being in the health/science sector, it offends me that whether someone lives/dies suffers/is relieved should depend on how much money/power they have. that's how animals behave, literally.
Re:You's just jealous cuz you got no 1337 skillz
on
Can You Raed Tihs?
·
· Score: 1
cool... love the sort { rand 2 }... beautiful. will put some effort into l33tful sh0rt3n1ng before posting my next 1-liner next time:-)
oh come on... the american health system is ridiculous. turning away the sick because they can't afford health insurance, whilst spending more than the other top 20 spenders combined on "defense" (ie: attack)?
Just for the sake of correctness, "ironical" is a word...
From WordNet (r) 1.7.1 (July 2002) [wn]: ironical adj 1: characterized by often poignant difference or incongruity between what is expected and what actually is; "madness, an ironic fate for such a clear thinker"; "it was ironical that the well-planned scheme failed so completely" [syn: {ironic}] 2: humorously sarcastic or mocking; "dry humor"; "an ironic remark often conveys an intended meaning obliquely"; "an ironic novel"; "an ironical smile"; "with a wry Scottish wit" [syn: {dry}, {ironic}, {wry}]
maybe in some american dictionary, 'ironical' is a "valid" adjective. i don't see the point of it though, since 'ironic' is also an adjective, which by the above definition, means exactly the same thing...
in any case, it's not a word in my English English dictionary. nor should it be. i agree with the original poster - it looks and sounds like poor grammar.
I write and present for a living. My wife for works for an international Investment bank. We DO NOT live in either the US or UK. We live in Switzerland.
i also write for a living, and am a native english speaker. i find the only people who use the altered '-or' form (color, flavor) are american. the rest of the world uses the original '-our' form (colour, flavour).
i'm surprised noone seems to have mentioned this already, but courriel is a nice word in french because it sounds nice when pronounced (say what you will about the french and their language, but it's quite lovely to speak and to listen to), and the word 'courriel' is the contraction of the words 'courrier electronique' (electronic mail).
voila.
if people (americans) want to criticise the french for their apparent language snobbery, recall that the forefathers of american culter deliberately went about inventing english words and misspellings (colour -> color, for eg.) in a deliberate attempt to distinguish themselves from the english. the US-specfic perversion of the english language continues to this day, eg 'already' used (incorrectly) in the present sense (as in "stopthat already"), the (incorrect) use of the word 'most' to mean 'almost' (as in "most everybody in america says this" instead of "almost everybody who speaks english says almost"). i can think of other examples...
i just recently submitted my PhD thesis, written entirely on OO run in both windows and linux as was convenient. this means that i was using it for long periods at a time over a 6 month period.
IMHO, OO is quality software and does many things better (read: reliably/predictably) than MS office, besides the fact that it's free and open source. on windows, speed is not an issue once loaded (it does load slow), and memory usage is comparable to office 2K. i don't believe that OO speed could be an issue unless you're using an old computer (like pre-pentium3 era) or don't have enough RAM.
OO also has some nifty out-of-the-box features, like being able to print directly to a PDF (and have everything look exactly as it was on your screen). also the unified 'styles' concept (character styles, paragraph styles, frame styles, page styles) is particularly good and easy to learn and use.
all-in-all, a very capable and polished office application suitable for general use IMHO. some specialist word processing people might find some necessary features, but it was certainly more than adequate to produce a 220 page PhD thesis, complete with embedded everything.
Your honor, I downloaded the file, but I did not decompress.
ah but you see, i kept the hard drive you decompressed on! after speaking to trailer park friend i took my hard drive home and archived it for later! i only told you i deleted it.
IAABAAP (i am a biologist and a programmer), and the 2 processes are not really similar. most higher organism genomes are chock full of very highly repetitive genetic filler/rubbish/crap, which makes the gene assembly *way* more difficult.
