The RIAA doesn't care if they are voted the 'worst company' - they have succeeded. Since they don't sell anything to the public, the fact that all the hatred has stuck to the RIAA _instead_ of the companies they represent, they have succeeded entirely in this goal - and I predict most people are too blind to this fact to see that this is anything other than an extremely hollow victory. The RIAA doesn't care if they are unpopular with the general public - because the general public is not their customer. So long as the hate and bile sticks to them, instead of the record companies they represent - they are winning.
- having laid out a double sided PCB, and got everything shoehorned onto a 160x100mm 'Eurocard' sized motherboard.
However, I've also retargeted the z88dk (Z88 Development Kit, originally designed for the Cambridge Z88 portable computer) to my Z80 board because while it'll be best to have all the low level stuff done in assembly language, writing things that use floating point will just be ten times faster to write in C.
But even if you never intend to hack hardware, it's still important to at least be familiar with assembly language - if only to know why unchecked buffers are bad. If you've ever written a program in asm and accidentally overwritten the stack and tromped all over your return address, you fundamentally understand why this is a bad thing. We've got into a whole world of hurt because many programmers didn't understand this.
Most people find pointers difficult because their minds have been poisoned by BASIC (Visual or otherwise). For such people, pointers are a gigantic conceptual leap.
Pointers are very simple if you're used to assembly language. After all, what is "ld a,(hl)" [0] other than using a pointer? You've just been calling it indirection rather than a pointer, but it's the same concept - you just dereferenced a pointer. BASIC programmers are never exposed to anything like that, and may reach a reasonable level of competence before even knowing such a thing is possible - they think they know all the abstract stuff about programming (loops, conditions etc.) and then are faced with pointers - something that simply doesn't exist in what they've been doing for the past ten years. Tell them that you can have pointers to pointers and their watch their heads explode. They will be thinking in BASIC and translating into C - but the trouble is there's no way to trivially think in BASIC and translate to a C pointer. It's not until they start thinking in C rather than BASIC that the light usually turns on.
[0] if you're unfamiliar with Z80 asm - "load the accumulator with the contents of the memory address pointed to by the register pair HL".
But they aren't doing what Microsoft were doing, and even a superficial look at the linked article shows that. Microsoft were hiring permanent temps as it were. Google are being up front that these are temporary positions, and therefore, it is highly likely that they are just that: temporary positions, not permanent jobs masquerading as temporary positions. What happened to innocent until proven guitly? Where's the evidence that Google are doing this to avoid paying benefits? There is none. The entire story is hot air.
Since when is offering temporary jobs a terrible thing to do? If you apply for one, you know _up front_ that it's a temporary position. It's not like they are baiting-and-switching anyone.
That will put them at a significant competitive disadvantage to the likes of RedHat. They will be saddled with maintaining old versions of very complex software (like the entire gcc toolchain, plus binutils and the like) - whereas companies who are not pariahs will just continue using the latest GPLv3 versions of this software. Novell's costs will therefore be significantly higher since they can no longer benefit from the work of the actual package maintainers themselves.
Because all the GNU tools that Linux depends upon (most significantly the entire toolchain they rely on to build the software) _will_ be GPL3 when GPL3 comes out. This means they either have to spend money to maintain the old GPL2 tools themselves or find alternates. No alternative currently exists for gcc which is free software.
On a point of pedantry, Linux is most certainly not freeware. Freeware generally means closed source, non-free utilities which are as proprietary as Windows itself - just distributed gratis. Linux is Free software - Free with a capital F. This doesn't necessarily mean you get it gratis - indeed, people charge for Linux distributions (see RedHat, Novell et al.) What the Free with a capital F means is 'freedom', not 'gratis'. It's quite an important distinction. Freeware, generally is non-free (i.e. you still don't have the freedom to modify or redistribute).
Anyway...moving swiftly on.
