The key thing is that it is algorithms what are more important - and these are easier to write/learn
in Python - so it students should learn Python first and only some need to learn fortran..
Uh, well, no. In the areas where Fortran is still dominant, that is not the key thing at all.
What is most important when developing a new airplane wing, flu vaccine, or artificial respirator for use during heart-lung operations, is that the libraries used for the complex math formulas are completely debugged and totally trustworthy. That requires the use of a language whose source code is simple for humans to read and critique, and whose compilers are fully transparent in the way they handle optimizations.
Python is a great scripting language (even though I personally dislike it).The Python with C optimizations that parent post describes is an excellent way to make business logic systems, build games, or construct an EssayGenerator that will give you a passing grade in Writing 101 with the push of a button. But Python is not a very good choice when a failure in accuracy in some unlikely edge case would cause death. Fortran is a better choice in that context, since it was explicitly designed to avoid those kinds of problems that can arise between source code and implementation.
These are undergraduate students. It is safe to assume that each and every one of them has been writing programs in high school in Python, Perl, or Ruby. And that all would have some skill in Javascript. Fortran would not be their first language. And... they are bound to arrive with some bad coding habits already established.
Fortran makes sense as an undergraduate course as it maps better to the realms of engineering and science than the C based languages, the Lisp based languages, or the Pascal language groups. In particular, I think Fortran would be an excellent choice to drill students on the rigors of structured programming. Fortran is also directly relevant in many of these subjects as it remains the best language ever for developing and maintaining libraries of differential equations and other exotic mathematical menageries.
My direct experience with Fortran is limited: an introductory course in 1972 that was seriously bogged down by us students having to transcribe our coding sheets to Hollerith cards. There were an adequate number of key punch machines, but most of us were hunt and peck typists back then, and the process was slow, error prone, and caused much anguish.
My indirect experience with Fortran is similar to everyone else's: for instance, I rely heavily on the Fortran libraries that were written in the 1950s every time I fly in a commercial jet, since those Fortran routines are still used to design wings and such.
The name was vaguely familiar, and I think if I had thought about it for a minute or so, I would have recalled who R.O. is. But I'm too impatient for that. Much easier to open another Firefox tab for Google and copy'n'paste R.O.'s name in.
Where would we be these days if it wasn't for Google? We'd probably be burning out synapses trying to recall the past relevance of members of Microsoft's upper echelons in this post desktop computer world...
That's seven different guys collaborating, each focusing on doing a good job on his own piece, and the whole thing coming together in standardized ways. Viva standardizacion!
The traditional "simple" desktop application that parent post referred to involved each team member claiming and defending his ego turf against the others, no clear boundaries between the different pieces of the project, and an end result that was chunks of this and that glued together, sort of, by compromises (instead of through standard interfaces).
It is far easier and less expensive to develop a project built of HTTP, HTML, CSS, XML, SQL, JavaScript, and { PHP | Python | Ruby | 'other scripting language' } than the old ways of doing things. I been there; I used to have the tee shirt but I tossed it out.
Which, when I think about it, might have something to do with Google's incredible output of interesting projects, compared to Microsoft's problems in just trying to re-version the same products they've been pushing for more than a decade.
I'd like to think if MLK came back from the dead he'd go all Cosby....
And sell his soul to Coca Cola? I don't think so.
I know that's not where parent post was heading with this, but despite MLK's philandering, I have a great deal of trouble with seeing him and Cosby tied together in the same sentence. One took tremendous personal risks that resulted in his assasination. The other is an entertainer who thought he knew how to get a free ride on a broad coattail.
ATTN: Slashdot Monitor, Galactic Navigators Guild
on
Black Hole Swallows Star
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Quoting this for your attention just in case (once again) your filter software fails to pick up on a communication whose existence your Guild would prefer to ignore:
The thing is, they DIDN'T see a black hole swallowing a star. They saw a massive burst of radiation. But they describe NOT what they actually observed, but their interpretation of what they observed instead. Are there no other possible sources for massive bursts of radiation than black holes swallowing stars? Given the aberrant numbers of high energy particles entering our star system, I would say it's premature indeed. Same with the neutron stars, or pulsars allegedly being stars that "rotate faster than dentist drills."
