I started using emacs about 7 years ago, at which point the jokes about its feature creep ("nice OS, just needs a good editor," etc.) were already probably 20 years old. A few years ago I switched to mg, which is an emacs clone that is much more lightweight. The advantage of mg is that it loads immediately, and it has all the features I actually need. So maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but -- what is currently happening in emacs development? New features? Better performance? Bug fixes? Polishing the brasswork? I'm honestly curious why it can't just go into the same kind of masterpiece-maintenance mode as some of Knuth's projects like Tex.
As far as bazaar, my impression is that it has had a much lower profile than git, and that its main selling point seems to be that it's supposed to be easier to use than git. Here is bazaar's explanation of why they think bazaar is good. Here is a similar sales job for git. Bazaar is used by ubuntu, sponsored by Canonical, and written in Python. You can get free bazaar-based hosting on Launchpad. Personally I've been happy with git.
It might come down to a "imperative programming vs. OOP" thing, but since most people will get into some contact with OOP anyway, why not start with it in the first place?
OO isn't the opposite of imperative. The opposite of imperative is functional.
OO is a good, natural fit to a few very specific tasks. One of those is GUIs. But in general, OO is simply one more technique to add to your toolkit, along with pointers, regexes, etc. Historically, OO is just one of the more recent fads in programming. If this was 1985, the fad we'd be discussing would be structured programming.
But if you are just trying to build interest, rather than solve a problem, I suggest javascript as you can build on an existing familiarity with web pages to interactive slide shows, quiz games, etc.
This seems to me like a good idea in theory, but a poor one in practice. I like javascript as a language, and have written a couple of reasonably nontrivial apps in it. However, a beginner is going to need a book that's designed to teach programming using a particular language. I don't think there is an appropriate book of that kind for js. The O'Reilly rhino book (Flanagan) is basically the only js book on the market that's any good. The rest are pretty much all crappy things aimed at teaching web designers to do little browser tricks; you could do everything that's in one of those books, and still never develop a clue about programming.
C also doesn't let you do any kind of little errors.
Some people would consider this a feature, not a bug. There are people who complete an entire CS degree without ever using a language that's closer to the metal than java. If you look at the OP's question, it's clear that he's trying to find a balanced approach.
You can get nice results with Delphi or Visual Basic (maybe C# too, never used it but it looks like that).
All three of these programming languages are proprietary. I would strongly suggest not starting a first-timer with a proprietary language. Although it's true that a lot of programming skills are language-independent, not all of them are, and history has shown that proprietary languages are a total dead end.
There's nothing particularly wrong with plain C as a first language. (I'd avoid all the intricacies of C++ syntax for a first-timer. The OO stuff is, in my opinion, totally unnecessary for a first-time programmer to learn.)
Another good language for first-timers is a scripting language like python or ruby. (I like perl, but perl's syntax is goofy, and if he does want to explore OO at some point, it's better to learn it in a language that uses more standard OO syntax.) I've used python as a teaching language in the past, and it works fine.
One thing to think about is what programming projects he's interested in doing, and make sure he's set up for success. A lot of kids that age want to program games, but programming a real-time video game requires a *lot* of skills. Whatever project he wants to do, make sure you have a combination of OS, development environment, and libraries that will work.
Patrolling the Mexican-American border is about as effective as the war on drugs. I thought the economic and social drain of the Berlin Wall was well known.
I was with you on the first sentence. But there's a problem with the Berlin Wall analogy: the Berlin Wall was designed to keep people in, whereas the US border controls are designed to keep people out.
TFA says: "the administrators of the site maintain the primary goal of the initiative is to tackle crime, not illegal immigration." In other words, this is about the war on drugs. At a cost of about 4 million dollars, 21 arrests have been made; "Critics say this does not represent value for money."
This is a fascinating proposition. Let's figure out the value-per-dollar supplied by the war on drugs in general, and see if it's better than the value-per-dollar supplied by this program.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the war on drugs. (The term was first used by Nixon in 1969.) I don't think it will come as a surprise that it's been a failure.
What about the "per-dollar" part? Well, I don't know about your state, but mine (California) spends more on prisons than it spends on education, and the vast majority of prison spending arises from drug prohibition. First of all, you have all the people in prison for buying, selling, or using drugs. Then you have all the crime directly associated with the illegal drug trade; just as the stereotypical Chicago gangster of the 1930's wouldn't have existed without Prohibition, gangs today wouldn't exist without drug prohibition. And then you have all the crime that indirectly arises from drug prohibition. Drug prohibition makes drugs expensive, so people commit crimes to support their habits. So we have all the costs of incarceration, the social costs suffered by the victims of violent crime, etc. It's a lot of money.
