Also, I used to use X on a 486/66 with 16MB RAM -- and it worked comparable to Win95, which was quite good. My mp3 player has far more juice and memory than that machine did, let alone a netbook.
Please don't take about things you don't know about as if you do.
Firefox left its original goal back while still in the milestone stage. Do a comparison between a milestone and the Mozilla suite -- which itself was a monster at the time.
The only thing leaner on Firefox was the interface. It's a great browser, but its also always been a pig.
I took a trip from Sydney to Vancouver, which stopped over in Hawaii for refueling. So they marched us out and spent an hour doing the paperwork & fingerprint deal before we were allowed back on the same aircraft to take off.
Why? There was no reason for us to even leave the plane.
Once was enough. My flight routes never pass over the US now.
Exposure to sexual situations buy young children have a negative impact later in life.
They do?
I suppose it's a matter of degree. I have some pretty fond memories as a 5-year-old of feeling up some girls in their teens. I didn't know why I liked it, I just did. A lot.
Yes, they can recover key and encryption algorithms from the unencrypted boot sector.
In TrueCrypt's case, they can't.
Here's what they know, since you're using TrueCrypt: you're using at least one of several supported algorithms for encryption, there are three possible hash algorithms used in key strengthening (and the number of iterations), and they can find the salt used in the key strengthening at the beginning of the volume.
That's all. You need a key -- derived from the password -- in order for TrueCrypt to make an attempt to determine which algorithms you're actually using. They don't know which hash algorithm you used for strengthening and they don't know the algorithms (you can chain several) you used to encrypt the volume header. Add a salt to prevent Rainbow attacks and this becomes very computationally expensive even for short passwords.
On the other hand, if the government states it won't pay more than $x for an MRI, the people giving MRIs won't have much choice. Socialized medical systems don't just hand out what's asked.
Having said that, I generally concur with the thrust of your argument.
"Strong communities" and "two-parent families" are and have always been myths
Ignoring the religious question altogether, I disagree that strong communities and families having a positive influence is a myth.
I came from a single-parent home. My mother chose to invest everything she had in me, and as a result we were very poor; I love her for it though. However, many single parents make the opposite choice and go to work, leaving the children to their own devices. It's not an easy decision to make.
The more people who are involved with the upbringing of a child, the less stress there is on any one individual. Larger and more distributed support structures make system-wide failure less likely.
Is this a general rant about some arbitrary definition of refactoring, or that advocated by the book?
If it's about the book, you haven't read it. One of the very first things it raises -- and repeats often -- is that you should have tests covering the functionality before refactoring. Guess why?
If you don't have good tests, jumping in and changing willy-nilly is idiotic.
Also, I should note that Joel's article mentions from scratch three times. How do you refactor a codebase from scratch exactly?
I suppose such (obvious) nuances are beyond the hoards of "I've worked at a load of places" Slashdot.
Do you have the freedom of accepting or rejecting a job offer?... nobody is pointing a gun at you.
Even when a person is pointing a gun at you trying to make you do something, it's still your choice how you respond.
Even when a person can provide the stuff you need to buy food (trying to make you do something), the same applies. I suppose an economic system that enforces such a choice isn't as dramatic nor obvious as a projectile weapon. Now, since you're apparently against serfdom, how does allowing unlimited economic disparity prevent this?
What is with libertarians and guns anyway? Don't you have any other tired clichés to trot out?
Somebody mentioned Ayn Rand in this thread and while I'm not an objectivist, she got some things right.
...yet you sound like a wannabe John Galt. I could almost lift your words out of Ayn Rand's novels.
So, what does Ayn Rand get wrong?
Should they withdraw their services you would perish... The question was what would happen if you removed that whole class of greedy capitalist producers that supply you consumers with everything you need to live.
Farmers supply what we need to live. They have been the backbone of most of our societies for the past several thousand years. If that's who you mean by persons of "ability", I concur. Industrialists generally aren't teachers, doctors or scientists either, yet I haven't seen any multi-millionaires (let alone billionaires) in those vocations.
