That is until the people in your town replace your current city commissioners with people more sympathetic to getting a Wal*mart. Unless you live in a particularly isolated or small well-to-do area, the people making less-than-average wages really do want to pay less for their cheap consumer goods. All it takes is a handful of noisy people to organize a "t'row da rich guys out" campaign.
Sure, Wal*mart is legendary for their ability to strangle local economies. But people who are desperate for work still have to buy food and clothing, and they want those low Wal*mart prices just as much as you don't -- maybe even more. And if they're unemployed, or perhaps retired and living on insufficient fixed incomes, they may have more free time to fight for it than you'd have to fight against it.
I'm not saying anything is likely to change for you in the short term, but I'm saying there's always an avenue for change to happen.
And as for The Body Shop, it's funny you should mention them. Their store in the mall next to my office building closed earlier this year. (It's not relevant to your point -- this mall has tried to "upscale" their image by raising their rents, and has driven out virtually all of their renters in the last few years, not just TBS.)
Because I have software today that removes the interference with my ability to view the movie as I want to. Maybe the Sony DVD player doesn't let me skip the FBI warning on the official disc, but it doesn't do anything about the unofficial discs. Blu-Ray and HD are going to be locked down much better than CSS, and HDCP may or may not ever be shattered the way CSS was.
Sure, they treat me as a criminal today. And I don't like it. My farking ReplayTV one day decided to add Macrovision for my viewing "pleasure." That machine is now collecting dust, and I won't be paying them for a replacement.
I've had it. I don't want their sh!t any more. I'm willing to settle for "less" as long as it doesn't get any worse than it is now.
And the quality increase between VHS and DVD was an order of magnitude. The quality increase between DVD and HD is much more subtle (and not even visible if you don't own an HDTV.) Yes, you'll obviously get a "better" picture on an HD signal, but all of the artifacts that made VHS even worse than it could have been (tape flutter, finicky drive mechanisms, tape rewinders, tracking issues, and media size / weight / durability / cost) were completely solved in the transition to DVD.
The only thing HD-DVD will bring to the table is picture quality, and any gains there will be largely offset by the inconveniences that will come with the content lockdown. Skipping commercials? Nope. Watch on any TV in the house? Not that one. Watch on your iPod? Not you. Watch on your Linux computer? Never, ever. Watch on Windows Vista? Only if you keep ponying up their monthly software license fees.
Certainly, anyone who buys any HD-Video anything anytime soon is either an idiot, or just has too much money, in which case they might as well throw some away.
Why? I have a big HDTV, and some money, but no plans to buy either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Ordinary DVDs are still almost good enough. What I'm not doing, though, is investing another dime in any of the content lockdown schemes that come along with these new formats.
I'm not a criminal, I'm not a pirate, and I'm not a consumer of pirated movies. And I shouldn't be treated like one. So I will be god-damned if I'm going to help them get their HDCP development money back by buying one cent of this sh!t. I think the rest of you need to quit drooling over HD-DVD and Blu-Ray and tell the suck-up hardware companies like Toshiba that you're not going to buy this crap, either. If we vote with our dollars, they may eventually get the picture, clearer than HD.
Oh, we used to DREAM of seven-segment LEDs. At least we would have, if they had been invented at that time. No, we had to punch our images into little dot pictures onto 80-column punch cards and shine a flashlight through the holes and onto the wall. (Never thought to do a flip-book.)
Of course that made it a big screen image, but it was a crappy-looking wall.:-)
[template]
1 : [A dummy publication that acts as a model for the structure and general layout of another publication.]
2 : [Part of the object that stores pattern of instance variables.]
If we take the second meaning, then no, [your template above] IS NOT [actually a template in the classical sense.]. It's the [lack of a Smalltalk implementation] and [invalid syntax] which excludes it as [an object].
[It's like copying someone's fill-in-the-blank Slashdot posting, without the insight.]
[Next time, Google might help you make a suggestion a bit more appropriate to the thread.]
Of course at that level it's all shades of grey anyway.
But where else do you draw the lines? Any open-source project can drag in millions of lines of code by reference, authored by thousands of people, some of whom are unknown (and possibly some of which may have been plagiarized or be in some other violation of Intellectual Property rights.) But Microsoft really has to account for the provenance of each line of code -- either they have to show who authored it in-house, or they have to come up with a receipt for the purchase of the rights to that code.
At least they do if they want to keep battling Linux over IP issues. The one thing they can't do is draw code from the GPL world, anyway, which leaves them only two other options -- buy it or write it.
