I mean what if everyone developed your mentality and decided "Well i'm ok with using Google products for free but no taking the advertising with it".
If people as a whole had the same mentality as I do, Google's business model would of course be completely broken: I once clicked a Google add by mistake, and every now and then I notice them and read them to get a sense of what Google's database knows about me, but basically I ignore them. In that case, presumably people would be spending their money on things which actually make lives better instead of this advertising driven consumerism, and this would include donating to useful free services like Google. I'd donate to Google myself if they needed it. This is a silly fantasy though, since people don't think that way, and show no signs of doing so any time soon.
I'm grateful that at least some of the excesses of consumerism go to things that are good and useful. I don't, however, see that I have any moral obligation to help prop up system that I don't like, and I see no problem at all with taking the benefits that the system gives freely.
Well, if you don't have a fast user switching system (you know, like they have in Windows, OS X, and Linux) that lets you log in as another user without logging out the current user, then this might be a valid argument.
So you just want everything for free, right? Google are supposed to eat air or something, and have nothing to work with, because you won't accept their main source of revenue?
Nonsense. I'm happy with Google making money off advertising as long as I'm not the one being advertised at. But if a browser doesn't let me avoid the adds, I won't use it.
More generally, I'm really quite grateful to all the consumers out there willing to spend vast quantities of money on things that don't make their lives noticeably better. The surplus from their spending benefits me through websites like Google, and in countless other ways. Also, since they spend so much, they have to work more, and other people working more is clearly of benefit to me. Without the American consumer my life would be much less pleasant.
For example I will use OS X and Ubuntu with AWN. They both have a fancy dock. AWN has way more features then the Mac OS X Dock. However it isn't really that usable. Things such as if you run a new app. I want to right click the running application and say keep on dock. Or just being able to drag and drop an App into awn from your file system browser... And get the correct Icon. Being able to group all open windows of the same application together. I am not talking about eyecandy, (like the OS X animations when you zoom in) but actual usability that people tend to miss when trying to copy the idea.
You might want to check out Cairo Dock. I tried AWN for a while, but found it lacking; I think that Cairo Dock has most if not all the features you mention. If you're using Ubuntu, make sure to use the Cairo-Dock Repo, the version in the default repo is out of date and ridiculously buggy.
Or maybe they really just don't know any better than just to "format and reinstall" on Windows.
Hey, don't knock "format and reinstall!" Wiping the computer blank and starting fresh is the best solution to any problem that would take more than 2 hours to locate and fix on Windows, or about 45 minutes on Ubuntu(assuming you have a separate/home partition).
As far as the download times, I would assume that you just have a slow internet connection. I regularly set up both Ubuntu and XP, and fetching the XP update always takes longer, and uses more system resources while it's running.
The simplest solution would be to allow any candidate in the running call for a manual recount no questions asked. Most races aren't anywhere near close enough that a candidate could reasonably ask for a recount without looking silly, and even if all the really tight races had to be manually counted it would probably be a big time saver.
Ultimately, the electronic count ought to be more accurate than a manual count, and a system of random manual audits should allow you to determine with a fair degree of certainty that the system is behaving as expected. Random manual audits could also make fraud very tricky.
That's shit. I'll take the ballot I handle and allow it to be scanned. If the count is suspect then the ballots exist outside of some computer generated fantasy and real humans can count them.
Well, that's why you have a printout which the voter verifies and essentially acts as your 'ballot'. Then you make sure that in the case of any remotely reasonable doubt you do a hand recount. I know I'm repeating myself, but your response suggests I wasn't clear enough.
This is a bit of an overreaction. There's no reason that a properly designed electronic voting system can't achieve greater speed and accuracy while producing a paper trail which allows full accountability. Just have the machine produce a printout which the individual voter can verify, then in case of doubt you can always resort to a manual count. Ultimately electronic voting systems should save time and increase accuracy, and we're going to switch to them.
The problem here is that the politicians have no idea what a properly designed electronic voting system looks like, and so they just leave it all up to Diebold and the like, who have no real incentive to do things right. What we really need here is a detailed set of specifications for how voting machines ought to perform, and laws that prevent machines which don't meet those specifications from being used in an election.
