But once you've completed your initial binge on TV Tropes, it isn't any more of a time waster than Wikipedia.
Cool! How many years does that "initial binge" take? Because I've been visiting TVTropes off-and-on for over two years now, and I still find it as much of a black hole as ever.:)
Bug trackers and version control are really orthogonal to FLOSS. Yes, it's true that most of the most popular VC systems and several popular bug trackers are OSS, but that's more by-the-way. These are all things that students of computer programming should have exposure to, yes, but mixing them all up as if they were the same thing may not be the most productive way to suggest that.
Actual Computer Science has very little to do with writing code. Of course, what they teach in CS classes usually has little to do with Computer Science, so it all evens out.:)
It's not like the royal family has any privacy!
on
The Queen Joins Facebook
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It's not like the royal family has any privacy left anyway, so, unlike the rest of us, there's no real reason for her not to join facebook!:)
Heh, well as you know (or should know), Wikipedia is not a reliable source. In this case, it's actually contradicting what it said a couple of years ago when I last looked, so I checked out the talk archives, and the current wording seems to be a compromise which may or may not last--people got tired of fighting. There are four common definitions of what constitutes a continent, and in half of those, North and South America are considered separate continents. The current Wikipedia wording seems to be based (judging from a quick skim through the talk archives) on checking dictionaries from different English-speaking regions, ignoring the overriding Wikipedia principle that local use should dominate (e.g. the article on The Beatles is written in English-English rather than American-English). The conclusion I've come to is that it's not that simple, and there's arguments on both sides, but they didn't want to over-complicate the lead, so they picked a wording that resulted in the least shouting, at least for now. The "right" answer is: it depends. But in America, what I said is generally considered correct; use of "America" (rather than "the Americas") to refer to the super-continent/pair-of-subcontinents is rare, especially in contemporary writing.
Hmm, what good is a video rental service (whether streaming or not) when you already own everything you might want to watch? That is a tricky question!:)
Note that a Netflix account always includes access to their much larger selection of physical DVDs and Blu-Rays.
But the point is that they don't only just have older stuff for streaming. Of last year's Hugo nominees, they have the winner (Moon) as well as three of the four runners-up (District 9, Star Trek, Up). The only one they're missing is Avatar--and that one you can have them mail to you.
A country that likes to call itself by the name of a continent
What continent is that? I'm aware of a continent called "North America", and another called "South America", and together they're called "The Americas" (note plural), but I'm not aware of any physical location that's named or referred to as just "America", other than the US. The rest of your post I agree with, but that whole continent nonsense just bugs me. America has enough real problems that we don't need to make crap up to complain about.
The fact that something's not illegal doesn't necessarily mean it's right. I'd rather pay a minimal sum (and the $12/mo I give to Netflix is pretty minimal) and know that at least some money is trickling back to the creators. It's like buying from iTunes or Amazon instead of downloading my music from a rip-and-post site. Plus I get a minimum quality guarantee, and I know that I'm going to get what it says on the tin, and don't have to worry (much) about viruses and trojans, and (in the case of Netflix) get to have two physical DVDs, with all the extras and whatnots, in my possession at any given time, along with the unlimited streaming.
I'm a little dubious about Hulu Plus, but that's mainly because I already have Netflix, and because, as this story reports, I wouldn't even get freedom from ads as a benefit like I do with Netflix. Netflix may have a more limited catalog for streaming, but I also get those two-DVDs-at-a-time to help me catch the stuff that isn't streamable.
Most importantly: it's got Firefly (and Serenity), it's got Dr. Who, it's got Red Dwarf, it's got Futurama (original series and movies), it's got Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it's got Battlestar Galactica, it's got most of the Stargate serieses, it's got Invader Zim, it's got Monk (for the obsessive-compulsives in the audience), and a large chunk of the Funimation anime catalog. What more could anyone from Slashdot want?:)
Up-to-the-second, maybe, but the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine shows that the concept may not be entirely out of reach. They may not download the entire web as quickly or frequently as Google, Bing, Ask, etc., but unlike those others, they keep backups! That's pretty impressive for a non-profit! (Though, to be fair, they keep backups instead of indexes. But still....)