So I would estimate that the value-per-dollar of the war on drugs over the last 40 years equals x/y, where x is a number so small that it's controversial whether it's positive or negative, and y is huge.
.. just switch providers. I'm sure there are companies that treat you better.
Reading between the lines, the real problem isn't that his provider is pawing around inside his box, it's that they seem to have worse reliability than he wants. This is very common, especially if you go with a cheap webhost. Discount webhosting is a very hard way to make a living. A lot of people think it sounds easy, so they start up a business, and then they find out that it's harder than they thought. Given that they're not charging the customer very much, they just can't afford to put in the large amounts of money, effort, and high-quality, over-specced hardware that would be required in order to have super-duper reliability. You get what you pay for. If the OP really needs higher reliability than he's getting, he may just need to switch to a more expensive provider. My experience has been that at less than $100/mo, you simply get lousy reliability and lousy service. If he's already paying that much, then I'd say he should probably just poke around on webhostingtalk.com and look for someone with better stats and reputation at the same price level.
He makes statements without backing them up. For instance, he insists sincerely that dumb people are rare, and that the schools make people dumb. Okay, interesting hypothesis. Where's his proof? Actually there's quite a bit of evidence that there are vast genetically determined intellectual differences between human beings. For instance, there are studies of twins separated at birth.
He also seems to have set up a very comfortable self-reinforcing belief system. "...if you asked the kids... why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it." His interpretation of these kids' statements is that they're all Einsteins who have been crushed by the educational system. Once we're convinced of this, everything that ever goes wrong with a kid's education is evidence that the educational system is messed up.
What if the kid is saying the work is boring because he's just a kid who isn't interested in intellectual things? What if the other kid is saying the work makes no sense because he's a kid who's just not very bright, for hereditary reasons, and can't understand it?
This being slashdot, I can predict that there will be lots of people modding each other up for saying that news should be free, comparing newspapers to manufacturers of buggy whips, etc. Actually the positions of both google and the traditional print media are a lot more nuanced than that, so it might be worth considering whether they actually know their own business better than slashdotters do. This article (not paywalled!) has a nice, up-to-date discussion of the issues. Google is trying to work out a compromise that works for both newspapers and users. The model they seem to have in mind is that articles will be indexed by google, and users will be able to click through to the articles for free after finding them in a google search, but newspapers will still be able to keep users from effectively getting a free subscription without paying for a subscription. Essentially you'd be able to read some number of articles over some period of time, but at some point a paywall will kick in.
Okay, I hear the howls of disgust. We hate paywalls, etc. Yeah, sure. As an internet user, I hate paywalls, and I especially hate sites that try to get into google search results, but then when you click through on the google search results, you can't actually read the content. It's misleading and a waste of my time. But it's not completely unreasonable for, e.g., the Wall Street Journal to want readers to pay for a subscription. They make money that way. They can only do high-quality reporting if they get income. Different newspapers are trying different models. The NY Times has messed around with its setup over the years, with the current situation being that anyone can read anything for free, without registering. That may be a workable business model for the NY Times in the long run, provided that they have some other revenue stream. That's why I subscribe to the NY Times in print. Editorial work isn't free. Sending reporters to Afghanistan isn't free. Yes, they can get some revenue from advertising, but possibly not enough to support high-quality reporting if it's the sole source of revenue.
Please, spare me the buggy whip analogy. It's a false analogy. Cars replaced horse-drawn carriages, and were superior to them. We don't have a superior replacement for traditional newspapers. No Digg is not a replacement for the NY Times.
"Only" 10 MB? How utterly absurd. And yes I get that in context to the claim made by the GP you have a point. (Possibly the GP has binaries compiled with debug symbols, or possibly *you* already have over a hundred megs of mono libraries loaded for something else and dont realise it.)
Sure 10 MB is absurd, but it's a lot less absurd than the claimed 189 MB. I don't think I had any mono libs loaded without knowing it. I was actually testing this under fluxbox, not gnome. When I deleted all the mono libraries using apt, the only other app that showed up as having a dependency on them was f-spot, and I didn't have f-spot loaded when I did the memory test. If the GGP had binaries compiled with debugging symbols, then that would mean that the GGP's 189 MB figure was basically wrong, because the point of his post was that he didn't think tomboy should be included in a default install of gnome.
I think the most likely possibilities are (1) that there's something wrong with the method I used to measure memory use, or (2) the 189 MB figure the GGP quoted was for an earlier release of tomboy/mono, and they've made it somewhat less insanely bloated since then.