If software patents evaporated tomorrow, what motivation would software companies have to release stuff quickly? We'll only see incremental changes and big design changes will be kept under wraps for years until they're fully mature, long enough so that no competitor could justify the effort to reproduce the functionality to enter the market. This will ensure even bigger monopolies and less compatibility. In fact, incompatibility will be their only shield left.
i completely disagree - companies would be forced to constantly innovate and improve in order to differentiate their products in a *much* more competitive environment, rather than lazily resting on their laurels because they have completely patented an area out of reach of other companies. the US patent system makes lawyers mre valuable than inventions.
of course there must be *some* level of intellectual property protection, but it should be much more difficult to obtain, and much more limited in duration. patents aren't a business' only recourse to IP management - there is also 'trade secret' (ie: don't tell anyone). the secret recipe that makes coca-cola taste like coca-cola is a trade secret - you think coca-cola's business has been restricted because of their lack of patent protection?
If patent laws are *too* strict, it'll be hard for companies to remain competitive against the hordes of smaller companies ripping off your ideas and selling a cheaper solution.
yeah, you're right - then they might have to actually compete on the merit of their implementation.
if all software patents evaporated tomorrow, what would it *really* change? businesses would still create software, it would just have to be *better* to thrive in the marketplace.
I'm not the only one around here getting frustrated, but all before me have been defeated. It seems I am to be as well, for today I have started to learn Visual Basic.
While I know Visual Basic (or just 'VB' as it is know in inside circles) isn't highly regard amongst the GNU/Slashdot population at large, it is often unfairly maligned and accidently lumped in with truly worthless languages like Scheme and LISP.
You mention that you would like to use Free software in your laboratory, but the preponderance of VB seems to preclude that. This doesn't have to be the case. As a counterexample, I give you win-apt-get, which is a Win32 port of the popular Debian apt-get package management program. I am porting this application to provide the Debian community with a third OS base, alongside GNU/Linux and GNU/Hurd: Debian GNU/Windows XP.
Sure, I had to resort to hand-optimised x86 assembler for some performance critical components of win-apt-get, but I was also able to get a lot of less speed sensitive parts of apt-get, like the Beowulf-clustering code and the paper-clip installation assistant coded quickly with VB.
I have a feeling that you are overlooking the potential synergistic benefits of Free Software and VB together. In fact, please contact me via e-mail if you are interested in collaborating on win-apt-get. It would be great to see how the world's greatest GNU/packaging system would benefit from the addition of quantum computing concepts. It's behaviour could change depending on how it was observed! Does it install the new update or not? Does it actually install both, but on a Debian GNU/Linux box in a parallel universe? Is there really a quantum copy of Bruce Perens somewhere in another dimension still employed at a pre-Compaq merger HP?
Sincerely,
Debian Troll
damn that's funny, debian troll. wish i had some moderator points. shame about these stuffy moderators...
the idea behind perl6 sitting on top of parrot, is to allow such elegant code as the following (remembering that perl6 will be a step back to perl's hardcore roots):
Public Sub AddColumnsToViewBox(ParamArray TitlesAndWidths())
Dim i, Width, ParameterCount, Msg
On Error GoTo ErrorHandler
ListView1.View = lvwReport
'Input-parameter check. (See Author's Note)
ParameterCount = UBound(TitlesAndWidths) + 1
If ParameterCount / 2 CInt(ParameterCount / 2) Then
Msg = "Input-parameter count is incorrect. You must " & _
"specify an equal number of titles and widths."
MsgBox Msg, , "Prameter-Count Error"
End If
Width = ListView1.Width - 80
With ListView1.ColumnHeaders.Clear
For i = 0 To UBound(TitlesAndWidths) - 1 Step 2.Add , , TitlesAndWidths(i), (TitlesAndWidths(i + 1) _
* Width) / 100
Next i
End With
Exit Sub
ErrorHandler:
MsgBox Err.Description & "." End Sub
this way, perl6 will retain a "hard edge", while still providing programmers with access to the raw speed of parrot assembly. the best of both worlds. this is also the reason why the python community are enthusiastic about parrot as the saviour of python's poor performance and dying following.
