He's just using loading the jQuery library from Google. The jQuery library is FOSS though (and consists of that single file), he could just as easily store it on his own server and is probably using Google for convenience's sake. I suppose technically jQuery is a dependency, but it's just JavaScript itself and so many people use it that I basically consider it part of the language now.
Jim Galvin of Afilias, an expert in DNSSEC, warned that a “split DNS” – where a country effectively sets up its own Internet within its borders and controls access to the global Internet - and the DNSSEC protocol “do not match very well”.
"It took a lot of work, but this latest Linux patch enables support for multi-petabyte file organization and storage!"
"Do you have support for smooth, full-screen Flash video yet?"
"No, but who uses that?"
Sometimes it seems like Slashdot posts stories about Israel for no other reason than to get people to start arguing. Come to think of it, the same goes for Apple.
Why does anyone need to know this? There's really not much discussion you can have about "this country lets you bring iPads" in, before this whole pages inevitably devolves into endless flaming about 1) Israel's foreign policy and/or 2) how the iPad sucks because it's a closed platform or whatever.
I'm just saying, it'd be cool if the editors stopped and asked themselves, "Are we posting this because it's important news that people should know, or are we posting it because we want to watch it draw trolls like moths to a flame?". This story is firmly in category 2.
The odds are stacked against an individual who might want to keep certain details of their life private when an organization as large as Google is trying to pry their lives open.
But Google isn't "prying", that's my point. They're collecting information that you have chosen to make available publicly, whether it's by placing it on the public Internet, or broadcasting it over EM waves where anyone nearby can pick it up. If you want privacy, don't announce your information in a public manner, and you will be off Google's radar. Google got blasted for Buzz (and deservedly so) because information that people thought they had selected as "private" was being made available, but that's not the issue here. If you're concerned with your MAC address being recorded, you need to learn how wireless networking works.
I know I'm supposed to be outraged about Street View. I'm trying, I really am. But the outrage just isn't there.
It's (generally) not illegal to take one picture of a storefront from your car. It's not illegal to take two, or three. Nor is it illegal to put those pictures on the internet. Google is just taking this process and deploying it on a larger scale than anyone previously had the resources for. I think it's the same with wireless networks. YOU have chosen to blast your MAC address into the ether for anyone within a certain radius to record, so why should you be surprised when someone does?
Google is just acting as an army of men with clipboards, no single one of whom is doing anything wrong, and for me it doesn't follow that there's something wrong when they do it en masse, provided they stick to public roads and take the privacy precautions (blurring faces, etc.) they have been.
I believe there was a court ruling that says the Treasury has to do this at some point in the future. To the best of my knowledge, they're still investigating possible options, although if you look at the list of security features for the new bill, one of them is "raised perforations". Perhaps these are an identifier, like Braille?
This whole Adobe-Apple thing was conflicting for me for a while: do I cheer Apple on for killing Adobe's standards-busting, lousy-performance (very, very lousy performance) closed-source plugins, or despise them for their policy of locking down their devices (of which Adobe was just one of several innocent bystanders).
At the end of the day, I've decided to give my grudging approval to what Apple is doing: at least by forcing people into HTML5, they're encouraging the adoption of a fully standards-based internet. And even though people go on and on about Apple banning Flash because it forces people to stay locked into the App Store ecosystem, HTML5 offers many of the same capabilities, and there is not-- yet-- any indication that Apple will restrict Safari in this way. (Of course, if/when they do, then we can start complaining, but not before).
I know I shouldn't be feeding the troll (who is showing exactly the kind of attitude I try to avoid), but in case anyone is genuinely confused by what I said before, I want to clarify: I've taken a look at only small portions of the kernel code, and have not (yet) make a concentrated effort to know more about it. The interface complaints are just what I keep hearing from programmers on various tech sites, including Slashdot, every time a story comes up regarding filesystems or somesuch. If kernel development doesn't, in fact, suck, then maybe there needs to be a better PR campaign to get the word out, because I've heard nothing but bad things.
Current college student ("young developer") speaking: I second this absolutely. I've contributed to a few open-source projects and once thought about getting involved with the kernel, but took one look at lkml and said "Fuck that". Maybe I just need to approach it again with an open mind, but it seemed to me like an endless battle of egos to get $PET_SEGMENT_OF_CODE approved. The fact that the kernel has a very poorly designed set of interfaces and is a nightmare to program for (at least, this is what I've heard- feel free to enlighten me if I'm wrong) doesn't help.
Nobody seems to be talking about the effect that this volcano will have of the weather. Previous large eruptions have caused mini ice ages.