If you're planning to use Ubuntu, the best approach is to scope out the laptop on the Ubuntu Wiki first. It isn't absolutely comprehensive, but it does cover the majority of popular laptops. I assume that other major distros have their own compatibility lists, and if your distro of choice doesn't, well, use the Ubuntu list, and at least you know that someone somewhere got your laptop working under Linux.
I wish I had mod points. This is a perfectly reasonable statement, backed by evidence and not made in an inflammatory fashion. The fact the most people disagree with it doesn't justify moding it as flamebait.
That said, the bigtime movie producers can afford coders, and so linux is a natural choice for the flexibility and automation that linux' excellent integration of scripting can provide. For single user desktop graphics work, the Mac is still a superior platform.
For 11-14 year olds the most important thing is getting them interested, not the technical details of the language. You'll want a language that will let them do what they want to do with as little effort as possible, which means you want a high level language with relatively intuitive syntax. Ideally you want a scripting language so that there's as little delay as possible between writing the code and seeing the results. Finally, you want an actively supported language with many modules so that students won't feel that they're playing with a toy language, but with something that can be used to do anything they want to do.
From this point of view, I would go with Ruby or Python. I personally prefer Python, primarily for it's excellent documentation, though if you're thorough enough in preparing materials for the students, Ruby could be an excellent choice also. Python can also be used as a sort of 'gateway language' to programming C for the more enterprising students since if you program enough in python, you'll eventually run into something that is best done by writing a module.
You've got me there. Most the time doing either of those is a bit of a hassle. I just send code as an attachment in emails. As for the wiki, writing it's no problem, but copy and pasting code is a nuisance. However, there are editors that can handle that gracefully (I just don't happen to use one).
Most of the time indentation errors cause a syntax error that prevents execution, but you're right that python code with an indentation error that still runs is much more likely than C code with a missing semi-colon that still runs. That said, indentation errors are quite rare in my experience because the indentation is so visibly clear that it's hard to not notice a mistake. Even when an indentation error doesn't cause a syntax error, it is almost always very obvious on execution.
In thousands on lines of code, I've never had an indentation error that took more than 2 minutes to find, and indentation errors are very rare in any case.
That'a reminds me of something else I like about Python.. its language is documented.
Mod parent up!
If there's a single feature that makes python stand out, it's that python has such a high standard of documentation that it is easy to pick up a new project grab the modules you need and start working. The documentation even extends to the implementation of python itself, which makes extending python via modules written in C really easy.
If you're looking for a language that will allow you to write clean code, and accomplish complex projects quickly and easily, Python is the way to go; the white space convention may seem odd at first (I certainly was very suspicious of it), but after a couple hours you'll find it quite comfortable, and you'll only get one indenting error for every ten semi-colons you would have forgotten in C, so it's ultimately a big time saver.
This isn't to say Python doesn't have its downsides. I've been working on several large projects, and performance issues do come up, but those can be worked around via C modules when necessary. All in all, thanks to the clear syntax and excellent documentation you'll find that you can write programs many times quicker in python than in C within just a few days of learning it.
There really aren't any clear winners. Opera has acid compliance in its favor. Firefox is extremely popular, easy to use and has plenty of features.
IE, while it may still lack acid compliance is making progress on the features front and security is supposedly improving. In the long run, the increase in popularity for alternative browsers will hopefully steer them all towards greater standards compliance leading to a big win for end users and content developers.
So, to paraphrase, you're saying: There aren't any clear winners, Opera is the best at following web standards, Firefox is popular and feature rich, and IE doesn't suck quite as much as it used to.
There may be no clear winner, but if this is the best someone can say about IE, it sounds as if there's a clear loser.
Third, you're wrong. Lets take a 65536 bit long encryption key, the product of two very large primes. Lets factor them! The best known deterministic algorithm is going to take longer than the universe will last. But I bet it takes well under a second to check an answer for correctness! Let's say you have a quantum "algorithm" Q. You are correct, you can't prove Q(key) will produce the correct factorization. But you can CHECK it in only a second. So, run Q(key) until your check passes. There, that's an algorithm by your definition. You just used math to prove that if you run your quantum + classical hybrid computer on that input, it will always output the correct result.
