As far as I know, this is not the case. Given your statement, hydrogen ions (say, in a plasma) would not be matter because they would be naked protons. I don't think anyone would agree with this.
Yet I don't feel the slightest urge to duck. Nor do I hear little clicking sounds as the electrons impact on my monitor screen.
Well, of course you don't. Electrons are smaller than visible light wavelengths, so you can't see them--hence scanning electron tunneling microscopes. You also don't hear the occasional proton or neutron that races down from the heavens and through your body, but that doesn't mean anything either. The total energy of these particles is too small to cause the gross physical movement that we would perceive as sound.
I have never understood there to be a quantitative distinction between particles and matter. I can certainly see a qualitative distinction--we are used to defining "matter" as the stuff we directly interact with day to day.
But, barring a more formal definition (the existence of which I admit I am ignorant), it seems that "matter" is adequately defined as an entity with rest mass, and electrons have rest mass, albeit small. Admittedly, it's not intuitive to think of the current from the battery running my laptop as "matter", or as a "matter" flow, but this doesn't dissuade me from using that definition.
What the hell are you talking about, The Princess Bride being a kids movie? The Princess Bride is a spoof on fairy tales, ala Shrek, though aimed at an older, more intelligent crowd, and IMHO far superior. The Princess Bride is a masterpiece of engaging story telling and genre twisting satire. Children may like the movie for a number of reasons, but certainly can't grasp the irony, satire, and deep humor in most of the dialogue.
If you doubt me, read Goldman's book by the same name. It's a surpringly different experience, and you'll clearly see that the seemingly sentimental emotions in the movie are far more adult-oriented than come across on screen.
If you don't like Forte, try version 3.0
on
Java IDEs?
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· Score: 3, Informative
The latest version of Forte for Java 3.0 is actually surprisingly good. I tried to use previous version of Forte and they were just terrible. If you tried Forte before and didn't like it, try it again now.
Version 3.0 seems to have fixed the major shortfallings and improved responsiveness tremendously. I run 3.0 on my 650 MHz laptop with only an occasional garbage collection pause, but it runs flawlessly on my 2x1 GHz machine. I've not switched to using it full time and haven't had any significant regrets.
I don't have a problem with someone implementing this sort of thing for the hell of it, but I do have a slight problem with it being portrayed as some way in which Linux is better than the competition. Puhleez.
Actually, I think the confusion about what open source is lies firmly in the collective mind of the open source community itself. On one end of the spectrum, you have people who like open source because they simply like to hack on whatever feature they personally like, as you've mentioned. Fine. On the other end of the spectrum, there are those like me who hope that open source is a method for creating self-organizing software projects with the ultimate goal of those projects being better than they otherwise could be.
Of course, all the confusion arises from the definition of "better"--what is the proper fitness function for open source software in general, and Linux in particular? For me, I see the complete lack of coherency in Linux and many other open source projects as their fatal flaw. People want to have Linux be a hackers paradise, yet topple Microsoft's OS monopoly by supplanting the desktop. Think about it, are these two goals really compatible?
The former requires no vision whatsoever of what Linux should be, and in fact thrives on its absence. The latter requires almost nothing but vision--the technical aspects are trivial. Unfortunately, the former goal tends to undermine efforts for the latter, and I frequently wish the Linux community as a whole would wake up and see what's in all of our collective best interest. Let people dick around with useless features in their spare time, but for God's sake, please have them more than that! Applause for the sort of nonsense described in this article just encourages more crap, more wasted time.
It's very frustrating to want to see Linux go somewhere important, yet see trivialities picked up by a bunch of fanboys as something important. So your proud of Linux, big deal, get on with it.
It's really very simple, put up or shut up.
Exactly. So let's see the fanboys excited by this news go out and make Linux a viable desktop OS, or shut the hell up about it replacing Windows.
Who cares about this except jerkoff Linux fanboys that have no use for such a feature anyway? Um, there's a reason Linux is in front here--no one else has been dumb enough to waste time implementing a similarly useless "feature".
Yeah, I know, what a rich tapestry of vision, solidarity, bazaars vs. cathedrals, free beers, etc. this represents. Whatever, blah blah. Instead, let's spend our limited time adding features to Linux that fscking matter, please.
Alternatively, rather than using hydrogen and oxygen we could use the easier-to-store sytem of ammonium and nitrous oxide
Um, we may have to rethink this idea. Making copious amounts of nitrous oxide (aka laughing gas) easily and cheaply accessible to reckless teenage drivers doesn't seem like such a great idea.
This is a chronic problem that most commercial software houses have.
