What part of 'Fastest Growing' don't you understand? Oh, and yes, I'm Debianese.:-)
Well, in terms of new sites per day (or other time unit), Red Hat is the fastest growing. In terms of percentage points increase in market share, Red Hat is the fastest growing.
Debian is only fastest growing relative to itself. The statistical lie here is that comparing two different percentages measuring different things (Red Hat's growth relative to Red Hat installs vs. Debian's growth relative to Debian installs) doesn't tell you much on its own, and may be actively misleading. In particular, it suffers from the amplification in growth rates that small players enjoy. If I release a distro tomorrow, and convince you to start using it, I'll have a 100% growth rate and blow Debian and Red Hat out of the water. Woohoo!
I wonder if shareholders in the companies which settled could sue those companies for not doing due diligence and defending their own intellectual property. Essentially, they conceded some of their own intellectual property without putting up a fight. A few successful lawsuits like that might make companies more inclined not to perpetuate the system by taking the easy way out and settling these bogus patent claims.
Actually, satellites utilize sound frequencies, not light. Specifically, DirecWay uses 1210 MHz, 1330 MHz and 1405 MHz on the Galaxy 3c satellite.
As the other reply has pointed out, this is wrong - satellites use radio waves, which are just a different frequency of the same electromagnetic radiation as light, and thus travel at the same speed as light. Light and radio is carried by photons, massless particles which always travel at the speed of light (although that speed varies in different media - the usual speed quoted is its speed in a vacuum).
From the quote above, it sounds as though you might be thinking that sound waves are just a shorter wavelength than light, perhaps. But sound waves are compression waves in air - kind of like waves in water - there are no photons involved. Audible sound goes up to about 20 kHz. Ultrasound can go as high as 30 MHz, although used in practice it typically tops out at about 10 MHz. Such high frequencies can't travel all that far, though - unlike light, whose photons travel through air and other "transparent" media without decelerating, sound waves *are* air, and subject to air drag in the same sort of way a car is - a sound wave effectively pushes its way through the air, pushing air in front of it and losing kinetic energy as it does so. Sending sound waves to/from satellites, even if possible, would be very slow and unreliable.
This hardon against javascript comes from the fact that half the sites I go to with JS tend to put a little alert icon on my status bar on one browser or another because something is broken.
The fact that the average web developer doesn't know how to write reliable, portable code is hardly an argument against the language that they don't know how to use.
We've used JS client-side validation to replace apps used by data-entry operators that have very demanding speed requirements. Without client-side validation and other client-side logic, we wouldn't have been able to use a browser at all.
You're right that Google might feel some pressure to try to make something like this go away, by settling with SCO. But the strategy of this situation is clear, and I'm sure Google knows it: the reason you don't negotiate with terrorists is that, even though it may give you a good short term result in a specific case, in the long run it leads to more terrorist behavior. That's why Google mustn't (and hopefully won't) negotiate with SCO.
Would you have entered the same boycott if the Exploratorium had an exhibit stating that the nearest star was 8.4 light years (double the truth)?
I don't think a numeric mistake like that is nearly as serious as a mistaken claim about a significant anatomical gender difference in our species. The latter seems to imply either a startling degree of ignorance, or as has been suggested, a religious agenda of some kind. Either way, I wouldn't place very much credence in other information presented by the same people. It has nothing to do with attitudes to religion, only with credibility.
i think that before you go applying such basic interpretations to a book written by an exceptionally well educated man, you might want to read his other works also, in the silmarillion ...
sarcasm and wit, that c.s.lewis and tolkein were lifetime friends should come as no surprise
Speaking of appreciating sarcasm and wit, did you happen to notice that the post you originally responded to was an example of that?
> Well, plug in a keyboard and press F1 to continue, duh.
With older machines, you couldn't plug a keyboard in after the machine had been turned on - it wouldn't be recognized. You still used to get that message, though.
Of course these are the exceptions, not the rule. I think perhaps there are a few people who are geneticly resistant to lung cancer. They can smoke all they want. They won't get cancer.
Cancer's not the only problem with smoking. Emphysema affects people much more predictably, and and can reduce quality of life enormously, i.e. needing to breath from an oxygen tank. Unfortunately you don't see people like this wandering around in malls much, so there's a tendency to forget that coating your lungs with the byproducts of burning dried leaves isn't just a crapshoot as to whether it's going to affect your health. It's going to, and the deterioration can be measured in every smoker in terms of lung function.
I've also heard that nicotine can actually help with ADHD. Perhaps, for a very small segment of society, tobacco could be safely "prescribed" as a beneficial medication.
You can take nicotine without inhaling smoke.
Of course, someday we may find such a gene, which opens a whole new kettle of fish...