Another thing to keep in mind is that although the GGP is complaining about tomboy's presence in a default install of Gnome, what's probably more relevant is what's present in a default install of popular desktop linux distributions. Ubuntu has decided to switch from including GIMP in a default install to including f-spot instead, and f-spot requires mono. And guess what the reasons were for switching from GIMP to f-spot? It was because GIMP too hard to use, took up too much space on a CD, and was too slow to start up. In other words, the concerns about bloat and performance that the GGP raised may actually be good reasons to have mono included on a default install.
For me, the really good reason to remove mono and mono-dependent apps from my machine is that I'm concerned about whether mono can really survive as open-source software, so I don't want to hitch my wagon to some app without realizing that it's dependent on mono.
Alas, Mono is still a part of the default Gnome distribution, just so they can have a note taking applet which takes 189MB memory (counting libraries used by it and no other process) and takes several seconds to start on beefy hardware while the C++ port of that very same code uses 5MB and starts near-instantly.
Hmm...I tried to verify the statement about the 189 MB and failed, but maybe I'm just using the wrong method. I did a free -m, loaded tomboy, and then did another free -m. The result was only a 10 MB change in the amount of free memory.
It's true that tomboy is slow-loading on my (relatively fast) hardware. It's also true that it uses quite a bit of disk space. I did
apt-get remove tomboy f-spot libmono* && apt-get autoremove && apt-get autoclean, and that freed up 64 Mb of disk space. If you're looking at, e.g., how much you can fit on a CD-based linux distro, 64 Mb is a heck of a lot to dedicate to something that's only needed for the sake of one applet.
Ummm, the techdirt article is based on an unsourced report - and if you look at the article that techdirt links to, it's a totally unsubstantiated piece of garbage, Are you really going to believe Amazon is losing money on every e-book transaction because of this nonsense article? No "facts" are provided, just unfounded conjecture.
This NY Times article says the same thing: "American publishers chafe over Amazon's pricing policy for the Kindle, under which it generally sells digital versions of best sellers at $9.99 - less than the wholesale price that Amazon pays for many of these books."
So does this article on Slate: "For a typical hardback that retails for $26--say, E.L. Doctorow's Homer & Langley--Amazon pays $13 and then sells it for $9.99 on the Kindle, taking a $3 loss on each sale." The same article also ran in Newsweek.
Here is an article at Publisher's Weekly: "That Amazon is currently treating the bulk of Kindle editions as loss leaders--items it either breaks even on or loses on to build market share in e-book sales and to fuel the growth of the Kindle--is one of the worrisome aspects of the current system."
Seems like a remarkable journalistic conspiracy by The New York Times, Slate, Newsweek, and Publisher's Weekly to cover up the truth. Or do you imagine that all these publications ran stories by all these reporters without making sure that the statements in them had sources?
When someone has pointed out that you've made a factual error, usually the best response isn't to get angry.
Please mod parent up. The post by dangitman, which has been modded up to 5, is factually incorrect. The parent post by AC, which is sitting at a moderation level of 0 right now, gives a link to an article on techdirt with the correct facts. What's incorrect about dangitman's reasoning is that he's failing to distinguish between the roles of the publisher and the retailer.
Are you using Debian? If so, can you try my latest package for it, before it's sent to SID and report if it's running well or not?:)
Hi -- I'd be glad to take a look. First could you drop me an email using the address given at http://www.lightandmatter.com/area4author.html ? I want to make sure we have two-way communication before I put any effort in.
If they have really found neutralinos then wouldn't that would mean supersymmetry is confirmed? It that case it is a whole new ballgame in particle physics.
What would the experimental signature of a neutralino be, as opposed to any other WIMP? Comparing the WP neutralino article to the arxiv paper, the mass range does seem to match up roughly, but that's about all I see that would help.
DKIM (formerly known as Domain Keys) is more sophisticated and worth looking into in addition to SPF. I'm using an implementation called DKIMproxy, which runs as a daemon and is specifically designed to work with postfix. I've been fairly happy with it. What's helpful about it is that if I get mail from someone who implements DKIM, I can be sure that it's really from them, and likewise if I get joe-jobbed, I can convince the recipient that the spam wasn't actually from me. The biggest and best known users of DKIM are gmail and yahoo, but I'm seeing it used elsewhere as well. For example, I recently got spam from lulu.com, and the good news was that it was DKIM-signed, so I could be sure it wasn't a joe job.
I understand what you mean about establishing a good reputation in terms of the email you send. Actually many of the big email providers have a policy of blacklisting all domains by default these days, and waiting for the domain operators to contact them and ask to be allowed to send mail to them. Both AOL and yahoo seem to do this. With yahoo, you can fill out a form to convince them you're not evil, and if the info on the form satisfies them, they stop blacklisting you. One of their criteria is that they're more likely to approve you if you implement DKIM. If you tell them you're using DKIM, then they won't accept mail from your domain that isn't DKIM-signed; this is to your advantage, because then their users won't be clicking on the spam button on mail that claims to be from you but isn't.
