Yes, and nothing says quality like market share. That's why Windows is widely acknowledged (especially around here) to be the best OS ever, and McDonald's to be the greatest cuisine of all time.:)
So what would you call a rocky body the size and shape of (say) Earth or Mars that doesn't orbit a star? The IAU's inane mal-definition aside[*], I suspect most people would call it a planet (possibly with the qualifier "rogue" tacked on). I don't think we have much idea how many such bodies exist, but it's not beyond the bounds of reason to think that there's are many, many times as many as there are stars.
[*] I don't really give a rats ass how they classify Pluto--it's clearly a different type of body, and I'd be happy if they called it a Megacomet instead of a Planet, but the IAU's definition is still idiotic: there's no classification for bodies which don't orbit a primary, just to start with, and we can't tell if exoplanets are planets or not without going there, and most damning of all, they define Mercury as being more like Jupiter than it is like Ceres, which is simply brain-dead.
DOS got driveletter-colon from CP/M, but CP/M didn't have subdirectories, and neither did DOS 1.x. Even MP/M (multiuser CP/M) lacked subdirectories. The slashes, introduced in DOS 2.0, were borrowed from MS XENIX, but for some dumbass reason, MS decided to make them backslashes. They could have borrowed inspiration from another system, except that they were explicitly borrowing features from XENIX (UNIX-like file handles, pipes, the ".." directory and a host of other UNIX-y features were introduced at the same time). They even supported regular slashes internally for pathnames in their APIs--only the command shell required the use of backslashes (and, for a long time, you could fix that by setting the switch character internally).
And you're right, they could have used another character (although that would have been pretty stupid too considering they were trying to UNIXify their CP/M clone), but the fact is that almost any other character would still have been better. Backslash is one of only a handful of punctuation characters that lacks a standard location on the keyboard, making it a truly idiotic character to use for something as common and regularly used as a directory separator.
Excellent point! I hesitate to use the term "LOL" because it's so widely abused and misused on teh Intarwebs, but I assure you that it was quite literally true in this case. Thanks for that.:)
Do I detect a No True Scotsman fallacy in the making here? I know that Stephen J. Gould was a huge baseball fan from his many (often horribly contrived) attempts to compare changes in the game to biological evolution. I've known plenty of both students and professors at nearby UC Berkeley who are huge fans of one or more of the Bay Area's local sports teams. In my experience, Scientists are more likely to be sports fans than liberal arts majors.
Now if you were to claim something about a rather more geeky, useless, and ineffectual bunch, like, say, slashdot readers, I might be willing to agree with you even though I'm sort of a counter-example myself.:)
But injecting a pop-up for notification purposes DOES work.
Injecting a popup into what? You're not one of those fools who believes that the web is the Internet, are you? Like that imbecile ISP that started responding to failed DNS requests with the IP of a site running a web server that offered ads to those who were using a web server, and seriously broke all sorts of other software (e.g. software designed to monitor the health of off-site systems).
I didn't prefer SysV. I was forced to use SysV. I preferred not to confuse myself by using a less-compatible product at home when there was another perfectly decent and more compatible option available for the same price.:)
if you want FreeBSD, use it.. If you want Linux, use it instead.
I don't want either one, I want GNU, but unfortunately, they refuse to create a useful kernel (there's some question as to whether they're even trying, or if they're just too wrapped up in "interesting" research to ever focus on making something useful), so I'm stuck with two options for my kernel, and, while Linux is the path of least resistance for GNU fans, it's also flakey as hell, so a supported GNU/BSD system is a refreshing alternative.
I could just go with BSD, but I hate their freakin' userspace, and, while Ports sounds good on paper, it can be (voice of experience here) a real PITA in a production environment. In my experience, Debian does the best and most reliable packaging of a wide variety of software, and a combination of Debian and GNU on a BSD kernel sounds a hell of a lot like my dream environment.
That depends upon what you mean by veteran, and what you mean by UNIX.
Ayup.
FreeBsd is closer to Unix due to its BSDness.
A peculiar interpretation. In the early days, I tended to prefer Linux over BSD because Linux generally acted more like the real UNIX(tm) systems at work, while BSD remained inherently...BSDish. Linux was like a Unix inflicted with a random, confusing scattering of BSDisms (like the operation of ps(1)). Of course, if you consider BSD to be The One True Unix (as many BSD fans do), then Linux looks like a UNIX with a random, confusing scattering of SYSVisms. In conclusion, I think I have to say that your first statement quoted above completely invalidates the second one, and I agree with the first. But I like BSD anyway.:)
MySpace has the duty to investigate the claim of copyright.
