Ok, maybe not a sign of the end of civilization, but certainly society is not doing well when a game company has to act like a parent. Shouldn't this stuff be the job of the parents, not the game company?
By the way, for those who don't remember Cray computer and their engineers, I very much recommend this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9kobkqAicU
Seymour Cray was a brilliant man and he attracted many brilliant engineers to work on his machines. The video gives some history from some actual workers at Cray and the first users of the Cray 1.
Thank you for the informative post. I only meant that St. Maurice was close, but as you say it was probably not touched by the actual tsunami it certainly felt the effects in so far as such an event has large social implications as well.
The name of the place is disputed precisely on etymological grounds. If you look at the other ancient names of cities in the valley of the Rhone: Acaune, Tarnade, Octans, Ocotdurum, Sedunum, the origin of the name actually is celtic or gaulois rather than Roman. *Taur, *Tur, or *Tor is actually a synonym for *Alp or *Penn which designates a peak or high place. *Dun or *Dunum means an elevated place next to water according to some. Thus the name means a peak or castle which is elevated near water. Others say that *Taur rather means passage or entrance (Thor or Thüre in German), or gorge, in Latin clusa. Some then say that it is equivalent to Porte du Scex or Fort de la Cluse.
In any case the area was quite strategic for the Romans, and the passage of St. Maurice was not very far away. It must have been a disaster of untold scale in a very critical region of the Roman empire - most of the traffic out of Italy would have passed through these regions (Martigny is not far away, once a fort city of the Emperor, the Theban legion was massacred not far from there). In a certain way this disaster probably spelled the end of an already weakened Roman civilization north of Italy by the fact that it destroyed most of the service towns along the way to the two major pathways into and out of Italy.
In any case it was a big deal. The Swiss are still talking about it.
The history of this event is actually quite interesting in itself. There are even ancient writers that describe it. One was Bishop Marius, the bishop of Avenches and later Lausanne (547-594), who was actually neighbor to this event.
In this year, the enormous mountain of Tauredunum in the territory of the Valais, collapsed so suddenly that it engulfed the neighboring fortress as well as the villages and all the inhabitants thereof. The lake was so engorged that along the length of 60 miles and width of 20 miles on both sides of the river there was great loss of life in the ancient towns, both of man and beast. It destroyed also many sanctuaries with the people and violently destroyed the bridge in Geneva, the mills and even penetrated into the city where many people died
(Quick translation from P.C. Basilii anno XXII. Ind. XI)
What the mountain 'Tauredunum' corresponds too in modern geographical terms is somewhat disputed.
If he seriously wants to brag about his exploit-free OS, let him put it out there in the world. Better yet, let us look at the source. Anything else is just words. Let's see the code.
A good writer by definition knows how to organize his thoughts, get quickly to what is important and is able to express himself clearly. Documentation is for people who develop software or products with your code, and in some ways analogous to what the user sees as an interface. Programming a user interface is often completely orthogonal to the technical part of the project, and really takes a different type of programmer. Look at how many excellent projects that work so well and yet are a real pain in the ass to use because of the interface - one can do well in one aspect and completely fail in the other. The same it is with code and documentation. The code might do what you want but if you have no idea how to implement the api it is damn useless.
I wish your last paragraph could be engraved in stone in every IT department. Yet there are these things called deadlines and emergencies that prevent doing anything in a sane manner. Such is life.
True enough, that a programmer needs to organize his thoughts, as the computer cannot function without clear directives. However communicating with human beings is a different matter. I would say that documentation is for the developer what the UI is for the user. Look at how many magnificent projects are technically sound and yet have a user interface that is completely unusuable. The same is true of documentation. Interacting with the developer or user of your code is something complementary to interacting with the computer.
It is very rare for a good programmer to be also a good writer. Heck in any job it is rare to find someone with two good skill sets. Even with the two skill sets you often only have time to do something well.
I would have to say though when then planets align and the good programmer is also a good writer, usually some sort of standard results from it, and lots of progress is made in the field.
Also, some projects don't really warrant the time to make extensive documentation. I wrote tons of LISP code that never had much of documentation because it didn't really need it and simply got the job done. I'm sure many projects never get past the stage of documentation on a need to know basis.
