Technically, East Germany was 2nd World, until unification.
The term "3rd World" was coined to describe the rest of the world, after NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations, which were implied to be the first and second worlds respectively.
Although that definition didn't stick, the phrase did, and quickly came to take on the meaning that we all know, since most of the nations it included were desperately poor.
I fully agree with you - Matrix printers still have important uses. They may have lost their place in the home market, but they are still being made, and businesses still buy them.
As well as the point made by the parent that they're capable of printing on multipart paper and fan-fold, they are also *much* cheaper to run than ink-jets or lasers (none of those overpriced cartidges that only last three days).
It's a real shame that Microsoft chooses to ignore them. A collegue of mine has spent a sizable part of this month fighting to get two apparently identical Windows systems to print a contract document correctly on a matrix printer, and it's all down to the Windows printer drivers - the only driver that actually works for us in all cases is the generic text driver, which lacks some key features.
Doesn't entitle him to be called 'Sir Bill' for a start, though I'm sure the Americans will go right ahead and call him that anyway.
I wouldn't entitle him to be called "Sir Bill" in any case; if it were allowed, he would be "Sir Bill Gates". The title 'Sir' is only supposed to go with your full name (ie first name + surname).
But you're right - the Americans won't let that get in the way; "Sir Bill" is just too tempting.
Get yourself one of the original "Game & Watch" models from the 80's. They may not be up to date, but they're major collectors' items now, so you'll definitely have the 'ooh' factor.
Your first point is by far the most important point that you made. Character sets are not uniform (at least in the world of 8 bits per character), even among nations that share most of them, and the upper/lower case equivalents are not always the same between them.
I also agree with your final point - case sensitivity can be useful in helping to pick up typing errors at compile time.
But as for the two other points you made...
The second point is not *quite* as strong. You're right that it does enable you to use similar names in the way you describe, but I have to dispute the need to do that - I hope you comment your code well, because you're certainly not making it any easier to read with that sort of naming scheme.
And as for the third point... Hmph. If I ever catch anyone using a single-character variable name...! Grrrr. Don't do it. There's absolutely never ever any possible excuse for it (unless you are deliberately obfuscating your code). At least call it "counter" or something similar if you can't come up with anything better.
Another good point (that has been made elsewhere, I think) is that case sensitivity is a way of trying to enforce consistency in your naming schemes, to benefit programmers reading each others' code - they will know, for example, that all upper case names are declared in the code as static, whereas if it case sensitivity isn't enforced you may type a name in a different case in different places, leaving it unclear to the reader how it's declared without checking back to the header.
This is a very welcome addition to the package. I know we've had tools like MySQL Navigator for a while, but they are fairly limited.
At the end of the day, MySQL is competing directly with MS SQL Server, which comes with Enterprise Manager. And no matter how easy it is to crash EM, it's what the boss sees when he makes his purchasing descision.
I personally know of at least one commercial web site that is using MS SQL and ASP, which won over MySQL and PHP purely on the fact that the buyer liked the being able to mess around with the DB with a GUI. The fact that he hasn't touched it since, and the developer hardly uses it either are beside the point.
But I do hope that the MySQL GUI doesn't have the same propensity to crash in the middle of a multi-table DB update like EM does.:(
All that said though, EM is a very capable tool, and has made plenty of DB administrators out of people who really aren't very adept with the SQL langauge itself (...kinda like the rest of Microsoft's products, if you think about it). When MySQL can do the same thing, it will go a long way toward helping itself and Linux on the road to general acceptance.
Hang on...! I was going to use one to generate random numbers... and now you're saying that there's signals out there that might not actually be random?
* Carried out their research a couple of years ago when line speeds were slower. * Looked at sites with lots of flashing animated banners. * Are biased in favour of whales.;-)
I recently added Google adwords to my site. I run my site as a hobby, so it's not like I need to earn money from it, but the ads are helping to cover costs (though not completely).
I really like the Adwords service. The ads are unobtrusive, text based, low bandwidth, and they actually make an effort to target them to the contents of the page they're on (though my site's topic of puns makes the targetting somewhat problematic at times).
I'm not offended that some people might choose to switch off the adverts - if they choose to do so, they probably wouldn't have clicked on the ad anyway so I haven't lost anything; at the end of the day I'm just pleased to have the visitor.
If people are having the advertising disabled without their knowledge, that's different. I'd sooner they were given the choice - you never know, they might actually have wanted to visit my advertisers. They're still welcome to visit though, either way.:)
Oh, and you know what? Google ads often include good causes, so your whales might even get some benefit after all.;-)
Here in the UK, you can use Multimap to acheive something close to this.
Multimap's main use is simple as an online map, and it's used heavily here in the UK, but they do show pin-marks on the location of any services they know about.
