Eiffel fufills all the requested features except for function overloading. This is considered a feature. According to the FAQ, the reason for this is that it improve's the compiler's ability to catch type errors.
I've never used it, but I saw Bertrand Meyer give a demonstration of the IDE recently and it looked pretty slick. An interesting feature included the ability to generate code from all diagrams produced with their tool, and vice versa.
The tools provide alot of cute little niceties, but some programmers may not like it's "enforced" way of doing things.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't this the same guy who was bullied a few months ago over the name Killustrator by Adobe?
The concept of trademarking common english is dubious at best and completely retarded at worst. Trademarks should be limited to unique LOGOS - not words. One simple test: "Can I find this word in a dictionary?" If so, no trademark should be granted on it. There is a big difference between "Floor, Dog, Architect, Illustrator" and "Coca-Cola, the Taste of a new Generation".
...somewhere deep down I'd REALLY like to see the olympics competed between genetically modified super steroid dope mungeous uber athletes.
You already do. Has anyone ever noticed how well host countries tend to do in the Olympics, compared to their average performance? Isn't it the slightest bit suspicious that Australia, a country with 16 million people came in 3rd on the medal tally in the last Olympics after America and Russia? I live in Australia and it's well known in athletic circles that there was/is tons of "Richard" available on the street. (Richard - short for Richard Gere). Get it? Sure we had a few athletes who "emigrated" from eastern europe, but that still makes for a wild statistical skew.
Personally, I don't mind, it's just unfair for the few atheletes that ARE stung for drug use. It's hypocritical.
If you are interested in this stuff, check out Testosterone a pro-steroid online body building mag. Search for the interview with Charlie Francis (Ben Johnson's illustrious trainer). Great article.
I registered a few domains with Dotster after they advertised on Slashdot. I don't reccomend them though, they spam and sell email lists. I won't be using them again. Also, after you register a domain, they park it and put up a page with all the known "variations" of your name, so any person visiting will be encouraged to purchase a "similiar" name. Eg. Misspelled names. To me, this is sort of a backhanded way to treat a customer. Also I agree with kilgore, they're service is slow.
It looks like Bush getting into power was fortuitous for Redmond. Luckily the only electronic voting project I know of uses Debian.:) Imagine going from forcing the company into 2 seperate companies to this unimpressive document. I wonder if they got less then they were offered from Microsoft during the original settlement negotiations. I wouldn't be suprised. It seems like Microsoft is dictating the terms as usual.
One the good side, they took care of the bootloader issue. They almost took care of the API issues, but left some fairly huge loopholes for Microsoft not to publish API functions if:
J. No provision of this Final Judgment shall:
1. Require Microsoft to document, disclose or license to third parties: (a) portions of APIs or Documentation or portions or layers of Communications Protocols the disclosure of which would compromise the security of anti-piracy, anti-virus, software licensing, digital rights management, encryption or authentication systems, including without limitation, keys, authorization tokens or enforcement criteria; or (b) any API, interface or other information related to any Microsoft product if lawfully directed not to do so by a governmental agency of competent jurisdiction.
In other words, API's for IE, Windows Media Player, Windows Moviemaker, Microsoft Firewall, any security software, any digital rights management software. This could be almost anything.
The major telco in my country successfully lobbied the government to make boosters illegal. Though this was widely viewed as a way to block access to cheaper less established industry players (with less coverage), there are legitimate reasons to not use these. The first very important reason is health. The second is if everyone started using them they would eventually cause problems with all the telcos spectrum allocation plans. Because spectrum is so precious, most telcos use an aggressive frequency reuse plan, reusing frequency's in a n=7 pattern. Imagine 7 hexagons on a map, fitting together in a circular pattern. One hexagon (location) on the bottom of the map would use the same frequency as one on the top. This efficiently reuses the frequency spectrum without causing interference, since both stations are far enough apart that multipath fading would have occured between their individual signals.
In other words they work, but I wouldn't reccomend using one, unless your brain needs a tan.
I think the proof is the simple fact that cars made in places such as Mexico, where the labour force is paid an iota of the price of the United States/Canadian auto labour force, cost just as much. VW, Chrysler, Ford : They've all opened plants there (many companies have opened plants based upon "low wages" and quickly pulled out after discovering that wages are only one small part of running a factory) and strangely I still see the price of cars rising and rising, yet at the same time the natural unemployment rate increases as an entire sector of workers is displaced. The idea that unions increase the cost of cars substantially is not based in any reality whatsoever.
