Using of the alternatives is normally not an option because of interoperability.
This is interesting - are you saying that pirated versions of Windows are the defacto standard OS in your country? And people keep on pirating Windows because of interoperability issues?
If this is the case, the whole country would probably benefit from a piracy crackdown, as it would force everyone to switch away from proprietary standards to a more economically sustainable model.
Hell, the media of the neighbour state called Gates "the father of the Internet"!
That makes me want to throw up. My father was a program manager at DARPA, and knew Larry Roberts personally.
In any case, I think the case for studying design patterns is a bit weaker than that for algorithms which has stood the test of time.
Given that most modern programming environments come with facilities that implement many if not most of the commonly used algorithms in very carefully optimized form, yet do not contain similar pre-cast design patterns I am not so sure that a programmer would benefit more from studying algorithms than design patterns.
I guess I'd say that it depends on the nature of the task at hand. If you are writing a database, then clearly a strong knowledge of algorithms is critical. But if you are putting together an e-commerce web site that is backed by a pre-existing database, then I think that the there is more to be gained from an understanding of design patterns than algorithms.
We rightly give the police tremendous leeway to detain suspects, confiscate goods and enter property. When this power is used on behalf of one party of a contract, it's very unfair. It's a dangerous extension of state and corporate power vs. the rights of individuals.
Last time I looked the court was just as much an extension of the state as the police. The court has as much, if not more power to order the seizure and search of property.
Software can be copied infinatly with no extra cost.
Yes, but the cost to write the code can be millions of dollars. Unless you have some mechanism to recover the cost of writing the software, the programmer is going to find another line of work and you won't get any more software.
Human societies the world over have emerged from the caves by their ability and willingness to share information freely, and use this information to better their lives.
This is totally against known history. Even mythological sources from the dawn of civilization embrace the concept of not sharing information. Why do you think Vulcan and Waylan are lame? It's so they can't leave their place of employment and share trade secrets with competitors.
Face it, from the early days of the caves survival often depended on an advantage over the neighbors - and that advantage was often in the form of information - where the best water source was, how to make the best bowstring, etc.
Human society coexisted with a nature red in tooth and claw. Intellectual property was often a life or death matter in an environment where nothing was abundant.
The notion of 'ownable intellectual property' was an artificial construct used initially to protect the incomes of publishers (who faced the large costs of typesetting and production),
Again totally ignoring actual history. The concept of intellectual property related to written works arose during Greek times in order to preserve the claim of origin by the original author. The first copyright law "Statute of Anne" arose with the spread of the printing press to codify what was common law long before the printing press was common. This law was designed to prevent piracy since the wide availability of the press made it easy to print something without the author's permission. If you take the time to read the Statute of Anne you will see that the fact of the matter is that copyrights were originally designed to protect authors - and it is still true today.
Do you think Sony would pay one nickel to any musician is they didn't have to???
Is LoTR the best movie ever made? I wish I could tell as I carry so much baggage from the book into the theater. Because of the place the book holds in my heart I cannot rate the movie objectively.
I'm a long-time fan of the books; I first read it in the 60's when it was originally published in the US. My wife does my one better - she actually bought a copy from England when it came out in the 50's (yes, she owns a First Edition).
I really looked at the production of the movie with great trepidation because I felt that there was no way that a movie could do full justice to the book, and given the material it is likely to be a disaster.
I was right and wrong - it doesn't equal the book. LoTR is a masterpiece of storytelling that cannot be fully translated to the screen. Yet it was not a disaster at all! - there were large parts of the movie that I really enjoyed.
All in all I think this movie is very impressive. It far exceeds my expectations, largely due to the terrific casting (only Elrod failed to carry off his role) and segments such as Hobbiton and Moria that carry off the flavor of the book exceedingly well. Parts are less good, however that is true of the book, too.
All in all I cannot imagine how a better job could have been done with this material - and I am eagerly awaiting the next two installments.
ACL isn't included as standard with any Unix AFAIK
The fact is that all major commercial unices including SGI IRIX, Digital, HP and Solaris have ACL type extensions in one form or another.
As far as what constitutes a 'standard' feature under Linux, that is difficult to say. What is quite clear is that there is support for ACL's in both the XFS file system port from SGI and in extensions to ext2/3.
Samba will actually take advantage of these various ACL implementations and allow mapping of NT ACLs to UNIX hosted SMB shares.
In the context of Mac vs. Linux, we have to presume that the user is fairly sophisticed technically, and so has no problem buying a case, motherboard, CPU, etc., and spending a half hour assembling it themselves.
Given that assumption, at any given level of performance on Unix-like things, you can beat any given Mac at a much lower cost.