They only show links to certain categories of service (hotels, and the like), but limited though it is, the search by location service has been available for some time.
Oh man, I am so looking forward to an updated version of Elite.
Elite was groundbreaking...Frontier (Elite 2) was also an excellent game.
But I want an updated version. I buy one, maybe two games a year: if Elite 3 ever comes out (and assuming it lived up to it's pedegree), it would be the one. There's just so much they could do with it now given the advances in hardware since Frontier. Gimme-gimme-gimme!
This is the real tragedy of video telephony systems. They all use different standards. The technology has been there to do it in one form or another for years, but who would go and buy one if you can only talk to other people using the same device?
This gadget sounds promising - it's fairly cheap, and goes after an existing userbase - but all the same if the technology isn't an open standard, or if it can't talk to devices made by other manufacturers, it will remain a toy, rather than anything more useful.
Yet, it pales in comparison to the accomplishment that "could have been" if they had collaborated with the Gnome team (or verse visa) to create one standard desktop.
Now we have two competing desktops with the users sitting on the sidelines waiting for a winner.
You're kidding right?
I always thought how great it is to have two major desktops on the same platform. Competition drives innovation, and I think that has been well demonstrated by the pace of development of both KDE and GNOME in recent years.
Put them together, and you'd have had a bunch of squabbling, bickering developers, and a product that wouldn't have been as advanced as either of them actually is today.
As for the users sitting waiting for one or other to win, remember that this is exactly why Microsoft has a monopoly now. There's nothing wrong with having two products in the same market place.
Slashdot Mirror
Instructions on making your own trackball:
1. Turn your mouse upside-down.
...the OWL Web Ontology Language...
Did anyone else misread that as OWL Web Ornothology Language?
Technically, East Germany was 2nd World, until unification.
;-) )
The term "3rd World" was coined to describe the rest of the world, after NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations, which were implied to be the first and second worlds respectively.
Although that definition didn't stick, the phrase did, and quickly came to take on the meaning that we all know, since most of the nations it included were desperately poor.
(Here endeth the history lesson
I fully agree with you - Matrix printers still have important uses. They may have lost their place in the home market, but they are still being made, and businesses still buy them.
As well as the point made by the parent that they're capable of printing on multipart paper and fan-fold, they are also *much* cheaper to run than ink-jets or lasers (none of those overpriced cartidges that only last three days).
It's a real shame that Microsoft chooses to ignore them. A collegue of mine has spent a sizable part of this month fighting to get two apparently identical Windows systems to print a contract document correctly on a matrix printer, and it's all down to the Windows printer drivers - the only driver that actually works for us in all cases is the generic text driver, which lacks some key features.
Doesn't entitle him to be called 'Sir Bill' for a start, though I'm sure the Americans will go right ahead and call him that anyway.
I wouldn't entitle him to be called "Sir Bill" in any case; if it were allowed, he would be "Sir Bill Gates". The title 'Sir' is only supposed to go with your full name (ie first name + surname).
But you're right - the Americans won't let that get in the way; "Sir Bill" is just too tempting.
Get yourself one of the original "Game & Watch" models from the 80's. They may not be up to date, but they're major collectors' items now, so you'll definitely have the 'ooh' factor.
Your first point is by far the most important point that you made. Character sets are not uniform (at least in the world of 8 bits per character), even among nations that share most of them, and the upper/lower case equivalents are not always the same between them.
I also agree with your final point - case sensitivity can be useful in helping to pick up typing errors at compile time.
But as for the two other points you made...
The second point is not *quite* as strong. You're right that it does enable you to use similar names in the way you describe, but I have to dispute the need to do that - I hope you comment your code well, because you're certainly not making it any easier to read with that sort of naming scheme.
And as for the third point... Hmph. If I ever catch anyone using a single-character variable name...! Grrrr. Don't do it. There's absolutely never ever any possible excuse for it (unless you are deliberately obfuscating your code). At least call it "counter" or something similar if you can't come up with anything better.
Another good point (that has been made elsewhere, I think) is that case sensitivity is a way of trying to enforce consistency in your naming schemes, to benefit programmers reading each others' code - they will know, for example, that all upper case names are declared in the code as static, whereas if it case sensitivity isn't enforced you may type a name in a different case in different places, leaving it unclear to the reader how it's declared without checking back to the header.
This is a very welcome addition to the package. I know we've had tools like MySQL Navigator for a while, but they are fairly limited.
:(
At the end of the day, MySQL is competing directly with MS SQL Server, which comes with Enterprise Manager. And no matter how easy it is to crash EM, it's what the boss sees when he makes his purchasing descision.
