Boring. Next thing you know we'll have a breathless account of how the secret leaked that they have facebook accounts too.
Much more clever. More interesting (on a nerd basis, not the social basis) would be a covert channel constructed entirely of fake registration addresses.
That is quite funny, but in fact in those days RMS had quite short hair. He didn't begin to grow it out until the summer of '84. In fact he dressed in the usual nerd look of the era: flannel or other collared shirt, short hair. Oh yeah, and an "impeach god" button at parties -- ok, not completely the "usual nerd" look.
I spent that year listening to such timeless classics as [...] Beer For My Horses.
Your story sounds sad, and even reading it backwards didn't make it happier.
But just as a (non-jokey) point of note: my sister did in fact feed beer to her horse. Beer is a grain product, and the horse liked it. She'd open a couple of six packs into a bucket and the horse would slurp it all up.
It didn't seem possible to supply enough to get the horse drunk, as far as I could tell. Probably a good thing!
2) No girls in classes (5-14%, falls as engineering major gets harder (ie electrical))
Really? At MIT, course 6 (i.e. EECS) I think the F:M ratio is still higher on the EE side than CS -- certainly was when I was there. Course 2 (ME) was close to 50:50 at the time. And I seem to remember that chem E was majority F.
And the default major, 18 (math) was mostly men.
It's been a while since I really bothered to notice this in detail, but I'd have heard if this had changed much.
...Many if not most, atheists (and what you really mean by that word, agnostics) do in fact "reason themselves into" that state....
(emphasis mine, not OP's).
Not sure I believe "most." There are plenty of people who grow up with the default state of no religion, and no religious exposure except in a religion survey as part of a grade school social studies class. Such people would have to "reason" themselves into religion. I wouldn't be surprised if these people are the majority of atheists, as I suspect most people don't really care much either way and just go along with what their community does "just because."
It's nice to have a conspiracy theory but ockham's razor says that Hypercard was killed for the same reason Apple kills most products it kills: the demand wasn't there.
Proof? Hypercard is essentially still available, both as replacement/upgrades like Supercard and through its intellectual descendants and shrapnel, like wikis, Applescript and the web in general. Plus there's essentially no barrier to software development on the mac. And yet Supercard lives at the margins, and even wikis aren't really that pervasive.
Dr. Paul and was also suppressed by his own political party for not being jingoistic enough.
There, I fixed that for you. Paul and Kucinich are quite nationalistic. Both are patriotic and concerned for the country. In fact I consider them both more patriotic than the positions of their respective parties in that they both seem far more concerned about the fate of their fellow citizens.
I have to qualify this by saying that I consider them both quite a distance along the path to lunacy, but on patriotism certainly they are far more trustworthy than the party positions or pols.
To me the strangest part of TFA (the computerworld one) is that G+ "ranked in the 42nd spot among social networking sites." Apart from the humour value of 42, I would have a hard time naming 41 other "social networking sites" -- in fact I doubt I could even name a dozen. Who are they?
I went to the "hitwise" site and couldn't find this number, or what the other sites are. For that matter, I don't know how they collect the data they claim to.
There is already enough tracking that goes on with the toll passes (EZ-Pass, Sun Pass, etc)...
Funny, these systems could easily have been deployed in a non-privacy-busting fashion (e.g. prepay them so they are like cash, and have no personally identifiable information in them). But somehow that option is never offered when these systems are deployed.
I assume the privacy-busting aspects are a major part of the appeal.
I cannot be the only person to think this is not a good thing. [...] As much as I want HTTP to be faster, I think this way is a bit degrading to the web... There was no standards process. It will probably now be rushed as a standard
Actually, this is an example of how standardisation should work. They thought about a good way to fix a problem (including consideration of past problems); chose an approach that was upwardly compatible and harmless to older clients; released a working implementation and source code.
Indeed, this is a major reason why the utilities support the "smart meter" investment (it's also a good way to stop employing meter readers). But there's a big question as to who owns the information, and the utilities are solidly behind the position that they use the info and can use it as they see fit (i.e. sell it and use for marketing). Some details about how it can be misused are here.
I know (as even the summary said) this is a religious/contentious topic, but: For both CS and computer engineering, math as a discipline provides several abstract tools in terms of abstraction, modeling, and discipline, as well as actual concrete skills (for algorithmic analysis, estimations and the like).
But the summary mentions continuous math, and I must say most non-CS programmers will only encounter discrete problems. Unfortunately some problems do require floating point or control of continuous processes (i.e process control applications), but regrettably by the time that happens most of the required math classes will long since have been forgotten!
