I went out and bought Fox Hunt just because I saw it on a certain (extremely attractive) actress's resume. After dealing with software issues (who writes these brain-dead installers?), I went through about 5 minutes of crude game play, potty humor, and really really bad acting before I realized that I'd never be able to do the game long enough to see the object of my obsession. Being a stalker is all very well, but there are things you just can't do!
But if enough people buy OSX Macs and then start helping out on the OpenOffice 2.0 project, then it could come out first on the Mac.
And if pigs had wings, they could fly. There isn't an infinite supply of volunteer labor for open source projects, and very few such projects are sustained primarily by it. Like most, OpenOffice.org gets most of its resources from a company with a vested interest in seeing it happen -- in this case Sun. The low priority for the OS X native version was probably dictated by a Sun project manager. Given the skill level of Sun project managers (they're among the best in the business) I'd guess this schedule is solid as a two-year schedule can be.
If he in fact was attempting to defraud the California government or the Feds for the purpose of gain, I would agree with you. If there is no profit (real or imaginary) or attempt for profit, what we have here is a guy looking to live his life in spite of some dumb ass laws.
Breaking a dumbass law is still breaking a law. When people conspire to break a law, dumbass or not, it's a criminal conspiracy. If you choose to ignore laws you consider stupid, well, that's your choice. But don't get all sensitive about the terminology!
You said you were worried about the "spam tracking through images problem". Images themselves provide no tracking mechanism. It's only when downloading the image causes a cookie to be set. If your mail client doesn't set cookies, the images are just images.
Probably comes from a story or novel. Polybius is the sort of thing a thriller or SF writer would invent. Perhaps we could ask the writers of a certain TV show where they ripped off the idea.
I'm reminded of Iain Banks's novel Complicity,
in which the protagonist spends rather too much time playing fancy computer games. Banks, who obviously has the same problem, invented some extremely cool games for him to play, including one which sounds like Civilization, only much more imaginative and creative. People are always asking Banks where they can buy these games. Sadly, they don't exist outside his head.
Well, there you have a point. About 75% of the time in Ask Slashdot, we get a question that's really specifics-deficient. (Cliff should really bounce these back to the submitters and ask them to fill in the blanks.) But a couple of notes:
You did make fun of the submitter for not mentioning what country he's in.
Some of the details you mention should have been included, but we certainly don't want to talk about cell phone issues that only apply to where he lives. A conversation that only applies to residents of Iowa is as out of place on Slashdot as one that only applies to residents of Wales. (Their populations are about the same.) One's specific residence is more relevent to the people answering the question than the guy asking, because they need to provide any indications that their facts might be local, even if the question is national.
Well, it's the lawyers who mostly say, "Sorry, not possible, bye bye." But I can't believe that it would really be THIS difficult to do a little telecommuting.
No, what the lawyer says is, "That's illegal. Please don't ask me help you break the law, I could lose my license."
In point of fact, this whole conversation we're having amounts to a minor criminal conspiracy. Not that I really care -- in a nation swarming with undocumented immigrants, I can't get worked up over a U.S. citizen pretending to be in his home state when he's really overseas. Which I have known people to get away with in precisely this kind of situation.
Bearing in mind, of course, that the federal justice system does not consider "everybody does it" or "no harm, no foul" to be legal defenses!
There are two primary reasons for getting a PhD, and they are for teaching at a university, and for doing research at a university or an industrial research lab.
That's the official theory. But outside the University system, any academic degree is just another credential -- and the credential that impresses more than anything is a PhD. I've been on hiring committees where people insisted that Doctors were by their nature preferable to Masters and Batchelors. (And of course college dropouts were beyond the pale, no matter how impressive the person's non-academic achievements.) Never mind whether their academic work has the slightest relevence to the job. Of course, these people were PhDs themselves, so there might have been a snob factor. And come to think of it, there usually is -- we all know pretentious assholes who insist that "PhD" is part of their name.
I seem to recall that the federal civil service requires a grade uptick for each advanced degree. Again, regardless of relevence to the job.
Face it, PhD = fatter paycheck, period. Maybe that's not what a PhD is supposed to mean, and it's certainly not popular with academic failures such as myself. But it's the truth. Unless, of course, it's a degree in Comparative Popular Culture from Mail Order University. And even then....
You seem to be assuming that I'm an advocate of CDMA. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I hate my CDMA phone, and will switch to GSM at the first opportunity. The hodgepodge of cell technologies in the U.S. sucks royally.