Only for the people dumb enough not to recognize that impairing their lung function doesn't make sense, even if their lungs start out with some excess capacity. Excess capacity is good, mmkay?
Re:tax scams aren't real
on
RIAA Quashed
·
· Score: 1
Can you point to a court decision where this distinction has led to a different outcome than would otherwise be the case?
tax scams aren't real
on
RIAA Quashed
·
· Score: 1
If I'm understanding you correctly, the distinction you're trying to make is the one used by the tax scams which claim that you don't have to pay federal tax. There's no real basis for it in law, afaik.
The laws about where the federal government has jurisdiction, vs. state governments, are fairly clear. And despite whatever crackpot interpretation people can come up with, if you can't make it work in court (which no-one has), it's meaningless, and could actually be harmful to the individual trying to use it.
Come on, you didn't really think the RIAA could just print out a subpoena, mail it to you, and force you to show up at their offices? Did you really think that no court was involved???
Yeah, I heard they print them out with Microsoft Subpoena 2003, DRM edition, with the DMCA.NET plugin.
These are all examples of AAP pleonasms. "AAP" stands for Acronym-Assisted Pleonasm. A pleonasm is a redundant phrase. If you use AAP pleonasms a lot, you may suffer from PNS syndrome, also known as RAS syndrome. PNS stands for PIN-Number Syndrome; RAS stands for Redundant Acronym Syndrome. RAS Syndrome actually seems to be the most commonly-used term for it, but AAP pleonasm sounds more impressive.
It seems that people like to use real nouns, using the acronym as a kind of modifier or qualifier of the noun. It's been suggested that this happens more in English, where common nouns don't frequently appear at the beginning of a sentence. Note that even someone with RAS Syndrome wouldn't normally use a sentence like "HTTP protocol is slow", whereas they might say "HTTP is slow". But if the acronym is moved further along in the sentence, it's more likely to be used with a redundant noun: "The HTTP protocol is slow".
Any grammarians who can explain this better, please step in.
The U.S. fabric-based bills are more biodegradable - that's why you don't see much money lying around in the streets. I bet in Australia, after a while there'll just be indestructible plastic money lying all over the place, the kangaroos won't be able to graze any more, and it'll be a mess!
my entire CS Masters was about a program design paradigm with highly esoteric underpinnings and very little mathematical substance - on the other hand it was well funded!
C'mon, tell us - what program design paradigm is that?
They're just toys that are very difficult to learn how to operate, and which can be dangerous. If you think they're not toys, what is it you're doing with yours, exactly? Running reconnaissance missions for the CIA, perhaps?
I second the Raptor 30 recommendation, BTW. Great little heli.
"One thing about the GPL is that you can't just license IBM Linux, or Red Hat Linux," Gates said. "The way the GPL works, if you license any Linux, you have to license all Linux."
What a bunch of crap. This is disinformation at its best.
Don't be so hard on poor Bill. It sounds as though, like most people, he just doesn't quite understand how the GPL works. I'm sure once someone's explained it to him properly, he'll be all for it!
Great. Thanks for reminding us that not only can't we compete with Indians in the job market, we can't even compete with them on the golf course.;)
It's worse than that - you can't even compete with the 1/8th of an American Indian in Tiger Woods. But perhaps the 1/4 Thai, 1/4 Chinese, 1/4 Black, and 1/8 White has something to do with it, also. Those Cablinasians are hard to beat...
Thanks for the explanation. I have to admit, not being an expert, I'm inclined to think there's a lot that could have happened in a relatively dense globular cluster, from the time of its formation until now.
After all, this planet happened to end up orbiting a pulsar and a white dwarf - which, as the coverage of this find seems fond of pointing out, bespeaks a tumultuous history. For all *I* know, it could be a brown dwarf that's had a really rough life over the past few billion years - what happens to a brown dwarf caught near a supernova explosion, for example?
I don't have the Science article, unfortunately, but none of the coverage is very explicit about how the age of this planet was determined. Might it not have been formed more recently, and isn't that in fact much more likely? In which case, it may say nothing about the ability of planets to form in the early universe, or with small quantities of heavy elements.
Actually, I don't know that that originates with "A gentle introduction to Haskell" - you can find that exact implementation in many other places, including in some Haskell distributions and many talk slides and college notes, and I happened to like it enough to memorize it, a number of years ago.
The only reason I presented it on two lines was because of Slashdot formatting restrictions - I couldn't get indentation to work.
Have I addressed all your concerns to your satisfaction?
Concord refers to agreement between different parts of a sentence, such as subject and verb. A concord error is when those parts don't agree. A couple of examples are "the dog are barking", or "you and me are going to have fun". Although the latter is pretty common colloquially, technically, it's just as bad as "me am going to have fun"; either way, it's a concord error.
