I went looking for some cities I know of in the US, and the coverage is spotty, to say the least. New York is there, of course, but I went south to New Jersey and Delaware, and both Gotham and Metropolis are missing. Duh! Iowa and Minnesota exist, but Central City and Keystone are missing. Boston and Seattle are there, but no sign of Hub City, Gateway City, Star City -- need I go on? Obviously Coast City isn't there, but there's no marker for where it WAS.
I suspect I may have a virus on my Linux system. The other day I switched the computer on, and it took a very long time to boot - and kept spewing out all this cryptic text as it did. After I logged in, I noticed that my desktop menu had a lot of strange, poorly documented programs in it, some of which didn't seem to do anything useful. The configuration system was strangely flakey, popping up tabbed windows that wouldn't go away when I clicked on other options. Various programs worked partially, but in some of them the clipboard didn't work properly and in others the windows widgets and controls looked wrong. A few would randomly open shell windows when I tried running them, even though they were GUI programs. The windows theming/skinning system worked partially, at best. I tried running a graphics program, but it just opened up lots of windows all over the screen and I couldn't get it to do anything reasonable, so I gave up. I suspect it was the cause of the virus infection, in fact, because it was called some insulting and childish name that had nothing to do with Graphics or Image Manipulation Programs or anything else. Oh, and there's this picture that shows up everywhere, of some kind of anatomically improbable cartoon bird with an eating disorder, which is either a symptom of virus infection or else a failed attempt at coordinated branding by a lot of uncoordinated programmers.
In general, my Linux system seems to be totally hosed. I think I'll go back to Windows.
Regarding all primates having opposable thumbs: this turns out not to be the case. (Thank god - I watch enough David Attenborough that I'd've been highly embarrassed to have gotten this one wrong!) Summary of the linked entry: some primates (although not tarsiers) have thumbs of varying degrees of opposability, but humans are the only ones who could actually use theirs to do complex things like, say, hijacking people's domain names or dupe-posting hoax news stories.
Claim: Slashdot articles are written by an infinite number of monkeys.
Status:False
Example:This article, and many, many, many others.
Origins: It seems that many people consider that a popular source of information must, by its very nature, be reliable. "With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow" is a common argument in support of this theory. But as can be seen with a cursory glance at the Slashdot "news" site, it just ain't so.
This dichotomy has led many people to assume that the so-called "editors" of Slashdot are nothing more than an infinite number of monkeys, but a little logic will demonstrate why this is also unlikely:
An infinite number of monkeys can be expected to produce the works of Shakespeare. Shakespeare had talent, integrity and an instinctive grasp of narrative and logic. Whoever is writing Slashdot articles shows none of these skills. Advantage: Monkeys.
Despite all this, Shakespeare's spelling was appalling. He even misspelled his own name! While the spelling abilities of Slashdot editors are certainly not up to the standard one would expect for one's household pets or pond algae, they're not as bad as ol' Will. Advantage: Slashdot.
However, the telling point is this: Monkeys are not aquatic. Thus, they have no interest in penguins. Slashdot editors, on the other hand, can think of little else. It seems far more likely that the Slashdot editors are an infinite number of penguins; the penguin's flippers are slightly more suited to keyboards than the monkeys hands which, despite having agile fingers, lack the opposable thumb essential to the operation of the space bar.
It's certainly easy to see how this urban legend got started, but as usual, a little logic goes a long way.
Barbara "anyway monkeys are way too bright" Spoofelson
I sympathise; I'm in Australia, and we have a one-party system too. AND an idiot with a middle initial of "W" nominally in charge. The chief defect of democracy is that we all get the leader that most of us deserve.
Listen, Richard, I realise it's pretty hard holding all those LISP functions in your head, but do you really need to Ask Slashdot? Surely the Emacs community is able to help in matters of this kind! And don't be too hard on Jamie; he may be a bit crotchetty at times, but that night club of his is taking a lot of his energy at the moment, so he may seem a little less patient than usual. Give him time; once he sees the coffee-maker attachment you're putting into version 22, he'll probably want to un-fork just so he can use it. Don't lose hope!