BoingBoing brought it up. They say it's too early to be certain, but so far, the latitude of the eruption seems to be high enough that the ash isn't going to block enough solar radiation to cause any noticeable impact. They point out how eruptions at high latitudes, even huge ones like Mt. St. Helens, have very little impact on climate, whereas smaller ones at low latitudes have a much larger one.
China, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines and probably a bunch of other countries in the region carry the death penalty for drug smuggling, and have for decades. This is nothing new.
This guy has produced some really fascinating work, I strongly recommend checking out some more of it if you have some free time. The high-speed robot hand he developed literally made my jaw drop.
No media at all is always is better than censored media.
That sentiment is wonderful in theory and worthless in practice. People need media. If there is no media available, censored media will step in to fill the vacuum.
One thing I hear a lot from programmers, particularly programmers unhappy with their Pointy Haired-Bosses, is, "I don't need to be managed as much as my bosses think I do!", and then pointing to a place like Google- which has one of the lowest managers-per-programmer ratios in the industry yet still produces amazing products- as an example.
The thing is, though, Google gets away with this because they hire the best of the best, and the best of the best can manage themselves pretty well. Most programmers are nowhere near as talented as the ones working at Google, they're the ones who need to be supervised. Managers are for programmers who write code that ends up on The Daily WTF, which is many of them.
I suspect that's what's going on here. Of course a bunch of MIT students can just hop on a project and be productive, that's why they're going to MIT. This result does not apply to the world at large.
Having said that though, I bet some of the techniques they used would apply to the world at large. I for one am going to see what I can learn from this with regards to getting people up-to-speed on new projects.
one would think that a company such as Microsoft that has been owning the software market for decades now would know how to implement a randomizing algorithm correctly.
Wrong: a software company such as Microsoft that has been owning the software market for decades now knows how to use programmer time and resources effectively. Spending the extra programmer time and effort to turn a "99.99% random" process into a "100% random" one is an utter waste of both on something this trivial. Hate to break it to you, and to look-at-me-I'm-so-much-smarter-than-evil-Microsoft Rob Weir, but they're not making any mistake here.
In my experience, there are three things you have to do when learning a new language, after you get the syntax:
Learn some common algorithms, and how to implement them in that language. Sounds like you've got yourself an algorithms textbook, which is great. Just make sure you're understanding why they work, not just going through the motions.
Learn the standard library of the language. Obviously Java's is enormous, and there's no way a human being could possibly keep it all in their head, but you should check out the Java API and get a sense of, "what things are available to me in case I need them?" Java in particular makes it very likely that something you're trying to write already exists in some form, and there are a lot of programmers who waste valuable time reinventing the wheel every day because they don't know enough about the standard library (the flipside though, is that, just like algorithms, you need to make sure you know what you're using. Way too many programmers throw in a java.util.LinkedList without knowing what the hell it is)
Experience! Write real code! This is the most important thing of all. The best experience comes from working in a group on a larger project, although of course that's not always possible. Try writing some larger programs on your own, making sure you keep your good design principles (use interfaces, abstraction, modularization, etc.) from start to finish. When you feel you're ready, there are plenty of open-source projects on Google Code in Java: download one and tinker with the source until you understand it. Hell, join the project if you're ready.
Steampunk has been gaining much broader appeal in recent months...
Awww, now it's not cool anymore. The mainstream had to take cyberpunk from us, and now this too?
Hmm, I guess it's time to think of what's next. How about, a genre where the Ancient Greeks actually had advanced technology, powered by water wheels and quicklime? We could call it "marblepunk". Fame, here I come!
You're absolutely right, but I detect in your voice that you think some people disagree with you. This is something I see a lot, especially from Europeans: the assumption that Americans are actually fanatical supporters of the Imperial system. The truth is, we don't like it (can't speak for the UK, but I suspect it's similar). There isn't anyone in America who actually believes that the Imperial system is easier or more useful. The reason it persists is simply one of tradition, and the enormous expense (in terms of money and headaches) it would take to move the entire country over to a new system.
For example, I have basically no concept in my mind of how far a "kilometer" is. Oh, I know it's.62 miles, and I can usually do the conversion in my head, but I don't have an intuitive, subconscious sense of how far a kilometer is, like I do for a mile. I suspect most people raised on the metric system are the same way for Imperial units, it's just not easy to get a natural sense of the units you didn't grow up with. An entire country of people who don't have an intuitive sense of the units they're using would be chaos.