I can just tell you that there are many, many stars and planets
Hypothetical, at least in the case of planets, although every bit of new evidence that comes in does seem to support the hypothesis.
but the chance that a planet will have life on it is low.
Even more hypothetical, and much less supported by the evidence. In fact, we have at least one other place in this system alone where the existence of life is considered reasonably plausible (Europa), and several more (Mars before the freeze, Venus before the meltdown, several other outer system moons) where it's considered plausible that life may have once existed, and a couple where it's totally up in the air (the gas giants themselves).
And, of course, you left out all the stuff about the development of intelligence, and the life-span of technical civilizations; details which are far too important to omit.
You're right that the Drake Equation could probably be summarized in a couple of sentences--if those sentences were long enough to mention all the factors described in the equation and how they relate to each other. But then, what you've got is some very long sentences that can be more efficiently summed up with the use of a simple equation, and... we're back where we started!:)
No, SSD is Solid State Drive, which is certainly a more common term to see on Slashdot than SDD. I had to read the summary a couple of times before I realized it was talking about mathematical arrays rather than persistent memory arrays. Then it made a lot more sense!:)
Indeed, Jobs is obviously right. When people in a western-style democracy have a choice of candidates, "[t]he user's left to figure it out" and can easily become confused. Soviet-style totalitarianism where the people have the "freedom" to vote for the one-and-only candidate on the ballot is clearly preferable.
No, but I know a lot of women (and a few men) who would happily sleep with him at the drop of a hat. But fuckability is not generally considered one of the defining characteristics of deityhood. I can easily see comparing him to rock stars or film idols, but to jump from that to calling him the messiah is as misguided and disingenous, IMO, as trying to read blasphemy into John Lennon's innocent claim (which probably wasn't true) that the Beatles were bigger (had more fans than) Jesus.
Veering sadly off-topic here (but I can afford the potential karma hit): if "America" is not the US, then what is it? There's no continent with that name. There's a continent named "North America" and another one named "South America, and collectively they are referred to as "the Americas" (note plural), but nothing on this Earth is simply named "America".
Using "America" to refer to the US may not be 100% unambiguous, but that's only because of a tiny percentage of idiots in North and South America who forget that there's another continent that shares that part of the name with their own continent. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen the word "America" used to refer to anything besides the US, except in the context of trying to mis-correct someone by falsely claiming that America is a continent, not a country.
And as I've gotten older, my interest in and support for Free/Libre/Open Source has only grown, but my interest in and support for open standards has grown even faster. Thus, ultimately, we agree on the extreme importance of open standards (and the inherent wrongness of the BSA's position on this matter) despite the fact that our opinions on FLOSS are moving in different directions.:)
Call me crazy but I can see the conflict of interest.
Ok, you're crazy. This isn't like proprietary software where everyone's in direct competition, and every user counts because every user is another dollar in your coffers. This is open source where code and be freely shared, and could flow from OO to LO and back again, and the raw number of users doesn't matter as long as you can maintain a critical level of developers. How many people will use both? Could be a lot. I've jumped back and forth between GNU Emacs and XEmacs a number of times in my life. I hop between browsers and desktops on a regular basis. I've even switched between Linux and BSD more than once. I've contributed to competing projects in the past both so that more users would be able to benefit from my work, and to keep my own options open. I'm not seeing any conflict of interest here unless Oracle has some sort of sinister plans for OO, and they know that the people involved in LO wouldn't want to participate.
Completely coincidentally, the set of software (both FOSS and commercial) written in C++ seems to overlap closely with the set of software for which large and prominent security flaws are discovered every month.
