Why is it the publishers job to censor or police what people publish?
Because Elsevier and other academic publishers justify the enormous cost of their journals pretty much solely by the pretense that they ascertain the highest possible scientific integrity in their publications, and that no wayward scientist should even think about publishing in more modern channels even when this would be way more efficient for everyone except the publishing houses. Not that this pretense wasn't already punctured before (google "Chaos, Solitons & Fractals" for an example), but collaborating in a pharma astroturf operation is a new low even for them.
Why should those people who are using computers as tools (in the same way they would use a car, lawnmower, or vibrator) have to know anything at all about how it works, where content is stored, etc?
Because misusing your computer connected to a worldwide network can do harm to uncounted others, while misusing your lawnmower/vibrator will only screw up your own lawn/body. Misusing your car, on the other hand... guess which of your three examples we regulate the hell out of?
Is Java better than Cobol ? Probably not, as Java is also an imperative language.
Granted, there is hype, and programming is intrinsically difficult. That said, if you believe that language designers have learnt no lessons whatsoever within 40 years, you are delusional.
OSS and even Alsa have problems with apps wanting to lock the soundcard to themselves. PulseAudio is supposed to once and for all end this and make it similar to X in that Pulse Audio can hook up any audio app and any soundcard, even over the network, and mix them together.
I have never understood why this auto-mixing is considered desirable.
I like that an application locks the soundcard. I listen to
high-quality music while I work - why on Earth would I want another
application mixing something else into that? The effect of two
different tracks of music sequences superimposed is virtually always
hideous cacophony - no thanks. I don't need a perky jingle to inform
me that a download has finished. I am actively grateful to X for
preventing the browser from interfering with my enjoyment. If I wanted
your web site to make noise, I'd rub my thumb against the monitor!
Honestly, what is this mythical use case in which hearing different
sources of digital sound simultaneously is a good thing?
There is a virus infecting a huge number of systems and no one knows what it is destined to do.
Seems like a pretty GOOD reason to genuinely care, if you ask me.
Not really... we can be reasonably sure that Conficker is designed to do what the previous five generations of worms did, only more effectively: provide nodes of a botnet for hire,
so criminals can send spam, threaten DDOS attacks etc. It's annoying, but the internet lives on. Why would the purpose suddenly become radically different just because the implementation has been improved?
Haley Barbour, former head of the RNC, that is. Again, party affiliation only gets mentioned when it makes Republicans look evil or Democrats look good. Note: I don't like either party. I just find the pattern to be interesting.
What do you mean? Forbidding traffic light cameras
does make him look evil! Not everyone puts
their right not to pay fines above other's safety,
you know.
I have to ask...do people REALLY that often, hit porn sites by accident?
Here's an anecdote for ya: I've been using the WWW since I got a
university account in 1993. As it happens, the first time I accidentally loaded a NSFW page, ever, was... today. (I was googling "LaTeX font color", of all things...)
So, anecdotally, I'd have to say: no, not really. YMMV.
The Update Manager is accessed via the starburst at the top right-hand top of the screen. Click it, but be prepared -- you're about to be confronted with literally hundreds of potential updates with incomprehensible names and unenlightening descriptions...
By default, every update has a check next to it in the Update Manager. Uncheck the boxes next to those you don't want to update -- I recommend updating only software that you recognize.
That's terrible advice.
No, it's excellent advice. Why? Updating software brings your system
from a state that you know works to a state that may or may not work
for you. It doesn't matter that the developers find their shiny new
features utterly adorable and consider everyone who doesn't share
their enthusiasm a thick-headed troglodyte. A user wants to get things
achieved, and if a program does what they want, they should not have
to or even be urged to update, ever.
The proper time to update is when you know a program well enough to
know that a newer version has a feature you want. And then the user
must be given the option to downgrade again if things don't work out.
As for security risks, most of the time there aren't any - someone who
doesn't run a DNS resolver shouldn't have to keep up with the
corresponding software, or even have it installed! Those few critical
vulnerabilities that actually endanger the user, or turn the
box into a zombie that harms others, should be updated automatically,
not optionally. If we have learnt one thing from Windows, sure it is
this principle.
The Itanium might have had a chance if optimizing compilers had been available that would actually exploit its hardware... but see the following sound bite:
the "Itanium" approach that was supposed to be so terrific - until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write.
I dont use Windows much but I assumed MS had disabled or at least set the default to off of the autoexec.bat feature so how else could it spread just by plugging in a USB stick? Someone tell me this security hole the size of a planet isn't still enabled by default in Windows installs??
It posts an "execute" option in the autoplay dialog that looks almost exactly like the
harmless "browse folder" option, complete with misleading folder icon. It's moderately clever, but of course still rquires autoplay to be enabled.