Just a completely different question - if this idea was patented wouldn't Canonical run into problems? Maybe the patent system can save Ubuntu from this garbage....
You can't even disassemble browser apps, all you have is the front-end.
Say that again? You just look at the source code, the javascript and it's all there. Maybe not like you want it, but there is nothing intrinsic to browser apps that make them a sort of DRM. If it is written in HTML5, you can look at the code if they make it available - in fact in some ways you can do 'Show Source' in a browser easier than many native apps. Even Google Apps you can do 'Show source' in your browser. In a certain way the web is far more open that native apps, which are painfully difficult to disassemble from the binary.
The only real problem are the requests from the server - true, they don't often release server software source. But often this is mostly connection to some database. While this can be problematic for open source, it is not intrinsically so. Most web apps can also be written to work offline.
If we take the word "PC" as meaning what it used to, namely "Personal Computer" one can argue that computers are now more personal than ever:
a/ a computer now holds all my personal data, my contacts and calendar b/ a computer is now almost always on my person c/ a computer now serves my personal needs instead of me having to teach it what I want it to do.
IN fact smartphones are more PC's than the PC's of the 1980's, as they are more personal, and more personalized, and always on our persons.
The fact that the computer no longer sits on my desk, but rather in my pocket, really is not that important in the long run. The fact is the PC is more personal than ever before. Dividing up statistics according to what kind of units sold might be useful for marketeers, but the reality is that the PC is stronger than ever.
Well, on most quality news sites the comments are of much lower quality than the comments. I was just saying that Slashdot is an exception - well, at least in this case.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, maybe not a sign of the end of civilization, but certainly society is not doing well when a game company has to act like a parent. Shouldn't this stuff be the job of the parents, not the game company?
Most of the time they elected to some minor political function where they make a lot of noise but do less damage. Or they become managers.
Javascript profiling will identify your browser even with user agent switcher. You can find out what browser they are using even with a simple DOM tree check. Heck even CSS can be used to find out what Browser you are really using. The agent string is only for convenience.
Javascript example: http://www.corephp.com/blog/hardcore-javascript-browser-and-computer-fingerprinting/
Paper on different method: http://w2spconf.com/2011/papers/jspriv.pdf
Old CSS history method, now mitigated : http://ha.ckers.org/weird/CSS-history.cgi
tl;dr version: the internet is a public network, you are never really private in a public space.
So many volunteers and so many packages - just thanks everyone for another release !
By the way, for those who don't remember Cray computer and their engineers, I very much recommend this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9kobkqAicU Seymour Cray was a brilliant man and he attracted many brilliant engineers to work on his machines. The video gives some history from some actual workers at Cray and the first users of the Cray 1.
Thank you for the informative post. I only meant that St. Maurice was close, but as you say it was probably not touched by the actual tsunami it certainly felt the effects in so far as such an event has large social implications as well.
Swiss geography and geology is very interesting.
The name of the place is disputed precisely on etymological grounds. If you look at the other ancient names of cities in the valley of the Rhone: Acaune, Tarnade, Octans, Ocotdurum, Sedunum, the origin of the name actually is celtic or gaulois rather than Roman. *Taur, *Tur, or *Tor is actually a synonym for *Alp or *Penn which designates a peak or high place. *Dun or *Dunum means an elevated place next to water according to some. Thus the name means a peak or castle which is elevated near water. Others say that *Taur rather means passage or entrance (Thor or Thüre in German), or gorge, in Latin clusa. Some then say that it is equivalent to Porte du Scex or Fort de la Cluse.
In any case the area was quite strategic for the Romans, and the passage of St. Maurice was not very far away. It must have been a disaster of untold scale in a very critical region of the Roman empire - most of the traffic out of Italy would have passed through these regions (Martigny is not far away, once a fort city of the Emperor, the Theban legion was massacred not far from there). In a certain way this disaster probably spelled the end of an already weakened Roman civilization north of Italy by the fact that it destroyed most of the service towns along the way to the two major pathways into and out of Italy.
In any case it was a big deal. The Swiss are still talking about it.
