Comment Re:Could've been worse... (Score 1) 366
Yeah, but that's the gift that keeps on giving all year!
Comment Re:This is so cool! (Score 1) 276
You think that's cool? I think it's frightening and would be a ridiculous invasion of privacy.
Do you really want George W. Bush having access to your thoughts, even if it was just visual data? I can personally think of few worse things than that.
Do you really want George W. Bush having access to your thoughts, even if it was just visual data? I can personally think of few worse things than that.
Comment Re:Direct link to the paper (Score 1) 392
In fact, this paper is just corroborating what other people have already proven in this Astrophysical Journal paper from 2005.
So yes, this is an interesting topic, but really the only plus on this paper was that they further refined the size of the black hole at the center of our galaxy (and of course they are assuming black holes exist).
Where is the revolutionary part of this paper? Anyone?
So yes, this is an interesting topic, but really the only plus on this paper was that they further refined the size of the black hole at the center of our galaxy (and of course they are assuming black holes exist).
Where is the revolutionary part of this paper? Anyone?
Comment Re:Well.. (Score 2, Insightful) 188
Safari: I dont own a mac. I dont care to own a mac. And I dont even want to pirate OSX for my very compatible Thinkpad-T61 to run it. And pretty much every software ported from OSX to Windows is bad, and I mean BAD.
iTunes, Quicktime, and Safari are all capable and useful software products for Windows. You may not like them, and they are not perfect, but calling them "BAD" is a bit ridiculous.
Webkit browsers (Safari, Chrome, Konqueror) seem to me to be noticeably faster than FireFox and IE in rendering pages that I frequent. To me, render time and memory footprint are a very important criteria when choosing a browser. Safari and Chrome are great options for most Windows users.
Do yourself a favor and download Safari or Chrome and give them a try, especially since you used to use Konqueror. I think you might be surprised, even if you have to give up Greasemonkey and AdBlock.
iTunes, Quicktime, and Safari are all capable and useful software products for Windows. You may not like them, and they are not perfect, but calling them "BAD" is a bit ridiculous.
Webkit browsers (Safari, Chrome, Konqueror) seem to me to be noticeably faster than FireFox and IE in rendering pages that I frequent. To me, render time and memory footprint are a very important criteria when choosing a browser. Safari and Chrome are great options for most Windows users.
Do yourself a favor and download Safari or Chrome and give them a try, especially since you used to use Konqueror. I think you might be surprised, even if you have to give up Greasemonkey and AdBlock.
Comment Re:I'll Tell You What It Means (Score 2, Insightful) 3709
Don't look now, but you are officially an author of the most concise and rational explanation of why the Republican party is in shambles.
The crazy thing is that McCain and Palin's "maverick" reputations still weren't enough to quell the insanity of the clowns that are in charge of that party. McCain's concession speech was indeed a beautiful thing, and you could see the "real" John McCain, freed from the irrational fear-mongering that the Republican party has been flinging at us for the past eight years.
The crazy thing is that McCain and Palin's "maverick" reputations still weren't enough to quell the insanity of the clowns that are in charge of that party. McCain's concession speech was indeed a beautiful thing, and you could see the "real" John McCain, freed from the irrational fear-mongering that the Republican party has been flinging at us for the past eight years.
Comment Out of curiosity... (Score 1) 429
Out of curiosity, what exactly are you trying to do that Hibernate isn't solving? Is it some database-level craziness with stored procedures or something?
Hibernate, while not perfect, meets the vast majority of my needs... and for the 0.1% of the time it doesn't, I can always write my own persistence layer.
Code re-use will make you look good when future requirements come up. For example, what happens when you decide to move to MySQL to get away from Oracle, and all of your code is using JDBC with hand-coded SQL? You'll be spending weeks changing that stuff when Hibernate would have abstracted away the vast majority of issues.
Ideally, the best way to avoid bugs is to code smartly and minimize lines of code. Re-using industry standard libraries and frameworks like Hibernate and Spring lets you do that.
Hibernate, while not perfect, meets the vast majority of my needs... and for the 0.1% of the time it doesn't, I can always write my own persistence layer.
Code re-use will make you look good when future requirements come up. For example, what happens when you decide to move to MySQL to get away from Oracle, and all of your code is using JDBC with hand-coded SQL? You'll be spending weeks changing that stuff when Hibernate would have abstracted away the vast majority of issues.
Ideally, the best way to avoid bugs is to code smartly and minimize lines of code. Re-using industry standard libraries and frameworks like Hibernate and Spring lets you do that.