Really? I'm not a C++ advocate, but I would have expected C, with its lack of exceptions or any straightforward way to implement RAII, to hold a commanding lead there.
Isn't bundled with the OS is probably the biggest factor, followed by lack of name recognition. Lack of extensions is probably down near not-open-source as far as most people are concerned. Anyway, can-run-extensions isn't going to help until extensions appear, unless it can run Firefox extensions. That said, I think it's a great move on their part, and it certainly makes me more interested. But I'm a nerd.:)
Technically, they didn't spot the collision. What they spotted was an asteroid that was probably involved in a recent collision. FTA: "Backtracking, they calculated that a single impact by a smaller asteroid could have blasted it all off the asteroid in February or March 2009." (Emphasis mine.) Still a pretty cool pic, though.
Including fruits that some people think are vegetables.
You say that as if fruit and vegetable were exclusive categories.
Vegetable, n. 1. a. A plant cultivated for an edible part. b. The edible part of such a plant. c. A member of the vegetable kingdom; a plant.
Oranges and strawberries are vegetables by any of those definitions just as much as tomatoes and cucumbers are fruit. All four fall into both categories; all edible fruits are vegetables.
Wikipedia has a slightly more nuanced definition of Vegetable: "an edible plant or part of a plant other than a sweet fruit or seed." There's no direct citation for this distinction, but even if we accept it, then strawberries stop being vegetables, but tomatoes and the like are still members of both categories. I can't find any definition anywhere that would exclude tomatoes or cucumbers from the vegetable category.
That said, while I basically agree with your point of your post, the claim "without bees no fruit" is slightly exaggerated. Not all edible fruits rely on bees. But the loss of those that do would certainly be catastrophic.
Slashdot Mirror
But once you've completed your initial binge on TV Tropes, it isn't any more of a time waster than Wikipedia.
Cool! How many years does that "initial binge" take? Because I've been visiting TVTropes off-and-on for over two years now, and I still find it as much of a black hole as ever. :)
Bug trackers and version control are really orthogonal to FLOSS. Yes, it's true that most of the most popular VC systems and several popular bug trackers are OSS, but that's more by-the-way. These are all things that students of computer programming should have exposure to, yes, but mixing them all up as if they were the same thing may not be the most productive way to suggest that.
Actual Computer Science has very little to do with writing code. Of course, what they teach in CS classes usually has little to do with Computer Science, so it all evens out. :)
It's not like the royal family has any privacy left anyway, so, unlike the rest of us, there's no real reason for her not to join facebook! :)
Heh, well as you know (or should know), Wikipedia is not a reliable source. In this case, it's actually contradicting what it said a couple of years ago when I last looked, so I checked out the talk archives, and the current wording seems to be a compromise which may or may not last--people got tired of fighting. There are four common definitions of what constitutes a continent, and in half of those, North and South America are considered separate continents. The current Wikipedia wording seems to be based (judging from a quick skim through the talk archives) on checking dictionaries from different English-speaking regions, ignoring the overriding Wikipedia principle that local use should dominate (e.g. the article on The Beatles is written in English-English rather than American-English). The conclusion I've come to is that it's not that simple, and there's arguments on both sides, but they didn't want to over-complicate the lead, so they picked a wording that resulted in the least shouting, at least for now. The "right" answer is: it depends. But in America, what I said is generally considered correct; use of "America" (rather than "the Americas") to refer to the super-continent/pair-of-subcontinents is rare, especially in contemporary writing.
Hmm, what good is a video rental service (whether streaming or not) when you already own everything you might want to watch? That is a tricky question! :)
Note that a Netflix account always includes access to their much larger selection of physical DVDs and Blu-Rays.
But the point is that they don't only just have older stuff for streaming. Of last year's Hugo nominees, they have the winner (Moon) as well as three of the four runners-up (District 9, Star Trek, Up). The only one they're missing is Avatar--and that one you can have them mail to you.
