> You forget that none of the causes you mention > involve playing with huge computers.
Sure they do. It's called "rational drug design". I spent a year of my life modelling networks of heart cells at an electrochemically detailed level. That line of work, if it was funded and pursued, could incrementally resolve the various causes of heart failure, and provide a wide array of mech- anisms to detect, prevent, or treat the various forms of arrythmia. It requires a lot of computing power to similuate the behaviour of networks of billions of cells at a fine scale.
The alternative to C is not Java, it's assembly. In the absence of C the situation would be profoundly worse. So you've seen a few misapplications of C. That hardly justifies an indictment of the language itself.
> The second big problem is weak interprocess > communication.
Solaris Doors are really cool. They allow you to call into another user-space process. But I disagree in part. Even if I were to accept that RPC is the primary function of IPC -- which I don't: although the importance of RPC has grown over the years most of the bytes going over IPC are raw data flow, even today -- network-transparency requires that the RPC be implemented over an I/O layer. Really, the only reason anyone uses local domain sockets is to pass capabilities! Besides which, there are plenty of RPC APIs on top of network I/O. How could their implementation model be impacting the quality of software so negatively as to merit being in your quirky list?
UNIX is partly responsible for this. Interprocess communication was retrofitted to UNIX in several different ways, most of them bad. The basic problem is that what you usually want is a subroutine call, but what the OS gives you is an I/O operation. If you build a subroutine call on top of an I/O operation, (think Sun RPC, or CORBA) it's slow. This leads to big, monolithic programs that crash all at once, instead of little, intercommunicating ones that contain the damage caused by a bug. It doesn't have to be this way. Take a look at QNX to see this done right.
The Israeli's can do anything cheaper, because the U.S. has already paid for it twice over. U.S. direct financial aid to Israel is over $US14,000 per capita per annum (and total costs to the US of aid per Israeli citizen including debt interest come to over $21,000). Most companies in Isreal don't even need to make a profit, because the handouts from the state make Asian crony capitalism look like a model of purity and virtue.
Why are all the little notebooks using dinky 20g harddrives and topping out at 256/384MB? It peeves me that the first thing i have to do when i spend a couple grand on a lap is replace the hard drive and expand the memory. It peeves me even more that the memory doesn't expand to something reasonable for a modern application load, like 1G/2G reasonable. Finally, what's up with the display sizes? I know they can put a decent resolution into a 10" screen -- but you can't find one on the market. The newer picturebooks and librettos are almost reasonable, at 1280x768. And this crappy proprietary hardware stuff has got to stop. I'm not going to buy a piece of hardware I can't control.
Punishment and morality are essentially irrelevant, although they may correlate in practice. Where you got the notion of a necessary connection between the two being drawn, I don't know. It seems like a straw man to me.
Morality must however be based on transcendent authority (i.e. God) otherwise deontic propositions have no truth-value.
Basically, IT is booming outside the U.S. Canada, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Chile, Europe, are all great destinations. The U.S. just plain sucks, because there are more H1Bs than jobs. Vote against the incumbents.
It would be irrational to believe that no molecular disruption will occur in living tissue as a result of proximate emission of radiation. While the evidence of causation is anecdotal, it is also quite persuasive in some cases, as when the form of a tumor mimics the form of an applied device. The bulk of research on the subject is currently funded by interested parties, so that inconclusive results are unpersuasive.
Eventually, the common-sense conclusion that some level of cancer incidence is directly tracable to body-hugging microwave transmitters will probably be borne out by specific statistical analysis of the accumulating mass of case studies. In the meanwhile, I use a headset, on the belief that it's much easier to get a hip replaced than a big chunk of cerebrum. I am sufficiently reckless, however, to sit with a wifi card in my lap most of the day. May God Almighty bless my gonads.
I bought two of them, and they gather dust. Why? Because Microsoft looses money on each sale. I am confident that there will be a mod-chip for the X-Box long before they are worth less than the $200 I paid for them.
But when it was said of Sawfish, it was true. This time it should be rephrased: A crippled nazi idiot window manager for the drooling incompetent sheep in you.
The number of bugs entered is more a measure of the maturity and popularity of the product than of the robustness of the code. The more bugs entered, the more likely it is that the code is mature, robust, and useful to many people.
The quality of the lisp hackers is vastly superior to that of the C hackers, however.
