When they start agreeing on things, that's when we start worrying.
Heh. Generally a good policy.
Some of our biggest problems up here are the first-past-the-post voting (with multiple parties, it really skews things), the fractioning of parties with fairly similar views, and the Block Quebecois, a party whose only platform is Quebec independence. They suck up a lot of seats that would otherwise cause a real change in political landscape.
My American friends are probably quite pleased that I've had to drop the moral superiority act, though:)
Yeah, it was an egregious abuse of democracy. Worked so well, Harper did it a second time, to avoid facing questions in parliament about an investigation into questionable actions in Afghanistan.
He's a good tactician though - proroguing parliament created enough of a delay in that first case that the coalition fell apart.
Our government (I'm Canadian) has become more and more dysfunctional in recent years. The Conservative party, now in power, has the support of somewhere around a third of Canadians. Despite this, they act as if they have a mandate to further their increasingly pro-business, pro-control policies. The moderate and left wing parties split the vote of the rest of the people, and rather than work together to accomplish anything, they're all fighting to get enough of the pie to form the next government.
Most of the people up here don't like what's going on much (when they're aware of it), but the opposition parties are more interested in bickering than finding common ground and bringing us back to sanity.
It's rather depressing how ashamed I've become of our country's policies.
I'm with you. I've been using linux as my primary OS for work and play since you had to edit x.conf by hand. I had a lot of fun learning about the guts of the system, I just don't have time to do that much anymore. I'm grateful that there are distributions that let me just get work done, and still let me get dirty with it if I really want to.
And after all these years, I'm finally having friends ask me, unprompted, to install linux on their machines because they're tired of Windows. It's only been recently that I've been able to say "sure" and leave off the two page list of caveats.
Heck, I don't even have to install it for them anymore - I just give them an Ubuntu CD and tell them to call me if they have any problems. They're usually just fine on their own.
Curious - what problems did you have with inotify? I was looking at it recently to handle some screwy file sharing needs, and it seemed to work well as far as I went with it. In the actual event, we didn't end up needing it, so I never went past some light testing. But if there's issues, it would be good to know next time it comes up.
That's why we have things like peer review and the scientific method. So others can, y'know, check the data.
Scientists aren't different from everyone else, except in one important way - they figured out a long time ago that you can't trust anyone, including yourself.
This has nothing to do with "faith." It's about what science is.
You are making the rather serious work of governing a country sound like running a Fortune 500 company. Many people are not comfortable with that view of things.
Federal scientists work for the government, not the political party in power at the moment. The government is (or should be) the people. We are the ones scientists should be speaking to.
That any political party thinks it is their right to control how and to whom a scientists paid by the people speaks frightens me.
Allowing only up-modding definitely works better. The behaviour of people more likely to up than down mod is different. One is constructive, the other less so.
I am surprised how well the mod system here works (most of the time) though. Slashdot has a unique user base, and what works here wouldn't necessarily transfer well to a less involved and less informed base.
If you make the mistake of digging through comments on any popular news site, it is incredibly depressing. Even more so than reading/. on -1. Makes me lose a little faith in the human race every time.
I make my money these days writing (god help me) PHP, and my entire professional career has been web development, but what I learned from grabbing a linux distro and working through K&R was such a fundamental experience for me, it's hard to overstate it. As the GP alluded to, learning how the tools you work with were made makes you more effective at using those tools.
I moved recently, and had to get rid of my books. I kept eight. That included the Bible, Ulysses and K&R.
You may underestimate the lack of confidence the rest of the world has in the American justice system, especially when it comes to dealing with non-US citizens.
I'm a Canadian. I've visited the US. Many Americans are quite nice. I have no criminal record. I won't cross the border.
It's like not wanting to visit your brother because you're not sure if he's going to be an insane drunkard that night.
I think the problem there is that Conservative supporters would just blame the Liberals/NDP/Bloc for not going along with the Conservatives and forcing an election on an issue they see as obvious or unimportant.
Conservative support is terribly low in a straight numbers sense. I think they're mostly stripped down to core supporters at the moment; that just happens to be all they need with the terrible centre-left split.
I'm quite surprised....I thought the people of Quebec were more sane than the rest of us on matters that impact culture and personal freedoms? What could the Bloc possibly have to gain?
