Sure, Win32 doesn't come with any reasonable built-in programming languages.
But it does come with MSIE 5+. Kids can easily begin "programming" in HTML in 5 minutes (I've taught junior high school kids the basics of how to create and view a file this quickly). And from there it's only a short matter of time before they want to check out JavaScript.
Granted, JavaScript can't manipulate binary files, it can't [really] open socket connections, and it cannot do a bunch of other things that adults expect a programming language to do. But it is free, it is readily available, and kids *can* be motivated to learn it through seeing all the "neat" things they can do to their web pages. There are lots of online resources, etc. The bar is set very, very low for learning JavaScript. And from this they will learn variables, loops, functions, objects, syntax, etc.
(I know very well that full-fledged DHTML is a nightmare to do cleanly and x-platform, but I'm just talking about basic JavaScript getting their feet wet in programming.)
Most of them offer lucrative business opportunities from the comfort of my own home. I can make up to $6000 per week, working just a few hours a day, for just a small investigative investment!
Other offers are seven-figure partnerships which often involve travel perks to exotic locations such as Nigeria.
With so many offers coming into my email inbox *without even looking for them*, times have never been better. How can folks say things are tough out there?
Bah. Obviously "American Scientists" are not "programmers", because each of those sub-pages generates a JavaScript error for me. (If you "scientists" are reading, the onload handler for the BODY tag has a call to some Macromedia Dreamweaver JavaScript libraries which are missing. Either supply the libs or remove the onload.)
A hypo-allergenic moist towelette designed for babies is *not* what is making baby's skin red. That would be the urine and fecal residue from incomplete cleanings.
To clear up the redness problem, I highly highly recommend Weleda baby diaper cream. Use it after some/most cleaning where you just didn't have time for a proper washing. Redness gone, guaranteed. Also hypo-allergenic, and baby actually likes it.
1. File an extension, so you can legally postpone your tax return filing beyond April 15th. You can download one in PDF form from the IRS and you can even telephone it in. The extension form takes less than 2 minutes to complete.
2. Talk to a tax accountant. It will cost you anywhere from $100-$500 and it can save you upwards of $1000. The first year I used one I saved myself $1400 over what I had computed for myself. The next year, benefitting from the free advice he had given me the first year, I saved over $5k. After that $11k, and so on.
3. They are not just there to fill in the form for you. They will also tell you what to do to save money, both on your current return and your future ones. In my experience, and the experience of people I know in our situation, it is very rare that the accountant costs you more than they save you. Think of them as a free money, that should be incentive enough to get you moving.
4. Don't use the corporate chain accountants. Talk with the old greybeard who has been an independant his whole life. This is very important. Get a referral, use the yellow pages, but do not go to H&R Block. Granted, the solo tax guy is swamped at this time of year, and you are too late to see him now before April 15th, but that is what step #1 is all about. He has plenty of time to help you out between 4/15 and 7/15.
* All software is insecure * Open source has the potential to be more secure than closed source * Providing updates quickly is the responsibility of the vendor or the community, depending on the software * Patching is the responsibility of the software user
That was always the problem at Netscape/Mozilla: EGO.
Larry Wall would tell you that Hubris is one of the 3 great virtues of a programmer.
Sometimes people do individual hacks because they want to. So be it. Individuality is great, so is personal invention. Long live the lone hacker on his own code branch.
"Forcing" people to work on common code branches "for the good of the people" smacks a tad bit of socialism. And that's a stigma the open source movement needs like it needs a hole in the head.
Why? It just says that they have to be considered, not that they have to be used. Requiring consideration is very different from requiring usage.
Yeah, but do we really need more nit-picking laws? A periodic memo would accomplish the same thing here....
A law is only useful if it a) protects something which needs protecting, and b) gets enforced. This law fits neither criteria. (Imagine someone getting brought up on charges for "not considering to use open source" and you'll see how silly this seems.)
BMW has been doing this for years. Nothing new here.
Re:CORBA is too heavy & EJB is too RMI/IIOP de
on
Web Services
·
· Score: 1
Before I begin, I want to make clear that I'm an XML skeptic. To me, XML is nothing more than formatted text -- utterly devoid of value until two or more parties agree on a shared vocabulary (in the form of a DTD or Schema).
Oh please, give it a rest. XML is a tool, nothing more and nothing less. It just happens to be a tool with a lot of support tools, making it extremely easy to use. It also suffers from the fact that it got hyped even more than Web Services. (There are no fewer than 30 glossy magazines devoted to XML, that's how stupid our thinking on the topic has become.)
