This is a completely baseless assertion. The constant may not be 4. Clustering may not be suitable in a specific situation. And you haven't remotely touched on reliability, support, or any other decision criteria-- many of which are far more important to TCO than initial purchase price of hardware and OS.
Hmmm. Hopefully you'll learn a little decorum while you're in school too, calling me names is not going to change my mind. Besides, that someone is or is not a moron does not affect the logical truth of their argument-- when you use that to discredit their argument, it's called an ad hominem attack. You may learn about it in Logic 101.
Hmmm. I'm not sure how easy it will be to program laying down. But GNU/Linux doesn't have any special languages that I'm aware of. C, C++, Perl, Python, Ruby, Lisp, Fortran, COBOL, BASIC, Java are all available on GNU/Linux (and I'm not even scratching the surface here). None of the serious computers in the world are running Visual Studio.NET, sorry. Many of the serious programs they run are written in COBOL, if you can believe that. Beyond that a lot of serious work is done in C or assembly. Your complaints are as spurious as they are rudely stated.
I didn't give you any shit about anything killing anything-- I'm far more aware of the history of computing than you are... I actually wrote my first program on a teletype machine, have you ever even seen one of those? I implied that unauthorized duplication of software is unethical. It is. Your puelling attempts to whine your way out of culpability can't change that. It's not life or death here, kid. This isn't like a father stealing food so he can feed his kids. If you have the money for a computer in the first place, there is no one "keeping you down" so that you need to copy software without permission. Get some fucking perspective, twerp.
Why set the cookie for such a short time? Do you really want to have to reset your preferences that often? I don't. Cookies are entirely under your control as a user though-- if you want to clean them out you can do it any time you like. Looking at the google cookie, the date looks suspiciously close to the date of the Unix version of the Y2K bug ("The next millenium headache"@Wired), so maybe the cookie programmer did it as a joke or it is somehow related to an integer used in the code that calculated the date for this field (which is why the epoch date in 2038 will be such fun) or something like that.
I think you are way over-worrying this thing. First of all, it is trivial to block cookies. Every major browser on the market gives a per server ability to accept/reject cookies. If you don't want Google to be able to track you accurately, don't accept their cookie. Once you've done that they can only go off your IP address.
If you have a modem, your IP address is mostly useless to them as it will change every time you dial in. If you have broadband this will be a little more useful to them since your IP address will change less frequently, if at all... but please realize that in this latter case, Google is not special. If you go to my web site or a thousand other web sites, your IP address and the parameters of your request will be logged. Most web servers work that way out of the box.
Finally, I have a hard time complaining about Google, when they provide several excellent services free of charge and do not require that you accept a cookie or javascript to use the site. They could easily charge a $10 annual fee (which I think a lot of us would pay) and then you'd not only need to accept a cookie, but they'd be able to attach it to your name and address.
While I agree that having to learn the map would be interesting it really isn't adding that much. There is already a lot of problem solving to do related to package weight, turn bidding, optimal path to destination, and how to cope with the other robots. I just wish they hadn't chosen a major US holiday weekend for this... I can't even think about finding the time to write an entry now.
You know, I think this whole "fire in a crowded theater" idiom is way overused in discussions about civil liberty. In fact, the more we talk about it, the more likely it seems that if there ever is a fire in a crowded theater, that yelling "fire" will likely lead to heckles and jeers and cries of "sit down and shut up!" rather than an orderly egress from the theater.
Let's see. Google is tracking what queries I make and storing that along with the IP address the request came from? And this is a problem? This is the default configuration for almost any web server you might install. It's called "logging" and is a standard practice.
Well, personally I don't find "weblog" any better than "blog"-- both are so vague that they approach uselessness. But a wiki is a fairly specific type of interface, basically turning the web from a read-only environment into a read-write environment. But a "weblog".... what is that? In the 9 years I've used the web, it seems like it could be just about anything.
I have. There is an "Ask Slashdot" about this same topic every month or two.
You do have to decide if you would rather have that particular job or if you like owning your thoughts when you are not at work. Personally I'd rather be a janitor than sign a contract that put my family snapshots, doodles, private email, and non-work-related programming efforts in jeopardy. The way some of these contracts are written that's not a far stretch. For 99% of all people, there is no reason at all for the company to have rights to any of your creative efforts that are explicitly created for work.
