OTOH, seeing armed National Guard soldiers in public places certainly doesn't make me feel nervous. Now, if they were regular Army or Marines, I would certainly have a problem with it. There is a difference.
Well, you're a fucking troll, and I'm old enough to know better, but...
Did it occur to you that the idea of having National Guard soldiers in camo isn't for them to be hidden, but for them to be seen. Yes, green camo sticks out like a sore thumb; it's supposed to. The very visible extra security is there for at least two reasons:
make traveling public less nervous
provide some measure of deterrent.
Granted, the latter is not, by itself, going to stop folks as determined as those on 9-11, but it might well either cause less determined terrorists to decide to try again another day or, because of extra nervousness, cause them to make mistakes and be caught.
If there is no performance hit, I agree with you. Certainly, unless there is a significant amount of concatination, it should be written with String "+" first. Only if testing shows a performance issue and profiling shows that it is the String concatination.
A few months ago, I achieved a performance improvement on the order of 2x-3x just by eliminating needless String concat. I only made the changes because our app was bogging down quite badly under certain conditions. Profiling showed that farking huge numbers of Strings were being instantiated because of String concatinations in a section of code that, under said conditions, was run many times. Between the String creation, char array copying and garbage collection, the cycles were few and far between to get anything else done. After cleaning up the two worst sections of code, the app was consistantly responsive and, as an added bonus, total heap size was smaller. That wasn't the first time, either.
Moral of the story: Knuth was right. But that doesn't mean that optimization is never usefull.
I agree that libraries rock. However, one minor quibble: they are not free. Nothing is free. Public libraries are paid for with a combination of tax dollars (which most of us that participate in the economy pay), fees and donations. I'd guess that, in most cases, it's tax dollars that pay most of the bills.
Always remember, if you think you're getting something for free, you just haven't thought about it long enough. There's a cost for all things. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's a good thing. Just pointing it out.
Perhaps vitriolic was a bit strong. To call it "mild", however, is at least as much of a mistake. It was slanted against the "religious right" in neon and flashi ng lights. Again, were it obviously labeled an opinion piece, or commentary or editorial or whatever coloring other than "news", I would not only have no problem with it, I would find it amusing.
As for the "incredible power" of religious fundamentalists, you over state greatly. I am concerned about some of the more reactionary groups. More accurately, I'm concerned about how easily said groups manage to herd significant numbers of people to mindless, irrational decisions.
Perhaps you're not used to reading things containing viewpoints which you disagree with.
As for that snide little comment, perhaps you should lower your fucking nose so that you can read my entire posting. I do agree, in great part, with the basic sentiment of the article. I love scewering religion; it's great sport. I do not, however, try to pass any such commentary off as "news".
Part of the problem is my bizarre opinion that news should report the story, not color it. Perhaps if I knew the Observer better I would know if it said on the masthead "News from the left" or "News from a Liberal point of view". If the paper says so up front, even then I wouldn't have quite as much of a problem with the story. I would still prefer that the news was the news and that the color commentary were seperate, but at least then I would know for certain that I should read any news story from that paper with my Liberal spin detector turned up a notch. Note that I would feel the same way were the story to have a right spin on it, instead.
The Observer article about Dark Materials made me mildly ill. It was nothing more than a vitriolic attack on the "religious right" dressed up as a report about the books.
I'm an athiest. Well, more honestly I suppose you could call me an "apathetic agnostic"; I don't know if there's a God, and I really can't be troubled to care. None the less, shite like this served up as if it were a news story makes me want to vomit.
If it were clearly marked as an editorial piece, then fine; flame on. This, however, was clearly listed under "News". Reprehensable.
I'll bite; what do you mean by "He will be missed?"
He posted yesterday to c.l.p.misc.
If you're referring to his conviction, his jail time was suspended, and, though I havent heard what the outcome was (or will be), his restitution sentence was sent back to a lower court for reconsideration. He was stupid, yes. But three felony counts was more stupid. IMHO, of course.
Yeah, I was all set to ask the "how will it recycle" question as well. Where I live, we seperate plastics, paper, glass and cans, with cans further devided between aluminum and non-aluminum. Until we moved out here, we could co-mingle (they used that word, I'm just parroting.)