It may not be terribly obvious, but Slashdot is definitely a U.S.-centric site. There's an implicit assumption that the default location for Slashdot stories in the U.S. I don't think that's anything to apologize for, though it could be more clearly stated.
The whole point of GPRS is that you pay for the traffic you use (rather than connect time)...
That's the theory. And it does appear that nobody's charging for GPRS connect time. (I'm not even sure it's possible.) But the big GSM/GPRS provider in my area (TMobile, California) seems to have had trouble selling GPRS on per-packet basis, and now offers a monthly rate with unlimited usage. I suspect people found the per-packet plan too expensive. Might be different in the U.S. than in countries where almost everybody uses GSM (such as Australia), and they can recover their capital costs from a larger consumer base.
Here's a little background for people in GSM-only land. Outside the U.S. In the U.S., providers refused to standardize their technology, claiming that GSM wasted too much bandwidth. If I remember correctly, CDMA is the leading technology, with TDMA second, and various forms of GSM (not all of them compatibile with international GSM systems) a distant third.
The link to Bagley.org gets diverted because Doug Bagley is a Slashdot-hater. You can read his summary of CAML by cutting and pasting
http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/
into your address bar.
Since CAML is a functional language, it's probably more productive to compare it with other functional languages than with more familiar procedural languages. Good stuff here and here. In this context, it makes sense to have a particular look at Guile, which is like mod_caml in that it implements a functional language as a means of writing application extensions.
So you spotted an apartment fire, calmly reported it to 911, then patiently got everybody out of the building. Somebody has to point out that this counts as major heroism which probably saved a life or two. Or were you just expressing your Avatar?
So because they don't buy your interpretation of the second amendment, they have a "slant"? That's silly. The ACLU didn't invent the "it's about militia" interpretation. It's been federal judicial dogma for a long time. You may consider this doctrine to be stupid. but it's the standard doctrine, and the ACLU people are no more "slanted" than most of the legal profession.
It's convenient to believe that people who disagree with your opinions are just being hypocritical. But that's just a childish way of avoiding honest debate. This kind of issue is a simple difference of opinion, nothing more.
This "comparison" is just your basic dog and pony show. Its purpose isn't to help you compare languages. They just want to fill your head with the "there's a.net language for everybody" party line.
Which is pretty normal for any technology company. So Microsoft bashing is, for once, inappropriate. What's stupid is that anybody would think that Slashdotters would be interested in it. Even if we were all rabid.net fans, this kind of thing would have no interest for us.
If a charity is doing things you don't approve of, it doesn't make sense to give them money. It doesn't matter how much you give them -- some of the money will go to activities that you think are wrong.
Except half of that $50 will go to stuff you don't approve of, so you'll have to withhold that. Then you have to withhold another $12.50...
It's actually a lot simpler than that. Either you approve of their ends (making sure the Bill of Rights covers everybody) and their means (litigating against abridgement of the Bill of Rights, no matter whose rights are being abridged), or you don't. If you do support their strategy, you're just going to have to live with the fact that Nazis, Pedophiles, and other uncool people are going to benefit from it.
Come on, this site is about "News for Nerds", not "Current Popular Views on American Politics".
You're making two mistakes. You're treating the ACLU as a political organization, which it is not. It's about civil liberties. It used to be that you could sort of argue that the ACLU had a liberal-left agenda, since that was the background of most members. But even that argument no longer holds water.
Second, you're thinking that nerdworld has nothing to do with the "real" world. Tell that to somebody who's getting sued by SCO or DirectTV because of technology they happen to own. Or face going to jail for writing DVD software for Linux! Or have to deal with any number of civil liberty issues that affect nerds.
That's a major argument for requiring that industry go metric. As long as American industry exists in a world of its own, we're at a major competitive disadvantage. OK, a changeover would hurt, but what does it matter as long as the hurt is shared fairly?
I was under the impression that the failure of metricization in the 70s was about people not wanting to learn how to read new road signs. Obviously I was wrong. It was about corporate America's usual inability to see past the next quarterly statement.
I'm told that the International Space Station is metric everywhere except in the American-built sections. How do you suppose that makes us look to our "partners"?
Slashdot Mirror
I went out and bought Fox Hunt just because I saw it on a certain (extremely attractive) actress's resume. After dealing with software issues (who writes these brain-dead installers?), I went through about 5 minutes of crude game play, potty humor, and really really bad acting before I realized that I'd never be able to do the game long enough to see the object of my obsession. Being a stalker is all very well, but there are things you just can't do!
