>You honestly believe that religious people are all abusing their children?
We're talking about 'mental abuse' here: if you organised the education of your children so that even as grown-up they believe that Santa Claus is real, I would call you a child abuser.
For me God == Santa Claus.
>You think that concept is 'reasonable'?
That's a funny one, ever since we have a quite good scientific understanding of how the universe is working, no religion has even been able to show that it was 'reasonable' to believe in it, so how teaching one religion to children could be reasonable??
I think that everybody agree that Bill Gates has made his fortune through his business skills and luck not because of his programming skills. So he may have spent 10,000 hours programming but this doesn't mean that he is a programming genius..
[[It's hard to imagine life without the null pointer!]] Nobody said that it would be *without* the null pointer, the idea is that a type reference would be non-nullable by default, but when you need it, you would declare your reference as 'nullable'.
So null is still here, it's just not the default.
Nice is a language which implement this: you can declare a reference either of type Foo (which means non-nullable) or of type Foo? (which means that the reference can be null).
Another behaviour by default that C got wrong is initialisation: by default your variables are not initialised so if you forget to initialise your variables your program may act randomly which is a pain to debug, the correct default would be to have all variables initialised by default but with the option to let variables non-initialised which can be useful as a performance optimisation.
Current crisis is one more proof that economy is 'wildly random' and that a stock market is even less reliable than a casino (where the randomness here is just 'normal'), so stock markets are like adding oil in a fire, they make crisis worse.. So the question is: is-it possible to have capitalism without a stock market or with a very regulated one?
I think that this is possible, but that it will take many crisis as the current one before the strict regulations start to kick in..
[[As you note, PDF is specifically designed to not be like a computer document, but rather to preserve printed media formatting. This makes them totally unsuitable for on-screen reading.]] Only if the screen is smaller than the page size used in the PDF, so 'totally unsuitable' is an exaggeration.
[[Why people continue to distribute documents that will never be printed in PDF format is beyond me.]] Because PDF retains formatting, which can be important even if the document isn't printed, for a CV for example..
You should have quoted the parent: for a moment I believed that you mistook energy production (ethanol) with energy distribution (H2 or electricity) as the GP did.
I've tried to use Chrome as my 'fallback' browser for some time but in the end, I gave up as Flash used too much CPU and memory with Chrome.. Sure you can kill the plugin easily in Chrome, but I'd prefer not having it started *at all*, so I'll retry Chrome once there is an easy way to ensure that I can see only the Flash animation which I select.
You know that it's quite funny: 10 minutes before reading the article about Chrome's emphasis on Javascript, I spent some time figuring how to disable an annoying 'vertically scrolling' ad on a website, it turned out that disabling Javascript was the key.
But I like Google's web application,so I have mixed feeling about Javascript..
>> and I've been told by some European doctor buddies that this sort of lax behavior in matters of sterile procedures is NOT tolerated in German hospitals.
Note that this doesn't apply everywhere in Europe: France has a high (compared to other European countries) number of illness caught in hospitals (unfortunately for me as I'm French).
Flash-aware filesystem currently only works on embeded setup where there is direct access to the Flash. Given the need for compatibility, SSD will always have a controller showing the SSD as a disk, but I agree that it'd be nice if they would add additionnal lower level access in the case the computer is able to use Flash-aware filesystem.
I think that you can compile only the filesystem you want in the kernel.. So the only complexity which matter to an user is the one of the filesystem they select to compile in the kernel!
BeOS had a very strong point not reproduced currently: responsiveness.
And it was (much) more responsive on a Celeron 333 with 128Mo than Linux or Windows are now on ten times more powerful hardware!!! As a nice bonus point, BeOS also booted quickly (14s from Lilo to a usable GUI)..
If being better than IE at the same price (free) leads only to a 20% marketshare, then to me this *strengthen* the argument that bundling is an effective way to assert a monopoly, not disprove it.
Beside given the size of Firefox or Opera, users on dialup may feel quite annoyed by having to download them..
