Please try to get some information about
what type 1 (juvenile-onset) diabetes is -
somewhere other than Hollywood *roll of eyes*.
As FallLine has already corrected here, if a
type 1 diabetic goes into a "coma", it's probably
due to hypoglycaemia or a low blood-sugar level. The blood-glucose level is normally kept from going too high by injections of insulin, usually two to four a day.
Note that some people who are not diabetics can also suffer from hypoglycaemia.
As FallLine also pointed out, any injection
given to a person in a hypoglycaemic coma would
(well, should:)
be an injection of glucose. Which works damn fast to bring one out it - or so I've been told
by those who have seen me coming out of a coma after a glucose injection:). BTW, from what I've
heard of the plot development, it's quite
plausible that the girl should have dropped into
a coma. Extreme stress can lower blood sugar level rather quickly.
The important thing to remember is that a healthy
type 1 diabetic can survive for quite a long time
without insulin. They'd feel like complete shit,
of course, and they'd have no energy and hardly
be able to eat anything with carbohydrates in it
(because that would only drive their BGL higher),
but they don't just up and die due to lack of insulin.
BTW, also try not to confuse type 1 and type 2
(mature onset, not-insulin-dependent) diabetes, because I'm sure someone's going to do
it in this discussion sooner or later, eg. "my
seventy-year-old dad has diabetes and he doesn't
blah blah blah..." *roll of eyes, grin*
He actually suggested tagging comercials and other stuff which speaks in his favour.
I don't think that speaks in his favour at all, actually. It just shows that he's yet another one of those that absolutely does not get it with regard to unsolicited commercial or bulk email. They shouldn't be sending this stuff at all. Legislation as he describes would
only have the effect of legitimising spam.
He's thinking of things purely on his own pissweak little level. All he's thinking of is something that'll
make it easier for him to filter
out the shit. Three hundred a day? Big f*cking deal. How would he like three thousand a day? Hell, how about thirty thousand a day... of which maybe a dozen or so are legitimate messages?
At that level, it doesn't matter if you can filter on a subject line (which you'd never be able to anyway, no spammer would obey such a law, even if they happened to live in a region subject to it), your ISP is paying for that traffic which means you will be paying for it. How would you feel about paying money to receive traffic that you never asked for, don't want and will never even see?
More to the point, how would that pathetic piece
of quasi-human filth Cantor feel?
He also acknowledges the inherent right of the individual to filter out what he does not like.
How generous of him:). I wonder
if he's willing to acknowledge the right of
individuals to control their own property (eg.
their computer and network resources) too?
Anyway, always remember rule number 1: Spammers lie. Also make a note of rule number 2: If you think a spammer may be telling the truth, see rule number 1.
Pete.
PS. Sorry if I sounded a bit aggressive above - it
wasn't really directed at you, arivanov. As you
can probably guess, I can get just a bit irritated
about spam.:)
I am sorry. But I have no respect for a man who does not read e-mail and appears to be proud of this.
Did you even read the link you posted?
He explains in perfectly understandable English
exactly why he doesn't use email (note the lack
of hyphen, which is also explained in the document
you linked) - aside from the very occasional
post to someone via his secretary. Try reading that document a few times, maybe you'll get it.
Communication via email may be appropriate for you. It's certainly appropriate for me, and
probably for the vast majority of people who read
and post to slashdot. But Knuth has made the decision that it's not appropriate for him
anymore - note that the guy did use email for 15 years, from 1975 to 1990 - so he is
perfectly aware of what he's missing out on
(not much) and what he's gaining (a hell of a lot
of extremely valuable time) by choosing to not
use email.
Perhaps you should reconsider the way your system of respect works.
Pete.
PS. I have no idea what made you think that he's proud of not using email.
People not think Andrew Plotkin good need read/play 'The Meteor, The Stone And A Long Glass of Sherbet' or other award-winning interactive fiction written by Andrew Plotkin.
I think you'll find that that particular game
was written by Graham Nelson (under the alias of
Angela M. Horns), in fact. It was the winner of
the 1996 IF competition. See here
for more information.
You can see the list of IF written by Plotkin
here.
Most notable (IMHO) are "Spider and Web" (5 XYZZYnews awards including Best Game, 1998), "A Change in the Weather" (winner of the first IF competition in 1995 (Inform division)) and "So Far"
(4 XYZZYnews awards including Best Game, 1996).
disclaimer: I don't know Zarf and don't want to speak (or make
guesstimates) of his intelligence level.
Hint (from someone who's played a number of his games and read a hell of a
lot of posts by him to rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction (you can have a read through those here) -
it's high. Very high. I'm actually quite surprised he reads slashdot.:)
Have a look through the relatively plain version of
his sitemap to get a
grasp of the number of coding and writing and other projects he's been
involved with.
But one presumes that he is at least somewhat familiar with Unix and Linux
derivatives. Based on his comments, he seems to be bumbling around OS X and
having more trouble than the average shmoe.
*sigh* A lot of other slashdot commenters appear to be having trouble
grasping his writing style in this "very secret" diary. As if the title
wasn't enough of a hint in itself. As if the "editorial comments" also made
by him didn't make it even more clear.
Mr Plotkin (Zarf) is an extremely literate person and widely experienced
both programming for and using different operating systems. I'm sure the
style of writing making up most of the "diary" is at least partly intended
to be humorous, but it's primarily intended to express his interaction
with the new (to him) operating system - and the writing style is just
another tool he's using to express that.
I did appreciate another/. poster pointing out that the writing made him
think of the Hulk. "Computer make no sense. Make Hulk MAD!":-)
Case in point: "Click the lock to make changes" and he's completely lost?
For crying out loud buddy, a new dialog is presented with only one choice
on it! What to do... hmmm... try the "any key", I hear that works.
The reason he was confused by it (and apparently others on this collection
of comments agree) is that is doesn't make sense.
Seriously, he seems quite confounded by this simple dialog.
Because it doesn't make sense.
This is a case where an experienced computer user would be puzzled,
and a relatively inexperienced computer user probably wouldn't be. The RICU
would read the words, think "Don't really understand... where's something
to click... oh! I can click that, let's click that." The RICU would simply
not think about what has just happened other than "The computer wanted me
to click something, so I clicked it. I don't know why the computer asks me
to click things, it just does that sometimes."
The ECU, however, would think "Why is it asking for a password for
administrative access? What would that be - the only password I've set so
far is for my personal account, and I'm not the administrator!" Or if the
ECU was aware that his personal account already had administrative
rights, he'd be thinking "But don't I already have admin rights? Why the
hell am I being asked for a password to access admin rights if I already
have those rights?"
I can see myself being just as puzzled by this dialog as Zarf. I'd probably
just click the padlock (although from what Z and others have said, it
doesn't actually look like a normal OSX button, so I might not
realise it's a button) and guesswork my way forward. But I would be really
(justifiably) pissed at the UI for being nonsensical.
Hint: It's asking you to enter a password to perform an admin-level
function. What text-based utility have we seen that does this? "sudo"
perhaps? This dialog is the graphical equivilent of sudo.
