Do you have any clue what types of chemicals are in batteries? What if "throwing away one set of batteries" adds more chemicals to the water than 10 years worth of burnt gas? And you're burning gas anyway, so let's say 5 years. Unless you have stats on the chemicals in batteries compared to those in burnt gas, your comment doesn't mean much.
The approval of this patent (#6,960,975) is a testament to the stupidity of the USPTO, which certainly affects the rights of everyone. What's to stop someone from writing a program that strings words together in patent-application-ese and mass submitting them? Then find people who are violating your wonderful patent and sue them. Or just patent every single device ever seen or conceived of in Star Trek or other Sci Fi, and then sue as they become invented. Illustrating the stupidity (and absurdity) of the USPTO is definitely a rights-related topic.
Agreed. Last time I was shopping for a video card (May 2004, when I built my current PC) I read through lots of reviews and came to the conclusion that it didn't really matter. I've been a PC gamer for 8+ years, and while I've gotten progressively less hardcore, at some point you realize that "the emperor has no clothes." So the GeForce 6800 GT was out for $350. The rest of my entire PC was something like $800, and that was with mid-upper level components. I said fuck it, limited myself to $150-$175 for a video card, found an Asus or Abit GeForce 5700 GX 256 for like $160 and it was fine. I played Doom3 on a high enough setting to scare myself, lots of Everquest, WoW, and currently Battlefield 2. At times I get the itch to upgrade, as playing at 800x600 without FSAA isn't optimal, but I'll be waiting until the cards that were high end at the time I bought my current card are at the price I bought my current card. I'm okay being a generation behind the curve if it means I can save $200+. I just with that pricing applied to laptops, I'd love a 1.5 ghz Laptop for $300.
* Muhammad Ali. The three-time heavyweight boxing champion, who lives in Berrien Springs, Mich., successfully defended the title 19 times and was a gold medalist at the 1960 Olympic Games.
* Carol Burnett. The actress and comedian debuted on Broadway in 1959 and starred for more than a decade on "The Carol Burnett Show."
* Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn. They designed the software code used to transmit data over the Internet.
* Robert Conquest. The historian is known for his work on Soviet history, politics, and foreign policy. More than 35 years after its publication, his book, "The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties," remains one of the most influential studies of Soviet history.
* Aretha Franklin. The singer has nearly two dozen No. 1 singles and has won numerous awards. The Detroit native was the first woman to be inducted into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame.
* Alan Greenspan. He has been chairman of the Federal Reserve for the past 18 years.
* Andy Griffith. The actor first achieved national acclaim in the 1950s for his standup comedy routines. He went on to star in television shows such as "The Andy Griffith Show" and "Matlock" and numerous Broadway productions and films.
* Paul Harvey. The radio personality's broadcasts started airing nationally in 1951.
* Sonny Montgomery. A veterans' supporter during his 30 years as a member of the House of Representatives. The Montgomery GI Bill helped make education affordable for millions of veterans.
* Gen. Richard Myers. He recently retired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
* Jack Nicklaus. The golfer won 18 major tournaments as a professional and more than 70 PGA Tour events.
* Frank Robinson. The current manager of the Washington Nationals, Robinson won most valuable player awards in both the American and National leagues. He broke the color barrier for managers, becoming the first black manager in Major League Baseball in 1975.
* Paul Rusesabagina. The hotelier's life was the subject of the movie "Hotel Rwanda," which depicted his courage and compassion in sheltering people at the hotel he managed during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Jack Nicklaus? How is playing golf now worthy of a "Freedom" medal? Sounds like a pretty worthless medal.
Think about it -- you're interviewing two guys for an important job. One talks about all the good things he's done at his last job. The other talks about how screwed up things were and how he 'fixed' them. Who are you going to hire?
Well, if you're looking to hire someone to fix a problem, experience fixing those types of problems seems like something you'd look for. I worked at one place where I literally fixed everything - the production web server was rooted and they had no security features in place, at all. I cleaned everything up, built a firewall and a sane security policy. At my next interview, while I didn't dwell on how bad things were before I started, I made it clear that I "fixed" a lot of stuff.
Even if the story had been about using the iPod to view medical images, so what? If you want a device just to view images, I'm sure there's a better way to do it than through the iPod, which was designed for music listening and with images as an afterthought. Why would you want a doctor to view your x-rays on a 2" screen?