Bah, OOffice and MS-Word are sufficiently identical that learning to use one makes it quite easy to learn the other one.
But there is a 'good for humanity' reason to shield children from MS-Office: file formats, OOffice has always used an open file formats, Microsoft has always tried to avoid open file format as much as possible, that is a significant difference.
>>I'm fairly well convinced that most people don't realize you can actually put the mouse on the left.
As a semy-lefty, I disagree for me the reason why leftie don't use the mouse with their left-hand is that it's easy enough with their right hand so they don't change it. It takes a lot of time and effort to learn to write, not so much using a mouse..
Agreed, there's one difference though: the live performance, while I like the latest Britey Spears I wouldn't want to see her live because either it would be a play-back or it would suck (not totally sure here as I've never heard her singing 'for real' but I consider this most likely).
But for example Sharleen Spitteri (of Texas fame), now that's something, she can even gives thrills singing 'a capella'.
But the price of those 15" OLED screen will be probably much higher than the price of the 24" LCD.. As DVD-audio has shown a superior technology doesn't win if consumers doesn't care about the benefits it bring, so will the better image qualities of OLED will be enough to compete even with the higher price tag?
Somehow I doubt it (and it could be the death knell of all these advanced display technology if OLED fails) but that's because I'm in a pessimistic mood;-)
Even if you activate the firewall before connecting to Internet? I doubt it.. My memory is fuzzy but I think that even original Windows XP had a firewall, but it was disabled by default (which was quite dumb or evil depending on how you look at it).
>Why is sound such a mess? That was a solved problem 15 years ago!
Criticism are easy, but solutions aren't: there's dozen of sound API, so anyway you look at it, as there's no real central decision power (for the OS not for the kernel), this issue will probably go on.. Wishful thinking (do this!) won't help.
As for the packaging I disagree, it brings significant benefits for the users for the software packaged by the distribution, but there should be room for commercial software downloaded from the website yes. I don't see any reason why 'app bundle' are incompatible with packaging.
Both issue are not really technical issues, it's more about making everyone agree on one solution.. And no I don't have the solution either.
[[the kernel _I_ use is not bloated. it's 20 something seconds from tapping enter on grub's menu to the login prompt (i log in text mode).]]
Uh? In autologin mode, with BeOS, the time from grub to a fully functionnal graphical desktop was 14s on a Celeron333 with 128Mo of RAM and that was several years ago, so I wouldn't bragg to much about 20+ seconds to boot the login prompt on a computer probably much, much more powerful: the Linux kernel you use is definitedly not optimised for fast booting..
Note that with current hardware it is possible to have fast boot with Linux: Arjan has made his Eee901 laptop boot Linux in 10s (without network and with an HDD, 5s with a SSD) using XFce as a desktop, yet it'll take probably a long time to have this included in a generic desktop distribution, *if* it happens this time, I'm cautiously optimistic as even though Arjan first patch to the Linux kernel was rejected, he rewrote his code and the other one has been accepted so he seems really dedicated to this goal but it'll take time..
>if trying to kill your king deserves such an unharsh word
Given that a (ruling) kind is just a dictator with the support of the religion, I don't see why trying to kill a king would necessarily deserve any harsh word..
If you do a discovery but do not make it public and then it's rediscovered by other (a very common occurence), what's the value of the original discovery?
Slashdot Mirror
[[ The main aim was to prevent (or at least forestall) any pressure for a cease-fire before Israel were able to seize the land they needed ]]
needed --> wanted.
Here the 'need' is a subjective one not an objective one.
>You honestly believe that religious people are all abusing their children?
We're talking about 'mental abuse' here: if you organised the education of your children so that even as grown-up they believe that Santa Claus is real, I would call you a child abuser.
For me God == Santa Claus.
>You think that concept is 'reasonable'?
That's a funny one, ever since we have a quite good scientific understanding of how the universe is working, no religion has even been able to show that it was 'reasonable' to believe in it, so how teaching one religion to children could be reasonable??