I'd be shocked if this laser is more powerful than 100 milliwatts (and it's probably much less), since even on the mosquito it doesn't appear to cause any damage to the main body, just the delicate flesh on the wings (according to the video). I wouldn't stare into it for long periods of time, but on your skin (and on brief exposure to the retinas), you'd be fine.
This is Slashdot. We should be griping about the DRM, or the removal of LAN play which is obviously intended to keep us as indentured servants to the corporate behemoth, not talking about trivial things like when the game is going to be released.
Slashdot Mirror
He's just using loading the jQuery library from Google. The jQuery library is FOSS though (and consists of that single file), he could just as easily store it on his own server and is probably using Google for convenience's sake. I suppose technically jQuery is a dependency, but it's just JavaScript itself and so many people use it that I basically consider it part of the language now.
Is parking for free an inalienable right now? Did I miss a recent update to the US/EU constitutions?
I detect insecurity in your tone, human.
Jim Galvin of Afilias, an expert in DNSSEC, warned that a “split DNS” – where a country effectively sets up its own Internet within its borders and controls access to the global Internet - and the DNSSEC protocol “do not match very well”.
Isn't that a good thing?
From 640% to 0% YoY growth in 9 months? Doesn't get much more "destroyed" than that.
"It took a lot of work, but this latest Linux patch enables support for multi-petabyte file organization and storage!"
"Do you have support for smooth, full-screen Flash video yet?"
"No, but who uses that?"
Sometimes it seems like Slashdot posts stories about Israel for no other reason than to get people to start arguing. Come to think of it, the same goes for Apple.
Why does anyone need to know this? There's really not much discussion you can have about "this country lets you bring iPads" in, before this whole pages inevitably devolves into endless flaming about 1) Israel's foreign policy and/or 2) how the iPad sucks because it's a closed platform or whatever.
I'm just saying, it'd be cool if the editors stopped and asked themselves, "Are we posting this because it's important news that people should know, or are we posting it because we want to watch it draw trolls like moths to a flame?". This story is firmly in category 2.
The odds are stacked against an individual who might want to keep certain details of their life private when an organization as large as Google is trying to pry their lives open.
But Google isn't "prying", that's my point. They're collecting information that you have chosen to make available publicly, whether it's by placing it on the public Internet, or broadcasting it over EM waves where anyone nearby can pick it up. If you want privacy, don't announce your information in a public manner, and you will be off Google's radar. Google got blasted for Buzz (and deservedly so) because information that people thought they had selected as "private" was being made available, but that's not the issue here. If you're concerned with your MAC address being recorded, you need to learn how wireless networking works.
I know I'm supposed to be outraged about Street View. I'm trying, I really am. But the outrage just isn't there.
It's (generally) not illegal to take one picture of a storefront from your car. It's not illegal to take two, or three. Nor is it illegal to put those pictures on the internet. Google is just taking this process and deploying it on a larger scale than anyone previously had the resources for. I think it's the same with wireless networks. YOU have chosen to blast your MAC address into the ether for anyone within a certain radius to record, so why should you be surprised when someone does?
Google is just acting as an army of men with clipboards, no single one of whom is doing anything wrong, and for me it doesn't follow that there's something wrong when they do it en masse, provided they stick to public roads and take the privacy precautions (blurring faces, etc.) they have been.
I believe there was a court ruling that says the Treasury has to do this at some point in the future. To the best of my knowledge, they're still investigating possible options, although if you look at the list of security features for the new bill, one of them is "raised perforations". Perhaps these are an identifier, like Braille?
This whole Adobe-Apple thing was conflicting for me for a while: do I cheer Apple on for killing Adobe's standards-busting, lousy-performance (very, very lousy performance) closed-source plugins, or despise them for their policy of locking down their devices (of which Adobe was just one of several innocent bystanders).
At the end of the day, I've decided to give my grudging approval to what Apple is doing: at least by forcing people into HTML5, they're encouraging the adoption of a fully standards-based internet. And even though people go on and on about Apple banning Flash because it forces people to stay locked into the App Store ecosystem, HTML5 offers many of the same capabilities, and there is not-- yet-- any indication that Apple will restrict Safari in this way. (Of course, if/when they do, then we can start complaining, but not before).
I know I shouldn't be feeding the troll (who is showing exactly the kind of attitude I try to avoid), but in case anyone is genuinely confused by what I said before, I want to clarify: I've taken a look at only small portions of the kernel code, and have not (yet) make a concentrated effort to know more about it. The interface complaints are just what I keep hearing from programmers on various tech sites, including Slashdot, every time a story comes up regarding filesystems or somesuch. If kernel development doesn't, in fact, suck, then maybe there needs to be a better PR campaign to get the word out, because I've heard nothing but bad things.
