I know it's just too hard to RTFA, but then you get crap like this. It's not about the ruler being sharp, it's about testing the rulers and paper clips for dangerous chemicals like lead. The problem being that it's exactly the same as the ruler that you can buy without this testing as long as it doesn't say "for kids" on it.
This seems to be some kind of power grab by the committee to try to regulate everything that might come in contact with a child and that they can make an argument that it is marketed to kids.
Having said that though, didn't the kits used to just have an invoice of mundane objects that you had to round up to do the experiments? It seems like a waste to have rulers and paper clips in every kit.
The Consumer Product Safety commission should only be concerned about things that are really hazards when used correctly or things that are easily used incorrectly, for example, lead based paint on children's toys, yeah thats a real concern. The fact that some children -might- -possibly- use some materials in a science kit and get hurt is nearly non-existent.
Surprise! That is exactly what this is about, but the commission is being stupid. The makers of the science kits are bundling ordinary objects like rulers, paper clips, etc in their kits, and the commission is saying that they have to have a testing regime in place that tests everything that goes into the kits for lead and other toxic chemicals because it is arguably marketed to kids. The solution will be that the kit makers will stop making science kits, even something completely innocuous like "how magnetism works kit", because the burden of testing everything that goes into the kits outweighs the potential profit.
There was a very similar story a while back about low-powered motorcycles marketed to kids that had lead in the ENGINE. The end result looked like it was going to just destroy the market for the product simply on the basis that there was lead in it, regardless of the fact that even if a child disassembled the engine and ate the part in question, it was present in an alloy that would not release the lead into the child's system.
What the story is really about is the committee trying to make their mandate apply to absolutely everything, regardless of whether it had any real chance of causing damage to children.
Adults can decide to watch it, but I think we'd agree that children below a certain age (as determined by their parents) shouldn't watch stuff like that, without triggering the "think of the children" or "censorship" alarms.
The problem with this is that you are not describing what is generally referred to as censorship. What you are describing is parents controlling what their children are exposed to, which I think shouldn't be interfered with, and should likely even be promoted, such as by legislation of means that parents can use to control access to content.
The implementation that we have of this concept though, is that the broadcast of "potentially offensive" material is chilled by the levying of heavy fines against the broadcaster, (this includes television, movies, books, and probably other formats that don't spring to mind as readily) instead of providing parents with effective means of controlling access to the content. THAT is what is generally referred to as censorship, and what I have zero tolerance for. The problem is that when the government steps in to protect "the children" or anyone else, they tend to "protect" everyone equally, most of which neither want nor need their "protection".
The one thing they can do that nobody else can -- because they're the message bus -- is to rewrite tweets in transit.
And if they do this they go straight from, "Doesn't seem all that great, but I might find a use for it at some point" to, "I will never, ever send a single message via this medium.".
That's extremely dangerous ground, I don't think even your average user is going to be happy about their messages being rewritten, much less the trend-setters with thousands of followers who are the source of Twitter's popularity.
I remember thinking a while back, "It would be nice if one of the more open alternatives had a chance to get off the ground, but Twitter would have to do something monumentally stupid to drive their customers away.". Thanks Twitter, for being more monumentally stupid than I could imagine.
I know anti-government paranoia is de rigeur here on/., but come on man, what other home production has been outlawed (with the exception of substances that are illegal to possess in the first place)?
-Farm animals? (sort of, generally outlawed in city limits, check your local laws, but if you're outside a city you're generally fine)
-Fresh vegetables? (not that I've ever heard of)
-Alchohol? (Sort-of, there are production limits, but they are actually quite reasonable, and really do seem aimed at penalizing unlicensed distribution rather than the act of production itself)
-drugs? (yep, but as I mentioned, they're illegal to possess, that's a whole different discussion)
So overall it's regulated, but I've never noticed any real trend to "stamp out" at-home production of foods.
Now if you're talking about the government wanting a cut of any "cottage industry" production where it is intended for sale, well of course they want their cut, that's the system we have.
Practically speaking, trying to exempt anything except, "for personal use only" is just asking for companies to try and pretend to be some kind of cottage industry so they can work around being taxed.
At no point does he say, "I can only eat 15 grams a day" or anything similar. At no point does he say that algae should be used as a source of calories.
What it excels at is providing various nutrients. Take a look at the nutritional data, and set the display to "Tablespoon", which is half what he says he eats daily. The vitamin load seems quite high to me for such a small amount of food, then there are amino acids, "good" fats etc...
Are you at all likely to get all the nutrition you need from this stuff? Not at all, but it looks like a pretty well rounded supplement to me. Note my assumption here is that when he says "15 grams", he means "the equivalent of 15 grams of dried Spirulina", if he literally means "15 grams of live Spirulina", I can't determine the nutrition information since I don't know how the drying process affects weight and nutrient content.
The appeal is that you can produce this stuff for extremely low cost and it has really good health benefits, in addition to actually lowering your impact on waste processing facilities (if you take the "urine as a fertilizer" approach).
