No one in government ever has "loyalties where they should be". It runs contrary to the laws of physics. As such regulation, in and of itself, is a bad idea.:)
Except for one thing. Calling system calls directly from your apps is a very rare occurrence. With any luck, it never happens. Which So what needs to be updated to reflect the new kernel interface? Glibc. Upgrade that, and it's possible for everything on your system to feel the benefit. In some cases, anyway. For the file-flushing bits obviously this doesn't apply because you still need to explicitly use those calls in your app. But you can't really do anything about that.
Evolution has the "functionality" part covered just fine. But what it needs to be succesful is the "bloated shit to cover up the fact that we're not getting any real work done" module. That's where Outlook shines.
I knew you were making things up at "wikipedia has a lightweight bit of code". I mean seriously, how is anyone going to believe that? Have you seen the mediawiki code?
If I run out of gas on the freeway, I get out my cellphone, call AAA and they come with a little tank to get me to the next gas station. What's my option with an electric car?
Nicest solution: there's a standard for car batteries; you call AAA, and they come out in a truck, pull the discharged batteries out of your car, replace them with a topped-off set, and charge yours when they get back. Then they charge for the visit and a nominal fee for the charge.
No really. Exploitation and dehumanization are at the very core of what Marxism is about, and/ASCII seems to understand it well enough. As to your argument -- if being offered the choice between work and starvation is "slavery", do you solve the problem by removing the choice of work?
Yes yes, I know about that. (Jobs were around before V, by the way). I'm talking about combinations of equipment, accessories, and abilities that are an order of magnitude more complexity than "jobs". That started, for the most part, with VII.
I definitely had the same thought about the graphics when I picked up VII (which I first played only last year) -- "man, this is so chunky. These guys weren't ready for 3D yet. I'd rather have VI than this crap" -- but it does grow on you. The graphics quality isn't hot, but there's still plenty of artistic merit there. As to the storytelling, I can't pick. I'd say VII is on a par with VI, and they're both excellent. VI has the best soundtrack of the entire series; VII has the second-best. When it comes to gameplay, again, they're both very good, but VII was the first to get a really good start towards truly customizable characters. VI was getting there, with Relics and some interesting character-specific moves, but VII blew the top off with Materia. VII also expanded the depth of "extras" -- hours and hours of completely optional gameplay. So yeah, it still deserves its title of Completely Awesome. Faster hardware and bigger storage have given new games the ability to compete with VII, but I haven't found one that bests it in scope and coolness quite yet.
"This strikes at the heart of the free and equal nature of the internet"
No it doesn't! It goes to the heart of the free and equal nature of the internet by letting anyone ask anything they want for service. Well okay, not quite, since we already don't see that kind of freedom. But at least it avoids making it worse by adding FCC regulation.
Uh, well actually, not that I'm defending Towns in this situation, but it doesn't seem to be an attack, so much as alerting people of a potential nutjob with an axe to grind. He hasn't made any argument based on that; he's just providing information to help people draw their own conclusions:)
PHP ain't "easy to read" by any stretch of the imagination. Thousands of functions in the core, a retarded sort of type system apparently inspired by Visual Basic which provides no clues as to what type you're actually working with, and wonderful action-at-a-distance-y "references" that really aren't? That's not so good. Complain all you like about Perl (I know you will) -- but it's possible to write clean, maintainable Perl code for any task if you're so inspired. Easy things easy, hard things possible, and all that. PHP's shortcomings, on the other hand, make it impossible to solve any even moderately complicated (read: "useful") problem without your code becoming hopelessly twisted.
As to the "brain-damage" effect, I really have seen it. If you cut your teeth on BASIC or PHP, you think that "learning to program" == "learning to work around $language's flaws" and when/if you move on to something else, it's painfully difficult to start thinking in terms of "real" design. It really crushes a lot of people. Better to learn some basics before you start writing crap code.
I'm willing to bet that it is, in fact, a konqueror bug -- because there used to be one just like it with buttons, a long time ago. Konqueror would render the buttons for forms somewhere up near the top of the page instead of anywhere near where it was placed in the form, but if you scrolled the button offscreen, it would magically pop to where it belonged. However, I've got to say that slashdot must be doing something weird to trigger this effect, because it's pretty hard to cause any sort of serious breakage in Konqueror anymore.
Actually my experience is that in a lot of places, you won't pass CS courses unless you had the knowledge to pass it going in -- because they don't teach anything worth a damn.
