Posts by Joe Cooper

@Jon Tocker

Tons of Americans know who Stephen Hawking is an respect him.

However, being BORN IN 1942, he doesn't really count as being from the same generation as wheeler. The topic is clearly "people who in the early 20th century figured out relativity and black holes and shit", and we enlightened and educated (compared to you) Americans know Stephen Hawking wasn't there.

Apparently you don't know anything about Stephen Hawking yourself, you just have a inferiority complex where you feel the need to turn any random discussion into an epic struggle to prove Americans aren't better.

Oh, and you got Hawking's name wrong too.

P.S.

I'm not saying Americans are better than anyone, just that you have a blatant inferiority complex.

@Joe Montana & @MemotoIBM

I second these notions.

$3.7k for a p505 is cheap in some contexts, but if they want to build a big, hipster-scale developer base, they gotta make these things cheap enough for experimenting geeks to buy.

I would LOVE to get a Power motherboard and chip and roll my own system.

Maybe not just a Linux DVD, but also a personal usage license of AIX. Sun is doing this. I'm not saying AIX has to go open source, but if I could get a Power system and a copy of AIX for free, I would learn to use it just for the sake of doing it. So would a lot of others. If they do it right they could build quite a developer community around it.

Some people are like me and they like exploring these things. Lots of people are. People would buy it just to learn what Power is like, and they'd true AIX too if they could get it. Trying a new platform is always fun.

Sun is doing this with their Solaris, because they realize one big advantage of Linux is that all the hipsters can get it and learn it and so there's tons of people who understand it, and that automatically makes Linux more cost effective for any business.

Defense

There's a lot of really lame rationalizations on here.

@Ben Davies

So you're saying it's okay to copy the music because... it's not worth having? It's not good?

Then why the hell do you want it? Obviously if someone is bothering to download it, they must like it. I call bullshit.

As for live performances, I somehow doubt any of you have researched the economics of it.

But regardless, a normal person can't spend their whole life in a tour bus doing live performances everywhere. That isn't a way to make a living. There are enormous costs to doing a concert, gas prices are rising, real estate prices are a factor for venues, etc.

You people are all selfish tarts and the artists are the only losers here. Trying to turn this into a "down with the faceless corporations!" thing is pure bullshit. All that's going to happen is an even SMALLER amount of people will be getting even MORE money.

PC Gaming

I would have to be totally batshit insane to pay this much for a gaming machine, especially considering the way PC games look.

There entire definition of "good graphics" is "more polygons". A typical PC game will throw a billion polygons a frame at poorly animated characters and ugly brown scenery.

You shoot someone in the arm enough and they just slump over dead. You go to open a door, and your character just waves his hand and the door magically opens. Two characters battling just stand there waving swords at each other while their numbers go down. It says "missed" when it very visibly did not.

Then it crashes.

But at least it's anti-aliased. At least, it is on the Mesh system :P

@b shubin

"sorry, the US spent all the money "spreading" democracy (or manure? or maybe death and destruction?), not enough left to fund the space program adequately"

As evidenced by the LAMEZ0RZ fonts, clearly the US cannot fund it's space program.

Apparently all the money went to some thing called Cassini, some lamez0rz mars rovers, a bunch of so-called satellites, a mission to pluto, and building a so called "space station".

But since the fonts are soooo lamez0rz, clearly they can't do ANYTHING!!! Stupid 'merkins.

As for Russia, I'd say it was the US's democracy spreading efforts combined with the fact that just about everyone was sick of Russia's shit. And everyone is STILL sick of Russia's shit, or so is the impression I get living in Poland.

Children

13 to 18 aren't children, they're young adults. They're angsty and a bit nuts with all the hormones but the raising has been done, pass tense.

And who in the hell turns their cell phone off at night?

ECS

Everything ECS produces is an epic pile of garbage.

@Funky

"But I'm not sure how many people actually run transcoding jobs that take 12 hours."

None, because they'll have 16-way SMP.

Also also

The legal usage of torrents usually amounts to a company (like Blizzard) attempting to increase their profits by dumping their server demand onto (paying) customers.

Obviously if torrents were a problem for customers they would simply switch to something else so for WoW players it's really not a worry. The only real benefactor is Blizzard's bottom line.