Hmm. Considering that I accepted a cookie, and that I post query strings to their server to do searches, I'd say there is no goddam way they are doing a dang thing to me "without [my] knowledge". I'm hardly a hypocrite for saying that if Microsoft provided the same exact service that Google provides I would gladly use it. But I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for your hypothetical case to come about, okay?
The odds of MS producing a free, no-Passport required, non-IE-compatible web search engine that doesn't artificially inflate the rankings of companies that pay them a lot of money are extremely low... but let me know when MS implements a search engine as cool as Google, and all they want to do is set an *anonymous* cookie, okay? I'll gladly use it-- especially if they throw in a web-wide image search and 20 years of Usenet history. Until then your statement is just a pointless barb based on the flawed assumption that Microsoft could or would provide a service like Google without pulling some typical MS BS behind the scenes.
Re:Cookie? What cookie?
on
Mr Anti-Google
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· Score: 2, Insightful
No kidding. As to the cookies: like some schmoe at Google really wants to sit down and follow my life history via my queries. And what will they do with it anyway, it's anonymous. I accepted their cookie to save preferences, but it's not like they know it's me personally. So at the best they will be able to connect the following queries: "ruby dbi", "emacs lisp", "annette bening", "minneapolis", and "regression analysis algorithm". BFD. We're all in a lot more danger from our ISPs who can log every packet we send and receive if they want to.
This software is not free as in beer, nor is it free as in speech. Your use of the word free here is inaccurate. The price of the software has been figured into the price of the drives or other Apple hardware when it is bundled with the hardware-- if Apple thought of the software as "free" in any sense of the word, they wouldn't care about this hack (whether it's a "patch" or a "crack" I am not interested in debating). As far as I can tell, this software is not available except as part of the purchase of an Apple SuperDrive. If it *is* available either for no-charge full download I apologize for the incorrect posting, but the only thing I'm finding is iDVD 2.1 for $20.
That's not what happened to tilly. The only law that applied in his case was contract law. He signed a contract that was overly generous to his employer in this regard. He says: I am a professional employee. I signed a routine employment contract while I was still pretty much of a novice as both a programmer and an employee.
The question is, how many of us have agreed to some similar contract without realizing it? My own "employment handbook" is quite large and I am regularly forced to "agree" to the terms laid out in that book by signing some form. Thankfully I've never found a section on "intelekshul prahpitty", because if they ever do sneak one in there, it'll have to respect my ownership of non-work-related ideas, or I'll have to strike it, or I'll have to quit.
Depends if his program is older than the day the DMCA was enacted. Ex post-facto. One of those little pesky things in the Constitution
This not true. His program is perfectly legal for him (if my understanding of the DMCA is clear) no matter when he made it. But even if he made it prior to the enactment of the DMCA, the act of sharing that device/program is now prohibited (assuming the DMCA does apply in this case). Unless he shared it prior to the DMCA he would definitely be breaking the law (again, assuming the device/program is actually prohibited under the DMCA, a separate question).
While the law can't take something you have already done and make it illegal and then prosecute you for that act. What the law can do is make an act-- even a passive act, like possessing certain pictures or the buds of a wild plant-- illegal. Then, while you can't be prosecuted for having done that in the past, you could be prosecuted for doing it now.
Both historically and now, I think the idea is that the financial incentive is what fosters innovation. So it's not so much one or the other, but that they are intertwined. Patents are still somewhat reasonable (although I agree that the pace of innovation in both medicine and high tech make 17 years seem like forever, we may see some slowdown in that pace in the future so a sudden change seems premature). Copyright, however, is out of control and hopefully after-the-fact extensions will be ruled unconstitutional. There is no way that grandchildren collecting royalties on something done by a guy who died 69 years ago is truly fostering new works.
Maybe not illegal for yourself, but you might be violating the DMCA by distributing a "circumvention device" if you gave the rest of us the code you used to do it.
I believe a simple "Here is the stuff in your order. Is this correct?" screen should take care of most of the "accidental" purchases that you describe. Have you ever worked in a convenience store? Did you know that it is one of the most dangerous professions there is? Those stores get held up all the time. These devices will cut down on danger to human life and loss from armed robbery.
I am certain any company with any sense will have a 1-800 number on such a machine that you can call if you have problems, either with the machine or with the merchandise.
My biggest concern is that it better not have a single customer interface, because that's a major bottleneck. I'm not going to want to stand in line behind some dillhole who can't work a wristwatch, let alone a big-ass vending machine.