The success of Linux and ultimately doomed state of ReactOS is because Linus was not shooting for a 'clone' - he was just shooting for something POSIX. Most of Unix is really all about open(), close(), read(), write(), select() and ioctl(). Implement those syscalls and you are a long way there. Then just add GNU - the utilities and libraries already pretty much complete in 1992, when Linux first started getting useful.
Win32 on the other hand... how many years has Wine been going without even getting close to decent compatibility with Windows? Win32 is a horrible, convoluted mess of an API, which certainly cannot be mostly boiled down to a handful of syscalls. Linus didn't have to write anything to do graphics - X already existed, and was already the standard for Unix. He didn't have to write standard C libraries or utilities - GNU already existed. ReactOS on the other hand have to implement equivalents of these from the ground up *and* the abortion that is Win32.
ReactOS's goals are very noble, but they aren't even chasing a stable API - Vista changes the goalposts again and adds on yet another layer they have to chase. They don't even expect to have full kernel compatibility by next year, let alone compatibility with Windows 2000 (which is now 7 years old).
The summary is extremely badly written and takes this entirely out of context - the actual article is comparing Vista's capabilities with _earlier_ versions of Windows, where 3rd party programs could sort of emulate Vista (while pegging the CPU) - not a comparison to OS X at all.
As an aside, did anyone else notice the BitchX irc session (probably running over an ssh connection from a more unixy machine) on page 4 of the article:-)
The mosquito isn't the actual problem - the problem is if you create sufficient selective pressure against the malaria parasite, eventually you'll get malaria parasites resistant to the gene in these mosquitos and will be back at square 1 again.
Algae is probably the most promising thing to develop (can be done on industrial land, using industrial methods rather than using up valuable, fertile land that's needed for food crops), as well as cellulosic ethanol (can be made by growing any invasive weed on marginal land).
The thing with algae - you can make a potential of something like 10,000 gallons per acre of algae plant. Ethanol from corn is on the order of 150 gallons per acre.
The slowness of Debian updates is a feature, not a bug. When you have a server 4,000 miles away from home (where a major OS upgrade can quite easily leave the machine an unbootable lump of metal), having a long time between major releases, and the updates to the current release being rock solid - it's a BIG feature. It's why I run Debian on those servers - because it's a lot less stressful than running a faster moving distribution.
On a point of pedantry, also you cannot have a meteoric rise. Meteors fall!
C++: You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying "That's me, over there."
Is it just me, or does Caldera's logo look like Mickey Mouse's ear (specifically, a sphere with a picture of Mickey Mouse on it, such that you can only see his ear) ?
GM food can produce _no_ significant crop that grows in the desert. Not unless you have widespread irrigation, and normal crops will grow in the desert with irrigation.
The other problem with GM is that companies like Monsanto get to own the food chain with patents. At least the patents have long expired (or never existed) for normal food crop cultivars. Monsanto have already done some pretty unpleasant things to farmers whose fields have been infected by pollen that has spread from neighbouring farms. You can be an 'IP pirate' just because the wind blew the wrong way.
I was glad when I heard that Monsanto had pulled out of Britain altogether - not because of any aversion to GM, but because of an aversion to Monsanto's business and legal practises.
Not when you're doing a conversion from SI units to kcal, you can't - otherwise you'll be three orders of magnitude off. Not everyone knows that a food calorie is actually one kcal, including, I suspect, the parent poster.
You can buy cheap battery powered radios which pick up the NWS weather radar broadcasts (which continuously broadcast weather information). You don't need TV to keep up with the weather.
Some people being fat is _entirely_ natural; no need to take them to a doctor for what is their natural state.
At my school, I was a geek. I did NOT appreciate any PE or games lessons because, to me, they were all as boring as fuck as well as a place to be bullied (with the sports teachers actively encouraging bullying). All I really learned from PE was how to successfully skive school lessons without being caught. The school wasn't interested at all in the kinds of exercise I (and funnily enough, many of the other geeks) find interesting - cycling, hiking, climbing etc. The school was only interested in 'field' sports such as rugby or hockey, or alternately closed track athletics. The former an avenue of exquisite pain and school sanctioned bullying, and the latter about as interesting as paint drying.