Can it be any more clear that the indigenous technosavvies of this backward planet are about to see through the ruses you have been feeding them, and recognize the artifacts of your warp ship accelerations for what they are? How long do you think you can preserve that foolish fiction of a "Hubble Constant Universe" you've been encouraging them to accept?
Would it really be that costly for you to exercise a little more control over your thrust vectors? Yes, it would cut into the profits of each voyage by several tenths of a percent. But that is a pittance to pay for this unique opportunity to study a pre-Warp and pre-Contact civilization during that critical period just prior to its recognition of the bubble distortion at its heliopause. We've only had one such opportunity before. Need I remind you of how your Guild mucked up that one?
Yeah, stats are the most interesting type of falsehood.
Wrt traffic accidents, the numbers clearly do not apply equally to everyone. It is patently obvious that the driver who has been in four accidents in the last three years is much more likely to be in an accident in the next year than the driver who has had no accidents in the last twenty years.
Taking this back more toward the original topic: Are there any other planes or boats that were lost or damaged by the same storms? With updrafts measured at 9,000 vertical feet per minute, it isn't hard to visualize a broken spar, bolt attached to a length of rope, or piece of someone else's airplane being lofted to the very top of the thunderheads, at 55,000 or 60,000 feet. Getting hit by debris carried aloft, that maybe had been in free fall for 1,000 feet, could be as nasty as getting hit by a meteor, and I think a lot more likely. Something like that hitting the windshield would be bad.
For that matter, a waterspout could have lifted any of the non-plane debris that has been found from the waves to a height where the 100 mph updrafts (9,000 ft/min) could have grabbed it and taken it up into the jet.
What gets me about driving in crowded freeway conditions is the amount of faith we have in the technical abilities of perfect strangers. In a one hour 50 mile drive between two cities during rush hour, a driver has to have faith that all his nearest neighbors can keep their vehicles within their small envelopes of safety, and that the neighbors of all those neighbors will do the same, and so on. And these aren't static cadres; new drivers are constantly filling the gaps as others reach their exits. Under these conditions, your health and safety are dependent on the abilities of perhaps a hundred different strangers to operate their lethal machines within very narrow constraints, and to cooperate with you and each other.
It can make one recognize that the belief in humanism is more powerful, and more common, than the belief in any god (even if it is rarely recognized).
While everyone knows that a.0 version may have bugs, it's also expected that a.0 version *will* be ready for prime time. If it's not, it should have an alpha or beta moniker.
Maybe in your world, but not in mine.
I would be very disappointed with a 1.9.x version that was a beta of a 2.0 major break rather than an elegant expression of the 1.xx series. I sometimes do upgrade minor releases of software that isn't critical to my work without paying much attention to the release notes. But I do expect to have to read the release notes on an x.0 release carefully. KOffice makes it very clear that this is an early beta, something for developers to look at to see if they might want to shape their products around it. Not something I want to mess with, yet, but I do look forward to the 2.1 release. OOo has been good, but I'd love to see a more modular approach.
How many projects use even numbers for unstable releases and odd numbers for end-user oriented releases? I think a fair number do that.
They're all a business and a scam. The difference is in their tactics.
Um, and pedophilia. Don't forget the pedophilia, since keeping it in mind helps to bring this entire sorry aspect of the human condition into better focus. Religion is one thing, but religious institutions of any kind have demonstrated that they can be rife with the worst types of depraved behavior, and enablers of depravity. They all need to be treated under the law as any other institution.
Never was the phrase 'Won't somebody think of the children?' more appropriate than in these woeful times.
Yeah, agreed. For the victims of gambling or scientology, it is basically the difference between fighting an internal demon and fighting external demons.
Religious freedom means everyone has the right to go to hell in their own way. And the converse: no one has the right to impose their hell on anyone else. What Scientology attempts to do to those who try to walk away from it violates this principle. I cannot say more without breaking Godwin's rule.
While the advantages of Linux are well known to most people on Slashdot, the average user has no idea...
They want to buy software on a store, simply because they do not know they can select it for free from the package manager and install it automatically...
