I'll second this. I've had a number of prospective employers read my blog, find my CV and only then contact me to ask if I would be interested in a full-time job. Having a good online presence can be invaluble when finding a job and puts you into a far better negotiating position (they admit they need you, instead of you admitting you need them).
Having said this, it is a good idea to use aliasses for crap like myspace, political forums and mmorpg's, using your name for these kind of things can only work against you. Just use some common sense.
And no, I don't need a job, but thanks for the offer;)
Except maybe MMORPG's? In games like EQ, UO and WoW you are just one cog of the machine. In these games, the world doesn't revolve around you any more than the real world does.
Maybe that also explains the addictiveness of MMOG's: everyone is trying to make a difference, yet only few can actually accomplish something new. Quests et al are nothing more than synthetic sugar: they eventually reset anyway, so others can accomplish exactly the same.
The planet is so far from overpopulated its not even funny. You could quite comfortably fit the entire population of the planet in the state of Texas, and I don't mean three high, I mean a house and land each. The perception of overpopulation is a misconception.
Finding this hard to believe, I did the math and came out on 115m^2 per person, which should be adequate for a small house and a nice lawn. There still is a problem on how to feed 6 billion people with only enough room for a herb garden each...
How about you install a proper media player like VLC instead? I don't like it when sites host a WMV, but as it's the choice of the publisher of the movie I don't whine. How about you do the same and search google first?
If I had any modpoints I'd mod parent up. Emoticons, those silly little critters, should be used much more often in email and not be looked down upon. It's the only way to determine how serious the sender is.
But then again, I'm a sarcastic asshole. Learned to use emoticons the hard way:)
F/OSS professes to want to provide the world with a viable alternative to the Microsofts
Who gave you that idea? Licenses are very much why F/OSS has been able to prosper as much as it has, especially RMS's GPL.
I think RMS has a point on this one, the zillions of CC-licenses are counter-productive, complicated and don't (all) ensure freedom. This should have been the purpose of the CC, and it turned out bad.
Oh, and the one who modded you insightful should get a clue.
It's not only the Mozilla-people, WhatWG also includes Apple (Safari) and Opera. But I agree: WhatWG can come up with all nice new proposals, what a webbrowser should implement are the W3C standards, not their own or those of a third party.
IMHO this isn't a fault of WhatWG, but of the FF developers thinking they should run ahead and implement any draft before it has been considered carefully.
Lets just, for the sake of clarity and shameless Python-fanboyism, ignore the fact that the PHP code was properly commented (about a third of the 'code') and the Python code had a whopping 1 (one) line of commenting. Not to mention the PHP code had extra newlines adding to the readability of the code, and about half the code was a (very neatly indentend) array for some external library. Wake me up when you have a proper comparison.
Don't get me wrong: I love Python. But it doesn't need flawed statistics. Heck, I'd think a maintenance programmer would love the PHP code easily over that Python mess. (K)LOC don't count people, your use of commenting and clear code does!
Having actually RTFA (thanks editors for yet another post full of flaws), am I the only one who doesn't see anything new with Stanley's approach? We've had probabilistic/certainty-based learning algorithms for years now (neural networks, bayesian inference), and any AI researcher worth his salt will tell you rule-based systems just won't cut it in a non-controlled real-world environment.
Still kudos to Stanford for being the fastest against the odds and a fine implementation, but this is hardly a giant leap for AI. Baby steps, useful interesting baby steps.
Is this pro-MS day or something? 'mericuns, stop seeing this as a US/EU war and look at the bigger picture.
The EU wants MS to open up their protocols and fileformats to allow fair competition. Aren't open standards what everyone here wants in the end? This 2.4M/day fine is just because MS isn't listening, the EU has fined MS before. This is the EU's way of saying: open up your protocols, your fileformats and your system or we'll force you to. Fines and legislation are the only way the EU can slowly force MS into accepting this fact.
I can't wait for the day that MS publishes actual complete documentation on implementing NTFS or communicating with an Exchange server. That is the day that we, the people, say that we won't stand for closed standards anymore.
Try the Clusty meta searchengine. Clean interface, clear privacy policy, Wikipedia-specific searching and your results are clustered into relevant groups. It tends to be a bit slower, but the results are on par.
I haven't been using Google for a few months now, there are valid alternatives.
5% for any major website should be enough to convince any PHB worth his salt.
I had a conversation about this with my boss some time ago, and stated that our e-commerce websites (very non-tech oriented) had gone over the 5%-boundry when it came to firefox users.
