So, I followed the link to the data, looked around a bit, and decided to see if I could get ahold of a decently large and interesting dataset that I could play with. I've been messing around with Fortran and OpenMP, and this sounded interesting.
So I go to the website, and it's... bad. Slow as fuck, no browsability (just searching through large categories), back button doesn't work right... it might be all right if you know exactly what you're looking for, but there's no discoverability there.
So I came here and it's nothing but asshats talking about their insecurities over gender issues.
Clinton's situation is exactly like Nixon's, except she doesn't have anything to resign from.
Think about it. Nixon was raked over the coals by the press and the Dems. Nixon was never convicted. A president let Nixon off "for the good of the country."
Clinton is being raked over the coals by the press and the GOP. Clinton won't be convicted as long as the Dems hold the White House. The current president is making excuses for Clinton.
Clinton might actually get convicted if a Republican wins the White House, although I doubt it. The Clintons have a lot of influence, even across the aisle. It'd also set a precedent, and no politician wants to face the chance of being held responsible for their actions. Honestly, I was shocked when Scooter Libby was convicted (although note who was convicted, what he was actually convicted of, and that jail was considered "too harsh" for what could be argued was a national security breach).
As far as Obama's situation - what situation are you talking about? What has Obama done that a president would fear impeachment? Any Democratic president would have the nuttier part of the Republican party screaming for impeachment, just as the nuttier part of the Democratic party was screaming for Bush's.
The entire point of political parties is to create a group of people who believe in similar things so that they can pull favors from each other and give each other a lift when they need it. There's nothing democratic about them at all - they consist entirely of back room deals and power plays. They're a necessary evil - our system of government couldn't exist without them - but don't expect justice or personal responsibility.
No, he hasn't. It's the same standard that's always applied to people at that level of power.
Laws don't apply to those in power. They're tools to be used against rivals, or just a way to control those without power. It's been that way ever since laws have existed, and it exists in every form of government. If someone can't get themselves out of trouble, they don't really have power, do they?
I've got a few Sun keyboards around here with the extra keys on the left, and never did use them for anything (other than Stop-A to drop to the firmware). I've always been curious how useful those would be, but never used a Sun workstation for anything other than sysadmin stuff. I don't like the keyboards much, though, so I never seriously considered getting the adapter to use them on PCs.
I thought it'd be cool to get a 104-key and have custom caps printed with Super and Hyper (for the Windows and Properties keys), but Unicomp don't offer that sort of thing for meta keys.
There's a lot of people that think we should be taking a closer look at lava tubes on the moon as potential sites for bases. The same could be used on Mars. No radiation, stable temperature, protection from micrometeorites... seems a no-brainer, except we haven't actually explored them yet.
With less gravity, you can have larger caves. There is evidence for lava tubes on the moon that you could fit stadiums in.
Something like this could be a cost effective way of using natural caves and lava tubes as bases. If you want the fabric to press against the walls, though, you'd have to do some excavation and smoothing first, though.
I had one of those (the original from IBM, not the Unicomp version). The plug wasn't compatible with anything I had, though, so I ended up tossing it.
I've thought about picking up one from Unicomp (I use their 101 key type-M remakes exclusively), but there's a few things that would drive me nuts, like where the backslash/pipe key is.
Have you set up actions for all the extra keys? Is that as useful as it seems it should be?
It's not about the public being willing to pay for it. The public doesn't get the choice.
Eliminating customer service personnel is a cost cutting measure. That's the real reason why banks are generally closing branch offices and pushing online banking. That's also why you either get a robot or some person with an indecipherable hindi accent when you call tech support. Do they ask the customers if they're willing to pay extra for these things? Generally, no.
It's not about customer choice, it's about economics.
I'm fully aware my plea for retaining human customer service personnel will remain unheeded. I just think it sucks.
Not all ATMs have the service, and the service isn't available all the time.
Just look for the ATMs near the scantily clad loiterers at night. Use the ATM to withdraw cash, then hand it to the woman in the corset and fishnet stockings standing nearby. The better ones are self-cleaning and offer better privacy than the alley around the corner.
You want to replace factory workers with robots? Sure, sounds great. It's worked well for the automotive industry, among others.
You want to replace the secretary pool and filing clerks with computers? Already happened, worked out just fine.
Simple tasks, such as replacing the greasy dude behind the counter at the local burger joint with a touchscreen ordering system? OK, I can see the use in that.
But stop replacing customer service positions with computers. People know how to interact with people. When we get a "friendly AI" on the phone, it's usually an exercise in frustration. It won't fair any better in meatspace. If I wanted my bank teller to be a robot, I'd just use the #**$ing ATM.