They do? Why? You can say "it's easy" all you want, but they still have to pay someone to take the time to do it. What obligation are they under that would make that expense a "duty"? I really don't know much about MySpace, since the whole place creeps me out, but my understanding was that they offered free hosting and social networking. How does "here's a gift" translate into "I'm obligated to take time away from my own work sort out your disputes with a third party about how you use that gift?"
Yes, but overly specific to grep. "|wc -l" works with all sorts of commands, so it's often easier to stick with the most general solution, rather than trying to learn which specific commands have unnecessary, redundant features, unless performance is actually an issue. I often start with grep, and then realize that I've got to reduce the noise and mis-hits by extracting the fields I need with sed or some other tool, which is why I rarely bother to even remember that grep even has a "-c" option.
Concentric circles don't show that any better than rows do.
They do for me. When I first encountered the periodic table, way back when, I found it very confusing until I constructed a mental model a lot more like the proposed one.
Gradients could be used to indicate the direction in which the shells get filled, with pale colors to represent emptier shells and darker ones for full. I'm not saying the idea is perfect (maybe there is no perfect representation), but I think the idea is well worth exploring. I also think the standard representation is strongly counterintuitive in some ways. Maybe it will turn out that it's the best we can do, but I see no harm in trying out some alternatives.
I think it needs work, but I think the fundamental idea is sound. The chemical properties of the elements are almost entirely based on how full the electron shells are, and I think a circular diagram represents that better. This particular representation is far from ideal (it's silly to have the names sideways and upside-down, among many other flaws), but as an abstract concept, I like it.
Wait. A modified "clone"? With--say--only 50% of my DNA included? Isn't that what they call a "normal child"!
So just what is it that you're volunteering for here, and are you sure it's legal in this state? Tell you what. Bend over, pick up that pencil I just dropped, and let me see if I might be willing to let you "access" my "source code".:)
Even if they do need a Windows machine, learning about a second machine will still make you more computer literate than someone who just knows one platform.
A) That's a pretty funky definition of "computer literate" you've got there. I don't think being able to move the mouse around and click on icons really makes anyone computer literate--I think it's possible to own and use both Mac and Win without ever approaching computer literacy. But, more importantly, B) your conclusion assumes that the same people are using both machines, rather than one person in the household (this was a survey of households, after all) using the Mac while another uses the Winbox.
In my experience, Mac seems to be most popular among two extremes: those who are more-than-usually computer literate and those who are less-. The presence of that first group probably means that you're going to be correct in your conclusions in many individual cases, but the presence of that quite-large second group means that you're going to be wrong a whole lot of the time as well. Especially, I suspect, if the Winbox is kept around just for games.
Of course, I do partly understand your confusion--the all-too-typically-poorly-written slashdot summary leads to your conclusion a little better than the actual facts of the matter do.
This is in danger of turning into one of those "my ID is lower than yours" pissing matches, but I'm going to mix it up by saying that I agree with pandrijeczko: my dislike for Apple has nothing to do with it being "cool" or "uncool", but has everything to do with their corporate practices and pricing, and the fact that they're stuck in an old-school model of proprietary lock-in at least as much, and arguably more, that Microsoft. Yes, they do support a lot of open source initiatives these days, and I applaud them for that, but they also tweak around with their devices, especially their handheld devices, to keep them as incompatible as possible with open standards. Till they change that, I'll stick with HTC (and hopefully Android), Samsung and the like, and maybe even Palm, but I will be staying as far away from Apple as I can. Just as I have since my Apple II died.:)
(Like Mr. Slippery, I also remember the look and feel lawsuits which resulted in Apple being the only company ever to have been boycotted by the FSF. Even Microsoft hasn't achieved that level of perfidy! Apple has improved a lot over the years, but there's still quite obviously traces of that old, really horrible mindset lurking around in the company. I'm just glad Apple never did achieve a monopoly in personal computers back in the day, because I think they would have made MS look like saints.)
Learning to use focus-follows-mouse isn't hard, though I admit it can be a little confusing at first; going back to crappy systems that don't offer it after you've learned its benefits is what's hard!
And the company doing the switching as they experience a period of lower productivity as they have to retrain the employees on using the new software.
