Well the verb is still about the notion of something being free from bonds, or released. So there can't be confusion with it. It's just a grammatical conversion. Also, the verb form of lose is quite different, especially because it can mean something more 'symbolic' like being defeated in a war. People just spell 'lose' wrong.
Lose=misplace something, defeat, etc.
Loose=something not tight, not restrained, etc.
Not trying to flame or bitch about anything, just trying to put an end to this spelling error.
And according to what everyone thinks when you talk about memory sizes, KB=1024 Bytes, MB=1024 KiloBytes, GB=1024 MegaBytes, etc. The companies that create harddisks and other storage devices know this and take advantage of it. Actually I'm impressed that someone sued them and actually won. I thought it was a lost cause but apparently it isn't. Still, I haven't seen a HDD offer that expresses the size in 'real' GigaBytes.
Also, fuck karma... I don't want to get to 40 and start to be a complete asshole because I didn't express something that annoyed me in my youth. Telling someone he is not funny may be rude, harsh and just bad behavior but it helps both of us in the long run. I appreciate when someone tells me that I already told him/her that joke or that I shouldn't tell anymore of those because they don't like it. Sure, it's kind of embarrassing but how else can I know what others want to hear or not?
"Newton's ideas are obsolete? They seem pretty solid to me. Relatively speaking, there are very few cases where his ideas are insufficient."
My point exactly: although it has been demonstrated that they aren't related perfectly to reality we still use them in the cases where they work. That was what I wanted to say.
About the joke part: I was mostly complaining that he attacks BASIC so the joke problem is not that big. But you can't say reading the same jokes over and over is not an issue if you just don't laugh at them. If you are in a group of friends and some idiot keeps saying unfunny jokes doesn't he ruin your mood? Of course I could skip 1,2,3 of them but when they repeat too many times it gets annoying.
Newton wasn't the first one in anything, he just came up with a better explanation for a lot of phenomena than the others before him. That's what BASIC did too at the time: it gave a solution to a problem and it apparently did it well.
I don't understand how BASIC can make such a bad programmer out of you: if you are looking at C vs. BASIC and you can't see why you should choose C although it's harder to code then you probably should keep to simple programming at most. Some people are just not meant to code, no matter how they begin. What BASIC does is give an extremely easy starter kit because you can just start writing and the freakin' program works. It's frustrating for a beginner to learn to use C from scratch. BASIC gives you the opportunity to practice algorithms without the hassle of what actually makes the program work. After you can handle simple algorithms you can start learning about computer related issues. When I need to test a simple algorithm I sometimes do it in QBasic because I get faster results and it's easier to plot a graph or something like that from scratch.
And that stuff is extremely redundant, I'm new here and I'm already tired of this everlasting bash on things some of you decide are bad. I did a lot of programming in BASIC, I learned a lot of things from it. I moved to other languages when I realized that BASIC did lack a lot of stuff but I'll never forget the moment I ran my first program and started to understand how it works. By your way of thinking we should bash Newton, Aristotle and others that made great achievements just because their ideas are now obsolete. Some of them still work in certain cases.
If you were trying just to be funny then learn some new friggin jokes.
I was going to agree with you that BASIC can be a programming language if used properly and patiently but then I saw your sig and i think you deserve your "1, troll". Nothing personal though, you are on slashdot, you know the 'risks'.
or you could have read the article:
"But Kemeny and Kurtz used what they learned to craft the Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, or Basic, starting in 1963."
No way, good usability is about making the interface intuitive with sane defaults but also making it enough customizable so people that don't like those defaults can change the way it behaves. This applies to the options too, if you think people might not think about the possibility of changing something, make it more obvious. In this case put a small checkbox in the most used menus or around the textbox. It's not that hard, they probably have some technical problems: a previous poster said something like they don't know how to handle this or that so they're forcing something easier to maintain. If they're just stubborn then it will probably get forked and in time, replaced by the new less restrictive client (of course, if it's properly maintained and all).
Yep, there is no democracy and never will be. Any kind of government tries to rule over the people, forcing to give them more power which they will use to get even more power. The 'democracy' these days is a way to do that. The thing is that it's more effective because people think they are free and that they have 'god given' rights that no-one can deny them. All they need is something to keep them busy, like sports, terrorism, war on communism, fear of nuclear war, hunger in Africa, etc. The sadder part is that most people that realize this, are not fully aware of its seriousness, don't care as long as they live OK or talk about it in places where only a handful of people get their ideas and even less agree with them (like me:D).
Oh man, it would be perfect... if they fail maybe they will at least release the sources to windows to ease up their stay in hell when they die and we would have enough material for ThedailyWTF for years!