Does the ability to use trade to corner a market justify their economic dominance over all else? What about lawyers? Accountants? Marketing?
Considering how few people disable javascript, I don't think the people making websites will miss them. I doubt they're going to give up what they can achieve with javascript due to a very small minority.
I'm sure there's someone out there still using Mosaic. Should we throw out CSS too?
I've seen plenty of articles with multiple sources deleted. There's an obvious mismatch between theory and practice here.
Personally, I concur with the necro2607, because it's happened several times that an article I found interesting in the past is no longer there or has been pared down so much it's uninteresting (to me, anyway). To say this annoys me is putting it mildly, yet I have no investment in this deleted articles at all. I know one person who has created close to 50 rather lengthy and well-referenced articles, many that have been either deleted or amended to near-uselessnes; he no longer contributes.
It's too easy for destroyers to remove the work of creators. I think the destroyers should be given a permanent "fuck you", just like in real life.
I'm not using Linux; I'm using OS X. I really don't care whether Linux has been doing it since 1991, since I'll never touch it again outside of a server context. All I care about is whether these features are new to OS X.
> You want fewer crappy lawyers? Lobby to allow the ABA to get back to its job of keeping those people out of our field.
I have a better idea: let's change things to make lawyers less needed in the first place.
I used to be in law school, and this is what I concluded before moving to a profession that produces value, not consumes it:
a) Ignorance is not a defense, but
b) It's easy to violate a law, often regardless of mens rea.
Why is b) true? Because thanks to our wonderful common-law system, there's an ungodly number of statutes. These statutes are inter-related, not necessarily the way you'd expect, and the relationships are often only implied. Of course, it's not just enough to know what's on the books, but also know how their interpretation has been modified by precedents (and not just local precedents either; judgments from overseas can have an effect too). How is anybody other than some specialist in the area supposed to untangle that? So we have people who acted in what they believed to be a lawful manner being punished. I find it particularly charming when even legal experts are largely clueless outside their area of specialization. In fact, I'm charmed by the number of specialists who don't even know their own specialization all that well. This isn't a problem of education, this is a problem of out-of-control complexity.
You'd expect that every citizen of society should clearly understand what is expected of them, right? If they break a law, which they of course knew about, there are repercussions. This is just. Instead you have cases being decided on fine nuances of meaning of single words thanks to whatever crazed set of precedent and statute some team of lawyers was able to drag together, rationalized by the excuse that it's a living law. Now toss in lawyers who charge sums of money that is beyond the reach of most people (and pro bono is a risible excuse to protect your guilty consciousness', because you fuckers almost never do it except for friends or cases that'll improve your visibility), and who only benefit by dragging cases out, and we have a problem. A few hundred to a few thousand dollars for a simple printout of some old template in your local copy of wordperfect or word, and it's not just a problem, it's pathetic unadulterated greed at everyone else's expense.
In short, to your profession and those of you who 'graduated' to politics: fuck you. You're a leech on society and promulgate a fundamentally unjust and morally-repugnant system. I don't know how you sleep at night -- while your new associates naively slave away of course. If Diogenes was to wander into a law firm you'd try to sell him a lamp for $5,000, and yet you're supposed to help propagate justice?
Advice for the rest of you: never use a lawyer unless the amount is -- or worth -- millions. Just move on; you'll save yourself much grief and debt.
Of course, just a few days ago I was looking at the Wikipedia entries on certain compiler optimization techniques. To say they are woeful is a bit of an understatement; many are little more than stubs.
I think it's more a case that the easy material has been covered; these are the things that many people can contribute to. Those topics that require more specialized knowledge -- and there sure is a lot of that -- are still sitting there waiting.
> No, I do not want the government monitoring my privacy. That is the exact opposite of privacy.