Current college student ("young developer") speaking: I second this absolutely. I've contributed to a few open-source projects and once thought about getting involved with the kernel, but took one look at lkml and said "Fuck that". Maybe I just need to approach it again with an open mind, but it seemed to me like an endless battle of egos to get $PET_SEGMENT_OF_CODE approved. The fact that the kernel has a very poorly designed set of interfaces and is a nightmare to program for (at least, this is what I've heard- feel free to enlighten me if I'm wrong) doesn't help.
Nobody seems to be talking about the effect that this volcano will have of the weather. Previous large eruptions have caused mini ice ages.
BoingBoing brought it up. They say it's too early to be certain, but so far, the latitude of the eruption seems to be high enough that the ash isn't going to block enough solar radiation to cause any noticeable impact. They point out how eruptions at high latitudes, even huge ones like Mt. St. Helens, have very little impact on climate, whereas smaller ones at low latitudes have a much larger one.
Can someone please call an ambulance? I think these sentences may have caused my head to explode.
China, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines and probably a bunch of other countries in the region carry the death penalty for drug smuggling, and have for decades. This is nothing new.
This guy has produced some really fascinating work, I strongly recommend checking out some more of it if you have some free time. The high-speed robot hand he developed literally made my jaw drop.
No media at all is always is better than censored media.
That sentiment is wonderful in theory and worthless in practice. People need media. If there is no media available, censored media will step in to fill the vacuum.
One thing I hear a lot from programmers, particularly programmers unhappy with their Pointy Haired-Bosses, is, "I don't need to be managed as much as my bosses think I do!", and then pointing to a place like Google- which has one of the lowest managers-per-programmer ratios in the industry yet still produces amazing products- as an example.
The thing is, though, Google gets away with this because they hire the best of the best, and the best of the best can manage themselves pretty well. Most programmers are nowhere near as talented as the ones working at Google, they're the ones who need to be supervised. Managers are for programmers who write code that ends up on The Daily WTF, which is many of them.
I suspect that's what's going on here. Of course a bunch of MIT students can just hop on a project and be productive, that's why they're going to MIT. This result does not apply to the world at large.
Having said that though, I bet some of the techniques they used would apply to the world at large. I for one am going to see what I can learn from this with regards to getting people up-to-speed on new projects.
one would think that a company such as Microsoft that has been owning the software market for decades now would know how to implement a randomizing algorithm correctly.
Wrong: a software company such as Microsoft that has been owning the software market for decades now knows how to use programmer time and resources effectively. Spending the extra programmer time and effort to turn a "99.99% random" process into a "100% random" one is an utter waste of both on something this trivial. Hate to break it to you, and to look-at-me-I'm-so-much-smarter-than-evil-Microsoft Rob Weir, but they're not making any mistake here.
Good luck, and godspeed.
Steampunk has been gaining much broader appeal in recent months...
Awww, now it's not cool anymore. The mainstream had to take cyberpunk from us, and now this too?
Hmm, I guess it's time to think of what's next. How about, a genre where the Ancient Greeks actually had advanced technology, powered by water wheels and quicklime? We could call it "marblepunk". Fame, here I come!
You're absolutely right, but I detect in your voice that you think some people disagree with you. This is something I see a lot, especially from Europeans: the assumption that Americans are actually fanatical supporters of the Imperial system. The truth is, we don't like it (can't speak for the UK, but I suspect it's similar). There isn't anyone in America who actually believes that the Imperial system is easier or more useful. The reason it persists is simply one of tradition, and the enormous expense (in terms of money and headaches) it would take to move the entire country over to a new system.
.62 miles, and I can usually do the conversion in my head, but I don't have an intuitive, subconscious sense of how far a kilometer is, like I do for a mile. I suspect most people raised on the metric system are the same way for Imperial units, it's just not easy to get a natural sense of the units you didn't grow up with. An entire country of people who don't have an intuitive sense of the units they're using would be chaos.
For example, I have basically no concept in my mind of how far a "kilometer" is. Oh, I know it's
I'd be shocked if this laser is more powerful than 100 milliwatts (and it's probably much less), since even on the mosquito it doesn't appear to cause any damage to the main body, just the delicate flesh on the wings (according to the video). I wouldn't stare into it for long periods of time, but on your skin (and on brief exposure to the retinas), you'd be fine.
This is Slashdot. We should be griping about the DRM, or the removal of LAN play which is obviously intended to keep us as indentured servants to the corporate behemoth, not talking about trivial things like when the game is going to be released.