I'm not saying we should stop improving things but that we should care more about backwards and (especially) forward compatibility.
The problem with most tools is that no one thinks ahead and we have to create new protocols for every new feature in the device. One of the reasons to this is the format wars which should be directed by some neutral party not the companies because then the winner is the the one with the most resources and lack of morality.
That was my point, not that computers are easy to produce these days but that require a lot of research and developing if you start low, like from the steam powered engine. Even if we retain the knowledge so we don't have to reinvent everything, it's still a long way to go.
"You can not have government control of the Infrastructure and individual freedom at the same time. When government is in control, it suppresses the individual to the will of the state, and imprisons or kills those who refuse to be trampled."
Well it's still better than what happens when the companies have control. The government is somewhat forced to make it better for the people but companies have no interest in caring for their customers as long as they get the money. And considering the owners of the company are still people they have immunity over the will of the customers (unless they do something illegal but they usually are careful with that). That immunity is granted by the government, which in theory is the expression of the people. Now that is not right at all.
well the problem is not the hardware itself but the software. we need some basic standards that we can trust to be there in 50 or 100 years from now for networking, documents, video, music and image files. we have the wrong conception that we have to change everything every 5 years and that doesn't count only for computers.
but as i said in a post for the drm article the only completely reliable way to store data is in a form that doesn't need auxiliary devices to work: books for documents and pictures for images; for music, video and other types of storage we could create some devices that can give you the information by themselves, like an mp3 player that can last 1000years without failing (or a phonograph or cassette recorder), a manual powered video projector:P, etc
yes but the full chain of research and production that was needed to get to the HDD needs a lot more energy than any library. that was his point: if something were to happen to the industry and market that enables the use of computers and we go back to the 19th century it's always good to have some simple way of retrieving knowledge like books. that's what happened in the middle ages, the romans were overwhelmed with barbarians that didn't care for their knowledge and it took us 1000 years (or more if you want) to get back to the same level of civilization. imagine the frustration of the people 30 years from now if they lose electricity and they get to lose any knowledge about how anything works although they have it all on pieces of metal that they can't use. after the current population dies, they're gonna go back to the middle ages.
in short: i trust books more than computers. /*doomsday theory over*/
1. that was his point, they define efficiency not as the percentage of raw energy transformed because we all know that is impossible to do that with 100% efficiency. they probably found out that they can do it for say a maximum of 70% efficiency and they are now at 35%. something like a practical efficiency not theoretical.
2. well in that case the definition is again misleading, if you want the bullet to get in the head, then shooting them in the head is 100% efficient. if you want to kill the guy then those that lived afterwards will lower the efficiency.
because people like aspiring to more or less godlike powers and the fact that the jedi and sith needed any kind of help to do all that 'magic', that they weren't gods by themselves pisses off everyone.
i would personally choose having weak telekinetic powers on my own rather than some machine reading my mind and moving objects as i please:D
yeah, and considering the usa has the largest budget in the world you would think that they would need a smaller percentage for military in order to maintain military superiority. i guess it's never enough...
the problem is like in any other country the fact that the people don't know much about how their taxes are spent. i'm not an american but if i would have been i would be pissed to find out that the military gets some 20% while nasa gets less than 1% (there was an article about this on slashdot, can't find it).
i'm not flaming the americans for being ignorant or something because this happens everywhere, including in my country. democracy is just another way of forcing something on the people but a lot more effective because it's done in the name of freedom and it gives you the impression that you matter and that what you want will someday, somehow be done.
yeah, but you would have to eat a lot more for the same amount of energy and nutrients. that's why we need to eat meat, because our way of life demands large quantities of energy that we can't get out of plants. herbivores spend most of their time eating: that is how much they need to eat. sure, there are vegan methods that should be able to sustain you but most vegetarians i know are less energetic and full of life than meat-eaters.
i actually use konqueror along with the shortcuts you are talking about but it's not good enough. the ctrl-tapping thing is great but only works if there are only a handful of links on the page. it should at least put shortcuts for the links visible, not from the beginning of the page. even then it wouldn't be as good as being able to select any control on the page with the cursor keys (tabbing is a pain in the ass compared to going to the mouse and clicking the thing).
that's why i hate browsing. it's very mouse oriented. i would love to see a browser that has a system like those on mobiles where you can scroll and select with the keyboard. it would make browsing enjoyable for me, because for now it's painful to keep going back to the mouse when i need to click a simple link.