Dude - has your brother-in-law considered a non-technological alternative? He could try (drum-roll please) treating his daughters like human beings. Because if he's concentrating his efforts on how to control and punish them, maybe he should leave home and get a dog.
I've been a Delphi programmer since version 1.0 (or earlier, if you consider Turbo Pascal to be its ancestor). I hate the way Borland has turned into a Pointy Haired company. They used to be the tech-driven company that all true geeks loved; they sold a blindingly fast, full-featured Pascal compiler for fifty bucks when Micro$oft was futzing around with a slow old piece of crap for ten times the price. But then they kicked out their geeks and turned into gods-know-what: a pack of clueless managers who changed the company's name, gave up on marketing its best products, bought a whole lot of useless add-on software that they can't even describe let alone sell, and fell into a quagmire from which they'll never return.
And now: the fifty-buck Pascal company is selling Delphi, complete with brand-new features that have been around in Python for years ("for...in"? good grief!), for three thousand dollars???!!!
Borland: Used To Be Good; Now Couldn't Sell Raw Meat To Wolves
It's OK to use HTML on a website, you know. I suggest:
<i>e<sup>iπ</sup> - 1 = 0</i>
... which will work nicely in most browsers.
Re:Old school hackers vs. new school hackers.
on
Good Bad Attitude
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It's not so much the greyness of the beards; the real reason, I think, is that the older hackers have had more time to produce something they want to protect, so they care more about the idea of protection.
It doesn't have to mean conventional copyright, tho. Me, I write songs and poetry; I'm happy to let people read and perform them if they wish, but they need to credit me as the author. I don't charge for the privilege, but if you take my stuff without even "paying" me in that simple way, then you're dishonourable and you deserve a thumping. If I create something of value, I expect to have the right to say how it's used. It's not fascism, it's just simple courtesy. No amount of argument will convince me that you have more right than me to decide how my work is used!
I always had the feeling that his word count program was running as a background process while he wrote his books, and as soon as he reached his word limit, he "wrapped up" (ha!) his plot threads as swiftly and messily as possible and pressed the button to send the lot off to the printers.
I thought Cryptonomicon had less of this problem than Diamond Age or Snow Crash, but in general it wasn't good enough to make me bother with anything else he wrote. It's like Piers Anthony: after a while you realise there's no point reading any more, because the problems aren't ever going to go away.
It's not that the editors don't use the site -- they have to waste time at work like the rest of us! It's just that they only use IE. Didn't you know Slashdot was invented in-house at Microsoft to distract the MS-haters of the world so they'd have no time left to actually achieve anything? Duh! How else do you explain Gnome and KDE?
Actually, that's a good point. We're thinking "jerk policeman picking on innocent geek", but it might have undercurrents of "jerk policemen who hates priests picking on innocent geek who is a priest". We probably need to get over the idea that certain occupations are automatically respected (priests, doctors, COBOL programmers, etc).
In fact in this case I'm disinclined to think it was a factor; Occam's razor and all that. But it's a viewpoint to consider. Doesn't make the cop any less of a jerk, of course.
This guy only knows Java and PHP, and he's amazed at how similar they are. Me, I only know Latin and PHP, and I'm amazed at how similar THEY are! I predict that PHP will soon change its name to the Pompeii Hypertext Processorium!
Try joining the Society for Creative Anachronism, a sort of cross between medieval reenactment and a social Renn Faire. Medievalism is as far from computing as you can get, which explains why so many geeks join it - geeks are logical, see, and it's logical to want to get away from geeking...
Remember: this package is voice operated. To start it up you must say "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good". And to shut it down, say "Mischief managed".
I use "millennium" and "millenium" for two different purposes when talking about the recent numerical irrelevances.
The millennium (two Ns) ended on 31 December 2000, which was also the last day of the 20th century.
The millenium (one N) ended a year earlier on 31 December 1999, when all the people who couldn't count (or were really really impressed by all those spooooky zeroes... or just liked Prince) thought the century was ending.
For a year, the pedants of the world were trying to drag everyone else kicking and screaming into the twentieth century. Thank {$this->choose_religion()->get_deity()->get_name() } we're all over it now.