While technically true, the connotation of your statement and the statements that follow are misleading. Sure, the state of testing is poor in commercial software, but it's even worse in open source software. At least commercial companies provide some minimal testing with each release, actually have people assigned and paid to do testing, and have someone to call when you have a problem. Compare this with the schlock you get with most open source software, which was at most tested on nothing other than the author's machine, with no code review, no test cases, and no accountability.
Of course, there are some open source exceptions, just as there are in the commercial world. But remember that 99.9% of open source software is NOT Apache or Linux, and the people developing the rest of this software are frequently more enthusiastic than skilled, and definitely have no resources dedicated to testing. In fact, many open source developers are also commercial developers who prefer to work on open source because they can work alone and it doesn't come with all the "crap" like code reviews.
So, let's lay blame where it belongs--on software development in general, the lack and/or cost of resources, and the general disregard for software quality as something important. None of these things are limited to commercial software development.
A class action lawsuit has been filed by Michael Granido, Jr., on behalf of himself and all others similarly situated
I admittedly haven't read the complaint yet, and I sympathize with anyone who's been burned by a bad IBM drive, but a class action suit against IBM doesn't seem like it's going to significantly help anyone, and may actually harm all of us.
As far as I understood from the previous/. article, IBM had accepted returns and provided users with problematic drives new ones that were known to be good. From what I can tell, it seems that IBM has acted in good faith.
A lawsuit against them raises the price of drives, and makes it harder and harder for anyone to release a product without excessive, often unecessary but always expensive, testing. Of course a product should perform as advertised, but in many cases, even exhaustive testing cannot determine how a product will perform when released to others. If the company acts in good faith (and maybe the complaint alleges that IBM didn't), a class actions lawsuit seems like nothing but trouble for all of us.
Why does it seem like there are as many people in the "community" criticizing open source as there are supporting it?
Because the reality is that open source software is neither as good as, nor as bad as, the zealots on both sides claim. More than closed source development, open source development is subject to significant variability in the skills of its practitioners. There is some open source software out there that is complete crap, and some that is very good, and far more than either that is merely mediocre.
And I would be careful about holding up Tomcat as an (open source) triumph. It's had some major bugs all through the 3.x timeframe, and its team includes at least a few daytime profressional "closed source" programmers (there's no correlation between the two, by the way).
Agreed, though I'm not sure it's for the reason we hope. The thing is, Apple appeals to a market segment that happily pays $5000 for a niche computer so thay can do things like run Photoshop ($800) and use the iPod ($400). These aren't people who steal music--they have too much money to bother.
They aren't "distributing" the code in the manner you imply. They are simply using it in some black box machine. The code isn't downloadable or accessible, it's merely used as an OS/service layer. If nothing has been changed in the code, the GPL doesn't hold any sway.
If it did, by your reasoning, anyone using Linux and Apache to run a web site would need to notify its visitors of the use of the software and provide a download link to them both.
Absolutely more meaningful, though of course, not ideal. DVD-RW and DVD+RW are completely arbitrary labels. What about the next format, will it be DVD/RW, or maybe DVD*RW. Why not DVD^RW or DVDln(RW). How the hell do you even pronounce these? If a consumer can't pronounce it, he/she probably won't buy it.
At least something containing a number is pronouncable, includes a sequence, and indicates an order to how the formats were developed and released.
Who the hell decided to use the abbreviations "DVD-RW" and "DVD+RW" for two significantly different formats? These couldn't be more confusing, especially since there is no clear way to even verbally articulate the difference. Why not "DVD-RW1" and "DVD-RW2"? Hasn't the hardware industry learned the lesson that causing confusion for consumers is detrimental to them?
What are you kidding? The obvious reason is that no female could be in the same room as Taco, Hemos, and the rest of them for any extended period. How many infrequently bathing, mouth-breathing, OP-short wearing, Linux-worshipping doofii can one woman stand at one time?
...you'd have a powerful, space saving desktop machine with ten times the sex appeal of any beige box. And there's the added bonus that you can easily pack it up and take it with you.
Of course, this was also exactly why it was so easy to steal. After having my computer stolen in the past, I can safely say that when it comes to desktop machines, I prefer them large, unwieldy, and bolted to the floor.
True, though it's not without its foundation in truth. Copeland lived with several Microserfs for months to gather source material and the right perspective. IIRC, the term "Microserfs" was the term the Microsoft employees used to refer to themselves.
...and i'll be honest with you, the real estate sellers on the web have NOTHING in the way of true online resources. Realty websites do nothing except serve as an advertisement for the realtors who will ultimately get your business anyway.
Did you try ZipRealty.com? Unlike other online services, they give you direct access to the MLS listings with MLS number. Granted, this isn't everything, but it is more than I've seen from any other realty site. They also send daily email listing updates, and give 1% rebates on houses brokered through them, which is usually enough to cover closing costs. So far, I've been very pleased with their listings.