And if you're squeamish about using urine for growing things, grow up. It's the same thing as people who object to head-on fish because, "I can't eat it if I can see it's face!". In other words, you're eating foods grown in bodily waste already, and having your head stuck in the ground (or elsewhere) won't change that.
It DOES mean that companies like Naxos who make money selling CDs of classical music will loose sales (not that that's a bad thing IMO)
Naxos buys up lots of quality recordings that would never otherwise see the light of day
...because they are locked up by copyright in the first place, right? When the only means of acquiring the music was by physical medium, buying the rights to it and selling at a marginal markup was laudable. Now that the publication cost is almost nil, is perpetuating copyright of these works, even at a fair price, really such a good deal?
Regardless, it sounds like they're just working within the system we have, I haven't heard their name on any of the particularly egregious articles I've run across, so live and let live.
I'm not an audiophile by any means, I use "decent" (sub-$100) headphones for all my listening, and I don't pay all that much attention to the decoding and amplification paths of my equipment (no gold-plated cables here), but a night at the local symphony (or for that matter the local pops) is money well spent in my opinion.
Right, it works fine as long as you haven't experienced how REAL change tracking works.
As a programmer, I'm used to being able to do all kinds of analysis of the change history, so when I see, "ooh look, I can see who made the changes", I'm extremely unimpressed. Also the implementation (in MS Word 2003) doesn't particularly impress in stability, performance, or presentation.
The thing that this thread seems to be ignoring is that BOTH sides are lying, and BOTH sides expect the other side to lie.
The thing is, this is not a side effect of online dating, this is the same as regular dating!
Your typical person (male or female) presents a generic, uninteresting set of interests tailored to appeal to the opposite sex, and only slowly as a relationship progresses do they drop the pretenses and reveal their real interests. That is assuming that they really want a long-term relationship. In that case the have to "play the game" long enough to get into a relationship, then they can start being genuine.
The reason for this is all the people who aren't interested in long-term relationships, and whose primary interest is the process of dating itself. The actual interests these people have is immaterial, because the activity that they are really interested in is... DATING. The whole process is a game, and the rules of the game dictate that you fit a certain mold pretty precisely based on sex/age/race/etc.
If you really just want to meet someone you are really compatable with, you either need to "play the game" and try to find someone else who is doing the same thing AND who shares your interests (remember, they aren't allowed to tell you about those interests initially), or you can try to avoid the whole dating scene and find someone with matching interests through some other venue, such as by pursuing the more social aspects of your interests and attempting to meet someone who shares them.
The whole thing about women saying they are interested in outdoorsy stuff when they really aren't is just a side effect of those activities being "in" right now, so it becomes extremely difficult to find people who actually have those interests via regular dating (including dating sites).
Note I'm not looking down on anyone for this, if my life were a bit different it seems like it would be a fascinating pastime. The deception only becomes a problem if both of the participants aren't on the same page about it.
Given the above, if you go into a normal dating scene expecting people to be genuine with you from the outset, there are definitely going to be problems.
And you're totally sure you can't have the same experience if the content is procedurally generated why?
Playing both Zangband and Dwarf Fortress, which are both totally dominated by procedurally-generated content*, I've commiserated in the same way that you mention with many other players of the same games, because the same situations emerge, even if the precise content and layout of the game changes from play to play.
Similarly, people are able to discuss and bond over experiences in multiplayer games, where the gameplay is crucially dependent on the behavior of the other players, which will necessarily change from game to game.
Also I find your analogy to bonding over experiences in a war interesting, as no two soldiers have *ever* had the exact same set of experiences as each other, but all the same they can experience an extremely strong sense of shared experience since certain aspects of their experiences correlate so well.
*both games have a handful of hard-coded scenarios and/or locations, but the trend is to improve the procedural generation to provide comparable content rather than to proliferate more hard-coded content.
As I see more and more focus on aircraft fuel efficiency, I keep wondering if somewhere down the road we will see catapults for regular airports to cut down on the amount of (portable) energy expended on takeoff. Don't get me wrong, I don't mean super-high-performance catapults like you see on an aircraft for extreme-short-runway takeoff. What I mean would be a system that provides similar acceleration to what the aircraft experiences now, but with most of the force coming from an external source so the aircraft can get into the air while expending less fuel.
Now it's probable that the amount of fuel burned while still on the runway is trivial compared to the amount burned during the initial climb, in which case the concept would be pretty pointless. Anyone know enough about fuel consumption rates to weigh in in this?
I think there are several factors that contribute to this: 1. Programming is a very popular and easy to enter field. 2. It's actually pretty easy to get by as a programmer without really understanding what you are doing. 3. Regardless of how much you hear about it, modularity, reusability, and highly structured programming do not have good penetration in Software Engineering. 4. Because of #3, it is all to easy for otherwise competent programmers to paint themselves into a corner and generate software with really messy architecture and/or implementation. 5. Programmers OFTEN have to clean up after other programmers.