Essentially I feel like Jobs said "Adobe's not open and we're not open in our core business but there are auxiliary/complimentary efforts we've been instrumental with that are actually open."
That's the crux of it, and love or hate Apple, smart business. You want to make the things that touch, but aren't core, to your business commodities. Microsoft commoditizes hardware, Google commodizes content, Apple commoditizes content delivery.
In a strange turn, it puts me in Apple's camp on this issue. Flash is a barrier to entry for content delivery; being a web developer, my business is enabling content delivery and proprietary formats increase the difficulty and cost required to do that. That Flash is a horrible UI blight on the world is just another reason to hate it.
After years with nothing much changing, it suddenly seems like everyone is managing to make the other guy's business a little bit less relevant. That this is driving towards open standards, with each of the big boys fighting the other's attempts at vendor lock-in, is a surprisingly hopeful turn of events.
I goodthink his assertion. Goodspeak clear. Unreal wordpics doubleunclear. Unreal wordpics make badthought. Unmodern peoplegroups had unhealth from doubleplusungoodthinking wordpics.
I find books each have their own time. How we read and relate to a book has a lot to do with where we're at when we read it. Unfortunately, when most of us our first exposed to the classics has nothing to do with this. I had a hate on for Stenibeck for years because I had to read "The Red Pony" and "The Blue Pearl" in grade 9. There was nothing I was going to relate to in these at the time, and the subject matter bored me to tears. I got over it, but it took me a while.
Some of the book selections made by the curriculum committees completely dumbfound me, not because they're bad books, but because the kids just aren't going to relate to them at the point they're introduced.
Bigger point - I'm not sure that some people realize when they're reading a classic that they may actually be reading something that SEEMS derivative, but may have been pretty innovative for its day.
It entertained me that the review for "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" had this to say:
"It's exactly the same as any other book about a poor family with an irresponsible father and a child who manages to be alright..."
Followed by a list of three books that were written later.
Yours is one of about three comments in this thread that isn't wildly stupid.
My company develops custom web applications, and this is essentially what we do. I've had lots of conversations about code ownership with clients. When they ask for ownership, they usually don't really understand the implications of what they're asking for, and are in fact asking for more than what they want. *
What they want is to make sure that they're not screwed if we go out of business, get hit by a bus, or just end up being hard to work with. They don't want to be responsible for maintaining library code, or pay for the thousands of LOC that we bring to a project with us. They're not unreasonable people who want to get our whole toolbox on the cheap and use it themselves.
I've found that a simple conversation (and license) explaining that they can modify the code themselves, make a reasonable number of copies for backup purposes and transfer the license to another party under the same terms makes everyone happy. And all without this dickish handwaving and posturing.
* This isn't always true - there was one instance where they did expect to be able to take the works and resell it en masse. This is why you have the conversation up front, and for $deity's sake, have a contract. (If the project's small, a letter of agreement may be enough.) The article author's advice about not bothering with contracts if it gets in the way of business is idiocy.
I just wish they'd split them up - why is the "I'm done with this, shut it down" button right next to the "I'm spending lots of time here, make it fit the whole screen" button?
When I used KDE, the first thing I'd do is move the min/max buttons to the left and leave the close on the right. Nice and far apart from each other.
Sadly, KDE on Ubuntu looks like ass, and I've never figured out how to make those changes in Gnome. (Yeah, I don't spend as much time in config files as I used to...)
I'm in the market because I plan on moving around a bit more. I moved across country last summer and had to liquidate the book collection. (Yeah, ouch.) It's not like I'm going to stop buying books, so portability is a big deal for me.
I've tried Komodo and Eclipse. Personally, I didn't find that they gave me anything I didn't get from vim and a few bash terminals, except a lot of annoyance. Intellisense was a pain in the ass. My first task was usually trying to turn it off. (Second was trying to find something decent for vim key bindings.) Some of the code refactoring tools were sort of handy, but not enough to make me put up with everything else. Reggexer works very nicely for most of what I used those for anyway.
It's been a while, so maybe I'm missing out on some shiny new must-have feature, but I have my doubts. I don't see the point in learning a big shiny tool that doesn't give me anything beyond what I already have, but with more mouse clicks.
The one time I did find an IDE handy was when I was learning Java. Once I figured out my way around, I went back to vim.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. Generally a good policy.