For instance, to simply output a line to a command line in Java you're looking at
System.out.println("output");
whereas with c++ (for instance) you have
cout << "output" << endl;
As someone who's teaching this stuff, the second is easier to explain in detail and doesn't rely on saying "don't worry what System.out is".
This is a troll, right? Calling a method is harder to explain than
applying a string literal to an ostream reference and receiving another ostream reference to which a special-purpose construct is then applied merely for its side effect? What color is the sky on your planet?
I would agree with this. When talking to grandma about trying Linux since all she wants to do is check e-mail, look at pictures of the grand kids and keep her MySpace page updated, you get the question thrown back..."why so many different ones? Are they all different?"
Second item...pick one desktop. GNOME, KDE...whatever. Just pick one.
OK. I'll keep using olvwm then, so everyone else in the world will just have to learn to love that.
2. Why the hell do I have to install a new kernel? Why? I've never had to on Windows - why is Linux different? Is it so buggy? I installed with a factory version something ending 054. Now I have something ending 122 I believe. I did it ok, but that's not the point I'm making; were there really 68 cock-ups so great in the kernel build from release-time until that now they had to re-release 68 times? I'm guessing probablly not, but still.
Almost certainly not. There might be a fix for critical security hole that could actually affect you, but almost always, a recommendation to upgrade only means that the geeks are eager to show off all the cool new features they have since integrated. (In commercial software, their enthusiasm would me moderated by a marketing team.) Normally, you upgrade your kernel only to support new hardware that didn't exist when your old kernel was written.
You fail to grasp the entire point of the Turing test. Everyone
who does AI research is aware that there is no good answer
to the question "What is thinking?". The test was proposed specifically to have something that researchers could work towards, without having to spend an eternity debating philosophical points first. It is not about "creating thought", but achieving definite advance over what we have so far.
The simple passing of all tests doesn't necessarily means that you didn't broke anything.
It means only that you passed the tests.
If the tests don't provide coverage for ALL the business issues that the piece of software is supposed to solve, then you pass the tests, but will have no clue if you broke or not things apart.
Of course it doesn't prove that, but remember that this is fundamentally impossible to prove anyway. Testing can demonstrate the presence of errors, but not their absence. (E.W. Dijkstra) Your tests can never be "enough" in that sense. But a code change that re-satisfies the existing test suite is at least much more likely not to break the system than one which doesn't.
I work on the e1000 team (including the e1000e driver) and here is what we know. A panic in another driver (believed to be the gfx driver but uncertain) which scribbles over the NIC/LOM non-volatile memory (NVM). This is only happening with the 2.6.27-rc kernels on ICHx systems. Since the NIC/LOM VNM is part of the whole BIOS image other things in the system could be effected by this driver panic as well. An update of the system BIOS will restore the NIC/LOM to be operational.
In other words, as usual, the device is NOT bricked.
Yeah, competition can be real bad for companies. But ignoring it is even worse. These guys will crash and burn if they persist in this.
Dude, this is Ryanair. One of the shops with cheap airflight as their business model. In the era after peak oil. They are already crashing and burning.
DVB transport streams contain four independent program streams each. You can in fact
record four programs at the same time by simply writing the unaltered transport stream
to disk. Decoding need not happen until you actually want to watch one of those programs.
"And he [Hiram] made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one rim to the other it was round all about, and...a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about....And it was an hand breadth thick...."
Those figures are obviously given to only one significant digit,
so the text merely implies that round(pi) = 3, which is perfectly true.
I have a question that has always troubled me regarding evolution vs. intelligent design. Is there any meaningful way, or even a need, to differentiate "created" things from "naturally occurring" things? Homo Sapiens may have "evolved" over millions of years, but there are objects on this earth (now even "living" objects) which are 100% the "creation" of us as a species, which would be very difficult to explain from an evolutionary standpoint.
You might be interested in reading Jacques Monod's utterly fascinating Chance and necessity, whose
first chapter explores precisely that question.
Let t1 = time required to make first version of the app. Let t2 = time required to make some refinements of version of app. You seem to be saying that the OP should only be paid for t2, not t1. And frankly, what if the author showed some creativity in creating that first version, i.e., conceptual stuff that may not itself have required programming time, but serious thinking time, bookwork, mathematics, a Ph.D., etc. None of this has value?
There may be kudos, karma, experience, etc. to be had from it, but the OP was asking explicitly about money. Monetary value is, by definition, what others are willing to pay for something. If the software is unsellable as it is, then no, it has no value in that respect - you have to work more until you can even start earning. That is what investing is all about, after all.
I want to make some money from the application, though I certainly don't expect to become a millionaire. The problem is that I'd like nothing better than to open-source it. There are many aspects of the application that I don't have time to refine, and other developers could definitely improve upon my work.