My guess would be that you are correct that currently aluminium is cheaper and easier to recycle. However, your comment "I would rather the manufacturer pay for it than my local co-op recycler" is a bit naieve. If the aluminum can is more expesive, they'll simply charge you more. That's not to say that, if the composite can is cheaper, they won't just scarf up the extra profit, mind you. If it is cheaper, it will allow them room to move the price down as necessary to encourage use of the new format, though. Once in a while that results in the price staying lower.
Re:You've yet to see station selling suitable fuel
on
239 MPG Car
·
· Score: 2
Yup.
Or else he wouldn't have won.
Unless you are suggesting that he won because they were better votes? I suppose one could make that argument.;)
Or were you confusing electoral votes (cast by Electors) with votes cast by citizens for a slate of Electors? If you were, perhaps you should consider educating yourself.
Re:You've yet to see station selling suitable fuel
on
239 MPG Car
·
· Score: 2
Um, the American people voted, and he received more electoral votes than his competitors?
All the cash in the world won't start a business if no one is willing to step up and do the work. That's just an excuse. Millions of people have found ways to bootstrap their businesses. If you have enough drive, you'll find the money if that's what you really need. As for skills, if college were the only way to get skills, we'd have fuck all for business in the US. Hell, by you're logic, I must not be able to make a living programming computers, since I didn't get a college degree. No way I could have learned the skills any other way.
Labor can indeed create value. Of course, your examples aren't the best. All of those types of business can be done by one person. Not in the same way, and not at the same level of production, mind you. One person can farm a plot of land, such as specialty crops (herbs, heirloom vegetables, etc.) with the aid of machinery. One person can build a car. It'd be a custom, one off job, of course, but it's doable. With sufficient automation, it is conceivable that one person could even build vehicles in some volume. As for software, you'd be hard pressed to prove that the concept of a one-man software shop can't work; especially custom software.
As for a worker being worth the value of the goods and/or services they're producing, they are indeed. They are worth the value that the person buying those services are willing to pay for them. In the case of an employee of a firm, the "person" paying for the worker's services is the firm.
Your example of worker-owned cooperatives is a nice one, except that they must be organized either as a) self-employed individuals who happen to work under the same name or b) an actual firm, that is incidentally owned by the workers. The firm still gets to decide what the workers get payed. In this case, it is a consensus between the workers. That's cool. And where there are groups of people who have the drive to start such a cooperative, cool. They have pretty much the same drive it takes to start any business.
Oddly enough, business shools, the local, State and Federal governments and the legal system agree with you. Only a few whiney little boys and girls on/. don't understand.
Many people who are self employed are not getting rich. Granted. Part of that is the tax structure (in the U.S.) that punishes people who have the drive and ambition to start a business.
But saying that any such operation "is not a business" is simply wrong. You would, in most cases, be correct in saying that thay are not "big business". Possibly even not "successfull business", though if they continue to operate at at least break-even (if the owner is paying himself a salery/wage) or small profit, I'd argue that they are, by definition, successfull.
A business needs employees just as much as it needs a boss.
The hell it does. A business can exist with just the "boss"; the entrepreneur. An employee can only exist if there is a "boss" to hire him.
As in all things, it's not the lack of skills. Skills can be learned. Face it: it's the lack of desire. The lack of drive.
I'm not knocking people who don't have that entrepreneurial drive; I've not started my own company yet (though I've made two abortive attempts). But I'm only worth what an employer is willing to pay. Note that I didn't specify my current employer. I'm free to try to find a better match; someone who values my particular skill set and persona more than my current employer. I'm not interested in doing so right now, because I already found an employer that treats me quite well, thank you very much.
Unforch, cool as it looks, the Zaurus doesn't solve my problem. I want a useable keyboard. IOW, I want to be able to type on it. A thumb-board, while better than nothing, doesn't quite get me there.
I'm a Palm user. Have been for quite a few years. I was a Franklin Quest user before that. I'm one of those people that needs a planner of some type.