No, it's not. Not remotely. Because first of all, he's supposed to
already have admin rights (theoretically at least). You don't have
to sudo if you already (should) have all the rights you need to accomplish
the task! And secondly, the way it generally works
on a "normal" UNIX-like system with sudo is that
a particular (trusted) user is given permission
(by the
root user) to run a particular program as root,
and they have to enter their password to verify
it's them trying to do it (not just someone who
wandered by the machine while they were getting
a coffee). That makes sense.
If you tried to install something that required root privileges on a
"normal" UNIX-like system, you'd probably get a number of filesystem-level
"you don't have permission to do this" errors. If you tried to run
something that required root privileges to run (eg. a telnet daemon to
listen on the official telnet port 23, among other things), you'd be told (in one form or
another) that you need root privileges to do that. You would still have to
sudo or su manually to become root for that particular task.
However, if you were effectively root under another name, everything would
(well, should:) just install and run.
I get the feeling good ol' Zarf tends to leave himself logged in as "root"
on his Linux box...
You probably should realise that Zarf is actually quite used to the
concept of multiuser operating systems, and is somewhat puzzled that the developers
of this aspect of OSX apparently aren't.:)
Dumb user? Or simple case of unfamiliarity in new operating environment.
Quick! Vote now!
I vote for "surprising degree of misunderstanding by quite a few slashdot
readers, including but not limited to yourself".:)
Linux can play games, just not all games. But, that's the whole reason why I dual boot 2K on my laptop - starcraft and Counter Strike,
It's interesting that you mention particularly Starcraft and CounterStrike (Half-Life mod), as
both of these are known to work well under Linux
with Wine. See the StarCraft under Wine HOWTO and the HOWTO on the Linux Half-Life page. I can verify that Half-Life and the Counterstrike mod work fine on my Linux machine. Not that this information is anything particularly new, but if you haven't tried using Wine before, it might be worth giving it a go now.
I'm sort of surprised that nobody's mentioned
Ratpoison
yet, as it'd have to be the slimmest window manager out there.:)
Here's a snippet of info from top(1) after I tried running a few of the "lightweight" window managers mentioned here (btw, thanks to whoever mentioned fluxbox, looks good):
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE S %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
26154 pete 10 0 3076 3076 1872 S 0.0 0.5 0:01 sawfish
26009 pete 9 0 1872 1872 1332 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 fluxbox
26124 pete 11 0 1816 1816 1260 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 icewm
26059 pete 9 0 1648 1648 1192 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 blackbox
26094 pete 10 0 1528 1528 1012 S 0.0 0.2 0:01 fvwm2
20798 pete 9 0 944 944 808 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 ratpoison
Sorry if that's not terribly readable, but the important figures are SIZE, RSS and SHARE. Note
that fvwm2, interestingly enough, appears even slimmer than blackbox (probably partly due to blackbox being written in C++). And, of course,
note that ratpoison is significantly slimmer than any of them.
Of course, you may not be the sort of person that
would appreciate ratpoison:) - but if you've
used screen(1) and like that, there's a good
chance you'll be able to absorb the ratpoison zen.
If you're the sort of person for whom screen
real estate is all-important and you tend to use mainly terminals and a few browser windows, then give it a go - it combines extreme minimalism with useful functionality in a very nice way. No bullshit to get in your way.
Plus, it's the only WM I've ever used that I haven't had to configure at all before being productive with it... of course, that could be partly because there's very little about it to configure...:-)
Pete.
Some REAL babble (was Re:Some REAL points)
on
GTK-- vs. QT
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
> See above. Kdevelop also makes it easy to set up
> automake/autoconf build methods, even for people
> who aren't familiar with them.
Those people have no business doing software development.
Um... yeah, riiiiight.
There are lots of things in the world of software development. Lots of
languages, lots of miscellaneous helper tools. Lots of IDEs. I've never used
automake/autoconf in my development career, and I've never needed to.
Hard as it may be for you to believe, autoconf/automake familiarity is
neither necessary nor sufficient to be a good software developer, in C++ or
any other language.
I also reckon that you believe WYSIWYG "html editors" have a place? Maybe
for my 10 year old female cousin, but not for anyone else. Yet again, they
shouldn't play the game if they are afraid of the ball.
I get the feeling you'd say that a UNIX sysadmin who wasn't familiar with
(and confident enough to modify directly)/etc/sendmail.cf has no business
doing UNIX system adminstration either. Even if they were adminning a
system without sendmail running? Hmmm.
Personally, I actually do think that WYSIWYG "HTML editors" have a place.
I also think applications like Lyx have a
place. It's just a shame that at the moment there aren't any standout
contenders in the HTML side that focus on generating standards-compliant
HTML (at least as far as I know, I'd be happy to be corrected on this
point).
As an aside, is there any particular reason you say "my 10 year old
female cousin," rather than just "my 10 year old cousin" or "a 10
year old child"? Are you trying to imply that she's doubly disadvantaged in
being ten years old and female? Or perhaps even more disadvantaged in that
she's your cousin?
SQL is a backend issue, there are no reasons for it to be tied into a
toolkit.. if so, it is the worst form of bloat.
I assume you meant to say "GUI toolkit" there... as a statement like
"there's no reason to tie SQL into a database toolkit" would seem more than
a little bit senseless.
Hard as this (again) may be for you to believe, but Qt is not just a GUI
toolkit. GUI stuff is a large part of it, but not the only part. I
mentioned in another comment that I know of one app, Doxygen, that used Qt without using any
of the GUI stuff - simply because the author really like the fact that it
abstracted the low-level platform-specific stuff so nicely.
The other major issue with QT is the terrible licensing. It still sucks,
and I doubt it will ever not suck. I would never base my software on
something that will make it as valuable as a pile of rubbish one day.
I love it when people say something "sucks" and offer absolutely no
explanation as to why they think it sucks. Try. Come on, have a go. Tell us
why the terrible Qt licensing system sucks. Lots of other people in this
topic have at least made an effort (and in the process demonstrated that
they don't know what they're talking about), but I'm sure you can do better
than them.
IDE.. hah, I'd like to see you use Kdevelop on a text terminal.
Um... yeah... I'd like to see you use Quake on a piece of paper.
WTF are you babbling about? If you want to restrict yourself to using a
text environment, do so. Nothing stopping you. Of course, if you're supposed to be
developing a GUI application, you might not be able to test it at
all, but I'm sure that doesn't matter for someone like you.
Have a nickle, get yourself a real computer.
Gee. A whole "nickle". Thanks.
Pete.
Re:Cuz it's crap (examples failed when I tried the
on
GTK-- vs. QT
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Hi Szplug (hmm, Tintin fan?)
I was examining cross platform GUIs a couple years ago, and gave wxWindows
a try; it's ugly (full of arbitrary little macros)
The macros aren't arbitrary, but there are a fair few of them though. I guess there are a few techniques you can use to help manage event handling - Trolltech uses C++ extensions, wx
uses macros. Once you get used to them, it's
not really an issue.
and, as the subject says, when I installed it and tried their example
programs, some either failed to compile (or more likely) failed to work (my
memory is unclear).
I've only been using wxWindows for about a year, so I can't really comment
on how easy older releases were to get working. But I can say that the
current ones work fine - if you're willing to give it another go sometime,
you may find life a lot easier.