By that reasoning the government has death-squads roaming the streets, and packs of government-sponsored gangs of rapists are having fun with anything that moves. Laws against it logically implies that they are doing it.
As we all know, "monitoring" really means that government inspectors who are supposedly ensuring compliance with privacy laws will actually be ninja spies sneaking into private institutions and copying customer databanks to truck back home to the NSA. Damn those oversight ninja spies.
I've seen some specious reasoning, but this sets new lows. The finishing touch is that someone actually thought it's "insightful".
Atomistic simulations of biomolecules. Chain a bunch of those together, and you begin to simulate systems on realistic time scales.
Considering the algorithmic complexity of these types of problems, I'm curious what you mean by this? Throwing more processors at protein-folding simulations, for example, is pointless (factorial time). That's why they use heuristics.
Real threads are in SBCL, Allegro, and (I think) ECL. Multiprocessing ala mcclim tends to work everywhere else. The Common Lisp Cookbook should have code for sockets, databases is generally CLSQL, and foreign functions is generally CFFI (the evolved version of UFFI).
Yes, it's true that most dialects include many or all of these things. It'd just be nice if all of them worked seamlessly together, no matter which compiler is used.
Slashdot Mirror
What decade do you live in, man? The 1980s? :/
http://www.xfree86.org/current/mit-shm.html
Also, I used to use X on a 486/66 with 16MB RAM -- and it worked comparable to Win95, which was quite good. My mp3 player has far more juice and memory than that machine did, let alone a netbook.
Please don't take about things you don't know about as if you do.
But I also believe in freedom of choice.
I don't. There are a lot of infectious diseases near where I live.
It's amazing how many people think that health care is an individual exercise. Tell that to an infectious agent.
Eight hour waiting lines?
This is big news to me. Maybe I'm not living in the same Canada you're hearing about.
*Starting* to get bloated?
Firefox left its original goal back while still in the milestone stage. Do a comparison between a milestone and the Mozilla suite -- which itself was a monster at the time.
The only thing leaner on Firefox was the interface. It's a great browser, but its also always been a pig.
You don't even have to change planes.
I took a trip from Sydney to Vancouver, which stopped over in Hawaii for refueling. So they marched us out and spent an hour doing the paperwork & fingerprint deal before we were allowed back on the same aircraft to take off.
Why? There was no reason for us to even leave the plane.
Once was enough. My flight routes never pass over the US now.
They do?
I suppose it's a matter of degree. I have some pretty fond memories as a 5-year-old of feeling up some girls in their teens. I didn't know why I liked it, I just did. A lot.
Yes, indeed. I quite liked this from the list:
Addresses legibility issues with the menu bar with an option to turn off transparency in Desktop & Screen Saver preferences.Shouldn't the default be the one that never has legibility issues? What does that semi-transparent menu really give us in return? Hello, Apple?
Or food.
People can't eat gold or cars. The only things really worth something are those that you'll die without.
Just a nitpick:
Yes, they can recover key and encryption algorithms from the unencrypted boot sector.In TrueCrypt's case, they can't.
Here's what they know, since you're using TrueCrypt: you're using at least one of several supported algorithms for encryption, there are three possible hash algorithms used in key strengthening (and the number of iterations), and they can find the salt used in the key strengthening at the beginning of the volume.
That's all. You need a key -- derived from the password -- in order for TrueCrypt to make an attempt to determine which algorithms you're actually using. They don't know which hash algorithm you used for strengthening and they don't know the algorithms (you can chain several) you used to encrypt the volume header. Add a salt to prevent Rainbow attacks and this becomes very computationally expensive even for short passwords.
This is a nice article about it: http://blog.bjrn.se/2008/01/truecrypt-explained.html
On the other hand, if the government states it won't pay more than $x for an MRI, the people giving MRIs won't have much choice. Socialized medical systems don't just hand out what's asked.
Having said that, I generally concur with the thrust of your argument.
Ignoring the religious question altogether, I disagree that strong communities and families having a positive influence is a myth.