When, and for whom, do you wish to write OpenGL/Vulkan for?
If you plan on writing code for platforms that universally support Vulkan (or will by the time you actually write your code), then learn that. If you plan on writing code for platforms that don't or won't anytime soon, learn OpenGL.
An example: Blender is just now removing OpenGL 1.3 code from the codebase, because the official policy is to enable backwards compatibility for low-end and older cards (there's a lot of third-world use of Blender). I believe the current release was the first to officially drop Windows XP support. If you wanted to write code for Blender, OpenGL is the way to go.
If you want to write for PCs, learn OpenGL. There's a ton of legacy OpenGL code out there and no GPU manufacturer is going to drop support any time soon. For high-end games that require the fastest and newest machines, Vulkan is an option, but probably not the way to go for a couple years at least.
On the other hand, if you want to write code for phones and tablets that will all have Vulkan support, then learn that.
Yes, it'd be hard. It'd be impractical for most people. But you do still have the right to live a nomadic lifestyle if you want, which was the only point I was making.
My family comes from the Ozark mountains (a hilly, forested region in the U.S. around Arkansas and Missouri). They were poor, but they owned a small farm and had no debt. They didn't make much money from the farm, but were able to keep themselves alive by a mixture of growing their own food and supplementing that with gathering and fishing. My grandmother and her brother spent quite a bit of time in the forest searching for edibles as children. Her father and uncle brought back fish and the occasional critter (squirrel, opossum, whatever they could trap). Her mother and aunt canned and preserved food to keep them alive in the winter.
The trespassing wasn't legal in the U.S. From what I understand, it would be legal there (although the fishing would be harder, since you're not allowed to use a pole, and the hunting would be out). Had law enforcement cared, my family would have had to join the hordes of homeless, wandering families looking for work and food that were so common in that era. The right to wander would have made the difference.
I've never been to Norway, nor do I personally know anyone from there. All I have to go on is the Wikipedia article, which states:
Ancient traces provide evidence of the freedom to roam in many European countries, suggesting such a freedom was once a common norm. Today, the right to roam has survived in perhaps its purest form in Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.
Its primary use might be to allow you to enjoy nature, but I highly doubt that was its primary function. I'm not an expert on Scandinavian history, but I doubt the tradition was formed with recreational camping in mind.
That doesn't mean that you can just cut down someones trees and build a log cabin and start to shoot moose all year round.
I didn't insinuate that you could.
I read "hunt their own food" more in a "eat all the wild berries and mushrooms you can find" sense than a "shoot all the moose" sense. Perhaps I should have been more clear.
Not disputing your point, but providing information:
1000 years ago, an unemployed person could still find wilderness and hunt their own food. Today that is not possible in *any?* western country anymore.
It's called the Freedom to Roam. A number of countries have it. It's considered a basic fundamental right in countries like Sweden and Finland.
Like most things though, it only works if only a few take advantage of that right. There's not enough wilderness to sustain everyone if we all decided to adopt the hunter/gatherer lifestyle.
You can say whatever you want as yourself*, and the government can't stop you.
If you're speaking as a representative of the government, however, the government can put limits on your speech, just like any employer can. As an example, IBM is well within their rights to fire an employee that badmouths their products while on service calls. A police officer that badmouths the mayor while in uniform can also be fired.
The government can certainly discriminate against employees or potential employees based on their views and political leanings**. I believe I was asked if I was a communist whenever I enlisted in the military.
TL;DR: Erik Barnett, the guy that lives on the corner and has the green lawn flamingos, can say whatever he wants. Erik Barnett, assistant deputy director at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and attache to the European Union at the Department of Homeland Security, can't.
[*] within various limits, fire in a theater, etc. [**] imagine the lawsuits for every presidential appointee if this wasn't the case
Non-digit unicode characters with a numeric value (½ and such) can now be used for that numeric value
and
Provide tau constant (also: )
(There's a Unicode tau there that slashdot won't pass)
I've seen this in Emacs LISP, but I haven't seen it elsewhere (granted, I mostly use older languages...). I imagine non-ASCII characters in code are going to be a point of contention among developers.
Related:
Superscripts can now be used for integer powers
I haven't payed much attention to Perl 6 (I use Perl 5 for a lot, though), but now I'm looking forward to playing with this.
It sounds like you don't use GNOME like it is intended either. Sure, you get what you want - for the most part - if you go without the panel and use compiz and build an OSX-like interface, etc. etc.
At that point, you're not running GNOME. You're using GNOME components.