Overall my impression was that it was a mess. Now, that was 2 or more years
ago, but I haven't heard much about wxWindows since.
It's not a mess. It's not as slick and nice as Qt, but it's very stable and
reliable and certainly not a mess. And while the wx documentation is solid
and perfectly usable for a capable C++ programmer, it's not as complete or
as well-written as Trolltech's Qt documentation. I still mention the Qt
documentation to co-workers as an example of what tech documentation should
be - I've never seen anything to match it.
We went with Qt, and it's clean and fast; I prefer it even to MFC (which
admittedly may not be saying much).
*grin* Indeed it is not. But yes, Qt is a very very nice GUI library...
and not just GUI either. Doxygen is a
good example of an application that for a long time used Qt even though it (Doxygen)
didn't have a GUI - just because the cross-platform abstractions were so
useful.
I certainly wouldn't recommend you change from Qt to wxWindows... I do
think Qt is technically superior to wx, but there are reasons why you might
find wx more appropriate for future projects with different needs. Try
installing wxPython and have
a look through the demo app - I find this a great way of showing off the
features/functionality/look/feel of wxWindows to people, even if all the
demo apps are written in Python. You can get a good feel for the way the
same apps would look in C++ even if you don't know much about Python.
Pete.
Re:Some points from using Qt.
on
GTK-- vs. QT
·
· Score: 1
Our AC friend Mark stated above (with regard to Qt):
You are dead wrong about the "superb OO design". There is virtually no OO design. Take the QFileDialog for example, it's absolutely horrible. Just look at the header. Ick!
I did have a look, actually, before I realised you were an AC. I saw only a perfectly normal OO/C++ header file (for those interested, src/dialogs/qfiledialog.h in the QT Free edition, version 3.0.0). Your thoughtful and detailed critique of "Ick!" doesn't lend too much insight as to the fundamental flaws in that source code that were apparently so obvious to you and so... um... not obvious to me.
The "not only a GUI toolkit" is not a good thing. It's a bad thing. If I already have a program that uses threads and I try to use Qt, I could be screwed. And it's not just threads, it's everything. Sockets, files, strings, even lists. All of this stuff is provided by other libraries.
...that are not necessarily cross-platform.
Threading systems is the most obvious example,
but TCP/IP and file management also differ quite
a bit between operating systems. The whole idea
of using a cross-platform library like Qt is
that you should be able to compile the code on different platforms with
no (or very minimal) changes.
This thread is completely offtopic of course, but what the hell.:)
RealityMaster101 said, among other things: "Bush won. He won by every measure, even the unreasonable ones." To which the only response
is to say, well, that's just not true. I'm sure there are lots of unreasonable measures by which Bush didn't win (I think you forget just how unreasonable humans can be:), but there are a
couple of very good reasonable measures.
First, Gore had the most votes of any candidate across the US,
winning narrowly but clearly in what is often referred to as the "popular vote" measure.
Second, there was a small but extremely signficant minor left-wing player (Ralph Nader) participating in the election, and I believe
it may be reasonable to assume that most of the
Nader-voters would have preferred Gore over Bush.
If the US had a preferential voting system
instead of this ludicrous first-past-the-post
crap, Gore should (probably:) have won quite clearly. And hell, Bush senior might well have
beaten Clinton in '92, assuming most of that very
large number voting for Perot would have preferred Bush.
Third, and this (probably) being the one that the guy's sig referred to, there were a number
of quite major fuckups in the Florida election
(and possibly elsewhere, but Florida was the
most significant). I don't think there was any simple way to solve this - probably the only really viable solution
would have been to hold another election (for
the whole country, not just Florida) and that
would be way too embarrassing for the USA as
a country. "Look! we're the leaders of the free
world, the richest and most powerful country
in the world, and champions of Democracy(tm)... and we still managed to screw up
our presidential election so badly that we had to do it again!"
*grin* Actually, that would be pretty funny.
But at least it would be admirable that you (the US as a country, not RealityMaster101 personally:) had
the balls to admit the mistake and actually
fix it, even if it was embarrassing to do so.
Instead, you ended up with a situation that was
more sad and pathetic than funny, as a classic
demonstration of the PHB ethos of "it's more
important to get something done on time, even
if it's wrong!" rather than being willing to
take the time to be sure you got it right.
There was one significant positive to come out
of that election though - it can now be almost
the canonical example of what is wrong with
the first-past-the-post voting system. Though
I don't have any great hopes of the US changing
their system anytime soon, at least there's
now something that people can point to and say
"This is why we should change."
I think what you meant to say was "I'd
rather be a hardworking opensource developer
spending large amounts of my valuable time
patiently answering repetitive questions (about
the product I work on) from people who haven't
even made the attempt to look in the product
documentation in which the answer to their
question can be found.... than a hardworking
opensource developer telling such people to
'go read the manual and stop wasting my time,
blah blah blah'"
Because otherwise your remark doesn't make sense,
and you're essentially saying "I'd rather be
part of a large problem than part of a small
problem (which could even be considered a partial
solution to the larger problem)."
Gordy, I'll assume you posted the above half-awake or something, because what you've said makes almost no sense:). This company has a commercial, closed-source software product that they already sell at least on Win32 operating systems. They're considering porting it to Linux(x86?) (and possibly other UNIX-like operatingsystems/architectures (OSX/PPC?) and, surprise surprise, selling the product for those systems. You see, then they might be able to sell more copies of their product and possibly raise their profile, both of which should help to make them more money - something that companies seem to think is quite important for some reason:).
Now, there are some situations in which it might be a good idea (or at the very least not a bad idea) for a company to opensource a software product... eg. to gain market share and/or profile (usually at the expense of a major competitor), hoping to indirectly boost sales of their other products (eg. Netscape with Mozilla, Sun with StarOffice, Trolltech with Qt-Designer and significant chunks of KDE) or because for various technical reasons there is little danger of competitors gaining value from their source code and having the source code is of significant benefit to their customers... and they can still make money out of it with dual-licensing (eg. Trolltech with Qt).... OR because their money is largely made from support contracts on the code they produce (eg. Redhat/Cygnus with GCC and heaps of other stuff).
Note that the above is certainly not an exhaustive selection of reasons for why opensourcing a product might be good... but still, none of those reasons really work for this company with this product. The most obvious reason for not opening their code would probably be that doing so would reveal all their funky optimising technology and techniques... which their competitors would then be able to duplicate (maybe not perfectly, but well enough) and hey presto, their major selling point is gone.
I don't think that sort of problem (competitors stealing "ideas") really applies in the case of (for example) Qt, as Qt is more of an architectural product - it's something you build on, not build with. The value of Qt is more in the superb structural design rather than in a collection of funky algorithms/techniques used to handle complex optimisation issues - my implication being that it should at least be possible to "borrow" the latter and graft it onto another project, whereas it would be just about impossible with the former.