I don't know about that. The times I've built my own box I've generally ended up spending more than if I bought an off-the-shelf machine. After all, ala carte carries a cost penalty with it.
The big advantage of build your own is that you get to specify exactly what you want in your box. That's particularly useful if you are going for compatability with a non-windows OS.
She thought that the article left out the most commonly suspected cause of autism, which is environmental pollution. According to her, there is very little research literature that expressed parental traits are any indication of autism.
There is also no proven link between environmental pollution and autism. Until there is some real evidence evertyhing is speculation. As far as it being the "most common suspected cause", well, a lot of people believed that stress causes ulcers until the real cause was found.
My youngest son has been diagnosed as having Asperger's syndrome by one of the top specialists in the world. Given that he has a very distinctive set of behaviours, I well believe it.
1. His motor coordination is such that he has a very difficult time writing anything longer than a few sentences. The writing is nearly illegible.
2. He has some social idiosycracies - judgement of other people's reactions is the most obvious.
3. He has an extraordinary memory - near eidetic in quality. The scope of it is stunning - it covers phots, music, and text.
4. He tends to focus narrowly on subjects.
Taken individually these behaviours are not meaningful. But the package is quite compelling.
Fortunately his main handicap is his handwriting which can be compensated for with a laptop. The talents plus his high native IQ are such that he is highly successful academically. So long as he gets the instruction he needs to compensate for his limitiations he will continue to be successful.
What is distressing is to read idiots in this forum and elsewhere who try to claim that all such behaviours need is a structured classroom. Baloney. Without support the talents that people like my son can bring to society would be wasted because of the of the inefficiencies the uncompensated handicaps enforce.
Someone doesn't know their thermodynamics, hmmm....
The heat that is coming out the back is exactly equivalent to the heat that is being lost inside of the appliance, causing the decrease in temperature.
Apparently you don't know your thermodynamics either. The heat coming out the back of an air conditioner must be more than that being lost by the room (thank you Sadie Carnot). Usual efficiencies expressed as COD are around 2.0-3.0 meaning that about 30-50% more than the amount of heat removed from the room is coming off the back end of the air conditioner.
Interestingly this was the premise of a story published in Analog Science Fiction earlier this year. The end result in the story was a not so nice form of AI made possible by the use of more efficient algorithms. Parts of the story also referred to some of the poster's concepts of failed cryptography, etc.
I wonder if the poster was 'inspired' by this story?
Re:Just a thought
on
Patented Seeds
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The real danger in this is that companies are designing plants that are only able to reproduce a limited number of times.
Nonsense. Almost all non-genengineered seeds sold to farmers today are hybrids that do not breed true. The fact is that farmers not been growing their own seeds for many, many years.
There is actually a substantial safety factor to self-extinguishing gencrops - by tying genetic mods to new genes you are less likely to get unexpected propagation of foreign genes in the wild.
Science provides the tools that engineers use to build stuff.
Science provides a lot of dandy tools. Engineers like tools.
Engineers would be useless without science to provide new raw materials.
Baloney. We (engineers) were building all sorts of impressive stuff long before the invention of science. Check out the Great Pyramid and Yu the Great.
Ok, I've been telling you guys for a couple years now that cable modem companies couldn't make money at $40 a month, that they'd break even closer to $50 a month.
@Home was getting $12/month from AT&T etc. They claim they would make money at $16/mo.
The Europeans have found us out! The GPS is really a source of mind control rays that warp sensibilities. Why do you think Jerry Lewis is so popular in France?
To retaliate they are going to build their own, and make us think the European rock and roll is good, and like warm beer, too!
See http://zapatopi.net/afdb.html for the defence against this dastardly plot!
Who is going to pay that subscription fee while there is a free one in the sky? It's like web sites. Who is going to pay for content when there is more than you can read in a lifetime free?
I have a feeling that if the Europeans build a fee based GPS, nobody will come. What a waste of Euro taxpayer dollars.
If taxpayer money is used to create the software, then it should be publicly available for free,
If the invention was created with public funds, then the government should retain IP rights, and license the invention to anyone willing to develop it commercially. Any license fees would then return to general revenues, and presumably help offset the cost of providing research grants etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Corba is a fscking b*tch to implement. XML-RPC is far more elegant and thus we have many more implementations (usually free) to choose from.
Using of the alternatives is normally not an option because of interoperability.
This is interesting - are you saying that pirated versions of Windows are the defacto standard OS in your country? And people keep on pirating Windows because of interoperability issues?
If this is the case, the whole country would probably benefit from a piracy crackdown, as it would force everyone to switch away from proprietary standards to a more economically sustainable model.