In the school population, there wasn't a noticable difference between obesity levels in those who frequented the computer room but avoided PE, and those who were keen on sports and bullied those in the computer room. Many of the strongest and most active (typically rugby players) spent _a lot_ of time doing active things, and yet as a proportion just as many of them were fat as the proportion in the computer room were fat.
The English invented the language, that's why it's called English. British English is therefore, defacto, the correct, reference version of the language. Therefore, the question should be why does the US de-pluralize 'maths' and pluralize 'sport'?
That person was lying about only eating 300 calories a day.
A completely sedentary human will run at about 90 watts (90 joules per second) of power - after all, the body needs to be heated, various processes need to be run, the brain needs a good supply of energy even when sleeping. 90 joules per second is 7776 kilojoules per day, or 1850kcal per day (when you talk of calories, you're actually talking about kilocalories, one calorie is actually rather a small amount of energy).
300kcal a day is a starvation diet, even for a person that is a paraplegic.
The person you saw eating as little as 300kcal a day over several months was _lying_ to you and sneaking in extra food when you weren't watching. It simply defies the laws of physics for them to eat that little over a period of months without starving to death. Even if their energy requirements were half that of a typical human, it would still be a starvation diet.
If your diet did not include nutritional deficiencies, well, it wasn't malnutrition. Malnutrition does not simply mean "not enough food". A high energy diet that otherwise provides more than ample energy may still be gross malnutrition if it fails to provide other things.
Slashdot Mirror
The RIAA doesn't care if they are voted the 'worst company' - they have succeeded. Since they don't sell anything to the public, the fact that all the hatred has stuck to the RIAA _instead_ of the companies they represent, they have succeeded entirely in this goal - and I predict most people are too blind to this fact to see that this is anything other than an extremely hollow victory. The RIAA doesn't care if they are unpopular with the general public - because the general public is not their customer. So long as the hate and bile sticks to them, instead of the record companies they represent - they are winning.
I'm building my own computer (no, not getting some random PCI cards and plugging them into a motherboard), but designing a simple Z80 system for fun.
0 -Project-Pages/Image19.html
If you want to mess around with this sort of thing, you cannot avoid writing things in asm. I've got this far:
http://www.alioth.net/Projects/Z80/Z80-Project/Z8
- having laid out a double sided PCB, and got everything shoehorned onto a 160x100mm 'Eurocard' sized motherboard.
However, I've also retargeted the z88dk (Z88 Development Kit, originally designed for the Cambridge Z88 portable computer) to my Z80 board because while it'll be best to have all the low level stuff done in assembly language, writing things that use floating point will just be ten times faster to write in C.
But even if you never intend to hack hardware, it's still important to at least be familiar with assembly language - if only to know why unchecked buffers are bad. If you've ever written a program in asm and accidentally overwritten the stack and tromped all over your return address, you fundamentally understand why this is a bad thing. We've got into a whole world of hurt because many programmers didn't understand this.
Most people find pointers difficult because their minds have been poisoned by BASIC (Visual or otherwise). For such people, pointers are a gigantic conceptual leap.
Pointers are very simple if you're used to assembly language. After all, what is "ld a,(hl)" [0] other than using a pointer? You've just been calling it indirection rather than a pointer, but it's the same concept - you just dereferenced a pointer. BASIC programmers are never exposed to anything like that, and may reach a reasonable level of competence before even knowing such a thing is possible - they think they know all the abstract stuff about programming (loops, conditions etc.) and then are faced with pointers - something that simply doesn't exist in what they've been doing for the past ten years. Tell them that you can have pointers to pointers and their watch their heads explode. They will be thinking in BASIC and translating into C - but the trouble is there's no way to trivially think in BASIC and translate to a C pointer. It's not until they start thinking in C rather than BASIC that the light usually turns on.
[0] if you're unfamiliar with Z80 asm - "load the accumulator with the contents of the memory address pointed to by the register pair HL".