Forget advanced math - too many people lack basic language skills.
I read your as half jest, half serious, but on a serious note: I find that good (and great) programmers are also very clear writers in English.
I think there's a strong correlation between the skills needed to decompose a problem, structure a solution, and find appropriate and understandable (to other programmers and one's self later) constructs in order to write a good program and the same skills in making an argument or mastering a complex topic.
I don't mean to suggest that great hackers are automatically great novelists! I am talking about clear expository prose.
I'm sad there isn't BD-Live for these in the Amazon description...
A serious question: are there any disks where BD-Live has been used? I've tried it on a bunch of BR disks and it's never been anything but ads for new movies. Bleagh. Can you recommend a disk where it was used for something that added to the movie? That would be cool.
Yes. Your quip is clever and funny, but to be serious for a second it is important to realise that government a priori does not automatically mean "nonfree" however much the popular rhetoric says so. For example the existance of maintained public roads increases your freedom of movement. A putatively impartial judiciary that enforces contract increases your freedom of commerce. A public agency that hunts down murderers increases your freedom unless you're a murderer etc etc.
OK OK, that being said we can start to argue about the dividing line in enabling and restrictive freedoms, Leviathan, 8000 years of political philosophy, abuse of power etc. But the point remains: people form and participate in/with governments because they feel they will be more free with them than without them. And people are fallible....quite fallible.
(and for the record this cash tracking is a horrible idea)
The two cases (of a dealer distributing a car with GPL code in it and Telstra distributing a device than an OEM had put GPL code into) are the same. Nobody is surprised when we make the same declaration for physical goods (e.g. we expect drug manufacturers to vet their raw materials, or car manufacturers to make sure the steel they start with is of the specified grade/alloy).
In this case the point is that the person who distributes the "code" (through the device) has to make the source available. That's true if you buy the box and sell it on craigslist. They can satisfy that by supplying a URL for the source, which could be a URL pointing at the OEM's web site. They can print that URL in their manual. (it's arguable that these days supplying the mfr's name and the model number might be deemed sufficient. I'd guess the answer is no, but who knows how courts would rule -- people's understanding of how to use web sites is evolving and improving).
The fact is you want things to work the way they are described in TFA. Telstra is the one with the buying clout in this case; they can force their vendors to do the right thing on their behalf.
In general I consider Telstra an odious beast but in this case it sounds like they are behaving honourably: "oops, sorry, we tried to get it right, looks like we didn't in at least one case, we'll get it fixed." What more could you ask than that? OK, you could ask that they respond when you talk to them directly and not wait until you make the issue public out of frustration, but, well, this is Telstra we're talking about. At least the tech side sounds honourable, then.
And what a great story: Gratton handled this in a cool calm way as opposed to flying off the handle. A great endorsement of the free software way. What a winner.
I think you missunderstood erroneus. My read of that message is exactly that Apple is classing Java as "yesterday's technology" and indicating a preference that apps be written in ObjC or HTML+Javascript or a combo of the two.
Your first two paragraphs aside, your message is good but adds insight into why Apple might make this decision. As a computer maker they are basically a client side presence. Yes, Apple does have a server product --- I use it -- but it's a workgroup-scale product.
Their business model doesn't justify making the ultra-low-margin servers people deploy with these days. So if adding their own tweaks to Java doesn't help them on the client side, why invest the R&D and (probably higher) support dollars? Those server side applications you talk about don't really need the special apple UI tweaks and although the Apple performance tweaks might be nice if you use the mac as your develoment platform, you'd have to ignore them and use the same JVM you would use for deployment -- so this policy wouldn't really change anything for you anyway.
PS: That Livescript->"Javascript" thing really irked me too. Yet it was somehow worse when GLS did the faux "standards" thing: I was then torn: call it ECMAScript to fracture the misleading "Java" connection or ignore it to scorn the astroturf "standard"? I guess the "market" chose.
Slashdot Mirror
Boring. Next thing you know we'll have a breathless account of how the secret leaked that they have facebook accounts too.
Much more clever. More interesting (on a nerd basis, not the social basis) would be a covert channel constructed entirely of fake registration addresses.
Any idiot can have a pile of ideas. The implementation is what matters.
