It is interesting to note that one of the oldest civilizations we know that used math, the Babylonians, used base 60. That gives easy dividing by 2, 3, 4(!), 5 and 6. Their system of dividing a day into 24 hours of 60 minutes of 60 seconds survives to this day.
SCO has been acting as if they had bought some sort of IP rights to SysV UNIX from Novell, and sold licenses based on those rights to Sun and Microsoft ("SVRX licenses").
Novell is now pointing at the actual text of the contract, which says that all SCO acquired was the right to act as an agent of Novell - basically, they can sell licenses in Novell's place, then hand over all the money to Novell. After that, Novell will return them 5% of the money as an agent fee.
It all seems pretty undisputable, from following Groklaw. As Novell claims SCO did its job badly so they won't even have to give them the 5% back, they're basically claiming that those cash infusions from Microsoft and Sun belong to Novell. And it's asking the judge to make haste, since this is simply their money, SCO is wasting it, and they'll soon be bankrupt.
Re:I remember Sealand from years ago...
on
Sealand Put Up For Sale
·
· Score: 1, Informative
So now they want to try their hand at web hosting, do they?
They tried their hand at web hosting years ago, during the original dot com boom. As the summary says, that's "in the past". The URL of the company providing it is http://havenco.com. That site used to have pictures of their facilities on Sealand, seems all that's left now is a hosting company, not saying anything about where the physical location of their servers is.
Re:I've been using vi for so long...
on
The Birth of vi
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Ironically, it doesn't really matter all that much if a command is mnemonic or makes sense in some other way, precisely because, as you say, "they are so ingrained in my brain I don't even remember the actual key sequences."
And from the point of an Emacs user, it doesn't seem so different to need to hit C-X before some commands, than to hit ESC and:.
That said, they're both fantastic text editors. Programmers do their daily work with text, and these two text editors really reward the time you put into learning them. Who cares about a learning curve if this is the sort of tool your career is built around; you need power.
I used to use slrn (news reader) and jed (editor), they're both written using slang and both are fine programs. All have the same author - John E. Davis. So I would certainly look at slang.
That said, ncurses is the standard, it is mature, it is well known. You'd need to have some pretty special requirements before ncurses wasn't the best option, I think.
From a quick scan - "Even with aggressive assumptions about biological productivity, we project costs for biodiesel which are two times higher than current petroleum diesel fuel costs".
If that was in 1998, then at should be very feasible with current petrol costs, especially taking into account the added value of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
Total control. A huge repository of free software ready to install. Multiple desktops. A few terminal windows, a fullscreen Emacs and Firefox on seperate desktops; the ability to do almost anything using keyboard shortcuts, an extremely powerful command line, or even by my own scripts, the ability to do most of this remotely if needed; heaven.
I kept Windows on a small partition when I bought a new laptop, but booting it is a very rare thing. I don't care if it's what "the average user" uses, it's not for me.
And one important tip from Fiore that helps me a lot - say you have work to do that fits into blocks of, say, ten hours work. Perhaps writing articles of some sort. Then the urge is really great when you finish one block, to stop then and reward yourself. Don't! Get into a habit of spending at least five or ten minutes starting on the next project.
After all, you're focused right now, and you'll feel much better about the next project knowing you've already made a start on it. If you don't, you may get anxious about starting it.
GTD is great, but Allen sometimes says things like "assume for a moment we are not putting off this task out of procrastination...", which is often not the case. Also, you don't use GTD for doing a thesis that requires a thousand hours of concentrated work. GTD is very biased towards a work style of little things to do next.
I use his book together with "The Now Habit" by Neil Fiore, it is concerned with procrastination related problems. Basically, he encourages to focus on _starting_ on something, not on finishing, since the finish will always seem intimidatingly far away; but starting is easy. Be really fanatic about planning your week - that is, with recreation, fun, meetings, anything that _isn't_ productive work; the fun is most important, you need to be able to reward yourself after work.
Then, do the work in focussed 30 minute chunks. They don't seem daunting, you can actually get something pretty good done in 30 minutes, you can reward yourself afterwards, and they're so short that your brain isn't going to demand perfection from one chunk of 30 minutes.
I use GTD to keep track of all the open loops and little things that need doing in the current context, but the Now Habit's "Unschedule" for planning fun, and for those huge projects that are a few hundred hours of concentrated work.