I'm a former production supervisor for one of the "Big 3" automakers. I will never buy an American car again, after seeing the quality of vehicle that rolled off our line. Why didn't I do anything? Well, short answer is that with the union it's pretty much impossible to make any meaningful change. The exception to this is American cars made in Mexico. I've visited Mexican automotive plants and the quality of car built is absolutely excellent. Mexican workers are extremely happy to have such high payinging jobs, relative to their fellow countrymen.
Unions DO increase the cost of cars substantially, not just the employment of surly overpaid union workers, but also with massive reductions in warranty cost, production costs, etc.
The bottom line is it would be much cheaper to build cars outside of the U.S. The reason it's not done is because of politics. Unions basically have the Big 3 by the cajones, and it's lucky for their membership, otherwise all these jobs would be shipped overseas.How? Well the UAW typically negotiates into their contract upgrades to current plants in use. (Eg, the company agrees to spend $25 million upgrading the "X car plant"). Also they have pretty much unionized all the major companies that supply parts to the big 3 automakers. This is leveraged in many ways. I'll leave it up to your imagination.
The main reason for two different APIs is because they are both, most likely, architectured completely differently from each other. One is OO while the other is procedural.
Well if you've ever programmed with GTK+ you will note that it is just about as OO as you can get with the C language. Everything inherits from GTKObject. By using nested structs. Each struct includes the entire struct of it's base class.
It all ends up being machine code in the end anyway, all I am saying is it would be nice to have a single unified API for KDE/GNOME.
I am a diehard KDE fan. I used to be a diehard gnome fan, before KDE 2.01. I will probably switch back and forth, as each desktop races ahead of the other. This competition is great, as everyone says. The problem though, and it's a huge problem is for those of us who program for KDE/GNOME. These are not just 2 user-space apps. They are part of the linux desktop infrastructure.
Everyone prefers running programs that are native to their desktop environments toolkit. The problem is that quite often, there is a better program for the other desktop environment. I can't help but think that Linux would be the king of the desktop right now if it wasn't for all this duplicated effort.
I put this question to Slashdotters:
What can we do to resolve this?
Here are a few of my ideas:
-Wrappers for one toolkit's API is translated into the other toolkit's API. I _think_ KDE might already be doing this somewhat. I am not sure of the status.
-A RAD tool, for both desktops. This would be awesome. Look at a great tool like glade. (glade rocks!) Imagine it could generate KDE/QT code as well. Then individual users could "make with-kde" or "make with-gnome".
-Along the same lines, a library that wrapped both toolkits, eg an entirely new API.
I generally use greyish/whiteish foreground text with a black background. Most computers I used before windows had this style of display. I find it's much easier on the eyes then a white background which to me is similiar to staring into a lightbulb.
Other stuff I do:
Use KDE's anti aliased fonts
Use a LCD monitor
I have a sed script that zips through local HTML documents and changes attributes like BGCOLOR
The only thing I don't have is a web browser that will absolutely enforce my style preferences. If anyone knows how to do this with konqueror or mozilla or whatever, please post!
You're kidding right? This player beat Short a lot worse than Short has been beaten anyone in the world including Garry Kasparov. The likelihood that there is someone out there able to defeat the best players in the world who happens to be so good he plays up to 8 bad moves at the beginning of the game and still defeats them who has never revealed himself is so unlikely as to be absurd.Maybe you'd feel better if you saw exactly what Short had to say about the incident. [google.com]
It's possible this is Fischer, but probably not. Fischer is a recluse's recluse, he's not dumb enough to give away clues to his identity (eg. speaking in American english) unless he wants his opponent to know who it is.