So, due to #1 and #2, there actually are quite a number of really bad programmers running around. Due to #3 and #4, there are quite a number of otherwise decent programmers who produce working but unmaintainable code. Due to #5, most programmers have ample opportunity to experience a great deal of pain from other programmer's incompetence. Due to human nature, programmers tend to assume that all that bad code comes from #1 and #2 rather than #3 and #4.
And more speculatively and unrelated to the above: 6. Lots of programmers tend to hang out on Usenet, internet fora, mailing lists, and IRC, where harsh criticism is de rigeur, and internalize the habit of harsh criticism in their professional lives.
I'd understand your response if the GP had said, "stay away from object-oriented languages FOREVER", but he didn't, he said, "stay away just until you are comfortable with lower-level languages".
The point isn't that C++ and similar languages are BAD, but that they hide things from you. When you are learning to program, that is BAD, but when you are writing production code, you will generally want to eliminate points of failure, and a great way to do that is to use a higher-level language that hides things like memory management from you.
One-liner version: C is dangerous to program in, even for great C programmers, but great C programmers make better programmers no matter what language they use, because they understand how the underlying system works.
Short Summary: We make some claims about scaling ACID databases, but then don't support them.
Longer summary: We don't like NoSQL and enjoy making baseless cracks about it such as it being a "lazy" approach. In our paper we demonstrate that our unconventional version of an ACID database scales better than a traditional ACID database in a specific environment, while merely throwing away some robustness guarantees and changing how transaction ordering works. No direct comparison to any NoSQL implementation is made.
So yea, I'm not holding my breath for companies to start migrating away from NoSQL.
Somewhere in between reading it wrong and it being written wrong. AFAIK OpenBTS has nothing to do with Burning Man except that Burning Man is using their software.
Well, for a display on its own, it's not terribly useful. After all, increase the pixel density beyond the iPhone 4 and you'll be adding useless pixels that take memory (framebuffer), power (all those pixels require controllers behind them, plus your 2D and 3D accellerators have to push that many more pixels) and size (enlarged bitmaps and the like take more space).
What part of "iPhone 4 has resolution that matches the resolution of the human eye when held at arm's length" did you miss? I'm guessing the part in bold. I for one would absolutely love to have a pair of glasses that met or exceeded the resolution my eyes could perceive. And frankly, even if the display is "wasting pixels" in a given scenario, the obvious solution is to cut back on processing somehow, perhaps by lowering the resolution of image rendering to what is needed instead of the native resolution of the display. Sure the device will need beefier hardware for the situations where it actually needs to render at native resolution, but nothing is forcing the system to actually use all of those resources at all times.
When I am on the street, I did not trow away any rights. I still should be expected to have certain privacy. e.g. NOT have pictures of me place online.
Actually you do. When you are in public, you give up some of your privacy rights. If you have a picture of you taken in a public place that will embarrass or harm you in some way, you have no legal recourse to avoid having that picture published as far as I know.
Repeat after me, "I have no expectation of privacy when in a public place.". It is an extremely simple principle, and I don't understand why people think that it doesn't apply to them.
There are laws against posting defamatory information of most kinds, but if it is a legitimate picture then there is no recourse.
And just because something is legal does not make it right to do so.
I feel the same way, like about people telling photographers that it is illegal for them to take pictures in public. It isn't illegal for private citizens to claim rights that they don't actually have as far as I know, but it isn't right to do so.
Fair enough question..Net is basically just the latest incarnation of MS's long history of writing (pretty good) programming platforms that they then use to generate lock-in for their platform. As you note, VB was outstandingly successful at this, locking huge swaths of the business market to MS technologies. They have actually done this a lot more than you would be aware of as a non-programmer with their extensions to C and C++, which were engineered better such that they weren't in the user's faces all the time.
As to the popularity, or lack thereof of.Net, we don't really have the luxury of only opposing popular platforms, because by the time they're popular, it's pretty much too late to effectively oppose them. We also don't have the luxury of only dealing with whatever is the most pressing threat to our freedom.
If you're already a Windows user, why would they need to "get" you? You're already captured. This kind of thing isn't about doing anything to the users, it's about locking in the software developers. You may notice people saying things like, "Linux will never take off unless people can use (insert some app here)". Well providing proprietary development environments is a big part of why it's difficult to just take (insert some app here) and run it on Linux.
As for MS's "promise", it's pretty worthless because as usual it only covers *part* of the specification. Much like Java, it's *possible* to write a portable application, but if you just write for Windows, it's generally going to use at least one (probably many) of the MS-only "extras" that are helpfully not labeled in any way as non-portable, and will therefore not be able to run on anything except Windows. The people working on Mono seem to think that if they provide enough cross-platform applications, that they can end up making a difference, but I'm pretty skeptical about that approach.
Sorry for the rather late reply, I don't tend to hit/. all that much on the weekends.