So the legal-use defence basically amounts to saying that Torrents are good or should be protected because it makes a given corporation (like Blizzard) more profitable.

Since the amount of profits gained by legal P2P doesn't hold a candle to profits lost, going with that defence is, to put it lightly, choosing the wrong battle.

Here's a clue: If ya'll are gonna rant about evil corporations, don't push for P2P by saying "it makes corporations more profitable" as it's primary merit.

Charging is not the solution

It's wrongheaded to think that charging would solve the problem.

When we put CAPTCHAs up, it didn't actually stop the spam, it just created a market for humans to break the CAPTCHAs.

If you put up frees, you're just going to create a new market for stolen credit card numbers and identity information.

Then you'll see spam REALLY start to cost people.

I don't think there's a technological solution. I mean, it's ~crime~. Anyone who can ~solve~ the problem crime needs to step away from the computer and put their magnificent brain to work on some bigger crimes than people sending annoying E-Mails.

Like murder or corruption or something...?

@Duncan Ellis

Of course, you know the garbage collector will queue them for deletion automatically once the references go out of scope.

If you're writing a desktop app or something that's just waiting for user input than that would be dandy to take advantage of. Save you lots of time; have confidence that the computer ~will~ zap those things when it gets around to it.

Only time I ever ran into trouble was with a video decoder that had to puke out three dozen BufferedImages a second; the garbage collecter would keep kicking in every second or two and visibly interrupting the video.

So what I did there was create a list of extended BufferedImages that were "recycleable"... A bit of a hack yes, but the only time I've ever had to do that.

And yes, manual memory management is definitely faster, and stack allocations are faster than heap allocations.

But if you're using Java, take advantage of it. Don't be recoding File classes to deallocate on command - very probably a waste of time unless your program is a very special case.

@Ian Hunter

Don't be silly, of course we didn't go to the moon. Surely you don't believe that fairy tale?

Next thing you'll be telling me there are these magical pods that fly around the Earth and let people communicate over long distances - like telepathy or something! - or track people's locations or spy on other countries.

I can't believe people fall for this "orbit" stuff. Everyone knows the Earth is flat.

Did you know...

"...moved the solar panels up into the treetops and run a wire over to his house. Problem solved."

Did you know that trees are solar powered?????

No, seriously. It's true! If the trees were under the panels, ~they~ would be in the shade, and consequently starve to death.

Zany isn't it?

@This helicopter needs gok wan

You vision of a scary robot is learned; you see hollywood robots, and they make them scary, so then when you see them, they look scary. It's built up associations.

...If this things works and is effective, and you have to fight them or see them in action, you will likewise ~learn to be scared~ because new associations will build up with it's image.

Shuttle

Using it as a space-only travel pod would mean spending enormous amounts of fuel to drag around inert launch engines, wings, tail, control surfaces, landing gear, unremovable living space, etc. etc. etc. Things you can't just pop off in orbit.

The space shuttle is not an efficient travel pod, not by a long shot; it's a lab, a LEO construction platform, a satellite deployment system, a FUNCTIONAL GLIDER, etc. etc. etc. but not a travel pod.

We have such a thing available anyway, the Soyuz, that IS designed to carry people to the Moon and back, to zip around to places in orbit, hang out at a space station for six months, and more.

Thanks to a few legal tweaks by congress a few years back, NASA can buy these wonderful travel pods at a price that's spare change compared to the shuttle.

Obviously the shuttle is great for a lot of things, but these are very different roles and the Shuttle as a travel pod would work as well as trying to use the Soyuz to build a space station or run a seven-person lab for two weeks.

You wouldn't take a 747 to a dogfight either. Some things just aren't meant to be.

Probability

"My own hunch is that five cable breaks cutting off one country is pretty damn unlikely unless there is deliberate cause."

...It is pretty damn unlikely. Which is why there were actually three cable breaks, and no country actually got cut off.

But nobody wants to look into that themselves. That's so boooring when you can just take the rumors and InternetTrafficReport.com at face value and spend your research time trying to prove Bush was behind it.

Ubuntu

...Except, if terrorists just started using Ubuntu, they would make an Ubuntu spyware. It's not hard, though a lot of people who spend their time explaining why it's impossible would never guess how.

Effing police!

Yeah, stick to The Man, Mark! Effing police won't let me threaten people with my shotgun.