Which is something they routinely experience anyway as they upgrade to the "All New And Improved(tm)" version of the software they're using now, which offers little or no useful new functionality combined with a revamped all-singing, all-dancing UI that leaves existing users befuddled (see, e.g. "ribbon"). Ironically, the efforts to copy "the evil Windows UI" in FOSS that are so derided by hardcore fanboys may actually lead to cases where switching could be easier than upgrading.
Yes, not only is Fusion power only 30 years away, but personal flying jet-packs are only 10 years away, and true Artificial Intelligence is only 20 years away.
The really cool thing is the way those numbers have remained constant since at least the eighties, and possibly much longer.:)
People walk away from paid jobs without losing money all the time. It's called 'getting a new job'. It not-infrequently results in an increase in income, but, on the other hand, people often take new jobs that offer less money, but more satisfaction or other intangible rewards, because money isn't the only motivator out there!
Anyway, you seem to be assuming that open source and paid jobs are incompatible concepts. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Furthermore, open source projects have to compete on the basis of the quality and maintainability of the code far more than proprietary software does (because nobody can see how ugly and unmaintainable the proprietary code is except insiders). In my day job (working with a mix of open source and inhouse code), I have frequently heard one of my bosses say "it would be nice if we took some time to clean up this [inhouse] code" (not all bosses are idiots), but actually finding time and a budget to do so almost never happens. Any cleanup that does happen usually has to happen as a side effect of other, business-related, changes, and always has a much lower priority than any other work being done, and rarely gets more than a half-assed attempt. In my experience, people who help clean up open source code on a volunteer basis often do so because of their frustration with their inability to clean up their day job's code. "At least I can have one set of code around here that isn't a complete mess!"
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and nothing says quality like market share. That's why Windows is widely acknowledged (especially around here) to be the best OS ever, and McDonald's to be the greatest cuisine of all time. :)
Its not going to happen. planets orbit stars
So what would you call a rocky body the size and shape of (say) Earth or Mars that doesn't orbit a star? The IAU's inane mal-definition aside[*], I suspect most people would call it a planet (possibly with the qualifier "rogue" tacked on). I don't think we have much idea how many such bodies exist, but it's not beyond the bounds of reason to think that there's are many, many times as many as there are stars.
[*] I don't really give a rats ass how they classify Pluto--it's clearly a different type of body, and I'd be happy if they called it a Megacomet instead of a Planet, but the IAU's definition is still idiotic: there's no classification for bodies which don't orbit a primary, just to start with, and we can't tell if exoplanets are planets or not without going there, and most damning of all, they define Mercury as being more like Jupiter than it is like Ceres, which is simply brain-dead.
I also hate finger typing.
Yes, much better to...type with your nose?
(I'm not fond of most cell-phone keyboards, although I have yet to see one that's worse than trying to type on a touch screen.)
The GPL3 has terms that I believe literally every developer I have ever talked to is not happy about.
Really? I have to ask: what are those terms? Because, speaking as a developer myself, I'm quite happy with the GPLv3.
The actual combo is altgr-+.
Oh yeah, and that doesn't involve taking your hands away from the home position....
DOS got it from CP/M.
DOS got driveletter-colon from CP/M, but CP/M didn't have subdirectories, and neither did DOS 1.x. Even MP/M (multiuser CP/M) lacked subdirectories. The slashes, introduced in DOS 2.0, were borrowed from MS XENIX, but for some dumbass reason, MS decided to make them backslashes. They could have borrowed inspiration from another system, except that they were explicitly borrowing features from XENIX (UNIX-like file handles, pipes, the ".." directory and a host of other UNIX-y features were introduced at the same time). They even supported regular slashes internally for pathnames in their APIs--only the command shell required the use of backslashes (and, for a long time, you could fix that by setting the switch character internally).
And you're right, they could have used another character (although that would have been pretty stupid too considering they were trying to UNIXify their CP/M clone), but the fact is that almost any other character would still have been better. Backslash is one of only a handful of punctuation characters that lacks a standard location on the keyboard, making it a truly idiotic character to use for something as common and regularly used as a directory separator.
Excellent point! I hesitate to use the term "LOL" because it's so widely abused and misused on teh Intarwebs, but I assure you that it was quite literally true in this case. Thanks for that. :)
Science is founded on the idea that our universe is predictable and that we can understand it.
