ps. how many of todays slashdot readers know what ^H means?
Well, no one has yet answered this, so...
On *nix systems, ^H is generally what you see when your tty settings do not have the backspace key bound to 'erase' (which will clear the previously typed character from the screen, as well move the cursor position one character back).
The command to do so is stty ^H erase . For ^H in this command, (on Solaris 9, at least (which is in front of me) ) you can utilize the two character combination '^' and 'H'.
By default erase is generally bound to delete (^?) - although don't try go binding delete to erase with the two character combination '^' and '?' - you have to press the delete key to get the actual code.
Why backspace is a two character key code and delete only looks like one I have not taken the time to figure out.
I would totally want a programmer who has a question about his work to come to me in order to get an answer or help.
If it is a question about how x, y or z should work, or how it fits in, etc. then it is even *more important* for them to ask. There are few things worse than someone charging ahead at a task they really don't understand, then having to have someone else rework it because it is fundamentally wrong in some fashion.
If it is a bug, or compile issue, etc, I am ok with it if they can show that they have put some thought into troubleshooting it already. "I did this, I tried that, it still isn't working!" I'd rather they take some of my time than beat their head against a wall for hours.
"You also need to show that nobody will get any private benefit from the publicly-funded works."
How is this possible with GPL'd (and perhaps other OSS licensed) code? I thought that anyone could repackage and sell it. With specifications such as the OGG Vorbis specification, they clearly state that it can be utilized to make commercial applications.
These seem to include private benefits of publicly funded works.
Re:Separating Content from Presentation a Good Thi
on
Office 2003 and XML
·
· Score: 1
The post you replied to was exactly correct. Your rant is a tangent (imagine that, on Slashdot!). Yes, it might be nice to keep format and content separate, but that is not the point, here. And I don't believe it was the point the original poster was trying to get across.
not having formatting information at all!
As I understand it, when you save into an XML format from 2003, you loose all formatting. Not that it is put somewhere else, but that nice indented italicized quote you put in the middle of your paper is going to end up looking like everything else.
The problem with "process" is that it can almost always be subverted by personal weaknesses in your programmers.
I submit that a process "so perfect that no personal weaknesses in your programmers can hurt the company" would sink the company by it's weight.
Such a process would have to include more than the checks and balances of test first design, pair programming, archetectural, code, design reviews, automated test suites, etc., etc., ad nauseum.
We certainly don't have that perfect process so far, and I doubt we will in the near future.
I think the real notion of software engineering is to create a repeatable process. One where, if you follow it, you can say things analogous to, "we need concrete pilings driven to a depth of 100' to suport this building", for every step of the process.
This begs the question as to whether building software is more like building a bridge or planting a garden. As far as I know, gardening has not risen (or sunk) to the level of engineering.
I find that the problem is that you generally will have a hard time finding someone (read: a company) to pay you to build "your application in painstakingly slow fashion".
You might write bullet-proof code, but if you finish after the product ship date announced by Marketing, you will be out of a job.
The same goes for work-for-hire. If you come in with an proposal for 6 months, and quite a few other people come in with proposals for 2-3 months, do you really think that they are going to pick you because you craft beautiful software?
Perhaps the default is 686, but in the makefile configuration script (which tells gcc what flags to utilize to compile with) you can optimize with whatever flags your heart desires (and gcc supports).
If you are complaining that the binary packages are 686 optimized, I would say why are you using gentoo? The beauty of it is that you *do* compile from source, and optimize exactly how you want to.
I don't see how your comment agrees with the facts.
For example
1) The pharmaceutical industry is ranked as the most profitable industry by Fortune magazine. At the close of 2001, the top 14 pharmaceutical companies altogether made profits of $38 billion.
2) In 2001, pharmaceutical companies spent more than $2.6 billion to advertise their prescription drugs, according to Intercontinental Marketing Services. This is up from $1.8 billion in 1999.
3) Drug manufacturers consistently rank among the top two industry groups in money spent to lobby Congress. With more than 400 registered lobbyists -- nearly one for each of the 535 members of Congress -- the pharmaceutical industry spent nearly $97 million in 2000, according to records filed with the Secretary of the Senate and compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.