I used to spend alot of time on ICC before I became aware of their co-opting of GPL'ed software of which they violated the spirit of, if not the letter of the law, using the ASP loophole. After that I stopped playing there. I did spend about 3 years there as a serious player at the time I was rated around 2200 OTB and significantly higher on ICC (around 2500). Alot of excellent players (GM's/IM's/FM's) play there, also alot of marked computers AND unmarked computers. ICC is and was a haven for troublemakers who liked to run unmarked computers like Fritz and Crafty, and other chess engines against top players for reasons of ego. Sometimes it was obvious, other times less so. Some "cheaters" as they are called on ICC are dumb enough to follow the ICC computer Howto exactly, which involves setting certain variables for computer players. It was also pretty obvious to me, for example, when I got a message from PimpBoy rated 1600 begging me to play him. Immediately after getting beat, you'd get a message from him that said "U R weak". My rating isn't the highest, but I've drawn GM's and beat IM's. It's unlikely that a player rated 1600-ICC (probably 1400-OTB) would be able to beat me. I and any one of thousands of players rated over 2000 could easily play Nigel with a copy of Fritz in the background, make a few ridiculous moves at the start, let Fritz play for awhile and occasionally interrupting Fritz to play a "human" move so that post-game analysis wouldn't make the use of a computer too obvious. The evidence is shakey at best. Nigel probably just wants some attention now that his rating is so low and the chess press no longer reports on his silly little idiosyncracies. Like dying his hair odd colours before matches. Nigel BTW, really dislikes Garry.
This is without a doubt dangerous territory to tread on...For, while I for one would love to see there be a contest of
"mental" challenges of "Olympic" proportions, I don't think the actual Olympics is the place or way to do it.
If Chess is added to the Olympics, it's only a matter of time before many many other "mental" games are petitioning
the Olympic Commission for admission to the games. Instead of allowing the Commission to be very judgemental in
what they allow, it'd make better sense for a mental Olympics to be wholly created outside of the existing Games,
IMHO.
Chess is a gruelling, physically challenging sport. It requires hours of intense concentration to win a game of chess. The nearest parallels are marksmanship and motor racing, where in both cases it is the intense concentration that is the true challenge. Sport is a continuum, with marathon running at or near one end of the spectrum and chess at the other. Unless you have played successfully in tournament chess like I have you will never realize how physically and mentally taxing it is. As a sport, it deserves inclusion in the Olympics like any other. It is chess' rich and timeless history that makes it worthy of inclusion in the Olymics.
Actually, chess has a history of this. Alot of rumous floated around the Korochnoi-Karpov world championship match back in the day that Karpov was being supplied amphetamines from his notorious Soviet era doctor. He was notorious because he used to wear mirror sunglasses while watching the match to freak out Korochnoi, but that's another story alltogether. Amphetamines as a drug would makes sense, as chess drains energy. Other candidate drugs that would be useful to use would include deprenyl,hydergine (so called smart drugs). And the other nootropics. Who knows if this stuff will leave you swatting an imaginary fly for the rest of your life like it supposedly did to one grandmaster, who's name I forget.
I had the same experience. I could barely get a Dell rep who spoke English on the phone, much less a reply to an email about linux. I bought the notebook because it had excellent hardware compatability but I found this out from the web, not from Dell. I really had to grit my teeth to order it from the company, but I am glad I did. The notebook works flawlessly. (Touch wood) I knew if SALES was that bad then support would be non-existant. But I never use support anyway. Overall I was left with a very negative impression of the company. But hey, I had pretty much the same problem with IBM, and the Dell model was $200 bucks cheaper.
The machine kicks butt though. Everything works great. I'm typing this with X running at 1400x1050:) If they think there is no demand, they may be right. But their is definitely a market. The problem with demand is their customers are getting fed up with dealing them. I think in general technical users, those more likely to use linux probably have a lower bullshit threshold then the average person, and this is their perceived lack of demand.
Ironically I installed RH7.1 on 3 dell notebooks today for a customer who is changing over their entire shop from NT to linux.
Oh my...
Consider a virus writer being caught, then going after the major antivirus software vendors for breaking the encryption
on his virus...
Not far off. A guy who wrote a bsd telnet exploit that was posted to bugtraq complained that bugtraq infringed on his copyright by posting it. It had a copyright notice on it (under a pseudonym - obviously). The problem was the exploit has been in the wild for a little while now. So that brings up an interesting question. If someone hacks your machine and leaves a copy of the exploit, are you LEGALLY prevented from posting it to bugtraq because of a copyright notice attached to it. The implications of this sort of stuff are mind blowing.
The Knee jerk lawmakers solution here would be to outlaw the use of copyrights under pseudonyms. (eg. Like Mark Twain)
BTW: Slashcode sucks. As of 2 months ago I routinely get "Invalid Form Key" error every time I try to submit a comment.
Human beings are too clever for their own good. Case in point: Society would be much better off without the invention of nuclear and biological weapons. I hope artificial intelligence is hard/impossible to achieve, but I doubt it.