The easiest thing to do would probably be to setup a Linux box and then just play around with Perl scripts to get the basic concepts like variables, arrays, and hashes down. Then PHP or whatever for more OO learning (yes I know you can do oo stuff in Perl but it's not as clear as in other languages). PHP is great because of its documentation - php.net/{whatever function name} to lookup the info on that function. PHP is probably the easiest language to teach yourself because of its documentation.
Why are we hearing about Microsoft's marketing plans all the time now? Over and over about their budget for marketing the Xbox, and now this. So Microsoft is going to have their name on a stadium in England - so what?
With the recently announced purchase of Innobase, Oracle has shown it's intention to further support open source.
Is this person high? If anyone thinks Oracle's purchase of Innobase is a sign of support for MySQL or any "Open Source" software, he's either delusional or just a spin doctor. Oracle is an extremely predatory company, more than willing to take some bad PR and lose money if it means they can take down a potential rival.
Trying to spin this as somehow good for Open Source is almost pathetic. Sure, it may have some ancillary benefit in mindshare, like, "Oh, Oracle views MySQL as a valid competitor!" but that doesn't gain you anything in the end.
How many people have accomplished their goals throughout history by using "class" versus "shock"? I don't think being "classy" is very effective overall.
Yeah, that's what we need, lots of bells and whistles to detract from the main focus of the site, which is discussion. Did you ever think that maybe some features are deemphasized by design? It's not important to have the intricacies of moderation and the friend/foe system stabbing one in the eye every time you load the page. There's a "Help" link to the left of the text box in which I'm typing that documents most of the lesser known features.
Slashdot's interface is perfect for its intended use, which is reading and posting comments. If you still can't wrap your mind around that and feel that there needs to be more emphasis placed on graphical smileys and other garbage, well, that's your problem I guess. And Slashdot's overall layout and design may be outdated but it's still completely functional. The only thing I'd add at this point would be "quote" functionality to make it easier to quote another blob of text, similar to phpBB's [quote="someone"] tag. I've had to <blockquote><i></i></blockquote> an annoying number of times.
And it takes too long to learn how to use Slashdot
Are you a member of homo sapiens? If you don't know how to "use" this site then I think you may seriously need to reconsider your answer to that question. This site is trivial to use for anyone who's ever used a form in a web browser. If you need instructions to "learn" how to "use" a website, I pity you.
I remember back when I was in college, Microsoft donated 40 computers to the professors in the Computer Science department, all of which came with NT4 (this was in 1999, I think). In their press release they claimed that the donation was worth $400,000. The machines they provided were relatively high-end at the time, but I don't see how they could possibly say they were $10,000 each, so maybe they were just making up a value for Windows. That's a fantastic way to invent tax deductions - donate a $200 piece of software (that costs you nothing to duplicate) to a school and write it off at a value of $5000+. I asked a couple of profs if they were going to format the machines and put Linux on them and most said they'd like to but were contractually bound to run NT for a while.
While donations are great and I hate to find ulterior motives for everything, corporations rarely do anything out of the goodness of their hearts. Most "charitable foudations" created by corporations or extremely wealthy individuals exist as a way to create tax deductions for the individuals or corporations in question. They get the tax break and also get to spend the money in a way that may directly or indirectly benefit them. It's mostly a win for everyone involved, but don't chalk it up to altruism or anything like that.
I stick with AOL's client because a) it's what I used first back in 1997 when AOL basically invented the free standalone instant messaging client for Windows, and b) I still like their client the best. I'm still using AIM 4.3.2229 which doesn't have all the annoying ads and flash and "AIM Today" garbage stuffed into more recent versions, but it also doesn't have 5.9.x's awesome firewall negotiation for sending files between firewalled users - but that's something I can deal with, there are other ways to get files to people.
At work I use gaim and connect to AIM, Google's Jabber server, and my company's Jabber server, but I still prefer the vanilla AIM interface.
I'd actually typed sizeof(int) but I wasn't sure if that was valid, or if you had to do sizeof(i). Regarding the multiplication, I think I may have been thinking of malloc().
As for your second point, I don't see how that's at all different from the first one. It seems like the question is akin to asking whether it takes more time to compute 2+2 or 1+3.
One of the mantras hammered into my head during my freshman CS class was:
"The name of an array is a pointer to its 0th element."
Another favorite was:
"Never dereference a null pointer."
From what I remember, arrays and pointers are interchangeable. I've forgotten the C syntax, but I believe that if you have int i[20] followed by int *k = i, then i[4] is the same as *(k + (4 * 4)). E.g. they're both references to specific locations in memory. I don't know about differences across architectures, but I'd imagine if that didn't hold true on a particular system then that system wouldn't really be implementing C correctly. Then again, I'm not much for languages.