I think he means the truth would be a statement more along the lines of "Vista is a hyperinflated conglomeration of foecal matter, stuffed almost beyond measure with gratuitous CPU-eating GUI tricks, inefficiencies a magnitude of order higher than anything else we've ever delivered, and Hollywood-sponsored media restrictions to give it that 'just-squatted' smell."
At least that's more nuanced and deeper, but maybe just a touch less subtle.
You project management plan looks great in Microsoft Project. Then you print it out and re-wallpaper the offices only to have the developers sift through it and go, "What the fsck?"
Actually, Windows developers go "What the CHKDSK.EXE?"
I think you're completely discounting the original usage of the word "concerted."
Debian isn't a concerted effort by any stretch of the imagination. It consists of thousands of modules that really exist independently of one another; the vast majority of them were not even written specifically for Debian at all, but rather for Linux in the general sense. They were simply included in the package. I'd go so far as to guess that some of them made it in "by proximity" -- they were in the same directory as something useful, and someone came along and did a 'cp coolutility/*/distro/coolutility/*'.
Now, if the Debian project managers were told to write specs for all n-thousand of these modules, and then told "deliver these modules so we can have the next 'eager beaver' release," then you'd be looking at a concerted effort.
He could, but he's big into the retro-computing image. He's got a metric buttload of ancient hardware up and operational, and likes to be surrounded by Hollywood quantities of blinkenlights.
I sometimes wonder what would happen to his house if someone sent him an email virus that caused all his computers to attempt to calculate the last digit of pi. Would his sound cards start singing "Daisy, Daisy"? Would some of the old boxes emit puffs of smoke and a few showers of sparks?
Actually, I might suggest he install a flashpan with a few serial-port-ignited pyrotechnic charges, just to wake up the gullible non-geeky visitors. Tuck it all behind a CD-ROM faceplate designed to blow open on detonation, that sort of thing.
A friend of mine has a rack in his basement that has 48 SCSI CD-ROM drives mounted in it. He just keeps them all on-line 24x7. Never has to touch them!
Sounds like you need more experience, instead of more band-aids.:-)
And I'd say better-made cases would help, but I realize they are few and far between. Even the more expensive cases I've dealt with lately are stamped from steel (or aluminium) that seem about one or two gauges too thin. Of course once the motherboard is installed and a few drives are mounted in the cages, they seem to be rigid enough, but what that really means is that any motion of the computer is physically stressing the motherboard, flexing and pulling at all those solder joints and perhaps inducing the weakest of them to fail.
As far as cuts on sharp edges go, I have taken a "deburring tool" to some really nasty cases, (and to some nasty mods I've made,) and I've also used a grinding stone chucked up in a Dremel. I'm not trying to achieve a completely "safe" case; I just see no reason for the hazardously poor quality cases coming out these days.
Ever have a service pack replace Notepad? Ever go to a coworker's desk, type "notepad" and get some weird-ass editor in its place?
Notepad2.exe is a "close" replacement, but not identical. I wanted the path of least surprises: if you type notepad, you should get exactly notepad. If you click "Open as" and pick notepad from the list, you should get exactly notepad. But if you accept the default editor on my machine, you'll get a decent replacement. And I have a copy named "n.exe" for quick typing in the command shell.
I agree that underage children shouldn't be able to buy M or AO rated games.
Why do you say that? Did the State of Minnesota mandate the rating process? Does the state oversee the correct application of a rating to a particular game? Did the state place the ratings on the boxes? Can a game producer appeal to the state if they feel a rating is unfair? Does the state regulate any portion of the rating system at all?
No.
A voluntary system created by the industry, with private reviews and voluntary compliance by game producers, and now it's somehow state-mandated that retailers abuse this completely unofficial system? And not only that, but to try to fine minors at the register? It's like someone wrote this law just to see how fast the Supreme Court can strike it down.
Let parents do their job and be parents. The state is horrible and ineffective at just about everything else they do, what on earth makes them think they know better than me what's best for my kid?
What I'd really like to see the ESRB do is to grant some game an M rating strictly for "flagrant blasphemy and satanic references". Then we'd see how quickly this idiocy could be overturned!
For windows, I've completely replaced "notepad.exe" with "notepad2.exe" And when I say completely, I mean I crawled through my system registry editing every occurrance of "notepad.exe" to "notepad2.exe". Shell opens, file associations, defaults of every sort use it. I love it. And unless someone using the computer is particularly observant, they don't even notice it's not the original notepad.