I'm certainly not interested in using it on non-Windows platforms because said media stuff doesn't work regardless.
Yep. I was mildly interested in trying moonlight, because MS has put the famous Feynman lectures on physics online for free, in silverlight format. So when I saw the slashdot article today, I thought, OK, I'll try installing moonlight on my ubuntu box and see if it lets me watch the lectures. First off, I do an apt-get install moonlight-plugin-mozilla. Go to the MS web site. "Sorry, Silverlight for your browser is not officially supported. The full list of compatible browsers you [sic] can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/get-started/install/default.aspx. Click on the link. "If you are using a Linux, FreeBSD or SolarisOS operating system, please press the Click to Install button to get the appropriate installation package for Silverlight." Okay, I click on the button and it sends me to go-mono.com. Download and install it. Restart my browser. Go back to the site for the Feynman lectures. "Sorry, Silverlight for your browser is not officially supported."
So here's this thing that almost no web site actually uses, and it doesn't actually work. And it's proprietary. And they promise not to sue me for using it. Woo hoo.
But is this significantly easier than other methods of harvesting email addresses? Spammers already do dictionary attacks on big providers like yahoo. It's not clear to me that this method is a better way of generating a list of email addresses. If you carry out a dictionary attack on yahoo.com, you're going to come up with probably tens of millions of valid email addresses. If you carry out this attack on gravatar.com, how many addresses are you going to get for your trouble? 10% of gravatar's users, apparently -- which I'm guessing is not really that big a number. Remember, once a spammer has a botnet, it costs him zero to send out one more spam to test whether a particular address is valid. Therefore the dictionary attack is free.
The defense against dictionary attacks is also exactly the same as the defense against this attack: either don't use a big email provider, or use a big email provider but pick a username that has a lot of characters (so it's not vulnerable to brute-forcing) and is also not vulnerable to dictionary attacks.
I do my searches using clusty.com rather than google, for exactly this reason.
In most cases, the search results are exactly the same quality as google's. It doesn't have certain specialized features that google has, e.g., book search and image search.
A simple way of enhancing your privacy is to set your firefox preferences so that it deletes all cookies when you exit the browser, except for cookies from a specified whitelist. Edit : Preferences : privacy. Uncheck "accept third-party cookies." Firefox will: Use custom settings for history. Keep until: I close Firefox. Exceptions: [set your list of exceptions]
But basically, if you completely hitch your wagon to gmail, google docs, etc., then I don't see how you can expect to preserve your privacy from being invaded by google. Google is an advertising company, and their whole business model revolves around selling your eyeballs.
>>Another possibility would be dual-licensing with CC-BY-SA and GFDL, but that's probably not worth the extra work unless you've identified materials you want to use that are under GFDL.
>If the things they want to use are GFDL-only and the product is an adaptation of those then they don't have the option of dual licensing. You may have meant "you want your work to be incorporated into that are under GFDL."
I don't think this is correct. This issue came up for me, and initially I thought the same thing you did, but when the issue came up we had sort of an online powwow, with some indirect input from lawyers. I think the situation is really as follows. Let's say A makes a photo and releases it under GFDL, then B writes a book under dual GFDL+CC-BY-SA, and B incorporates the photo into the book. I think everything is actually cool and legal. Now suppose C comes along and wants to redistribute B's book; I think C is required to maintain the dual-licensing scheme. If C wants to redistribute the book under pure CC, then C needs to strip out the GFDL'd photo. Another situation is that D comes along and wants to use one chapter of the book as part of a derived work, and that chapter doesn't include the GFDL'd photo. Then D is free to use GFDL, or CC, or propagate the dual license.
Oops, sorry for the reply-to-self, but I thought of something else I wanted to mention. GFDL says that if other people use your work to make their own derived works, they have to provide the derived work in at least one editable format, such as an OpenOffice or LaTeX file. That makes it kind of silly to put out your book under GFDL unless you can and will release it in at least one format that's editable with open-source software; you can do it, but it makes it difficult or impossible for other people to use your work, because they would have to somehow convert it into an editable format. So if you've already started working on your book in some proprietary format like Quark or PageMaker, GFDL is probably not a very logical choice. Ditto if for some reason you only want to offer it as a PDF or in print. Another note about the GFDL is that it has various optional clauses; if you choose GFDL, please please please do not use the optional clauses, because experience has shown that it causes endless trouble. (E.g., Debian has a long, painful debate about whether software manuals that used GFDL with the optional clauses was compatible with their free-software guidelines.)
