Have you noticed at restaurants, when the servers flock together to sing to a person having a birthday, instead of the proprietary 'Happy Birthday to You', they sing a different song entirely. I offer, under the GPL , this little ditty:
Happy, happy birthday!
We sing this song to you
(We'd like to sing a different one
But then we might get sued)
Being experienced shouldn't blind you to things that are broken.
I do tech support for a living. I've been getting training on a software line, the producer of which was bought out by my employer. The people doing the training, of course, are the ones who used to work for the company we bought out. It just blows me away how many things they think are obvious, but to my mind are completely counterintuitive. I'm making an effort to take notes on these things before experience clouds my judgement, because I know they are the places I'm going to find a lot of people having trouble with.
It helps that this software is used by power-users, who get training in its quirks. That means I don't have to deal with basic how-do-I-use-a-computer stuff. They get that the flip side of the freedom our (proprietary) software gives them is the responsibility to learn how to use that freedom to produce the results they want.
To go back to the car analogy, it's a lot easier to 'drive' an elevator, or ride on a bus or train, than drive a car, but you also don't have as much freedom, because someone else gets to limit what your destinations could be.
People have unrealistic ideas about what 'free' means. It's the speech/beer thing. While sometimes things can be free in both senses, there is often a tradeoff between the two.
My Chevy is 'free/open source' in the sense that I can get my oil changed at Jiffy Lube instead of Mr. Goodwrench. Or I can buy some oil, a filter, and the appropriate tools (maybe even a Haynes manual) at O'Reilly Auto Parts, and do it myself.
My Linux boxes are free in the sense that I can hire anyone I want to help me with them, or I can get a book from O'Reilly Media, and do it myself.
Freedom doesn't mean that no effort/expense is required. It only means that the effort won't be artificially impeded.
Those to stupid to know that publicly flaunting their ignorance is not clever are obviously incapable of being educated.
As a fellow Grammar Nazi, I share your pain. That's what makes this so painful. By your own words, I can't educate you, so I'll just have to ask you to re-read this sentence. See if you can spot the obvious error you committed. You use a certain word two times, but the proper usage would have been to use one spelling in one place, and another spelling too.
Watt wood-eyed dew width aught mine ice bell Czech her?
Then, people who did not use it would not be standards compliant...
People who use IIS are already noncompliant. That doesn't seem to carry any weight with PHBs, who assume that MS software is by definition, compliant with MS. (Never mind that from a technical standpoint, MS software is incompatible with other MS software at least as often as FLOSS is)
I fail to see how Microsoft can take an open, XML-based, plain text format that is ratified in numerous RFCs, and somehow "corrupt it" amd make it unuseable by adding some extra extentions.
Maybe not unuseable, but bloated for damnsure. Here's an example:
<sx:history when="Sat, 21 May 2005 09:43:33 GMT" by="REO1750"/>
With a proper IS0-8601-compliant date format, that can be done as:
<sx:history when="20050521T094333" by="REO1750"/>
Yes, it omits the day of week, but that can always be derived from the full 8-digit date, so it need not be transmitted. Similarly, the timezone is extraneous because the spec says that all times must be in GMT. Since there are going to be a lot of these fields, they'll add up. I can also change 'when' to 'at', and save two more bytes, but at least 'when' is unambiguously time rather than place, so it's defensible.
The second form is not only smaller, but easier to process, because a ASCII sort of the 'when' values is sufficient to determine which represents an earlier moment in time.
If you think about it, when you use passwords, you are using security by obscurity.
Nope. The correct analogy would be using plain-text passwords stored in/home/nobody/.junk/.1337/h4h4h4 instead of/etc/password. That would be security through obscurity. So is one of those fake rocks that you can put a spare house key in.
A security protocol presumes that the authorized user has some secret information. Security through obscurity is the false belief that hiding the protocol itself enhances security. But a protocol that hasn't been presented to peer review is likely to fall over the moment someone with a clue tries to analyze it. How long do you think it is before burglars know what the fake rocks look like?
