, but this AC is making the only point that needs to be made here. My own home router could comfortably serve a block of my neighborhood including the nearby park (I tried) but I'm not going to open it up because under US law I will go to jail if someone uses my open WiFi to download childporn or some such.
The cost to me would be minimal and I'd set the QOs such that the freeloaders wouldn't interfere with my own activities -- and if everybody did that, we'd already have free ubiquitous wifi in all cities in the US. Because there's always some server around somewhere -- it's been forever since I truly got a "NO networks found". They're just all locked down like crazy because of the absurd US laws that hold a communications provider (me!) responsible for what clients do with the services they provide for free out of the goodness of their hearts...
In what way is 524 meters more sensible than 1,720 feet?
In that 95% of the world population have a good intuitive feel for "five hundred meters". They've all walked a kilometer so they know how far 1/2 of that is. They don't have an intuitive feel for "1700 feet". How much is that?
So if you're trying to talk to the world (by, say, posting something on the internet) then 524m is "more sensible" in exactly the way you described:
"Readily perceived; appreciable.v",
Sorry, can you tell me what a metric buttload is in imperial units? I don't know the conversion ratio.
Given the size of the average American butt, I am guessing that a metric buttload is at most 0.453 imperial buttloads. However I hear that there is some holdover historical British Empire buttload still in use in India and the Philippines which is probably at most 1/12 of that (I mean have you ever seen what a skinny butt Gandhi had?)
Without using a calculator, 155 minutes are how many hours? How many days?
Neither "minutes" nor "hours" nor "days" are SI units of time. Without a calculator: 155 seconds are how many milliseconds? How many nansoseconds? Turns out to be really easy, eh?
All information is physical and it's entrophy can be calculated. Sure entrophy can make it irretrievable from a practical point of view but you can't destroy it without destroying the matter/energy that holds the information.
This is absurd gibberish. There is no "hidden information" in any quantum systems - they contain as much information as can in principle be retrieved. And no more or less.
When an atom is hit by a photon and absorbs it by going into an excited state, the spatial information where the photon came from is lost. It is not contained in the universe any more. No process, known or unknown, will retrieve it. Spontaneous emission of another photon (when the excited state decays) will be in a random direction.
You are advised to learn a little science before you presume to lecture others about it.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but - according to SCIENCE - you're wrong.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you are advised not to talk about science when you don't understand any of it.
When an excited atomic state decays resulting in the emission of a photon, the information that the state existed is lost. No amount of analysis of the photon will reveal that it was emitted by this kind of atom in that kind of process such many seconds (or years) ago. Conversely if the photon hits another atom and is absorbed, the information which direction the original photon came from is lost. No further study of the atom under consideration can bring it back. Spontaneous re-emission of another photon will be in a random direction.
Look uo "spontaneous emission" in any decent undergrad atomic physics textbook.
(Pointing to wikipedia for science information is a clear sign that you don't know what you're talking about.)
to "destroy" it would imply you can destroy information. /pedant
And that's problematic how? There's no law of conservation of information. Information is destroyed all around us all the time. Look up "second law of thermodynamics" one of these days.
We haven't hit peak oil yet.
This statement is confused at best, a bald-faced lie at worst.
At any moment, there was another moment in the past at which oil production has peaked. That was peak oil. We won't know whether it was THE peak until we either exceed that past peak or until we've waited ... how long? How many years do we have to go past a peak in oil production until you people will admit that this was THE peak oil?
Crude prices have exploded over the last couple years and yet the production peak of May 2005 has never been exceeded. If we can not increase production at $140 per barrel over that when it was $50 then I'm puzzled where anybody gets the sheer pigheaded ignorance to claim that we haven't hit peak oil yet (or mod such a claim "insightful").
There's always the chance that we haven't. There's always the possibility that something completely unforseen happens in the future -- that's why it's the future. But to look at the flat line in that graph and pretend that it is magically going to go up at some time in the future betrays a confidence born exactly out of putting one's head into the sand.
Many of them can barely speak Engrish, and those that can, act like they have never seen a computer before working for Accenture.
And that distinguishes them from the average American BSCS how exactly?
But seriously, its cool to see progress from all these small/private space companies..
Correction: it would be nice to see some actual progress from these companies. So far all we've seen is "concept drawings" and announcement after announcement of what they're planning to do in the future. Paper and vapor.
I wish them all luck and such, but I'll get excited when any of them actually puts people into LEO. Repeatably. Cheaper and safer then what we have now.
I think Elon Musk is the prime example of a "space entrepreneur" who's been forced to eat humble pie after repeated failure of his grandly announced space ventures. I hope he'll succeed in the end, but he's currently learning what these other wannabee upstarts keep missing: it is rocket science.
Let's see what's wrong with Vista:
1) lack of hardware drivers, rendering many machines obsolete
...which is a problem with the hardware and/or the hardware manufacturer who decided not to support their hardware in Vista. It is NOT a problem of Vista any more than some hardware without a working Linux driver is a problem of Linux.
2) lack of support for legacy apps (although arguably, some of those apps were badly written)
every single one of which was badly written. MS had been spending years and uncounted dollars telling people how to write their apps so that they will remain compatible with future versions of Windows. If people insist on circumventing the Windows API and writing their own little gizmos to implement some functionality then they shouldn't be surprised when this functionality ceases to function when the underlying OS structure changes.
This, too, is not a problem with Vista, but with retarded children who imagine they're "programmers" because they get one kind of function working in one version of one OS and fantasize that from there on all OS progress must be halted so as to not break their crummy little hack.
3) intensive hassling of the user because of inept prior version code that make user root/admin
And you're pointing out yourself that this is ALSO not a problem with Vista. It's a problem with lazy and inept 3rd-party programmers who insisted on making everybody root. Which is decidedly a BAD idea. Which MS correctly identified and put a halt on. MS did every single thing right here and you call it "buggy".
That's why you're a Troll.
4) truly piggish DRM
Yeah - let's round it out with a statement that's not measurable or quantifiable. "piggish". Hum.
You have failed to name one single of the "enormous and embarrassing mistakes found in Vista" you claimed before. Not one. Because there are no particular mistakes in Vista. The usual slew of a little bug here and a minor annoyance there; but as I said, certainly no more of them than XP ever had.
That's why I call you a troll. Because you make an assertion of "enormous and embarrassing mistakes found in Vista" and yet you are completely incapable when it comes to naming some of them.