Python and Ruby may be "dynamic" in some sense, but in both of them string += int will cause an exception. They're strictly typed, just with dynamic binding. Javascript really is a bit odd in allowing += for both addition and concatenation, and giving no warnings if you mix types. That's the sort of fuzzy thing that you'd only expect in PHP.
Yes, theoretically. However, that would also imply that IT makes all the specific requirements of their setup known to Dev.
At least, it sounds like the deployment environment is rather tricky. If it's sufficiently tricky to have implications for development, then that should lead to explicit, testable requirements.
The first "0." is simply superfluous, projects like this should drop it.
A normal release means you increase your release number. 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0. Even if that happens every few weeks. You use the second number for quick fix releases that you need to rush out when something critical is found in a release, or if the main trunk is now at 10.0 but you still want to fix a security issue in old versions too, without the new functionality since then.
It's a version number. It should be used to number versions. I don't know when the custom started to use 3 numbers instead of 2, but it was a mistake and every new OSS project has been mindlessly copying it since then.
You see, in the future mankind will have the ability to revive deceased people. That's why so many of those future-nuts have their bodies frozen: they think they'll be revived. But why would the people in the future do that? It's bound to be expensive, and it's not as if there will ever be a people shortage.
That's why you should learn Cobol. To be irreplaceable not just now, but also in the year 9999. And in the year 99999. And in 999999...
I'd also say it's deserving of a fine of around $100 or so, nothing more.
And immediate job loss without privileges for several of the highest ranking managers responsible for letting the insanely lacking security system live for so long.
Slashdot Mirror
It is interesting to note that one of the oldest civilizations we know that used math, the Babylonians, used base 60. That gives easy dividing by 2, 3, 4(!), 5 and 6. Their system of dividing a day into 24 hours of 60 minutes of 60 seconds survives to this day.
They were pretty advanced, being able to solve some 3rd degree polynomials, and with reasonably advanced architecture and commerce. See e.g. http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics /Babylonian_mathematics.html. Not bad for 5000 years ago.
SCO has been acting as if they had bought some sort of IP rights to SysV UNIX from Novell, and sold licenses based on those rights to Sun and Microsoft ("SVRX licenses").
Novell is now pointing at the actual text of the contract, which says that all SCO acquired was the right to act as an agent of Novell - basically, they can sell licenses in Novell's place, then hand over all the money to Novell. After that, Novell will return them 5% of the money as an agent fee.
It all seems pretty undisputable, from following Groklaw. As Novell claims SCO did its job badly so they won't even have to give them the 5% back, they're basically claiming that those cash infusions from Microsoft and Sun belong to Novell. And it's asking the judge to make haste, since this is simply their money, SCO is wasting it, and they'll soon be bankrupt.
So now they want to try their hand at web hosting, do they?
They tried their hand at web hosting years ago, during the original dot com boom. As the summary says, that's "in the past". The URL of the company providing it is http://havenco.com. That site used to have pictures of their facilities on Sealand, seems all that's left now is a hosting company, not saying anything about where the physical location of their servers is.
Ironically, it doesn't really matter all that much if a command is mnemonic or makes sense in some other way, precisely because, as you say, "they are so ingrained in my brain I don't even remember the actual key sequences."
And from the point of an Emacs user, it doesn't seem so different to need to hit C-X before some commands, than to hit ESC and :.
That said, they're both fantastic text editors. Programmers do their daily work with text, and these two text editors really reward the time you put into learning them. Who cares about a learning curve if this is the sort of tool your career is built around; you need power.
What they can do is list the IPs from which spam has originated. Period. That's what they're supposed to do.
I used to use slrn (news reader) and jed (editor), they're both written using slang and both are fine programs. All have the same author - John E. Davis. So I would certainly look at slang.
That said, ncurses is the standard, it is mature, it is well known. You'd need to have some pretty special requirements before ncurses wasn't the best option, I think.
That's nothing, Britney Spears is the queen of semiconductor physics!
Very interesting, thanks!
From a quick scan - "Even with aggressive assumptions about biological productivity, we project costs for biodiesel which are two times higher than current petroleum diesel fuel costs".
If that was in 1998, then at should be very feasible with current petrol costs, especially taking into account the added value of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
Why don't they look at how to make liquified coal cheaper and better?
Firstly, "they" are of course looking at that. The fact that some scientists work on biodiesel does not mean that nobody is looking at liquified coal.
Secondly, liquified coal doesn't do anything towards solving the CO2 problem, so biodiesel should always be preferable.
