Does it make any sense to say all the useful GUI programs have been written? The GUI is just a method of interaction. Having to design for a command-line interface encourages model-view-controller design. IMO, a proper application can be run interactively, through config files and a command-line, or as an API from another program.
First, don't attribute a columnist's piece to the newspaper. Second, John Naughton praises wikipedia for what it could be more than what it is right now. He's excited about it as a proof-of-concept.
No it ain't dead.
on
The VHS is Dead
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I've rented so many scratched DVDs that at this point I rent the VHS tape before I rent the DVD.
Re:Save Social Security - Have More Kids!
on
The Jobs Crunch
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· Score: 1
Good luck with all that. But the last few thousands of years of history suggests that no matter how hard parents, rulers, educators, or anyone else like you try to keep their the next generation safe from corrupting influences, a non-trivial minority always rejects all that dogma and seeks it out.
How about creating a society that doesn't need everyone to believe the same way? Where everyone is raised with a healthy dose of skepticism toward everything? Would that be so awful? How terrified are of you of having to admit that maybe we don't know all the answers?
If you don't want to keep making that annual $60 donation, that's ok, but you shouldn't act as if you got ripped off.
You seem to consider the fact that Mandrake is going with.torrents rather than FTP as a personal insult. I'm different; I would prefer that Mandrake spends as little money as possible on bandwidth charges and as much as possible on development. Every time Mandrake has set up FTP servers restricted to club members, they get rewarded with people giving away userids and passwords on #mandrake and then their sites get pounded. So now they switch to Bittorrent, and now you'll have to wait at most a few days to get your ISOs, and they save serious cash.
The Mandrake Club idea has always advertised itself as primarilly a way for people to give something back to Mandrake. The other perks are just gravy. The point behind RPM voting is to give the volunteer packagers an idea of what people want. Mandrake doesn't employ a packager to just watch the voting section all day and make packages.
I doubt I'll be able to convince you to seeing things my way, but I believe there's a difference in the way that open-source developers borrow ideas from eachother and the way that closed-source developers would work on competing products.
If a KDE developer likes a GNOME feature, she can read about how it works or even ask the author to explain it. If the feature is built on some very clever hack that took six months of work to complete, she can just grab the results of that labor for free. Now, if MS Word has that same feature, and Wordperfect wants to implement it also, they've got to do their own R&D. That's where the redundancy comes in. The same clever hack has to be researched twice.
In terms of how open-source projects often emulate closed-source projects, there is a redundancy. But that's not inherent to open-source; the redundancy is because mozilla, for example, can't look at the guts of IE to see how to pull off some HTML rendering code, so they have to figure everything out themselves.
I hoped to read a new argument in the debate, but this guy is making the same tired arguments we've all heard ever since Free software started. My response: as long as people want to do something new with computers, they'll have to hire programmers to write that new application. Free and open-source software helps us avoid duplicating efforts, and it makes us all more productive.
I'll keep my eye out for those other fine products. "Red Stripe for men" sounds very macho. Is the Red Stripe I'm drinking now somehow not a man's lager?
Those poor limey bastards probably had to use a fire extinguisher after the/.ing.
If I hadn't just finished my Red Stripe, thus rendering myself incapable of doing any work for the night, I would create a.torrent myself for the site. Maybe some other noble soul will, before the mirrors are all smoked also?
My genetic algorithm has evolved to the point where it goes on dates with two women on the same night, plays golf with the boss, and gets coffee from the foxy chick at Starbucks because they had a fling after the Phish show last October.
Now if only I can get it to dump its ruleset into ASCII format...
Fedora is Red Hat minus the Red Hat corporate backing, which is really the main reason for using Red Hat. Mandrake has a better installer and urpmi has been used for years now. Mandrake is completely agnostic about which window manager you can use. The Mandrake Control Center rawks and covers 99% of the typical user's needs. And Mandrake has been down with BitTorrent since before it was cool.
There's a.torrent link for the Windows Installer lower on this page. I used it, but before I install, I'd like to be able to verify the package with md5sum or some other tool, but I can't find md5sums posted anywhere on the mozilla site.
BitTorrent is great, but it seems like a malicious user could fake out a lot of people by releasing a.torrent that points out at something completely different.
The thing that jumped out at me the most when I read the books was every use of the Gregorian calendar. This is middle Earth, not medieval Europe, so there would be no "October" because there never was a Roman Emperor named Octavius.
Tolkien was a linguist; he had to be aware of the etymology of the words he used. Maybe he decided that unless he wanted to create a new vocabulary to write his stories in, he would just accept the inaccuracy.
The fact that the Hubble telescope is being abandoned so that NASA can focus on manned trips to Mars is a @#$@#$ing tragedy. The HST's main flaw was that it didn't have the public appeal. We're giving up a good scientific tool in order to divert funding to some seriously nonsensical crap.
