19 hours ago, Bas wrote

*snip*

What does it matter? As long as people get to choose to do something they enjoy. Which isn't always driving a car.

Will it be something you enjoy? Playing Angry Birds for the Nth time in a row gets boring. People look for escape all the time, and then the escape becomes tedium quickly but they get addicted to the tedium.

All I'm saying is people need to slow down a bit.

The bad thing to me about driving in traffic isn't that I'm driving, but I'm stuck and my options to do things are limited. If my car could drive itself, I'd have a little more flexibility in the case I needed to stop and do something. That'd be nice.

But I don't know that I need to be entertained.

11 hours ago, Bas wrote

*snip*

I'd like to choose when I get to enjoy driving a car, instead of being forced to do it twice a day. I'd be all over a self-driving car, then I can just enjoy my time without having to waste it on driving.

What are you going to do to enjoy your time? Post on Channel9? Play Angry Birds? My larger point was what most people would do to pass time in a car ride is just as much a waste of time as driving -- although some people would use it productively. 

Google wants to give you more time to enjoy your life

Page also talked a little bit about Google's famous self-driving car, saying it would change people's lives by giving them more time to do stuff instead of driving. So basically you can jump in the car, have it drive you to work and spend the 50 minutes or so that takes doing something productive or fun.

What ever happened to enjoying driving a car? Or enjoying your time without a phone to keep you company? Are people's attention spans growing smaller?

I would like it better if the message was "Google wants to give you more control over your life."

1 day ago, Dr Herbie wrote

*snip*

papers did their checks properly they wouldn't publish them when they realised that they were leaving themselves wide open to looking foolish when it turns out he is not a credible source. I'm not suggesting a ban, just journalistic competence.

It would even be more helpful if journalists actually studied the subjects they were reporting on, and could talk in depth about facts and debates within the field, instead of just quoting people they've determined to be experts.

Parroting experts is one of the biggest problems in our culture. People have some responsibility to actually read the subjects the experts are talking about, look at outside critiques objectively, and use logic and reason to decide whether they have a point.

Journalists -- the same. They should have enough knowledge of the field to be able to report on outside critiques objectively and impartially; instead of just being parrots.

2 days ago, figuerres wrote

*snip*

how much of a test was that ?  I think it was more of a marketing game, give a sample and at then end of each game they were doing adverts to pre order the game.

It wasn't just a marketing game, they did use feedback from testers to improve things; and they were also testing the capability of the servers.

Still, they did seem to go out of the way to not give beta testers much value for their playtesting. I got an e-mail invite the same day they wanted me to test, couple hours notice, the test was only for a couple of hours, and the sessions were still limited to 1 hr. I participated in the previous open beta. Where was my incentive to help them out??

36 minutes ago, magicalclick wrote

*snip*nope. You have to box the object since you are moving the entire box, not individual items. Telling someone to move box of toys, or take toys out and move them, are completely different things, as the box is gone and the toys do not have the same relative displacement anymore. It is the same as you pass in a student object pointer or pass in individual student attributes in the parameters. They are very different and is no brainer to programmers.

Yea, but the alternative is an order of operations which is difficult to use in practice. So some type of "boxing" order of operations is preserved, higher order mathematical functions are given first priority, and the "boxing" is in your head. I never said it was necessary, just that it wasn't arbitrary, and its not arbitrary.

The standard order of operations also prevents a left-to-right "stacking" of the operations and allows you to do it from either direction.

So lets say someone knows nothing of math and sees an equation and doesn't get what to do. I understand the problem. But if you take one or two math courses, the choice for the standard order of operations should seem intuitive, and not something easy to forget.

1 minute ago, Blue Ink wrote

*snip*

The problem is that operator precedence is largely a convention; there's no real reason why 3 + 3 * 4 = 15 and not 24; it's just that we decided it has to be that way.

That's what makes it hard to teach: you can paraphrase it all you want, but the answer is essentially "just because" and that never flies too well with kids.

Sure there's a reason. If the operators applied based on order in the equation, then the operations couldn't be freely associated with each other and always would have to be put in place in a certain order. For example, lets say you had an equation x × 2 = y × 3. You want to be able to rewrite the equation as x × 2 - y × 3 = 0 and still have it mean the same thing without putting in parentheses. If it was based on the order in the equation you couldn't do that very well. Stacking operations isn't very intuitive for people, only useful for calculators that can only enter one operation at a time. And if you had addition/subtraction taking precedence before multiplication/division you would have something that was intuitively strange, too.