Above was certainly true at the end of the last century, but it is less and less the case. In the USA, there is an increasing awareness of Linux through the "I know this guy who has a friend who has changed to Ubuntu and he says..." channels. The buzz is that Linux comes with a large package of good software and it is easy to get more. Elsewhere in the world, where more people get their news more from other people than from idjit boxes, I think the word is spreading faster.
As a wag, the Linux adoption curve is probably very similar to the Firefox adoption curve, stretched out somewhat. That suggests to me that probably 3% of the "market" are using Linux several hours each week, and probably an additional 4% to 5% play with it every now and then, either as a dual boot or from a CD or USB device.
I think a telling point is that in Costco and other big box stores, the display area given to software has shrunk dramatically over the last 5 years. If those stores are finding software less profitable than the pet food aisle, then Bob and Betty Average are not buying their software in stores so much, any more.
Actually in this context neither "operating system" nor "applications" is correct. We are really talking about different computer ecosystems or cultures and simply using the generic name of the OS as a convenient shorthand. Which is really quite appropriate, since it is generally recognized that geeks don't have culture (cue the toe fungus jokes), which would mean we'd have to talk about silicon ecosystems which, aside from being just silly, would also inevitably lead to conversing about habitats (cue Mom's basement jokes).
So there really isn't any other good choice if we want to have a serious conversation about the differences between the Zen of WinXYZ and the Tao of Linux distros. Remember that when comparing these kinds of religious differences: that was zen; this is tao.
The overwhelming mainstream demand of Linux is that it become as much a clone of Windows as possible.
No no no!!! Please, if anyone gets anything from this let it be that Linux cannot be just a Windows clone, it has to be something better! Why would anyone go through the trouble of installing a completely different operating system that is exactly the same as the one they have? There HAS to be something extra, even for the average user.
But there is indeed "something extra", that the average new Ubuntu convert recognizes and lauds. Actually more than one such feature:
Freedom from forced upgrades. The new convert actually does understand the long term benefits of real ODF, and buys into the concept.
I have yet to meet anyone new to Ubuntu who did not like the Update Manager, especially after being shown how to configure it for daily checks.
The wealth of available software that can be installed with the click of a button, and if it fails to impress during trials, uninstalled just as easily.
That menus and controls are where they expect to find them, and not moved onto some fancy "ribbon", etc, whose supposed benefits come up short when weighed against their desire to stay with hard-won habits that work for them
Mostly the people I work with are not very articulate when it comes to computers, and would not express Ubuntu's strengths the way I have just done.
On a somewhat related note: the machine I'm typing this on is a Dell that came with WinXP installed, and now has a dual boot with WinXP and Ubuntu. Since the WinXP partition is about a third of the hard disk with the Linux partition taking up the rest, should this machine be counted as 1/3 Windows and 2/3 Linux? Or would the temporal distribution be more appropriate, in which case it should be counted as 5% Windows and 95% Linux? These fancy statistics... I get so confused!
Yeah, its probably a matter of incompetence rather than evil intent, but I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. You can regard evil behavior as something separate from the person who uses it and then you can sometimes get them to mend their ways.
But there's not much you can do about incompetence, except hope that the person grows out of it. And unless the person is still a teenager, it is not realistic to entertain high hopes about that.
Seems a little strange to be more pessimistic than a curmudgeonlyoldbloke. Maybe this cold is affecting my normally sunny nature.
I got the same message ('you need to install a new version of Flash') when I visited. After telling NoScript to allow wilsoncenter.org, and then timeglider.com, I had access without the need to load another Flash reader.
I don't know what that site is doing to test for Flash on the browser, but I don't like its dishonesty.
Parent post has been trounced (doubly!) as a troll, and it certainly dripped sarcastic acid. But the question it posed does seem like a valid one:
Is there any equivalent configuration of Apache that would expose a similar vulnerability? That is, is this kind of vulnerability something that could possibly affect Mac, Linux, BSD, or Unix environments, or is it solely limited to Microsoft shops?