Re:Assembly: Why It Will Replace C++/Java
on
More on the PowerPC 970
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
as a programmer for a fortune 500 company, i feel i must respond. there are a number of factual inconsistencies in your post, let's see:
the 3.5" floppy was replaced by the zip disk, which could store up to 10 meg of data, which was then replaced by the jazz disk, which could store 50. CDRs came later.
the FSF does not make gcc (the Gnome C Compiler), it is written by RMS and the OSI (Open Source Institution).
but, you're right. assembly is certainly the "new" and "hip" thing to be using right now. for example, the next version of perl (a language normally derided for being slow and hard to understand), will be based on top of parrot, a high-level assembly language. projects like this offer hope to the struggling languages you mentioned, like python, without compromising the raw speed that assembly offers.
we are certainly looking forward to the recent announcement of JEnterprise Assembly++ for our next enterprise project.
The low number of genes means humans have as few as 300 more genes than a mouse and only twice the genes of the fruit fly. "A lot of people will find that philosophically disturbing," says theoretical biologist Jean-Michel Claverie
I don't see why they should. More genes == more superiority? Who made up that rule? How about "better genes == more superiority"?
sure. many plant genomes (eg: arabidopsis (mustard)) are larger than ours, but that certainly doesn't make them more "complex".
Slashdot Mirror
> Favorite bloatware: Emacs
they don't call it Eighteen Megabytes And Continually Swapping for nothing dude!
being in the health/science sector, it offends me that whether someone lives/dies suffers/is relieved should depend on how much money/power they have. that's how animals behave, literally.
cool... love the sort { rand 2 }... beautiful. will put some effort into l33tful sh0rt3n1ng before posting my next 1-liner next time :-)
oh come on... the american health system is ridiculous. turning away the sick because they can't afford health insurance, whilst spending more than the other top 20 spenders combined on "defense" (ie: attack)?
now that's what i called an enlightened society.
eg: here's what it does to this post:
hmm... wonder if i can get away with reading news for the rest of the day...
i think you missed the implicit sarcasm tags. :-)
I know Mandrake absolutely rocks, but isn't this a bit to much, making a
if a story doesn't interest you much, don't read it dude. there's already enough pointless spam posting and crapfloods already. like this one.
So isn't the American spellings a correction of the mispelled European variants?
It's aren't (3rd person plural), not isn't (3rd person singular).
I rest my case.
maybe in some american dictionary, 'ironical' is a "valid" adjective. i don't see the point of it though, since 'ironic' is also an adjective, which by the above definition, means exactly the same thing...
in any case, it's not a word in my English English dictionary. nor should it be. i agree with the original poster - it looks and sounds like poor grammar.
well, English, the language, was created by the English, who spell colour, 'colour'. QED.
...except that colour, flavour and savour all predated the american mispelling of those words by a few hundred years.
nice try.
I write and present for a living. My wife for works for an international Investment bank. We DO NOT live in either the US or UK. We live in Switzerland.
i also write for a living, and am a native english speaker. i find the only people who use the altered '-or' form (color, flavor) are american. the rest of the world uses the original '-our' form (colour, flavour).
i'm surprised noone seems to have mentioned this already, but courriel is a nice word in french because it sounds nice when pronounced (say what you will about the french and their language, but it's quite lovely to speak and to listen to), and the word 'courriel' is the contraction of the words 'courrier electronique' (electronic mail).
voila.
if people (americans) want to criticise the french for their apparent language snobbery, recall that the forefathers of american culter deliberately went about inventing english words and misspellings (colour -> color, for eg.) in a deliberate attempt to distinguish themselves from the english. the US-specfic perversion of the english language continues to this day, eg 'already' used (incorrectly) in the present sense (as in "stopthat already"), the (incorrect) use of the word 'most' to mean 'almost' (as in "most everybody in america says this" instead of "almost everybody who speaks english says almost"). i can think of other examples...
i just recently submitted my PhD thesis, written entirely on OO run in both windows and linux as was convenient. this means that i was using it for long periods at a time over a 6 month period.