A country that likes to call itself by the name of a continent
What continent is that? I'm aware of a continent called "North America", and another called "South America", and together they're called "The Americas" (note plural), but I'm not aware of any physical location that's named or referred to as just "America", other than the US. The rest of your post I agree with, but that whole continent nonsense just bugs me. America has enough real problems that we don't need to make crap up to complain about.
The fact that something's not illegal doesn't necessarily mean it's right. I'd rather pay a minimal sum (and the $12/mo I give to Netflix is pretty minimal) and know that at least some money is trickling back to the creators. It's like buying from iTunes or Amazon instead of downloading my music from a rip-and-post site. Plus I get a minimum quality guarantee, and I know that I'm going to get what it says on the tin, and don't have to worry (much) about viruses and trojans, and (in the case of Netflix) get to have two physical DVDs, with all the extras and whatnots, in my possession at any given time, along with the unlimited streaming.
I'm a little dubious about Hulu Plus, but that's mainly because I already have Netflix, and because, as this story reports, I wouldn't even get freedom from ads as a benefit like I do with Netflix. Netflix may have a more limited catalog for streaming, but I also get those two-DVDs-at-a-time to help me catch the stuff that isn't streamable.
Most importantly: it's got Firefly (and Serenity), it's got Dr. Who, it's got Red Dwarf, it's got Futurama (original series and movies), it's got Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it's got Battlestar Galactica, it's got most of the Stargate serieses, it's got Invader Zim, it's got Monk (for the obsessive-compulsives in the audience), and a large chunk of the Funimation anime catalog. What more could anyone from Slashdot want? :)
Up-to-the-second, maybe, but the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine shows that the concept may not be entirely out of reach. They may not download the entire web as quickly or frequently as Google, Bing, Ask, etc., but unlike those others, they keep backups! That's pretty impressive for a non-profit! (Though, to be fair, they keep backups instead of indexes. But still....)
I can just tell you that there are many, many stars and planets
Hypothetical, at least in the case of planets, although every bit of new evidence that comes in does seem to support the hypothesis.
but the chance that a planet will have life on it is low.
Even more hypothetical, and much less supported by the evidence. In fact, we have at least one other place in this system alone where the existence of life is considered reasonably plausible (Europa), and several more (Mars before the freeze, Venus before the meltdown, several other outer system moons) where it's considered plausible that life may have once existed, and a couple where it's totally up in the air (the gas giants themselves).
And, of course, you left out all the stuff about the development of intelligence, and the life-span of technical civilizations; details which are far too important to omit.
You're right that the Drake Equation could probably be summarized in a couple of sentences--if those sentences were long enough to mention all the factors described in the equation and how they relate to each other. But then, what you've got is some very long sentences that can be more efficiently summed up with the use of a simple equation, and... we're back where we started! :)
Linux VM on a Windows host? Isn't that like building a cement house on top of a wooden foundation? :)
If VirtualBox makes that an attractive solution, then perhaps investigating other options like VMWare is worth it!
SSD - symmetric diagonally dominant
No, SSD is Solid State Drive, which is certainly a more common term to see on Slashdot than SDD. I had to read the summary a couple of times before I realized it was talking about mathematical arrays rather than persistent memory arrays. Then it made a lot more sense! :)
Indeed, Jobs is obviously right. When people in a western-style democracy have a choice of candidates, "[t]he user's left to figure it out" and can easily become confused. Soviet-style totalitarianism where the people have the "freedom" to vote for the one-and-only candidate on the ballot is clearly preferable.
No, but I know a lot of women (and a few men) who would happily sleep with him at the drop of a hat. But fuckability is not generally considered one of the defining characteristics of deityhood. I can easily see comparing him to rock stars or film idols, but to jump from that to calling him the messiah is as misguided and disingenous, IMO, as trying to read blasphemy into John Lennon's innocent claim (which probably wasn't true) that the Beatles were bigger (had more fans than) Jesus.
