Shoddy business practices, nerve-wracking battles with the Control Panel (I'd much rather deal with/etc thank you) and a long history of instability crises. That and UNIXish environments are much more conducive to development work, I find.
I do know that WinXP is much less crash prone than stuff I was using years ago, before I made the switch, but I just use what works. GNU/Linux is a pretty good power user's desktop platform. And of course, the price is right.
There is method to the madness, which you probably would've caught onto if you had been paying attention.
Every level has its own context of directories: bin, sbin, lib, etc, share, et al. The breakdown (ideally) is something like this:
/ - absolutely necessary system-level stuff, like the shell should be in/bin, so that it can be run even if other partitions fail to mount. The "bare essentials" of the system are at this level./usr - stuff the distro puts there./usr/local - stuff the individual system administrator puts there.
Of course,./configure scripts allow you to explicitly specify which of these levels to install into upon compilation with the --prefix. It's an interesting idea to give every single application it's own --prefix, but it means that your PATH variable has to be ridiculously long. To solve this you might put symlinks into/usr/bin or whatever, but then we're back to the original problem and you might as well just run a decent package management system.
Setting a variable and "BREAK"'ing, or better yet, having this within a separate procedure and returning an error code. GOTO just makes code hard to read and harder to debug.
While I hated it when I was in high school (mostly because I had a programming background), Turing, developed by Holt Software, is a pretty neat pascal-derivative language. It enforces good style in that there is no "goto" statement, a big problem with BASIC. Plus it has a lot of fun graphics mode routines like drawfillmapleleaf() for wasting classroom time... I mean... studying!
It's got a fairly decent IDE with syntax highlighting and the like, and even a compiler should you want to redistribute your dinky little maple leaf assassins. There was also an Object-Oriented Turing (OOT) available, but once you're into OO I'd say you should move to a real language like Java.
Teaching someone BASIC is a betrayal. As Edsger Dijkstra once put it, "It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
Even if she's not going to ever need to learn proper style, better to teach her nothing than to have her learn BASIC.
I donate my CPU cycles to art. Electric Sheep users are constantly rendering beautiful abstract video art, and getting treated to the latest generations as their screensaver.
No amount of explanation will fix that stupid idea.
According to you, and that's not the point. You don't go to a class and tell the professor he's full of shit when you haven't read the required reading for the course. You don't dispute something without a clear idea of what's being said.
It's not the fact that you disagree (heck, I disagree with some of it), but that you disagree without knowing what you're disagreeing with, exactly. As far as I'm concerned, you're just another/. forum monkey with nothing better than to do than post ill-informed knee-jerk reactions.
I know this. I am a subscriber, as evidenced by the star next to my name. As are you, as evidenced by the star next to your name. The parent of this thread does not have a star. Hence, my conclusion that he did not read the article before posting.
This is somewhat true, but I wouldn't say we've quite reached the point where we can remove ourselves from the nitty-gritty. For anything remotely time critical, using quasi-interpreted languages like Java is foolish.
Moore's Law has been breaking down for quite some time now. If computing resources were as abundant as your camp would like us to believe, we wouldn't have so many people working hard on optimizing compilers - generating good machine code so you don't have to.
This is incredibly stupid. How come XML helps in dealing with data and metadata? Metadata *is* data.
Just an observation. This comment was literally posted 2 minutes after the story went live on/. - thus there's absolutely no way in hell you've read the paper and already you're trashing it. How mature.
Let's not forget that John Nash himself (the fellow upon which A Beautiful Mind was based) has not used medication for quite some time in his fight against his mental illness. This obviously isn't an easy road on which to walk, and I'm sure he struggles with it, but it demonstrates a powerful point that in some cases, mental illness can be overcome without anti-psychotics. This sort of approach doubtlessly requires an extraordinary amount of discipline and will-power on behalf of the patient; the support of friends and family would prove invaluable as well.
I do agree that the psychiatric community sometimes seems overly concerned with "medicating" the patient rather than helping the patient. On the other hand, sometimes medication (despite its drawbacks; I know them well, having a long history with anti-depressant medication) is the only viable solution.
The important thing, then, is firstly and foremostly the diagnosis and acknowledgement of the illness. From there, the patient with the assistance of medical personnel can decide what to do about it.
JavaScript vs. C, that's like... fire vs. frying pan. Honestly, who the hell in their right mind would use JavaScript for more than the occasional form validator?
Linux can be pretty great under Mom & Pop situations. A friend of mine's parents use it, in fact they like it better.