Wow, blatant self-contradiction within three sentences! If the application makes you money, then by definition, you can afford some time to work on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it the publishers job to censor or police what people publish?
Because Elsevier and other academic publishers justify the enormous cost of their journals pretty much solely by the pretense that they ascertain the highest possible scientific integrity in their publications, and that no wayward scientist should even think about publishing in more modern channels even when this would be way more efficient for everyone except the publishing houses. Not that this pretense wasn't already punctured before (google "Chaos, Solitons & Fractals" for an example), but collaborating in a pharma astroturf operation is a new low even for them.
Why should those people who are using computers as tools (in the same way they would use a car, lawnmower, or vibrator) have to know anything at all about how it works, where content is stored, etc?
Because misusing your computer connected to a worldwide network can do harm to uncounted others, while misusing your lawnmower/vibrator will only screw up your own lawn/body. Misusing your car, on the other hand... guess which of your three examples we regulate the hell out of?
Is Java better than Cobol ? Probably not, as Java is also an imperative language.
Granted, there is hype, and programming is intrinsically difficult. That said, if you believe that language designers have learnt no lessons whatsoever within 40 years, you are delusional.
OSS and even Alsa have problems with apps wanting to lock the soundcard to themselves. PulseAudio is supposed to once and for all end this and make it similar to X in that Pulse Audio can hook up any audio app and any soundcard, even over the network, and mix them together.
I have never understood why this auto-mixing is considered desirable. I like that an application locks the soundcard. I listen to high-quality music while I work - why on Earth would I want another application mixing something else into that? The effect of two different tracks of music sequences superimposed is virtually always hideous cacophony - no thanks. I don't need a perky jingle to inform me that a download has finished. I am actively grateful to X for preventing the browser from interfering with my enjoyment. If I wanted your web site to make noise, I'd rub my thumb against the monitor! Honestly, what is this mythical use case in which hearing different sources of digital sound simultaneously is a good thing?
There is a virus infecting a huge number of systems and no one knows what it is destined to do.
Seems like a pretty GOOD reason to genuinely care, if you ask me.
Not really... we can be reasonably sure that Conficker is designed to do what the previous five generations of worms did, only more effectively: provide nodes of a botnet for hire, so criminals can send spam, threaten DDOS attacks etc. It's annoying, but the internet lives on. Why would the purpose suddenly become radically different just because the implementation has been improved?
Haley Barbour, former head of the RNC, that is. Again, party affiliation only gets mentioned when it makes Republicans look evil or Democrats look good. Note: I don't like either party. I just find the pattern to be interesting.
What do you mean? Forbidding traffic light cameras does make him look evil! Not everyone puts their right not to pay fines above other's safety, you know.
I have to ask...do people REALLY that often, hit porn sites by accident?
Here's an anecdote for ya: I've been using the WWW since I got a university account in 1993. As it happens, the first time I accidentally loaded a NSFW page, ever, was... today. (I was googling "LaTeX font color", of all things...)
So, anecdotally, I'd have to say: no, not really. YMMV.
Choice quote:
The Update Manager is accessed via the starburst at the top right-hand top of the screen. Click it, but be prepared -- you're about to be confronted with literally hundreds of potential updates with incomprehensible names and unenlightening descriptions ...
By default, every update has a check next to it in the Update Manager. Uncheck the boxes next to those you don't want to update -- I recommend updating only software that you recognize.
That's terrible advice.
No, it's excellent advice. Why? Updating software brings your system from a state that you know works to a state that may or may not work for you. It doesn't matter that the developers find their shiny new features utterly adorable and consider everyone who doesn't share their enthusiasm a thick-headed troglodyte. A user wants to get things achieved, and if a program does what they want, they should not have to or even be urged to update, ever.
The proper time to update is when you know a program well enough to know that a newer version has a feature you want. And then the user must be given the option to downgrade again if things don't work out.
As for security risks, most of the time there aren't any - someone who doesn't run a DNS resolver shouldn't have to keep up with the corresponding software, or even have it installed! Those few critical vulnerabilities that actually endanger the user, or turn the box into a zombie that harms others, should be updated automatically, not optionally. If we have learnt one thing from Windows, sure it is this principle.
Disclaimer: my opinion may differ from yours.
about 0.5 per cent a day... topping one per cent by day four
So, they started out with -1% market share?
the "Itanium" approach that was supposed to be so terrific - until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write.
(http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856)
When Don Knuth says your chip is impossible to program for, you're in deep, deep trouble.
I dont use Windows much but I assumed MS had disabled or at least set the default to off of the autoexec.bat feature so how else could it spread just by plugging in a USB stick? Someone tell me this security hole the size of a planet isn't still enabled by default in Windows installs??