Well, without any single clue what this person's reasons for considering those languages the best tools, we have no way to answer the question on the merits of the tools themselves. Almost every advantage is also a disadvantage in some situation. Therefore the only possible answer we can give is that in the general case, Perl can do those jobs as well as Python or PHP, but you can't do sysadmin work with PHP (that I know of) and you may not want to use Python for web work (although you might, in which case Python is a good candidate to replace PHP here)... but Perl does both, and does both well-- and that's a major advantage since it means you only have to learn, install, and support one language instead of two.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of Katz, what happened to him? He hasn't frontpaged an article here in almost two months!
This is a completely baseless assertion. The constant may not be 4. Clustering may not be suitable in a specific situation. And you haven't remotely touched on reliability, support, or any other decision criteria-- many of which are far more important to TCO than initial purchase price of hardware and OS.
Yes, but the trick is that you have to do it with a computer.
correction: that should read "puerile", not "puelling".
Hmmm. I'm not sure how easy it will be to program laying down. But GNU/Linux doesn't have any special languages that I'm aware of. C, C++, Perl, Python, Ruby, Lisp, Fortran, COBOL, BASIC, Java are all available on GNU/Linux (and I'm not even scratching the surface here). None of the serious computers in the world are running Visual Studio.NET, sorry. Many of the serious programs they run are written in COBOL, if you can believe that. Beyond that a lot of serious work is done in C or assembly. Your complaints are as spurious as they are rudely stated.
I didn't give you any shit about anything killing anything-- I'm far more aware of the history of computing than you are... I actually wrote my first program on a teletype machine, have you ever even seen one of those? I implied that unauthorized duplication of software is unethical. It is. Your puelling attempts to whine your way out of culpability can't change that. It's not life or death here, kid. This isn't like a father stealing food so he can feed his kids. If you have the money for a computer in the first place, there is no one "keeping you down" so that you need to copy software without permission. Get some fucking perspective, twerp.
Why set the cookie for such a short time? Do you really want to have to reset your preferences that often? I don't. Cookies are entirely under your control as a user though-- if you want to clean them out you can do it any time you like. Looking at the google cookie, the date looks suspiciously close to the date of the Unix version of the Y2K bug ("The next millenium headache"@Wired), so maybe the cookie programmer did it as a joke or it is somehow related to an integer used in the code that calculated the date for this field (which is why the epoch date in 2038 will be such fun) or something like that.
If you have a modem, your IP address is mostly useless to them as it will change every time you dial in. If you have broadband this will be a little more useful to them since your IP address will change less frequently, if at all... but please realize that in this latter case, Google is not special. If you go to my web site or a thousand other web sites, your IP address and the parameters of your request will be logged. Most web servers work that way out of the box.
Finally, I have a hard time complaining about Google, when they provide several excellent services free of charge and do not require that you accept a cookie or javascript to use the site. They could easily charge a $10 annual fee (which I think a lot of us would pay) and then you'd not only need to accept a cookie, but they'd be able to attach it to your name and address.
While I agree that having to learn the map would be interesting it really isn't adding that much. There is already a lot of problem solving to do related to package weight, turn bidding, optimal path to destination, and how to cope with the other robots. I just wish they hadn't chosen a major US holiday weekend for this... I can't even think about finding the time to write an entry now.
You know, I think this whole "fire in a crowded theater" idiom is way overused in discussions about civil liberty. In fact, the more we talk about it, the more likely it seems that if there ever is a fire in a crowded theater, that yelling "fire" will likely lead to heckles and jeers and cries of "sit down and shut up!" rather than an orderly egress from the theater.
Let's see. Google is tracking what queries I make and storing that along with the IP address the request came from? And this is a problem? This is the default configuration for almost any web server you might install. It's called "logging" and is a standard practice.
Well, personally I don't find "weblog" any better than "blog"-- both are so vague that they approach uselessness. But a wiki is a fairly specific type of interface, basically turning the web from a read-only environment into a read-write environment. But a "weblog".... what is that? In the 9 years I've used the web, it seems like it could be just about anything.
Hopefully by then you'll stop making lame excuses for clearly unethical behavior, too.
er, that should be not explicitly.
You do have to decide if you would rather have that particular job or if you like owning your thoughts when you are not at work. Personally I'd rather be a janitor than sign a contract that put my family snapshots, doodles, private email, and non-work-related programming efforts in jeopardy. The way some of these contracts are written that's not a far stretch. For 99% of all people, there is no reason at all for the company to have rights to any of your creative efforts that are explicitly created for work.