As far as what's missing, it was like I said: configurability. There was a constant push to remove options from settings panels, and a constant push towards a Windows-like workflow. That's great for people coming from Windows. It sucks for people like me, who actually liked OpenLook, FVWM, and Afterstep, and whose first actions upon a new install is to put a launch icon for xterm and add a grid of desktops with edge flipping.
It's been fifteen years, I can't give you specifics. The mailing lists should still be there, and you'll find people on them (including myself) complaining about the process. My point was merely that people have been complaining about UX designers mucking about with GNOME for long before 3.x.
Oh, and I like Motif, too, in a strange sort of way. Want to talk about removal of configrability, just ask where X resources went.
Emacs isn't hard to learn. It's certainly no harder than vi. It helps to ignore all the parts in the tutorial about being compatible with old terminals - in other words, if you like using PgUp/PgDown and the arrow keys, use them - they work just fine.
If you do a lot of text editing, you just switch to it. In a couple weeks you'll be up to your old speed or faster than you were in whatever you used to use (unless what you used to use was just a simple editor, in which case you'll be up to speed in much less time). Learning to customize it involves learning some LISP, but LISP syntax is simple and you can pick it up pretty quick (probably quicker than vimscript, anyway). I came from vim so I use evil mode, which gives Emacs vi keybindings.
So, you have coworker with a different skillset, and you blame his choice of tools rather than the person himself?
Did you come here from 4chan?
I can't make out your point. Something about Unicode, some implication that open source doesn't offer features (which is false), a bunch of talk about various graphical stuff with the implication that those are unavailable in open source (the only one that might apply to is CAD, but I don't do CAD so I don't know), and then some sort of rant about GUI vs. CLI that doesn't apply to any of this (are you under the impression that all open source apps are CLI?).
Slashdot Mirror
So, I followed the link to the data, looked around a bit, and decided to see if I could get ahold of a decently large and interesting dataset that I could play with. I've been messing around with Fortran and OpenMP, and this sounded interesting.
So I go to the website, and it's... bad. Slow as fuck, no browsability (just searching through large categories), back button doesn't work right... it might be all right if you know exactly what you're looking for, but there's no discoverability there.
So I came here and it's nothing but asshats talking about their insecurities over gender issues.
Guess this place really is dead now.
It's also the world's messiest urinal.
Clinton's situation is exactly like Nixon's, except she doesn't have anything to resign from.
Think about it. Nixon was raked over the coals by the press and the Dems. Nixon was never convicted. A president let Nixon off "for the good of the country."
Clinton is being raked over the coals by the press and the GOP. Clinton won't be convicted as long as the Dems hold the White House. The current president is making excuses for Clinton.
Clinton might actually get convicted if a Republican wins the White House, although I doubt it. The Clintons have a lot of influence, even across the aisle. It'd also set a precedent, and no politician wants to face the chance of being held responsible for their actions. Honestly, I was shocked when Scooter Libby was convicted (although note who was convicted, what he was actually convicted of, and that jail was considered "too harsh" for what could be argued was a national security breach).
As far as Obama's situation - what situation are you talking about? What has Obama done that a president would fear impeachment? Any Democratic president would have the nuttier part of the Republican party screaming for impeachment, just as the nuttier part of the Democratic party was screaming for Bush's.
The entire point of political parties is to create a group of people who believe in similar things so that they can pull favors from each other and give each other a lift when they need it. There's nothing democratic about them at all - they consist entirely of back room deals and power plays. They're a necessary evil - our system of government couldn't exist without them - but don't expect justice or personal responsibility.
Sorry, that's a level of evil far beyond what even emacs is capable of. You may want to consult a priest, or perhaps a demolitions expert.
so, then, why did Nixon resign?
I may not know everything, but at least I know how to read and apply critical thinking.
I said:
Laws don't apply to those in power. They're tools to be used against rivals, or just a way to control those without power.
Emphasis added for the thinking impaired.
Nixon wasn't the only person with power. He still had enough to never be convicted, though.
Since you've turned this into a personal attack, log in or I'll just ignore you from now on.
Obama has clearly set a double standard
No, he hasn't. It's the same standard that's always applied to people at that level of power.
Laws don't apply to those in power. They're tools to be used against rivals, or just a way to control those without power. It's been that way ever since laws have existed, and it exists in every form of government. If someone can't get themselves out of trouble, they don't really have power, do they?
It's still a better term than "thieves," which even people around here use, which is just as inaccurate.
A lot of people who do not-for-profit copyright infringement call themselves pirates. I'd say the definition has changed.
I run emacs with evil mode, so everyone can hate me.