Comment Re:Two words (Score 1) 3709
Even though I voted Obama and am VERY glad he won, I think that's overly harsh on McCain. Every impression I got was that he was more intelligent and sane than the Texas Village Idiot.
Nice backhanded compliment!
The problem is that McCain and Palin ran on a platform that catered to the same uneducated religious nutjobs that Bush appealed to.
They were trying to get elected, and since it worked for Bush, they figured it was their best shot. Unfortunately, it seems that McCain sold out everything that he did over the past thirty years and listened to his Karl Rove-esque advisers too much. Every time I saw McCain speak over the last couple of months, I have come away with the feeling that he wasn't happy about what he was saying.
For example, in the debate, when he never looked at Obama... and in all of the slanderous and patently outright ridiculous TV advertisements and speeches... and even at the RNC when he made his acceptance speech... it just seemed like you are watching someone who doesn't like what he's been doing.
McCain's acceptance speech, when he was again freed from the confines of his (obviously terrible) campaign advisors, showed me the McCain of last year... the one who has honor and integrity and is not afraid to say what he thinks (most of the time).
Nice backhanded compliment!
The problem is that McCain and Palin ran on a platform that catered to the same uneducated religious nutjobs that Bush appealed to.
They were trying to get elected, and since it worked for Bush, they figured it was their best shot. Unfortunately, it seems that McCain sold out everything that he did over the past thirty years and listened to his Karl Rove-esque advisers too much. Every time I saw McCain speak over the last couple of months, I have come away with the feeling that he wasn't happy about what he was saying.
For example, in the debate, when he never looked at Obama... and in all of the slanderous and patently outright ridiculous TV advertisements and speeches... and even at the RNC when he made his acceptance speech... it just seemed like you are watching someone who doesn't like what he's been doing.
McCain's acceptance speech, when he was again freed from the confines of his (obviously terrible) campaign advisors, showed me the McCain of last year... the one who has honor and integrity and is not afraid to say what he thinks (most of the time).
Submission + - Find every Web App available for iPhone, easily (applejuicr.com)
filterban writes: "Today marks the public launch of AppleJuicr, a web application designed to make it easy to find and manage iPhone and iPod Touch web apps. It's UI is designed for Mobile Safari and low-bandwidth wireless connections.
It was created and is hosted on completely free software components, including iUI and Debian Linux. It is currently in beta and is undergoing constant development.
Disclaimer: I am the author of the application."
It was created and is hosted on completely free software components, including iUI and Debian Linux. It is currently in beta and is undergoing constant development.
Disclaimer: I am the author of the application."
Videogames Doomed for a 'Comics-like Ghetto'? 354
At the Newsweek blog LevelUp, journalist N'Gai Croal wrote this week about the sometimes-precarious position of videogames in popular culture. The frustrations of legislators, lawyers, and 'pro-family' groups aside, the popularity and record sales of the gaming industry would seem to indicate rising stock for gaming as an art form in the US. And yet, there are some folks who see gaming as just another fad, which in some time will be equal in popularity to comic books or tabletop roleplaying. N'Gai starts to form his response by noting that learning to play videogames is considerably easier than developing an appreciation for literature of any kind. He then goes on to note that the (oft-cited) lack of weighty subjects in gaming is more due to the 'pop culture' nature of the hobby than the medium itself. "Popular fiction generally outsells literary fiction. Summer blockbusters generally out-gross arthouse films. Is this any different from, say, Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat out-NPD-ing BioShock last year, or Madden doing the same to Shadow of the Colossus in 2005?" He discusses some ways to address that, but do you have any solutions? Or are games doomed to be the playthings of adolescent boys for the rest of the century? (And yeah, I resent the 'comics ghetto' label too.)
Feed Techdirt: French Court Tells Google To Do The Impossible: Stop People From Uploading Copyr (techdirt.com)
What do you do when the court orders you to do the impossible? The French High Court has apparently told Google that if someone alerts it to an unauthorized video being uploaded to Google video, not only does it need to take the video down, but it must prevent that same video from ever being uploaded again ever. It seems that some people still believe that this really is possible, but despite some companies claiming they offer filters that will block certain uploads, none have been shown to be all that effective. There's always some way to mask or change the content enough that these filters won't work. The question that comes up again, though, is why is this Google's responsibility? If there's liability, it should be on the person uploading the unauthorized content. If someone is clever enough to get around any filter, then why should Google have to pay for that?
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