Hmm, getting late, I really should wind this up. Basically, opensourcing a (formerly closed-source) software product is always going to be a risky option for a company. There are ways in which is can be beneficial in certain circumstances (some described above), but there are also a lot of ways in which it can be of little or no benefit and also cause massive damage to the bottom line. Especially if, as in this case, we are talking about what is essentially a one-product-company.:)
Mind you, it has been years since I've looked at RAD tools -- it may be that some of them now do support dynamic layouts better, and maybe even use logical positioning (eg, sizers and other layout tools) rather than rely on absolute positioning and sizing. If there was such a tool (preferably for wxPython, which is what I'm coding in now), I'd love to hear about it!
Ah, another wx fan:).
I'm guessing you're a fairly recent wxPython
convert, otherwise you would have already heard
of this, but anyway - wxDesigner
will almost certainly fit your needs. The author
is one of the primary developers of wxWindows
and he sells wxDesigner (quite cheaply - student
license US$19, single-user license US$89, 10-user license US$299) as a
closed-source extra.
(Also, on that retraining... the above poster hired a -contractor-. You don't train contractors, you train full-timers.)
I agree with pretty much everything Parity says
above - I'm just intrigued by the wording of the
above sentence. Why do you make a distinction
between contractors and "full-timers"?
Now I have encountered people before (usually HR types) who refer exclusively
to permanent staff as "full-time" (for example, when I ask if they're willing to hire me as a contractor: "No, we're only looking for a full-time person")) but I've discovered it's
pretty much a waste of time asking them to
clarify their terminology.
I mean, at least in my experience, contractors
work at least the same number of hours a week as
"permanent" (another dicey term, but anyway) employees and usually more (hell, they're getting paid per hour;). And if you use the term "full-time" to refer to "permanent" employees,
how do you refer
to permanent employees who work part-time?
Part-time full-timers? *grin*
Oh well, just a minor rant against illogical
use of language. Feel free to ignore.
Pete.
PS. Tune in next week for the episode 217.6
of "Pete's Miscellaneous Language Rants",
when we'll try to work out why US-ians insist on
saying "I could care less" when they really mean
"I couldn't care less.";-)
I worked for MS as in intern a few summers ago, and I hung out with some
the real high-level programmers (the ones who get to make REAL decisions)
during my smoke breaks.
What project(s) did these guys work on? Just curious, if you don't remember
it isn't important.
They had an interesting perspective on free software.
YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PERSPECTIVES, ALL ALIKE.
Their most convincing argument is that programming is a job. It's work, and
it can be hard work at times.
True. But it's also fun. And sometimes if something is enjoyable enough to
a person, even if it is Work(tm), that person might still do it and
not necessarily need (or even want) to be paid for it.
But if all software is free, then who pays the programmers?
I'll assume you're not intending to confuse gratis and libre here and you
are meaning gratis. Well, I guess if all software doesn't cost any money,
then nobody's going to pay programmers to produce software. So programmers
won't produce software. So there will be no new software produced. And if
someone needs software that doesn't already exist, he'll have to find a
programmer to do it for free, because software doesn't cost anything,
right, everybody knows that!
Hm. I'm sure I was going somewhere with this at one time.:)
It's pretty clear by this time that selling support contracts don't work.
Maybe it's clearer to you (and/or the programmers you're quoting) than it
is to me. Maybe selling support contracts doesn't always work, but I
think you'd be pushing it to conclude that selling support contract
always doesn't work.
I'm assuming from the context that you meant to say something like "selling
support contracts for open-source software doesn't work." Well - how many
companies producing OSS are there that make their money primarily (or even
purely) from selling support contracts for that software? How many have
failed in the last year (ie. during a global tech wreck from which few tech
companies of any kind survived unscathed)? I'm sure there's a few, but
can't name any names off the top of my head. How many have been around for
longer than five years? Ten years? For the latter, I can only think of one
(Cygnus), even though it's now owned by RedHat.
If a company can't pay its programmers, then who would work for them.
You might as well say "If a company can't earn any money, why would it
exist?"
They were continually amazed at the amount of work that is poured into free
software, and they wondered what Linux or *BSD would be like if there were
some system for everyone who contributes to be compensated.
I think this is one of the points covered (to some extent) in some of Eric Raymond's writings.
Part of the reality of opensource programming is that those who contribut
to a successful project (or to a project that becomes successful) feel that
they are compensated (either just by the existence of the project or in a
variety of other ways). Note that the definition of "successful" in that
last sentence can cover a wide area.
I can recall one of the engineers saying something like, "We [MS] wouldn't
have a chance if people with REAL talent [professional programmers] were
contributing to the free software movement. Thank god the only people who
really contribute are kiddies."
*grin* Quick, better back off from that comment!
Now, I don't think everyone who contributes to free software is a kiddie,
Phew... just made it in time.:)
but it does bring up an interesting point: what would Linux be like today
if it could attract top-tier engineers?
I'd say it also brings up another interesting point: how do you define
"top-tier engineer"?
I'll be generous to the anonymous MS programmer you quoted above and
presume that she was as least partly joking... though I'll acknowledge
there's a possibility that she wasn't (at least, you seemed to present it
as a serious comment, and you were there when she said it). At any rate -
what is a top-tier engineer? Can you tell them purely by their work?
How reliable is your judgement in that case? Can you tell them by the
way they work? Can you tell them by the the way they dress? Their
hair? Their impressive collection of facial tics?
I'll just add in closing to this otherwise largely content-free response:)
that I find that the sort of people who feel a need to publically denigrate
the skills of others only do it as a way of making them (the denigrater, not the denigratee) feel better about
themselves.
I can't get a free (speech, not beer) DVD player for Linux.
Just had to correct this. Yes you can. I've been watching DVDs in Linux for a few months now using
Xine.
It's great. Well, as long as
you're not overly
attached to the pretty DVD menus, which it
doesn't do (no great loss).
Anyway, if you want to play DVDs under Linux/FreeBSD, get Xine and try it.
Pete.
Re:Stuff from the book I'm glad they left out
on
Hannibal's Return
·
· Score: 1
Regarding the snippets from Lecter's childhood
at the end of WW2, where his sister was eaten:
Harris ruined everything by trying to pass Lecter's behavior off on some childhood trauma in typical pop-psychology fashion.
Correction: this is your interpretation - and if not necessarily wrong, at least grossly simplifying the issue.
It is part of the style of Harris to show something of the childhood influence(s) on his
major characters. Mostly Starling in SOTL,
but also Jame Gumb (to a lesser degree) and
the Red Dragon in Red Dragon. It also
works in Hannibal because of the way the
book goes towards the end - I believe the implication is that the memories of Mischa
start to trouble Hannibal because he is starting
to "get better", as it were - even to the point
of actually caring for another human being
in Clarice.
Speaking of which, bugger the brain-eating scene
(and not much of a meal it was - only Krendler
having a bit of a nibble) - I want to know why
they didn't include what I found to be a much
more grotesque/gruesome pair of scenes, where
Hannibal pretends to be Starling's father and talks to her, and
where Starling sits with her father's dressed-up
corpse
(Starling quite thoroughly drugged on both
occasions). Now they were effective. Mmmm, childhood trauma.
I can't watch a movie where every 10 seconds I say to myself "there's no way that could happen." I'm not referring to anything science-fiction, where we totally throw out the reality that we know, but rather these movies that attempt to stay in the context of the real world.