I came from a single-parent home. My mother chose to invest everything she had in me, and as a result we were very poor; I love her for it though. However, many single parents make the opposite choice and go to work, leaving the children to their own devices. It's not an easy decision to make.
The more people who are involved with the upbringing of a child, the less stress there is on any one individual. Larger and more distributed support structures make system-wide failure less likely.
Is this a general rant about some arbitrary definition of refactoring, or that advocated by the book?
If it's about the book, you haven't read it. One of the very first things it raises -- and repeats often -- is that you should have tests covering the functionality before refactoring. Guess why?
If you don't have good tests, jumping in and changing willy-nilly is idiotic.
Also, I should note that Joel's article mentions from scratch three times. How do you refactor a codebase from scratch exactly?
I suppose such (obvious) nuances are beyond the hoards of "I've worked at a load of places" Slashdot.
Even when a person is pointing a gun at you trying to make you do something, it's still your choice how you respond.
Even when a person can provide the stuff you need to buy food (trying to make you do something), the same applies. I suppose an economic system that enforces such a choice isn't as dramatic nor obvious as a projectile weapon. Now, since you're apparently against serfdom, how does allowing unlimited economic disparity prevent this?
What is with libertarians and guns anyway? Don't you have any other tired clichés to trot out?
Somebody mentioned Ayn Rand in this thread and while I'm not an objectivist, she got some things right....yet you sound like a wannabe John Galt. I could almost lift your words out of Ayn Rand's novels.
So, what does Ayn Rand get wrong?
Should they withdraw their services you would perishFarmers supply what we need to live. They have been the backbone of most of our societies for the past several thousand years. If that's who you mean by persons of "ability", I concur. Industrialists generally aren't teachers, doctors or scientists either, yet I haven't seen any multi-millionaires (let alone billionaires) in those vocations.
Does the ability to use trade to corner a market justify their economic dominance over all else? What about lawyers? Accountants? Marketing?
Considering how few people disable javascript, I don't think the people making websites will miss them. I doubt they're going to give up what they can achieve with javascript due to a very small minority.
I'm sure there's someone out there still using Mosaic. Should we throw out CSS too?
I've seen plenty of articles with multiple sources deleted. There's an obvious mismatch between theory and practice here.
Personally, I concur with the necro2607, because it's happened several times that an article I found interesting in the past is no longer there or has been pared down so much it's uninteresting (to me, anyway). To say this annoys me is putting it mildly, yet I have no investment in this deleted articles at all. I know one person who has created close to 50 rather lengthy and well-referenced articles, many that have been either deleted or amended to near-uselessnes; he no longer contributes.
It's too easy for destroyers to remove the work of creators. I think the destroyers should be given a permanent "fuck you", just like in real life.
Your comments regarding Linux are misguided.
I'm not using Linux; I'm using OS X. I really don't care whether Linux has been doing it since 1991, since I'll never touch it again outside of a server context. All I care about is whether these features are new to OS X.
Are they? Okay then.
If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck...
> You want fewer crappy lawyers? Lobby to allow the ABA to get back to its job of keeping those people out of our field.
I have a better idea: let's change things to make lawyers less needed in the first place.
I used to be in law school, and this is what I concluded before moving to a profession that produces value, not consumes it:
a) Ignorance is not a defense, but
b) It's easy to violate a law, often regardless of mens rea.
Why is b) true? Because thanks to our wonderful common-law system, there's an ungodly number of statutes. These statutes are inter-related, not necessarily the way you'd expect, and the relationships are often only implied. Of course, it's not just enough to know what's on the books, but also know how their interpretation has been modified by precedents (and not just local precedents either; judgments from overseas can have an effect too). How is anybody other than some specialist in the area supposed to untangle that? So we have people who acted in what they believed to be a lawful manner being punished. I find it particularly charming when even legal experts are largely clueless outside their area of specialization. In fact, I'm charmed by the number of specialists who don't even know their own specialization all that well. This isn't a problem of education, this is a problem of out-of-control complexity.