So what you're saying is that you've missed the last century or so of physics. :)
Real scientists don't care about sports.
Do I detect a No True Scotsman fallacy in the making here? I know that Stephen J. Gould was a huge baseball fan from his many (often horribly contrived) attempts to compare changes in the game to biological evolution. I've known plenty of both students and professors at nearby UC Berkeley who are huge fans of one or more of the Bay Area's local sports teams. In my experience, Scientists are more likely to be sports fans than liberal arts majors.
Now if you were to claim something about a rather more geeky, useless, and ineffectual bunch, like, say, slashdot readers, I might be willing to agree with you even though I'm sort of a counter-example myself. :)
But injecting a pop-up for notification purposes DOES work.
Injecting a popup into what? You're not one of those fools who believes that the web is the Internet, are you? Like that imbecile ISP that started responding to failed DNS requests with the IP of a site running a web server that offered ads to those who were using a web server, and seriously broke all sorts of other software (e.g. software designed to monitor the health of off-site systems).
Oh wait, wasn't that Comcast too? :)
You should have stated your preference for SysV
I didn't prefer SysV. I was forced to use SysV. I preferred not to confuse myself by using a less-compatible product at home when there was another perfectly decent and more compatible option available for the same price. :)
if you want FreeBSD, use it.. If you want Linux, use it instead.
I don't want either one, I want GNU, but unfortunately, they refuse to create a useful kernel (there's some question as to whether they're even trying, or if they're just too wrapped up in "interesting" research to ever focus on making something useful), so I'm stuck with two options for my kernel, and, while Linux is the path of least resistance for GNU fans, it's also flakey as hell, so a supported GNU/BSD system is a refreshing alternative.
I could just go with BSD, but I hate their freakin' userspace, and, while Ports sounds good on paper, it can be (voice of experience here) a real PITA in a production environment. In my experience, Debian does the best and most reliable packaging of a wide variety of software, and a combination of Debian and GNU on a BSD kernel sounds a hell of a lot like my dream environment.
That depends upon what you mean by veteran, and what you mean by UNIX.
Ayup.
FreeBsd is closer to Unix due to its BSDness.
A peculiar interpretation. In the early days, I tended to prefer Linux over BSD because Linux generally acted more like the real UNIX(tm) systems at work, while BSD remained inherently...BSDish. Linux was like a Unix inflicted with a random, confusing scattering of BSDisms (like the operation of ps(1)). Of course, if you consider BSD to be The One True Unix (as many BSD fans do), then Linux looks like a UNIX with a random, confusing scattering of SYSVisms. In conclusion, I think I have to say that your first statement quoted above completely invalidates the second one, and I agree with the first. But I like BSD anyway. :)
MySpace has the duty to investigate the claim of copyright.
They do? Why? You can say "it's easy" all you want, but they still have to pay someone to take the time to do it. What obligation are they under that would make that expense a "duty"? I really don't know much about MySpace, since the whole place creeps me out, but my understanding was that they offered free hosting and social networking. How does "here's a gift" translate into "I'm obligated to take time away from my own work sort out your disputes with a third party about how you use that gift?"
Yes, but overly specific to grep. "|wc -l" works with all sorts of commands, so it's often easier to stick with the most general solution, rather than trying to learn which specific commands have unnecessary, redundant features, unless performance is actually an issue. I often start with grep, and then realize that I've got to reduce the noise and mis-hits by extracting the fields I need with sed or some other tool, which is why I rarely bother to even remember that grep even has a "-c" option.
Concentric circles don't show that any better than rows do.
They do for me. When I first encountered the periodic table, way back when, I found it very confusing until I constructed a mental model a lot more like the proposed one.
Gradients could be used to indicate the direction in which the shells get filled, with pale colors to represent emptier shells and darker ones for full. I'm not saying the idea is perfect (maybe there is no perfect representation), but I think the idea is well worth exploring. I also think the standard representation is strongly counterintuitive in some ways. Maybe it will turn out that it's the best we can do, but I see no harm in trying out some alternatives.
I think it needs work, but I think the fundamental idea is sound. The chemical properties of the elements are almost entirely based on how full the electron shells are, and I think a circular diagram represents that better. This particular representation is far from ideal (it's silly to have the names sideways and upside-down, among many other flaws), but as an abstract concept, I like it.
Wait. A modified "clone"? With--say--only 50% of my DNA included? Isn't that what they call a "normal child"!
