You see, when it comes to Gattaca, you are right that "we're not there... yet." But I only said that much of Gattaca is already happening. With the British government allowing insurers to deny coverage based on genetics, it is only a very few small steps away from having an underclass that can't get health insurance, while genetically lucky (and soon, engineered) people form a privileged class. In my eyes, Gattaca is already happening.
...is that, depite going to these pages and seeing the technology, I really feel in my gut that much of this is decades away. These agencies (NASA, JPL) seem so slow-moving. It seems crazy, but more and more I find I am pinning my dreams of space onto civilians like "Rocketguy" and Dennis Tito. It is frustrating to look at the new technologies and be so jaded about them, but what normal people are doing to get into space soon excites me in ways that NASA can't match.
These sites are failing for a reason: they are poorly run from the outset, have burned through all their VC by buying Aeron chairs for everyone and their dog
Well, you make a really great point about Internet Startups in general, but maybe not such a great point about these particular sites (Suck, etc.). From what I've read, Suck ran on a staff of seven. The whole site, everything from start to finish, was done by seven people. I don't know about you, but that is not a bloated Internet Startup. Sure, smart people can do even better -- probably a quarter of the people reading slashdot can create a similar site and run it well with just a staff of maybe 3. But that's barebones and assumes you get lucky putting 3 very skilled people together. Suck's numbers were reasonable. I don't think they burned through cash irresponsibily. Rather, I suspect that there just wasn't much cash in the first place.
Well thanks for that bit of info. I assume that implies a GUI in a very small RAM space -- if it's running well on a 386, I suspect it's able to do X and blackbox in perhaps 4 megs of RAM? I could go check their site, but I'm very tired of checking *nix sites. Besides, I suspect I will be the only to read this, considering how long ago the OP was made.
In any case, my complaint was more about Linux in particular than Unix in general. I know the BSDs are more refined (especially OpenBSD, now there is system security done right), but I've shied away from the BSDs for two reasons. First, I'm a Web developer, I want to concentrate on building Web pages. All I need is a text editor and a browser. So I don't want to geek out with the box itself -- I'm not a sysadmin and don't want to become one. And I just haven't found the rpm/deb friendliness on BSD. Second -- and I could probably only get away with saying this in a dead thread like this one -- but I really feel in my gut that I don't like the BSD community. This is not a community of people looking to grow. They're trigger-happy with the "rtfm" crap.
I know it doesn't have to be that way. Back when I played with Perl 4 in 1995, the community was quite friendly, but over the years got really exhausted (as a whole) by the influx of new users. Eventually their FAQs and massive, sprawling man-pages were used as weapons to shut up anyone with nearly any question. The Perl community stagnated, and started losing out to technologies like PHP, which has an absurdly friendly community (see phpbuilder.com). In recent weeks, the Perl community has begun to change -- starting a newbie mailing list (see perl.com) and a general trend toward new-user outreach. To see a mature technology and entrenched user-base deliberately decide to reasses and reengineer their group-mindset is an impressive thing. It gives me hope for BSD, but I don't see anyone in the BSD community following Perl's lead. And in the Open Source world -- and much of the point of the Cathedral and the Bazaar -- is that it's all about community.
Of course, $HTTP_USER_AGENT is just fiction anyway. You just filtered out a lot of other users too since everyone tells their browser to spoof as MSIE
Ummmm... if "everyone" is technically advanced enough to spoof the USER AGENT header, I suspect that "everyone" is technically advanced enough to change it again when viewing an "IE 6 not welcome here" message. I hardly think Webmasters need to worry about this class of people.
Basically, the original post said (paraphrase) "My God, it's an XML file!" And your rebuttal is (paraphrase) "Hey, it's just an XML file." Wow. Very compelling.
I think the original post makes sense. My mother does not know what XML is, typically takes the default settings of any program, and thinks changing preferences with a GUI is a pain in the ass. If I can't get her editing httpd.conf, there is no way she'll even know or understand how to do this.
This "feature" needs to be disabled by default. Or else I'm going to be doing a lot of stuff like "if (isIE6) { print('Not a compatible browser, sorry.'); }" -- and I hate that. It goes against the open nature of the Web. But then again, so does Microsoft.
Dude, I don't know anyone that "takes that old machine in the corner" and loads Win2K on it;)
Actually, I'm having trouble taking "that old machine in the corner" and loading Linux on it. Firsthand experience over the past month of reading, experimenting, and downloading distros has revealed that most 2000 and 2001 Linux distributions really don't work that well for old machines anymore. You can see it with Mandrake and others optimizing for 586 or even 686 processors now. You can see it in Debian 2.1 vs. 2.2 -- the memory requirements for 2.1 (1999) are 4 megs ram minimum (16 recommended), for 2.2 (2001) the minimum is 12 (64 recommended).
What I've found is for my older machines -- 486s, 586s, moderate amounts of RAM -- that I have to track down pre-2000 distributions, or settle for crippled distributions such as SmallLinux (very cool, can do X-Windows in 4 megs of RAM, but also states very clearly "this is not a complete distribution"). I think our convincing arguements about how good Linux is with old machines are becoming less convincing as older distributions become more obscured or drop off the Web entirely.
I've worked for some large companies (Borland, Actuate, SST), and my perception does not match yours. I got 4 Linux machines into Borland back in 1997, before they "got the gospel." My current company is a chip company -- fairly cyclical industry -- and in downturns, they are always interested in saving a quarter-million. If I can show them a small, 3 machine Linux cluster put together for $15,000, and have it work as well as the $90,000 E450 box, well they're interested in that.