Hell, the media of the neighbour state called Gates "the father of the Internet"!
That makes me want to throw up. My father was a program manager at DARPA, and knew Larry Roberts personally.
In any case, I think the case for studying design patterns is a bit weaker than that for algorithms which has stood the test of time.
Given that most modern programming environments come with facilities that implement many if not most of the commonly used algorithms in very carefully optimized form, yet do not contain similar pre-cast design patterns I am not so sure that a programmer would benefit more from studying algorithms than design patterns.
I guess I'd say that it depends on the nature of the task at hand. If you are writing a database, then clearly a strong knowledge of algorithms is critical. But if you are putting together an e-commerce web site that is backed by a pre-existing database, then I think that the there is more to be gained from an understanding of design patterns than algorithms.
We rightly give the police tremendous leeway to detain suspects, confiscate goods and enter property. When this power is used on behalf of one party of a contract, it's very unfair. It's a dangerous extension of state and corporate power vs. the rights of individuals.
Last time I looked the court was just as much an extension of the state as the police. The court has as much, if not more power to order the seizure and search of property.
Software can be copied infinatly with no extra cost.
Yes, but the cost to write the code can be millions of dollars. Unless you have some mechanism to recover the cost of writing the software, the programmer is going to find another line of work and you won't get any more software.
Some say $50 is a fair value for a game. In some countries, this is enough money to feed a person for 3 months. How do you defend this price now?
You don't do your case much good with this sort of specious argument. The people buying computer games are not living on a $17/month food budget.
Human societies the world over have emerged from the caves by their ability and willingness to share information freely, and use this information to better their lives.
This is totally against known history. Even mythological sources from the dawn of civilization embrace the concept of not sharing information. Why do you think Vulcan and Waylan are lame? It's so they can't leave their place of employment and share trade secrets with competitors.
Face it, from the early days of the caves survival often depended on an advantage over the neighbors - and that advantage was often in the form of information - where the best water source was, how to make the best bowstring, etc.
Human society coexisted with a nature red in tooth and claw. Intellectual property was often a life or death matter in an environment where nothing was abundant.
The notion of 'ownable intellectual property' was an artificial construct used initially to protect the incomes of publishers (who faced the large costs of typesetting and production),
Again totally ignoring actual history. The concept of intellectual property related to written works arose during Greek times in order to preserve the claim of origin by the original author. The first copyright law "Statute of Anne" arose with the spread of the printing press to codify what was common law long before the printing press was common. This law was designed to prevent piracy since the wide availability of the press made it easy to print something without the author's permission. If you take the time to read the Statute of Anne you will see that the fact of the matter is that copyrights were originally designed to protect authors - and it is still true today.
Do you think Sony would pay one nickel to any musician is they didn't have to???
Is LoTR the best movie ever made? I wish I could tell as I carry so much baggage from the book into the theater. Because of the place the book holds in my heart I cannot rate the movie objectively.
I'm a long-time fan of the books; I first read it in the 60's when it was originally published in the US. My wife does my one better - she actually bought a copy from England when it came out in the 50's (yes, she owns a First Edition).
I really looked at the production of the movie with great trepidation because I felt that there was no way that a movie could do full justice to the book, and given the material it is likely to be a disaster.
I was right and wrong - it doesn't equal the book. LoTR is a masterpiece of storytelling that cannot be fully translated to the screen. Yet it was not a disaster at all! - there were large parts of the movie that I really enjoyed.
All in all I think this movie is very impressive. It far exceeds my expectations, largely due to the terrific casting (only Elrod failed to carry off his role) and segments such as Hobbiton and Moria that carry off the flavor of the book exceedingly well. Parts are less good, however that is true of the book, too.
All in all I cannot imagine how a better job could have been done with this material - and I am eagerly awaiting the next two installments.
ACL isn't included as standard with any Unix AFAIK
The fact is that all major commercial unices including SGI IRIX, Digital, HP and Solaris have ACL type extensions in one form or another.
As far as what constitutes a 'standard' feature under Linux, that is difficult to say. What is quite clear is that there is support for ACL's in both the XFS file system port from SGI and in extensions to ext2/3.
Samba will actually take advantage of these various ACL implementations and allow mapping of NT ACLs to UNIX hosted SMB shares.
In the context of Mac vs. Linux, we have to presume that the user is fairly sophisticed technically, and so has no problem buying a case, motherboard, CPU, etc., and spending a half hour assembling it themselves.
Given that assumption, at any given level of performance on Unix-like things, you can beat any given Mac at a much lower cost.
I don't know about that. The times I've built my own box I've generally ended up spending more than if I bought an off-the-shelf machine. After all, ala carte carries a cost penalty with it.