The point is that if someone wants to use emacs, vi, sed, pico, ed, red, jed, fred, ted, perl, python, ruby, or whatever, they can do that, because it's an open format.
I've told lots of people about how easy it would have been for me to write a little shell script to unzip each open document, do a search/replace on my employer's old and new name (this is at least the 3rd time it's changed since I came to work here in summer of '01) and zip the contents back up without ever launching an office app.
One of the big reasons that Google is behind OpenDocument is that they already have the largest HTML-producing server farm in the world. Those same servers can produce zipped XML with very little additional work. In fact, zipped XML should use less bandwidth than HTML does.
10. I think we need to establish a committee to deal with that.
11. Is this initiative compatible with our Mission Statement?
12. Can we proactively leverage vertical syergies to deliver five-nines reliability?
13. We need a subcommittee to work on that aspect of your plan.
14. Now that you've written all that code, we're changing the design specs on you.
15....again.
16. If there's such a thing as a sub-subcommittee, we'll be needing one of those.
17. We need a cross-departmental task force to get a wider perspective on things.
18. The task force needs to divide itself into committees along departmental lines.
19. We need to make everything top priority!
20. ???
21. PROFIT!
We need students and employees who are well prepared in the sciences and are capable of thinking independently
As a Kansas resident, I have more than a passing interest in this subject. The funny thing about the controversy is that the people opposed to thinking independently are the ones who insist that a collection of ideas be taught as established fact, no longer subject to critical analysis. Nobody is demanding that schools teach that YHVH made Adam out of mud. They're saying that evidence continues to come in to refine theories. Kinda like when Einstein came up with some ideas that didn't exactly agree with what Newton said before.
Kubuntu or Mandriva - both were pretty KDE-centric last time I checked them out.
Kubuntu is still KDE-centric, and probably will continue to be. But I hear there's talk of a GNOME-centric version of Kubuntu in the works. I wonder how that one's coming along....
The Bride of Monster works in Kansas City, MO, and we live in KS. KS will allow us a credit for the 'income tax' that everyone who lives/works in the state pays, but not for the 1% 'earnings tax' that KC and St. Louis to collect. I think it's a ripoff, because cities are creations of state government, and the authority to collect that E-tax was granted by the same state that passed the income tax. To my way of thinking, KS shouldn't classify one as a 'city tax' and the other as 'state tax'. What difference does it make that one check goes to KC and the other to Jefferson City? Either way, it's not in our bank account.
left wingers love talking about the evil corporations, but never mention the big distribution companies that really stole the poor people's money.
They do it here in the US too. The left despises Wal-Mart, which got to be as big as it is by offering their customers consistently low prices. Those customers tend to be those on the lower end of the economic scale. Even people who don't shop there benefit from the competition that forces other retailers to hold their prices down.
But the left's love of the poor is surpassed by their obligation to their trade union constituency to oppose any large business that doesn't pay union scale. They focus their ire on the alleged shoddy treatment of Wal-Mart employees. And I suppose by their standards, it is so. But somehow they find people who want to work under those conditions. I assume it's because they can't find anything better. I always tell people who hate Wal-Mart so much that they can get together and each kick a few bucks into the pot to form a corporation that will offer low prices to poor customers and still pay high wages to the workers, if they believe so strongly in the idea.
What does that have to do with the topic at hand? It's this: People who don't like MS Office have gotten together to make and improve software that implements the OASIS OpenDocument standards. What MA has done is not to prevent MS from selling to them, (analogous to the communities that won't allow Wal-Mart to build a store) but to allow competition.
A benefit for the pornographic sites is that lawsuits would be more likely to fail since the.xxx TLD would be an explicit "brown bag".
But you're missing the big picture. Once such a domain exists, sites that don't join the.xxx TLD have a greater risk of lawsuits and criminal actions against them. A site that offers information about health issues that impinge upon sexuality can be deemed too dirty for the regular intarweb. Their failure to move to the 'red light district' will then be used against them.