I largely agree, although I can grimace my way through them a lot of the time. Also, I don't give
sci-fi, etc. a free pass on this - they still have
to stay internally consistent, even if they can
be shown to not always follow the "rules" of our
world (and if they don't, they should make some effort to justify why not:).
Hannibal... So fake. He's an old man, my grandmother could kick his ass... so don't give me this shit about overpowering 2 prison guards and killing an ambulance worker and [.... ]
Actually, while I found all that a little dicey,
I still thought it was reasonably plausible. According to the book,
Hannibal was six in 1944, so born in 1938, so
would be just over sixty if we presume
the story is set in around 1998/1999 (I don't
know how old Anthony Hopkins is, but I wouldn't
think too far off sixty). Which
means he would have been about fifty in Silence
of the Llamas, where he pulled off the stunts
you refer to above. Fifty is hardly "old",
especially if you're in good physical condition.
Just while I'm thinking about it, I don't think
there's really anything that he does in Hannibal that is really all that physically
challenging... okay, he demonstrates some speed
with a knife on a couple of occasions, but it's
not like he ever squares up for a boxing match with
Lewis or Holyfield or anything. He relies
primarily on 1. catching people by surprise and/or
2. coming at them from behind - one well-placed
blow with a knife or mace/pepper spray or
truncheon or an
ether sponge as with Pazzi) and your proverbial
grandma could
handle them from there. Both the incidents you
mention above qualify under these conditions.
It's not so much that he's physically tough -
more that his mind is extraordinarily good at
handling combat (if you can call them that)
situations quickly and effectively. He is also
able to largely "switch off" pain, so when he is
injured, it doesn't bother him as much as it
would a normal person. He can move
unusually quickly, and he is supposed
to be unusually strong for his size, but not to
a ridiculous degree. Mentally, this guy is waaaay
off the bell curve - it's not too difficult to
believe he possesses some moderate physical
gifts as well.
Anyway, hope that provides some food for thought.
Pete.
Re:Cannibalism is NOT ENTERTAINMENT.
on
Hannibal's Return
·
· Score: 1
Okay, okay.... I'm about 90% sure that the
comment I'm replying to is a pisstake. All right,
after checking it again, closer to 95%.
Hmmmm.
Flabdabb, you want to reassure the 5% of me that thinks you might possibly be serious?:)
I remember seeing the Zorks on sale for the Commodore 64, and wishing I had enough money to buy one:). Since then, I've played quite a few IF games
acquired from a number of different source for several different platforms - most for free. I must say it is very cool now being able to play the Zorks and all other Infocom adventures
(not to mention the frequently far superior productions of raif/rgif (note: rec.{arts,games}.int-fiction) regulars) on my Palm Vx. Ridiculously portable, these things are, and great fun.
Although it is easy to spend a lot of time with them...:)
It's encouraging to see/. mentioning the IF competition. I've wondered before how many slashdot regulars
are likely to have been Infocom or general text adventure fans back in the eighties, and might not have known that there is still a very lively online presence of free (beer) IF authors and fans.
If any are interested, have a look at http://www.ifarchive.org/. There's also a few other useful links at the competition site given above.
"What are Share Options Worth?" "Hacker Stockholders Unite!" "The Stock Market, Armageddon, the Net and OSS" "Ask Slashdot:Linux and Stocks" "Buy MS stock now! Cheap!" "Red Hat Stock Splitting" "Caldera Publically Trading" "Red Hat Files For Followup Stock Offering" "VA Reprices Again" "How to Approach Venture Capital Firms?" "Red Hat Announces IPO"
Mr. Malda, how exactly is the stock market 'offtopic' on Slashdot?
CmdrTaco wrote in his story note:
I consider stories about the stock market to be CNNfn or CNBCs thing.
We only bring up the market when it deals with specific companies that we're interested in (pete: my emphasis), not when the story is "The Market." But here it is.
Most of the stories you mention obviously qualify under his statement "We only bring up the market when it deals with specific companies that we're interested in..." And I'm guessing the first story you mention (title: "What are Share Options Worth?") was probably sparked by the stock market performance of a company or companies "of interest" to the slashdot crew. Similarly, the others qualify as tangentially interesting, as they involve the stock market in relation to linux/OSS/hackers.
As another note, the second last story you mention: "How to approach Venture Capital Firms?" is not directly about the stock market, although it is a related topic.
Try to be a little more careful with your responses/accusations. If you think you see a obvious lie or mistake in something someone has said, try rereading it a couple of times first to make sure you haven't misunderstood it.
Slashdot Mirror
Please try to get some information about what type 1 (juvenile-onset) diabetes is - somewhere other than Hollywood *roll of eyes*.
As FallLine has already corrected here, if a type 1 diabetic goes into a "coma", it's probably due to hypoglycaemia or a low blood-sugar level. The blood-glucose level is normally kept from going too high by injections of insulin, usually two to four a day. Note that some people who are not diabetics can also suffer from hypoglycaemia. As FallLine also pointed out, any injection given to a person in a hypoglycaemic coma would (well, should :)
be an injection of glucose. Which works damn fast to bring one out it - or so I've been told
by those who have seen me coming out of a coma after a glucose injection :). BTW, from what I've
heard of the plot development, it's quite
plausible that the girl should have dropped into
a coma. Extreme stress can lower blood sugar level rather quickly.
The important thing to remember is that a healthy type 1 diabetic can survive for quite a long time without insulin. They'd feel like complete shit, of course, and they'd have no energy and hardly be able to eat anything with carbohydrates in it (because that would only drive their BGL higher), but they don't just up and die due to lack of insulin.
BTW, also try not to confuse type 1 and type 2 (mature onset, not-insulin-dependent) diabetes, because I'm sure someone's going to do it in this discussion sooner or later, eg. "my seventy-year-old dad has diabetes and he doesn't blah blah blah..." *roll of eyes, grin*
Have a look through the misc.health.diabetes FAQ for more information.
Pete.
I don't think that speaks in his favour at all, actually. It just shows that he's yet another one of those that absolutely does not get it with regard to unsolicited commercial or bulk email. They shouldn't be sending this stuff at all. Legislation as he describes would only have the effect of legitimising spam.
He's thinking of things purely on his own pissweak little level. All he's thinking of is something that'll make it easier for him to filter out the shit. Three hundred a day? Big f*cking deal. How would he like three thousand a day? Hell, how about thirty thousand a day... of which maybe a dozen or so are legitimate messages?
At that level, it doesn't matter if you can filter on a subject line (which you'd never be able to anyway, no spammer would obey such a law, even if they happened to live in a region subject to it), your ISP is paying for that traffic which means you will be paying for it. How would you feel about paying money to receive traffic that you never asked for, don't want and will never even see?
More to the point, how would that pathetic piece of quasi-human filth Cantor feel?
How generous of him :). I wonder
if he's willing to acknowledge the right of
individuals to control their own property (eg.
their computer and network resources) too?
Anyway, always remember rule number 1: Spammers lie. Also make a note of rule number 2: If you think a spammer may be telling the truth, see rule number 1.
Pete.