I've read every Gibson - his concepts are great, but I find his language appauling (grammar errors, spelling errors, concorde errors);
Hmm, I suspect as far as the grammar and concord errors go, you're talking about Gibson's writing style, which is deliberate - the kind of thing you can learn if you study creative writing at university and you get very, very good at it.
There are quite a few literarily-admired non-SF authors who write in some variation on this style. One that comes to mind is E.L. Doctorow. At its best, this kind of writing borders on poetry: a stream of words communicates ideas, feelings, sensation, mood, not necessarily by following purely grammatical and factual communication techniques, but for example by using words that have certain connotations, using unusual sentence structures and punctuation that - ideally - forces the reader to look past the superficial meaning of the sentence itself, past its structure and presentation, to the ideas that the author is trying to communicate. Typical grade-school or business communication grammatical no-nos - like the previous run-on sentence - are not necessarily a bad thing, if they serve a purpose and don't make the text unreadable.
All that an author can ever do is try to communicate ideas from his head to his readers' heads. You can do that with plain, matter of fact language, in the Hemingway-inspired way someone like Tom Clancy tends to do: "The man fired." In this mode, much of the flavor of a story is actually filled in by the reader, since the author may not do much to help communicate anything other than facts and dialog, with some basic descriptive filler. Or you can paint an impressionistic word picture, which is what Gibson does. The Gibsonesque style is much more ambitious, but also therefore more risky. Gibson is good because a lot of the time, he pulls it off - but at times, it can instead seem forced.
As for spelling errors, I'd love to see some examples. I didn't notice many in the editions I've read, and I'm an excellent speller.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, in terms of new sites per day (or other time unit), Red Hat is the fastest growing. In terms of percentage points increase in market share, Red Hat is the fastest growing.
Debian is only fastest growing relative to itself. The statistical lie here is that comparing two different percentages measuring different things (Red Hat's growth relative to Red Hat installs vs. Debian's growth relative to Debian installs) doesn't tell you much on its own, and may be actively misleading. In particular, it suffers from the amplification in growth rates that small players enjoy. If I release a distro tomorrow, and convince you to start using it, I'll have a 100% growth rate and blow Debian and Red Hat out of the water. Woohoo!
I wonder if shareholders in the companies which settled could sue those companies for not doing due diligence and defending their own intellectual property. Essentially, they conceded some of their own intellectual property without putting up a fight. A few successful lawsuits like that might make companies more inclined not to perpetuate the system by taking the easy way out and settling these bogus patent claims.
All your base are belong to meme humor...
As the other reply has pointed out, this is wrong - satellites use radio waves, which are just a different frequency of the same electromagnetic radiation as light, and thus travel at the same speed as light. Light and radio is carried by photons, massless particles which always travel at the speed of light (although that speed varies in different media - the usual speed quoted is its speed in a vacuum).
From the quote above, it sounds as though you might be thinking that sound waves are just a shorter wavelength than light, perhaps. But sound waves are compression waves in air - kind of like waves in water - there are no photons involved. Audible sound goes up to about 20 kHz. Ultrasound can go as high as 30 MHz, although used in practice it typically tops out at about 10 MHz. Such high frequencies can't travel all that far, though - unlike light, whose photons travel through air and other "transparent" media without decelerating, sound waves *are* air, and subject to air drag in the same sort of way a car is - a sound wave effectively pushes its way through the air, pushing air in front of it and losing kinetic energy as it does so. Sending sound waves to/from satellites, even if possible, would be very slow and unreliable.
We've used JS client-side validation to replace apps used by data-entry operators that have very demanding speed requirements. Without client-side validation and other client-side logic, we wouldn't have been able to use a browser at all.
You're right that Google might feel some pressure to try to make something like this go away, by settling with SCO. But the strategy of this situation is clear, and I'm sure Google knows it: the reason you don't negotiate with terrorists is that, even though it may give you a good short term result in a specific case, in the long run it leads to more terrorist behavior. That's why Google mustn't (and hopefully won't) negotiate with SCO.
I don't think a numeric mistake like that is nearly as serious as a mistaken claim about a significant anatomical gender difference in our species. The latter seems to imply either a startling degree of ignorance, or as has been suggested, a religious agenda of some kind. Either way, I wouldn't place very much credence in other information presented by the same people. It has nothing to do with attitudes to religion, only with credibility.
Speaking of appreciating sarcasm and wit, did you happen to notice that the post you originally responded to was an example of that?
> Well, plug in a keyboard and press F1 to continue, duh.
With older machines, you couldn't plug a keyboard in after the machine had been turned on - it wouldn't be recognized. You still used to get that message, though.