Since when do slashdot headlines or summaries show any evidence of reading comprehension or writing skills on the part of the submitter, or editing skills on the part of the editor? It's apparently not even worth bringing up. I really do wish they would at least change the "editors'" job titles though, since they publicly refuse to edit.
There are also some major bugs in the layout in recent konq -- for example, those pretty slidey menus have all of their items render at the upper-left corner of the page, instead of where they belong. And, yeah, the font size is definitely not in keeping with every other site out there. It's noticeably small, to the point where if I didn't have pretty good eyesight I wouldn't be able to read it. This isn't a bug on my end; my resolution is set up properly, and everything else looks fine.
The parent post reminds me of something else, though -- if this whole thing is about cleaning up the design and moving to a position where everything can be styled by CSS, why did they not make it so that you can specify your own stylesheet in the preferences? It'd be so easy... just a text box for short inputs, and a URL box for a longer stylesheet (on the assumption that you can use your own bandwidth instead of having Slashdot send you a crapload of CSS with every page). And it would make so many people happy.
Sure, building a good, integrated system is hard, and I'll grant you that it takes an expert. But I'll go one step further than what you said a moment ago and say that you most emphatically should not be writing your own algorithms.
How about on Linux? I can print anything to a PostScript file easily enough, and ps2pdf is a part of Ghostscript and available on most systems. In fact, KDE includes an easy "Print to PDF File" option. So is this licensed for $$$ from Adobe, or is it just another free, conforming PDF-writing app? And if the latter, couldn't someone hook the same functionality into Windows easily enough?
Depends, of course, on the format -- but most of the sane systems that I've seen encrypt blocks independently (where a block is something from, say, 512 to 4096 bytes), with an IV that's dependent on the block number, and possibly the filename (depending on the level that the encryption is working at). So given a small error, you would likely lose one or two blocks -- not an entire file or directory or filesystem.
Since you specifically asked: you almost had it. The word you were looking for is "unashamedly". However, it has a cousin that's not quite so hard to work with: "shamelessly".
Slashdot Mirror
They should have a human adjustable clock (instead of the tech adjustable multiplier etc) so that the average user can keep their laptop cool.
You mean like every laptop made in recent history already does?
No one in government ever has "loyalties where they should be". It runs contrary to the laws of physics. As such regulation, in and of itself, is a bad idea. :)
They are maximizing their profit. They're just not applying the standard business combination of stupidity and myopia.
Except for one thing. Calling system calls directly from your apps is a very rare occurrence. With any luck, it never happens. Which So what needs to be updated to reflect the new kernel interface? Glibc. Upgrade that, and it's possible for everything on your system to feel the benefit. In some cases, anyway. For the file-flushing bits obviously this doesn't apply because you still need to explicitly use those calls in your app. But you can't really do anything about that.
Evolution has the "functionality" part covered just fine. But what it needs to be succesful is the "bloated shit to cover up the fact that we're not getting any real work done" module. That's where Outlook shines.
I knew you were making things up at "wikipedia has a lightweight bit of code". I mean seriously, how is anyone going to believe that? Have you seen the mediawiki code?
Nicest solution: there's a standard for car batteries; you call AAA, and they come out in a truck, pull the discharged batteries out of your car, replace them with a topped-off set, and charge yours when they get back. Then they charge for the visit and a nominal fee for the charge.
I'm aware. Stop ruining the joke. :P
The U.S. will resemble Manhattan. The EU will resemble Woodstock.
Woodstock 1999, you mean?
No really. Exploitation and dehumanization are at the very core of what Marxism is about, and /ASCII seems to understand it well enough. As to your argument -- if being offered the choice between work and starvation is "slavery", do you solve the problem by removing the choice of work?
Yes yes, I know about that. (Jobs were around before V, by the way). I'm talking about combinations of equipment, accessories, and abilities that are an order of magnitude more complexity than "jobs". That started, for the most part, with VII.
I definitely had the same thought about the graphics when I picked up VII (which I first played only last year) -- "man, this is so chunky. These guys weren't ready for 3D yet. I'd rather have VI than this crap" -- but it does grow on you. The graphics quality isn't hot, but there's still plenty of artistic merit there. As to the storytelling, I can't pick. I'd say VII is on a par with VI, and they're both excellent. VI has the best soundtrack of the entire series; VII has the second-best. When it comes to gameplay, again, they're both very good, but VII was the first to get a really good start towards truly customizable characters. VI was getting there, with Relics and some interesting character-specific moves, but VII blew the top off with Materia. VII also expanded the depth of "extras" -- hours and hours of completely optional gameplay. So yeah, it still deserves its title of Completely Awesome. Faster hardware and bigger storage have given new games the ability to compete with VII, but I haven't found one that bests it in scope and coolness quite yet.