It has a very simple interface that looks like the original notepad, it does syntax coloring for two dozen different languages and file formats, shows bracket matching, adds line numbers, word wrap features, support for UNIX- and mac-style line terminations, regexps, and is in general what notepad itself should have been back in the 1990s. Plus, it's freeware. What more could you want?
If you're looking for really lightweight, run the code through a prettyprinter first. Pick the style you can most easily read. For example, I personally don't like K&R style, but that's entirely up to you.
If you're looking more for documentation of existing code, doxygen is great. It produces click-to-follow hierarchies, graphical pictures of trees, and can will intelligently display some of the comments it encounters. It can produce output in html, LaTeX, rtf, PS, PDF, and even man pages. And I know from experience that it can handle some pretty massive projects.
That's not how I read it. As far as I could tell, they were seriously considering whether or not censoring the search results per China's request was "more evil" than denying Chinese citizens the ability to search at all.
My understanding of their moral 'compromise' was that they would provide the censored search, but to put the disclaimer on the bottom of each page stating (not in so many words): "your government forced us to censor the search results they don't want you talking about." The rationalization was the continued presense of the warning would make the censorship feel like a burr under the saddle. A frequent little reminder that those in power are truly oppressing them.
Of course, as with any compromise, external people saw the decision in whichever light reflected their own viewpoint. Most people who were paying attention saw it as a horrible move supporting a violently oppresive regime. Others, perhaps those who are tolerant of more limited forms of censorship (such as the suppresion of nazi imagery or propaganda in Germany) saw it as an ethical compromise by Google. Businesspeople who wanted to advertise in the rapidly expanding Chinese markets saw it as a wise move, enabling them to pitch their wares more effectively. Finally, the vast majority of people outside of China don't much care what happens inside China -- they're too busy worrying about their own problems (or the ones their own government invents to terrify them into submission.)
Sure, there are dollars (or yuan) to consider, too. They have to answer to stockholders, after all. But "don't be evil" is a big part of who they are, and it doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room for things like "mostly don't be evil."
That's all well and good for you, but when you're not personally acquainted with Ross and are simply trying to do your job and get your research into EXPO format, your first entry into Google is not going to be "expo king soldatova ontology". Trust me on this one.
With any luck, there will eventually be tools to use the language that will have their own names, and we can hope those will serve to disambiguate EXPO.
No, they never *denied* censoring their search results. As a matter of fact, the pages they return come with a disclaimer stating that certain items may have been removed in order to comply with the law.
Google has been agonizing over this since they did it. This latest news just shows they're not completely evil (like Yahoo!) -- at least not yet.
But "endearing" isn't a quantifiable measure of science. Neither is "cute", "ugly", "republican", "democrat", "conservative" or "liberal".
Science is supposed to be about facts. If the machine can produce them without bias, I should think that makes the output more reliable (yes, I know you can only trust it as far as the input.) But by automating the process, it introduces "repeatability" which is always a good thing.
It's virtually hopeless to try to find information about EXPO on Google. You've got the Home Depot Expo site, you've got E3, Macworld Expo, Linuxworld Expo, Book Expo; expositions seem to be coming out of your ears, and if you try to qualify it with helpful keywords such as science and/or language, it seems that every elementary school is hawking their science expos, in addition to documents from historical expos going back to the 1970s and possibly even earlier!
And forgive me for thinking the university would be more helpful, but no, there's been a series of expos at the University of Aberystwyth, from art through VoIP.
I'd love to have found more info on the language, but my casual browsing got stopped right there.
If they'd named it something like EXPI or EXPLO at least it'd be uniquely locatable. Google might whine about the potential misspelling of Expo, but it would dutifully locate the search term as requested.
In the 1920s cigarettes were much more of a luxury item than the "staple" they've since become. It took a serious marketing effort to get them into everyday life -- actors and studios were paid to show smoking on movie screens, ad campaigns were designed to convince women that smoking wasn't a "men's only" pleasure, and the like. Besides, smokers wouldn't have interrupted their 1920s workday for a cigarette break -- their bosses would most likely have forbidden it.
Go back another few decades, and you'd probably find smoking a cigarette inside a building would have been weirder. Or only bring the time travellers in from the 1960s -- they'd be the ones weirded out.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, Wal*mart is legendary for their ability to strangle local economies. But people who are desperate for work still have to buy food and clothing, and they want those low Wal*mart prices just as much as you don't -- maybe even more. And if they're unemployed, or perhaps retired and living on insufficient fixed incomes, they may have more free time to fight for it than you'd have to fight against it.
I'm not saying anything is likely to change for you in the short term, but I'm saying there's always an avenue for change to happen.