That's just the money given to congresscritters, not for the lobbyists themselves.
4) Major drug makers spend nearly twice as much to advertise their medicines as to research and develop them, from Families USA.
For example, Merck & Co. netted $40.36 billion in sales in 2000. Of that amount, 17 percent was profit; 15 percent was spent on advertising, marketing and administration; and 6 percent was spent on research and development (SEC filings).
So don't go telling me how drug prices can't get any cheaper because of all the research money spent on them!
Yes, "litterally billions" of dollars are spent on research, but *THAT* is only a small portion of where the money you pay for drugs goes.
What you pay for is the pharmaceutical companies ability to maximize profits by having a single source of something that people need.
I have a related issue, in this regard. Some of the problems I am working on require arbitrary precision floating point numbers. E.g., one number might be 3.2334, but it needs to be multiplied by 3.4568902349830983945873908730987578439345, and I need all the resultant digits.
The problem is that the output of one calculation is fed into the input stage of another, that output being the input of the first calculation, in a circular style, so that small rounding changes may have a large affect on the final outcome.
Now, at some points, the precision may be truncated (where the effect will be unnoticable to the equations), but at certain points I need the exact number.
I have heard that with Lisp you can have numbers as large as you like, but I don't know how hard it is to perform complex numerical tasks in Lisp. Also, speed is an issue (I want it to be as fast as possible).
I think you are very wrong. The simple economics of email spam are such that a.01% hit rate is considered good.
If that million (spam) emails were charged at even $.01 an email, the spammer could not sell enough product via this method to turn a profit.
Re:so do some DMs/GMs
on
Infinite Games?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
What a poor way to play a role playing game. It seems as if the role you are playing is someone playing an RPG. I'm sure your character walks up to a door and says "sense", or goes into a room and says "detect trap".
Perhaps it is an indication of the skill of the GM, but it is also up to you to role play.
Each side feeds the other. Perhaps if you were to say something like
"Hmm, the door is locked. I look at the handle and lock. Are there any hinges on this side of the door?"
"No"
If you actually do have a magical ability to detect traps, you could say something like:
"I open up my awareness to the chi/feng shui (or whatever genre you are playing in) of the room, does anything seem amiss?"
"Well, the whole room seems kind of off, and the chest in the corner is tickling your awareness more strongly."
However, if you have more of a thief type skill, I would expect you to actually start looking at parts of the room. You might start with:
"I scan the room, looking for anything amiss - cracks in the wall, outcroppings of stone, shelves, niches, darkened areas."
If you actually make an easy detect traps roll, the GM should give you some area to concentrate on, so you can hone your *actual* problem solving skills on the real challenge - the trap.
If not, I would expect you to try and look at individual parts of the room, like the chest, door, walls, floor, ceiling, etc.
I always prefer people to actually *solve* the trap, as opposed to relying on some stupid roll of the dice. Perhaps they can even solve it in a way that I have not thought of, but is reasonable.
I can't imagine why, other than the geekiness factor, wireless data transmission would be needed to have the DVD player and the PC communicate.
I don't think there's a need to have a wireless connection, however, some people's houses are not yet fully wired - there's no fiber (or even CAT5) in the walls (the horror!).
These people may 1) not want cables running all over the house or 2) not want to pay the money or time to install the wiring.
You seem to be forgetting about the other Rational products. Rose was only one. I really like the abilities of Purify, for example. ClearCase, though horrendously complex also lets you do horredendously complex things.
Oh, yes, and of course in that timeperiod, absoultely *nothing* was done in hardware - a 286 is pretty much the same thing as a 2.6 Ghz P4..., a floppy drive == cdrw, etc...
Ethically, I have to watch the crap they call ads? Perhaps if pop-up ads were the *only* way for web-sites to remain active, it *might* be called enlightened self interest to view the ads, but really! I know of many web-sites that seem to be doing ok without them.
I suppose the next argument is that it is somhow 'morally' wrong to block them. Doh! In fact, I believe this is where anti-leech was headed with their talk of viewers being thieves...