Well, technically all we know is that it will never output an incorrect result. It could just continue to run until the sun goes nova, though of course this result is vanishingly improbable. Not that I disagree with your main point at all, I just like nitpicking!
That said, I think what the GP is concerned about is that with traditional algorithms you can, if you have enough time and paper, sit down and follow the same steps the computer does to do the calculation by hand. What he doesn't realize is that Quantum algorithms can also be performed on pencil and paper, they would just be extremely inefficient without the particularities of the hardware of a quantum computer.
Are you insinuating terrorism is strictly non-profit??
Of course terrorism isn't strictly non profit. However, I think the dictionary, and anyone who knows the English language, will agree with me when I say that an act which is not done for the purpose of instilling terror is not terrorism.
Certainly these criminals are engaging in both theft and vandalism, crimes which have suitable punishments, but to try to punish the criminal for more than these is just plain nonsense. Why not punish them for rape while we're at it?
The best way to ensure that uTP doesn't kill the internet is to throttle it at the source, and any law that stands in the way of ISPs exercising that level of management is deadly to the internet.
The problem here is that he starts with a valid premise: completely unmanged uTP is a threat to the continued smooth operation of the internet, and comes to the completely unsupported conclusion that any law restricting the ISPs is bad.
ISPs need to be allowed to control bandwidth flow in a fair fashion to provide the best service possible to their clients, but this doesn't mean we should let them do whatever they want either. ISPs should, for instance, not be allowed to treat packets differently based on who they're coming from/going to, or what their content is, but some ISPs have been talking about doing exactly that.
Over regulation is bad. This doesn't make no regulation good.
No, the Wikipedia doesn't have limitless room, virtually or really. Wikipedia is limited by how many editors it can attract and keep to monitor and maintain it's articles.
This is true, but the articles that get deleted are usually articles put up and maintained by particularly devoted followers of whatever obscure topic it is about. Having them writing and maintaining these articles in no way diminishes your stock of editors for other pages. In fact, deleting these articles probably loses wikipedia editors since people leave if they feel their contributions are unwanted.
I'm not necessarily in favor of including every topic someone feels like writing about on wikipedia, but I think that the decision of what gets included or not should be based on what makes the best reference source.
Re:No its worse than that
on
Evolving Rocks
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· Score: 1
No its worse than that. They are using "evolved" to mean changed. Its like saying that spring evolves into summer, or a newspaper of paper mache.
Exactly. The modern use of evolution to describe the biological process of descent with modification is in fact a rather poor use of language. Dictionary.com defines 'evolution' as "any process of formation or growth," which is clearly an appropriate description in this case. Furthermore, Darwin himself avoided using the word 'evolution' to describe his theory, because it was such a poor description.
Of course the Slashdot headline is, as usual, meant to deceive, but then what would we have to talk about if the headlines and summaries were reasonable and accurate?
Well, they claim that they're never going to use the patents, so no one is required to pay them. If IBM or Cisco decides not to join, they still won't use the patents. That makes them very different from patent trolls.
Obviously the question is, why would anyone pay a company to do what it intends to do anyway? The answer is, most companies wouldn't, but the very largest companies with the most to lose from patent lawsuits are willing to pay because they like being safe from those lawsuits. They know that if they don't pay no one will, and the patent company will go out of business, so they're willing to pay because it will cost them less than buying the patents themselves, or dealing with expensive lawsuits. Probably the paying companies will also have some say in which patents get bought up, which would be well worth paying for.
This really isn't all that complicated, I'm not sure I understand why so many comments calling the new company a patent troll are getting modded up.
So I assume you also avoid any open source software that runs on Windows or OS X?
'Requires' is not the same as 'runs on'. GIMP, Pidgin, Blender and many other excellent programs run on Windows, but don't require it.
I would certainly think twice about any open source project that requires Windows or OS X, at least if a linux based or cross platform alternative were around.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean what if everyone developed your mentality and decided "Well i'm ok with using Google products for free but no taking the advertising with it".