It posts an "execute" option in the autoplay dialog that looks almost exactly like the harmless "browse folder" option, complete with misleading folder icon. It's moderately clever, but of course still rquires autoplay to be enabled.
RMS is always so adamant that we call it "Free Software" and not "Open Source Software".
You know, that's probably because those are very different things.
For instance, to simply output a line to a command line in Java you're looking at System.out.println("output"); whereas with c++ (for instance) you have cout << "output" << endl; As someone who's teaching this stuff, the second is easier to explain in detail and doesn't rely on saying "don't worry what System.out is".
This is a troll, right? Calling a method is harder to explain than applying a string literal to an ostream reference and receiving another ostream reference to which a special-purpose construct is then applied merely for its side effect? What color is the sky on your planet?
I would agree with this. When talking to grandma about trying Linux since all she wants to do is check e-mail, look at pictures of the grand kids and keep her MySpace page updated, you get the question thrown back..."why so many different ones? Are they all different?"
Second item...pick one desktop. GNOME, KDE...whatever. Just pick one.
OK. I'll keep using olvwm then, so everyone else in the world will just have to learn to love that.
See how silly your idea is?
Almost certainly not. There might be a fix for critical security hole that could actually affect you, but almost always, a recommendation to upgrade only means that the geeks are eager to show off all the cool new features they have since integrated. (In commercial software, their enthusiasm would me moderated by a marketing team.) Normally, you upgrade your kernel only to support new hardware that didn't exist when your old kernel was written.
You fail to grasp the entire point of the Turing test. Everyone who does AI research is aware that there is no good answer to the question "What is thinking?". The test was proposed specifically to have something that researchers could work towards, without having to spend an eternity debating philosophical points first. It is not about "creating thought", but achieving definite advance over what we have so far.
The simple passing of all tests doesn't necessarily means that you didn't broke anything.
It means only that you passed the tests.
If the tests don't provide coverage for ALL the business issues that the piece of software is supposed to solve, then you pass the tests, but will have no clue if you broke or not things apart.
Of course it doesn't prove that, but remember that this is fundamentally impossible to prove anyway. Testing can demonstrate the presence of errors, but not their absence. (E.W. Dijkstra) Your tests can never be "enough" in that sense. But a code change that re-satisfies the existing test suite is at least much more likely not to break the system than one which doesn't.
I work on the e1000 team (including the e1000e driver) and here is what we know. A panic in another driver (believed to be the gfx driver but uncertain) which scribbles over the NIC/LOM non-volatile memory (NVM). This is only happening with the 2.6.27-rc kernels on ICHx systems. Since the NIC/LOM VNM is part of the whole BIOS image other things in the system could be effected by this driver panic as well. An update of the system BIOS will restore the NIC/LOM to be operational.
In other words, as usual, the device is NOT bricked.
Dude, this is Ryanair. One of the shops with cheap airflight as their business model. In the era after peak oil. They are already crashing and burning.
"There is so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?"
(Dick Cavett)
DVB transport streams contain four independent program streams each. You can in fact record four programs at the same time by simply writing the unaltered transport stream to disk. Decoding need not happen until you actually want to watch one of those programs.
Those figures are obviously given to only one significant digit,
so the text merely implies that round(pi) = 3, which is perfectly true.
I have a question that has always troubled me regarding evolution vs. intelligent design. Is there any meaningful way, or even a need, to differentiate "created" things from "naturally occurring" things? Homo Sapiens may have "evolved" over millions of years, but there are objects on this earth (now even "living" objects) which are 100% the "creation" of us as a species, which would be very difficult to explain from an evolutionary standpoint. You might be interested in reading Jacques Monod's utterly fascinating Chance and necessity, whose first chapter explores precisely that question.
Let t1 = time required to make first version of the app. Let t2 = time required to make some refinements of version of app. You seem to be saying that the OP should only be paid for t2, not t1. And frankly, what if the author showed some creativity in creating that first version, i.e., conceptual stuff that may not itself have required programming time, but serious thinking time, bookwork, mathematics, a Ph.D., etc. None of this has value?
There may be kudos, karma, experience, etc. to be had from it, but the OP was asking explicitly about money.
Monetary value is, by definition, what others are willing to pay for something. If the software is
unsellable as it is, then no, it has no value in that respect - you have to work more until you can even
start earning. That is what investing is all about, after all.
I want to make some money from the application, though I
certainly don't expect to become a millionaire. The problem is that
I'd like nothing better than to open-source it. There are many
aspects of the application that I don't have time to refine, and
other developers could definitely improve upon my work.
Wow, blatant self-contradiction within three sentences! If the application
makes you money, then by definition, you can afford some time to work on it.