I'm also a college professor, and I've done the same thing you're doing. I originally used GFDL, because CC didn't exist yet. Later I switched to a dual-licensing scheme with both GFDL and CC-BY-SA, because I wanted to be able to share with other people using CC-BY-SA. Eventually Wikipedia switched all of its licensing from GFDL to CC-BY-SA, so I've dropped the GFDL licensing. So rather than the two options you mentioned, let me discuss three:
CC-BY-SA - You can use other people's materials that are CC-BY-SA licensed. This includes Wikipedia, for photos. The Share-Alike (SA) part means that other people can only use your work if the thing they're using it in is under the same license; this eliminates the feeling that someone will cynically exploit your work for their own commercial gain, in a project that they themselves will not make freely available.
GFDL - You can use other people's materials that are GFDL licensed, but this isn't such a big benefit, since there isn't that much GFDL content out there anymore. (WP used to be GFDL, but essentially everything on there is now relicensed under CC-BY-SA.) You get the same Share-Alike thing as with CC-BY-SA.
CC-BY - This is a very liberal license. It says anyone can use your work, even in a commercial product that is not free.
My recommendation would be CC-BY-SA. Another possibility would be dual-licensing with CC-BY-SA and GFDL, but that's probably not worth the extra work unless you've identified materials you want to use that are under GFDL. Only do CC-BY if you simply want to make a gift to the world, and you don't care if your work is repackaged into something non-free by other people.
Slashdot Mirror
I started using emacs about 7 years ago, at which point the jokes about its feature creep ("nice OS, just needs a good editor," etc.) were already probably 20 years old. A few years ago I switched to mg, which is an emacs clone that is much more lightweight. The advantage of mg is that it loads immediately, and it has all the features I actually need. So maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but -- what is currently happening in emacs development? New features? Better performance? Bug fixes? Polishing the brasswork? I'm honestly curious why it can't just go into the same kind of masterpiece-maintenance mode as some of Knuth's projects like Tex.
As far as bazaar, my impression is that it has had a much lower profile than git, and that its main selling point seems to be that it's supposed to be easier to use than git. Here is bazaar's explanation of why they think bazaar is good. Here is a similar sales job for git. Bazaar is used by ubuntu, sponsored by Canonical, and written in Python. You can get free bazaar-based hosting on Launchpad. Personally I've been happy with git.
OO isn't the opposite of imperative. The opposite of imperative is functional.
OO is a good, natural fit to a few very specific tasks. One of those is GUIs. But in general, OO is simply one more technique to add to your toolkit, along with pointers, regexes, etc. Historically, OO is just one of the more recent fads in programming. If this was 1985, the fad we'd be discussing would be structured programming.
This seems to me like a good idea in theory, but a poor one in practice. I like javascript as a language, and have written a couple of reasonably nontrivial apps in it. However, a beginner is going to need a book that's designed to teach programming using a particular language. I don't think there is an appropriate book of that kind for js. The O'Reilly rhino book (Flanagan) is basically the only js book on the market that's any good. The rest are pretty much all crappy things aimed at teaching web designers to do little browser tricks; you could do everything that's in one of those books, and still never develop a clue about programming.
Some people would consider this a feature, not a bug. There are people who complete an entire CS degree without ever using a language that's closer to the metal than java. If you look at the OP's question, it's clear that he's trying to find a balanced approach.
All three of these programming languages are proprietary. I would strongly suggest not starting a first-timer with a proprietary language. Although it's true that a lot of programming skills are language-independent, not all of them are, and history has shown that proprietary languages are a total dead end.
There's nothing particularly wrong with plain C as a first language. (I'd avoid all the intricacies of C++ syntax for a first-timer. The OO stuff is, in my opinion, totally unnecessary for a first-time programmer to learn.)
Another good language for first-timers is a scripting language like python or ruby. (I like perl, but perl's syntax is goofy, and if he does want to explore OO at some point, it's better to learn it in a language that uses more standard OO syntax.) I've used python as a teaching language in the past, and it works fine.
One thing to think about is what programming projects he's interested in doing, and make sure he's set up for success. A lot of kids that age want to program games, but programming a real-time video game requires a *lot* of skills. Whatever project he wants to do, make sure you have a combination of OS, development environment, and libraries that will work.
I think there's an important distinction between being on the inside and the outside of a state prison.
I was with you on the first sentence. But there's a problem with the Berlin Wall analogy: the Berlin Wall was designed to keep people in, whereas the US border controls are designed to keep people out.
TFA says: "the administrators of the site maintain the primary goal of the initiative is to tackle crime, not illegal immigration." In other words, this is about the war on drugs. At a cost of about 4 million dollars, 21 arrests have been made; "Critics say this does not represent value for money."