Really, sawfish is vastly superior to metacity because it is so easily scriptable. You can do *anything* with sawfish, and you don't need to recompile to do it. Comparatively, Metacity is a locked box, for the user who doesn't want to mess up his installed RPMs.
I think this is another stupid decision by Sun on the desktop, just like dropping NeWS, settling on OpenView, and clinging to CDE. Really, they suck at picking desktop winners.
Now if I could just use sawfish as my KDE window manager without getting crippled by incompatibilities, I'd be a happy camper.
Freedom of information is the sine qua non of democracy: It is impossible to make a free decision on the basis of controlled information; without freedom of information, the government is illegitimate.
The US is now a facist oligarchy, in which a seething mass of media wonks, intelligence hacks, and monied interests battle for ever increasing shares of the power once reserved to the electorate. There can be no democracy in the US because there is no effective dissemination of the crucial pertinent facts regarding current events, and because the state has systematically indoctrinated the plebians into a willing servitude, through the state schools and the allied media.
Making IDs more difficult to forge is a *bad* thing. It means that I have to blow your head off to get through the door, instead of just flashing my badge.
In the U.S. you are not obligated to have an SSN, or to give it out to anyone under any circumstances, with the exception of a court order, if you do have one.
It's not the law abiding citizens I want to protect: It's the freedom fighters, who are actually worthy of the air they breathe, unlike said good Germans.
Prepare powerpoints and voice-overs, push them with a web conferencing tool like Cata or Webex, that supports whiteboards and application sharing in browsers. Answer questions in text chat, or use a voice bridge.
Slashdot Mirror
Millions of people are using it today.
But the biggest IM service is the world is OICQ,
also known as QQ, from Tencent (www.tencent.com).
Everything else is small potatoes in comparison.
> I stand by all my statements.
Then you stand on quicksand.
> You forget that none of the causes you mention
> involve playing with huge computers.
Sure they do. It's called "rational drug design".
I spent a year of my life modelling networks of
heart cells at an electrochemically detailed level.
That line of work, if it was funded and pursued,
could incrementally resolve the various causes of
heart failure, and provide a wide array of mech-
anisms to detect, prevent, or treat the various
forms of arrythmia. It requires a lot of
computing power to similuate the behaviour of
networks of billions of cells at a fine scale.
> It's not just the bad guys who use mobile phones. Having been
> part of security details for a government organization...
So you're a bad guy too. Where's the counter-example?
> The biggest single problem is C
The alternative to C is not Java, it's
assembly. In the absence of C the situation
would be profoundly worse. So you've seen
a few misapplications of C. That hardly
justifies an indictment of the language itself.
> The second big problem is weak interprocess
> communication.
Solaris Doors are really cool. They allow you
to call into another user-space process. But
I disagree in part. Even if I were to accept
that RPC is the primary function of IPC -- which
I don't: although the importance of RPC has
grown over the years most of the bytes going over
IPC are raw data flow, even today --
network-transparency requires that the RPC be
implemented over an I/O layer. Really, the
only reason anyone uses local domain sockets
is to pass capabilities! Besides which, there
are plenty of RPC APIs on top of network I/O.
How could their implementation model be impacting
the quality of software so negatively as to
merit being in your quirky list?
UNIX is partly responsible for this. Interprocess communication was retrofitted to UNIX in several different ways, most of them bad. The basic problem is that what you usually want is a subroutine call, but what the OS gives you is an I/O operation. If you build a subroutine call on top of an I/O operation, (think Sun RPC, or CORBA) it's slow. This leads to big, monolithic programs that crash all at once, instead of little, intercommunicating ones that contain the damage caused by a bug. It doesn't have to be this way. Take a look at QNX to see this done right.
> we'd have a surrealist oppressive society trying to
> decide how paranoid to be about it's own growing
> internal facism.
Wow, just the the U.S. today! And yes, it sucks.
The Israeli's can do anything cheaper, because
the U.S. has already paid for it twice over.
U.S. direct financial aid to Israel is over $US14,000
per capita per annum (and total costs to the US
of aid per Israeli citizen including debt interest
come to over $21,000). Most companies in Isreal
don't even need to make a profit, because the
handouts from the state make Asian crony capitalism
look like a model of purity and virtue.