Of course it's not the holy grail. But as far as "two or more parties" agreeing on a shared vocabulary, those 2 parties are usually named "client" and "server". Both written by the same entity. Most browsers have an XML parser built in, and those that don't can use a JavaScript parser in under 5k of code. All servers have an XML parser. So the 2 parties you are talking about just happen to be the same 2 parties most commonly associated with Web Services. Namely, the web service provider and the browsing client.
Let me add that Web Services is just a new spin on the old Application Service Provider (ASP) from 1998.
This is a classic case of using old tools to combat new problems. It simply doesn't work sometimes.
Sound is analog data, which means that will always be one step away from becoming digital data. The only way to stop sound from being recorded is to play silence.
(What's next? Making paintings which cannot be photographed? The only way to stop the capture of light is to reflect no light. Just as the only way to stop sound from being recorded is to emit no sound.)
Music is essentially already software, albeit analog software. The software industry years ago has tried all of this. Disk-drive access schemes, dongles, you name it, been there, failed. Software vendors have given up on copy-protection and moved to prosecution of offenders. Still not a complete success, but cheaper and more effective than protection.
It's also a war of attrition. It costs the recording industry millions to research and implement failed copyright schemes, and that cost is always passed on to the customer. In this case, an added cost to the customer is the potential for the damage of their CD player.
But let's not be fooled that Sony is actually worried about damaging CD players. They probably do not mind one bit that x% of CD players which repeatedly play the Michael Jackson CD will need to be replaced within 6 months. After all, they do a bang-up business in both CDs and CD players from all of this.
(To put this into perspective, imagine the furor which would erupt if Intel sold software which was known to damage their CPUs. Can anyone say illegal business practices? Class-action? I certainly can and more importantly, I would.)
In all this, the irony is that pirating MP3s is already a crime, and one which the record companies can act upon if they choose. Pirating MP3s is very, very prevalent in our society -- it happens more than littering and jaywalking combined, which is to say that is basically un-policeable on a wide scale.
But the record companies would be fully justified in hiring a few interns to snoop out piraters, and then getting the courts to levy fines on those people. Do it more than once to repeat offenders, and the global network would feel the impact. If an 14-year-old gets slapped with a $250 fine, her parents are responsible for paying that fine, so let's not presume that youth can escape the law either.
By levying fines in court, the record companies could recuperate some of their losses in ways that expensive copyright protection schemes never will.
Dave Farber is not only a great technologist (one of the founding fathers of the Internet)
Cool, excellent. My question is, who exactly are the founding fathers of the Internet? Is there any definitive list of such? Or are people earning this title retroactively as we notice that they were influential "in the beginning"?
(I'm not trolling, I'm actually quite curious, but since every other post I've ever written has been modded a troll, you might as well nail this one too!)
I drove by my neighborhood Safeway tonight and they were using emergency generators to keep their coolers cool. The rest of the shopping plaza surrounding Safeway was completely dark.
Last night my power was off from 12:45 to 2:15. (Hooray for my UPS!)
I live in San Rafael, CA, 15 miles north of San Francisco, and blackouts are real.
I have a problem with our terms here. We need to stop calling this spam. It's not spam because you gave them your email address. True, you asked them not to send you any email, but you still gave them your address, knowing that if the situation warranted it they would be able to send you mail. Well, the situation warranted it (in their minds) so they sent you mail.
It's annoying, but it's not spam. It's just you doing business with a company who sometimes conducts business in a way you find irritating.
That's very different from someone you don't know mining your email address to send you mail on topics they have no idea whether or not you will be interested in, purely for the sake of profiting on the 1/100,000th customer.
Unless you are French, you don't have any gripe in this regard. Though the Internet is "global", that doesn't mean that all local laws should be thrown out to make way for the Universal American Truth(tm). America has already done enough to homogenize and sterilize world cultures.
Forget the technical issues for a moment. Let the French make their own laws, as ridiculous as they may seem. If they don't want Nazi memorabilia as part of their culture, then so be it. More power to them. Censorship may be Unamerican, but we are talking about France after, which to my knowledge has never signed on and pledged to uphold the constitution of the U.S.A. Let it go.
Re:I Got 0.11 But I Cheated.
on
Quickie Twister
·
· Score: 1
I used the keyboard and got a.10. I pressed Start, hit tab to select the Stop key, then hit enter when the screen changed colors. Easy.
Slashdot Mirror
Can we have a Slashdot filter to filter out all stories that come from the Guardian? I mean jeez, has there ever been a worse tech rag?
Sure, Win32 doesn't come with any reasonable built-in programming languages.