This is a fascinating proposition. Let's figure out the value-per-dollar supplied by the war on drugs in general, and see if it's better than the value-per-dollar supplied by this program.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the war on drugs. (The term was first used by Nixon in 1969.) I don't think it will come as a surprise that it's been a failure.
What about the "per-dollar" part? Well, I don't know about your state, but mine (California) spends more on prisons than it spends on education, and the vast majority of prison spending arises from drug prohibition. First of all, you have all the people in prison for buying, selling, or using drugs. Then you have all the crime directly associated with the illegal drug trade; just as the stereotypical Chicago gangster of the 1930's wouldn't have existed without Prohibition, gangs today wouldn't exist without drug prohibition. And then you have all the crime that indirectly arises from drug prohibition. Drug prohibition makes drugs expensive, so people commit crimes to support their habits. So we have all the costs of incarceration, the social costs suffered by the victims of violent crime, etc. It's a lot of money.
So I would estimate that the value-per-dollar of the war on drugs over the last 40 years equals x/y, where x is a number so small that it's controversial whether it's positive or negative, and y is huge.
Reading between the lines, the real problem isn't that his provider is pawing around inside his box, it's that they seem to have worse reliability than he wants. This is very common, especially if you go with a cheap webhost. Discount webhosting is a very hard way to make a living. A lot of people think it sounds easy, so they start up a business, and then they find out that it's harder than they thought. Given that they're not charging the customer very much, they just can't afford to put in the large amounts of money, effort, and high-quality, over-specced hardware that would be required in order to have super-duper reliability. You get what you pay for. If the OP really needs higher reliability than he's getting, he may just need to switch to a more expensive provider. My experience has been that at less than $100/mo, you simply get lousy reliability and lousy service. If he's already paying that much, then I'd say he should probably just poke around on webhostingtalk.com and look for someone with better stats and reputation at the same price level.
Gotto has some interesting things to say, but:
He makes statements without backing them up. For instance, he insists sincerely that dumb people are rare, and that the schools make people dumb. Okay, interesting hypothesis. Where's his proof? Actually there's quite a bit of evidence that there are vast genetically determined intellectual differences between human beings. For instance, there are studies of twins separated at birth.
He also seems to have set up a very comfortable self-reinforcing belief system. "...if you asked the kids... why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it." His interpretation of these kids' statements is that they're all Einsteins who have been crushed by the educational system. Once we're convinced of this, everything that ever goes wrong with a kid's education is evidence that the educational system is messed up. What if the kid is saying the work is boring because he's just a kid who isn't interested in intellectual things? What if the other kid is saying the work makes no sense because he's a kid who's just not very bright, for hereditary reasons, and can't understand it?
This being slashdot, I can predict that there will be lots of people modding each other up for saying that news should be free, comparing newspapers to manufacturers of buggy whips, etc. Actually the positions of both google and the traditional print media are a lot more nuanced than that, so it might be worth considering whether they actually know their own business better than slashdotters do. This article (not paywalled!) has a nice, up-to-date discussion of the issues. Google is trying to work out a compromise that works for both newspapers and users. The model they seem to have in mind is that articles will be indexed by google, and users will be able to click through to the articles for free after finding them in a google search, but newspapers will still be able to keep users from effectively getting a free subscription without paying for a subscription. Essentially you'd be able to read some number of articles over some period of time, but at some point a paywall will kick in.
Okay, I hear the howls of disgust. We hate paywalls, etc. Yeah, sure. As an internet user, I hate paywalls, and I especially hate sites that try to get into google search results, but then when you click through on the google search results, you can't actually read the content. It's misleading and a waste of my time. But it's not completely unreasonable for, e.g., the Wall Street Journal to want readers to pay for a subscription. They make money that way. They can only do high-quality reporting if they get income. Different newspapers are trying different models. The NY Times has messed around with its setup over the years, with the current situation being that anyone can read anything for free, without registering. That may be a workable business model for the NY Times in the long run, provided that they have some other revenue stream. That's why I subscribe to the NY Times in print. Editorial work isn't free. Sending reporters to Afghanistan isn't free. Yes, they can get some revenue from advertising, but possibly not enough to support high-quality reporting if it's the sole source of revenue.
Please, spare me the buggy whip analogy. It's a false analogy. Cars replaced horse-drawn carriages, and were superior to them. We don't have a superior replacement for traditional newspapers. No Digg is not a replacement for the NY Times.
Sure 10 MB is absurd, but it's a lot less absurd than the claimed 189 MB. I don't think I had any mono libs loaded without knowing it. I was actually testing this under fluxbox, not gnome. When I deleted all the mono libraries using apt, the only other app that showed up as having a dependency on them was f-spot, and I didn't have f-spot loaded when I did the memory test. If the GGP had binaries compiled with debugging symbols, then that would mean that the GGP's 189 MB figure was basically wrong, because the point of his post was that he didn't think tomboy should be included in a default install of gnome.
