The sentence about open source licensing was omitted
from the dead tree version of the article printed in
today's Melbourne Age (and presumably also in its sister paper the Sydney Morning Herald). I'm guessing it was written by an overly clueless journalist and later removed by the editor, but the change somehow missed the online version.
Now that NZ is a trendy movie location ("Star Wars Episode 2 [slashdot.org], The Matrix [amazon.com], etc I am sure their services will be in demand from time to time.
Ah... those two films were both shot in Australia, not NZ.
The main problem mentioned in many of the posts here is that a user might only be willing to pay say $100 for a new feature, but the time required by the developer wouldn't make such a small donation worthwhile.
But what if multiple people wanted the same new feature and were each willing to pay $100 (or even many people willing to pay say $5)?
What would be useful would be a site that allowed these people to get together and pledge a certain amount for a new feature. Once enough money has been pledged that the developer thinks it's worthwhile, they can develop the feature and collect the pledged money.
Month-day-year is the way that people say dates in english, thus it's always made the most sense to me, a non-American. Certainly, in other languages the "standard" day-month-year format works well.
Today is July 4th, 2002.
Actually, in Australia (and I suspect other English-speaking countries outside the US), it's just as common to say "the 4th of July" or "the 11th of September" rather than "July 4th", "September 11th".
Sure, we use base 10 for everything, so one could argue that the US will switch to metrics shortly because it makes sense. But we (as a nation) are so comfortable with the english system.
It's always puzzled me why the US and UK still use the awkward Imperial system. Australia did a wholesale change to metric 35 years ago (14 Feb 1966) and hasn't looked back since.
Re:... to feed the hungry or to save your soul?
on
Geek Charities?
·
· Score: 1
Wow, you speak the truth about Christianity and get modded down as flamebait. I'm sorry about that:( The ignorance about Christianity (and other religions as well) here at/. is simply astounding...
Yeah, it's tragic that so many people are anti-Christian without even bothering or wanting to know what Christians beleive. Christianity, as it is popularly perceived, is an easy target for attack by the ignorant. But if someone tries to provide a bit of information about what it's really all about, no-one is interested.
I wouldn't have been surprised if my post had been modded down as off-topic, but flamebait was certainly not my intention.
Anyway, thanks for your response. Good to know someone out there sees things the same way I do:-)
Mercury is a research project at the University of Melbourne, not a company. The funding we got from Microsoft came with no strings attached.
Sure, it benefits MS to be able to say they have lots of languages supporting.net. But it has also benefitted Mercury by enabling us to write a new backend with which we can easily target many other VMs, including the JVM, thus increasing the usefulness of our language.
Slashdot Mirror
The sentence about open source licensing was omitted from the dead tree version of the article printed in today's Melbourne Age (and presumably also in its sister paper the Sydney Morning Herald). I'm guessing it was written by an overly clueless journalist and later removed by the editor, but the change somehow missed the online version.
Ah... those two films were both shot in Australia, not NZ.
"Meter" is the American spelling of "metre".
The main problem mentioned in many of the posts here is that a user might only be willing to pay say $100 for a new feature, but the time required by the developer wouldn't make such a small donation worthwhile. But what if multiple people wanted the same new feature and were each willing to pay $100 (or even many people willing to pay say $5)?
What would be useful would be a site that allowed these people to get together and pledge a certain amount for a new feature. Once enough money has been pledged that the developer thinks it's worthwhile, they can develop the feature and collect the pledged money.
For a discussion on how such a system might work, see The Rational Street Performer Protocol
I've just been looking at the curve document class for LaTeX and it seems to be very well suited for what you want to do. You can grab it from CTAN.
I wouldn't have been surprised if my post had been modded down as off-topic, but flamebait was certainly not my intention.
Anyway, thanks for your response. Good to know someone out there sees things the same way I do :-)
Mercury is a research project at the University of Melbourne, not a company. The funding we got from Microsoft came with no strings attached.
.net. But it has also benefitted Mercury by enabling us to write a new backend with which we can easily target many other VMs, including the JVM, thus increasing the usefulness of our language.
Sure, it benefits MS to be able to say they have lots of languages supporting