So are you saying I cannot sell a digital copy of a picture in the public domain? Or perhaps I can't sell you those lists of government grants that will get you $50,000?
" I wish to read where Bill Gates called "charitable work by open source developers" "communist" and "cancer". Please provide a reference to the quote so I can better understand your point of view."
Isn't most work being done on open source products (that make it back to the community) charitable work?
Go get another NVRAM - it's prolly the battery on the stupid thing that isn't saving your state anymore. I had this problem myself. It's a snap to do, and doesn't cost very much, either.
If you read the article,they are putting out a CD which will do exactly what you want - install a system painlessly and easily in a short period of time.
You could then customize it (as appropriate) for the task you wish to accomplish...
Sure, sience makes sense, but not the kind of sense you are talking about above.
Take quantum mechanics. I defy you to 'make sense' of it in a "hmm, *that* makes sense!" kind of way.
If you can gather information from something that *might* have happened, but didn't, I don't think it's too far of a strech to think that maybe we don't know everything yet, and just maybe... not everything makes sense.
That was raahul_da_man's opinion, for which he gave no supporting arguments.
I think that the simple fact of the new EULA for BitKeeper is enough of a supporting argument.
If the new EULA makes BK no longer the best tool for the job then it's time to change the tool. If the pain of changeover is worth enduring then the decision is clear. It's not like we're chained to BK by a pact of blood. This is what I call pragmatism.
So you agree that there would be some 'pain' in changing over to some other system? You also agree that the new EULA may be a reason to switch?
Is there a place in your so called 'pragmatism' for forward looking thinking? If so, by your own statements, you seem to be saying that choosing BK was wrong in the first place, pragmatically, not ideologically.
Slashdot Mirror
What is the Matrix?
ps. how many of todays slashdot readers know what ^H means?
Well, no one has yet answered this, so...
On *nix systems, ^H is generally what you see when your tty settings do not have the backspace key bound to 'erase' (which will clear the previously typed character from the screen, as well move the cursor position one character back).
The command to do so is stty ^H erase . For ^H in this command, (on Solaris 9, at least (which is in front of me) ) you can utilize the two character combination '^' and 'H'.
By default erase is generally bound to delete (^?) - although don't try go binding delete to erase with the two character combination '^' and '?' - you have to press the delete key to get the actual code.
Why backspace is a two character key code and delete only looks like one I have not taken the time to figure out.
I would totally want a programmer who has a question about his work to come to me in order to get an answer or help.
If it is a question about how x, y or z should work, or how it fits in, etc. then it is even *more important* for them to ask. There are few things worse than someone charging ahead at a task they really don't understand, then having to have someone else rework it because it is fundamentally wrong in some fashion.
If it is a bug, or compile issue, etc, I am ok with it if they can show that they have put some thought into troubleshooting it already. "I did this, I tried that, it still isn't working!" I'd rather they take some of my time than beat their head against a wall for hours.
Last time I tried GNUCash (1.6.8 stable), it could not handle importing my quicken accounts correctly.
Simply could not do it. I was told that it was because of the lack of data that Quicken put into their export files.
However, since then, I upgraded Quicken, and they seem to save a buttload more stuff into their files (MUCH bigger!).
I suppose it might be time to try again, with 1.8.2 out.
"You also need to show that nobody will get any private benefit from the publicly-funded works."
How is this possible with GPL'd (and perhaps other OSS licensed) code? I thought that anyone could repackage and sell it. With specifications such as the OGG Vorbis specification, they clearly state that it can be utilized to make commercial applications.
These seem to include private benefits of publicly funded works.
The post you replied to was exactly correct. Your rant is a tangent (imagine that, on Slashdot!). Yes, it might be nice to keep format and content separate, but that is not the point, here. And I don't believe it was the point the original poster was trying to get across.
not having formatting information at all!
As I understand it, when you save into an XML format from 2003, you loose all formatting. Not that it is put somewhere else, but that nice indented italicized quote you put in the middle of your paper is going to end up looking like everything else.
The problem with "process" is that it can almost always be subverted by personal weaknesses in your programmers.