If people as a whole had the same mentality as I do, Google's business model would of course be completely broken: I once clicked a Google add by mistake, and every now and then I notice them and read them to get a sense of what Google's database knows about me, but basically I ignore them. In that case, presumably people would be spending their money on things which actually make lives better instead of this advertising driven consumerism, and this would include donating to useful free services like Google. I'd donate to Google myself if they needed it. This is a silly fantasy though, since people don't think that way, and show no signs of doing so any time soon.
I'm grateful that at least some of the excesses of consumerism go to things that are good and useful. I don't, however, see that I have any moral obligation to help prop up system that I don't like, and I see no problem at all with taking the benefits that the system gives freely.
Well, if you don't have a fast user switching system (you know, like they have in Windows, OS X, and Linux) that lets you log in as another user without logging out the current user, then this might be a valid argument.
So you just want everything for free, right? Google are supposed to eat air or something, and have nothing to work with, because you won't accept their main source of revenue?
Nonsense. I'm happy with Google making money off advertising as long as I'm not the one being advertised at. But if a browser doesn't let me avoid the adds, I won't use it.
More generally, I'm really quite grateful to all the consumers out there willing to spend vast quantities of money on things that don't make their lives noticeably better. The surplus from their spending benefits me through websites like Google, and in countless other ways. Also, since they spend so much, they have to work more, and other people working more is clearly of benefit to me. Without the American consumer my life would be much less pleasant.
For example I will use OS X and Ubuntu with AWN. They both have a fancy dock. AWN has way more features then the Mac OS X Dock. However it isn't really that usable. Things such as if you run a new app. I want to right click the running application and say keep on dock. Or just being able to drag and drop an App into awn from your file system browser... And get the correct Icon. Being able to group all open windows of the same application together. I am not talking about eyecandy, (like the OS X animations when you zoom in) but actual usability that people tend to miss when trying to copy the idea.
You might want to check out Cairo Dock. I tried AWN for a while, but found it lacking; I think that Cairo Dock has most if not all the features you mention. If you're using Ubuntu, make sure to use the Cairo-Dock Repo, the version in the default repo is out of date and ridiculously buggy.
Or maybe they really just don't know any better than just to "format and reinstall" on Windows.
Hey, don't knock "format and reinstall!" Wiping the computer blank and starting fresh is the best solution to any problem that would take more than 2 hours to locate and fix on Windows, or about 45 minutes on Ubuntu(assuming you have a separate /home partition).
As far as the download times, I would assume that you just have a slow internet connection. I regularly set up both Ubuntu and XP, and fetching the XP update always takes longer, and uses more system resources while it's running.
Yes.
The simplest solution would be to allow any candidate in the running call for a manual recount no questions asked. Most races aren't anywhere near close enough that a candidate could reasonably ask for a recount without looking silly, and even if all the really tight races had to be manually counted it would probably be a big time saver.
Ultimately, the electronic count ought to be more accurate than a manual count, and a system of random manual audits should allow you to determine with a fair degree of certainty that the system is behaving as expected. Random manual audits could also make fraud very tricky.
That's shit. I'll take the ballot I handle and allow it to be scanned. If the count is suspect then the ballots exist outside of some computer generated fantasy and real humans can count them.
Well, that's why you have a printout which the voter verifies and essentially acts as your 'ballot'. Then you make sure that in the case of any remotely reasonable doubt you do a hand recount. I know I'm repeating myself, but your response suggests I wasn't clear enough.
This is a bit of an overreaction. There's no reason that a properly designed electronic voting system can't achieve greater speed and accuracy while producing a paper trail which allows full accountability. Just have the machine produce a printout which the individual voter can verify, then in case of doubt you can always resort to a manual count. Ultimately electronic voting systems should save time and increase accuracy, and we're going to switch to them.
The problem here is that the politicians have no idea what a properly designed electronic voting system looks like, and so they just leave it all up to Diebold and the like, who have no real incentive to do things right. What we really need here is a detailed set of specifications for how voting machines ought to perform, and laws that prevent machines which don't meet those specifications from being used in an election.