I like this quote, but personally would not attempt to use it when talking about Van Jacobson
That is quite funny, but in fact in those days RMS had quite short hair. He didn't begin to grow it out until the summer of '84. In fact he dressed in the usual nerd look of the era: flannel or other collared shirt, short hair. Oh yeah, and an "impeach god" button at parties -- ok, not completely the "usual nerd" look.
I spent that year listening to such timeless classics as [...] Beer For My Horses.
Your story sounds sad, and even reading it backwards didn't make it happier.
But just as a (non-jokey) point of note: my sister did in fact feed beer to her horse. Beer is a grain product, and the horse liked it. She'd open a couple of six packs into a bucket and the horse would slurp it all up.
It didn't seem possible to supply enough to get the horse drunk, as far as I could tell. Probably a good thing!
Really? At MIT, course 6 (i.e. EECS) I think the F:M ratio is still higher on the EE side than CS -- certainly was when I was there. Course 2 (ME) was close to 50:50 at the time. And I seem to remember that chem E was majority F.
And the default major, 18 (math) was mostly men.
It's been a while since I really bothered to notice this in detail, but I'd have heard if this had changed much.
...Many if not most, atheists (and what you really mean by that word, agnostics) do in fact "reason themselves into" that state....
(emphasis mine, not OP's).
Not sure I believe "most." There are plenty of people who grow up with the default state of no religion, and no religious exposure except in a religion survey as part of a grade school social studies class. Such people would have to "reason" themselves into religion. I wouldn't be surprised if these people are the majority of atheists, as I suspect most people don't really care much either way and just go along with what their community does "just because."
It's nice to have a conspiracy theory but ockham's razor says that Hypercard was killed for the same reason Apple kills most products it kills: the demand wasn't there.
Proof? Hypercard is essentially still available, both as replacement/upgrades like Supercard and through its intellectual descendants and shrapnel, like wikis, Applescript and the web in general. Plus there's essentially no barrier to software development on the mac. And yet Supercard lives at the margins, and even wikis aren't really that pervasive.
Cool how you fixated on the reference to Chiropractors out of a list of other charlatanry like belly button massage. Got an agenda?
There, I fixed that for you. Paul and Kucinich are quite nationalistic. Both are patriotic and concerned for the country. In fact I consider them both more patriotic than the positions of their respective parties in that they both seem far more concerned about the fate of their fellow citizens.
I have to qualify this by saying that I consider them both quite a distance along the path to lunacy, but on patriotism certainly they are far more trustworthy than the party positions or pols.
It reminds everybody that it isn't just the same set of contributors, and that it's worth submitting a story. I like it, actually.
To me the strangest part of TFA (the computerworld one) is that G+ "ranked in the 42nd spot among social networking sites." Apart from the humour value of 42, I would have a hard time naming 41 other "social networking sites" -- in fact I doubt I could even name a dozen. Who are they?
I went to the "hitwise" site and couldn't find this number, or what the other sites are. For that matter, I don't know how they collect the data they claim to.
Funny, these systems could easily have been deployed in a non-privacy-busting fashion (e.g. prepay them so they are like cash, and have no personally identifiable information in them). But somehow that option is never offered when these systems are deployed.
I assume the privacy-busting aspects are a major part of the appeal.
I cannot be the only person to think this is not a good thing. [...] As much as I want HTTP to be faster, I think this way is a bit degrading to the web... There was no standards process. It will probably now be rushed as a standard
Actually, this is an example of how standardisation should work. They thought about a good way to fix a problem (including consideration of past problems); chose an approach that was upwardly compatible and harmless to older clients; released a working implementation and source code.
How could anyone do better? This is the classic path to "rough consensus and running code".
There are plenty of criticisms appropriate to SPDY and Google in general, but how they have proceeded in this case is not one of them.
Indeed, this is a major reason why the utilities support the "smart meter" investment (it's also a good way to stop employing meter readers). But there's a big question as to who owns the information, and the utilities are solidly behind the position that they use the info and can use it as they see fit (i.e. sell it and use for marketing). Some details about how it can be misused are here.
The DoE actually says that the info is the customer's. Sad to say legislation doesn't support that, and you can be sure that in the continuous struggle for increasing ARPU, the customer will get the shaft.
I know (as even the summary said) this is a religious/contentious topic, but: For both CS and computer engineering, math as a discipline provides several abstract tools in terms of abstraction, modeling, and discipline, as well as actual concrete skills (for algorithmic analysis, estimations and the like).
But the summary mentions continuous math, and I must say most non-CS programmers will only encounter discrete problems. Unfortunately some problems do require floating point or control of continuous processes (i.e process control applications), but regrettably by the time that happens most of the required math classes will long since have been forgotten!