I submit that a process "so perfect that no personal weaknesses in your programmers can hurt the company" would sink the company by it's weight.
Such a process would have to include more than the checks and balances of test first design, pair programming, archetectural, code, design reviews, automated test suites, etc., etc., ad nauseum.
We certainly don't have that perfect process so far, and I doubt we will in the near future.
I think the real notion of software engineering is to create a repeatable process. One where, if you follow it, you can say things analogous to, "we need concrete pilings driven to a depth of 100' to suport this building", for every step of the process.
This begs the question as to whether building software is more like building a bridge or planting a garden. As far as I know, gardening has not risen (or sunk) to the level of engineering.
I find that the problem is that you generally will have a hard time finding someone (read: a company) to pay you to build "your application in painstakingly slow fashion".
You might write bullet-proof code, but if you finish after the product ship date announced by Marketing, you will be out of a job.
The same goes for work-for-hire. If you come in with an proposal for 6 months, and quite a few other people come in with proposals for 2-3 months, do you really think that they are going to pick you because you craft beautiful software?
I've used gentoo.
Perhaps the default is 686, but in the makefile configuration script (which tells gcc what flags to utilize to compile with) you can optimize with whatever flags your heart desires (and gcc supports).
If you are complaining that the binary packages are 686 optimized, I would say why are you using gentoo? The beauty of it is that you *do* compile from source, and optimize exactly how you want to.
I don't see how your comment agrees with the facts.
For example
1) The pharmaceutical industry is ranked as the most profitable industry by Fortune magazine. At the close of 2001, the top 14 pharmaceutical companies altogether made profits of $38 billion.
2) In 2001, pharmaceutical companies spent more than $2.6 billion to advertise their prescription drugs, according to Intercontinental Marketing Services. This is up from $1.8 billion in 1999.
3) Drug manufacturers consistently rank among the top two industry groups in money spent to lobby Congress. With more than 400 registered lobbyists -- nearly one for each of the 535 members of Congress -- the pharmaceutical industry spent nearly $97 million in 2000, according to records filed with the Secretary of the Senate and compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.
That's just the money given to congresscritters, not for the lobbyists themselves.
4) Major drug makers spend nearly twice as much to advertise their medicines as to research and develop them, from Families USA.
For example, Merck & Co. netted $40.36 billion in sales in 2000. Of that amount, 17 percent was profit; 15 percent was spent on advertising, marketing and administration; and 6 percent was spent on research and development (SEC filings).
So don't go telling me how drug prices can't get any cheaper because of all the research money spent on them!
Yes, "litterally billions" of dollars are spent on research, but *THAT* is only a small portion of where the money you pay for drugs goes.
What you pay for is the pharmaceutical companies ability to maximize profits by having a single source of something that people need.
If something is unpatentable, anyone can, for a low cost, patent it.
Lol. I guess you are using the same semantics for what the prefix 'un' means as Oracle did in 'unbreakable'.
I have a related issue, in this regard. Some of the problems I am working on require arbitrary precision floating point numbers. E.g., one number might be 3.2334, but it needs to be multiplied by 3.4568902349830983945873908730987578439345, and I need all the resultant digits.
The problem is that the output of one calculation is fed into the input stage of another, that output being the input of the first calculation, in a circular style, so that small rounding changes may have a large affect on the final outcome.
Now, at some points, the precision may be truncated (where the effect will be unnoticable to the equations), but at certain points I need the exact number.
I have heard that with Lisp you can have numbers as large as you like, but I don't know how hard it is to perform complex numerical tasks in Lisp. Also, speed is an issue (I want it to be as fast as possible).
Any suggestions as to how to accomplish this?
I think you are very wrong. The simple economics of email spam are such that a .01% hit rate is considered good.
If that million (spam) emails were charged at even $.01 an email, the spammer could not sell enough product via this method to turn a profit.
What a poor way to play a role playing game. It seems as if the role you are playing is someone playing an RPG. I'm sure your character walks up to a door and says "sense", or goes into a room and says "detect trap".
Perhaps it is an indication of the skill of the GM, but it is also up to you to role play.