But it does come with MSIE 5+. Kids can easily begin "programming" in HTML in 5 minutes (I've taught junior high school kids the basics of how to create and view a file this quickly). And from there it's only a short matter of time before they want to check out JavaScript.
Granted, JavaScript can't manipulate binary files, it can't [really] open socket connections, and it cannot do a bunch of other things that adults expect a programming language to do. But it is free, it is readily available, and kids *can* be motivated to learn it through seeing all the "neat" things they can do to their web pages. There are lots of online resources, etc. The bar is set very, very low for learning JavaScript. And from this they will learn variables, loops, functions, objects, syntax, etc.
(I know very well that full-fledged DHTML is a nightmare to do cleanly and x-platform, but I'm just talking about basic JavaScript getting their feet wet in programming.)
Every day I get literally dozens of offers.
Most of them offer lucrative business opportunities from the comfort of my own home. I can make up to $6000 per week, working just a few hours a day, for just a small investigative investment!
Other offers are seven-figure partnerships which often involve travel perks to exotic locations such as Nigeria.
With so many offers coming into my email inbox *without even looking for them*, times have never been better. How can folks say things are tough out there?
I love how all the quotes come from the top 25% (nay, even the top 1% in many cases) of the food chain. Hogwash.
Certainly the unemployed fledgeling DBA who never gets interviewed does not love the bust.
Bah. Obviously "American Scientists" are not "programmers", because each of those sub-pages generates a JavaScript error for me. (If you "scientists" are reading, the onload handler for the BODY tag has a call to some Macromedia Dreamweaver JavaScript libraries which are missing. Either supply the libs or remove the onload.)
A hypo-allergenic moist towelette designed for babies is *not* what is making baby's skin red. That would be the urine and fecal residue from incomplete cleanings.
To clear up the redness problem, I highly highly recommend Weleda baby diaper cream. Use it after some/most cleaning where you just didn't have time for a proper washing. Redness gone, guaranteed. Also hypo-allergenic, and baby actually likes it.
That was a Nine Inch Nails song? Cool!
I'd just kinda figured NiN had recorded a Johnny Cash cover twelve years before he decided to sing it.
Microsoft seeks to make money off their own technology. News at Eleven.
Big deal. Grow up.
1. File an extension, so you can legally postpone your tax return filing beyond April 15th. You can download one in PDF form from the IRS and you can even telephone it in. The extension form takes less than 2 minutes to complete.
2. Talk to a tax accountant. It will cost you anywhere from $100-$500 and it can save you upwards of $1000. The first year I used one I saved myself $1400 over what I had computed for myself. The next year, benefitting from the free advice he had given me the first year, I saved over $5k. After that $11k, and so on.
3. They are not just there to fill in the form for you. They will also tell you what to do to save money, both on your current return and your future ones. In my experience, and the experience of people I know in our situation, it is very rare that the accountant costs you more than they save you. Think of them as a free money, that should be incentive enough to get you moving.
4. Don't use the corporate chain accountants. Talk with the old greybeard who has been an independant his whole life. This is very important. Get a referral, use the yellow pages, but do not go to H&R Block. Granted, the solo tax guy is swamped at this time of year, and you are too late to see him now before April 15th, but that is what step #1 is all about. He has plenty of time to help you out between 4/15 and 7/15.
I could say closed source has the potential to be more secure than open source
You could! You did. Our statements are not incompatible.
Blast you for taunting me to continue flogging this poor dead beast.
Repeat after me...
* All software is insecure
* Open source has the potential to be more secure than closed source
* Providing updates quickly is the responsibility of the vendor or the community, depending on the software
* Patching is the responsibility of the software user
Next topic.
Where is the wild? Anyone have the address?
I'd like to run about there also.
TIA!
That was always the problem at Netscape/Mozilla: EGO.
Larry Wall would tell you that Hubris is one of the 3 great virtues of a programmer.
Sometimes people do individual hacks because they want to. So be it. Individuality is great, so is personal invention. Long live the lone hacker on his own code branch.
"Forcing" people to work on common code branches "for the good of the people" smacks a tad bit of socialism. And that's a stigma the open source movement needs like it needs a hole in the head.
Any idiot knows that 1:00 is twice as long as 0:50! :)
Why do you suppose the Slashdot toadies blindly worship at your feet when you are clearly nothing more than a criminal convicted of a crime?
Where the beef in this story? Sure beats me.
So, how do you play with another player?
BMW has been doing this for years. Nothing new here.
Before I begin, I want to make clear that I'm an XML skeptic. To me, XML is nothing more than formatted text -- utterly devoid of value until two or more parties agree on a shared vocabulary (in the form of a DTD or Schema).