You said you were worried about the "spam tracking through images problem". Images themselves provide no tracking mechanism. It's only when downloading the image causes a cookie to be set. If your mail client doesn't set cookies, the images are just images.
Are you sure you played it yourself? Perhaps you know someone who knows someone...
I'm reminded of Iain Banks's novel Complicity, in which the protagonist spends rather too much time playing fancy computer games. Banks, who obviously has the same problem, invented some extremely cool games for him to play, including one which sounds like Civilization, only much more imaginative and creative. People are always asking Banks where they can buy these games. Sadly, they don't exist outside his head.
In point of fact, this whole conversation we're having amounts to a minor criminal conspiracy. Not that I really care -- in a nation swarming with undocumented immigrants, I can't get worked up over a U.S. citizen pretending to be in his home state when he's really overseas. Which I have known people to get away with in precisely this kind of situation.
Bearing in mind, of course, that the federal justice system does not consider "everybody does it" or "no harm, no foul" to be legal defenses!
They'd agrees if they'd recognizes irony.
I seem to recall that the federal civil service requires a grade uptick for each advanced degree. Again, regardless of relevence to the job.
Face it, PhD = fatter paycheck, period. Maybe that's not what a PhD is supposed to mean, and it's certainly not popular with academic failures such as myself. But it's the truth. Unless, of course, it's a degree in Comparative Popular Culture from Mail Order University. And even then....
Maybe your post got modded down because you're all about the ego competition. It's supposed to be about the conversation.
You seem to be assuming that I'm an advocate of CDMA. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I hate my CDMA phone, and will switch to GSM at the first opportunity. The hodgepodge of cell technologies in the U.S. sucks royally.
It may not be terribly obvious, but Slashdot is definitely a U.S.-centric site. There's an implicit assumption that the default location for Slashdot stories in the U.S. I don't think that's anything to apologize for, though it could be more clearly stated.
Here's a little background for people in GSM-only land. Outside the U.S. In the U.S., providers refused to standardize their technology, claiming that GSM wasted too much bandwidth. If I remember correctly, CDMA is the leading technology, with TDMA second, and various forms of GSM (not all of them compatibile with international GSM systems) a distant third.
Since CAML is a functional language, it's probably more productive to compare it with other functional languages than with more familiar procedural languages. Good stuff here and here. In this context, it makes sense to have a particular look at Guile, which is like mod_caml in that it implements a functional language as a means of writing application extensions.
May you live in interesting times!
But this doesn't expose new languages. All of these have been around for a while, even C#.
So use an email client that doesn't allow cookies in email. Like Netscape/Mozilla.
So you spotted an apartment fire, calmly reported it to 911, then patiently got everybody out of the building. Somebody has to point out that this counts as major heroism which probably saved a life or two. Or were you just expressing your Avatar?
It's convenient to believe that people who disagree with your opinions are just being hypocritical. But that's just a childish way of avoiding honest debate. This kind of issue is a simple difference of opinion, nothing more.
Which is pretty normal for any technology company. So Microsoft bashing is, for once, inappropriate. What's stupid is that anybody would think that Slashdotters would be interested in it. Even if we were all rabid .net fans, this kind of thing would have no interest for us.
If a charity is doing things you don't approve of, it doesn't make sense to give them money. It doesn't matter how much you give them -- some of the money will go to activities that you think are wrong.
It's actually a lot simpler than that. Either you approve of their ends (making sure the Bill of Rights covers everybody) and their means (litigating against abridgement of the Bill of Rights, no matter whose rights are being abridged), or you don't. If you do support their strategy, you're just going to have to live with the fact that Nazis, Pedophiles, and other uncool people are going to benefit from it.
Second, you're thinking that nerdworld has nothing to do with the "real" world. Tell that to somebody who's getting sued by SCO or DirectTV because of technology they happen to own. Or face going to jail for writing DVD software for Linux! Or have to deal with any number of civil liberty issues that affect nerds.
I was under the impression that the failure of metricization in the 70s was about people not wanting to learn how to read new road signs. Obviously I was wrong. It was about corporate America's usual inability to see past the next quarterly statement.
I'm told that the International Space Station is metric everywhere except in the American-built sections. How do you suppose that makes us look to our "partners"?