Why are all the little notebooks using dinky 20g
harddrives and topping out at 256/384MB? It peeves
me that the first thing i have to do when i spend
a couple grand on a lap is replace the hard drive
and expand the memory. It peeves me even more that
the memory doesn't expand to something reasonable
for a modern application load, like 1G/2G
reasonable. Finally, what's up with the display
sizes? I know they can put a decent resolution
into a 10" screen -- but you can't find one on the
market. The newer picturebooks and librettos are
almost reasonable, at 1280x768.
And this crappy proprietary hardware stuff has
got to stop. I'm not going to buy a piece of
hardware I can't control.
Punishment and morality are essentially irrelevant,
although they may correlate in practice. Where
you got the notion of a necessary connection between
the two being drawn, I don't know. It seems like
a straw man to me.
Morality must however be based on transcendent
authority (i.e. God) otherwise deontic propositions
have no truth-value.
Basically, IT is booming outside the U.S.
Canada, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Chile,
Europe, are all great destinations. The U.S.
just plain sucks, because there are more H1Bs
than jobs. Vote against the incumbents.
Schemata is Greek. Schemas is English as She is Spoke.
Plurals of loan-words are inconsistent in English.
It would be irrational to believe that no molecular
disruption will occur in living tissue as a result of
proximate emission of radiation. While the evidence
of causation is anecdotal, it is also quite persuasive
in some cases, as when the form of a tumor mimics the
form of an applied device. The bulk of research on the
subject is currently funded by interested parties, so that
inconclusive results are unpersuasive.
Eventually, the common-sense conclusion that some level
of cancer incidence is directly tracable to body-hugging
microwave transmitters will probably be borne out by
specific statistical analysis of the accumulating mass
of case studies. In the meanwhile, I use a headset, on
the belief that it's much easier to get a hip replaced
than a big chunk of cerebrum. I am sufficiently reckless,
however, to sit with a wifi card in my lap most of the day.
May God Almighty bless my gonads.
I bought two of them, and they gather dust.
Why? Because Microsoft looses money on each sale.
I am confident that there will be a mod-chip for the
X-Box long before they are worth less than the $200
I paid for them.
I know IIS has a lot of holes, but I didn't
realize that the International Space Station
is that leaky too.
But when it was said of Sawfish, it was true.
This time it should be rephrased: A crippled
nazi idiot window manager for the drooling
incompetent sheep in you.
The number of bugs entered is more a measure
of the maturity and popularity of the product
than of the robustness of the code. The more
bugs entered, the more likely it is that the
code is mature, robust, and useful to many people.
The quality of the lisp hackers is vastly
superior to that of the C hackers, however.
Really, sawfish is vastly superior to metacity
because it is so easily scriptable. You can
do *anything* with sawfish, and you don't
need to recompile to do it. Comparatively,
Metacity is a locked box, for the user who doesn't
want to mess up his installed RPMs.
I think this is another stupid decision by Sun
on the desktop, just like dropping NeWS,
settling on OpenView, and clinging to CDE.
Really, they suck at picking desktop winners.
Now if I could just use sawfish as my KDE
window manager without getting crippled by
incompatibilities, I'd be a happy camper.
Hehe. They're planning to base the FILESYSTEM
on it in the future. What an auspicious beginning!
Freedom of information is the sine qua non of democracy:
It is impossible to make a free decision on the basis of
controlled information; without freedom of information,
the government is illegitimate.
The US is now a facist oligarchy, in which a seething mass
of media wonks, intelligence hacks, and monied interests
battle for ever increasing shares of the power once reserved
to the electorate. There can be no democracy in the US because
there is no effective dissemination of the crucial pertinent
facts regarding current events, and because the state has
systematically indoctrinated the plebians into a willing
servitude, through the state schools and the allied media.
Making IDs more difficult to forge is a *bad*
thing. It means that I have to blow your head off
to get through the door, instead of just flashing
my badge.
In the U.S. you are not obligated to have an SSN,
or to give it out to anyone under any circumstances,
with the exception of a court order,
if you do have one.
It's not the law abiding citizens I
want to protect: It's the freedom fighters,
who are actually worthy of the air they breathe,
unlike said good Germans.
You can't travel without being tracked.
That's a violation of your privacy,
all sophistry and gerrymandering aside.
...it's time to hunt me some scumbag congressmen.
Prepare powerpoints and voice-overs,
push them with a web conferencing tool
like Cata or Webex, that supports whiteboards
and application sharing in browsers.
Answer questions in text chat, or use a
voice bridge.