INT((6 * RND(0)) + INT(6 * RND(0)) + INT(6 * RND(0) + 3 )
But your function is just as wrong. Suppose RND*6 returns.4, 1.2 and 2.2. That should be 1, 1, 2 for a total of 4. Your function would return 0 + 1 + 5. Yeah, you're adding in those extra 1s, but because they aren't within the INT() they aren't being used properly.
Sorry, but your correction is incorrect. The series.4, 1.2, and 2.2 should be the equivalent of dice reading 1, 2, and 3, for a total of 6. My rewrite of his function returns the correct total. His doesn't. It probably would have been more clear had I pushed the +3 outside the final parenthesis as I intended, but the result is the same.
Would it be more elegant to write a d6 subroutine and call that 3 times? Yes. But that's not the point I was addressing, which is that the INT must be applied to each die, not to the sum of the floats generated by the RND*6.
You were smart enough to recognize that you had to use an INT function, but failed to apply it to each RND. The distribution of this function will not be that of 3d6.
As an example, suppose the RND functions return 1.6, 2.4, and 3.3 respectively. The correct 3d6 sum would be 2 + 3 + 4 = 9, but your function would produce 10 instead. Your function will consistently produce output higher than it should. Occasionally it will generate a 19 or 20!
While a good idea, you have to remember that the folks lobbying for an.xxx domain are doing so precisely so they can tell the rest of us how to think, and speak, and act.
Well, that's my point, really. If they want to go off and make a.kids domain where everything has to meet their standards, more power to 'em. They'll have no power over.com,.net,.org,.mil, and.edu, which were the original domains set up by adults for adults. OTOH, the implication of setting up an.xxx domain is that its existence somehow affects the rules for the existing domains. And that's where they're wrong. The Internet is not Mayberry. It's more like the analgamated metropolis in the horrid Babe: Pig in the City that juxtaposes famous landmarks of the world. If you want to go create Mayberry, fine. Just don't insist that the whole internet be Mayberry.
Because the US is still in control, we do not have the.xxx TLD, nor will we for many years.
And yet, via the ccTLD mechanism, we have federated control of domains to every nation on earth, including some with policies we don't much like.
So, for example, if those wonderful bastions of free speech, the French, wanted to, they could make an.xxx.fr domain. Whatever interference is exerted by USGOV to prevent.xxx, there also must be hundreds of other countries preventing.xxx.$(cc) as well.
I personally oppose.xxx, but not for the reason you might expect. I think people (including my own brother) who demand that the Internet be made safe for the Precious Children<tm>, perhaps by ghettoizing 'adult content', have it backwards. The Internet was built by and for adults, and the presumption should be that a site is for adults unless otherwise specified. I'm all in favor of.kids or other mechanisms to 'whitelist' G-rated content, but want no part of a system that requires consenting adults to do anything to keep kids out. That's their parents' job.
How about CONSUMERS pay for new TVs or converters themselves?
Well, there's one problem with that. It's the government forcing broadcasters to stop using the NTSC frequencies and analog encoding scheme that my TV uses. It's only fair that if they're going to make my tuner useless, they help out with the cost of making it work correctly again. Leaving the consumer on the hook for $10 seems reasonable.
Now, in my particular case it won't matter, because Time-Warner Cable will do the converting for me, and I won't have to buy anything. In that case, if the government helps them pay for the equipment to do so, presumably the savings will be passed along to me. But there are a lot of people who don't have cable TV.
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It helps that this software is used by power-users, who get training in its quirks. That means I don't have to deal with basic how-do-I-use-a-computer stuff. They get that the flip side of the freedom our (proprietary) software gives them is the responsibility to learn how to use that freedom to produce the results they want.
To go back to the car analogy, it's a lot easier to 'drive' an elevator, or ride on a bus or train, than drive a car, but you also don't have as much freedom, because someone else gets to limit what your destinations could be.
My Linux boxes are free in the sense that I can hire anyone I want to help me with them, or I can get a book from O'Reilly Media, and do it myself.
Freedom doesn't mean that no effort/expense is required. It only means that the effort won't be artificially impeded.
Watt wood-eyed dew width aught mine ice bell Czech her?
Then refer to it as "Ubuntu 6.06", and skip the codename.