And as for The Body Shop, it's funny you should mention them. Their store in the mall next to my office building closed earlier this year. (It's not relevant to your point -- this mall has tried to "upscale" their image by raising their rents, and has driven out virtually all of their renters in the last few years, not just TBS.)
Sure, they treat me as a criminal today. And I don't like it. My farking ReplayTV one day decided to add Macrovision for my viewing "pleasure." That machine is now collecting dust, and I won't be paying them for a replacement.
I've had it. I don't want their sh!t any more. I'm willing to settle for "less" as long as it doesn't get any worse than it is now.
And the quality increase between VHS and DVD was an order of magnitude. The quality increase between DVD and HD is much more subtle (and not even visible if you don't own an HDTV.) Yes, you'll obviously get a "better" picture on an HD signal, but all of the artifacts that made VHS even worse than it could have been (tape flutter, finicky drive mechanisms, tape rewinders, tracking issues, and media size / weight / durability / cost) were completely solved in the transition to DVD.
The only thing HD-DVD will bring to the table is picture quality, and any gains there will be largely offset by the inconveniences that will come with the content lockdown. Skipping commercials? Nope. Watch on any TV in the house? Not that one. Watch on your iPod? Not you. Watch on your Linux computer? Never, ever. Watch on Windows Vista? Only if you keep ponying up their monthly software license fees.
In my house? Nope.
Why? I have a big HDTV, and some money, but no plans to buy either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Ordinary DVDs are still almost good enough. What I'm not doing, though, is investing another dime in any of the content lockdown schemes that come along with these new formats.
I'm not a criminal, I'm not a pirate, and I'm not a consumer of pirated movies. And I shouldn't be treated like one. So I will be god-damned if I'm going to help them get their HDCP development money back by buying one cent of this sh!t. I think the rest of you need to quit drooling over HD-DVD and Blu-Ray and tell the suck-up hardware companies like Toshiba that you're not going to buy this crap, either. If we vote with our dollars, they may eventually get the picture, clearer than HD.
Of course that made it a big screen image, but it was a crappy-looking wall. :-)
[template]
1 : [A dummy publication that acts as a model for the structure and general layout of another publication.]
2 : [Part of the object that stores pattern of instance variables.]
If we take the second meaning, then no, [your template above] IS NOT [actually a template in the classical sense.]. It's the [lack of a Smalltalk implementation] and [invalid syntax] which excludes it as [an object].
[It's like copying someone's fill-in-the-blank Slashdot posting, without the insight.]
[Next time, Google might help you make a suggestion a bit more appropriate to the thread.]
[Template (programming)]
But where else do you draw the lines? Any open-source project can drag in millions of lines of code by reference, authored by thousands of people, some of whom are unknown (and possibly some of which may have been plagiarized or be in some other violation of Intellectual Property rights.) But Microsoft really has to account for the provenance of each line of code -- either they have to show who authored it in-house, or they have to come up with a receipt for the purchase of the rights to that code.
At least they do if they want to keep battling Linux over IP issues. The one thing they can't do is draw code from the GPL world, anyway, which leaves them only two other options -- buy it or write it.
At least that's more nuanced and deeper, but maybe just a touch less subtle.
Actually, Windows developers go "What the CHKDSK.EXE?"
Debian isn't a concerted effort by any stretch of the imagination. It consists of thousands of modules that really exist independently of one another; the vast majority of them were not even written specifically for Debian at all, but rather for Linux in the general sense. They were simply included in the package. I'd go so far as to guess that some of them made it in "by proximity" -- they were in the same directory as something useful, and someone came along and did a 'cp coolutility/* /distro/coolutility/*'.
Now, if the Debian project managers were told to write specs for all n-thousand of these modules, and then told "deliver these modules so we can have the next 'eager beaver' release," then you'd be looking at a concerted effort.
I sometimes wonder what would happen to his house if someone sent him an email virus that caused all his computers to attempt to calculate the last digit of pi. Would his sound cards start singing "Daisy, Daisy"? Would some of the old boxes emit puffs of smoke and a few showers of sparks?
Actually, I might suggest he install a flashpan with a few serial-port-ignited pyrotechnic charges, just to wake up the gullible non-geeky visitors. Tuck it all behind a CD-ROM faceplate designed to blow open on detonation, that sort of thing.
A friend of mine has a rack in his basement that has 48 SCSI CD-ROM drives mounted in it. He just keeps them all on-line 24x7. Never has to touch them!