My understanding (not a ridiculously well-founded one, so I'd advise looking around some more as well) is that C, C++, Perl, PHP, Python, Lua, TCL... in other words pretty much every major language with the exception of Java and the.Net family, are substantially* free of this kind of problem. Personally I recommend C and Python, but I keep trying to grok lisp because of how awesome people keep saying it is;)
*I say substantially because I do know that there are fully proprietary implementations of some of these languages, there are many compiler writers with a long history of "Embrace, Extend,..., Profit!" in the C and C++ family, and some of the others may be subject to this as well, but the languages I listed, unlike Java/.Net have standard compilers and/or interpreters that ARE fully open.
Sun made a promise and commitment to make Java an ANSI/ISO standard and they failed to live up to that, period. As a result, the industry is stuck with a proprietary and badly designed language.
I disagree, Sun made a promise.(full stop) The industry believed them, and as a result is stuck with a proprietary and badly designed language.
NEVER take action based on a companies "promises". Either it's a legally binding agreement, or it doesn't even belong in your decision-making process.
tl;dr summary since I got pretty long-winded: The problem is that Java was never open in the first place. Users of FOSS need to learn to decide for themselves when technologies aren't really open, and avoid using them.
It will be hard to find out whether Oracle planned this kind of aggression when buying Sun, but it can certainly be stated that the free software/open source community hasn't benefited from the acquisition.
There's a number of important questions that Oracle's patent attack raises:
* Did Oracle try to resolve this amicably with Google (by way of a license deal) or is Oracle pursuing purely destructive objectives?
Does this really matter? It would have been good for PR, but is anyone really under the illusion that Oracle wants to play nice with anyone? Personally I'd rather companies make it clear when they intend to swing around the "government-sanctioned monopolist hammer" instead of pretending that they're really quite reasonable, but that you do owe them quite a bit of money for using that technology they insisted was really open. Regarding PR, this kind of activity does put companies in my, "prone to dangerous legal demands" category, but frankly, Sun and Oracle were already both in that category.
* Will Google solve this patent problem in a way that the entire Android ecosystem (including the makers of Android-based phones and the authors of Android apps) will be reassured, or will Google only take care of its own risk?
Valid and important question, but as a non-Android and non-Java developer, I'm not interested in the answer.
* Is Java less of an open standard now than C#? I don't really buy the argument that Oracle may only be suing because of deviations from the standards definition. This kind of patent attack is evil no matter whether Google adhere to certain specififcations or not.
I wouldn't say Java is "less" open than C#. I do and always have put them in the same boat, which is "IP minefield, never develop in these environments." Also, this action changed NOTHING. Java has ALWAYS been an IP minefield just as much as C#, it's just that Sun managed to fool quite a few more people about it than Microsoft could. The only good patents are patents that are effectively neutered by PERMISSIVE patent grants. Sun's patent grant has always been a joke.
* Isn't this now the ultimate proof that the Open Invention Network doesn't really protect the Linux ecosystem from patent attacks? This is case of one OIN licensee (Oracle) suing another (Google).
Another interesting question, OIN's license only grants acces to patents specifically related to the Linux System as defined by OIN. After a quick look through the listing, the Java SDK itself doesn't seem to be there. There are several components that rely on Java (ant, an eclipse java compiler, a gcc Java runtime), but if those packages don't exercise the patents in question, then Oracle is acting exactly as the OIN is designed to allow them to act.
I don't see this as a failing of OIN. The way I see it, the fact that the Java SDK isn't considered a part of the "Linux System" by OIN means that Oracle doesn't consider Java to be open, which means to me that I don't want to use or rely on Java. It's nice for PR to say things like, "OIN protects licensees from patent threats related to Linux", but if you're going to be doing business based on that assurance, you should definitely be checking the definitions and making sure that what you think is covered is actually covered.
After putting in a bit more thought before posting, I have to say that while my previous comments are valid, your point is also valid. The "Linux Ecosystem", a more broadly defined set of software than the quite narrowly-defined "Linux System" according to OIN, is not at all fully covered
Have you been following the whole software patents thing?
That's the whole problem, that Sun acquired a monopoly on certain programming techniques from the government, and regardless of whether Dalvik pulls directly from Sun code, if it happens to use those techniques, then it falls afoul of patent law.
My takeaway from all of this is that it reaffirms my opinion of Java, that it's poison.
Seriously? Your point is that Gentoo doesn't do enough hand-holding? This is a distribution that has built its reputation around NOT doing excessive hand-holding.
That having been said, Gentoo does leave services that have security implications unconfigured, but I'm having trouble understanding how memcached is such a service. This isn't a system configuration issue, but a network layout issue.
Finally, there is this:
The admin may not be aware that memcached is not designed to be exposed directly to the internet.
Huh? You're administering an internet-facing server, and installing an internet-facing service, and you haven't checked that it is in fact intended to be internet-facing? If you're that oblivious, how the hell is making you fill out a config file going to help you? Captain McBlivious is still going to just blindly add configuration to the system until it starts doing what he expected, which is providing caching services.