Lately, though, I find that my Palm Vx sits in its cradle most of the time. I still need the planner, but a palm-top is just too big a pain. I'm so keyboard-centered. I can use Graphiti just fine (faster than I can legibly write), but it is still to much of a shift.
For my next laptop I'm seriously considering an ultra-light such as the Fujitsu P2000 series. My previous laptop was a Sony Z505ls, and it was almost small and light enough. Too bad the base battery only lasted a hour and a half. Reguardless, something with the following features would be perfect for me:
useable keyboard (must be able to touch type easily on it. I'm willing to get used to a slightly smaller size than standard, but only if it isn't too far off
standard battery life must be at least 5 or 6 hours.
must run a Unix-like OS *well*, preferably Linux. By well, I mean that power management must be fully functional, and all hardware must be supported, with the only excepetions allowed being the internal modem, if there is at least one PCMCIA slot.
Best fit I know of is the P2000 series. I think I could work with that. The Apple iBook is in the running, but all the samples I have examined have seemed cheap and fragile. Perhaps just perception. The keybards do have a lot of flex to them, though. Yuck. Also, sigle button "mouse" is a pain. (yes, I know I can define keys as mouse buttons. so what. when I'm using the pointer I want to use the pointer, not the keyboard, and vise versa)
Anyway, that's my take. I still like the Palm the best of all the PDAs I've tried, and I still go through stages where I use I quite a bit. Perhaps if it were even smaller and lighter, like the new ones.
This should make the folks over at XForms happy! Isn't it neat the way we reuse names?
I thought that XForms was pretty much moribund, mostly caused (IMHO) by the "only free for non-comercial use" license. It appears that I was wrong, though. In fact, it looks like the soon to be released 1.0 will be licensed under LGPL. Too bad about the name clash, though.
What I would love to see is an archive of _Computer_Language_Magazine_. Good stuff! I used to have several dozen article clippings, but over time they've all bitten the dust.
Old Byte mags (back when Ciarcia was writing for them) would rock, as well.
Hell, even old DDJ, back before it became the watered down dross it is today. It's still about the best left, but only because it doesn't really have competition, IMHO.
No, I consider C++ to be somewhere in the middle. C is old. Lisp, Fortran and Pascal are all most definately old.
All of this is, obviously, somewhat subjective. The maturity of a language depends upon more than a simple count of years. By any measure, though, C is more mature than Python, Java more mature than C# and (I hope) we are more mature than this line of logic. I perhaps could have worded my comment better; I certainly should have proofed it more thoroughly. I guess I just mean that in the grand history of programming languages, Python and Perl5 (I consider it quite distinct from Perl are young.
I disagree. Limiting the degrees of freedom does allow a programmer to concentrate on the problem they're trying to solve. To the degree that the language fits the problem domain, this is certainly a good thing. However, to say the constraints in and of themselves tend to increase expressiveness is patently absurd. Expressiveness comes from having language constructs that are a good fit to a) the problem domain and b) your ways of thinking.
In addition, Stroustrup was correct in saying that a language affects the ways you think about a problem. His language (C++) is certainly expressive, if terminally ugly and wart ridden.
In addition, I think that there are plenty of counter examples to your assertion. Python and Perl are both (relativily) young languages that allow many degrees of freedom. Further examples would be ocaml, which is also quite dynamic.
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OTOH, seeing armed National Guard soldiers in public places certainly doesn't make me feel nervous. Now, if they were regular Army or Marines, I would certainly have a problem with it. There is a difference.
Did it occur to you that the idea of having National Guard soldiers in camo isn't for them to be hidden, but for them to be seen. Yes, green camo sticks out like a sore thumb; it's supposed to. The very visible extra security is there for at least two reasons:
- make traveling public less nervous
- provide some measure of deterrent.
Granted, the latter is not, by itself, going to stop folks as determined as those on 9-11, but it might well either cause less determined terrorists to decide to try again another day or, because of extra nervousness, cause them to make mistakes and be caught.It doen NOT beg any damn question. The claim may suggest a question, or raise a question or perhaps.
Does any-fucking-body know the meaning of "begging the question"? I don't believe I've heard correct use of the phrase even once in the past year.