I think the most likely possibilities are (1) that there's something wrong with the method I used to measure memory use, or (2) the 189 MB figure the GGP quoted was for an earlier release of tomboy/mono, and they've made it somewhat less insanely bloated since then.
Another thing to keep in mind is that although the GGP is complaining about tomboy's presence in a default install of Gnome, what's probably more relevant is what's present in a default install of popular desktop linux distributions. Ubuntu has decided to switch from including GIMP in a default install to including f-spot instead, and f-spot requires mono. And guess what the reasons were for switching from GIMP to f-spot? It was because GIMP too hard to use, took up too much space on a CD, and was too slow to start up. In other words, the concerns about bloat and performance that the GGP raised may actually be good reasons to have mono included on a default install.
For me, the really good reason to remove mono and mono-dependent apps from my machine is that I'm concerned about whether mono can really survive as open-source software, so I don't want to hitch my wagon to some app without realizing that it's dependent on mono.
Hmm...I tried to verify the statement about the 189 MB and failed, but maybe I'm just using the wrong method. I did a free -m, loaded tomboy, and then did another free -m. The result was only a 10 MB change in the amount of free memory.
It's true that tomboy is slow-loading on my (relatively fast) hardware. It's also true that it uses quite a bit of disk space. I did apt-get remove tomboy f-spot libmono* && apt-get autoremove && apt-get autoclean, and that freed up 64 Mb of disk space. If you're looking at, e.g., how much you can fit on a CD-based linux distro, 64 Mb is a heck of a lot to dedicate to something that's only needed for the sake of one applet.
This NY Times article says the same thing: "American publishers chafe over Amazon's pricing policy for the Kindle, under which it generally sells digital versions of best sellers at $9.99 - less than the wholesale price that Amazon pays for many of these books."
So does this article on Slate: "For a typical hardback that retails for $26--say, E.L. Doctorow's Homer & Langley--Amazon pays $13 and then sells it for $9.99 on the Kindle, taking a $3 loss on each sale." The same article also ran in Newsweek.
Here is an article at Publisher's Weekly: "That Amazon is currently treating the bulk of Kindle editions as loss leaders--items it either breaks even on or loses on to build market share in e-book sales and to fuel the growth of the Kindle--is one of the worrisome aspects of the current system."
Seems like a remarkable journalistic conspiracy by The New York Times, Slate, Newsweek, and Publisher's Weekly to cover up the truth. Or do you imagine that all these publications ran stories by all these reporters without making sure that the statements in them had sources?
When someone has pointed out that you've made a factual error, usually the best response isn't to get angry.
Please mod parent up. The post by dangitman, which has been modded up to 5, is factually incorrect. The parent post by AC, which is sitting at a moderation level of 0 right now, gives a link to an article on techdirt with the correct facts. What's incorrect about dangitman's reasoning is that he's failing to distinguish between the roles of the publisher and the retailer.
Hi -- I'd be glad to take a look. First could you drop me an email using the address given at http://www.lightandmatter.com/area4author.html ? I want to make sure we have two-way communication before I put any effort in.
I can't believe this is only up to +1, Funny so far.
What would the experimental signature of a neutralino be, as opposed to any other WIMP? Comparing the WP neutralino article to the arxiv paper, the mass range does seem to match up roughly, but that's about all I see that would help.
DKIM (formerly known as Domain Keys) is more sophisticated and worth looking into in addition to SPF. I'm using an implementation called DKIMproxy, which runs as a daemon and is specifically designed to work with postfix. I've been fairly happy with it. What's helpful about it is that if I get mail from someone who implements DKIM, I can be sure that it's really from them, and likewise if I get joe-jobbed, I can convince the recipient that the spam wasn't actually from me. The biggest and best known users of DKIM are gmail and yahoo, but I'm seeing it used elsewhere as well. For example, I recently got spam from lulu.com, and the good news was that it was DKIM-signed, so I could be sure it wasn't a joe job.
I understand what you mean about establishing a good reputation in terms of the email you send. Actually many of the big email providers have a policy of blacklisting all domains by default these days, and waiting for the domain operators to contact them and ask to be allowed to send mail to them. Both AOL and yahoo seem to do this. With yahoo, you can fill out a form to convince them you're not evil, and if the info on the form satisfies them, they stop blacklisting you. One of their criteria is that they're more likely to approve you if you implement DKIM. If you tell them you're using DKIM, then they won't accept mail from your domain that isn't DKIM-signed; this is to your advantage, because then their users won't be clicking on the spam button on mail that claims to be from you but isn't.