His face went pale. 5% of all users means 5% of ad and sale income. Multiplied by the numbers we get, this is a serious enough difference for him to consider: the difference was more than both our salaries combined. He ordered thorough testing on IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari, and full adherence to web standards some time later.
Lets, just for the fun of it, compare our beloved kernel with a non-stable ABI to a userspace library like glibc.
We've been through the whole libc5->glibc transition years ago, and for distributions offering binaries (Debian?) these transitions have always been a pain. Thankfully they don't happen very often, and there are numerous ways how userland libraries provide space for future API-expansion. If I choose to use binary applications, I can do so, but it's my choice to forgo the freedom-of-source, not that of the library developers. Now how would you like to recompile all your binaries each time a new version of glibc comes out? Because this is what we've been having to do with device drivers every new kernel release. It just isn't necessary.
Essentially what driver developers get is a moving target. A driver working today can be broken tomorrow, no guarentees. Naturally, your precious kernelspace ivory tower can not be compared to us lowly userland developers, but as I see it the kernel developers are treating this as a moral problem, not as a technical one.
So, instead of one proper ABI, we get companies creating compatibility layers, of which they know the interface doesn't change (as they wrote it themselves). Look at what nvidia has done. You are not stopping people from using non-free 'illegal' drivers, you are merely making it harder for companies to develop for linux and for us users to use. Does this change the result? We still have non-free drivers floating around, your choices thankfully can't stop them (for they give us more freedom!). And instead of having easy-to-use repositories of device drivers, we have to recompile all of them every time we want to upgrade our kernel a notch.
Freedom is good. So is the freedom of making decisions that are not your own. Grow up, and give us users our freedom.
Behe's purpose in this book is to provide counter examples to current evolutionary theory at the biochemical level. I think it's a great book and asks the right questions, scientifically, about evolutionary theory. Though I think his answers are weak. Basically his answer is: if current evolutionary theory can't explain a biochemical system, then God did it.
It is interesting to note that most, if not all, of his questions have since been answered (eyes for example evolving multiple different times via photosensitive cells). Also, in spite what most people believe, Behe isn't an ID'er: he doesn't deny for example that humans evolved from apes. He merely tried to pinpoint areas that weren't yet explained by evolution. The loonies took his ideas and grossly distorted them for their own purposes.
As Mr. Jobs has stated in the past, you have to realize that millions of people are going to use your product. Suppose 10 million people use OOo, a minute a year would result to 19 human-years lost. For merely loading documents.
From my personal experience, OOo takes at least 20 seconds to load on a reasonable machine. Suppose I start OOo once every day (not very unrealistic) that would mean some 120 minutes lost. That would result in 2280 years lost over the population of OOo users. Tends to put load-times in perspective, doesn't it?
Abiword and Gnumeric do fine for me personally and start in a flash. Now if my boss would stop sending me.ppt's I could finally get rid of OOo for good. Speaking of which, the latest Abiword can handle ODF! \o/
... and every time our faculty gets pummeled. Basterds, all of you!
Oh well, at least this time there wasn't a cs.vu.nl link in the post *content with Guillaumes & Steen's Globule finally getting a stress-test, burn burn burn...*
I for one am happy with the new Minix release. Finally emacs. Finally Minix could actually be useful...
Slashdot Mirror
Really, what are you smoking? I could use some of that...
Having said this, it is a good idea to use aliasses for crap like myspace, political forums and mmorpg's, using your name for these kind of things can only work against you. Just use some common sense.
And no, I don't need a job, but thanks for the offer ;)
Maybe that also explains the addictiveness of MMOG's: everyone is trying to make a difference, yet only few can actually accomplish something new. Quests et al are nothing more than synthetic sugar: they eventually reset anyway, so others can accomplish exactly the same.
Yes, I was bored, please move along...
With a bit of (bad) luck, he'd be running that script as root... *shudder*
"News for nerds". Heh, how times change...
But then again, I'm a sarcastic asshole. Learned to use emoticons the hard way :)
I think RMS has a point on this one, the zillions of CC-licenses are counter-productive, complicated and don't (all) ensure freedom. This should have been the purpose of the CC, and it turned out bad.
Oh, and the one who modded you insightful should get a clue.
IMHO this isn't a fault of WhatWG, but of the FF developers thinking they should run ahead and implement any draft before it has been considered carefully.