I think the real point of the matter is missed by you, and so many others. BUY DECENT HARDWARE. If you're going to use Linux, buy hardware that you know is supported. The Hardware Compatibility List is comprehensive and up to date, for just about everything. My Audigy 2 doesn't work flawlessly, but I knew that when I bought it. If you're going to by a computer with whatever crap parts some OEM vendor gives you, you deserve what you get. My Intel onboard Gigabit Ethernet doesn't work either, but I got the board for nothing, so I'm not complaining.
For the past 5 or 6 years, getting my sound working has been as simple as "modprobe emu10k1". Get a life.
... considering reception on most Centrino laptops I've encountered is garbage compared to what I get on my iBook (my favourite incident was when the local Microsoft evangelist would have Windows bluescreen on him whenever a wireless network was detected - GO CENTRINO!:D)
The University of Toronto is doing fairly well, considering the hugeness of the campus. Here for more info.
I submitted this story yesterday, in fact before the CBC was even covering it, citing CTV's coverage of the same story.
The point that a lot of people seem to miss when I tell them about this is that it's not about whether or not you're cheating, it's a matter of a university presuming your guilt. I know that when I submit work I've put my heart and soul into it, and I don't appreciate being treated like a criminal. Furthermore, I don't want people making money off of MY work unless I get paid dividends for it (and I consent to it in the first place). The vast majority of students are not "cheaters", and these sorts of systems generate all sorts of false-positives. "Better to let 10 murderers go free than to crucify one innocent person."
People who say "Well I don't care because I don't plagiarize" are missing the point entirely.
It'd be hard to port because there's really only one set of hardware that OSX currently has to support: Apple hardware. There are more cards that do the same fscking thing on the x86 than you can shake a stick at. Drivers, drivers, more drivers. Also, I can't see Apple pushing this too hard - they'd lose money on the hardware they're not selling.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. SpamAssassin will do the trick.
Shoddy business practices, nerve-wracking battles with the Control Panel (I'd much rather deal with /etc thank you) and a long history of instability crises. That and UNIXish environments are much more conducive to development work, I find.
I do know that WinXP is much less crash prone than stuff I was using years ago, before I made the switch, but I just use what works. GNU/Linux is a pretty good power user's desktop platform. And of course, the price is right.
There is method to the madness, which you probably would've caught onto if you had been paying attention.
/bin, so that it can be run even if other partitions fail to mount. The "bare essentials" of the system are at this level. /usr - stuff the distro puts there. /usr/local - stuff the individual system administrator puts there.
./configure scripts allow you to explicitly specify which of these levels to install into upon compilation with the --prefix. It's an interesting idea to give every single application it's own --prefix, but it means that your PATH variable has to be ridiculously long. To solve this you might put symlinks into /usr/bin or whatever, but then we're back to the original problem and you might as well just run a decent package management system.
Every level has its own context of directories: bin, sbin, lib, etc, share, et al. The breakdown (ideally) is something like this:
/ - absolutely necessary system-level stuff, like the shell should be in
Of course,
Setting a variable and "BREAK"'ing, or better yet, having this within a separate procedure and returning an error code. GOTO just makes code hard to read and harder to debug.
While I hated it when I was in high school (mostly because I had a programming background), Turing, developed by Holt Software, is a pretty neat pascal-derivative language. It enforces good style in that there is no "goto" statement, a big problem with BASIC. Plus it has a lot of fun graphics mode routines like drawfillmapleleaf() for wasting classroom time... I mean... studying!
It's got a fairly decent IDE with syntax highlighting and the like, and even a compiler should you want to redistribute your dinky little maple leaf assassins. There was also an Object-Oriented Turing (OOT) available, but once you're into OO I'd say you should move to a real language like Java.
Teaching someone BASIC is a betrayal. As Edsger Dijkstra once put it, "It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
Even if she's not going to ever need to learn proper style, better to teach her nothing than to have her learn BASIC.
I donate my CPU cycles to art. Electric Sheep users are constantly rendering beautiful abstract video art, and getting treated to the latest generations as their screensaver.
No amount of explanation will fix that stupid idea.
/. forum monkey with nothing better than to do than post ill-informed knee-jerk reactions.
According to you, and that's not the point. You don't go to a class and tell the professor he's full of shit when you haven't read the required reading for the course. You don't dispute something without a clear idea of what's being said.