PS. Sorry if I sounded a bit aggressive above - it wasn't really directed at you, arivanov. As you can probably guess, I can get just a bit irritated about spam. :)
Did you even read the link you posted?
He explains in perfectly understandable English exactly why he doesn't use email (note the lack of hyphen, which is also explained in the document you linked) - aside from the very occasional post to someone via his secretary. Try reading that document a few times, maybe you'll get it.
Communication via email may be appropriate for you. It's certainly appropriate for me, and probably for the vast majority of people who read and post to slashdot. But Knuth has made the decision that it's not appropriate for him anymore - note that the guy did use email for 15 years, from 1975 to 1990 - so he is perfectly aware of what he's missing out on (not much) and what he's gaining (a hell of a lot of extremely valuable time) by choosing to not use email.
Perhaps you should reconsider the way your system of respect works.
Pete.
PS. I have no idea what made you think that he's proud of not using email.
I think you'll find that that particular game was written by Graham Nelson (under the alias of Angela M. Horns), in fact. It was the winner of the 1996 IF competition. See here for more information.
You can see the list of IF written by Plotkin here. Most notable (IMHO) are "Spider and Web" (5 XYZZYnews awards including Best Game, 1998), "A Change in the Weather" (winner of the first IF competition in 1995 (Inform division)) and "So Far" (4 XYZZYnews awards including Best Game, 1996).
Pete.
Hint (from someone who's played a number of his games and read a hell of a lot of posts by him to rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction (you can have a read through those here) - it's high. Very high. I'm actually quite surprised he reads slashdot. :)
Have a look through the relatively plain version of his sitemap to get a grasp of the number of coding and writing and other projects he's been involved with.
*sigh* A lot of other slashdot commenters appear to be having trouble grasping his writing style in this "very secret" diary. As if the title wasn't enough of a hint in itself. As if the "editorial comments" also made by him didn't make it even more clear.
Mr Plotkin (Zarf) is an extremely literate person and widely experienced both programming for and using different operating systems. I'm sure the style of writing making up most of the "diary" is at least partly intended to be humorous, but it's primarily intended to express his interaction with the new (to him) operating system - and the writing style is just another tool he's using to express that.
I did appreciate another /. poster pointing out that the writing made him
think of the Hulk. "Computer make no sense. Make Hulk MAD!" :-)
The reason he was confused by it (and apparently others on this collection of comments agree) is that is doesn't make sense.
Because it doesn't make sense.
This is a case where an experienced computer user would be puzzled, and a relatively inexperienced computer user probably wouldn't be. The RICU would read the words, think "Don't really understand... where's something to click... oh! I can click that, let's click that." The RICU would simply not think about what has just happened other than "The computer wanted me to click something, so I clicked it. I don't know why the computer asks me to click things, it just does that sometimes."
The ECU, however, would think "Why is it asking for a password for administrative access? What would that be - the only password I've set so far is for my personal account, and I'm not the administrator!" Or if the ECU was aware that his personal account already had administrative rights, he'd be thinking "But don't I already have admin rights? Why the hell am I being asked for a password to access admin rights if I already have those rights?"
I can see myself being just as puzzled by this dialog as Zarf. I'd probably just click the padlock (although from what Z and others have said, it doesn't actually look like a normal OSX button, so I might not realise it's a button) and guesswork my way forward. But I would be really (justifiably) pissed at the UI for being nonsensical.
No, it's not. Not remotely. Because first of all, he's supposed to already have admin rights (theoretically at least). You don't have to sudo if you already (should) have all the rights you need to accomplish the task! And secondly, the way it generally works on a "normal" UNIX-like system with sudo is that a particular (trusted) user is given permission (by the root user) to run a particular program as root, and they have to enter their password to verify it's them trying to do it (not just someone who wandered by the machine while they were getting a coffee). That makes sense.
If you tried to install something that required root privileges on a "normal" UNIX-like system, you'd probably get a number of filesystem-level "you don't have permission to do this" errors. If you tried to run something that required root privileges to run (eg. a telnet daemon to listen on the official telnet port 23, among other things), you'd be told (in one form or another) that you need root privileges to do that. You would still have to sudo or su manually to become root for that particular task.
However, if you were effectively root under another name, everything would (well, should :) just install and run.
You probably should realise that Zarf is actually quite used to the concept of multiuser operating systems, and is somewhat puzzled that the developers of this aspect of OSX apparently aren't. :)
I vote for "surprising degree of misunderstanding by quite a few slashdot readers, including but not limited to yourself". :)
Pete.
It's interesting that you mention particularly Starcraft and CounterStrike (Half-Life mod), as both of these are known to work well under Linux with Wine. See the StarCraft under Wine HOWTO and the HOWTO on the Linux Half-Life page. I can verify that Half-Life and the Counterstrike mod work fine on my Linux machine. Not that this information is anything particularly new, but if you haven't tried using Wine before, it might be worth giving it a go now.
Hope that helps, :)
Pete.
Here's a snippet of info from top(1) after I tried running a few of the "lightweight" window managers mentioned here (btw, thanks to whoever mentioned fluxbox, looks good):
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE S %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
26154 pete 10 0 3076 3076 1872 S 0.0 0.5 0:01 sawfish
26009 pete 9 0 1872 1872 1332 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 fluxbox
26124 pete 11 0 1816 1816 1260 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 icewm
26059 pete 9 0 1648 1648 1192 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 blackbox
26094 pete 10 0 1528 1528 1012 S 0.0 0.2 0:01 fvwm2
20798 pete 9 0 944 944 808 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 ratpoison
Sorry if that's not terribly readable, but the important figures are SIZE, RSS and SHARE. Note that fvwm2, interestingly enough, appears even slimmer than blackbox (probably partly due to blackbox being written in C++). And, of course, note that ratpoison is significantly slimmer than any of them.
Of course, you may not be the sort of person that would appreciate ratpoison :) - but if you've
used screen(1) and like that, there's a good
chance you'll be able to absorb the ratpoison zen.
If you're the sort of person for whom screen real estate is all-important and you tend to use mainly terminals and a few browser windows, then give it a go - it combines extreme minimalism with useful functionality in a very nice way. No bullshit to get in your way.
Plus, it's the only WM I've ever used that I haven't had to configure at all before being productive with it... of course, that could be partly because there's very little about it to configure... :-)
Pete.
There are lots of things in the world of software development. Lots of languages, lots of miscellaneous helper tools. Lots of IDEs. I've never used automake/autoconf in my development career, and I've never needed to. Hard as it may be for you to believe, autoconf/automake familiarity is neither necessary nor sufficient to be a good software developer, in C++ or any other language.
I get the feeling you'd say that a UNIX sysadmin who wasn't familiar with (and confident enough to modify directly)Personally, I actually do think that WYSIWYG "HTML editors" have a place. I also think applications like Lyx have a place. It's just a shame that at the moment there aren't any standout contenders in the HTML side that focus on generating standards-compliant HTML (at least as far as I know, I'd be happy to be corrected on this point).
As an aside, is there any particular reason you say "my 10 year old female cousin," rather than just "my 10 year old cousin" or "a 10 year old child"? Are you trying to imply that she's doubly disadvantaged in being ten years old and female? Or perhaps even more disadvantaged in that she's your cousin?