Slashdot Mirror
I know it's just too hard to RTFA, but then you get crap like this. It's not about the ruler being sharp, it's about testing the rulers and paper clips for dangerous chemicals like lead. The problem being that it's exactly the same as the ruler that you can buy without this testing as long as it doesn't say "for kids" on it.
This seems to be some kind of power grab by the committee to try to regulate everything that might come in contact with a child and that they can make an argument that it is marketed to kids.
Having said that though, didn't the kits used to just have an invoice of mundane objects that you had to round up to do the experiments? It seems like a waste to have rulers and paper clips in every kit.
The Consumer Product Safety commission should only be concerned about things that are really hazards when used correctly or things that are easily used incorrectly, for example, lead based paint on children's toys, yeah thats a real concern. The fact that some children -might- -possibly- use some materials in a science kit and get hurt is nearly non-existent.
Surprise! That is exactly what this is about, but the commission is being stupid. The makers of the science kits are bundling ordinary objects like rulers, paper clips, etc in their kits, and the commission is saying that they have to have a testing regime in place that tests everything that goes into the kits for lead and other toxic chemicals because it is arguably marketed to kids. The solution will be that the kit makers will stop making science kits, even something completely innocuous like "how magnetism works kit", because the burden of testing everything that goes into the kits outweighs the potential profit.
There was a very similar story a while back about low-powered motorcycles marketed to kids that had lead in the ENGINE. The end result looked like it was going to just destroy the market for the product simply on the basis that there was lead in it, regardless of the fact that even if a child disassembled the engine and ate the part in question, it was present in an alloy that would not release the lead into the child's system.
What the story is really about is the committee trying to make their mandate apply to absolutely everything, regardless of whether it had any real chance of causing damage to children.
Adults can decide to watch it, but I think we'd agree that children below a certain age (as determined by their parents) shouldn't watch stuff like that, without triggering the "think of the children" or "censorship" alarms.
The problem with this is that you are not describing what is generally referred to as censorship. What you are describing is parents controlling what their children are exposed to, which I think shouldn't be interfered with, and should likely even be promoted, such as by legislation of means that parents can use to control access to content.
The implementation that we have of this concept though, is that the broadcast of "potentially offensive" material is chilled by the levying of heavy fines against the broadcaster, (this includes television, movies, books, and probably other formats that don't spring to mind as readily) instead of providing parents with effective means of controlling access to the content. THAT is what is generally referred to as censorship, and what I have zero tolerance for. The problem is that when the government steps in to protect "the children" or anyone else, they tend to "protect" everyone equally, most of which neither want nor need their "protection".
The one thing they can do that nobody else can -- because they're the message bus -- is to rewrite tweets in transit.
And if they do this they go straight from, "Doesn't seem all that great, but I might find a use for it at some point" to, "I will never, ever send a single message via this medium.".
That's extremely dangerous ground, I don't think even your average user is going to be happy about their messages being rewritten, much less the trend-setters with thousands of followers who are the source of Twitter's popularity.
I remember thinking a while back, "It would be nice if one of the more open alternatives had a chance to get off the ground, but Twitter would have to do something monumentally stupid to drive their customers away.". Thanks Twitter, for being more monumentally stupid than I could imagine.
I know anti-government paranoia is de rigeur here on /., but come on man, what other home production has been outlawed (with the exception of substances that are illegal to possess in the first place)?
-Farm animals? (sort of, generally outlawed in city limits, check your local laws, but if you're outside a city you're generally fine)
-Fresh vegetables? (not that I've ever heard of)
-Alchohol? (Sort-of, there are production limits, but they are actually quite reasonable, and really do seem aimed at penalizing unlicensed distribution rather than the act of production itself)
-post-production? (cheeses, breads, preserves, processed meats) (not that I've ever heard of)
-drugs? (yep, but as I mentioned, they're illegal to possess, that's a whole different discussion)
So overall it's regulated, but I've never noticed any real trend to "stamp out" at-home production of foods.
Now if you're talking about the government wanting a cut of any "cottage industry" production where it is intended for sale, well of course they want their cut, that's the system we have.
Practically speaking, trying to exempt anything except, "for personal use only" is just asking for companies to try and pretend to be some kind of cottage industry so they can work around being taxed.
At no point does he say, "I can only eat 15 grams a day" or anything similar. At no point does he say that algae should be used as a source of calories.
What it excels at is providing various nutrients. Take a look at the nutritional data, and set the display to "Tablespoon", which is half what he says he eats daily. The vitamin load seems quite high to me for such a small amount of food, then there are amino acids, "good" fats etc...
Are you at all likely to get all the nutrition you need from this stuff? Not at all, but it looks like a pretty well rounded supplement to me. Note my assumption here is that when he says "15 grams", he means "the equivalent of 15 grams of dried Spirulina", if he literally means "15 grams of live Spirulina", I can't determine the nutrition information since I don't know how the drying process affects weight and nutrient content.
The appeal is that you can produce this stuff for extremely low cost and it has really good health benefits, in addition to actually lowering your impact on waste processing facilities (if you take the "urine as a fertilizer" approach).