Oh wow, I've looked for those before and never found them. Thanks, man.
I've got a few Sun keyboards around here with the extra keys on the left, and never did use them for anything (other than Stop-A to drop to the firmware). I've always been curious how useful those would be, but never used a Sun workstation for anything other than sysadmin stuff. I don't like the keyboards much, though, so I never seriously considered getting the adapter to use them on PCs.
I thought it'd be cool to get a 104-key and have custom caps printed with Super and Hyper (for the Windows and Properties keys), but Unicomp don't offer that sort of thing for meta keys.
There's a lot of people that think we should be taking a closer look at lava tubes on the moon as potential sites for bases. The same could be used on Mars. No radiation, stable temperature, protection from micrometeorites... seems a no-brainer, except we haven't actually explored them yet.
With less gravity, you can have larger caves. There is evidence for lava tubes on the moon that you could fit stadiums in.
Something like this could be a cost effective way of using natural caves and lava tubes as bases. If you want the fabric to press against the walls, though, you'd have to do some excavation and smoothing first, though.
I had one of those (the original from IBM, not the Unicomp version). The plug wasn't compatible with anything I had, though, so I ended up tossing it.
I've thought about picking up one from Unicomp (I use their 101 key type-M remakes exclusively), but there's a few things that would drive me nuts, like where the backslash/pipe key is.
Have you set up actions for all the extra keys? Is that as useful as it seems it should be?
It's not about the public being willing to pay for it. The public doesn't get the choice.
Eliminating customer service personnel is a cost cutting measure. That's the real reason why banks are generally closing branch offices and pushing online banking. That's also why you either get a robot or some person with an indecipherable hindi accent when you call tech support. Do they ask the customers if they're willing to pay extra for these things? Generally, no.
It's not about customer choice, it's about economics.
I'm fully aware my plea for retaining human customer service personnel will remain unheeded. I just think it sucks.
Not all ATMs have the service, and the service isn't available all the time.
Just look for the ATMs near the scantily clad loiterers at night. Use the ATM to withdraw cash, then hand it to the woman in the corset and fishnet stockings standing nearby. The better ones are self-cleaning and offer better privacy than the alley around the corner.
Oh yeah, here.
You want to replace factory workers with robots? Sure, sounds great. It's worked well for the automotive industry, among others.
You want to replace the secretary pool and filing clerks with computers? Already happened, worked out just fine.
Simple tasks, such as replacing the greasy dude behind the counter at the local burger joint with a touchscreen ordering system? OK, I can see the use in that.
But stop replacing customer service positions with computers. People know how to interact with people. When we get a "friendly AI" on the phone, it's usually an exercise in frustration. It won't fair any better in meatspace. If I wanted my bank teller to be a robot, I'd just use the #**$ing ATM.
When, and for whom, do you wish to write OpenGL/Vulkan for?
If you plan on writing code for platforms that universally support Vulkan (or will by the time you actually write your code), then learn that. If you plan on writing code for platforms that don't or won't anytime soon, learn OpenGL.
An example: Blender is just now removing OpenGL 1.3 code from the codebase, because the official policy is to enable backwards compatibility for low-end and older cards (there's a lot of third-world use of Blender). I believe the current release was the first to officially drop Windows XP support. If you wanted to write code for Blender, OpenGL is the way to go.
If you want to write for PCs, learn OpenGL. There's a ton of legacy OpenGL code out there and no GPU manufacturer is going to drop support any time soon. For high-end games that require the fastest and newest machines, Vulkan is an option, but probably not the way to go for a couple years at least.
On the other hand, if you want to write code for phones and tablets that will all have Vulkan support, then learn that.
Yes, it'd be hard. It'd be impractical for most people. But you do still have the right to live a nomadic lifestyle if you want, which was the only point I was making.
My family comes from the Ozark mountains (a hilly, forested region in the U.S. around Arkansas and Missouri). They were poor, but they owned a small farm and had no debt. They didn't make much money from the farm, but were able to keep themselves alive by a mixture of growing their own food and supplementing that with gathering and fishing. My grandmother and her brother spent quite a bit of time in the forest searching for edibles as children. Her father and uncle brought back fish and the occasional critter (squirrel, opossum, whatever they could trap). Her mother and aunt canned and preserved food to keep them alive in the winter.
The trespassing wasn't legal in the U.S. From what I understand, it would be legal there (although the fishing would be harder, since you're not allowed to use a pole, and the hunting would be out). Had law enforcement cared, my family would have had to join the hordes of homeless, wandering families looking for work and food that were so common in that era. The right to wander would have made the difference.