I assume you meant to say "GUI toolkit" there... as a statement like "there's no reason to tie SQL into a database toolkit" would seem more than a little bit senseless.Hard as this (again) may be for you to believe, but Qt is not just a GUI toolkit. GUI stuff is a large part of it, but not the only part. I mentioned in another comment that I know of one app, Doxygen, that used Qt without using any of the GUI stuff - simply because the author really like the fact that it abstracted the low-level platform-specific stuff so nicely.
I love it when people say something "sucks" and offer absolutely no explanation as to why they think it sucks. Try. Come on, have a go. Tell us why the terrible Qt licensing system sucks. Lots of other people in this topic have at least made an effort (and in the process demonstrated that they don't know what they're talking about), but I'm sure you can do better than them. Um... yeah... I'd like to see you use Quake on a piece of paper.WTF are you babbling about? If you want to restrict yourself to using a text environment, do so. Nothing stopping you. Of course, if you're supposed to be developing a GUI application, you might not be able to test it at all, but I'm sure that doesn't matter for someone like you.
Gee. A whole "nickle". Thanks.Pete.
I certainly wouldn't recommend you change from Qt to wxWindows... I do think Qt is technically superior to wx, but there are reasons why you might find wx more appropriate for future projects with different needs. Try installing wxPython and have a look through the demo app - I find this a great way of showing off the features/functionality/look/feel of wxWindows to people, even if all the demo apps are written in Python. You can get a good feel for the way the same apps would look in C++ even if you don't know much about Python.
Pete.
Threading systems is the most obvious example, but TCP/IP and file management also differ quite a bit between operating systems. The whole idea of using a cross-platform library like Qt is that you should be able to compile the code on different platforms with no (or very minimal) changes.
Pete.
RealityMaster101 said, among other things: "Bush won. He won by every measure, even the unreasonable ones." To which the only response is to say, well, that's just not true. I'm sure there are lots of unreasonable measures by which Bush didn't win (I think you forget just how unreasonable humans can be :), but there are a
couple of very good reasonable measures.
First, Gore had the most votes of any candidate across the US, winning narrowly but clearly in what is often referred to as the "popular vote" measure.
Second, there was a small but extremely signficant minor left-wing player (Ralph Nader) participating in the election, and I believe it may be reasonable to assume that most of the Nader-voters would have preferred Gore over Bush. If the US had a preferential voting system instead of this ludicrous first-past-the-post crap, Gore should (probably :) have won quite clearly. And hell, Bush senior might well have
beaten Clinton in '92, assuming most of that very
large number voting for Perot would have preferred Bush.
Third, and this (probably) being the one that the guy's sig referred to, there were a number of quite major fuckups in the Florida election (and possibly elsewhere, but Florida was the most significant). I don't think there was any simple way to solve this - probably the only really viable solution would have been to hold another election (for the whole country, not just Florida) and that would be way too embarrassing for the USA as a country. "Look! we're the leaders of the free world, the richest and most powerful country in the world, and champions of Democracy(tm)... and we still managed to screw up our presidential election so badly that we had to do it again!"
*grin* Actually, that would be pretty funny. But at least it would be admirable that you (the US as a country, not RealityMaster101 personally :) had
the balls to admit the mistake and actually
fix it, even if it was embarrassing to do so.
Instead, you ended up with a situation that was
more sad and pathetic than funny, as a classic
demonstration of the PHB ethos of "it's more
important to get something done on time, even
if it's wrong!" rather than being willing to
take the time to be sure you got it right.
There was one significant positive to come out of that election though - it can now be almost the canonical example of what is wrong with the first-past-the-post voting system. Though I don't have any great hopes of the US changing their system anytime soon, at least there's now something that people can point to and say "This is why we should change."
Pete.
Because otherwise your remark doesn't make sense, and you're essentially saying "I'd rather be part of a large problem than part of a small problem (which could even be considered a partial solution to the larger problem)."
Pete.
Now, there are some situations in which it might be a good idea (or at the very least not a bad idea) for a company to opensource a software product... eg. to gain market share and/or profile (usually at the expense of a major competitor), hoping to indirectly boost sales of their other products (eg. Netscape with Mozilla, Sun with StarOffice, Trolltech with Qt-Designer and significant chunks of KDE) or because for various technical reasons there is little danger of competitors gaining value from their source code and having the source code is of significant benefit to their customers... and they can still make money out of it with dual-licensing (eg. Trolltech with Qt).... OR because their money is largely made from support contracts on the code they produce (eg. Redhat/Cygnus with GCC and heaps of other stuff).
Note that the above is certainly not an exhaustive selection of reasons for why opensourcing a product might be good... but still, none of those reasons really work for this company with this product. The most obvious reason for not opening their code would probably be that doing so would reveal all their funky optimising technology and techniques... which their competitors would then be able to duplicate (maybe not perfectly, but well enough) and hey presto, their major selling point is gone.
I don't think that sort of problem (competitors stealing "ideas") really applies in the case of (for example) Qt, as Qt is more of an architectural product - it's something you build on, not build with. The value of Qt is more in the superb structural design rather than in a collection of funky algorithms/techniques used to handle complex optimisation issues - my implication being that it should at least be possible to "borrow" the latter and graft it onto another project, whereas it would be just about impossible with the former.
Hmm, getting late, I really should wind this up. Basically, opensourcing a (formerly closed-source) software product is always going to be a risky option for a company. There are ways in which is can be beneficial in certain circumstances (some described above), but there are also a lot of ways in which it can be of little or no benefit and also cause massive damage to the bottom line. Especially if, as in this case, we are talking about what is essentially a one-product-company.
Pete.
Ah, another wx fan :).
I'm guessing you're a fairly recent wxPython convert, otherwise you would have already heard of this, but anyway - wxDesigner will almost certainly fit your needs. The author is one of the primary developers of wxWindows and he sells wxDesigner (quite cheaply - student license US$19, single-user license US$89, 10-user license US$299) as a closed-source extra.
It can be used with C++, Python or Perl code.
Pete.
I agree with pretty much everything Parity says above - I'm just intrigued by the wording of the above sentence. Why do you make a distinction between contractors and "full-timers"?
Now I have encountered people before (usually HR types) who refer exclusively to permanent staff as "full-time" (for example, when I ask if they're willing to hire me as a contractor: "No, we're only looking for a full-time person")) but I've discovered it's pretty much a waste of time asking them to clarify their terminology.
I mean, at least in my experience, contractors work at least the same number of hours a week as "permanent" (another dicey term, but anyway) employees and usually more (hell, they're getting paid per hour ;). And if you use the term "full-time" to refer to "permanent" employees,
how do you refer
to permanent employees who work part-time?
Part-time full-timers? *grin*
Oh well, just a minor rant against illogical use of language. Feel free to ignore.
Pete.
PS. Tune in next week for the episode 217.6 of "Pete's Miscellaneous Language Rants", when we'll try to work out why US-ians insist on saying "I could care less" when they really mean "I couldn't care less." ;-)
What project(s) did these guys work on? Just curious, if you don't remember it isn't important.
YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PERSPECTIVES, ALL ALIKE.
True. But it's also fun. And sometimes if something is enjoyable enough to a person, even if it is Work(tm), that person might still do it and not necessarily need (or even want) to be paid for it.
I'll assume you're not intending to confuse gratis and libre here and you are meaning gratis. Well, I guess if all software doesn't cost any money, then nobody's going to pay programmers to produce software. So programmers won't produce software. So there will be no new software produced. And if someone needs software that doesn't already exist, he'll have to find a programmer to do it for free, because software doesn't cost anything, right, everybody knows that!
Hm. I'm sure I was going somewhere with this at one time. :)
Maybe it's clearer to you (and/or the programmers you're quoting) than it is to me. Maybe selling support contracts doesn't always work, but I think you'd be pushing it to conclude that selling support contract always doesn't work.
I'm assuming from the context that you meant to say something like "selling support contracts for open-source software doesn't work." Well - how many companies producing OSS are there that make their money primarily (or even purely) from selling support contracts for that software? How many have failed in the last year (ie. during a global tech wreck from which few tech companies of any kind survived unscathed)? I'm sure there's a few, but can't name any names off the top of my head. How many have been around for longer than five years? Ten years? For the latter, I can only think of one (Cygnus), even though it's now owned by RedHat.
You might as well say "If a company can't earn any money, why would it exist?"
I think this is one of the points covered (to some extent) in some of Eric Raymond's writings. Part of the reality of opensource programming is that those who contribut to a successful project (or to a project that becomes successful) feel that they are compensated (either just by the existence of the project or in a variety of other ways). Note that the definition of "successful" in that last sentence can cover a wide area.
*grin* Quick, better back off from that comment!
Phew... just made it in time. :)
I'd say it also brings up another interesting point: how do you define "top-tier engineer"?
I'll be generous to the anonymous MS programmer you quoted above and presume that she was as least partly joking... though I'll acknowledge there's a possibility that she wasn't (at least, you seemed to present it as a serious comment, and you were there when she said it). At any rate - what is a top-tier engineer? Can you tell them purely by their work? How reliable is your judgement in that case? Can you tell them by the way they work? Can you tell them by the the way they dress? Their hair? Their impressive collection of facial tics?
I'll just add in closing to this otherwise largely content-free response :)
that I find that the sort of people who feel a need to publically denigrate
the skills of others only do it as a way of making them (the denigrater, not the denigratee) feel better about
themselves.
Pete.
Here's a direct link to the Salon RealPlayer version (which I've just watched on Linux).
You can dowload a Linux version of RealPlayer Basic from here. Well, hopefully you can, assuming I've got the link right.
Pete.
Just had to correct this. Yes you can. I've been watching DVDs in Linux for a few months now using Xine. It's great. Well, as long as you're not overly attached to the pretty DVD menus, which it doesn't do (no great loss). Anyway, if you want to play DVDs under Linux/FreeBSD, get Xine and try it.
Pete.
Correction: this is your interpretation - and if not necessarily wrong, at least grossly simplifying the issue.
It is part of the style of Harris to show something of the childhood influence(s) on his major characters. Mostly Starling in SOTL, but also Jame Gumb (to a lesser degree) and the Red Dragon in Red Dragon. It also works in Hannibal because of the way the book goes towards the end - I believe the implication is that the memories of Mischa start to trouble Hannibal because he is starting to "get better", as it were - even to the point of actually caring for another human being in Clarice.
Speaking of which, bugger the brain-eating scene (and not much of a meal it was - only Krendler having a bit of a nibble) - I want to know why they didn't include what I found to be a much more grotesque/gruesome pair of scenes, where Hannibal pretends to be Starling's father and talks to her, and where Starling sits with her father's dressed-up corpse (Starling quite thoroughly drugged on both occasions). Now they were effective. Mmmm, childhood trauma.
Pete.
I largely agree, although I can grimace my way through them a lot of the time. Also, I don't give sci-fi, etc. a free pass on this - they still have to stay internally consistent, even if they can be shown to not always follow the "rules" of our world (and if they don't, they should make some effort to justify why not :).
Actually, while I found all that a little dicey, I still thought it was reasonably plausible. According to the book, Hannibal was six in 1944, so born in 1938, so would be just over sixty if we presume the story is set in around 1998/1999 (I don't know how old Anthony Hopkins is, but I wouldn't think too far off sixty). Which means he would have been about fifty in Silence of the Llamas, where he pulled off the stunts you refer to above. Fifty is hardly "old", especially if you're in good physical condition.
Just while I'm thinking about it, I don't think there's really anything that he does in Hannibal that is really all that physically challenging... okay, he demonstrates some speed with a knife on a couple of occasions, but it's not like he ever squares up for a boxing match with Lewis or Holyfield or anything. He relies primarily on 1. catching people by surprise and/or 2. coming at them from behind - one well-placed blow with a knife or mace/pepper spray or truncheon or an ether sponge as with Pazzi) and your proverbial grandma could handle them from there. Both the incidents you mention above qualify under these conditions.
It's not so much that he's physically tough - more that his mind is extraordinarily good at handling combat (if you can call them that) situations quickly and effectively. He is also able to largely "switch off" pain, so when he is injured, it doesn't bother him as much as it would a normal person. He can move unusually quickly, and he is supposed to be unusually strong for his size, but not to a ridiculous degree. Mentally, this guy is waaaay off the bell curve - it's not too difficult to believe he possesses some moderate physical gifts as well.
Anyway, hope that provides some food for thought.
Pete.
Hmmmm.
Flabdabb, you want to reassure the 5% of me that thinks you might possibly be serious? :)
Pete.
I remember seeing the Zorks on sale for the Commodore 64, and wishing I had enough money to buy one :). Since then, I've played quite a few IF games
acquired from a number of different source for several different platforms - most for free. I must say it is very cool now being able to play the Zorks and all other Infocom adventures
(not to mention the frequently far superior productions of raif/rgif (note: rec.{arts,games}.int-fiction) regulars) on my Palm Vx. Ridiculously portable, these things are, and great fun.
Although it is easy to spend a lot of time with them... :)
It's encouraging to see /. mentioning the IF competition. I've wondered before how many slashdot regulars
are likely to have been Infocom or general text adventure fans back in the eighties, and might not have known that there is still a very lively online presence of free (beer) IF authors and fans.
If any are interested, have a look at http://www.ifarchive.org/. There's also a few other useful links at the competition site given above.
Enjoy.
CmdrTaco wrote in his story note:
Most of the stories you mention obviously qualify under his statement "We only bring up the market when it deals with specific companies that we're interested in..." And I'm guessing the first story you mention (title: "What are Share Options Worth?") was probably sparked by the stock market performance of a company or companies "of interest" to the slashdot crew. Similarly, the others qualify as tangentially interesting, as they involve the stock market in relation to linux/OSS/hackers.
As another note, the second last story you mention: "How to approach Venture Capital Firms?" is not directly about the stock market, although it is a related topic.
Try to be a little more careful with your responses/accusations. If you think you see a obvious lie or mistake in something someone has said, try rereading it a couple of times first to make sure you haven't misunderstood it.