Code for the best first, then add hacks for the rest. That means: get the site looking perfect in the latest version of Mozilla, then add in all the necessary hacks to make it perfect in IE6/Win. After that, you can (if you wish) get it looking good in IE5 on Win and Mac, and if you're a masochist try to make it work in NN4 and IE4. If you use a couple of CSS filters (notably the * html hack and the underscore hack) you can pass commands to IE only, and the various @import and commands will help you serve the right code (or none at all) to other browsers.
But basically, once it's right in Moz, it's going to be mostly right elsewhere. Whereas if you get it perfect in IE first, you will inevitably find you've done a whole bunch of things the wrong way and you have to UNDO them to get them to work elsewhere.
Other hints: the box model is only a problem if you use padding, thus:.abc { width: 18em; padding: 1em; }
This will make the box 20em in standard browsers, but only 18em in IE5.x. To solve it, replace the rule with:.abc { width: 18em; }.abc * { margin: 1em; }
Exactly the same effect in standard browsers AND in IE.
For more, read dithered.com's filter table and follow some of Zeldman's and Mezzoblue's links.
Actually it's most clear that the english language is poor and abused in this case.
The difficulty is that "poor abused wossname" is perfectly acceptable, because both adjectives clearly describe the noun. So the addition of a comma is unnecessary and, as often happens, leads one to consider an alternative reading in which it's not unnecessary. That's all.
A good example of why poor grammar and misused punctuation are bad things:
"Forbes Sympathises With Poor, Abused Fax.com" means "Forbes Sympathises With Poor (people), AND ALSO Forbes Abused Fax.Com (at some time in the past)". Good on them for sympathising with the poor; so many big companies don't. What a shame they had to spoil it by abusing Fax.com, whoever they are.
If you remove the comma, this (presumably erroneous) reading is no longer the most correct one.
Grammar and punctuation have one purpose (two if you count the entertainment of pedants): to improve comprehension. The "laws", such as they are, of grammar are not there to make people's heads hurt; they're there to make people's communications work.
Slashdot Mirror
I went looking for some cities I know of in the US, and the coverage is spotty, to say the least. New York is there, of course, but I went south to New Jersey and Delaware, and both Gotham and Metropolis are missing. Duh! Iowa and Minnesota exist, but Central City and Keystone are missing. Boston and Seattle are there, but no sign of Hub City, Gateway City, Star City -- need I go on? Obviously Coast City isn't there, but there's no marker for where it WAS.
Pretty shakey all round. Not impressed.
I suspect I may have a virus on my Linux system. The other day I switched the computer on, and it took a very long time to boot - and kept spewing out all this cryptic text as it did. After I logged in, I noticed that my desktop menu had a lot of strange, poorly documented programs in it, some of which didn't seem to do anything useful. The configuration system was strangely flakey, popping up tabbed windows that wouldn't go away when I clicked on other options. Various programs worked partially, but in some of them the clipboard didn't work properly and in others the windows widgets and controls looked wrong. A few would randomly open shell windows when I tried running them, even though they were GUI programs. The windows theming/skinning system worked partially, at best. I tried running a graphics program, but it just opened up lots of windows all over the screen and I couldn't get it to do anything reasonable, so I gave up. I suspect it was the cause of the virus infection, in fact, because it was called some insulting and childish name that had nothing to do with Graphics or Image Manipulation Programs or anything else. Oh, and there's this picture that shows up everywhere, of some kind of anatomically improbable cartoon bird with an eating disorder, which is either a symptom of virus infection or else a failed attempt at coordinated branding by a lot of uncoordinated programmers.
In general, my Linux system seems to be totally hosed. I think I'll go back to Windows.
On Slashdot? Really? Wow!
Regarding all primates having opposable thumbs: this turns out not to be the case. (Thank god - I watch enough David Attenborough that I'd've been highly embarrassed to have gotten this one wrong!) Summary of the linked entry: some primates (although not tarsiers) have thumbs of varying degrees of opposability, but humans are the only ones who could actually use theirs to do complex things like, say, hijacking people's domain names or dupe-posting hoax news stories.
Claim: Slashdot articles are written by an infinite number of monkeys.
Status: False
Example: This article, and many, many, many others.
Origins: It seems that many people consider that a popular source of information must, by its very nature, be reliable. "With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow" is a common argument in support of this theory. But as can be seen with a cursory glance at the Slashdot "news" site, it just ain't so.