>>Belief in God and a respect and enthusiasm for science are not mutually exclusive.
But they are: if you really respect the scientific method, explain me how you applied it to choose the God you're believing in?
>so your program can act randomly when the default value is not suitable in your scenario
Your program won't act randomly, even if it's the wrong result at least you have a consistent/coherent behaviour which allow easy troubleshooting.
The default value assigned to a variable could be to a special 'unitialised value' but due to current CPU this has an hight performance cost..
>C++ solves that [cut]
No, it doesn't as this works only for user-defined types, and 'base type' are still quite used in C++ so this is only a very partial solution..
I think that everybody agree that Bill Gates has made his fortune through his business skills and luck not because of his programming skills.
So he may have spent 10,000 hours programming but this doesn't mean that he is a programming genius..
[[It's hard to imagine life without the null pointer!]]
Nobody said that it would be *without* the null pointer, the idea is that a type reference would be non-nullable by default, but when you need it, you would declare your reference as 'nullable'.
So null is still here, it's just not the default.
Nice is a language which implement this: you can declare a reference either of type Foo (which means non-nullable) or of type Foo? (which means that the reference can be null).
Another behaviour by default that C got wrong is initialisation: by default your variables are not initialised so if you forget to initialise your variables your program may act randomly which is a pain to debug, the correct default would be to have all variables initialised by default but with the option to let variables non-initialised which can be useful as a performance optimisation.
The things is are the exception of a model 'normal' vs 'abnormal'?
Benoit Mandelbrot and other think that the economy is 'wildly random', see this 2006 paper:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/5372968a-ba82-11da-980d-0000779e2340,dwp_uuid=77a9a0e8-b442-11da-bd61-0000779e2340.html
Current crisis is one more proof that economy is 'wildly random' and that a stock market is even less reliable than a casino (where the randomness here is just 'normal'), so stock markets are like adding oil in a fire, they make crisis worse..
So the question is: is-it possible to have capitalism without a stock market or with a very regulated one?
I think that this is possible, but that it will take many crisis as the current one before the strict regulations start to kick in..
[[As you note, PDF is specifically designed to not be like a computer document, but rather to preserve printed media formatting. This makes them totally unsuitable for on-screen reading.]]
Only if the screen is smaller than the page size used in the PDF, so 'totally unsuitable' is an exaggeration.
[[Why people continue to distribute documents that will never be printed in PDF format is beyond me.]]
Because PDF retains formatting, which can be important even if the document isn't printed, for a CV for example..
You should have quoted the parent: for a moment I believed that you mistook energy production (ethanol) with energy distribution (H2 or electricity) as the GP did.
I've tried to use Chrome as my 'fallback' browser for some time but in the end, I gave up as Flash used too much CPU and memory with Chrome..
Sure you can kill the plugin easily in Chrome, but I'd prefer not having it started *at all*, so I'll retry Chrome once there is an easy way to ensure that I can see only the Flash animation which I select.
You know that it's quite funny: 10 minutes before reading the article about Chrome's emphasis on Javascript, I spent some time figuring how to disable an annoying 'vertically scrolling' ad on a website, it turned out that disabling Javascript was the key.
But I like Google's web application,so I have mixed feeling about Javascript..
>> and I've been told by some European doctor buddies that this sort of lax behavior in matters of sterile procedures is NOT tolerated in German hospitals.
Note that this doesn't apply everywhere in Europe: France has a high (compared to other European countries) number of illness caught in hospitals (unfortunately for me as I'm French).
Flash-aware filesystem currently only works on embeded setup where there is direct access to the Flash.
Given the need for compatibility, SSD will always have a controller showing the SSD as a disk, but I agree that it'd be nice if they would add additionnal lower level access in the case the computer is able to use Flash-aware filesystem.
I think that you can compile only the filesystem you want in the kernel..
So the only complexity which matter to an user is the one of the filesystem they select to compile in the kernel!