I read your as half jest, half serious, but on a serious note: I find that good (and great) programmers are also very clear writers in English.
I think there's a strong correlation between the skills needed to decompose a problem, structure a solution, and find appropriate and understandable (to other programmers and one's self later) constructs in order to write a good program and the same skills in making an argument or mastering a complex topic.
I don't mean to suggest that great hackers are automatically great novelists! I am talking about clear expository prose.
Streaming on my 360 is perfect. I really don't notice it.
Hmm, and do you think this might have anything to do with that?
A serious question: are there any disks where BD-Live has been used? I've tried it on a bunch of BR disks and it's never been anything but ads for new movies. Bleagh. Can you recommend a disk where it was used for something that added to the movie? That would be cool.
Yes. Your quip is clever and funny, but to be serious for a second it is important to realise that government a priori does not automatically mean "nonfree" however much the popular rhetoric says so. For example the existance of maintained public roads increases your freedom of movement. A putatively impartial judiciary that enforces contract increases your freedom of commerce. A public agency that hunts down murderers increases your freedom unless you're a murderer etc etc.
OK OK, that being said we can start to argue about the dividing line in enabling and restrictive freedoms, Leviathan, 8000 years of political philosophy, abuse of power etc. But the point remains: people form and participate in/with governments because they feel they will be more free with them than without them. And people are fallible....quite fallible.
(and for the record this cash tracking is a horrible idea)
This is definitely news for nerds, but this phrase in the summary got me wound up:
Aargh! Surely someone who doesn't know what a gate is wouldn't be reading slashdot?
Surely Tableau's takedown was a (successful) marketing program. Nobody had heard of them before, now everybody has.
The two cases (of a dealer distributing a car with GPL code in it and Telstra distributing a device than an OEM had put GPL code into) are the same. Nobody is surprised when we make the same declaration for physical goods (e.g. we expect drug manufacturers to vet their raw materials, or car manufacturers to make sure the steel they start with is of the specified grade/alloy).
In this case the point is that the person who distributes the "code" (through the device) has to make the source available. That's true if you buy the box and sell it on craigslist. They can satisfy that by supplying a URL for the source, which could be a URL pointing at the OEM's web site. They can print that URL in their manual. (it's arguable that these days supplying the mfr's name and the model number might be deemed sufficient. I'd guess the answer is no, but who knows how courts would rule -- people's understanding of how to use web sites is evolving and improving).
The fact is you want things to work the way they are described in TFA. Telstra is the one with the buying clout in this case; they can force their vendors to do the right thing on their behalf.
In general I consider Telstra an odious beast but in this case it sounds like they are behaving honourably: "oops, sorry, we tried to get it right, looks like we didn't in at least one case, we'll get it fixed." What more could you ask than that? OK, you could ask that they respond when you talk to them directly and not wait until you make the issue public out of frustration, but, well, this is Telstra we're talking about. At least the tech side sounds honourable, then.
And what a great story: Gratton handled this in a cool calm way as opposed to flying off the handle. A great endorsement of the free software way. What a winner.
I leave it to the reader to decide which of the two is the drowning company and which is the brick
I think you missunderstood erroneus. My read of that message is exactly that Apple is classing Java as "yesterday's technology" and indicating a preference that apps be written in ObjC or HTML+Javascript or a combo of the two.
Your first two paragraphs aside, your message is good but adds insight into why Apple might make this decision. As a computer maker they are basically a client side presence. Yes, Apple does have a server product --- I use it -- but it's a workgroup-scale product.
Their business model doesn't justify making the ultra-low-margin servers people deploy with these days. So if adding their own tweaks to Java doesn't help them on the client side, why invest the R&D and (probably higher) support dollars? Those server side applications you talk about don't really need the special apple UI tweaks and although the Apple performance tweaks might be nice if you use the mac as your develoment platform, you'd have to ignore them and use the same JVM you would use for deployment -- so this policy wouldn't really change anything for you anyway.
PS: That Livescript->"Javascript" thing really irked me too. Yet it was somehow worse when GLS did the faux "standards" thing: I was then torn: call it ECMAScript to fracture the misleading "Java" connection or ignore it to scorn the astroturf "standard"? I guess the "market" chose.
Who uses docking ports these days anyway? I want them to standardize the frigging batteries.
Still, I'm not surprised the Chinese are the impetus for this. They got charging to standardize on mini-USB, after all.