IMHO, OO is quality software and does many things better (read: reliably/predictably) than MS office, besides the fact that it's free and open source. on windows, speed is not an issue once loaded (it does load slow), and memory usage is comparable to office 2K. i don't believe that OO speed could be an issue unless you're using an old computer (like pre-pentium3 era) or don't have enough RAM.
OO also has some nifty out-of-the-box features, like being able to print directly to a PDF (and have everything look exactly as it was on your screen). also the unified 'styles' concept (character styles, paragraph styles, frame styles, page styles) is particularly good and easy to learn and use.
all-in-all, a very capable and polished office application suitable for general use IMHO. some specialist word processing people might find some necessary features, but it was certainly more than adequate to produce a 220 page PhD thesis, complete with embedded everything.
Your honor, I downloaded the file, but I did not decompress.
ah but you see, i kept the hard drive you decompressed on! after speaking to trailer park friend i took my hard drive home and archived it for later! i only told you i deleted it.
IAABAAP (i am a biologist and a programmer), and the 2 processes are not really similar. most higher organism genomes are chock full of very highly repetitive genetic filler/rubbish/crap, which makes the gene assembly *way* more difficult.
i completely disagree - companies would be forced to constantly innovate and improve in order to differentiate their products in a *much* more competitive environment, rather than lazily resting on their laurels because they have completely patented an area out of reach of other companies. the US patent system makes lawyers mre valuable than inventions.
of course there must be *some* level of intellectual property protection, but it should be much more difficult to obtain, and much more limited in duration. patents aren't a business' only recourse to IP management - there is also 'trade secret' (ie: don't tell anyone). the secret recipe that makes coca-cola taste like coca-cola is a trade secret - you think coca-cola's business has been restricted because of their lack of patent protection?
yeah, you're right - then they might have to actually compete on the merit of their implementation.
if all software patents evaporated tomorrow, what would it *really* change? businesses would still create software, it would just have to be *better* to thrive in the marketplace.
damn that's funny, debian troll. wish i had some moderator points. shame about these stuffy moderators...
Yeah i know. The americans have trouble with any technology that doesn't blow up foreign nationals.
Fuck you hitlerbush!!!
well said, my compatriot. and let's not even get STARTED on the amercicans and the metric system....
mwahahahaha
thank you.
the idea behind perl6 sitting on top of parrot, is to allow such elegant code as the following (remembering that perl6 will be a step back to perl's hardcore roots):
this way, perl6 will retain a "hard edge", while still providing programmers with access to the raw speed of parrot assembly. the best of both worlds. this is also the reason why the python community are enthusiastic about parrot as the saviour of python's poor performance and dying following.
as a programmer for a fortune 500 company, i feel i must respond. there are a number of factual inconsistencies in your post, let's see:
the 3.5" floppy was replaced by the zip disk, which could store up to 10 meg of data, which was then replaced by the jazz disk, which could store 50. CDRs came later.
the FSF does not make gcc (the Gnome C Compiler), it is written by RMS and the OSI (Open Source Institution).
but, you're right. assembly is certainly the "new" and "hip" thing to be using right now. for example, the next version of perl (a language normally derided for being slow and hard to understand), will be based on top of parrot, a high-level assembly language. projects like this offer hope to the struggling languages you mentioned, like python, without compromising the raw speed that assembly offers.
we are certainly looking forward to the recent announcement of JEnterprise Assembly++ for our next enterprise project.
sure. many plant genomes (eg: arabidopsis (mustard)) are larger than ours, but that certainly doesn't make them more "complex".