I haven't worked on MS-specific stuff for nearly a decade (except as needed to get MSIE to do what standards-compliant browsers do). So I don't know WebDEV or any of the CASE tools that work with MS. And I'm kind of wondering whether this story has any significance to anyone outside of the Microsoft ecosystem. (Other than the obvious fact that no one should entrust any private data to any web site being run with Microsoft products, unless they are confident that the responsible IT department understands these kinds of risks and goes the extra steps necessary to assure that clients don't become victims.)
That would be like saying you can't assess the quality of a basketball player unless you understand exactly how he does his thing.
It is more like saying that you can't assess the quality of a basketball player unless you understand the rules of basketball.
Copyright law has become so twisted from its original intent that no one yet understands the new rules of the game. It seems like most of these cases are like arguments in Calvinball about which rules apply this time. GP post has it right: even if it were a judge's duty to determine competency of representation, it couldn't be done in the realm of Calvinball. Oops, I mean current copyright law.
Oh, please stop dribbling. Its dripping onto the keyboard. Remember: dribbling is the number one reason that basketball analogies never work well on Slashdot.
K.A.D. Camara is not only a very bright young lawyer, he also has credentials in computer science and would probably be accepted by the Court as an expert witness on the technology (except for the conflict of roles). Not that he would do that. Just that he could do that.
There is no question that he is going to be more knowledgeable about the technology than any other lawyer or judge involved in the RIAA cases. If Camara wants to rapidly establish himself as THE expert on IT law, this pro bono work is an excellent start.
The RIAA lawyers should be afraid. Very afraid. For whatever his reason might be, they are now facing a crusader who knows the landscape better than they do.
So this ins't such a big deal because... well, because... uh, I'm just supposed to trust that the IT Guy knows what he's doing. I guess.
Maybe you can help me understand this mess a little better. If you would just tell me what the equivalent vulnerability is in that other really popular server called Apache, then perhaps I could go back to trusting that the IT Guy really knows what he's talking about when he starts gibbering like this.
So how could I duplicate this vulnerability on Apache?
Slashdot Mirror
The key thing is that it is algorithms what are more important - and these are easier to write/learn in Python - so it students should learn Python first and only some need to learn fortran..
Uh, well, no. In the areas where Fortran is still dominant, that is not the key thing at all.
What is most important when developing a new airplane wing, flu vaccine, or artificial respirator for use during heart-lung operations, is that the libraries used for the complex math formulas are completely debugged and totally trustworthy. That requires the use of a language whose source code is simple for humans to read and critique, and whose compilers are fully transparent in the way they handle optimizations.
Python is a great scripting language (even though I personally dislike it).The Python with C optimizations that parent post describes is an excellent way to make business logic systems, build games, or construct an EssayGenerator that will give you a passing grade in Writing 101 with the push of a button. But Python is not a very good choice when a failure in accuracy in some unlikely edge case would cause death. Fortran is a better choice in that context, since it was explicitly designed to avoid those kinds of problems that can arise between source code and implementation.
These are undergraduate students. It is safe to assume that each and every one of them has been writing programs in high school in Python, Perl, or Ruby. And that all would have some skill in Javascript. Fortran would not be their first language. And... they are bound to arrive with some bad coding habits already established.
Fortran makes sense as an undergraduate course as it maps better to the realms of engineering and science than the C based languages, the Lisp based languages, or the Pascal language groups. In particular, I think Fortran would be an excellent choice to drill students on the rigors of structured programming. Fortran is also directly relevant in many of these subjects as it remains the best language ever for developing and maintaining libraries of differential equations and other exotic mathematical menageries.
My direct experience with Fortran is limited: an introductory course in 1972 that was seriously bogged down by us students having to transcribe our coding sheets to Hollerith cards. There were an adequate number of key punch machines, but most of us were hunt and peck typists back then, and the process was slow, error prone, and caused much anguish.
My indirect experience with Fortran is similar to everyone else's: for instance, I rely heavily on the Fortran libraries that were written in the 1950s every time I fly in a commercial jet, since those Fortran routines are still used to design wings and such.
Sheesh! That's what Google's for!
The name was vaguely familiar, and I think if I had thought about it for a minute or so, I would have recalled who R.O. is. But I'm too impatient for that. Much easier to open another Firefox tab for Google and copy'n'paste R.O.'s name in.