The second form is not only smaller, but easier to process, because a ASCII sort of the 'when' values is sufficient to determine which represents an earlier moment in time.
A security protocol presumes that the authorized user has some secret information. Security through obscurity is the false belief that hiding the protocol itself enhances security. But a protocol that hasn't been presented to peer review is likely to fall over the moment someone with a clue tries to analyze it. How long do you think it is before burglars know what the fake rocks look like?
I've told lots of people about how easy it would have been for me to write a little shell script to unzip each open document, do a search/replace on my employer's old and new name (this is at least the 3rd time it's changed since I came to work here in summer of '01) and zip the contents back up without ever launching an office app.
One of the big reasons that Google is behind OpenDocument is that they already have the largest HTML-producing server farm in the world. Those same servers can produce zipped XML with very little additional work. In fact, zipped XML should use less bandwidth than HTML does.
10. I think we need to establish a committee to deal with that. ...again.
11. Is this initiative compatible with our Mission Statement?
12. Can we proactively leverage vertical syergies to deliver five-nines reliability?
13. We need a subcommittee to work on that aspect of your plan.
14. Now that you've written all that code, we're changing the design specs on you.
15.
16. If there's such a thing as a sub-subcommittee, we'll be needing one of those.
17. We need a cross-departmental task force to get a wider perspective on things.
18. The task force needs to divide itself into committees along departmental lines.
19. We need to make everything top priority!
20. ???
21. PROFIT!
woosh!
woosh!
The Bride of Monster works in Kansas City, MO, and we live in KS. KS will allow us a credit for the 'income tax' that everyone who lives/works in the state pays, but not for the 1% 'earnings tax' that KC and St. Louis to collect. I think it's a ripoff, because cities are creations of state government, and the authority to collect that E-tax was granted by the same state that passed the income tax. To my way of thinking, KS shouldn't classify one as a 'city tax' and the other as 'state tax'. What difference does it make that one check goes to KC and the other to Jefferson City? Either way, it's not in our bank account.
But the left's love of the poor is surpassed by their obligation to their trade union constituency to oppose any large business that doesn't pay union scale. They focus their ire on the alleged shoddy treatment of Wal-Mart employees. And I suppose by their standards, it is so. But somehow they find people who want to work under those conditions. I assume it's because they can't find anything better. I always tell people who hate Wal-Mart so much that they can get together and each kick a few bucks into the pot to form a corporation that will offer low prices to poor customers and still pay high wages to the workers, if they believe so strongly in the idea.
What does that have to do with the topic at hand? It's this: People who don't like MS Office have gotten together to make and improve software that implements the OASIS OpenDocument standards. What MA has done is not to prevent MS from selling to them, (analogous to the communities that won't allow Wal-Mart to build a store) but to allow competition.
I've often wondered why you're 1, and not 0. Is there a 0?
Would it be more elegant to write a d6 subroutine and call that 3 times? Yes. But that's not the point I was addressing, which is that the INT must be applied to each die, not to the sum of the floats generated by the RND*6.
You want something more like this:
which also shaves a few cycles by only performing a single addition instead of 3 of them.So, for example, if those wonderful bastions of free speech, the French, wanted to, they could make an .xxx.fr domain. Whatever interference is exerted by USGOV to prevent .xxx, there also must be hundreds of other countries preventing .xxx.$(cc) as well.
I personally oppose .xxx, but not for the reason you might expect. I think people (including my own brother) who demand that the Internet be made safe for the Precious Children<tm>, perhaps by ghettoizing 'adult content', have it backwards. The Internet was built by and for adults, and the presumption should be that a site is for adults unless otherwise specified. I'm all in favor of .kids or other mechanisms to 'whitelist' G-rated content, but want no part of a system that requires consenting adults to do anything to keep kids out. That's their parents' job.
Now, in my particular case it won't matter, because Time-Warner Cable will do the converting for me, and I won't have to buy anything. In that case, if the government helps them pay for the equipment to do so, presumably the savings will be passed along to me. But there are a lot of people who don't have cable TV.