I personally know of at least one commercial web site that is using MS SQL and ASP, which won over MySQL and PHP purely on the fact that the buyer liked the being able to mess around with the DB with a GUI. The fact that he hasn't touched it since, and the developer hardly uses it either are beside the point.
But I do hope that the MySQL GUI doesn't have the same propensity to crash in the middle of a multi-table DB update like EM does.
All that said though, EM is a very capable tool, and has made plenty of DB administrators out of people who really aren't very adept with the SQL langauge itself (...kinda like the rest of Microsoft's products, if you think about it). When MySQL can do the same thing, it will go a long way toward helping itself and Linux on the road to general acceptance.
Fnars?
:-o
Oh dear. Viz magazine has infected Slashdot!
(uh... appologies if you didn't get the joke - it's only going to be understood by the Brits...)
Hang on...! I was going to use one to generate random numbers... and now you're saying that there's signals out there that might not actually be random?
;)
Rats. So much for that perfect plan.
No, but it was made of glass, so it was a hard die for the die-hard die fan.
At last! Now I can get out to realty world. good bye matrix world! ...wait a minute, this is just a game. bleh!
I'm looking forward to seeing the optional self-contained pods for users, so they can play the game while they sleep...
Yes, but Linux runs on PCs...
:(
pah. doesn't matter. I know what they mean.
Don't forget - if you die in the matrix, you die in real life too! :-o
Old joke -
"Did you know you've got your finger in your ear?"
"I'm sorry, you'll have to speak up - I've got my finger in my ear..."
In fact, research shows...
;-)
:)
;-)
I suspect that your researchers:
* Carried out their research a couple of years ago when line speeds were slower.
* Looked at sites with lots of flashing animated banners.
* Are biased in favour of whales.
I recently added Google adwords to my site. I run my site as a hobby, so it's not like I need to earn money from it, but the ads are helping to cover costs (though not completely).
I really like the Adwords service. The ads are unobtrusive, text based, low bandwidth, and they actually make an effort to target them to the contents of the page they're on (though my site's topic of puns makes the targetting somewhat problematic at times).
I'm not offended that some people might choose to switch off the adverts - if they choose to do so, they probably wouldn't have clicked on the ad anyway so I haven't lost anything; at the end of the day I'm just pleased to have the visitor.
If people are having the advertising disabled without their knowledge, that's different. I'd sooner they were given the choice - you never know, they might actually have wanted to visit my advertisers.
They're still welcome to visit though, either way.
Oh, and you know what? Google ads often include good causes, so your whales might even get some benefit after all.
X10 Files For Chapter 11
Hmm... Maybe they should change their name to X11?
Here in the UK, you can use Multimap to acheive something close to this.
Multimap's main use is simple as an online map, and it's used heavily here in the UK, but they do show pin-marks on the location of any services they know about.
They only show links to certain categories of service (hotels, and the like), but limited though it is, the search by location service has been available for some time.
Oh man, I am so looking forward to an updated version of Elite.
Elite was groundbreaking...Frontier (Elite 2) was also an excellent game.
But I want an updated version. I buy one, maybe two games a year: if Elite 3 ever comes out (and assuming it lived up to it's pedegree), it would be the one. There's just so much they could do with it now given the advances in hardware since Frontier. Gimme-gimme-gimme!
Zobmies with RPGs?
Back in my day it was the RPGs that had Zombies.
(uh.... you were talking about role-playing games, weren't you?)
Okay, so they're doing this a couple of years later than Arthur C Clarke predicted, but the big question is: Did they find the monolinth yet?
and someone with the same equipment
This is the real tragedy of video telephony systems. They all use different standards. The technology has been there to do it in one form or another for years, but who would go and buy one if you can only talk to other people using the same device?
This gadget sounds promising - it's fairly cheap, and goes after an existing userbase - but all the same if the technology isn't an open standard, or if it can't talk to devices made by other manufacturers, it will remain a toy, rather than anything more useful.
Forget about laptops; I know someone who claimed he'd run over a bible with a steamroller....
But I didn't believe him - it was obvious he was just stretching the truth.
You've obviously never been to England - it's standard fare here for the 20-somethings desperate to make themselves sick every friday night.
Yet, it pales in comparison to the accomplishment that "could have been" if they had collaborated with the Gnome team (or verse visa) to create one standard desktop.
Now we have two competing desktops with the users sitting on the sidelines waiting for a winner.
You're kidding right?
I always thought how great it is to have two major desktops on the same platform. Competition drives innovation, and I think that has been well demonstrated by the pace of development of both KDE and GNOME in recent years.
Put them together, and you'd have had a bunch of squabbling, bickering developers, and a product that wouldn't have been as advanced as either of them actually is today.
As for the users sitting waiting for one or other to win, remember that this is exactly why Microsoft has a monopoly now. There's nothing wrong with having two products in the same market place.