Getting up2date to work through a tight firewall with multiple proxies was a huge hassle. The fact that Red Hat intentionally makes installing new packages and updates difficult (without up2date) has always turned me off. They want to protect their revenue stream, so they don't make it easy to mirror everything locally to do lots of updates to different machines behind a firewall.
I'm sure I'm not the only person that loses goodwill when I have to explain to my boss why he has to write another check for something he thinks he already bought. I suspect that this move will lead to a hell of a lot of unpatched Red Hat 9 boxes sitting around after April 1st. Red Hat has made it difficult to keep boxes secure by charging for updates. Savvy sysadmins have already installed apt-for-rpm, or something similar, but Windows shops that tried out Linux for fun are going to feel burned.
Anyway, I lobbied for Mandrake at the beginning, but the PHB wanted something he had heard about. But I think I can use the specture of us needing to pay for the top corporate up2date subscription as a way to argue for Mandrake. 9.2, here I come.
PHP appealed to a lot of people because it was very simple and had limited syntax and didn't implement a lot of complicated data types. PHP was the kind of thing a non-programmer could learn in an afternoon. You didn't need to explain regular expressions, object-oriented design, or pointers/references. PHP originally just had loops, conditional statements, simple functions, and include statements.
But every version has added on more features. Now instead of a smooth and light templating language, people are now writing templating languages to be parsed by PHP. Gahh! The proper response to all the trolls that insult PHP by saying that it isn't a real language is not "Wait until version 5! It supports class introspection!" Instead, the PHP community should have said that PHP wasn't meant to be a "real" language.
Now that PHP requires a 1000-page book, why should it exist? Why not use Perl, or Python, or C?
I will say that the PHP community is a very friendly and helpful group of people. Perhaps that is because so many PHP developers were previously graphic designers, and so they still remember how daunting programming can be to learn.
I bought a few of the bionicles because they had some new pieces like ball-and-socket joints and lots of gears. The problem was that until you accumulate several kits, you're pretty limited. The typical kits has enough to build exactly one freaky alien warrior: two arms, two legs, a trunk, and a head. There's just not that much you can do when the pieces are so specialized.
After getting several kits, though, then I could come up with more designs, like centipede monsters, etc, but I still felt constrained by how specialized the pieces were. It's hard to figure out an alternate use for the little brain piece that only connects with one other piece, for example The ball-socket joints and the gears were a nice addition though.
Anyway, I'm glad to see legos returning to the original free-form ideal rather than becoming a glorified action-figure maker.
Also reviewed on k5.
on
Oryx and Crake
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· Score: 3, Informative
I wrote this review of Oryx and Crake for k5 back in June of 2003. In a lot of Margaret Atwood's stuff, there's a theme where people try to understand/make peace with some inexplicable tragedy. At the end of Oryx and Crake, I felt like it wasn't clear why Crake decided to wipe out humanity; that may have been Atwood's intention.
Anyway, I'm happy to see something besides Flash Gordon science fiction getting reviews here.
You're right: correlation does not prove causation. But the other part of the scientific method is that we use correlation to verify a hypothesis about causation. Correlation studies that may lend creedence to a theory are often the only way to do longitudinal medical research. Are you going to volunteer to spend he next 20 years in a perfectly-controlled lab?
RedHat finally realized that most IT departments don't like upgrading every 9 months to the next batch of bleeding-edge sofware. Enterprise linux focuses on stability and has an 18-month release cycle.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just curious
Does it make any sense to say all the useful GUI programs have been written? The GUI is just a method of interaction. Having to design for a command-line interface encourages model-view-controller design. IMO, a proper application can be run interactively, through config files and a command-line, or as an API from another program.
First, don't attribute a columnist's piece to the newspaper. Second, John Naughton praises wikipedia for what it could be more than what it is right now. He's excited about it as a proof-of-concept.
Try here to get a copy from the Coral network.
I've rented so many scratched DVDs that at this point I rent the VHS tape before I rent the DVD.
Good luck with all that. But the last few thousands of years of history suggests that no matter how hard parents, rulers, educators, or anyone else like you try to keep their the next generation safe from corrupting influences, a non-trivial minority always rejects all that dogma and seeks it out.
How about creating a society that doesn't need everyone to believe the same way? Where everyone is raised with a healthy dose of skepticism toward everything? Would that be so awful? How terrified are of you of having to admit that maybe we don't know all the answers?
Santa ain't real.
If you can run python, you can ipcheck.
You seem to consider the fact that Mandrake is going with .torrents rather than FTP as a personal insult. I'm different; I would prefer that Mandrake spends as little money as possible on bandwidth charges and as much as possible on development. Every time Mandrake has set up FTP servers restricted to club members, they get rewarded with people giving away userids and passwords on #mandrake and then their sites get pounded. So now they switch to Bittorrent, and now you'll have to wait at most a few days to get your ISOs, and they save serious cash.