And if you're squeamish about using urine for growing things, grow up. It's the same thing as people who object to head-on fish because, "I can't eat it if I can see it's face!". In other words, you're eating foods grown in bodily waste already, and having your head stuck in the ground (or elsewhere) won't change that.
It DOES mean that companies like Naxos who make money selling CDs of classical music will loose sales (not that that's a bad thing IMO)
Naxos buys up lots of quality recordings that would never otherwise see the light of day
...because they are locked up by copyright in the first place, right? When the only means of acquiring the music was by physical medium, buying the rights to it and selling at a marginal markup was laudable. Now that the publication cost is almost nil, is perpetuating copyright of these works, even at a fair price, really such a good deal?
Regardless, it sounds like they're just working within the system we have, I haven't heard their name on any of the particularly egregious articles I've run across, so live and let live.
^^^ THIS! ^^^
I'm not an audiophile by any means, I use "decent" (sub-$100) headphones for all my listening, and I don't pay all that much attention to the decoding and amplification paths of my equipment (no gold-plated cables here), but a night at the local symphony (or for that matter the local pops) is money well spent in my opinion.
Right, it works fine as long as you haven't experienced how REAL change tracking works.
As a programmer, I'm used to being able to do all kinds of analysis of the change history, so when I see, "ooh look, I can see who made the changes", I'm extremely unimpressed. Also the implementation (in MS Word 2003) doesn't particularly impress in stability, performance, or presentation.
The thing that this thread seems to be ignoring is that BOTH sides are lying, and BOTH sides expect the other side to lie.
The thing is, this is not a side effect of online dating, this is the same as regular dating!
Your typical person (male or female) presents a generic, uninteresting set of interests tailored to appeal to the opposite sex, and only slowly as a relationship progresses do they drop the pretenses and reveal their real interests. That is assuming that they really want a long-term relationship. In that case the have to "play the game" long enough to get into a relationship, then they can start being genuine.
The reason for this is all the people who aren't interested in long-term relationships, and whose primary interest is the process of dating itself. The actual interests these people have is immaterial, because the activity that they are really interested in is... DATING. The whole process is a game, and the rules of the game dictate that you fit a certain mold pretty precisely based on sex/age/race/etc.
If you really just want to meet someone you are really compatable with, you either need to "play the game" and try to find someone else who is doing the same thing AND who shares your interests (remember, they aren't allowed to tell you about those interests initially), or you can try to avoid the whole dating scene and find someone with matching interests through some other venue, such as by pursuing the more social aspects of your interests and attempting to meet someone who shares them.
The whole thing about women saying they are interested in outdoorsy stuff when they really aren't is just a side effect of those activities being "in" right now, so it becomes extremely difficult to find people who actually have those interests via regular dating (including dating sites).
Note I'm not looking down on anyone for this, if my life were a bit different it seems like it would be a fascinating pastime. The deception only becomes a problem if both of the participants aren't on the same page about it.
Given the above, if you go into a normal dating scene expecting people to be genuine with you from the outset, there are definitely going to be problems.
And you're totally sure you can't have the same experience if the content is procedurally generated why?
Playing both Zangband and Dwarf Fortress, which are both totally dominated by procedurally-generated content*, I've commiserated in the same way that you mention with many other players of the same games, because the same situations emerge, even if the precise content and layout of the game changes from play to play.
Similarly, people are able to discuss and bond over experiences in multiplayer games, where the gameplay is crucially dependent on the behavior of the other players, which will necessarily change from game to game.
Also I find your analogy to bonding over experiences in a war interesting, as no two soldiers have *ever* had the exact same set of experiences as each other, but all the same they can experience an extremely strong sense of shared experience since certain aspects of their experiences correlate so well.
*both games have a handful of hard-coded scenarios and/or locations, but the trend is to improve the procedural generation to provide comparable content rather than to proliferate more hard-coded content.
As I see more and more focus on aircraft fuel efficiency, I keep wondering if somewhere down the road we will see catapults for regular airports to cut down on the amount of (portable) energy expended on takeoff. Don't get me wrong, I don't mean super-high-performance catapults like you see on an aircraft for extreme-short-runway takeoff. What I mean would be a system that provides similar acceleration to what the aircraft experiences now, but with most of the force coming from an external source so the aircraft can get into the air while expending less fuel.
Now it's probable that the amount of fuel burned while still on the runway is trivial compared to the amount burned during the initial climb, in which case the concept would be pretty pointless. Anyone know enough about fuel consumption rates to weigh in in this?
I think there are several factors that contribute to this:
1. Programming is a very popular and easy to enter field.
2. It's actually pretty easy to get by as a programmer without really understanding what you are doing.
3. Regardless of how much you hear about it, modularity, reusability, and highly structured programming do not have good penetration in Software Engineering.
4. Because of #3, it is all to easy for otherwise competent programmers to paint themselves into a corner and generate software with really messy architecture and/or implementation.
5. Programmers OFTEN have to clean up after other programmers.
So, due to #1 and #2, there actually are quite a number of really bad programmers running around.