I've never been to Norway, nor do I personally know anyone from there. All I have to go on is the Wikipedia article, which states:
Ancient traces provide evidence of the freedom to roam in many European countries, suggesting such a freedom was once a common norm. Today, the right to roam has survived in perhaps its purest form in Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.
Its primary use might be to allow you to enjoy nature, but I highly doubt that was its primary function. I'm not an expert on Scandinavian history, but I doubt the tradition was formed with recreational camping in mind.
That doesn't mean that you can just cut down someones trees and build a log cabin and start to shoot moose all year round.
I didn't insinuate that you could.
I read "hunt their own food" more in a "eat all the wild berries and mushrooms you can find" sense than a "shoot all the moose" sense. Perhaps I should have been more clear.
Not disputing your point, but providing information:
1000 years ago, an unemployed person could still find wilderness and hunt their own food. Today that is not possible in *any?* western country anymore.
It's called the Freedom to Roam. A number of countries have it. It's considered a basic fundamental right in countries like Sweden and Finland.
Like most things though, it only works if only a few take advantage of that right. There's not enough wilderness to sustain everyone if we all decided to adopt the hunter/gatherer lifestyle.
That's not quite how freedom of speech works.
You can say whatever you want as yourself*, and the government can't stop you.
If you're speaking as a representative of the government, however, the government can put limits on your speech, just like any employer can. As an example, IBM is well within their rights to fire an employee that badmouths their products while on service calls. A police officer that badmouths the mayor while in uniform can also be fired.
The government can certainly discriminate against employees or potential employees based on their views and political leanings**. I believe I was asked if I was a communist whenever I enlisted in the military.
TL;DR: Erik Barnett, the guy that lives on the corner and has the green lawn flamingos, can say whatever he wants. Erik Barnett, assistant deputy director at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and attache to the European Union at the Department of Homeland Security, can't.
[*] within various limits, fire in a theater, etc.
[**] imagine the lawsuits for every presidential appointee if this wasn't the case
One thing that caught my eye was this:
Non-digit unicode characters with a numeric value (½ and such) can now be used for that numeric value
and
Provide tau constant (also: )
(There's a Unicode tau there that slashdot won't pass)
I've seen this in Emacs LISP, but I haven't seen it elsewhere (granted, I mostly use older languages...). I imagine non-ASCII characters in code are going to be a point of contention among developers.
Related:
Superscripts can now be used for integer powers
I haven't payed much attention to Perl 6 (I use Perl 5 for a lot, though), but now I'm looking forward to playing with this.
It sounds like you don't use GNOME like it is intended either. Sure, you get what you want - for the most part - if you go without the panel and use compiz and build an OSX-like interface, etc. etc.
At that point, you're not running GNOME. You're using GNOME components.
As far as what's missing, it was like I said: configurability. There was a constant push to remove options from settings panels, and a constant push towards a Windows-like workflow. That's great for people coming from Windows. It sucks for people like me, who actually liked OpenLook, FVWM, and Afterstep, and whose first actions upon a new install is to put a launch icon for xterm and add a grid of desktops with edge flipping.
It's been fifteen years, I can't give you specifics. The mailing lists should still be there, and you'll find people on them (including myself) complaining about the process. My point was merely that people have been complaining about UX designers mucking about with GNOME for long before 3.x.
Oh, and I like Motif, too, in a strange sort of way. Want to talk about removal of configrability, just ask where X resources went.
Emacs isn't hard to learn. It's certainly no harder than vi. It helps to ignore all the parts in the tutorial about being compatible with old terminals - in other words, if you like using PgUp/PgDown and the arrow keys, use them - they work just fine.
If you do a lot of text editing, you just switch to it. In a couple weeks you'll be up to your old speed or faster than you were in whatever you used to use (unless what you used to use was just a simple editor, in which case you'll be up to speed in much less time). Learning to customize it involves learning some LISP, but LISP syntax is simple and you can pick it up pretty quick (probably quicker than vimscript, anyway). I came from vim so I use evil mode, which gives Emacs vi keybindings.
So, you have coworker with a different skillset, and you blame his choice of tools rather than the person himself?
Did you come here from 4chan?
I can't make out your point. Something about Unicode, some implication that open source doesn't offer features (which is false), a bunch of talk about various graphical stuff with the implication that those are unavailable in open source (the only one that might apply to is CAD, but I don't do CAD so I don't know), and then some sort of rant about GUI vs. CLI that doesn't apply to any of this (are you under the impression that all open source apps are CLI?).
I hope your coworker is more coherent than you.