You'd expect that every citizen of society should clearly understand what is expected of them, right? If they break a law, which they of course knew about, there are repercussions. This is just. Instead you have cases being decided on fine nuances of meaning of single words thanks to whatever crazed set of precedent and statute some team of lawyers was able to drag together, rationalized by the excuse that it's a living law. Now toss in lawyers who charge sums of money that is beyond the reach of most people (and pro bono is a risible excuse to protect your guilty consciousness', because you fuckers almost never do it except for friends or cases that'll improve your visibility), and who only benefit by dragging cases out, and we have a problem. A few hundred to a few thousand dollars for a simple printout of some old template in your local copy of wordperfect or word, and it's not just a problem, it's pathetic unadulterated greed at everyone else's expense.
In short, to your profession and those of you who 'graduated' to politics: fuck you. You're a leech on society and promulgate a fundamentally unjust and morally-repugnant system. I don't know how you sleep at night -- while your new associates naively slave away of course. If Diogenes was to wander into a law firm you'd try to sell him a lamp for $5,000, and yet you're supposed to help propagate justice?
Advice for the rest of you: never use a lawyer unless the amount is -- or worth -- millions. Just move on; you'll save yourself much grief and debt.
Of course, just a few days ago I was looking at the Wikipedia entries on certain compiler optimization techniques. To say they are woeful is a bit of an understatement; many are little more than stubs.
I think it's more a case that the easy material has been covered; these are the things that many people can contribute to. Those topics that require more specialized knowledge -- and there sure is a lot of that -- are still sitting there waiting.
Except that there is no "role-play" on graphical MMORPGs.
None. Zero. Nada. It doesn't exist.
MMORPGs don't deserve the "RP" part. It's a tragedy that people think these games are "role-playing" just because they have that in the genre's title.
Some people try, of course, but they don't last long because of the behaviour of everyone else. And that's not going to change any time soon.
> No, I do not want the government monitoring my privacy. That is the exact opposite of privacy.
By that reasoning the government has death-squads roaming the streets, and packs of government-sponsored gangs of rapists are having fun with anything that moves. Laws against it logically implies that they are doing it.
As we all know, "monitoring" really means that government inspectors who are supposedly ensuring compliance with privacy laws will actually be ninja spies sneaking into private institutions and copying customer databanks to truck back home to the NSA. Damn those oversight ninja spies.
I've seen some specious reasoning, but this sets new lows. The finishing touch is that someone actually thought it's "insightful".
> Oh wait this is slashdot, logic not requited.
Clearly.
Why, not only do the editors not read the stories anymore, they don't even read the submissions!
Atomistic simulations of biomolecules. Chain a bunch of those together, and you begin to simulate systems on realistic time scales.
Considering the algorithmic complexity of these types of problems, I'm curious what you mean by this? Throwing more processors at protein-folding simulations, for example, is pointless (factorial time). That's why they use heuristics.
Real threads are in SBCL, Allegro, and (I think) ECL. Multiprocessing ala mcclim tends to work everywhere else. The Common Lisp Cookbook should have code for sockets, databases is generally CLSQL, and foreign functions is generally CFFI (the evolved version of UFFI).
Yes, it's true that most dialects include many or all of these things. It'd just be nice if all of them worked seamlessly together, no matter which compiler is used.
1. Must be able to disable garbage collection and manage allocation explicitly
Yes, using std.gc.enable()/disable(): http://digitalmars.com/d/phobos/std_gc.html. You can still use malloc and friends, even while GC is active.
2. Must be able to allocate classes on the stack
Yes, using the scope keyword: http://www.digitalmars.com/d/memory.html#raii
3. Must minimize use of exceptions in the standard library (in other words, exceptions must only be used for exceptional cases)
Exceptions are common in the standard library. All the ones I have seen seem only for exceptional cases. Define exceptional?