Where's the effing freedom? True freedom! Freedom to take my video camera into the theater! Freedom to hit my wife when my carrots are too salty! Freedom to enjoy naked pictures of children! Freedom to shit in a cop's hat! Not this sham capitalist freedom.

Goddamn Americans. Everyone knows that violence only happens in America. Americans are so stupid. Just look at this election nonsense. If only it was more like Kenya. I hear they're sane there.

@Hindenburg

If we had that attitude, we wouldn't have subsonic airliners either. Or ships.

Stop being such a jealous tart.

@Kevin

Funny you should mention a sanity check, nutcase.

It's total bullshit

I'm completely tired of hearing about the dangers of Iran. A lot of what gets Americans hyped up is based on mistranslations anyway.

And let's face it: They're not acting irrationally. Think about it.

If Russia occupied Canada, what do you think the US would be doing? Attempting to influence the situation while at the same time seriously building up our military? You fucking bet! And it wouldn't be crazy to be doing so.

This is a big thing for Iran. First launch into space, AND first satellite. How many middle eastern countries are too busy blowing themselves up right now? Plenty of them. Yay for Iran.

And anyway, the US intelligence agencies very recently said out loud that they think Iran halted their nuclear weapons program back in 2003.

But you wouldn't hear that from Bush.

@Simon King: Double fail

ChrisC is spot on, as he was talking all about lasers and the fact that CD\GD lasers don't need to do the same thing as a dual layer DVD.

Remember that a GD-ROM is just a CD with different angular velocity and data density. There is no practical difference as far as this discussion is concerned. If you actually knew what a GD-ROM was, you wouldn't get so "OMG IT HAS A G AND NOT A C" on everyone.

Anyway, I've been going through old systems lately and finding that they actually are quite delicate.

One Gamecube I could not get to read ~at all~. Had to buy a new one. While dropping for a used Dreamcast, the first one I found didn't read discs at all either, had to get another one of those.

The first Playstation I got here worked, but it's video playback is pretty choppy at times.

Sorry but these older system designs aren't magically better.

And Nintendo will clean your system anyway.

iMac

Why in the blue hell would you complain about iMac servicability? The whole idea and purpose of the iMac is to have a really little base and a tightly integrated unit. You can't be all things to all people.

That's why they have MAC TOWERS.

That's just fuckn stupid.

Counting it wrong

You're all waaaay off. I can't believe I'm reading this here.

There were two product lines \ code bases. Windows and Windows NT.

Windows classic went like this:

Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.11

Windows 95 (4.0)

Windows 98 (4.1)

Windows ME (4.something)

Meanwhile the NT product line - a fundamentally different operating system featuring protected memory, SMP support, platform independence and multi-user. It also had a different filesystem.

NT 3.somethings, NT 4.0

Windows 2000 (NT 5.0)

Windows XP (NT 5.1)

Windows 2003 (NT 5.2)

Windows Vista (NT 6.0)

The successor to Vista would be Windows NT 7.0.

That's the thing here. These are two seperate product lines, that used to exist in parallel.

The "classic" line was dumped because it was a single-user platform with no protected memory.

If you're on XP or 2000, you should be able to find references to NT all over the place if you dig around.

RE: Crackers take out power grid

Why would white people want to take out the power grid?

Bad analogy

"A structural engineer saying "bridges break, get over it" would be roasted alive."

Bridges don't magically break, but you don't have every asshole out there trying to break it.

That's just not a good analogy. In fact it's a really, really bad one unless you're implying that bridges can have bombs dropped on them relentlessly without breaking.

You can sit there in your armchair and spout teleologies all you want, it doesn't change the cold hard reality that if people want to destroy something, they can.

Now if you can create a totally invincible, indestructible platform, be my guest. Let us all know once you've done it.

RE: Anyone remember the Vincennes?

"It seems that not much has changed in the Gulf in a generation. Someone will start a war because they're not capable of stopping and thinking."

But they didn't shoot them.

Actual military boats showed up, swarmed them, and someone on the radio said they were about to explode. And the USN didn't even fire a warning shot.

This is after the Cole was *successfully* attacked by a little pussy boat like these.

And you're comparing that to shooting a completely unidentified flying object because "it's coming right for us".

Shit, why stop there? Anyone remember the Rape of Nanking?

Howabout Duran Duran?