And I'd say better-made cases would help, but I realize they are few and far between. Even the more expensive cases I've dealt with lately are stamped from steel (or aluminium) that seem about one or two gauges too thin. Of course once the motherboard is installed and a few drives are mounted in the cages, they seem to be rigid enough, but what that really means is that any motion of the computer is physically stressing the motherboard, flexing and pulling at all those solder joints and perhaps inducing the weakest of them to fail.
As far as cuts on sharp edges go, I have taken a "deburring tool" to some really nasty cases, (and to some nasty mods I've made,) and I've also used a grinding stone chucked up in a Dremel. I'm not trying to achieve a completely "safe" case; I just see no reason for the hazardously poor quality cases coming out these days.
"Cry 'havoc!' and let slip the hares of war!"
Sorry, someone had to say it. :-)
Notepad2.exe is a "close" replacement, but not identical. I wanted the path of least surprises: if you type notepad, you should get exactly notepad. If you click "Open as" and pick notepad from the list, you should get exactly notepad. But if you accept the default editor on my machine, you'll get a decent replacement. And I have a copy named "n.exe" for quick typing in the command shell.
Why do you say that? Did the State of Minnesota mandate the rating process? Does the state oversee the correct application of a rating to a particular game? Did the state place the ratings on the boxes? Can a game producer appeal to the state if they feel a rating is unfair? Does the state regulate any portion of the rating system at all?
No.
A voluntary system created by the industry, with private reviews and voluntary compliance by game producers, and now it's somehow state-mandated that retailers abuse this completely unofficial system? And not only that, but to try to fine minors at the register? It's like someone wrote this law just to see how fast the Supreme Court can strike it down.
Let parents do their job and be parents. The state is horrible and ineffective at just about everything else they do, what on earth makes them think they know better than me what's best for my kid?
What I'd really like to see the ESRB do is to grant some game an M rating strictly for "flagrant blasphemy and satanic references". Then we'd see how quickly this idiocy could be overturned!
It has a very simple interface that looks like the original notepad, it does syntax coloring for two dozen different languages and file formats, shows bracket matching, adds line numbers, word wrap features, support for UNIX- and mac-style line terminations, regexps, and is in general what notepad itself should have been back in the 1990s. Plus, it's freeware. What more could you want?
If you're looking more for documentation of existing code, doxygen is great. It produces click-to-follow hierarchies, graphical pictures of trees, and can will intelligently display some of the comments it encounters. It can produce output in html, LaTeX, rtf, PS, PDF, and even man pages. And I know from experience that it can handle some pretty massive projects.
Not mine. I renamed the icon to be "this".
My understanding of their moral 'compromise' was that they would provide the censored search, but to put the disclaimer on the bottom of each page stating (not in so many words): "your government forced us to censor the search results they don't want you talking about." The rationalization was the continued presense of the warning would make the censorship feel like a burr under the saddle. A frequent little reminder that those in power are truly oppressing them.
Of course, as with any compromise, external people saw the decision in whichever light reflected their own viewpoint. Most people who were paying attention saw it as a horrible move supporting a violently oppresive regime. Others, perhaps those who are tolerant of more limited forms of censorship (such as the suppresion of nazi imagery or propaganda in Germany) saw it as an ethical compromise by Google. Businesspeople who wanted to advertise in the rapidly expanding Chinese markets saw it as a wise move, enabling them to pitch their wares more effectively. Finally, the vast majority of people outside of China don't much care what happens inside China -- they're too busy worrying about their own problems (or the ones their own government invents to terrify them into submission.)
Sure, there are dollars (or yuan) to consider, too. They have to answer to stockholders, after all. But "don't be evil" is a big part of who they are, and it doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room for things like "mostly don't be evil."
With any luck, there will eventually be tools to use the language that will have their own names, and we can hope those will serve to disambiguate EXPO.
Google has been agonizing over this since they did it. This latest news just shows they're not completely evil (like Yahoo!) -- at least not yet.
Science is supposed to be about facts. If the machine can produce them without bias, I should think that makes the output more reliable (yes, I know you can only trust it as far as the input.) But by automating the process, it introduces "repeatability" which is always a good thing.
And forgive me for thinking the university would be more helpful, but no, there's been a series of expos at the University of Aberystwyth, from art through VoIP.
I'd love to have found more info on the language, but my casual browsing got stopped right there.
If they'd named it something like EXPI or EXPLO at least it'd be uniquely locatable. Google might whine about the potential misspelling of Expo, but it would dutifully locate the search term as requested.
Go back another few decades, and you'd probably find smoking a cigarette inside a building would have been weirder. Or only bring the time travellers in from the 1960s -- they'd be the ones weirded out.