But the complaint would be based on bad acts the offending party has already been doing for years. Even if they stop now, a great deal of damage has already been done to a great many computers. While I see your point, the damage has been done. If someone's stealing money from you, you don't not report it just because they stop stealing, unless maybe they give back everything they stole.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have any clue what types of chemicals are in batteries? What if "throwing away one set of batteries" adds more chemicals to the water than 10 years worth of burnt gas? And you're burning gas anyway, so let's say 5 years. Unless you have stats on the chemicals in batteries compared to those in burnt gas, your comment doesn't mean much.
Boy, am I glad this wasn't in the "Ask Slashdot" section...
The approval of this patent (#6,960,975) is a testament to the stupidity of the USPTO, which certainly affects the rights of everyone. What's to stop someone from writing a program that strings words together in patent-application-ese and mass submitting them? Then find people who are violating your wonderful patent and sue them. Or just patent every single device ever seen or conceived of in Star Trek or other Sci Fi, and then sue as they become invented. Illustrating the stupidity (and absurdity) of the USPTO is definitely a rights-related topic.
LiveHTTP Headers - see the HTTP headers as they come in
Web Dev - Lets you do all sorts of stuff like disable CSS / JS / Forms / resubmit POST forms as GET & vice versa (iirc).
The one that lets you not open PDFs in the browser
Flashblock
Hmm, the title of the page was "Slashdot | Patents Chilling Effect on Science". If you take out the pipe it makes sense!
Agreed. VA Linux's IPO was in 1999. I think it's safe to say that most big businesses were well aware of Linux before 2001.
/
http://www.salon.com/tech/log/1999/12/10/va_linux
Agreed. Last time I was shopping for a video card (May 2004, when I built my current PC) I read through lots of reviews and came to the conclusion that it didn't really matter. I've been a PC gamer for 8+ years, and while I've gotten progressively less hardcore, at some point you realize that "the emperor has no clothes." So the GeForce 6800 GT was out for $350. The rest of my entire PC was something like $800, and that was with mid-upper level components. I said fuck it, limited myself to $150-$175 for a video card, found an Asus or Abit GeForce 5700 GX 256 for like $160 and it was fine. I played Doom3 on a high enough setting to scare myself, lots of Everquest, WoW, and currently Battlefield 2. At times I get the itch to upgrade, as playing at 800x600 without FSAA isn't optimal, but I'll be waiting until the cards that were high end at the time I bought my current card are at the price I bought my current card. I'm okay being a generation behind the curve if it means I can save $200+. I just with that pricing applied to laptops, I'd love a 1.5 ghz Laptop for $300.
Jack Nicklaus? How is playing golf now worthy of a "Freedom" medal? Sounds like a pretty worthless medal.
Think about it -- you're interviewing two guys for an important job. One talks about all the good things he's done at his last job. The other talks about how screwed up things were and how he 'fixed' them. Who are you going to hire?
Well, if you're looking to hire someone to fix a problem, experience fixing those types of problems seems like something you'd look for. I worked at one place where I literally fixed everything - the production web server was rooted and they had no security features in place, at all. I cleaned everything up, built a firewall and a sane security policy. At my next interview, while I didn't dwell on how bad things were before I started, I made it clear that I "fixed" a lot of stuff.
In Postgres getting the "next value" is easy, you just get it before you insert it.
SELECT nextval('somesequence') as next_value; - usually takes something on the order of 0.0001 seconds
INSERT INTO table (index, something) VALUES (next_value, 'something'); - normal insert
Even if the story had been about using the iPod to view medical images, so what? If you want a device just to view images, I'm sure there's a better way to do it than through the iPod, which was designed for music listening and with images as an afterthought. Why would you want a doctor to view your x-rays on a 2" screen?
The easiest thing to do would probably be to setup a Linux box and then just play around with Perl scripts to get the basic concepts like variables, arrays, and hashes down. Then PHP or whatever for more OO learning (yes I know you can do oo stuff in Perl but it's not as clear as in other languages). PHP is great because of its documentation - php.net/{whatever function name} to lookup the info on that function. PHP is probably the easiest language to teach yourself because of its documentation.
So stop using it?
Why are we hearing about Microsoft's marketing plans all the time now? Over and over about their budget for marketing the Xbox, and now this. So Microsoft is going to have their name on a stadium in England - so what?