"This strikes at the heart of the free and equal nature of the internet"
No it doesn't! It goes to the heart of the free and equal nature of the internet by letting anyone ask anything they want for service. Well okay, not quite, since we already don't see that kind of freedom. But at least it avoids making it worse by adding FCC regulation.
Uh, well actually, not that I'm defending Towns in this situation, but it doesn't seem to be an attack, so much as alerting people of a potential nutjob with an axe to grind. He hasn't made any argument based on that; he's just providing information to help people draw their own conclusions :)
PHP ain't "easy to read" by any stretch of the imagination. Thousands of functions in the core, a retarded sort of type system apparently inspired by Visual Basic which provides no clues as to what type you're actually working with, and wonderful action-at-a-distance-y "references" that really aren't? That's not so good. Complain all you like about Perl (I know you will) -- but it's possible to write clean, maintainable Perl code for any task if you're so inspired. Easy things easy, hard things possible, and all that. PHP's shortcomings, on the other hand, make it impossible to solve any even moderately complicated (read: "useful") problem without your code becoming hopelessly twisted.
As to the "brain-damage" effect, I really have seen it. If you cut your teeth on BASIC or PHP, you think that "learning to program" == "learning to work around $language's flaws" and when/if you move on to something else, it's painfully difficult to start thinking in terms of "real" design. It really crushes a lot of people. Better to learn some basics before you start writing crap code.
Slashdot is not offtopic on slashdot.
I'm willing to bet that it is, in fact, a konqueror bug -- because there used to be one just like it with buttons, a long time ago. Konqueror would render the buttons for forms somewhere up near the top of the page instead of anywhere near where it was placed in the form, but if you scrolled the button offscreen, it would magically pop to where it belonged. However, I've got to say that slashdot must be doing something weird to trigger this effect, because it's pretty hard to cause any sort of serious breakage in Konqueror anymore.
Actually my experience is that in a lot of places, you won't pass CS courses unless you had the knowledge to pass it going in -- because they don't teach anything worth a damn.
Since when do slashdot headlines or summaries show any evidence of reading comprehension or writing skills on the part of the submitter, or editing skills on the part of the editor? It's apparently not even worth bringing up. I really do wish they would at least change the "editors'" job titles though, since they publicly refuse to edit.
There are also some major bugs in the layout in recent konq -- for example, those pretty slidey menus have all of their items render at the upper-left corner of the page, instead of where they belong. And, yeah, the font size is definitely not in keeping with every other site out there. It's noticeably small, to the point where if I didn't have pretty good eyesight I wouldn't be able to read it. This isn't a bug on my end; my resolution is set up properly, and everything else looks fine.
The parent post reminds me of something else, though -- if this whole thing is about cleaning up the design and moving to a position where everything can be styled by CSS, why did they not make it so that you can specify your own stylesheet in the preferences? It'd be so easy... just a text box for short inputs, and a URL box for a longer stylesheet (on the assumption that you can use your own bandwidth instead of having Slashdot send you a crapload of CSS with every page). And it would make so many people happy.
Sure, building a good, integrated system is hard, and I'll grant you that it takes an expert. But I'll go one step further than what you said a moment ago and say that you most emphatically should not be writing your own algorithms.
How about on Linux? I can print anything to a PostScript file easily enough, and ps2pdf is a part of Ghostscript and available on most systems. In fact, KDE includes an easy "Print to PDF File" option. So is this licensed for $$$ from Adobe, or is it just another free, conforming PDF-writing app? And if the latter, couldn't someone hook the same functionality into Windows easily enough?
Depends, of course, on the format -- but most of the sane systems that I've seen encrypt blocks independently (where a block is something from, say, 512 to 4096 bytes), with an IV that's dependent on the block number, and possibly the filename (depending on the level that the encryption is working at). So given a small error, you would likely lose one or two blocks -- not an entire file or directory or filesystem.
Can't spell worth a damn, but still smarter than the average slashdotter.
Since you specifically asked: you almost had it. The word you were looking for is "unashamedly". However, it has a cousin that's not quite so hard to work with: "shamelessly".