This dichotomy has led many people to assume that the so-called "editors" of Slashdot are nothing more than an infinite number of monkeys, but a little logic will demonstrate why this is also unlikely:
- An infinite number of monkeys can be expected to produce the works of Shakespeare. Shakespeare had talent, integrity and an instinctive grasp of narrative and logic. Whoever is writing Slashdot articles shows none of these skills. Advantage: Monkeys.
- Despite all this, Shakespeare's spelling was appalling. He even misspelled his own name! While the spelling abilities of Slashdot editors are certainly not up to the standard one would expect for one's household pets or pond algae, they're not as bad as ol' Will. Advantage: Slashdot.
However, the telling point is this: Monkeys are not aquatic. Thus, they have no interest in penguins. Slashdot editors, on the other hand, can think of little else. It seems far more likely that the Slashdot editors are an infinite number of penguins; the penguin's flippers are slightly more suited to keyboards than the monkeys hands which, despite having agile fingers, lack the opposable thumb essential to the operation of the space bar.It's certainly easy to see how this urban legend got started, but as usual, a little logic goes a long way.
Barbara "anyway monkeys are way too bright" Spoofelson
I sympathise; I'm in Australia, and we have a one-party system too. AND an idiot with a middle initial of "W" nominally in charge. The chief defect of democracy is that we all get the leader that most of us deserve.
Yes, it's too much to ask. If the editors had any editing ability, they'd have jobs.
Listen, Richard, I realise it's pretty hard holding all those LISP functions in your head, but do you really need to Ask Slashdot? Surely the Emacs community is able to help in matters of this kind! And don't be too hard on Jamie; he may be a bit crotchetty at times, but that night club of his is taking a lot of his energy at the moment, so he may seem a little less patient than usual. Give him time; once he sees the coffee-maker attachment you're putting into version 22, he'll probably want to un-fork just so he can use it. Don't lose hope!
Dude - has your brother-in-law considered a non-technological alternative? He could try (drum-roll please) treating his daughters like human beings. Because if he's concentrating his efforts on how to control and punish them, maybe he should leave home and get a dog.
I've been a Delphi programmer since version 1.0 (or earlier, if you consider Turbo Pascal to be its ancestor). I hate the way Borland has turned into a Pointy Haired company. They used to be the tech-driven company that all true geeks loved; they sold a blindingly fast, full-featured Pascal compiler for fifty bucks when Micro$oft was futzing around with a slow old piece of crap for ten times the price. But then they kicked out their geeks and turned into gods-know-what: a pack of clueless managers who changed the company's name, gave up on marketing its best products, bought a whole lot of useless add-on software that they can't even describe let alone sell, and fell into a quagmire from which they'll never return.
And now: the fifty-buck Pascal company is selling Delphi, complete with brand-new features that have been around in Python for years ("for...in"? good grief!), for three thousand dollars???!!!
Borland: Used To Be Good; Now Couldn't Sell Raw Meat To Wolves
It's OK to use HTML on a website, you know. I suggest:
... which will work nicely in most browsers.
It's not so much the greyness of the beards; the real reason, I think, is that the older hackers have had more time to produce something they want to protect, so they care more about the idea of protection. It doesn't have to mean conventional copyright, tho. Me, I write songs and poetry; I'm happy to let people read and perform them if they wish, but they need to credit me as the author. I don't charge for the privilege, but if you take my stuff without even "paying" me in that simple way, then you're dishonourable and you deserve a thumping. If I create something of value, I expect to have the right to say how it's used. It's not fascism, it's just simple courtesy. No amount of argument will convince me that you have more right than me to decide how my work is used!
I always had the feeling that his word count program was running as a background process while he wrote his books, and as soon as he reached his word limit, he "wrapped up" (ha!) his plot threads as swiftly and messily as possible and pressed the button to send the lot off to the printers.
I thought Cryptonomicon had less of this problem than Diamond Age or Snow Crash, but in general it wasn't good enough to make me bother with anything else he wrote. It's like Piers Anthony: after a while you realise there's no point reading any more, because the problems aren't ever going to go away.