The problem with something like A.I. is that after a machine achieves cognition it could learn at an exponential rate.
The notion that we could code in something like Asimov's Robot rules is laughable at best. I could think of at least 10 situations off the top of my head that allows world domination by machine's without violating any of Asimov's rules. eg. Are robot's allowed to solicit stupid/gullible humans into changing their programs?
My sister-in-law has a funny job. She is a former television producer and her current job is as a consultant "auditing" large corporations public relations departments'. The company will implement a scenario. Eg. "300 workers died in a chemical fire". She will then pose as a reporter and badger their PR department. Did they give out too much information? Did they express an appropriate level of regret without assuming liability? etc etc. Pretty crazy world we live in huh?
Extrapolating from other stories she has told me, I wouldn't be at all surprised if, after having looked at some of these "pro-Adobe" comments if some of them have been written by Adobe paid/sponsored shills. Slashdot is pretty well known in mainstream tech circle's as the mouthpiece of the free software/open source movement. It only makes sense to try to subvert community opinion within a public forum. It's good "PR".
IMHO, I think it's pretty stupid to believe that the word Illustrator with a "K" tacked onto the front of it infringes Adobe's trademark. Trademarks were never intended to cover the English language, just things like logos, that identify a product uniquely. If a person cannot tell the difference between "KIllustrator" and "Adobe Illustrator", then that same person probably cannot tell the difference between "KIllustrator (a software package) and an Illustrator (a human who draws). That person by my definition would be an idiot.
Yah, I've seen this too. With the IT boom that just happened the university I did my undergraduate CS degree was also sort of doing consulting. I didn't know too much about it. Several friend's of mine did projects that were largely prototype's for commercial projects which they found out about either part way through or afterwards.
Now as a Master's student, I personally GPL all my code. IANAL but I'd guess unless you have signed a specific agreement, (I haven't) you own the copyright's for any works you produce.
Speakfreely does work quite well. It also supports encryption if you don't mind negotiating a session key via PGP first. (If you want it to be secure, it currently only supports private key crypto). Sound quality is excellent over 56K and it's an open source license, BSD IIRC. Supports GSM,LPC,LPC-10, and other voice compression schemes. The only problem you may run into is some people have problems with full duplex audio on linux, but this might be an issue with any linux Briefly describe the extra code required so that the program will work correctly. (1 Mark)VoIP solution.
Excellent comment. Could you expand with regards to the object-lifecycle comment and about the piles of one layer classes? The only true OO programming I've did was in java and I've found this somewhat unavoidable sometimes. I also don't find it to big of an issue but I'd like to hear why you think it's bad (struct + getters and setters?) Is it because of poor code reusage? I'm intrigued.
Crap. Canadian health care system is in a state of crisis. Waiting times in some hospitals emergencies rooms is outrageous. Canada should send a team to study the Australian model that is a hybrid public/private system. It works very well.
I don't think so. People with wacky ideas and a some conviction have long attracted "sheeple" without the aid of the internet. Examples include David Koresh, Jim Jones (of Jonestown), and "Elron" who's brethen recently got a comment deleted off Slashdot.
I think one (of many) reasons crap like this flourishes is because there is sometimes a small amount of truth to it.
Literature exists that shows that some (not all!) Chinese acupuncture is quite efficacious and works via stimulating localized opiate neurotransmitters. So I'm hypothesizing that possibly their is some small noticeable metabolic change by wearing the rings. It's quite possibly they do nothing at all other then stimulating a placebo effect. People who have been given the amino acid niacin in blind trials will often have powerful placebo effects because it produces a warm flushed feeling that is definitely noticeable. A small part of the problem is for awhile a stigma has existed in western medicine for people who wanted to study/test alternative medicine. It's certainly been shown some OTHER alternative medicines are highly efficacious. (eg. Certain herbal extracts). The big part of the problem though is crackpots like Chiu pushing immortality rings. Let's not forget that magnetic fields are also what give kids who leave near power lines leukemia.
Slashdot Mirror
If you only need IMAP, KMail works pretty well. It still has a few bugs, but overall not too shabby.
Eiffel fufills all the requested features except for function overloading. This is considered a feature. According to the FAQ, the reason for this is that it improve's the compiler's ability to catch type errors.
I've never used it, but I saw Bertrand Meyer give a demonstration of the IDE recently and it looked pretty slick. An interesting feature included the ability to generate code from all diagrams produced with their tool, and vice versa.