Is this person high? If anyone thinks Oracle's purchase of Innobase is a sign of support for MySQL or any "Open Source" software, he's either delusional or just a spin doctor. Oracle is an extremely predatory company, more than willing to take some bad PR and lose money if it means they can take down a potential rival.
http://www.businessweek.com/print/technology/cont
Trying to spin this as somehow good for Open Source is almost pathetic. Sure, it may have some ancillary benefit in mindshare, like, "Oh, Oracle views MySQL as a valid competitor!" but that doesn't gain you anything in the end.
How many people have accomplished their goals throughout history by using "class" versus "shock"? I don't think being "classy" is very effective overall.
Yeah, that's what we need, lots of bells and whistles to detract from the main focus of the site, which is discussion. Did you ever think that maybe some features are deemphasized by design? It's not important to have the intricacies of moderation and the friend/foe system stabbing one in the eye every time you load the page. There's a "Help" link to the left of the text box in which I'm typing that documents most of the lesser known features.
Slashdot's interface is perfect for its intended use, which is reading and posting comments. If you still can't wrap your mind around that and feel that there needs to be more emphasis placed on graphical smileys and other garbage, well, that's your problem I guess. And Slashdot's overall layout and design may be outdated but it's still completely functional. The only thing I'd add at this point would be "quote" functionality to make it easier to quote another blob of text, similar to phpBB's [quote="someone"] tag. I've had to <blockquote><i></i></blockquote> an annoying number of times.
And it takes too long to learn how to use Slashdot
Are you a member of homo sapiens? If you don't know how to "use" this site then I think you may seriously need to reconsider your answer to that question. This site is trivial to use for anyone who's ever used a form in a web browser. If you need instructions to "learn" how to "use" a website, I pity you.
I remember back when I was in college, Microsoft donated 40 computers to the professors in the Computer Science department, all of which came with NT4 (this was in 1999, I think). In their press release they claimed that the donation was worth $400,000. The machines they provided were relatively high-end at the time, but I don't see how they could possibly say they were $10,000 each, so maybe they were just making up a value for Windows. That's a fantastic way to invent tax deductions - donate a $200 piece of software (that costs you nothing to duplicate) to a school and write it off at a value of $5000+. I asked a couple of profs if they were going to format the machines and put Linux on them and most said they'd like to but were contractually bound to run NT for a while.
Ah, here's some info: http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~brd/Press/msr.html
While donations are great and I hate to find ulterior motives for everything, corporations rarely do anything out of the goodness of their hearts. Most "charitable foudations" created by corporations or extremely wealthy individuals exist as a way to create tax deductions for the individuals or corporations in question. They get the tax break and also get to spend the money in a way that may directly or indirectly benefit them. It's mostly a win for everyone involved, but don't chalk it up to altruism or anything like that.
This is why I still run Acrobat 4. :-)
I stick with AOL's client because a) it's what I used first back in 1997 when AOL basically invented the free standalone instant messaging client for Windows, and b) I still like their client the best. I'm still using AIM 4.3.2229 which doesn't have all the annoying ads and flash and "AIM Today" garbage stuffed into more recent versions, but it also doesn't have 5.9.x's awesome firewall negotiation for sending files between firewalled users - but that's something I can deal with, there are other ways to get files to people.
At work I use gaim and connect to AIM, Google's Jabber server, and my company's Jabber server, but I still prefer the vanilla AIM interface.
I'd actually typed sizeof(int) but I wasn't sure if that was valid, or if you had to do sizeof(i). Regarding the multiplication, I think I may have been thinking of malloc().
As for your second point, I don't see how that's at all different from the first one. It seems like the question is akin to asking whether it takes more time to compute 2+2 or 1+3.
One of the mantras hammered into my head during my freshman CS class was:
"The name of an array is a pointer to its 0th element."
Another favorite was:
"Never dereference a null pointer."
From what I remember, arrays and pointers are interchangeable. I've forgotten the C syntax, but I believe that if you have int i[20] followed by int *k = i, then i[4] is the same as *(k + (4 * 4)). E.g. they're both references to specific locations in memory. I don't know about differences across architectures, but I'd imagine if that didn't hold true on a particular system then that system wouldn't really be implementing C correctly. Then again, I'm not much for languages.
But the complaint would be based on bad acts the offending party has already been doing for years. Even if they stop now, a great deal of damage has already been done to a great many computers. While I see your point, the damage has been done. If someone's stealing money from you, you don't not report it just because they stop stealing, unless maybe they give back everything they stole.