$EDITOR just wanted to invoke the Russianness of the story to head off complaints about his inability to spell "Millennium" in the summary.
It's not that the editors don't use the site -- they have to waste time at work like the rest of us! It's just that they only use IE. Didn't you know Slashdot was invented in-house at Microsoft to distract the MS-haters of the world so they'd have no time left to actually achieve anything? Duh! How else do you explain Gnome and KDE?
Actually, that's a good point. We're thinking "jerk policeman picking on innocent geek", but it might have undercurrents of "jerk policemen who hates priests picking on innocent geek who is a priest". We probably need to get over the idea that certain occupations are automatically respected (priests, doctors, COBOL programmers, etc).
In fact in this case I'm disinclined to think it was a factor; Occam's razor and all that. But it's a viewpoint to consider. Doesn't make the cop any less of a jerk, of course.
This guy only knows Java and PHP, and he's amazed at how similar they are. Me, I only know Latin and PHP, and I'm amazed at how similar THEY are! I predict that PHP will soon change its name to the Pompeii Hypertext Processorium!
Try joining the Society for Creative Anachronism, a sort of cross between medieval reenactment and a social Renn Faire. Medievalism is as far from computing as you can get, which explains why so many geeks join it - geeks are logical, see, and it's logical to want to get away from geeking...
Remember: this package is voice operated. To start it up you must say "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good". And to shut it down, say "Mischief managed".
I use "millennium" and "millenium" for two different purposes when talking about the recent numerical irrelevances.
The millennium (two Ns) ended on 31 December 2000, which was also the last day of the 20th century.
The millenium (one N) ended a year earlier on 31 December 1999, when all the people who couldn't count (or were really really impressed by all those spooooky zeroes... or just liked Prince) thought the century was ending.
For a year, the pedants of the world were trying to drag everyone else kicking and screaming into the twentieth century. Thank {$this->choose_religion()->get_deity()->get_name() } we're all over it now.
Code for the best first, then add hacks for the rest. That means: get the site looking perfect in the latest version of Mozilla, then add in all the necessary hacks to make it perfect in IE6/Win. After that, you can (if you wish) get it looking good in IE5 on Win and Mac, and if you're a masochist try to make it work in NN4 and IE4. If you use a couple of CSS filters (notably the * html hack and the underscore hack) you can pass commands to IE only, and the various @import and commands will help you serve the right code (or none at all) to other browsers.
.abc { width: 18em; padding: 1em; }
.abc { width: 18em; } .abc * { margin: 1em; }
But basically, once it's right in Moz, it's going to be mostly right elsewhere. Whereas if you get it perfect in IE first, you will inevitably find you've done a whole bunch of things the wrong way and you have to UNDO them to get them to work elsewhere.
Other hints: the box model is only a problem if you use padding, thus:
<div class="abc">
<p>Blah blah blah</p>
<ul>...</ul>
</div>
This will make the box 20em in standard browsers, but only 18em in IE5.x. To solve it, replace the rule with:
Exactly the same effect in standard browsers AND in IE.
For more, read dithered.com's filter table and follow some of Zeldman's and Mezzoblue's links.
: Bat :
Correct spelling is offtopic? What is this - Slashdot?
Step 1. s/gasses/gases/ ...
Step 2. Buy a fsking dictionary
Step 3.
Step 4. Profit!
Actually it's most clear that the english language is poor and abused in this case.
The difficulty is that "poor abused wossname" is perfectly acceptable, because both adjectives clearly describe the noun. So the addition of a comma is unnecessary and, as often happens, leads one to consider an alternative reading in which it's not unnecessary. That's all.
A good example of why poor grammar and misused punctuation are bad things:
"Forbes Sympathises With Poor, Abused Fax.com" means "Forbes Sympathises With Poor (people), AND ALSO Forbes Abused Fax.Com (at some time in the past)". Good on them for sympathising with the poor; so many big companies don't. What a shame they had to spoil it by abusing Fax.com, whoever they are.
If you remove the comma, this (presumably erroneous) reading is no longer the most correct one.
Grammar and punctuation have one purpose (two if you count the entertainment of pedants): to improve comprehension. The "laws", such as they are, of grammar are not there to make people's heads hurt; they're there to make people's communications work.