The tools provide alot of cute little niceties, but some programmers may not like it's "enforced" way of doing things.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't this the same guy who was bullied a few months ago over the name Killustrator by Adobe?
The concept of trademarking common english is dubious at best and completely retarded at worst. Trademarks should be limited to unique LOGOS - not words. One simple test: "Can I find this word in a dictionary?" If so, no trademark should be granted on it. There is a big difference between "Floor, Dog, Architect, Illustrator" and "Coca-Cola, the Taste of a new Generation".
You already do. Has anyone ever noticed how well host countries tend to do in the Olympics, compared to their average performance? Isn't it the slightest bit suspicious that Australia, a country with 16 million people came in 3rd on the medal tally in the last Olympics after America and Russia? I live in Australia and it's well known in athletic circles that there was/is tons of "Richard" available on the street. (Richard - short for Richard Gere). Get it? Sure we had a few athletes who "emigrated" from eastern europe, but that still makes for a wild statistical skew.
Personally, I don't mind, it's just unfair for the few atheletes that ARE stung for drug use. It's hypocritical.
If you are interested in this stuff, check out Testosterone a pro-steroid online body building mag. Search for the interview with Charlie Francis (Ben Johnson's illustrious trainer). Great article.
I registered a few domains with Dotster after they advertised on Slashdot. I don't reccomend them though, they spam and sell email lists. I won't be using them again. Also, after you register a domain, they park it and put up a page with all the known "variations" of your name, so any person visiting will be encouraged to purchase a "similiar" name. Eg. Misspelled names. To me, this is sort of a backhanded way to treat a customer. Also I agree with kilgore, they're service is slow.
Stay tuned. KDE 2.2.2 will be released on November 12th. It is a bugfix release for 2.2. KDE 3.0 Beta 1 should be out on December 3rd.
One the good side, they took care of the bootloader issue. They almost took care of the API issues, but left some fairly huge loopholes for Microsoft not to publish API functions if:
In other words, API's for IE, Windows Media Player, Windows Moviemaker, Microsoft Firewall, any security software, any digital rights management software. This could be almost anything.
The major telco in my country successfully lobbied the government to make boosters illegal.
Though this was widely viewed as a way to block access to cheaper less established industry players (with less coverage), there are legitimate reasons to not use these. The first very important reason is health. The second is if everyone started using them they would eventually cause problems with all the telcos spectrum allocation plans. Because spectrum is so precious, most telcos use an aggressive frequency reuse plan, reusing frequency's in a n=7 pattern. Imagine 7 hexagons on a map, fitting together in a circular pattern. One hexagon (location) on the bottom of the map would use the same frequency as one on the top. This efficiently reuses the frequency spectrum without causing interference, since both stations are far enough apart that multipath fading would have occured between their individual signals.
In other words they work, but I wouldn't reccomend using one, unless your brain needs a tan.
I'm a former production supervisor for one of the "Big 3" automakers. I will never buy an American car again, after seeing the quality of vehicle that rolled off our line. Why didn't I do anything? Well, short answer is that with the union it's pretty much impossible to make any meaningful change. The exception to this is American cars made in Mexico. I've visited Mexican automotive plants and the quality of car built is absolutely excellent. Mexican workers are extremely happy to have such high payinging jobs, relative to their fellow countrymen.
Unions DO increase the cost of cars substantially, not just the employment of surly overpaid union workers, but also with massive reductions in warranty cost, production costs, etc.
The bottom line is it would be much cheaper to build cars outside of the U.S. The reason it's not done is because of politics. Unions basically have the Big 3 by the cajones, and it's lucky for their membership, otherwise all these jobs would be shipped overseas.How? Well the UAW typically negotiates into their contract upgrades to current plants in use. (Eg, the company agrees to spend $25 million upgrading the "X car plant"). Also they have pretty much unionized all the major companies that supply parts to the big 3 automakers. This is leveraged in many ways. I'll leave it up to your imagination.
Well if you've ever programmed with GTK+ you will note that it is just about as OO as you can get with the C language. Everything inherits from GTKObject. By using nested structs. Each struct includes the entire struct of it's base class.
It all ends up being machine code in the end anyway, all I am saying is it would be nice to have a single unified API for KDE/GNOME.