Oh please, give it a rest. XML is a tool, nothing more and nothing less. It just happens to be a tool with a lot of support tools, making it extremely easy to use. It also suffers from the fact that it got hyped even more than Web Services. (There are no fewer than 30 glossy magazines devoted to XML, that's how stupid our thinking on the topic has become.)
Of course it's not the holy grail. But as far as "two or more parties" agreeing on a shared vocabulary, those 2 parties are usually named "client" and "server". Both written by the same entity. Most browsers have an XML parser built in, and those that don't can use a JavaScript parser in under 5k of code. All servers have an XML parser. So the 2 parties you are talking about just happen to be the same 2 parties most commonly associated with Web Services. Namely, the web service provider and the browsing client.
Let me add that Web Services is just a new spin on the old Application Service Provider (ASP) from 1998.
This is a classic case of using old tools to combat new problems. It simply doesn't work sometimes.
Sound is analog data, which means that will always be one step away from becoming digital data. The only way to stop sound from being recorded is to play silence.
(What's next? Making paintings which cannot be photographed? The only way to stop the capture of light is to reflect no light. Just as the only way to stop sound from being recorded is to emit no sound.)
Music is essentially already software, albeit analog software. The software industry years ago has tried all of this. Disk-drive access schemes, dongles, you name it, been there, failed. Software vendors have given up on copy-protection and moved to prosecution of offenders. Still not a complete success, but cheaper and more effective than protection.
It's also a war of attrition. It costs the recording industry millions to research and implement failed copyright schemes, and that cost is always passed on to the customer. In this case, an added cost to the customer is the potential for the damage of their CD player.
But let's not be fooled that Sony is actually worried about damaging CD players. They probably do not mind one bit that x% of CD players which repeatedly play the Michael Jackson CD will need to be replaced within 6 months. After all, they do a bang-up business in both CDs and CD players from all of this.
(To put this into perspective, imagine the furor which would erupt if Intel sold software which was known to damage their CPUs. Can anyone say illegal business practices? Class-action? I certainly can and more importantly, I would.)
In all this, the irony is that pirating MP3s is already a crime, and one which the record companies can act upon if they choose. Pirating MP3s is very, very prevalent in our society -- it happens more than littering and jaywalking combined, which is to say that is basically un-policeable on a wide scale.
But the record companies would be fully justified in hiring a few interns to snoop out piraters, and then getting the courts to levy fines on those people. Do it more than once to repeat offenders, and the global network would feel the impact. If an 14-year-old gets slapped with a $250 fine, her parents are responsible for paying that fine, so let's not presume that youth can escape the law either.
By levying fines in court, the record companies could recuperate some of their losses in ways that expensive copyright protection schemes never will.
Sheer folly, all of it.
-brundlefly
Dave Farber is not only a great technologist (one of the founding fathers of the Internet)
Cool, excellent. My question is, who exactly are the founding fathers of the Internet? Is there any definitive list of such? Or are people earning this title retroactively as we notice that they were influential "in the beginning"?
(I'm not trolling, I'm actually quite curious, but since every other post I've ever written has been modded a troll, you might as well nail this one too!)
I drove by my neighborhood Safeway tonight and they were using emergency generators to keep their coolers cool. The rest of the shopping plaza surrounding Safeway was completely dark.
Last night my power was off from 12:45 to 2:15. (Hooray for my UPS!)
I live in San Rafael, CA, 15 miles north of San Francisco, and blackouts are real.
I have a problem with our terms here. We need to stop calling this spam. It's not spam because you gave them your email address. True, you asked them not to send you any email, but you still gave them your address, knowing that if the situation warranted it they would be able to send you mail. Well, the situation warranted it (in their minds) so they sent you mail.
It's annoying, but it's not spam. It's just you doing business with a company who sometimes conducts business in a way you find irritating.
That's very different from someone you don't know mining your email address to send you mail on topics they have no idea whether or not you will be interested in, purely for the sake of profiting on the 1/100,000th customer.
Unless you are French, you don't have any gripe in this regard. Though the Internet is "global", that doesn't mean that all local laws should be thrown out to make way for the Universal American Truth(tm). America has already done enough to homogenize and sterilize world cultures.
Forget the technical issues for a moment. Let the French make their own laws, as ridiculous as they may seem. If they don't want Nazi memorabilia as part of their culture, then so be it. More power to them. Censorship may be Unamerican, but we are talking about France after, which to my knowledge has never signed on and pledged to uphold the constitution of the U.S.A. Let it go.
I used the keyboard and got a .10. I pressed Start, hit tab to select the Stop key, then hit enter when the screen changed colors. Easy.