So just what is it that you're volunteering for here, and are you sure it's legal in this state? Tell you what. Bend over, pick up that pencil I just dropped, and let me see if I might be willing to let you "access" my "source code". :)
Even if they do need a Windows machine, learning about a second machine will still make you more computer literate than someone who just knows one platform.
A) That's a pretty funky definition of "computer literate" you've got there. I don't think being able to move the mouse around and click on icons really makes anyone computer literate--I think it's possible to own and use both Mac and Win without ever approaching computer literacy. But, more importantly, B) your conclusion assumes that the same people are using both machines, rather than one person in the household (this was a survey of households, after all) using the Mac while another uses the Winbox.
In my experience, Mac seems to be most popular among two extremes: those who are more-than-usually computer literate and those who are less-. The presence of that first group probably means that you're going to be correct in your conclusions in many individual cases, but the presence of that quite-large second group means that you're going to be wrong a whole lot of the time as well. Especially, I suspect, if the Winbox is kept around just for games.
Of course, I do partly understand your confusion--the all-too-typically-poorly-written slashdot summary leads to your conclusion a little better than the actual facts of the matter do.
It's worth checking out the link to make sure you know what your state does, and does not, ban.
Um, thanks, but I think I'm going to try to refrain from insane, hazardous driving techniques no matter whether my state bans 'em or not! :)
This is in danger of turning into one of those "my ID is lower than yours" pissing matches, but I'm going to mix it up by saying that I agree with pandrijeczko: my dislike for Apple has nothing to do with it being "cool" or "uncool", but has everything to do with their corporate practices and pricing, and the fact that they're stuck in an old-school model of proprietary lock-in at least as much, and arguably more, that Microsoft. Yes, they do support a lot of open source initiatives these days, and I applaud them for that, but they also tweak around with their devices, especially their handheld devices, to keep them as incompatible as possible with open standards. Till they change that, I'll stick with HTC (and hopefully Android), Samsung and the like, and maybe even Palm, but I will be staying as far away from Apple as I can. Just as I have since my Apple II died. :)
(Like Mr. Slippery, I also remember the look and feel lawsuits which resulted in Apple being the only company ever to have been boycotted by the FSF. Even Microsoft hasn't achieved that level of perfidy! Apple has improved a lot over the years, but there's still quite obviously traces of that old, really horrible mindset lurking around in the company. I'm just glad Apple never did achieve a monopoly in personal computers back in the day, because I think they would have made MS look like saints.)
Learning to use focus-follows-mouse isn't hard, though I admit it can be a little confusing at first; going back to crappy systems that don't offer it after you've learned its benefits is what's hard!
And the company doing the switching as they experience a period of lower productivity as they have to retrain the employees on using the new software.
Which is something they routinely experience anyway as they upgrade to the "All New And Improved(tm)" version of the software they're using now, which offers little or no useful new functionality combined with a revamped all-singing, all-dancing UI that leaves existing users befuddled (see, e.g. "ribbon"). Ironically, the efforts to copy "the evil Windows UI" in FOSS that are so derided by hardcore fanboys may actually lead to cases where switching could be easier than upgrading.
Yes, not only is Fusion power only 30 years away, but personal flying jet-packs are only 10 years away, and true Artificial Intelligence is only 20 years away.
The really cool thing is the way those numbers have remained constant since at least the eighties, and possibly much longer. :)
People walk away from paid jobs without losing money all the time. It's called 'getting a new job'. It not-infrequently results in an increase in income, but, on the other hand, people often take new jobs that offer less money, but more satisfaction or other intangible rewards, because money isn't the only motivator out there!
Anyway, you seem to be assuming that open source and paid jobs are incompatible concepts. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Furthermore, open source projects have to compete on the basis of the quality and maintainability of the code far more than proprietary software does (because nobody can see how ugly and unmaintainable the proprietary code is except insiders). In my day job (working with a mix of open source and inhouse code), I have frequently heard one of my bosses say "it would be nice if we took some time to clean up this [inhouse] code" (not all bosses are idiots), but actually finding time and a budget to do so almost never happens. Any cleanup that does happen usually has to happen as a side effect of other, business-related, changes, and always has a much lower priority than any other work being done, and rarely gets more than a half-assed attempt. In my experience, people who help clean up open source code on a volunteer basis often do so because of their frustration with their inability to clean up their day job's code. "At least I can have one set of code around here that isn't a complete mess!"