</peeve>
A few months ago, I achieved a performance improvement on the order of 2x-3x just by eliminating needless String concat. I only made the changes because our app was bogging down quite badly under certain conditions. Profiling showed that farking huge numbers of Strings were being instantiated because of String concatinations in a section of code that, under said conditions, was run many times. Between the String creation, char array copying and garbage collection, the cycles were few and far between to get anything else done. After cleaning up the two worst sections of code, the app was consistantly responsive and, as an added bonus, total heap size was smaller. That wasn't the first time, either.
Moral of the story: Knuth was right. But that doesn't mean that optimization is never usefull.
Always remember, if you think you're getting something for free, you just haven't thought about it long enough. There's a cost for all things. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's a good thing. Just pointing it out.
As for the "incredible power" of religious fundamentalists, you over state greatly. I am concerned about some of the more reactionary groups. More accurately, I'm concerned about how easily said groups manage to herd significant numbers of people to mindless, irrational decisions.
As for that snide little comment, perhaps you should lower your fucking nose so that you can read my entire posting. I do agree, in great part, with the basic sentiment of the article. I love scewering religion; it's great sport. I do not, however, try to pass any such commentary off as "news".Part of the problem is my bizarre opinion that news should report the story, not color it. Perhaps if I knew the Observer better I would know if it said on the masthead "News from the left" or "News from a Liberal point of view". If the paper says so up front, even then I wouldn't have quite as much of a problem with the story. I would still prefer that the news was the news and that the color commentary were seperate, but at least then I would know for certain that I should read any news story from that paper with my Liberal spin detector turned up a notch. Note that I would feel the same way were the story to have a right spin on it, instead.
I'm an athiest. Well, more honestly I suppose you could call me an "apathetic agnostic"; I don't know if there's a God, and I really can't be troubled to care. None the less, shite like this served up as if it were a news story makes me want to vomit.
If it were clearly marked as an editorial piece, then fine; flame on. This, however, was clearly listed under "News". Reprehensable.
He posted yesterday to c.l.p.misc.
If you're referring to his conviction, his jail time was suspended, and, though I havent heard what the outcome was (or will be), his restitution sentence was sent back to a lower court for reconsideration. He was stupid, yes. But three felony counts was more stupid. IMHO, of course.
My guess would be that you are correct that currently aluminium is cheaper and easier to recycle. However, your comment "I would rather the manufacturer pay for it than my local co-op recycler" is a bit naieve. If the aluminum can is more expesive, they'll simply charge you more. That's not to say that, if the composite can is cheaper, they won't just scarf up the extra profit, mind you. If it is cheaper, it will allow them room to move the price down as necessary to encourage use of the new format, though. Once in a while that results in the price staying lower.
Or else he wouldn't have won.
Unless you are suggesting that he won because they were better votes? I suppose one could make that argument. ;)
Or were you confusing electoral votes (cast by Electors) with votes cast by citizens for a slate of Electors? If you were, perhaps you should consider educating yourself.
Um, the American people voted, and he received more electoral votes than his competitors?
If so, then I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on this point. No biggie whoop.
- All the cash in the world won't start a business if no one is willing to step up and do the work. That's just an excuse. Millions of people have found ways to bootstrap their businesses. If you have enough drive, you'll find the money if that's what you really need. As for skills, if college were the only way to get skills, we'd have fuck all for business in the US. Hell, by you're logic, I must not be able to make a living programming computers, since I didn't get a college degree. No way I could have learned the skills any other way.
- Labor can indeed create value. Of course, your examples aren't the best. All of those types of business can be done by one person. Not in the same way, and not at the same level of production, mind you. One person can farm a plot of land, such as specialty crops (herbs, heirloom vegetables, etc.) with the aid of machinery. One person can build a car. It'd be a custom, one off job, of course, but it's doable. With sufficient automation, it is conceivable that one person could even build vehicles in some volume. As for software, you'd be hard pressed to prove that the concept of a one-man software shop can't work; especially custom software.