The significant cost of virus infection isn't in the damage to any one user's machine or files for which they are responsible, but in the fact that a careless or ignorant user can infect hundreds or thousands of other machines, or common "promiscuous" machines that are used by many other users.
How does this "individual responsibility" strategy translate to keeping the hotseat computers in the student lab free from viruses? Once one user infects a computer, it can be the infection vector for god knows how many other users, and there's no way to track it back to the original user, or recover the files that the virus damages.
If you can do something about the problem--and you can, easily, by just buying some antivrus software--you must. Individual responsibility is hardly a solution in this situation. Sadly, with the state of modern (US) society, individual responsibility is hardly a solution for anything anymore.
If a woman burns her thighs on the hot coffee she was holding in her lap while driving, she blames the restaurant.
By the way, this is not what happened. The woman in question was handed a cup of coffee at the drive-through window at McDonalds that fell into her lap. The coffee was at over 190 degees F, and she required skin grafts on her thighs where the coffee spilled.
The main crackpot behind the Face is Richard C. Hoagland. Rather than see the foundation of his other crackpot ideas torpedoed, he's embraced the new photos as evidence of a conspiracy in NASA, and proof that the face is actually a human-feline hybrid. It's amazing what these charlatans will do to salvage their flimsy positions.
I work for Sun and recall seeing an email a few months ago asking for both technical and non-technical users to undergo usability testing with Gnome. This is one of the best things to come out of Sun's stewardship; they're able to do due diligence and add the missing ingredients that the OS community never could (or would). If you ever want to see UNIX or Linux broadly deployed on the desktop, this is the first big step in that direction.
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I have never understood there to be a quantitative distinction between particles and matter. I can certainly see a qualitative distinction--we are used to defining "matter" as the stuff we directly interact with day to day.
But, barring a more formal definition (the existence of which I admit I am ignorant), it seems that "matter" is adequately defined as an entity with rest mass, and electrons have rest mass, albeit small. Admittedly, it's not intuitive to think of the current from the battery running my laptop as "matter", or as a "matter" flow, but this doesn't dissuade me from using that definition.
What the hell are you talking about, The Princess Bride being a kids movie? The Princess Bride is a spoof on fairy tales, ala Shrek, though aimed at an older, more intelligent crowd, and IMHO far superior. The Princess Bride is a masterpiece of engaging story telling and genre twisting satire. Children may like the movie for a number of reasons, but certainly can't grasp the irony, satire, and deep humor in most of the dialogue.
If you doubt me, read Goldman's book by the same name. It's a surpringly different experience, and you'll clearly see that the seemingly sentimental emotions in the movie are far more adult-oriented than come across on screen.
The latest version of Forte for Java 3.0 is actually surprisingly good. I tried to use previous version of Forte and they were just terrible. If you tried Forte before and didn't like it, try it again now.
Version 3.0 seems to have fixed the major shortfallings and improved responsiveness tremendously. I run 3.0 on my 650 MHz laptop with only an occasional garbage collection pause, but it runs flawlessly on my 2x1 GHz machine. I've not switched to using it full time and haven't had any significant regrets.
Actually, I think the confusion about what open source is lies firmly in the collective mind of the open source community itself. On one end of the spectrum, you have people who like open source because they simply like to hack on whatever feature they personally like, as you've mentioned. Fine. On the other end of the spectrum, there are those like me who hope that open source is a method for creating self-organizing software projects with the ultimate goal of those projects being better than they otherwise could be.
Of course, all the confusion arises from the definition of "better"--what is the proper fitness function for open source software in general, and Linux in particular? For me, I see the complete lack of coherency in Linux and many other open source projects as their fatal flaw. People want to have Linux be a hackers paradise, yet topple Microsoft's OS monopoly by supplanting the desktop. Think about it, are these two goals really compatible?
The former requires no vision whatsoever of what Linux should be, and in fact thrives on its absence. The latter requires almost nothing but vision--the technical aspects are trivial. Unfortunately, the former goal tends to undermine efforts for the latter, and I frequently wish the Linux community as a whole would wake up and see what's in all of our collective best interest. Let people dick around with useless features in their spare time, but for God's sake, please have them more than that! Applause for the sort of nonsense described in this article just encourages more crap, more wasted time.
It's very frustrating to want to see Linux go somewhere important, yet see trivialities picked up by a bunch of fanboys as something important. So your proud of Linux, big deal, get on with it.
Exactly. So let's see the fanboys excited by this news go out and make Linux a viable desktop OS, or shut the hell up about it replacing Windows.Who cares about this except jerkoff Linux fanboys that have no use for such a feature anyway? Um, there's a reason Linux is in front here--no one else has been dumb enough to waste time implementing a similarly useless "feature".