Slashdot Mirror
Well the verb is still about the notion of something being free from bonds, or released. So there can't be confusion with it. It's just a grammatical conversion. Also, the verb form of lose is quite different, especially because it can mean something more 'symbolic' like being defeated in a war. People just spell 'lose' wrong.
Lose=misplace something, defeat, etc.
Loose=something not tight, not restrained, etc.
Not trying to flame or bitch about anything, just trying to put an end to this spelling error.
And according to what everyone thinks when you talk about memory sizes, KB=1024 Bytes, MB=1024 KiloBytes, GB=1024 MegaBytes, etc. The companies that create harddisks and other storage devices know this and take advantage of it. Actually I'm impressed that someone sued them and actually won. I thought it was a lost cause but apparently it isn't. Still, I haven't seen a HDD offer that expresses the size in 'real' GigaBytes.
Also, fuck karma... I don't want to get to 40 and start to be a complete asshole because I didn't express something that annoyed me in my youth. Telling someone he is not funny may be rude, harsh and just bad behavior but it helps both of us in the long run. I appreciate when someone tells me that I already told him/her that joke or that I shouldn't tell anymore of those because they don't like it. Sure, it's kind of embarrassing but how else can I know what others want to hear or not?
"Newton's ideas are obsolete? They seem pretty solid to me. Relatively speaking, there are very few cases where his ideas are insufficient."
My point exactly: although it has been demonstrated that they aren't related perfectly to reality we still use them in the cases where they work. That was what I wanted to say.
About the joke part: I was mostly complaining that he attacks BASIC so the joke problem is not that big. But you can't say reading the same jokes over and over is not an issue if you just don't laugh at them. If you are in a group of friends and some idiot keeps saying unfunny jokes doesn't he ruin your mood? Of course I could skip 1,2,3 of them but when they repeat too many times it gets annoying.
Newton wasn't the first one in anything, he just came up with a better explanation for a lot of phenomena than the others before him. That's what BASIC did too at the time: it gave a solution to a problem and it apparently did it well.
I don't understand how BASIC can make such a bad programmer out of you: if you are looking at C vs. BASIC and you can't see why you should choose C although it's harder to code then you probably should keep to simple programming at most. Some people are just not meant to code, no matter how they begin. What BASIC does is give an extremely easy starter kit because you can just start writing and the freakin' program works. It's frustrating for a beginner to learn to use C from scratch. BASIC gives you the opportunity to practice algorithms without the hassle of what actually makes the program work. After you can handle simple algorithms you can start learning about computer related issues. When I need to test a simple algorithm I sometimes do it in QBasic because I get faster results and it's easier to plot a graph or something like that from scratch.
And that stuff is extremely redundant, I'm new here and I'm already tired of this everlasting bash on things some of you decide are bad. I did a lot of programming in BASIC, I learned a lot of things from it. I moved to other languages when I realized that BASIC did lack a lot of stuff but I'll never forget the moment I ran my first program and started to understand how it works. By your way of thinking we should bash Newton, Aristotle and others that made great achievements just because their ideas are now obsolete. Some of them still work in certain cases.
If you were trying just to be funny then learn some new friggin jokes.
I was going to agree with you that BASIC can be a programming language if used properly and patiently but then I saw your sig and i think you deserve your "1, troll". Nothing personal though, you are on slashdot, you know the 'risks'.
or you could have read the article:
"But Kemeny and Kurtz used what they learned to craft the Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, or Basic, starting in 1963."
No way, good usability is about making the interface intuitive with sane defaults but also making it enough customizable so people that don't like those defaults can change the way it behaves. This applies to the options too, if you think people might not think about the possibility of changing something, make it more obvious. In this case put a small checkbox in the most used menus or around the textbox. It's not that hard, they probably have some technical problems: a previous poster said something like they don't know how to handle this or that so they're forcing something easier to maintain. If they're just stubborn then it will probably get forked and in time, replaced by the new less restrictive client (of course, if it's properly maintained and all).
Yep, there is no democracy and never will be. Any kind of government tries to rule over the people, forcing to give them more power which they will use to get even more power. The 'democracy' these days is a way to do that. The thing is that it's more effective because people think they are free and that they have 'god given' rights that no-one can deny them. All they need is something to keep them busy, like sports, terrorism, war on communism, fear of nuclear war, hunger in Africa, etc. The sadder part is that most people that realize this, are not fully aware of its seriousness, don't care as long as they live OK or talk about it in places where only a handful of people get their ideas and even less agree with them (like me :D).
Oh man, it would be perfect... if they fail maybe they will at least release the sources to windows to ease up their stay in hell when they die and we would have enough material for ThedailyWTF for years!