Its not absolutely necessary, of course, but there's a reason behind it; its not arbitrary that standard order of operations works like that.

17 hours ago, Sven Groot wrote

Lots of people just don't remember the operator order, which is hardly surprising since it's not something most people actually need very often.

Yea but everyone learns it in school, and its pretty intuitive, meaning its not hard to forget. So I still don't get it.

Its possible your neighbor doesn't mind if people piggyback on his Internet access, so it would be the equivalent of him putting out some broken couch on the sidewalk for anyone to pick up whom wants it.

But you don't know that, so its more of an equivalent to a fruit tree overhanging his property line, and that involves some sort of moral judgment. If it were a tree of a neighbor you don't know that lives a block away, if it were a neighbor next door that you know well, or a neighbor next door that you don't know very well, but the tree isn't overhanging the sidewalk, but rather into your property, and you pick it from your property. Same sort of moral judgment applies to Internet piggybacking. Overall the best ethic is to use your own wifi, but in some cases using others shouldn't be such a big issue.

1 hour ago, figuerres wrote

I think a better way to look at it is like this, say a house has an open door, you walk in and attach an electric cord and run it over to your house and use the power.  that is also theft.  same thing.

the "right" thing to do is go ask if you can use it, also tell them they should put a lock on it to stop others from taking the service w/o asking.

Yes, but their electricity costs them money by the watt, while most IPs won't charge with bandwidth, you're also opening their door and stepping inside which they might consider a violation of their property, which you aren't doing with wifi. But still... when I'm in a public place and my cell phone isn't charged I often look for an outlet on the side of a commercial building to plug it in. Nobody cares.

At any rate, there's also a wider definition of stealing which has no moral context to it. Consider expressions like "I stole a glimpse", "I stole the gift into the house," etc. which just means to take surreptitiously. 

4 hours ago, DCMonkey wrote

*snip*

I believe that "interpretation" comes from apparently coincidental post blog by a MS employee from the SQL Server team that watched WinFS flounder.

So it would seem there are at least two interpretations of how WinFS was interpreted within MS.

WinFS touched upon so many technologies that I can understand that those that worked on each chunk of it emphasized their particular piece of the pie when discussing it.

As an outsider, it was pretty clear to me what WinFS was; like PaoloM said, all those things.

.NET was originally pictured as the new API for Windows, a replacement for COM, and just as WPF was meant to be the Presentation API, WinFS was meant to be the Storage API. Of course, like all of .NET, that meant making it updated, modern, object-oriented and glued into technologies becoming standard to .NET, including SQL and XML. XML would be the way metadata would be handled, because it would allow it to be self-descriptive. LINQ/SQL would be used to allow the user to traverse files based on metadata rather than physical location.

For the press and the masses, this was often boiled down into saying "instant network wide search based on various metadata" because that would be one of the most practical uses of it.

Some of the technology from WinFS has survived in other forms, but that doesn't mean WinFS is still alive, they just picked bones from its corpse.

4 days ago, evildictait​or wrote

*snip*

Anyone who has a private file server is a pretty big outlier on the distribution of how an average person uses a computer.

 

Too bad , 'cus it makes a lot of sense to have a personal file server if the future is tablets or tablet like PCs with relatively low internal hdd space.

Currently I use a external hdd, if I ever bought a Surface or Surface Pro, with the even more limited disk space, I'd probably upgrade that to a  file server.

11 minutes ago, kettch wrote

@brian.shapiro: Even better than desktop applications being sold through the store, is the idea of desktop applications being updated through system API's. (insert angelic choir/happy dance)

We could see the end of little services that do nothing but ping for updates and nag. Get back in your hole Acrobat! I'll update when I'm good and ready!

And my hope is if that happens eventually we might get rid of the distinction between Desktop apps and Metro apps, and just have both full screen versions and windowed versions of some apps.

@brian.shapiro: What do you mean by porting WinRT to the desktop?

C

Well, if the Desktop is really "here to stay" like Microsoft is saying it is, and its not just a legacy environment, I expect WinRT as an architecture will eventually replace WPF and standard COM development. Desktop apps could then be installed through the Windows Store, etc. 

18 hours ago, magicalclick wrote

It is pretty much a mentality that, Surface RT is tablet only, and if they want to have ability to run desktop apps as a backup plan, they can still have that on Surface Pro.

I think once desktop apps get compiled for ARM, or WinRT gets ported to the desktop to make cross-platform desktop apps, it will change that.

2 hours ago, Heywood_J wrote

*snip*Judging by this video, they seem to be marketing the Surface to pedophiles.