It's not the fact that you disagree (heck, I disagree with some of it), but that you disagree without knowing what you're disagreeing with, exactly. As far as I'm concerned, you're just another
I know this. I am a subscriber, as evidenced by the star next to my name. As are you, as evidenced by the star next to your name. The parent of this thread does not have a star. Hence, my conclusion that he did not read the article before posting.
This is somewhat true, but I wouldn't say we've quite reached the point where we can remove ourselves from the nitty-gritty. For anything remotely time critical, using quasi-interpreted languages like Java is foolish.
Moore's Law has been breaking down for quite some time now. If computing resources were as abundant as your camp would like us to believe, we wouldn't have so many people working hard on optimizing compilers - generating good machine code so you don't have to.
I second that.
Need some of those too...
This is incredibly stupid. How come XML helps in dealing with data and metadata? Metadata *is* data.
/. - thus there's absolutely no way in hell you've read the paper and already you're trashing it. How mature.
Just an observation. This comment was literally posted 2 minutes after the story went live on
The document is mirrored here to help compensate for the bandwidth deluge.
Let's not forget that John Nash himself (the fellow upon which A Beautiful Mind was based) has not used medication for quite some time in his fight against his mental illness. This obviously isn't an easy road on which to walk, and I'm sure he struggles with it, but it demonstrates a powerful point that in some cases, mental illness can be overcome without anti-psychotics. This sort of approach doubtlessly requires an extraordinary amount of discipline and will-power on behalf of the patient; the support of friends and family would prove invaluable as well.
I do agree that the psychiatric community sometimes seems overly concerned with "medicating" the patient rather than helping the patient. On the other hand, sometimes medication (despite its drawbacks; I know them well, having a long history with anti-depressant medication) is the only viable solution.
The important thing, then, is firstly and foremostly the diagnosis and acknowledgement of the illness. From there, the patient with the assistance of medical personnel can decide what to do about it.
JavaScript vs. C, that's like... fire vs. frying pan. Honestly, who the hell in their right mind would use JavaScript for more than the occasional form validator?
Linux can be pretty great under Mom & Pop situations. A friend of mine's parents use it, in fact they like it better.
I think the real point of the matter is missed by you, and so many others. BUY DECENT HARDWARE. If you're going to use Linux, buy hardware that you know is supported. The Hardware Compatibility List is comprehensive and up to date, for just about everything. My Audigy 2 doesn't work flawlessly, but I knew that when I bought it. If you're going to by a computer with whatever crap parts some OEM vendor gives you, you deserve what you get. My Intel onboard Gigabit Ethernet doesn't work either, but I got the board for nothing, so I'm not complaining.
For the past 5 or 6 years, getting my sound working has been as simple as "modprobe emu10k1". Get a life.
... considering reception on most Centrino laptops I've encountered is garbage compared to what I get on my iBook (my favourite incident was when the local Microsoft evangelist would have Windows bluescreen on him whenever a wireless network was detected - GO CENTRINO! :D)
The University of Toronto is doing fairly well, considering the hugeness of the campus. Here for more info.
Is "Start Me Up" by the Rolling Stones up for download? That'd bring the whole MS circle of crap to a sort of cosmic finality. :)
I submitted this story yesterday, in fact before the CBC was even covering it, citing CTV's coverage of the same story.
The point that a lot of people seem to miss when I tell them about this is that it's not about whether or not you're cheating, it's a matter of a university presuming your guilt. I know that when I submit work I've put my heart and soul into it, and I don't appreciate being treated like a criminal. Furthermore, I don't want people making money off of MY work unless I get paid dividends for it (and I consent to it in the first place). The vast majority of students are not "cheaters", and these sorts of systems generate all sorts of false-positives. "Better to let 10 murderers go free than to crucify one innocent person."
People who say "Well I don't care because I don't plagiarize" are missing the point entirely.
More like $200 off $1500 (iBook G4, here in Canada).
That's the kind of student discount I'm talking about.
It'd be hard to port because there's really only one set of hardware that OSX currently has to support: Apple hardware. There are more cards that do the same fscking thing on the x86 than you can shake a stick at. Drivers, drivers, more drivers. Also, I can't see Apple pushing this too hard - they'd lose money on the hardware they're not selling.
Or do without saying "didn't you get the memo?" once a day. Scandalous!
That sure didn't stop the folks over at KDevelop.
Just a thought - you might try e-mailing those in charge of the port and asking them? ;)
No, they really don't, since KWord can't read MS Word properly, and most people still use MS Word, they're happy.