If you're planning to use Ubuntu, the best approach is to scope out the laptop on the Ubuntu Wiki first. It isn't absolutely comprehensive, but it does cover the majority of popular laptops. I assume that other major distros have their own compatibility lists, and if your distro of choice doesn't, well, use the Ubuntu list, and at least you know that someone somewhere got your laptop working under Linux.
Actually, he'd be better off braking that sentence in two with the diction he chose
Really, I don't think his sentence was too precipitous, so braking seems unnecessary.
Might have been a good idea to use two sentences instead of one though.
I wish I had mod points. This is a perfectly reasonable statement, backed by evidence and not made in an inflammatory fashion. The fact the most people disagree with it doesn't justify moding it as flamebait.
That said, the bigtime movie producers can afford coders, and so linux is a natural choice for the flexibility and automation that linux' excellent integration of scripting can provide. For single user desktop graphics work, the Mac is still a superior platform.
For 11-14 year olds the most important thing is getting them interested, not the technical details of the language. You'll want a language that will let them do what they want to do with as little effort as possible, which means you want a high level language with relatively intuitive syntax. Ideally you want a scripting language so that there's as little delay as possible between writing the code and seeing the results. Finally, you want an actively supported language with many modules so that students won't feel that they're playing with a toy language, but with something that can be used to do anything they want to do.
From this point of view, I would go with Ruby or Python. I personally prefer Python, primarily for it's excellent documentation, though if you're thorough enough in preparing materials for the students, Ruby could be an excellent choice also. Python can also be used as a sort of 'gateway language' to programming C for the more enterprising students since if you program enough in python, you'll eventually run into something that is best done by writing a module.
You've got me there. Most the time doing either of those is a bit of a hassle. I just send code as an attachment in emails. As for the wiki, writing it's no problem, but copy and pasting code is a nuisance. However, there are editors that can handle that gracefully (I just don't happen to use one).
Most of the time indentation errors cause a syntax error that prevents execution, but you're right that python code with an indentation error that still runs is much more likely than C code with a missing semi-colon that still runs. That said, indentation errors are quite rare in my experience because the indentation is so visibly clear that it's hard to not notice a mistake. Even when an indentation error doesn't cause a syntax error, it is almost always very obvious on execution.
In thousands on lines of code, I've never had an indentation error that took more than 2 minutes to find, and indentation errors are very rare in any case.
That'a reminds me of something else I like about Python.. its language is documented.
Mod parent up!
If there's a single feature that makes python stand out, it's that python has such a high standard of documentation that it is easy to pick up a new project grab the modules you need and start working. The documentation even extends to the implementation of python itself, which makes extending python via modules written in C really easy.
If you're looking for a language that will allow you to write clean code, and accomplish complex projects quickly and easily, Python is the way to go; the white space convention may seem odd at first (I certainly was very suspicious of it), but after a couple hours you'll find it quite comfortable, and you'll only get one indenting error for every ten semi-colons you would have forgotten in C, so it's ultimately a big time saver.
This isn't to say Python doesn't have its downsides. I've been working on several large projects, and performance issues do come up, but those can be worked around via C modules when necessary. All in all, thanks to the clear syntax and excellent documentation you'll find that you can write programs many times quicker in python than in C within just a few days of learning it.
There really aren't any clear winners. Opera has acid compliance in its favor. Firefox is extremely popular, easy to use and has plenty of features.
IE, while it may still lack acid compliance is making progress on the features front and security is supposedly improving. In the long run, the increase in popularity for alternative browsers will hopefully steer them all towards greater standards compliance leading to a big win for end users and content developers.
So, to paraphrase, you're saying: There aren't any clear winners, Opera is the best at following web standards, Firefox is popular and feature rich, and IE doesn't suck quite as much as it used to.
There may be no clear winner, but if this is the best someone can say about IE, it sounds as if there's a clear loser.
Third, you're wrong. Lets take a 65536 bit long encryption key, the product of two very large primes. Lets factor them! The best known deterministic algorithm is going to take longer than the universe will last. But I bet it takes well under a second to check an answer for correctness! Let's say you have a quantum "algorithm" Q. You are correct, you can't prove Q(key) will produce the correct factorization. But you can CHECK it in only a second. So, run Q(key) until your check passes. There, that's an algorithm by your definition. You just used math to prove that if you run your quantum + classical hybrid computer on that input, it will always output the correct result.