Hmm. Considering that I accepted a cookie, and that I post query strings to their server to do searches, I'd say there is no goddam way they are doing a dang thing to me "without [my] knowledge". I'm hardly a hypocrite for saying that if Microsoft provided the same exact service that Google provides I would gladly use it. But I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for your hypothetical case to come about, okay?
The odds of MS producing a free, no-Passport required, non-IE-compatible web search engine that doesn't artificially inflate the rankings of companies that pay them a lot of money are extremely low... but let me know when MS implements a search engine as cool as Google, and all they want to do is set an *anonymous* cookie, okay? I'll gladly use it-- especially if they throw in a web-wide image search and 20 years of Usenet history. Until then your statement is just a pointless barb based on the flawed assumption that Microsoft could or would provide a service like Google without pulling some typical MS BS behind the scenes.
No kidding. As to the cookies: like some schmoe at Google really wants to sit down and follow my life history via my queries. And what will they do with it anyway, it's anonymous. I accepted their cookie to save preferences, but it's not like they know it's me personally. So at the best they will be able to connect the following queries: "ruby dbi", "emacs lisp", "annette bening", "minneapolis", and "regression analysis algorithm". BFD. We're all in a lot more danger from our ISPs who can log every packet we send and receive if they want to.
This software is not free as in beer, nor is it free as in speech. Your use of the word free here is inaccurate. The price of the software has been figured into the price of the drives or other Apple hardware when it is bundled with the hardware-- if Apple thought of the software as "free" in any sense of the word, they wouldn't care about this hack (whether it's a "patch" or a "crack" I am not interested in debating). As far as I can tell, this software is not available except as part of the purchase of an Apple SuperDrive. If it *is* available either for no-charge full download I apologize for the incorrect posting, but the only thing I'm finding is iDVD 2.1 for $20.
apt-get install cron-apt. Your problems are over.
The question is, how many of us have agreed to some similar contract without realizing it? My own "employment handbook" is quite large and I am regularly forced to "agree" to the terms laid out in that book by signing some form. Thankfully I've never found a section on "intelekshul prahpitty", because if they ever do sneak one in there, it'll have to respect my ownership of non-work-related ideas, or I'll have to strike it, or I'll have to quit.
This not true. His program is perfectly legal for him (if my understanding of the DMCA is clear) no matter when he made it. But even if he made it prior to the enactment of the DMCA, the act of sharing that device/program is now prohibited (assuming the DMCA does apply in this case). Unless he shared it prior to the DMCA he would definitely be breaking the law (again, assuming the device/program is actually prohibited under the DMCA, a separate question).
While the law can't take something you have already done and make it illegal and then prosecute you for that act. What the law can do is make an act-- even a passive act, like possessing certain pictures or the buds of a wild plant-- illegal. Then, while you can't be prosecuted for having done that in the past, you could be prosecuted for doing it now.
Both historically and now, I think the idea is that the financial incentive is what fosters innovation. So it's not so much one or the other, but that they are intertwined. Patents are still somewhat reasonable (although I agree that the pace of innovation in both medicine and high tech make 17 years seem like forever, we may see some slowdown in that pace in the future so a sudden change seems premature). Copyright, however, is out of control and hopefully after-the-fact extensions will be ruled unconstitutional. There is no way that grandchildren collecting royalties on something done by a guy who died 69 years ago is truly fostering new works.
Maybe not illegal for yourself, but you might be violating the DMCA by distributing a "circumvention device" if you gave the rest of us the code you used to do it.
I am certain any company with any sense will have a 1-800 number on such a machine that you can call if you have problems, either with the machine or with the merchandise.
My biggest concern is that it better not have a single customer interface, because that's a major bottleneck. I'm not going to want to stand in line behind some dillhole who can't work a wristwatch, let alone a big-ass vending machine.
Well, without any single clue what this person's reasons for considering those languages the best tools, we have no way to answer the question on the merits of the tools themselves. Almost every advantage is also a disadvantage in some situation. Therefore the only possible answer we can give is that in the general case, Perl can do those jobs as well as Python or PHP, but you can't do sysadmin work with PHP (that I know of) and you may not want to use Python for web work (although you might, in which case Python is a good candidate to replace PHP here)... but Perl does both, and does both well-- and that's a major advantage since it means you only have to learn, install, and support one language instead of two.