Where would we be these days if it wasn't for Google? We'd probably be burning out synapses trying to recall the past relevance of members of Microsoft's upper echelons in this post desktop computer world...
That's seven different guys collaborating, each focusing on doing a good job on his own piece, and the whole thing coming together in standardized ways. Viva standardizacion!
The traditional "simple" desktop application that parent post referred to involved each team member claiming and defending his ego turf against the others, no clear boundaries between the different pieces of the project, and an end result that was chunks of this and that glued together, sort of, by compromises (instead of through standard interfaces).
It is far easier and less expensive to develop a project built of HTTP, HTML, CSS, XML, SQL, JavaScript, and { PHP | Python | Ruby | 'other scripting language' } than the old ways of doing things. I been there; I used to have the tee shirt but I tossed it out.
Which, when I think about it, might have something to do with Google's incredible output of interesting projects, compared to Microsoft's problems in just trying to re-version the same products they've been pushing for more than a decade.
I'd like to think if MLK came back from the dead he'd go all Cosby....
And sell his soul to Coca Cola? I don't think so.
I know that's not where parent post was heading with this, but despite MLK's philandering, I have a great deal of trouble with seeing him and Cosby tied together in the same sentence. One took tremendous personal risks that resulted in his assasination. The other is an entertainer who thought he knew how to get a free ride on a broad coattail.
Quoting this for your attention just in case (once again) your filter software fails to pick up on a communication whose existence your Guild would prefer to ignore:
The thing is, they DIDN'T see a black hole swallowing a star. They saw a massive burst of radiation. But they describe NOT what they actually observed, but their interpretation of what they observed instead. Are there no other possible sources for massive bursts of radiation than black holes swallowing stars? Given the aberrant numbers of high energy particles entering our star system, I would say it's premature indeed. Same with the neutron stars, or pulsars allegedly being stars that "rotate faster than dentist drills."
Can it be any more clear that the indigenous technosavvies of this backward planet are about to see through the ruses you have been feeding them, and recognize the artifacts of your warp ship accelerations for what they are? How long do you think you can preserve that foolish fiction of a "Hubble Constant Universe" you've been encouraging them to accept?
Would it really be that costly for you to exercise a little more control over your thrust vectors? Yes, it would cut into the profits of each voyage by several tenths of a percent. But that is a pittance to pay for this unique opportunity to study a pre-Warp and pre-Contact civilization during that critical period just prior to its recognition of the bubble distortion at its heliopause. We've only had one such opportunity before. Need I remind you of how your Guild mucked up that one?
wrt parent post's sig line:
This comment is worded exactly as the author intended. Which is often very different from the meaning his readers will walk away with.
There, I fixed that lameness for you. I made it oh so much more clear.
Don't write for yourself. As a reader, I could give a f*ck about what you intended. Instead, write for your reader: show him what you mean.
The brief form: Don't masturbate on the keyboard. It's messy.
Having driven taxi in Boston (several decades ago), I can tell you that you are doing it wrong.
The proper Bostonian way to signal a lane change is to stick your front fender into the desired lane.
Yeah, stats are the most interesting type of falsehood.
Wrt traffic accidents, the numbers clearly do not apply equally to everyone. It is patently obvious that the driver who has been in four accidents in the last three years is much more likely to be in an accident in the next year than the driver who has had no accidents in the last twenty years.
Taking this back more toward the original topic: Are there any other planes or boats that were lost or damaged by the same storms? With updrafts measured at 9,000 vertical feet per minute, it isn't hard to visualize a broken spar, bolt attached to a length of rope, or piece of someone else's airplane being lofted to the very top of the thunderheads, at 55,000 or 60,000 feet. Getting hit by debris carried aloft, that maybe had been in free fall for 1,000 feet, could be as nasty as getting hit by a meteor, and I think a lot more likely. Something like that hitting the windshield would be bad.
For that matter, a waterspout could have lifted any of the non-plane debris that has been found from the waves to a height where the 100 mph updrafts (9,000 ft/min) could have grabbed it and taken it up into the jet.