As if python itself wasn't fun enough :)
Lets just, for the sake of clarity and shameless Python-fanboyism, ignore the fact that the PHP code was properly commented (about a third of the 'code') and the Python code had a whopping 1 (one) line of commenting. Not to mention the PHP code had extra newlines adding to the readability of the code, and about half the code was a (very neatly indentend) array for some external library. Wake me up when you have a proper comparison.
Don't get me wrong: I love Python. But it doesn't need flawed statistics. Heck, I'd think a maintenance programmer would love the PHP code easily over that Python mess. (K)LOC don't count people, your use of commenting and clear code does!
Still kudos to Stanford for being the fastest against the odds and a fine implementation, but this is hardly a giant leap for AI. Baby steps, useful interesting baby steps.
Tried using a laptop recently?
The EU wants MS to open up their protocols and fileformats to allow fair competition. Aren't open standards what everyone here wants in the end? This 2.4M/day fine is just because MS isn't listening, the EU has fined MS before. This is the EU's way of saying: open up your protocols, your fileformats and your system or we'll force you to. Fines and legislation are the only way the EU can slowly force MS into accepting this fact.
I can't wait for the day that MS publishes actual complete documentation on implementing NTFS or communicating with an Exchange server. That is the day that we, the people, say that we won't stand for closed standards anymore.
I haven't been using Google for a few months now, there are valid alternatives.
5% for any major website should be enough to convince any PHB worth his salt.
I had a conversation about this with my boss some time ago, and stated that our e-commerce websites (very non-tech oriented) had gone over the 5%-boundry when it came to firefox users.
His face went pale. 5% of all users means 5% of ad and sale income. Multiplied by the numbers we get, this is a serious enough difference for him to consider: the difference was more than both our salaries combined. He ordered thorough testing on IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari, and full adherence to web standards some time later.
Gotta love capitalism.
Simple. Because it's easier coming up with new eye candy.
Also, I'm not sure I'd want my computer reading my mind. I've got enough porn as is, thank you very much.
nano-ITX boards have been 'nearly there yet' for years now. Don't wait for them. I have, and I've regretted it.
Anyway, just my 2 cents. nano-ITX boards would be very, very cool if they were available...
Only on slashdot could people take this seriously...
Finally a proper microkernel OS design by Microsoft! prof Tanenbaum would be proud!
/.: Die M$ XP, DIE! *pinky to mouth*
Come on, who cares about statistics? I'm glad they're actually doing something useful: CS research!
Oh wait, this is
We've been through the whole libc5->glibc transition years ago, and for distributions offering binaries (Debian?) these transitions have always been a pain. Thankfully they don't happen very often, and there are numerous ways how userland libraries provide space for future API-expansion. If I choose to use binary applications, I can do so, but it's my choice to forgo the freedom-of-source, not that of the library developers. Now how would you like to recompile all your binaries each time a new version of glibc comes out? Because this is what we've been having to do with device drivers every new kernel release. It just isn't necessary.
Essentially what driver developers get is a moving target. A driver working today can be broken tomorrow, no guarentees. Naturally, your precious kernelspace ivory tower can not be compared to us lowly userland developers, but as I see it the kernel developers are treating this as a moral problem, not as a technical one.
So, instead of one proper ABI, we get companies creating compatibility layers, of which they know the interface doesn't change (as they wrote it themselves). Look at what nvidia has done. You are not stopping people from using non-free 'illegal' drivers, you are merely making it harder for companies to develop for linux and for us users to use. Does this change the result? We still have non-free drivers floating around, your choices thankfully can't stop them (for they give us more freedom!). And instead of having easy-to-use repositories of device drivers, we have to recompile all of them every time we want to upgrade our kernel a notch.
Freedom is good. So is the freedom of making decisions that are not your own. Grow up, and give us users our freedom.
Now back on topic: has Google released anything new this morning? *ducks chair*
From my personal experience, OOo takes at least 20 seconds to load on a reasonable machine. Suppose I start OOo once every day (not very unrealistic) that would mean some 120 minutes lost. That would result in 2280 years lost over the population of OOo users. Tends to put load-times in perspective, doesn't it?
Abiword and Gnumeric do fine for me personally and start in a flash. Now if my boss would stop sending me .ppt's I could finally get rid of OOo for good. Speaking of which, the latest Abiword can handle ODF! \o/
Oh well, at least this time there wasn't a cs.vu.nl link in the post *content with Guillaumes & Steen's Globule finally getting a stress-test, burn burn burn...*
I for one am happy with the new Minix release. Finally emacs. Finally Minix could actually be useful...