Due to #3 and #4, there are quite a number of otherwise decent programmers who produce working but unmaintainable code.
Due to #5, most programmers have ample opportunity to experience a great deal of pain from other programmer's incompetence.
Due to human nature, programmers tend to assume that all that bad code comes from #1 and #2 rather than #3 and #4.
And more speculatively and unrelated to the above:
6. Lots of programmers tend to hang out on Usenet, internet fora, mailing lists, and IRC, where harsh criticism is de rigeur, and internalize the habit of harsh criticism in their professional lives.
I'd understand your response if the GP had said, "stay away from object-oriented languages FOREVER", but he didn't, he said, "stay away just until you are comfortable with lower-level languages".
The point isn't that C++ and similar languages are BAD, but that they hide things from you. When you are learning to program, that is BAD, but when you are writing production code, you will generally want to eliminate points of failure, and a great way to do that is to use a higher-level language that hides things like memory management from you.
One-liner version: C is dangerous to program in, even for great C programmers, but great C programmers make better programmers no matter what language they use, because they understand how the underlying system works.
Short Summary:
We make some claims about scaling ACID databases, but then don't support them.
Longer summary:
We don't like NoSQL and enjoy making baseless cracks about it such as it being a "lazy" approach.
In our paper we demonstrate that our unconventional version of an ACID database scales better than a traditional ACID database in a specific environment, while merely throwing away some robustness guarantees and changing how transaction ordering works.
No direct comparison to any NoSQL implementation is made.
So yea, I'm not holding my breath for companies to start migrating away from NoSQL.
Somewhere in between reading it wrong and it being written wrong. AFAIK OpenBTS has nothing to do with Burning Man except that Burning Man is using their software.
Well, for a display on its own, it's not terribly useful. After all, increase the pixel density beyond the iPhone 4 and you'll be adding useless pixels that take memory (framebuffer), power (all those pixels require controllers behind them, plus your 2D and 3D accellerators have to push that many more pixels) and size (enlarged bitmaps and the like take more space).
What part of "iPhone 4 has resolution that matches the resolution of the human eye when held at arm's length" did you miss? I'm guessing the part in bold. I for one would absolutely love to have a pair of glasses that met or exceeded the resolution my eyes could perceive. And frankly, even if the display is "wasting pixels" in a given scenario, the obvious solution is to cut back on processing somehow, perhaps by lowering the resolution of image rendering to what is needed instead of the native resolution of the display. Sure the device will need beefier hardware for the situations where it actually needs to render at native resolution, but nothing is forcing the system to actually use all of those resources at all times.
When I am on the street, I did not trow away any rights. I still should be expected to have certain privacy. e.g. NOT have pictures of me place online.
Actually you do. When you are in public, you give up some of your privacy rights. If you have a picture of you taken in a public place that will embarrass or harm you in some way, you have no legal recourse to avoid having that picture published as far as I know.
Repeat after me, "I have no expectation of privacy when in a public place.". It is an extremely simple principle, and I don't understand why people think that it doesn't apply to them.
There are laws against posting defamatory information of most kinds, but if it is a legitimate picture then there is no recourse.
And just because something is legal does not make it right to do so.
I feel the same way, like about people telling photographers that it is illegal for them to take pictures in public. It isn't illegal for private citizens to claim rights that they don't actually have as far as I know, but it isn't right to do so.
Fair enough question. .Net is basically just the latest incarnation of MS's long history of writing (pretty good) programming platforms that they then use to generate lock-in for their platform. As you note, VB was outstandingly successful at this, locking huge swaths of the business market to MS technologies. They have actually done this a lot more than you would be aware of as a non-programmer with their extensions to C and C++, which were engineered better such that they weren't in the user's faces all the time.
As to the popularity, or lack thereof of .Net, we don't really have the luxury of only opposing popular platforms, because by the time they're popular, it's pretty much too late to effectively oppose them. We also don't have the luxury of only dealing with whatever is the most pressing threat to our freedom.
If you're already a Windows user, why would they need to "get" you? You're already captured. This kind of thing isn't about doing anything to the users, it's about locking in the software developers. You may notice people saying things like, "Linux will never take off unless people can use (insert some app here)". Well providing proprietary development environments is a big part of why it's difficult to just take (insert some app here) and run it on Linux.
As for MS's "promise", it's pretty worthless because as usual it only covers *part* of the specification. Much like Java, it's *possible* to write a portable application, but if you just write for Windows, it's generally going to use at least one (probably many) of the MS-only "extras" that are helpfully not labeled in any way as non-portable, and will therefore not be able to run on anything except Windows. The people working on Mono seem to think that if they provide enough cross-platform applications, that they can end up making a difference, but I'm pretty skeptical about that approach.
Sorry for the rather late reply, I don't tend to hit /. all that much on the weekends.