What gets me about driving in crowded freeway conditions is the amount of faith we have in the technical abilities of perfect strangers. In a one hour 50 mile drive between two cities during rush hour, a driver has to have faith that all his nearest neighbors can keep their vehicles within their small envelopes of safety, and that the neighbors of all those neighbors will do the same, and so on. And these aren't static cadres; new drivers are constantly filling the gaps as others reach their exits. Under these conditions, your health and safety are dependent on the abilities of perhaps a hundred different strangers to operate their lethal machines within very narrow constraints, and to cooperate with you and each other.
It can make one recognize that the belief in humanism is more powerful, and more common, than the belief in any god (even if it is rarely recognized).
While everyone knows that a .0 version may have bugs, it's also expected that a .0 version *will* be ready for prime time. If it's not, it should have an alpha or beta moniker.
Maybe in your world, but not in mine.
I would be very disappointed with a 1.9.x version that was a beta of a 2.0 major break rather than an elegant expression of the 1.xx series. I sometimes do upgrade minor releases of software that isn't critical to my work without paying much attention to the release notes. But I do expect to have to read the release notes on an x.0 release carefully. KOffice makes it very clear that this is an early beta, something for developers to look at to see if they might want to shape their products around it. Not something I want to mess with, yet, but I do look forward to the 2.1 release. OOo has been good, but I'd love to see a more modular approach.
How many projects use even numbers for unstable releases and odd numbers for end-user oriented releases? I think a fair number do that.
Hmmf. I spent part of my youth in Maine, and I can tell you Maine has only two seasons.
Winter.
And the Fourth of July.
They're all a business and a scam. The difference is in their tactics.
Um, and pedophilia. Don't forget the pedophilia, since keeping it in mind helps to bring this entire sorry aspect of the human condition into better focus. Religion is one thing, but religious institutions of any kind have demonstrated that they can be rife with the worst types of depraved behavior, and enablers of depravity. They all need to be treated under the law as any other institution.
Never was the phrase 'Won't somebody think of the children?' more appropriate than in these woeful times.
Yeah, agreed. For the victims of gambling or scientology, it is basically the difference between fighting an internal demon and fighting external demons.
Religious freedom means everyone has the right to go to hell in their own way. And the converse: no one has the right to impose their hell on anyone else. What Scientology attempts to do to those who try to walk away from it violates this principle. I cannot say more without breaking Godwin's rule.
While the advantages of Linux are well known to most people on Slashdot, the average user has no idea... They want to buy software on a store, simply because they do not know they can select it for free from the package manager and install it automatically...
Above was certainly true at the end of the last century, but it is less and less the case. In the USA, there is an increasing awareness of Linux through the "I know this guy who has a friend who has changed to Ubuntu and he says..." channels. The buzz is that Linux comes with a large package of good software and it is easy to get more. Elsewhere in the world, where more people get their news more from other people than from idjit boxes, I think the word is spreading faster.
As a wag, the Linux adoption curve is probably very similar to the Firefox adoption curve, stretched out somewhat. That suggests to me that probably 3% of the "market" are using Linux several hours each week, and probably an additional 4% to 5% play with it every now and then, either as a dual boot or from a CD or USB device.
I think a telling point is that in Costco and other big box stores, the display area given to software has shrunk dramatically over the last 5 years. If those stores are finding software less profitable than the pet food aisle, then Bob and Betty Average are not buying their software in stores so much, any more.
Actually in this context neither "operating system" nor "applications" is correct. We are really talking about different computer ecosystems or cultures and simply using the generic name of the OS as a convenient shorthand. Which is really quite appropriate, since it is generally recognized that geeks don't have culture (cue the toe fungus jokes), which would mean we'd have to talk about silicon ecosystems which, aside from being just silly, would also inevitably lead to conversing about habitats (cue Mom's basement jokes).
So there really isn't any other good choice if we want to have a serious conversation about the differences between the Zen of WinXYZ and the Tao of Linux distros. Remember that when comparing these kinds of religious differences: that was zen; this is tao.
The overwhelming mainstream demand of Linux is that it become as much a clone of Windows as possible.
No no no!!! Please, if anyone gets anything from this let it be that Linux cannot be just a Windows clone, it has to be something better! Why would anyone go through the trouble of installing a completely different operating system that is exactly the same as the one they have? There HAS to be something extra, even for the average user.