I'm not saying we should stop improving things but that we should care more about backwards and (especially) forward compatibility.
The problem with most tools is that no one thinks ahead and we have to create new protocols for every new feature in the device. One of the reasons to this is the format wars which should be directed by some neutral party not the companies because then the winner is the the one with the most resources and lack of morality.
That was my point, not that computers are easy to produce these days but that require a lot of research and developing if you start low, like from the steam powered engine. Even if we retain the knowledge so we don't have to reinvent everything, it's still a long way to go.
"You can not have government control of the Infrastructure and individual freedom at the same time. When government is in control, it suppresses the individual to the will of the state, and imprisons or kills those who refuse to be trampled."
Well it's still better than what happens when the companies have control. The government is somewhat forced to make it better for the people but companies have no interest in caring for their customers as long as they get the money. And considering the owners of the company are still people they have immunity over the will of the customers (unless they do something illegal but they usually are careful with that). That immunity is granted by the government, which in theory is the expression of the people. Now that is not right at all.
well the problem is not the hardware itself but the software. we need some basic standards that we can trust to be there in 50 or 100 years from now for networking, documents, video, music and image files. we have the wrong conception that we have to change everything every 5 years and that doesn't count only for computers.
:P, etc
but as i said in a post for the drm article the only completely reliable way to store data is in a form that doesn't need auxiliary devices to work: books for documents and pictures for images; for music, video and other types of storage we could create some devices that can give you the information by themselves, like an mp3 player that can last 1000years without failing (or a phonograph or cassette recorder), a manual powered video projector
yes but the full chain of research and production that was needed to get to the HDD needs a lot more energy than any library. that was his point: if something were to happen to the industry and market that enables the use of computers and we go back to the 19th century it's always good to have some simple way of retrieving knowledge like books. that's what happened in the middle ages, the romans were overwhelmed with barbarians that didn't care for their knowledge and it took us 1000 years (or more if you want) to get back to the same level of civilization. imagine the frustration of the people 30 years from now if they lose electricity and they get to lose any knowledge about how anything works although they have it all on pieces of metal that they can't use. after the current population dies, they're gonna go back to the middle ages.
/*doomsday theory over*/
in short: i trust books more than computers.
1. that was his point, they define efficiency not as the percentage of raw energy transformed because we all know that is impossible to do that with 100% efficiency. they probably found out that they can do it for say a maximum of 70% efficiency and they are now at 35%. something like a practical efficiency not theoretical.
2. well in that case the definition is again misleading, if you want the bullet to get in the head, then shooting them in the head is 100% efficient. if you want to kill the guy then those that lived afterwards will lower the efficiency.
because people like aspiring to more or less godlike powers and the fact that the jedi and sith needed any kind of help to do all that 'magic', that they weren't gods by themselves pisses off everyone. :D
i would personally choose having weak telekinetic powers on my own rather than some machine reading my mind and moving objects as i please
yeah, and considering the usa has the largest budget in the world you would think that they would need a smaller percentage for military in order to maintain military superiority. i guess it's never enough...
the problem is like in any other country the fact that the people don't know much about how their taxes are spent. i'm not an american but if i would have been i would be pissed to find out that the military gets some 20% while nasa gets less than 1% (there was an article about this on slashdot, can't find it).
i'm not flaming the americans for being ignorant or something because this happens everywhere, including in my country. democracy is just another way of forcing something on the people but a lot more effective because it's done in the name of freedom and it gives you the impression that you matter and that what you want will someday, somehow be done.
yeah, but you would have to eat a lot more for the same amount of energy and nutrients. that's why we need to eat meat, because our way of life demands large quantities of energy that we can't get out of plants. herbivores spend most of their time eating: that is how much they need to eat.
sure, there are vegan methods that should be able to sustain you but most vegetarians i know are less energetic and full of life than meat-eaters.
"claiming that the charitable giving of Gates and others simply extends power in the market to power over society"
:D
so the idea is that bill gates should sponsor open-source?
i actually use konqueror along with the shortcuts you are talking about but it's not good enough. the ctrl-tapping thing is great but only works if there are only a handful of links on the page. it should at least put shortcuts for the links visible, not from the beginning of the page. even then it wouldn't be as good as being able to select any control on the page with the cursor keys (tabbing is a pain in the ass compared to going to the mouse and clicking the thing).
that's why i hate browsing. it's very mouse oriented. i would love to see a browser that has a system like those on mobiles where you can scroll and select with the keyboard. it would make browsing enjoyable for me, because for now it's painful to keep going back to the mouse when i need to click a simple link.