That was mostly my point; I absolutely do care about both price and OSS ideology. Just that you don't doesn't mean nobody does and vice versa.
Total control. A huge repository of free software ready to install. Multiple desktops. A few terminal windows, a fullscreen Emacs and Firefox on seperate desktops; the ability to do almost anything using keyboard shortcuts, an extremely powerful command line, or even by my own scripts, the ability to do most of this remotely if needed; heaven.
I kept Windows on a small partition when I bought a new laptop, but booting it is a very rare thing. I don't care if it's what "the average user" uses, it's not for me.
And one important tip from Fiore that helps me a lot - say you have work to do that fits into blocks of, say, ten hours work. Perhaps writing articles of some sort. Then the urge is really great when you finish one block, to stop then and reward yourself. Don't! Get into a habit of spending at least five or ten minutes starting on the next project.
After all, you're focused right now, and you'll feel much better about the next project knowing you've already made a start on it. If you don't, you may get anxious about starting it.
GTD is great, but Allen sometimes says things like "assume for a moment we are not putting off this task out of procrastination...", which is often not the case. Also, you don't use GTD for doing a thesis that requires a thousand hours of concentrated work. GTD is very biased towards a work style of little things to do next.
I use his book together with "The Now Habit" by Neil Fiore, it is concerned with procrastination related problems. Basically, he encourages to focus on _starting_ on something, not on finishing, since the finish will always seem intimidatingly far away; but starting is easy. Be really fanatic about planning your week - that is, with recreation, fun, meetings, anything that _isn't_ productive work; the fun is most important, you need to be able to reward yourself after work.
Then, do the work in focussed 30 minute chunks. They don't seem daunting, you can actually get something pretty good done in 30 minutes, you can reward yourself afterwards, and they're so short that your brain isn't going to demand perfection from one chunk of 30 minutes.
I use GTD to keep track of all the open loops and little things that need doing in the current context, but the Now Habit's "Unschedule" for planning fun, and for those huge projects that are a few hundred hours of concentrated work.
With Solaris, Java and Open Office, I believe Sun is the biggest contributor to free software now, by far. Thanks Sun!
I've been using computers for well more than 10 years, and ASCII is still just as readable as ever.
But EBCDIC is slightly harder. Besides, ASCII is only usable for a subset of human text - basically only for English. It's not really a solution.
Python and Ruby may be "dynamic" in some sense, but in both of them string += int will cause an exception. They're strictly typed, just with dynamic binding. Javascript really is a bit odd in allowing += for both addition and concatenation, and giving no warnings if you mix types. That's the sort of fuzzy thing that you'd only expect in PHP.
Quoth the 'pedia:
One of the most massive stars known is Eta Carinae, with 100 - 150 times as much mass as the Sun;
Really? Only HTML and CSS? No table and no javascript messing around rewriting the document?
In what way is table not HTML?
But it's weird, isn't that what copyright is for? Why patent an exact look?
This is the strange effect brought on by the following situation:
Yes, theoretically. However, that would also imply that IT makes all the specific requirements of their setup known to Dev.
At least, it sounds like the deployment environment is rather tricky. If it's sufficiently tricky to have implications for development, then that should lead to explicit, testable requirements.
The first "0." is simply superfluous, projects like this should drop it.
A normal release means you increase your release number. 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0. Even if that happens every few weeks. You use the second number for quick fix releases that you need to rush out when something critical is found in a release, or if the main trunk is now at 10.0 but you still want to fix a security issue in old versions too, without the new functionality since then.
It's a version number. It should be used to number versions. I don't know when the custom started to use 3 numbers instead of 2, but it was a mistake and every new OSS project has been mindlessly copying it since then.
Learn Cobol! It's the only way to live forever.
You see, in the future mankind will have the ability to revive deceased people. That's why so many of those future-nuts have their bodies frozen: they think they'll be revived. But why would the people in the future do that? It's bound to be expensive, and it's not as if there will ever be a people shortage.
That's why you should learn Cobol. To be irreplaceable not just now, but also in the year 9999. And in the year 99999. And in 999999...
Learn Cobol, for job security forever!
Exactly, of course this is against the law.
I'd also say it's deserving of a fine of around $100 or so, nothing more.
And immediate job loss without privileges for several of the highest ranking managers responsible for letting the insanely lacking security system live for so long.
I know, it was a miserable attempt at making a joke...