Some of our biggest problems up here are the first-past-the-post voting (with multiple parties, it really skews things), the fractioning of parties with fairly similar views, and the Block Quebecois, a party whose only platform is Quebec independence. They suck up a lot of seats that would otherwise cause a real change in political landscape.
My American friends are probably quite pleased that I've had to drop the moral superiority act, though :)
Yeah, it was an egregious abuse of democracy. Worked so well, Harper did it a second time, to avoid facing questions in parliament about an investigation into questionable actions in Afghanistan.
He's a good tactician though - proroguing parliament created enough of a delay in that first case that the coalition fell apart.
Our government (I'm Canadian) has become more and more dysfunctional in recent years. The Conservative party, now in power, has the support of somewhere around a third of Canadians. Despite this, they act as if they have a mandate to further their increasingly pro-business, pro-control policies. The moderate and left wing parties split the vote of the rest of the people, and rather than work together to accomplish anything, they're all fighting to get enough of the pie to form the next government.
Most of the people up here don't like what's going on much (when they're aware of it), but the opposition parties are more interested in bickering than finding common ground and bringing us back to sanity.
It's rather depressing how ashamed I've become of our country's policies.
I'm with you. I've been using linux as my primary OS for work and play since you had to edit x.conf by hand. I had a lot of fun learning about the guts of the system, I just don't have time to do that much anymore. I'm grateful that there are distributions that let me just get work done, and still let me get dirty with it if I really want to.
And after all these years, I'm finally having friends ask me, unprompted, to install linux on their machines because they're tired of Windows. It's only been recently that I've been able to say "sure" and leave off the two page list of caveats.
Heck, I don't even have to install it for them anymore - I just give them an Ubuntu CD and tell them to call me if they have any problems. They're usually just fine on their own.
Y'know, it would be great if you could edit your own posts, so that when you type "inotify" but mean "incrond" you could correct yourself.
Bother.
Curious - what problems did you have with inotify? I was looking at it recently to handle some screwy file sharing needs, and it seemed to work well as far as I went with it. In the actual event, we didn't end up needing it, so I never went past some light testing. But if there's issues, it would be good to know next time it comes up.
That's why we have things like peer review and the scientific method. So others can, y'know, check the data.
Scientists aren't different from everyone else, except in one important way - they figured out a long time ago that you can't trust anyone, including yourself.
This has nothing to do with "faith." It's about what science is.
You are making the rather serious work of governing a country sound like running a Fortune 500 company. Many people are not comfortable with that view of things.
Federal scientists work for the government, not the political party in power at the moment. The government is (or should be) the people. We are the ones scientists should be speaking to.
That any political party thinks it is their right to control how and to whom a scientists paid by the people speaks frightens me.
Allowing only up-modding definitely works better. The behaviour of people more likely to up than down mod is different. One is constructive, the other less so.
I am surprised how well the mod system here works (most of the time) though. Slashdot has a unique user base, and what works here wouldn't necessarily transfer well to a less involved and less informed base.
If you make the mistake of digging through comments on any popular news site, it is incredibly depressing. Even more so than reading /. on -1. Makes me lose a little faith in the human race every time.
I make my money these days writing (god help me) PHP, and my entire professional career has been web development, but what I learned from grabbing a linux distro and working through K&R was such a fundamental experience for me, it's hard to overstate it. As the GP alluded to, learning how the tools you work with were made makes you more effective at using those tools.
I moved recently, and had to get rid of my books. I kept eight. That included the Bible, Ulysses and K&R.
Except you don't have to keep subscribing to read what's already written. You keep that, DRM free. The subscription is for continued new content.
You may underestimate the lack of confidence the rest of the world has in the American justice system, especially when it comes to dealing with non-US citizens.
I'm a Canadian. I've visited the US. Many Americans are quite nice. I have no criminal record. I won't cross the border.
It's like not wanting to visit your brother because you're not sure if he's going to be an insane drunkard that night.
I think the problem there is that Conservative supporters would just blame the Liberals/NDP/Bloc for not going along with the Conservatives and forcing an election on an issue they see as obvious or unimportant.
Conservative support is terribly low in a straight numbers sense. I think they're mostly stripped down to core supporters at the moment; that just happens to be all they need with the terrible centre-left split.