As for a worker being worth the value of the goods and/or services they're producing, they are indeed. They are worth the value that the person buying those services are willing to pay for them. In the case of an employee of a firm, the "person" paying for the worker's services is the firm.Your example of worker-owned cooperatives is a nice one, except that they must be organized either as a) self-employed individuals who happen to work under the same name or b) an actual firm, that is incidentally owned by the workers. The firm still gets to decide what the workers get payed. In this case, it is a consensus between the workers. That's cool. And where there are groups of people who have the drive to start such a cooperative, cool. They have pretty much the same drive it takes to start any business.
Oddly enough, business shools, the local, State and Federal governments and the legal system agree with you. Only a few whiney little boys and girls on /. don't understand.
Many people who are self employed are not getting rich. Granted. Part of that is the tax structure (in the U.S.) that punishes people who have the drive and ambition to start a business.
But saying that any such operation "is not a business" is simply wrong. You would, in most cases, be correct in saying that thay are not "big business". Possibly even not "successfull business", though if they continue to operate at at least break-even (if the owner is paying himself a salery/wage) or small profit, I'd argue that they are, by definition, successfull.
No, I'm not trolling. I was simply pointing out a fact. A fact that you simply proved again for me. A business can exist as a sole proprietership.
As in all things, it's not the lack of skills. Skills can be learned. Face it: it's the lack of desire. The lack of drive.
I'm not knocking people who don't have that entrepreneurial drive; I've not started my own company yet (though I've made two abortive attempts). But I'm only worth what an employer is willing to pay. Note that I didn't specify my current employer. I'm free to try to find a better match; someone who values my particular skill set and persona more than my current employer. I'm not interested in doing so right now, because I already found an employer that treats me quite well, thank you very much.
Unforch, cool as it looks, the Zaurus doesn't solve my problem. I want a useable keyboard. IOW, I want to be able to type on it. A thumb-board, while better than nothing, doesn't quite get me there.
I was making a lame attempt at humor. I fscked up and submitted w/o previewing my post. That's all. Nothing to see here folks ... move along.
Item 1. should have read:
Lately, though, I find that my Palm Vx sits in its cradle most of the time. I still need the planner, but a palm-top is just too big a pain. I'm so keyboard-centered. I can use Graphiti just fine (faster than I can legibly write), but it is still to much of a shift.
For my next laptop I'm seriously considering an ultra-light such as the Fujitsu P2000 series. My previous laptop was a Sony Z505ls, and it was almost small and light enough. Too bad the base battery only lasted a hour and a half. Reguardless, something with the following features would be perfect for me:
Best fit I know of is the P2000 series. I think I could work with that. The Apple iBook is in the running, but all the samples I have examined have seemed cheap and fragile. Perhaps just perception. The keybards do have a lot of flex to them, though. Yuck. Also, sigle button "mouse" is a pain. (yes, I know I can define keys as mouse buttons. so what. when I'm using the pointer I want to use the pointer, not the keyboard, and vise versa)
Anyway, that's my take. I still like the Palm the best of all the PDAs I've tried, and I still go through stages where I use I quite a bit. Perhaps if it were even smaller and lighter, like the new ones.
I thought that XForms was pretty much moribund, mostly caused (IMHO) by the "only free for non-comercial use" license. It appears that I was wrong, though. In fact, it looks like the soon to be released 1.0 will be licensed under LGPL. Too bad about the name clash, though.
Old Byte mags (back when Ciarcia was writing for them) would rock, as well.
Hell, even old DDJ, back before it became the watered down dross it is today. It's still about the best left, but only because it doesn't really have competition, IMHO.
All of this is, obviously, somewhat subjective. The maturity of a language depends upon more than a simple count of years. By any measure, though, C is more mature than Python, Java more mature than C# and (I hope) we are more mature than this line of logic. I perhaps could have worded my comment better; I certainly should have proofed it more thoroughly. I guess I just mean that in the grand history of programming languages, Python and Perl5 (I consider it quite distinct from Perl are young.
In addition, Stroustrup was correct in saying that a language affects the ways you think about a problem. His language (C++) is certainly expressive, if terminally ugly and wart ridden.
In addition, I think that there are plenty of counter examples to your assertion. Python and Perl are both (relativily) young languages that allow many degrees of freedom. Further examples would be ocaml, which is also quite dynamic.