The Mandrake Club idea has always advertised itself as primarilly a way for people to give something back to Mandrake. The other perks are just gravy. The point behind RPM voting is to give the volunteer packagers an idea of what people want. Mandrake doesn't employ a packager to just watch the voting section all day and make packages.
If a KDE developer likes a GNOME feature, she can read about how it works or even ask the author to explain it. If the feature is built on some very clever hack that took six months of work to complete, she can just grab the results of that labor for free. Now, if MS Word has that same feature, and Wordperfect wants to implement it also, they've got to do their own R&D. That's where the redundancy comes in. The same clever hack has to be researched twice.
In terms of how open-source projects often emulate closed-source projects, there is a redundancy. But that's not inherent to open-source; the redundancy is because mozilla, for example, can't look at the guts of IE to see how to pull off some HTML rendering code, so they have to figure everything out themselves.
I hoped to read a new argument in the debate, but this guy is making the same tired arguments we've all heard ever since Free software started. My response: as long as people want to do something new with computers, they'll have to hire programmers to write that new application. Free and open-source software helps us avoid duplicating efforts, and it makes us all more productive.
I'll keep my eye out for those other fine products. "Red Stripe for men" sounds very macho. Is the Red Stripe I'm drinking now somehow not a man's lager?
If I hadn't just finished my Red Stripe, thus rendering myself incapable of doing any work for the night, I would create a .torrent myself for the site. Maybe some other noble soul will, before the mirrors are all smoked also?
Now if only I can get it to dump its ruleset into ASCII format...
Fedora is Red Hat minus the Red Hat corporate backing, which is really the main reason for using Red Hat. Mandrake has a better installer and urpmi has been used for years now. Mandrake is completely agnostic about which window manager you can use. The Mandrake Control Center rawks and covers 99% of the typical user's needs. And Mandrake has been down with BitTorrent since before it was cool.
BitTorrent is great, but it seems like a malicious user could fake out a lot of people by releasing a .torrent that points out at something completely different.
Tolkien was a linguist; he had to be aware of the etymology of the words he used. Maybe he decided that unless he wanted to create a new vocabulary to write his stories in, he would just accept the inaccuracy.
The fact that the Hubble telescope is being abandoned so that NASA can focus on manned trips to Mars is a @#$@#$ing tragedy. The HST's main flaw was that it didn't have the public appeal. We're giving up a good scientific tool in order to divert funding to some seriously nonsensical crap.
Your girlfriend is brilliant.
I'm sure I'm not the only person that loses goodwill when I have to explain to my boss why he has to write another check for something he thinks he already bought. I suspect that this move will lead to a hell of a lot of unpatched Red Hat 9 boxes sitting around after April 1st. Red Hat has made it difficult to keep boxes secure by charging for updates. Savvy sysadmins have already installed apt-for-rpm, or something similar, but Windows shops that tried out Linux for fun are going to feel burned.
Anyway, I lobbied for Mandrake at the beginning, but the PHB wanted something he had heard about. But I think I can use the specture of us needing to pay for the top corporate up2date subscription as a way to argue for Mandrake. 9.2, here I come.
But every version has added on more features. Now instead of a smooth and light templating language, people are now writing templating languages to be parsed by PHP. Gahh! The proper response to all the trolls that insult PHP by saying that it isn't a real language is not "Wait until version 5! It supports class introspection!" Instead, the PHP community should have said that PHP wasn't meant to be a "real" language.
Now that PHP requires a 1000-page book, why should it exist? Why not use Perl, or Python, or C?
I will say that the PHP community is a very friendly and helpful group of people. Perhaps that is because so many PHP developers were previously graphic designers, and so they still remember how daunting programming can be to learn.
After getting several kits, though, then I could come up with more designs, like centipede monsters, etc, but I still felt constrained by how specialized the pieces were. It's hard to figure out an alternate use for the little brain piece that only connects with one other piece, for example The ball-socket joints and the gears were a nice addition though.
Anyway, I'm glad to see legos returning to the original free-form ideal rather than becoming a glorified action-figure maker.
Anyway, I'm happy to see something besides Flash Gordon science fiction getting reviews here.
You're right: correlation does not prove causation. But the other part of the scientific method is that we use correlation to verify a hypothesis about causation. Correlation studies that may lend creedence to a theory are often the only way to do longitudinal medical research. Are you going to volunteer to spend he next 20 years in a perfectly-controlled lab?
I'm not certain, but I think that he's called "Gollum" because he makes a coughing/swallowing sound that sounds like he's saying "gollum."
RedHat finally realized that most IT departments don't like upgrading every 9 months to the next batch of bleeding-edge sofware. Enterprise linux focuses on stability and has an 18-month release cycle.