I wish I were as cool as those kids.

7 hours ago, jinx101 wrote

*snip*

And, I did figure it out and I didn't like it.  Figuring something out doesn't mean I have to prefer it that way.  There are plenty of things I can figure out I don't like. 

No, its just that, for me, its pretty easy to use, not just pretty easy to figure out.

1 hour ago, jinx101 wrote

I have my fair share of complaints about Windows 8 that I feel are warranted and reasonable.  I gave it a fair shot, it frustrated me a lot.  That said, I have found 3rd party utilities that add or change the behavior of Windows that have taken away most of those frustrations and allowed me to use Windows 8 like it was Windows 7 and STILL have the ability to get into the Metro apps if I want (which is rare, but there are a few I do use).  In fact, some of the utilities are customizable enough that they allow me to pick and choose to do more easier than Windows 7 (I love the ability to choose and not have something I don't like forced on me if I want to stay current).

I'll leave the "Microsoft should have and still should" rant out, but there are software packages that have at least made Windows 8 work like I want it to work. 

I understand people who think the Start Screen was a bad decision from a abstract standpoint -- saying it introduces incongruency, novices might not 'get' it, businesses would need retraining, etc..

What I don't understand is people who are good at computers, plenty capable of figuring out how things work, spending their effort turning it off. Its frustrating? Really? Its pretty damn easy.

Part of the whole idea about building an OS that can handle full screen tablet-capable apps and also traditional desktop apps is that you might want something to carry around with you during the day, able to write on with a pen, etc., and then when you come home, sit it on your desk and use it like a desktop computer.

I would be interested, but I just got through paying for fixes to my laptop so I'm going to wait a while.

The HDD space isn't that important to me since I always use an external drive for my files, typically I just use the internal HDD for apps, although I have enough space on my external drive to handle that too if I need it. Getting a computer with high disk space = unimportant.

6 hours ago, Dr Herbie wrote

@fanbaby: "What's sauce for the Goose is sauce for the Gander".

If MS are sued for anti-competitive actions, then so should everyone else who acts anti-competitively.  Imagine you peed on your neighbour's lawn and they sued you, then the neighbour on the other side peed on your lawn; wouldn't you think it would be unfair for them to get away with it if you didn't?

Herbie

 

EDIT: My argument above is purely based on personal morals, but we mustn't forget that MS is a publicly owned company, so they have to do everything they legally can to ensure a level market with their competitors (and if they do something illegal, they deserve to be sued).

 

EDIT, EDIT:  I'm not saying I don't see the irony, but suggesting that MS cannot morally make this argument is stretching credulity.

Microsoft may or may not have to do that as a public company, but I hope that isn't anyone's personal moral code. Its the opposite of morals, because it shows a lack of integrity. Integrity means you don't do something just because everyone else is doing it.

The #1 reason people act immorally is because they use this excuse, and then other people see them doing it and use that excuse, and then everyone is doing it and using that excuse. Meanwhile people imagine they're better than everyone else because they're only doing it because others are, while they imagine others aren't. That's what goes on in politics all the time. "Lets run smears against our opponent, because if we don't, they'll run them against us. Lets make deals with lobbyists, because that's what our opponent will do"

Personally, I don't buy the argument that companies can't legally act in a more ethical manner, either. Maintaining a good reputation is a good way to keep market-share.

24 minutes ago, BitFlipper wrote

*snip*

The problem is that if we stop complaining about the horrible direction Windows is taking, MS might think we started liking it.

And if people stopped complaining about the complainers, MS might start to think everyone hates it.

Starting drama is fun.

1 minute ago, cbae wrote

@brian.shapiro: He actually never touched the mouse except to speak into it like a microphone. As for the keyboard, it's not like he didn't recognize it initially. He just thought he didn't need to use it. My car door has a keyhole and I know it's there, but it's never been used before.

What's more annoying is that we're led to believe that you can do anything useful on a Mac.

Yea, I just think it was a bit unrealistic that he wouldn't kind of intuitively get what the mouse was, since I'm sure they still had some sort of touch movements on the Enterprise computer, and as an engineer he should have known enough about computing history to at least suspect that there wasn't good enough AI then to be able to do a complex voice request. The fact that he knew how to use all the Mac apps just made that sillier.

23 minutes ago, Geoffreyk wrote

*snip*

Ah, a keyboard, how quaint.

The idea that he wasn't smart enough to recognize a mouse and keyboard, but once realizing it was a mouse and keyboard, instantly understood how to use MacOS and create a molecular diagram on it within a few seconds always annoyed me.