Yeah, I know, what a rich tapestry of vision, solidarity, bazaars vs. cathedrals, free beers, etc. this represents. Whatever, blah blah. Instead, let's spend our limited time adding features to Linux that fscking matter, please.
Of course, there are some open source exceptions, just as there are in the commercial world. But remember that 99.9% of open source software is NOT Apache or Linux, and the people developing the rest of this software are frequently more enthusiastic than skilled, and definitely have no resources dedicated to testing. In fact, many open source developers are also commercial developers who prefer to work on open source because they can work alone and it doesn't come with all the "crap" like code reviews.
So, let's lay blame where it belongs--on software development in general, the lack and/or cost of resources, and the general disregard for software quality as something important. None of these things are limited to commercial software development.
As far as I understood from the previous /. article, IBM had accepted returns and provided users with problematic drives new ones that were known to be good. From what I can tell, it seems that IBM has acted in good faith.
A lawsuit against them raises the price of drives, and makes it harder and harder for anyone to release a product without excessive, often unecessary but always expensive, testing. Of course a product should perform as advertised, but in many cases, even exhaustive testing cannot determine how a product will perform when released to others. If the company acts in good faith (and maybe the complaint alleges that IBM didn't), a class actions lawsuit seems like nothing but trouble for all of us.
And I would be careful about holding up Tomcat as an (open source) triumph. It's had some major bugs all through the 3.x timeframe, and its team includes at least a few daytime profressional "closed source" programmers (there's no correlation between the two, by the way).
Agreed, though I'm not sure it's for the reason we hope. The thing is, Apple appeals to a market segment that happily pays $5000 for a niche computer so thay can do things like run Photoshop ($800) and use the iPod ($400). These aren't people who steal music--they have too much money to bother.
Another Open Source debacle. They add gobs of new features while leaving the most fundamental and important feature untouched (again). Feh.
Go ahead, flame away, I can take it.
They aren't "distributing" the code in the manner you imply. They are simply using it in some black box machine. The code isn't downloadable or accessible, it's merely used as an OS/service layer. If nothing has been changed in the code, the GPL doesn't hold any sway.
If it did, by your reasoning, anyone using Linux and Apache to run a web site would need to notify its visitors of the use of the software and provide a download link to them both.
Absolutely more meaningful, though of course, not ideal. DVD-RW and DVD+RW are completely arbitrary labels. What about the next format, will it be DVD/RW, or maybe DVD*RW. Why not DVD^RW or DVDln(RW). How the hell do you even pronounce these? If a consumer can't pronounce it, he/she probably won't buy it.
At least something containing a number is pronouncable, includes a sequence, and indicates an order to how the formats were developed and released.
Who the hell decided to use the abbreviations "DVD-RW" and "DVD+RW" for two significantly different formats? These couldn't be more confusing, especially since there is no clear way to even verbally articulate the difference. Why not "DVD-RW1" and "DVD-RW2"? Hasn't the hardware industry learned the lesson that causing confusion for consumers is detrimental to them?
What are you kidding? The obvious reason is that no female could be in the same room as Taco, Hemos, and the rest of them for any extended period. How many infrequently bathing, mouth-breathing, OP-short wearing, Linux-worshipping doofii can one woman stand at one time?
True, though it's not without its foundation in truth. Copeland lived with several Microserfs for months to gather source material and the right perspective. IIRC, the term "Microserfs" was the term the Microsoft employees used to refer to themselves.
How does this "individual responsibility" strategy translate to keeping the hotseat computers in the student lab free from viruses? Once one user infects a computer, it can be the infection vector for god knows how many other users, and there's no way to track it back to the original user, or recover the files that the virus damages.
If you can do something about the problem--and you can, easily, by just buying some antivrus software--you must. Individual responsibility is hardly a solution in this situation. Sadly, with the state of modern (US) society, individual responsibility is hardly a solution for anything anymore.
You mean like they did to the Norweigan kid who wrote DeCSS? I guess the answer would have to be yes.
The main crackpot behind the Face is Richard C. Hoagland. Rather than see the foundation of his other crackpot ideas torpedoed, he's embraced the new photos as evidence of a conspiracy in NASA, and proof that the face is actually a human-feline hybrid. It's amazing what these charlatans will do to salvage their flimsy positions.
I work for Sun and recall seeing an email a few months ago asking for both technical and non-technical users to undergo usability testing with Gnome. This is one of the best things to come out of Sun's stewardship; they're able to do due diligence and add the missing ingredients that the OS community never could (or would). If you ever want to see UNIX or Linux broadly deployed on the desktop, this is the first big step in that direction.