Well, technically all we know is that it will never output an incorrect result. It could just continue to run until the sun goes nova, though of course this result is vanishingly improbable. Not that I disagree with your main point at all, I just like nitpicking!
That said, I think what the GP is concerned about is that with traditional algorithms you can, if you have enough time and paper, sit down and follow the same steps the computer does to do the calculation by hand. What he doesn't realize is that Quantum algorithms can also be performed on pencil and paper, they would just be extremely inefficient without the particularities of the hardware of a quantum computer.
Are you insinuating terrorism is strictly non-profit??
Of course terrorism isn't strictly non profit. However, I think the dictionary, and anyone who knows the English language, will agree with me when I say that an act which is not done for the purpose of instilling terror is not terrorism.
Certainly these criminals are engaging in both theft and vandalism, crimes which have suitable punishments, but to try to punish the criminal for more than these is just plain nonsense. Why not punish them for rape while we're at it?
In related news, studies confirm grass if often green, and water is often wet.
The best way to ensure that uTP doesn't kill the internet is to throttle it at the source, and any law that stands in the way of ISPs exercising that level of management is deadly to the internet.
The problem here is that he starts with a valid premise: completely unmanged uTP is a threat to the continued smooth operation of the internet, and comes to the completely unsupported conclusion that any law restricting the ISPs is bad.
ISPs need to be allowed to control bandwidth flow in a fair fashion to provide the best service possible to their clients, but this doesn't mean we should let them do whatever they want either. ISPs should, for instance, not be allowed to treat packets differently based on who they're coming from/going to, or what their content is, but some ISPs have been talking about doing exactly that.
Over regulation is bad. This doesn't make no regulation good.
No, the Wikipedia doesn't have limitless room, virtually or really. Wikipedia is limited by how many editors it can attract and keep to monitor and maintain it's articles.
This is true, but the articles that get deleted are usually articles put up and maintained by particularly devoted followers of whatever obscure topic it is about. Having them writing and maintaining these articles in no way diminishes your stock of editors for other pages. In fact, deleting these articles probably loses wikipedia editors since people leave if they feel their contributions are unwanted.
I'm not necessarily in favor of including every topic someone feels like writing about on wikipedia, but I think that the decision of what gets included or not should be based on what makes the best reference source.
No its worse than that. They are using "evolved" to mean changed. Its like saying that spring evolves into summer, or a newspaper of paper mache.
Exactly. The modern use of evolution to describe the biological process of descent with modification is in fact a rather poor use of language. Dictionary.com defines 'evolution' as "any process of formation or growth," which is clearly an appropriate description in this case. Furthermore, Darwin himself avoided using the word 'evolution' to describe his theory, because it was such a poor description.
Of course the Slashdot headline is, as usual, meant to deceive, but then what would we have to talk about if the headlines and summaries were reasonable and accurate?
Well, they claim that they're never going to use the patents, so no one is required to pay them. If IBM or Cisco decides not to join, they still won't use the patents. That makes them very different from patent trolls.
Obviously the question is, why would anyone pay a company to do what it intends to do anyway? The answer is, most companies wouldn't, but the very largest companies with the most to lose from patent lawsuits are willing to pay because they like being safe from those lawsuits. They know that if they don't pay no one will, and the patent company will go out of business, so they're willing to pay because it will cost them less than buying the patents themselves, or dealing with expensive lawsuits. Probably the paying companies will also have some say in which patents get bought up, which would be well worth paying for.
This really isn't all that complicated, I'm not sure I understand why so many comments calling the new company a patent troll are getting modded up.
So I assume you also avoid any open source software that runs on Windows or OS X?
'Requires' is not the same as 'runs on'. GIMP, Pidgin, Blender and many other excellent programs run on Windows, but don't require it.
I would certainly think twice about any open source project that requires Windows or OS X, at least if a linux based or cross platform alternative were around.