I am a diehard KDE fan. I used to be a diehard gnome fan, before KDE 2.01. I will probably switch back and forth, as each desktop races ahead of the other. This competition is great, as everyone says. The problem though, and it's a huge problem is for those of us who program for KDE/GNOME. These are not just 2 user-space apps. They are part of the linux desktop infrastructure.
Everyone prefers running programs that are native to their desktop environments toolkit. The problem is that quite often, there is a better program for the other desktop environment. I can't help but think that Linux would be the king of the desktop right now if it wasn't for all this duplicated effort.
I put this question to Slashdotters:
What can we do to resolve this?
Here are a few of my ideas:
-Wrappers for one toolkit's API is translated into the other toolkit's API. I _think_ KDE might already be doing this somewhat. I am not sure of the status.
-A RAD tool, for both desktops. This would be awesome. Look at a great tool like glade. (glade rocks!) Imagine it could generate KDE/QT code as well. Then individual users could "make with-kde" or "make with-gnome".
-Along the same lines, a library that wrapped both toolkits, eg an entirely new API.
Anyone have any other suggestions?
Mirror:
Kde Aqua theme
I have to add this line because of the stupid Slashdot zlib filter.
Other stuff I do:
The only thing I don't have is a web browser that will absolutely enforce my style preferences. If anyone knows how to do this with konqueror or mozilla or whatever, please post!
It's possible this is Fischer, but probably not. Fischer is a recluse's recluse, he's not dumb enough to give away clues to his identity (eg. speaking in American english) unless he wants his opponent to know who it is.
I used to spend alot of time on ICC before I became aware of their co-opting of GPL'ed software of which they violated the spirit of, if not the letter of the law, using the ASP loophole. After that I stopped playing there.
I did spend about 3 years there as a serious player at the time I was rated around 2200 OTB and significantly higher on ICC (around 2500). Alot of excellent players (GM's/IM's/FM's) play there, also alot of marked computers AND unmarked computers. ICC is and was a haven for troublemakers who liked to run unmarked computers like Fritz and Crafty, and other chess engines against top players for reasons of ego. Sometimes it was obvious, other times less so. Some "cheaters" as they are called on ICC are dumb enough to follow the ICC computer Howto exactly, which involves setting certain variables for computer players. It was also pretty obvious to me, for example, when I got a message from PimpBoy rated 1600 begging me to play him. Immediately after getting beat, you'd get a message from him that said "U R weak". My rating isn't the highest, but I've drawn GM's and beat IM's. It's unlikely that a player rated 1600-ICC (probably 1400-OTB) would be able to beat me. I and any one of thousands of players rated over 2000 could easily play Nigel with a copy of Fritz in the background, make a few ridiculous moves at the start, let Fritz play for awhile and occasionally interrupting Fritz to play a "human" move so that post-game analysis wouldn't make the use of a computer too obvious. The evidence is shakey at best. Nigel probably just wants some attention now that his rating is so low and the chess press no longer reports on his silly little idiosyncracies. Like dying his hair odd colours before matches. Nigel BTW, really dislikes Garry.
Actually, chess has a history of this. Alot of rumous floated around the Korochnoi-Karpov world championship match back in the day that Karpov was being supplied amphetamines from his notorious Soviet era doctor. He was notorious because he used to wear mirror sunglasses while watching the match to freak out Korochnoi, but that's another story alltogether. Amphetamines as a drug would makes sense, as chess drains energy. Other candidate drugs that would be useful to use would include deprenyl,hydergine (so called smart drugs). And the other nootropics. Who knows if this stuff will leave you swatting an imaginary fly for the rest of your life like it supposedly did to one grandmaster, who's name I forget.
I had the same experience. I could barely get a Dell rep who spoke English on the phone, much less a reply to an email about linux. I bought the notebook because it had excellent hardware compatability but I found this out from the web, not from Dell. I really had to grit my teeth to order it from the company, but I am glad I did. The notebook works flawlessly. (Touch wood) I knew if SALES was that bad then support would be non-existant. But I never use support anyway. Overall I was left with a very negative impression of the company. But hey, I had pretty much the same problem with IBM, and the Dell model was $200 bucks cheaper. The machine kicks butt though. Everything works great. I'm typing this with X running at 1400x1050 :) If they think there is no demand, they may be right. But their is definitely a market. The problem with demand is their customers are getting fed up with dealing them. I think in general technical users, those more likely to use linux probably have a lower bullshit threshold then the average person, and this is their perceived lack of demand.