But they aren't doing what Microsoft were doing, and even a superficial look at the linked article shows that. Microsoft were hiring permanent temps as it were. Google are being up front that these are temporary positions, and therefore, it is highly likely that they are just that: temporary positions, not permanent jobs masquerading as temporary positions. What happened to innocent until proven guitly? Where's the evidence that Google are doing this to avoid paying benefits? There is none. The entire story is hot air.
Since when is offering temporary jobs a terrible thing to do? If you apply for one, you know _up front_ that it's a temporary position. It's not like they are baiting-and-switching anyone.
Sex is like bridge. You don't need a partner if you have a good hand.
That will put them at a significant competitive disadvantage to the likes of RedHat. They will be saddled with maintaining old versions of very complex software (like the entire gcc toolchain, plus binutils and the like) - whereas companies who are not pariahs will just continue using the latest GPLv3 versions of this software. Novell's costs will therefore be significantly higher since they can no longer benefit from the work of the actual package maintainers themselves.
Because all the GNU tools that Linux depends upon (most significantly the entire toolchain they rely on to build the software) _will_ be GPL3 when GPL3 comes out. This means they either have to spend money to maintain the old GPL2 tools themselves or find alternates. No alternative currently exists for gcc which is free software.
On a point of pedantry, Linux is most certainly not freeware. Freeware generally means closed source, non-free utilities which are as proprietary as Windows itself - just distributed gratis. Linux is Free software - Free with a capital F. This doesn't necessarily mean you get it gratis - indeed, people charge for Linux distributions (see RedHat, Novell et al.) What the Free with a capital F means is 'freedom', not 'gratis'. It's quite an important distinction. Freeware, generally is non-free (i.e. you still don't have the freedom to modify or redistribute).
Anyway...moving swiftly on.
The success of Linux and ultimately doomed state of ReactOS is because Linus was not shooting for a 'clone' - he was just shooting for something POSIX. Most of Unix is really all about open(), close(), read(), write(), select() and ioctl(). Implement those syscalls and you are a long way there. Then just add GNU - the utilities and libraries already pretty much complete in 1992, when Linux first started getting useful.
Win32 on the other hand... how many years has Wine been going without even getting close to decent compatibility with Windows? Win32 is a horrible, convoluted mess of an API, which certainly cannot be mostly boiled down to a handful of syscalls. Linus didn't have to write anything to do graphics - X already existed, and was already the standard for Unix. He didn't have to write standard C libraries or utilities - GNU already existed. ReactOS on the other hand have to implement equivalents of these from the ground up *and* the abortion that is Win32.
ReactOS's goals are very noble, but they aren't even chasing a stable API - Vista changes the goalposts again and adds on yet another layer they have to chase. They don't even expect to have full kernel compatibility by next year, let alone compatibility with Windows 2000 (which is now 7 years old).
Yeah, I agree it shouldn't have been modded offtopic. It should have been modded Overrated instead.
The summary is extremely badly written and takes this entirely out of context - the actual article is comparing Vista's capabilities with _earlier_ versions of Windows, where 3rd party programs could sort of emulate Vista (while pegging the CPU) - not a comparison to OS X at all.
:-)
As an aside, did anyone else notice the BitchX irc session (probably running over an ssh connection from a more unixy machine) on page 4 of the article
The mosquito isn't the actual problem - the problem is if you create sufficient selective pressure against the malaria parasite, eventually you'll get malaria parasites resistant to the gene in these mosquitos and will be back at square 1 again.
Algae is probably the most promising thing to develop (can be done on industrial land, using industrial methods rather than using up valuable, fertile land that's needed for food crops), as well as cellulosic ethanol (can be made by growing any invasive weed on marginal land).
The thing with algae - you can make a potential of something like 10,000 gallons per acre of algae plant. Ethanol from corn is on the order of 150 gallons per acre.
While embetter is cromulent, according to dictionary.com, embroaden is not!