My understanding (not a ridiculously well-founded one, so I'd advise looking around some more as well) is that C, C++, Perl, PHP, Python, Lua, TCL... in other words pretty much every major language with the exception of Java and the .Net family, are substantially* free of this kind of problem. Personally I recommend C and Python, but I keep trying to grok lisp because of how awesome people keep saying it is ;)
*I say substantially because I do know that there are fully proprietary implementations of some of these languages, there are many compiler writers with a long history of "Embrace, Extend, ..., Profit!" in the C and C++ family, and some of the others may be subject to this as well, but the languages I listed, unlike Java/.Net have standard compilers and/or interpreters that ARE fully open.
Sun made a promise and commitment to make Java an ANSI/ISO standard and they failed to live up to that, period. As a result, the industry is stuck with a proprietary and badly designed language.
I disagree, Sun made a promise.(full stop)
The industry believed them, and as a result is stuck with a proprietary and badly designed language.
NEVER take action based on a companies "promises". Either it's a legally binding agreement, or it doesn't even belong in your decision-making process.
tl;dr summary since I got pretty long-winded: The problem is that Java was never open in the first place. Users of FOSS need to learn to decide for themselves when technologies aren't really open, and avoid using them.
It will be hard to find out whether Oracle planned this kind of aggression when buying Sun, but it can certainly be stated that the free software/open source community hasn't benefited from the acquisition.
There's a number of important questions that Oracle's patent attack raises:
* Did Oracle try to resolve this amicably with Google (by way of a license deal) or is Oracle pursuing purely destructive objectives?
Does this really matter? It would have been good for PR, but is anyone really under the illusion that Oracle wants to play nice with anyone? Personally I'd rather companies make it clear when they intend to swing around the "government-sanctioned monopolist hammer" instead of pretending that they're really quite reasonable, but that you do owe them quite a bit of money for using that technology they insisted was really open. Regarding PR, this kind of activity does put companies in my, "prone to dangerous legal demands" category, but frankly, Sun and Oracle were already both in that category.
* Will Google solve this patent problem in a way that the entire Android ecosystem (including the makers of Android-based phones and the authors of Android apps) will be reassured, or will Google only take care of its own risk?
Valid and important question, but as a non-Android and non-Java developer, I'm not interested in the answer.
* Is Java less of an open standard now than C#? I don't really buy the argument that Oracle may only be suing because of deviations from the standards definition. This kind of patent attack is evil no matter whether Google adhere to certain specififcations or not.
I wouldn't say Java is "less" open than C#. I do and always have put them in the same boat, which is "IP minefield, never develop in these environments." Also, this action changed NOTHING. Java has ALWAYS been an IP minefield just as much as C#, it's just that Sun managed to fool quite a few more people about it than Microsoft could. The only good patents are patents that are effectively neutered by PERMISSIVE patent grants. Sun's patent grant has always been a joke.
* Isn't this now the ultimate proof that the Open Invention Network doesn't really protect the Linux ecosystem from patent attacks? This is case of one OIN licensee (Oracle) suing another (Google).
Another interesting question, OIN's license only grants acces to patents specifically related to the Linux System as defined by OIN. After a quick look through the listing, the Java SDK itself doesn't seem to be there. There are several components that rely on Java (ant, an eclipse java compiler, a gcc Java runtime), but if those packages don't exercise the patents in question, then Oracle is acting exactly as the OIN is designed to allow them to act.
I don't see this as a failing of OIN. The way I see it, the fact that the Java SDK isn't considered a part of the "Linux System" by OIN means that Oracle doesn't consider Java to be open, which means to me that I don't want to use or rely on Java. It's nice for PR to say things like, "OIN protects licensees from patent threats related to Linux", but if you're going to be doing business based on that assurance, you should definitely be checking the definitions and making sure that what you think is covered is actually covered.
After putting in a bit more thought before posting, I have to say that while my previous comments are valid, your point is also valid. The "Linux Ecosystem", a more broadly defined set of software than the quite narrowly-defined "Linux System" according to OIN, is not at all fully covered
Have you been following the whole software patents thing?
That's the whole problem, that Sun acquired a monopoly on certain programming techniques from the government, and regardless of whether Dalvik pulls directly from Sun code, if it happens to use those techniques, then it falls afoul of patent law.
My takeaway from all of this is that it reaffirms my opinion of Java, that it's poison.
Not really, cremation is the traditional method of corpse disposal in Japan. This would be a step back for them.
Seriously? Your point is that Gentoo doesn't do enough hand-holding? This is a distribution that has built its reputation around NOT doing excessive hand-holding.
That having been said, Gentoo does leave services that have security implications unconfigured, but I'm having trouble understanding how memcached is such a service. This isn't a system configuration issue, but a network layout issue.
Finally, there is this:
The admin may not be aware that memcached is not designed to be exposed directly to the internet.
Huh? You're administering an internet-facing server, and installing an internet-facing service, and you haven't checked that it is in fact intended to be internet-facing? If you're that oblivious, how the hell is making you fill out a config file going to help you? Captain McBlivious is still going to just blindly add configuration to the system until it starts doing what he expected, which is providing caching services.