Cancer's not the only problem with smoking. Emphysema affects people much more predictably, and and can reduce quality of life enormously, i.e. needing to breath from an oxygen tank. Unfortunately you don't see people like this wandering around in malls much, so there's a tendency to forget that coating your lungs with the byproducts of burning dried leaves isn't just a crapshoot as to whether it's going to affect your health. It's going to, and the deterioration can be measured in every smoker in terms of lung function.
I've also heard that nicotine can actually help with ADHD. Perhaps, for a very small segment of society, tobacco could be safely "prescribed" as a beneficial medication.
You can take nicotine without inhaling smoke.
Of course, someday we may find such a gene, which opens a whole new kettle of fish...
Only for the people dumb enough not to recognize that impairing their lung function doesn't make sense, even if their lungs start out with some excess capacity. Excess capacity is good, mmkay?
Can you point to a court decision where this distinction has led to a different outcome than would otherwise be the case?
The laws about where the federal government has jurisdiction, vs. state governments, are fairly clear. And despite whatever crackpot interpretation people can come up with, if you can't make it work in court (which no-one has), it's meaningless, and could actually be harmful to the individual trying to use it.
Yeah, I heard they print them out with Microsoft Subpoena 2003, DRM edition, with the DMCA .NET plugin.
It seems that people like to use real nouns, using the acronym as a kind of modifier or qualifier of the noun. It's been suggested that this happens more in English, where common nouns don't frequently appear at the beginning of a sentence. Note that even someone with RAS Syndrome wouldn't normally use a sentence like "HTTP protocol is slow", whereas they might say "HTTP is slow". But if the acronym is moved further along in the sentence, it's more likely to be used with a redundant noun: "The HTTP protocol is slow".
Any grammarians who can explain this better, please step in.
The U.S. fabric-based bills are more biodegradable - that's why you don't see much money lying around in the streets. I bet in Australia, after a while there'll just be indestructible plastic money lying all over the place, the kangaroos won't be able to graze any more, and it'll be a mess!
C'mon, tell us - what program design paradigm is that?
I second the Raptor 30 recommendation, BTW. Great little heli.
It's worse than that - you can't even compete with the 1/8th of an American Indian in Tiger Woods. But perhaps the 1/4 Thai, 1/4 Chinese, 1/4 Black, and 1/8 White has something to do with it, also. Those Cablinasians are hard to beat...
After all, this planet happened to end up orbiting a pulsar and a white dwarf - which, as the coverage of this find seems fond of pointing out, bespeaks a tumultuous history. For all *I* know, it could be a brown dwarf that's had a really rough life over the past few billion years - what happens to a brown dwarf caught near a supernova explosion, for example?
Good luck with your work!
I don't have the Science article, unfortunately, but none of the coverage is very explicit about how the age of this planet was determined. Might it not have been formed more recently, and isn't that in fact much more likely? In which case, it may say nothing about the ability of planets to form in the early universe, or with small quantities of heavy elements.
The only reason I presented it on two lines was because of Slashdot formatting restrictions - I couldn't get indentation to work.
Have I addressed all your concerns to your satisfaction?
The trick is to use a truly high-level language, so the coding is trivial as long as you remember the basic algorithm:
Concord refers to agreement between different parts of a sentence, such as subject and verb. A concord error is when those parts don't agree. A couple of examples are "the dog are barking", or "you and me are going to have fun". Although the latter is pretty common colloquially, technically, it's just as bad as "me am going to have fun"; either way, it's a concord error.
Hmm, I suspect as far as the grammar and concord errors go, you're talking about Gibson's writing style, which is deliberate - the kind of thing you can learn if you study creative writing at university and you get very, very good at it.
There are quite a few literarily-admired non-SF authors who write in some variation on this style. One that comes to mind is E.L. Doctorow. At its best, this kind of writing borders on poetry: a stream of words communicates ideas, feelings, sensation, mood, not necessarily by following purely grammatical and factual communication techniques, but for example by using words that have certain connotations, using unusual sentence structures and punctuation that - ideally - forces the reader to look past the superficial meaning of the sentence itself, past its structure and presentation, to the ideas that the author is trying to communicate. Typical grade-school or business communication grammatical no-nos - like the previous run-on sentence - are not necessarily a bad thing, if they serve a purpose and don't make the text unreadable.
All that an author can ever do is try to communicate ideas from his head to his readers' heads. You can do that with plain, matter of fact language, in the Hemingway-inspired way someone like Tom Clancy tends to do: "The man fired." In this mode, much of the flavor of a story is actually filled in by the reader, since the author may not do much to help communicate anything other than facts and dialog, with some basic descriptive filler. Or you can paint an impressionistic word picture, which is what Gibson does. The Gibsonesque style is much more ambitious, but also therefore more risky. Gibson is good because a lot of the time, he pulls it off - but at times, it can instead seem forced.
As for spelling errors, I'd love to see some examples. I didn't notice many in the editions I've read, and I'm an excellent speller.