In this year, the enormous mountain of Tauredunum in the territory of the Valais, collapsed so suddenly that it engulfed the neighboring fortress as well as the villages and all the inhabitants thereof. The lake was so engorged that along the length of 60 miles and width of 20 miles on both sides of the river there was great loss of life in the ancient towns, both of man and beast. It destroyed also many sanctuaries with the people and violently destroyed the bridge in Geneva, the mills and even penetrated into the city where many people died
(Quick translation from P.C. Basilii anno XXII. Ind. XI) What the mountain 'Tauredunum' corresponds too in modern geographical terms is somewhat disputed.
If he seriously wants to brag about his exploit-free OS, let him put it out there in the world. Better yet, let us look at the source. Anything else is just words. Let's see the code.
A good writer by definition knows how to organize his thoughts, get quickly to what is important and is able to express himself clearly. Documentation is for people who develop software or products with your code, and in some ways analogous to what the user sees as an interface. Programming a user interface is often completely orthogonal to the technical part of the project, and really takes a different type of programmer. Look at how many excellent projects that work so well and yet are a real pain in the ass to use because of the interface - one can do well in one aspect and completely fail in the other. The same it is with code and documentation. The code might do what you want but if you have no idea how to implement the api it is damn useless.
I wish your last paragraph could be engraved in stone in every IT department. Yet there are these things called deadlines and emergencies that prevent doing anything in a sane manner. Such is life.
True enough, that a programmer needs to organize his thoughts, as the computer cannot function without clear directives. However communicating with human beings is a different matter. I would say that documentation is for the developer what the UI is for the user. Look at how many magnificent projects are technically sound and yet have a user interface that is completely unusuable. The same is true of documentation. Interacting with the developer or user of your code is something complementary to interacting with the computer.
It is very rare for a good programmer to be also a good writer. Heck in any job it is rare to find someone with two good skill sets. Even with the two skill sets you often only have time to do something well. I would have to say though when then planets align and the good programmer is also a good writer, usually some sort of standard results from it, and lots of progress is made in the field. Also, some projects don't really warrant the time to make extensive documentation. I wrote tons of LISP code that never had much of documentation because it didn't really need it and simply got the job done. I'm sure many projects never get past the stage of documentation on a need to know basis.
Mars looks almost orange in my telescope, undoutably because of all the orange juice.
You sound more like a memory chip salesman than a software developer actually.
Actually Gnome 3 did the same. What is wrong with OS designers these days?
There is even FreeBSD .
Just a completely different question - if this idea was patented wouldn't Canonical run into problems? Maybe the patent system can save Ubuntu from this garbage....
You mean like unix has done like forever ?
Say that again? You just look at the source code, the javascript and it's all there. Maybe not like you want it, but there is nothing intrinsic to browser apps that make them a sort of DRM. If it is written in HTML5, you can look at the code if they make it available - in fact in some ways you can do 'Show Source' in a browser easier than many native apps. Even Google Apps you can do 'Show source' in your browser. In a certain way the web is far more open that native apps, which are painfully difficult to disassemble from the binary.
The only real problem are the requests from the server - true, they don't often release server software source. But often this is mostly connection to some database. While this can be problematic for open source, it is not intrinsically so. Most web apps can also be written to work offline.
So this is what they mean when he 'brings home the bacon' ?
If we take the word "PC" as meaning what it used to, namely "Personal Computer" one can argue that computers are now more personal than ever:
a/ a computer now holds all my personal data, my contacts and calendar
b/ a computer is now almost always on my person
c/ a computer now serves my personal needs instead of me having to teach it what I want it to do.
IN fact smartphones are more PC's than the PC's of the 1980's, as they are more personal, and more personalized, and always on our persons.
The fact that the computer no longer sits on my desk, but rather in my pocket, really is not that important in the long run. The fact is the PC is more personal than ever before. Dividing up statistics according to what kind of units sold might be useful for marketeers, but the reality is that the PC is stronger than ever.
Errm I meant to say that the comments are of much lower quality than the articles. Time to stop commenting before I ruin Slashdot. Goodnight.
Well, on most quality news sites the comments are of much lower quality than the comments. I was just saying that Slashdot is an exception - well, at least in this case.
Only on Slashdot can you find a comment better than the article. Someone give him a modpoint.