The slowness of Debian updates is a feature, not a bug. When you have a server 4,000 miles away from home (where a major OS upgrade can quite easily leave the machine an unbootable lump of metal), having a long time between major releases, and the updates to the current release being rock solid - it's a BIG feature. It's why I run Debian on those servers - because it's a lot less stressful than running a faster moving distribution.
On a point of pedantry, also you cannot have a meteoric rise. Meteors fall!
Reminds me of...
C: You shoot yourself in the foot.
C++: You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying "That's me, over there."
Is it just me, or does Caldera's logo look like Mickey Mouse's ear (specifically, a sphere with a picture of Mickey Mouse on it, such that you can only see his ear) ?
GM food can produce _no_ significant crop that grows in the desert. Not unless you have widespread irrigation, and normal crops will grow in the desert with irrigation.
The other problem with GM is that companies like Monsanto get to own the food chain with patents. At least the patents have long expired (or never existed) for normal food crop cultivars. Monsanto have already done some pretty unpleasant things to farmers whose fields have been infected by pollen that has spread from neighbouring farms. You can be an 'IP pirate' just because the wind blew the wrong way.
I was glad when I heard that Monsanto had pulled out of Britain altogether - not because of any aversion to GM, but because of an aversion to Monsanto's business and legal practises.
Not when you're doing a conversion from SI units to kcal, you can't - otherwise you'll be three orders of magnitude off. Not everyone knows that a food calorie is actually one kcal, including, I suspect, the parent poster.
You can buy cheap battery powered radios which pick up the NWS weather radar broadcasts (which continuously broadcast weather information). You don't need TV to keep up with the weather.
That would only be true if the human body was 100% efficient - therefore, 100 calories 'at the foot' meant only 100 calories burned.
This is not even the slightest bit true - the body has to expend vastly more than 100 calories to lay down 100 calories at the soles of your feet.
Some people being fat is _entirely_ natural; no need to take them to a doctor for what is their natural state.
At my school, I was a geek. I did NOT appreciate any PE or games lessons because, to me, they were all as boring as fuck as well as a place to be bullied (with the sports teachers actively encouraging bullying). All I really learned from PE was how to successfully skive school lessons without being caught. The school wasn't interested at all in the kinds of exercise I (and funnily enough, many of the other geeks) find interesting - cycling, hiking, climbing etc. The school was only interested in 'field' sports such as rugby or hockey, or alternately closed track athletics. The former an avenue of exquisite pain and school sanctioned bullying, and the latter about as interesting as paint drying.
In the school population, there wasn't a noticable difference between obesity levels in those who frequented the computer room but avoided PE, and those who were keen on sports and bullied those in the computer room. Many of the strongest and most active (typically rugby players) spent _a lot_ of time doing active things, and yet as a proportion just as many of them were fat as the proportion in the computer room were fat.
It's just the way some people are made.
Maths = short for mathematics.
The English invented the language, that's why it's called English. British English is therefore, defacto, the correct, reference version of the language. Therefore, the question should be why does the US de-pluralize 'maths' and pluralize 'sport'?
That person was lying about only eating 300 calories a day.
A completely sedentary human will run at about 90 watts (90 joules per second) of power - after all, the body needs to be heated, various processes need to be run, the brain needs a good supply of energy even when sleeping. 90 joules per second is 7776 kilojoules per day, or 1850kcal per day (when you talk of calories, you're actually talking about kilocalories, one calorie is actually rather a small amount of energy).
300kcal a day is a starvation diet, even for a person that is a paraplegic.
The person you saw eating as little as 300kcal a day over several months was _lying_ to you and sneaking in extra food when you weren't watching. It simply defies the laws of physics for them to eat that little over a period of months without starving to death. Even if their energy requirements were half that of a typical human, it would still be a starvation diet.
If your diet did not include nutritional deficiencies, well, it wasn't malnutrition. Malnutrition does not simply mean "not enough food". A high energy diet that otherwise provides more than ample energy may still be gross malnutrition if it fails to provide other things.