Yep. I was mildly interested in trying moonlight, because MS has put the famous Feynman lectures on physics online for free, in silverlight format. So when I saw the slashdot article today, I thought, OK, I'll try installing moonlight on my ubuntu box and see if it lets me watch the lectures. First off, I do an apt-get install moonlight-plugin-mozilla. Go to the MS web site. "Sorry, Silverlight for your browser is not officially supported. The full list of compatible browsers you [sic] can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/get-started/install/default.aspx. Click on the link. "If you are using a Linux, FreeBSD or SolarisOS operating system, please press the Click to Install button to get the appropriate installation package for Silverlight." Okay, I click on the button and it sends me to go-mono.com. Download and install it. Restart my browser. Go back to the site for the Feynman lectures. "Sorry, Silverlight for your browser is not officially supported."
So here's this thing that almost no web site actually uses, and it doesn't actually work. And it's proprietary. And they promise not to sue me for using it. Woo hoo.
But is this significantly easier than other methods of harvesting email addresses? Spammers already do dictionary attacks on big providers like yahoo. It's not clear to me that this method is a better way of generating a list of email addresses. If you carry out a dictionary attack on yahoo.com, you're going to come up with probably tens of millions of valid email addresses. If you carry out this attack on gravatar.com, how many addresses are you going to get for your trouble? 10% of gravatar's users, apparently -- which I'm guessing is not really that big a number. Remember, once a spammer has a botnet, it costs him zero to send out one more spam to test whether a particular address is valid. Therefore the dictionary attack is free.
The defense against dictionary attacks is also exactly the same as the defense against this attack: either don't use a big email provider, or use a big email provider but pick a username that has a lot of characters (so it's not vulnerable to brute-forcing) and is also not vulnerable to dictionary attacks.
I do my searches using clusty.com rather than google, for exactly this reason. In most cases, the search results are exactly the same quality as google's. It doesn't have certain specialized features that google has, e.g., book search and image search.
A simple way of enhancing your privacy is to set your firefox preferences so that it deletes all cookies when you exit the browser, except for cookies from a specified whitelist. Edit : Preferences : privacy. Uncheck "accept third-party cookies." Firefox will: Use custom settings for history. Keep until: I close Firefox. Exceptions: [set your list of exceptions]
But basically, if you completely hitch your wagon to gmail, google docs, etc., then I don't see how you can expect to preserve your privacy from being invaded by google. Google is an advertising company, and their whole business model revolves around selling your eyeballs.
I don't think this is correct. This issue came up for me, and initially I thought the same thing you did, but when the issue came up we had sort of an online powwow, with some indirect input from lawyers. I think the situation is really as follows. Let's say A makes a photo and releases it under GFDL, then B writes a book under dual GFDL+CC-BY-SA, and B incorporates the photo into the book. I think everything is actually cool and legal. Now suppose C comes along and wants to redistribute B's book; I think C is required to maintain the dual-licensing scheme. If C wants to redistribute the book under pure CC, then C needs to strip out the GFDL'd photo. Another situation is that D comes along and wants to use one chapter of the book as part of a derived work, and that chapter doesn't include the GFDL'd photo. Then D is free to use GFDL, or CC, or propagate the dual license.
Oops, sorry for the reply-to-self, but I thought of something else I wanted to mention. GFDL says that if other people use your work to make their own derived works, they have to provide the derived work in at least one editable format, such as an OpenOffice or LaTeX file. That makes it kind of silly to put out your book under GFDL unless you can and will release it in at least one format that's editable with open-source software; you can do it, but it makes it difficult or impossible for other people to use your work, because they would have to somehow convert it into an editable format. So if you've already started working on your book in some proprietary format like Quark or PageMaker, GFDL is probably not a very logical choice. Ditto if for some reason you only want to offer it as a PDF or in print. Another note about the GFDL is that it has various optional clauses; if you choose GFDL, please please please do not use the optional clauses, because experience has shown that it causes endless trouble. (E.g., Debian has a long, painful debate about whether software manuals that used GFDL with the optional clauses was compatible with their free-software guidelines.)
I'm also a college professor, and I've done the same thing you're doing. I originally used GFDL, because CC didn't exist yet. Later I switched to a dual-licensing scheme with both GFDL and CC-BY-SA, because I wanted to be able to share with other people using CC-BY-SA. Eventually Wikipedia switched all of its licensing from GFDL to CC-BY-SA, so I've dropped the GFDL licensing. So rather than the two options you mentioned, let me discuss three:
My recommendation would be CC-BY-SA. Another possibility would be dual-licensing with CC-BY-SA and GFDL, but that's probably not worth the extra work unless you've identified materials you want to use that are under GFDL. Only do CC-BY if you simply want to make a gift to the world, and you don't care if your work is repackaged into something non-free by other people.