The big advantage of build your own is that you get to specify exactly what you want in your box. That's particularly useful if you are going for compatability with a non-windows OS.
Easy, allow a file or directory to have different permissions for multiple different groups.
Try again. It's part of the POSIX ACL standard.
She thought that the article left out the most commonly suspected cause of autism, which is environmental pollution. According to her, there is very little research literature that expressed parental traits are any indication of autism.
There is also no proven link between environmental pollution and autism. Until there is some real evidence evertyhing is speculation. As far as it being the "most common suspected cause", well, a lot of people believed that stress causes ulcers until the real cause was found.
My youngest son has been diagnosed as having Asperger's syndrome by one of the top specialists in the world. Given that he has a very distinctive set of behaviours, I well believe it.
1. His motor coordination is such that he has a very difficult time writing anything longer than a few sentences. The writing is nearly illegible.
2. He has some social idiosycracies - judgement of other people's reactions is the most obvious.
3. He has an extraordinary memory - near eidetic in quality. The scope of it is stunning - it covers phots, music, and text.
4. He tends to focus narrowly on subjects.
Taken individually these behaviours are not meaningful. But the package is quite compelling.
Fortunately his main handicap is his handwriting which can be compensated for with a laptop. The talents plus his high native IQ are such that he is highly successful academically. So long as he gets the instruction he needs to compensate for his limitiations he will continue to be successful.
What is distressing is to read idiots in this forum and elsewhere who try to claim that all such behaviours need is a structured classroom. Baloney. Without support the talents that people like my son can bring to society would be wasted because of the of the inefficiencies the uncompensated handicaps enforce.
Someone doesn't know their thermodynamics, hmmm....
The heat that is coming out the back is exactly equivalent to the heat that is being lost inside of the appliance, causing the decrease in temperature.
Apparently you don't know your thermodynamics either. The heat coming out the back of an air conditioner must be more than that being lost by the room (thank you Sadie Carnot). Usual efficiencies expressed as COD are around 2.0-3.0 meaning that about 30-50% more than the amount of heat removed from the room is coming off the back end of the air conditioner.
Interestingly this was the premise of a story published in Analog Science Fiction earlier this year. The end result in the story was a not so nice form of AI made possible by the use of more efficient algorithms. Parts of the story also referred to some of the poster's concepts of failed cryptography, etc.
I wonder if the poster was 'inspired' by this story?
The real danger in this is that companies are designing plants that are only able to reproduce a limited number of times.
Nonsense. Almost all non-genengineered seeds sold to farmers today are hybrids that do not breed true. The fact is that farmers not been growing their own seeds for many, many years.
There is actually a substantial safety factor to self-extinguishing gencrops - by tying genetic mods to new genes you are less likely to get unexpected propagation of foreign genes in the wild.
Really? Where do you get it at that price?
One reason might be that Porstgres is free, whilst SQL server has a $20,000 per CPU license fee.
Science provides the tools that engineers use to build stuff.
Science provides a lot of dandy tools. Engineers like tools.
Engineers would be useless without science to provide new raw materials.
Baloney. We (engineers) were building all sorts of impressive stuff long before the invention of science. Check out the Great Pyramid and Yu the Great.
Ok, I've been telling you guys for a couple years now that cable modem companies couldn't make money at $40 a month, that they'd break even closer to $50 a month.
@Home was getting $12/month from AT&T etc. They claim they would make money at $16/mo.
I honestly don't understand why the service costs so much in the usa
It varies. I'm on Cablevison in the US, and I get 8 MBs down, 1.0 up for $29 US.
15 ms ping to most places, too.
There is a keen difference (in my experience) between masss produced European and mass produced American beer
Well, in my travels on both sides of the pond I've learned to stay away from mass produced beer of either sort.
And yes, I still prefer specialty beers cold.
The Europeans have found us out! The GPS is really a source of mind control rays that warp sensibilities. Why do you think Jerry Lewis is so popular in France?
To retaliate they are going to build their own, and make us think the European rock and roll is good, and like warm beer, too!
See http://zapatopi.net/afdb.html for the defence against this dastardly plot!
Who is going to pay that subscription fee while there is a free one in the sky? It's like web sites. Who is going to pay for content when there is more than you can read in a lifetime free?
I have a feeling that if the Europeans build a fee based GPS, nobody will come. What a waste of Euro taxpayer dollars.
If taxpayer money is used to create the software, then it should be publicly available for free,
If the invention was created with public funds, then the government should retain IP rights, and license the invention to anyone willing to develop it commercially. Any license fees would then return to general revenues, and presumably help offset the cost of providing research grants etc.