Ironically I installed RH7.1 on 3 dell notebooks today for a customer who is changing over their entire shop from NT to linux.
BTW: Slashcode sucks. As of 2 months ago I routinely get "Invalid Form Key" error every time I try to submit a comment.
Human beings are too clever for their own good.
Case in point: Society would be much better off without the invention of nuclear and biological weapons.
I hope artificial intelligence is hard/impossible to achieve, but I doubt it.
The problem with something like A.I. is that after a machine achieves cognition it could learn at an exponential rate.
The notion that we could code in something like Asimov's Robot rules is laughable at best. I could think of at least 10 situations off the top of my head that allows world domination by machine's without violating any of Asimov's rules. eg. Are robot's allowed to solicit stupid/gullible humans into changing their programs?
My sister-in-law has a funny job. She is a former television producer and her current job is as a consultant "auditing" large corporations public relations departments'. The company will implement a scenario. Eg. "300 workers died in a chemical fire". She will then pose as a reporter and badger their PR department. Did they give out too much information? Did they express an appropriate level of regret without assuming liability? etc etc.
Pretty crazy world we live in huh?
Extrapolating from other stories she has told me, I wouldn't be at all surprised if, after having looked at some of these "pro-Adobe" comments if some of them have been written by Adobe paid/sponsored shills.
Slashdot is pretty well known in mainstream tech circle's as the mouthpiece of the free software/open source movement. It only makes sense to try to subvert community opinion within a public forum. It's good "PR".
IMHO, I think it's pretty stupid to believe that the word Illustrator with a "K" tacked onto the front of it infringes Adobe's trademark. Trademarks were never intended to cover the English language, just things like logos, that identify a product uniquely. If a person cannot tell the difference between "KIllustrator" and "Adobe Illustrator", then that same person probably cannot tell the difference between "KIllustrator (a software package) and an Illustrator (a human who draws). That person by my definition would be an idiot.
Yah, I've seen this too. With the IT boom that just happened the university I did my undergraduate CS degree was also sort of doing consulting. I didn't know too much about it. Several friend's of mine did projects that were largely prototype's for commercial projects which they found out about either part way through or afterwards.
Now as a Master's student, I personally GPL all my code. IANAL but I'd guess unless you have signed a specific agreement, (I haven't) you own the copyright's for any works you produce.
Speakfreely does work quite well. It also supports encryption if you don't mind negotiating a session key via PGP first. (If you want it to be secure, it currently only supports private key crypto). Sound quality is excellent over 56K and it's an open source license, BSD IIRC. Supports GSM,LPC,LPC-10, and other voice compression schemes. The only problem you may run into is some people have problems with full duplex audio on linux, but this might be an issue with any linux Briefly describe the extra code required so that the program will work correctly. (1 Mark)VoIP solution.
Excellent comment. Could you expand with regards to the object-lifecycle comment and about the piles of one layer classes? The only true OO programming I've did was in java and I've found this somewhat unavoidable sometimes. I also don't find it to big of an issue but I'd like to hear why you think it's bad (struct + getters and setters?) Is it because of poor code reusage?
I'm intrigued.
Crap. Canadian health care system is in a state of crisis. Waiting times in some hospitals emergencies rooms is outrageous. Canada should send a team to study the Australian model that is a hybrid public/private system. It works very well.
From a Canadian living in Australia...
I don't think so. People with wacky ideas and a some conviction have long attracted "sheeple" without the aid of the internet. Examples include David Koresh, Jim Jones (of Jonestown), and "Elron" who's brethen recently got a comment deleted off Slashdot.
I think one (of many) reasons crap like this flourishes is because there is sometimes a small amount of truth to it.
Literature exists that shows that some (not all!) Chinese acupuncture is quite efficacious and works via stimulating localized opiate neurotransmitters. So I'm hypothesizing that possibly their is some small noticeable metabolic change by wearing the rings. It's quite possibly they do nothing at all other then stimulating a placebo effect. People who have been given the amino acid niacin in blind trials will often have powerful placebo effects because it produces a warm flushed feeling that is definitely noticeable.
A small part of the problem is for awhile a stigma has existed in western medicine for people who wanted to study/test alternative medicine. It's certainly been shown some OTHER alternative medicines are highly efficacious. (eg. Certain herbal extracts).
The big part of the problem though is crackpots like Chiu pushing immortality rings. Let's not forget that magnetic fields are also what give kids who leave near power lines leukemia.