I'm quite surprised....I thought the people of Quebec were more sane than the rest of us on matters that impact culture and personal freedoms? What could the Bloc possibly have to gain?
That's the crux of it, and love or hate Apple, smart business. You want to make the things that touch, but aren't core, to your business commodities. Microsoft commoditizes hardware, Google commodizes content, Apple commoditizes content delivery.
In a strange turn, it puts me in Apple's camp on this issue. Flash is a barrier to entry for content delivery; being a web developer, my business is enabling content delivery and proprietary formats increase the difficulty and cost required to do that. That Flash is a horrible UI blight on the world is just another reason to hate it.
After years with nothing much changing, it suddenly seems like everyone is managing to make the other guy's business a little bit less relevant. That this is driving towards open standards, with each of the big boys fighting the other's attempts at vendor lock-in, is a surprisingly hopeful turn of events.
Psst: I think he meant a party with human interaction. Y'know, like in the old days.
I goodthink his assertion. Goodspeak clear. Unreal wordpics doubleunclear. Unreal wordpics make badthought. Unmodern peoplegroups had unhealth from doubleplusungoodthinking wordpics.
I find books each have their own time. How we read and relate to a book has a lot to do with where we're at when we read it. Unfortunately, when most of us our first exposed to the classics has nothing to do with this. I had a hate on for Stenibeck for years because I had to read "The Red Pony" and "The Blue Pearl" in grade 9. There was nothing I was going to relate to in these at the time, and the subject matter bored me to tears. I got over it, but it took me a while.
Some of the book selections made by the curriculum committees completely dumbfound me, not because they're bad books, but because the kids just aren't going to relate to them at the point they're introduced.
It entertained me that the review for "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" had this to say:
Followed by a list of three books that were written later.
On the contrary, I found your post rather elliptical.
Yours is one of about three comments in this thread that isn't wildly stupid.
My company develops custom web applications, and this is essentially what we do. I've had lots of conversations about code ownership with clients. When they ask for ownership, they usually don't really understand the implications of what they're asking for, and are in fact asking for more than what they want. *
What they want is to make sure that they're not screwed if we go out of business, get hit by a bus, or just end up being hard to work with. They don't want to be responsible for maintaining library code, or pay for the thousands of LOC that we bring to a project with us. They're not unreasonable people who want to get our whole toolbox on the cheap and use it themselves.
I've found that a simple conversation (and license) explaining that they can modify the code themselves, make a reasonable number of copies for backup purposes and transfer the license to another party under the same terms makes everyone happy. And all without this dickish handwaving and posturing.
* This isn't always true - there was one instance where they did expect to be able to take the works and resell it en masse. This is why you have the conversation up front, and for $deity's sake, have a contract. (If the project's small, a letter of agreement may be enough.) The article author's advice about not bothering with contracts if it gets in the way of business is idiocy.
I just wish they'd split them up - why is the "I'm done with this, shut it down" button right next to the "I'm spending lots of time here, make it fit the whole screen" button?
When I used KDE, the first thing I'd do is move the min/max buttons to the left and leave the close on the right. Nice and far apart from each other.
Sadly, KDE on Ubuntu looks like ass, and I've never figured out how to make those changes in Gnome. (Yeah, I don't spend as much time in config files as I used to...)
I'm in the market because I plan on moving around a bit more. I moved across country last summer and had to liquidate the book collection. (Yeah, ouch.) It's not like I'm going to stop buying books, so portability is a big deal for me.
I've tried Komodo and Eclipse. Personally, I didn't find that they gave me anything I didn't get from vim and a few bash terminals, except a lot of annoyance. Intellisense was a pain in the ass. My first task was usually trying to turn it off. (Second was trying to find something decent for vim key bindings.) Some of the code refactoring tools were sort of handy, but not enough to make me put up with everything else. Reggexer works very nicely for most of what I used those for anyway.
It's been a while, so maybe I'm missing out on some shiny new must-have feature, but I have my doubts. I don't see the point in learning a big shiny tool that doesn't give me anything beyond what I already have, but with more mouse clicks.
The one time I did find an IDE handy was when I was learning Java. Once I figured out my way around, I went back to vim.
Succinct, cogent and accurate. Are you sure you're on the right site?