BeOS had a very strong point not reproduced currently: responsiveness.
And it was (much) more responsive on a Celeron 333 with 128Mo than Linux or Windows are now on ten times more powerful hardware!!!
As a nice bonus point, BeOS also booted quickly (14s from Lilo to a usable GUI)..
The main drawback of BeOS the lack of software..
If being better than IE at the same price (free) leads only to a 20% marketshare, then to me this *strengthen* the argument that bundling is an effective way to assert a monopoly, not disprove it.
Beside given the size of Firefox or Opera, users on dialup may feel quite annoyed by having to download them..
Bah, OOffice and MS-Word are sufficiently identical that learning to use one makes it quite easy to learn the other one.
But there is a 'good for humanity' reason to shield children from MS-Office: file formats, OOffice has always used an open file formats, Microsoft has always tried to avoid open file format as much as possible, that is a significant difference.
>>I'm fairly well convinced that most people don't realize you can actually put the mouse on the left.
As a semy-lefty, I disagree for me the reason why leftie don't use the mouse with their left-hand is that it's easy enough with their right hand so they don't change it.
It takes a lot of time and effort to learn to write, not so much using a mouse..
Agreed, there's one difference though: the live performance, while I like the latest Britey Spears I wouldn't want to see her live because either it would be a play-back or it would suck (not totally sure here as I've never heard her singing 'for real' but I consider this most likely).
But for example Sharleen Spitteri (of Texas fame), now that's something, she can even gives thrills singing 'a capella'.
But the price of those 15" OLED screen will be probably much higher than the price of the 24" LCD..
As DVD-audio has shown a superior technology doesn't win if consumers doesn't care about the benefits it bring, so will the better image qualities of OLED will be enough to compete even with the higher price tag?
Somehow I doubt it (and it could be the death knell of all these advanced display technology if OLED fails) but that's because I'm in a pessimistic mood ;-)
Even if you activate the firewall before connecting to Internet?
I doubt it.. My memory is fuzzy but I think that even original Windows XP had a firewall, but it was disabled by default (which was quite dumb or evil depending on how you look at it).
>Why is sound such a mess? That was a solved problem 15 years ago!
Criticism are easy, but solutions aren't: there's dozen of sound API, so anyway you look at it, as there's no real central decision power (for the OS not for the kernel), this issue will probably go on..
Wishful thinking (do this!) won't help.
As for the packaging I disagree, it brings significant benefits for the users for the software packaged by the distribution, but there should be room for commercial software downloaded from the website yes. I don't see any reason why 'app bundle' are incompatible with packaging.
Both issue are not really technical issues, it's more about making everyone agree on one solution..
And no I don't have the solution either.
[[the kernel _I_ use is not bloated. it's 20 something seconds from tapping enter on grub's menu to the login prompt (i log in text mode).]]
Uh? In autologin mode, with BeOS, the time from grub to a fully functionnal graphical desktop was 14s on a Celeron333 with 128Mo of RAM and that was several years ago, so I wouldn't bragg to much about 20+ seconds to boot the login prompt on a computer probably much, much more powerful: the Linux kernel you use is definitedly not optimised for fast booting..
Note that with current hardware it is possible to have fast boot with Linux: Arjan has made his Eee901 laptop boot Linux in 10s (without network and with an HDD, 5s with a SSD) using XFce as a desktop, yet it'll take probably a long time to have this included in a generic desktop distribution, *if* it happens this time, I'm cautiously optimistic as even though Arjan first patch to the Linux kernel was rejected, he rewrote his code and the other one has been accepted so he seems really dedicated to this goal but it'll take time..
>if trying to kill your king deserves such an unharsh word
Given that a (ruling) kind is just a dictator with the support of the religion, I don't see why trying to kill a king would necessarily deserve any harsh word..
Valuable?
If you do a discovery but do not make it public and then it's rediscovered by other (a very common occurence), what's the value of the original discovery?
Except for bragging rights, not much..