But there is indeed "something extra", that the average new Ubuntu convert recognizes and lauds. Actually more than one such feature:
Mostly the people I work with are not very articulate when it comes to computers, and would not express Ubuntu's strengths the way I have just done.
On a somewhat related note: the machine I'm typing this on is a Dell that came with WinXP installed, and now has a dual boot with WinXP and Ubuntu. Since the WinXP partition is about a third of the hard disk with the Linux partition taking up the rest, should this machine be counted as 1/3 Windows and 2/3 Linux? Or would the temporal distribution be more appropriate, in which case it should be counted as 5% Windows and 95% Linux? These fancy statistics... I get so confused!
Yeah, its probably a matter of incompetence rather than evil intent, but I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. You can regard evil behavior as something separate from the person who uses it and then you can sometimes get them to mend their ways.
But there's not much you can do about incompetence, except hope that the person grows out of it. And unless the person is still a teenager, it is not realistic to entertain high hopes about that.
Seems a little strange to be more pessimistic than a curmudgeonlyoldbloke. Maybe this cold is affecting my normally sunny nature.
I think it means that we now don't have to worry about the inflationary theory, so it will be easier to solve the economic crisis with Obama bucks.
Or something like that. But I'm no rocket surgeon.
There are new, mediocre discoveries every day but they're never heard about except in some dusty journal.
That's unfair!
Not every journal published by Elsevier is dusty. Some, like the famous Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, are bright, shiny things...
...oooh! Shiny...
I got the same message ('you need to install a new version of Flash') when I visited. After telling NoScript to allow wilsoncenter.org, and then timeglider.com, I had access without the need to load another Flash reader.
I don't know what that site is doing to test for Flash on the browser, but I don't like its dishonesty.
Parent post has been trounced (doubly!) as a troll, and it certainly dripped sarcastic acid. But the question it posed does seem like a valid one:
Is there any equivalent configuration of Apache that would expose a similar vulnerability? That is, is this kind of vulnerability something that could possibly affect Mac, Linux, BSD, or Unix environments, or is it solely limited to Microsoft shops?
I haven't worked on MS-specific stuff for nearly a decade (except as needed to get MSIE to do what standards-compliant browsers do). So I don't know WebDEV or any of the CASE tools that work with MS. And I'm kind of wondering whether this story has any significance to anyone outside of the Microsoft ecosystem. (Other than the obvious fact that no one should entrust any private data to any web site being run with Microsoft products, unless they are confident that the responsible IT department understands these kinds of risks and goes the extra steps necessary to assure that clients don't become victims.)
That would be like saying you can't assess the quality of a basketball player unless you understand exactly how he does his thing.
It is more like saying that you can't assess the quality of a basketball player unless you understand the rules of basketball.
Copyright law has become so twisted from its original intent that no one yet understands the new rules of the game. It seems like most of these cases are like arguments in Calvinball about which rules apply this time. GP post has it right: even if it were a judge's duty to determine competency of representation, it couldn't be done in the realm of Calvinball. Oops, I mean current copyright law.
Oh, please stop dribbling. Its dripping onto the keyboard. Remember: dribbling is the number one reason that basketball analogies never work well on Slashdot.
This should be very interesting.
K.A.D. Camara is not only a very bright young lawyer, he also has credentials in computer science and would probably be accepted by the Court as an expert witness on the technology (except for the conflict of roles). Not that he would do that. Just that he could do that.
There is no question that he is going to be more knowledgeable about the technology than any other lawyer or judge involved in the RIAA cases. If Camara wants to rapidly establish himself as THE expert on IT law, this pro bono work is an excellent start.
The RIAA lawyers should be afraid. Very afraid. For whatever his reason might be, they are now facing a crusader who knows the landscape better than they do.
So this ins't such a big deal because... well, because... uh, I'm just supposed to trust that the IT Guy knows what he's doing. I guess.
Maybe you can help me understand this mess a little better. If you would just tell me what the equivalent vulnerability is in that other really popular server called Apache, then perhaps I could go back to trusting that the IT Guy really knows what he's talking about when he starts gibbering like this.
So how could I duplicate this vulnerability on Apache?