Each side feeds the other. Perhaps if you were to say something like
"Hmm, the door is locked. I look at the handle and lock. Are there any hinges on this side of the door?"
"No"
If you actually do have a magical ability to detect traps, you could say something like:
"I open up my awareness to the chi/feng shui (or whatever genre you are playing in) of the room, does anything seem amiss?"
"Well, the whole room seems kind of off, and the chest in the corner is tickling your awareness more strongly."
However, if you have more of a thief type skill, I would expect you to actually start looking at parts of the room. You might start with:
"I scan the room, looking for anything amiss - cracks in the wall, outcroppings of stone, shelves, niches, darkened areas."
If you actually make an easy detect traps roll, the GM should give you some area to concentrate on, so you can hone your *actual* problem solving skills on the real challenge - the trap.
If not, I would expect you to try and look at individual parts of the room, like the chest, door, walls, floor, ceiling, etc.
I always prefer people to actually *solve* the trap, as opposed to relying on some stupid roll of the dice. Perhaps they can even solve it in a way that I have not thought of, but is reasonable.
I could go on, but hopefully you get the idea.
I can't imagine why, other than the geekiness factor, wireless data transmission would be needed to have the DVD player and the PC communicate.
I don't think there's a need to have a wireless connection, however, some people's houses are not yet fully wired - there's no fiber (or even CAT5) in the walls (the horror!).
These people may 1) not want cables running all over the house or 2) not want to pay the money or time to install the wiring.
You seem to be forgetting about the other Rational products. Rose was only one. I really like the abilities of Purify, for example. ClearCase, though horrendously complex also lets you do horredendously complex things.
Togehtersoft also requires at least 512M RAM, and the fastest processor you can get your hands on. God that app is slow!
Oh, yes, and of course in that timeperiod, absoultely *nothing* was done in hardware - a 286 is pretty much the same thing as a 2.6 Ghz P4..., a floppy drive == cdrw, etc...
I think that this is ridiculous.
Ethically, I have to watch the crap they call ads? Perhaps if pop-up ads were the *only* way for web-sites to remain active, it *might* be called enlightened self interest to view the ads, but really! I know of many web-sites that seem to be doing ok without them.
I suppose the next argument is that it is somhow 'morally' wrong to block them. Doh! In fact, I believe this is where anti-leech was headed with their talk of viewers being thieves...
So are you saying I cannot sell a digital copy of a picture in the public domain? Or perhaps I can't sell you those lists of government grants that will get you $50,000?
I 'own' neither, yet I can sell you both.
" I wish to read where Bill Gates called "charitable work by open source developers" "communist" and "cancer". Please provide a reference to the quote so I can better understand your point of view."
Isn't most work being done on open source products (that make it back to the community) charitable work?
Go get another NVRAM - it's prolly the battery on the stupid thing that isn't saving your state anymore. I had this problem myself. It's a snap to do, and doesn't cost very much, either.
See this .
If you read the article,they are putting out a CD which will do exactly what you want - install a system painlessly and easily in a short period of time.
You could then customize it (as appropriate) for the task you wish to accomplish...
Sure, sience makes sense, but not the kind of sense you are talking about above.
Take quantum mechanics. I defy you to 'make sense' of it in a "hmm, *that* makes sense!" kind of way.
If you can gather information from something that *might* have happened, but didn't, I don't think it's too far of a strech to think that maybe we don't know everything yet, and just maybe... not everything makes sense.
That was raahul_da_man's opinion, for which he gave no supporting arguments.
I think that the simple fact of the new EULA for BitKeeper is enough of a supporting argument.
If the new EULA makes BK no longer the best tool for the job then it's time to change the tool. If the pain of changeover is worth enduring then the decision is clear. It's not like we're chained to BK by a pact of blood. This is what I call pragmatism.
So you agree that there would be some 'pain' in changing over to some other system? You also agree that the new EULA may be a reason to switch?
Is there a place in your so called 'pragmatism' for forward looking thinking? If so, by your own statements, you seem to be saying that choosing BK was wrong in the first place, pragmatically, not ideologically.