Veering sadly off-topic here (but I can afford the potential karma hit): if "America" is not the US, then what is it? There's no continent with that name. There's a continent named "North America" and another one named "South America, and collectively they are referred to as "the Americas" (note plural), but nothing on this Earth is simply named "America".
Using "America" to refer to the US may not be 100% unambiguous, but that's only because of a tiny percentage of idiots in North and South America who forget that there's another continent that shares that part of the name with their own continent. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen the word "America" used to refer to anything besides the US, except in the context of trying to mis-correct someone by falsely claiming that America is a continent, not a country.
And as I've gotten older, my interest in and support for Free/Libre/Open Source has only grown, but my interest in and support for open standards has grown even faster. Thus, ultimately, we agree on the extreme importance of open standards (and the inherent wrongness of the BSA's position on this matter) despite the fact that our opinions on FLOSS are moving in different directions. :)
Call me crazy but I can see the conflict of interest.
Ok, you're crazy. This isn't like proprietary software where everyone's in direct competition, and every user counts because every user is another dollar in your coffers. This is open source where code and be freely shared, and could flow from OO to LO and back again, and the raw number of users doesn't matter as long as you can maintain a critical level of developers. How many people will use both? Could be a lot. I've jumped back and forth between GNU Emacs and XEmacs a number of times in my life. I hop between browsers and desktops on a regular basis. I've even switched between Linux and BSD more than once. I've contributed to competing projects in the past both so that more users would be able to benefit from my work, and to keep my own options open. I'm not seeing any conflict of interest here unless Oracle has some sort of sinister plans for OO, and they know that the people involved in LO wouldn't want to participate.
Indeed, it's like he's never heard the term Joe Job.
Completely coincidentally, the set of software (both FOSS and commercial) written in C++ seems to overlap closely with the set of software for which large and prominent security flaws are discovered every month.
Really? I'm not a C++ advocate, but I would have expected C, with its lack of exceptions or any straightforward way to implement RAII, to hold a commanding lead there.
...the slowest sorting algorithm
Bubble sort's not even close. The shuffle sort beats it hands down:
do {
random_shuffle(container);
} while (!sorted(container));
The initial shuffle helps avoid good performance even when the data is pre-sorted. :)
Isn't bundled with the OS is probably the biggest factor, followed by lack of name recognition. Lack of extensions is probably down near not-open-source as far as most people are concerned. Anyway, can-run-extensions isn't going to help until extensions appear, unless it can run Firefox extensions. That said, I think it's a great move on their part, and it certainly makes me more interested. But I'm a nerd. :)
Technically, they didn't spot the collision. What they spotted was an asteroid that was probably involved in a recent collision. FTA: "Backtracking, they calculated that a single impact by a smaller asteroid could have blasted it all off the asteroid in February or March 2009." (Emphasis mine.) Still a pretty cool pic, though.
Of course, the virus-fungus outbreak is the result of global warming.
No, no, it's God punishing us for allowing gays to serve in the military.
Including fruits that some people think are vegetables.
You say that as if fruit and vegetable were exclusive categories.
Vegetable, n.
1.
a. A plant cultivated for an edible part.
b. The edible part of such a plant.
c. A member of the vegetable kingdom; a plant.
Oranges and strawberries are vegetables by any of those definitions just as much as tomatoes and cucumbers are fruit. All four fall into both categories; all edible fruits are vegetables.
Wikipedia has a slightly more nuanced definition of Vegetable: "an edible plant or part of a plant other than a sweet fruit or seed." There's no direct citation for this distinction, but even if we accept it, then strawberries stop being vegetables, but tomatoes and the like are still members of both categories. I can't find any definition anywhere that would exclude tomatoes or cucumbers from the vegetable category.
That said, while I basically agree with your point of your post, the claim "without bees no fruit" is slightly exaggerated. Not all edible fruits rely on bees. But the loss of those that do would certainly be catastrophic.