I'm not saying it is easy. I have to sell the ideas and talk to the right people. But I am suggesting that if this guy gets his report in front of the right people, buying patterns can be altered. I've done it.
part of palm's trouble is people like me...
on
Palm In Trouble?
·
· Score: 2
...I want to buy a new Palm. My old PalmPilot "Pro" model, from back before they numbered the things, is a little outdated. But I have a dilemma. The handwriting recognition, which has had 4 or 5 YEARS to improve since I bought my model, still requires me to use the "graffiti" system, and still has a box dedicated to text entry. What a misuse of space! I should be able to write anywhere on screen, and the area with the pre-drawn text entry box should be nothing but pixels, so that anything can be displayed there.
These issues -- the screen space and the handwriting recognition -- wouldn't be hurting Palm if it weren't for the fact that other companies have now licensed Apple's Newton technology, and their handwriting recognition is really, really good in comparison. And other handhelds cram many more pixels onto their screen space, resulting in sharper images.
In short, the Palm may be tricked out in wild, new ways like media cards and wireless technology, but it is far from competitive in the basics.
I also dealt with these issues in a/. post here. I felt that, although my company was solidly behind NT and Solaris, that the other pieces in the puzzle -- Apache, PHP, MySQL -- would be enticing to open source programmers. It turned out to be more difficult than I had imagined. I was flooded with ASP programmers, but PHP was a hard skill to come by. Eventually with the assistance of the article on/. I found my hire.
I have not regretted the decision to hire this person. This developer was programming in his spare time because he loves to build Web sites. He's proud of his work. Because of this, he has worked hard at his new job -- he'll stay late without being asked, simply because he's fascinated by an algorithm or particularly crafty bit of code. When the project gets reviewed, he cares about it. At one presentation, I stumbled across two bugs, big and ugly on a huge projection screen. As we left the presentation, he was jotting down notes and quickly headed off to fix everything without any prodding from me.
I would say the only issue to be aware of is code sharing. If the developer has projects outside of work, there is a good chance that modules from the outside may end up in the company code, or vice versa. I have to constantly remind my employee that GPL and "proprietary and confidential" don't mix. This is difficult, because no developer wants to reinvent the wheel when there are perfectly good wheels just an FTP site away. But other than that, things are going quite well. My next hire will be another open source developer I've had my eye on, if I have any luck.
I am not suggesting that these parents are correct in suing ID and others over the Columbine deaths. They must take responsibility. But I am suggesting that/. readers who hold the media blameless are ignoring their own science and psychological studies.
For more in-depth info, look up "werther effect" and "social proof" on Google.
I originally wired my house with a Netgear 10/100 switch, 4 ports plus an uplink (never used). We installed Novell's old/free MacIPX on the Macs and added a similar service to the Windows computers (built-in, part of the Network control panel), and then played Diablo 1 for hours and hours.
Just this past month, we re-wired with a SMC Barriade 10/100 with 7 ports plus an uplink (and other goodies). Before doing this, we evaluated wireless. Here are my observations from both the first and second wiring:
Netgear makes good, stable, solid hubs and switches, usually made of steel. They hurt your toes if you drop 'em, but they keep working without any damage.
A hub will have a lot of collisions (data needs to be re-sent), a switch will have fewer. In other words, expect a 10/100 hub to be a bit slower than a 10/100 switch. This is obvious to anyone doing any networking, but if you're new at this, now ya know.
If you're going to keep the Ethernet cables "loose" on the ground, go to Home Depot or a similar store, and get "cabling nails" which are small nails with white hooks on them. You pound the nail in, and it holds down the cable, so you can run it along the wall or something and it is almost as good as having it in the wall.
A home network needs a firewall. In addition to the free software firewall from Zone Labs, many companies offer hubs/switches that double as a firewall and router. Linksys and SMC seem to get good reviews here.
The SMC Barricade includes extras, like: a COM port for modem sharing (!) and a printer port for printer sharing. It works well so far. It has a NAT firewall configured via a Web-based interface, so Linux computers can access it too (and you can use lpr for printer sharing).
If you go wireless, beware of the costs, which don't scale well. We have 3 laptops and 4 desktop computers. Linux, Mac, Windows. Getting wireless cards for them would have cost about $1000. The "base station" would have been another $250. In contrast, our 10/100 cable setup cost about $350 total.
If you're going for broadband, cable and DSL are fair choices, but broadband with a dish (like Sprint's current offering) is very, very, very fast. Unfortunately, if lots of people use the service, it can slow to the speed of a cable or DSL line.
DSL gets better ping times than a dish will.
PacBell will not let you run servers, but the companies that resell PacBell (like Sonic) will.
bdlinux13, you make your post as if to argue with the parent post. However, you've just agreed. His point was that a private police force would still have racism problems, and your counter, that "racism is everywhere dude" only confirms the point: a private police force would be just as miserably bad as a government police force.
What time would you save by uploading a huge wav and letting a remote server turn it into an mp3 and then ship it back to you.
Of course, Microsoft and other companies are not doing this as a benefit to the user. There are some benefits -- such as access-anywhere and edit-from-any-machine documents -- but you get those benefits with just about any centralized file server.
The real motivation is, of course, the licensing. You state: "This is just a plan to get us to get people hooked" as if it is a secret. It's not. The companies have published white papers and executives have made comments in interviews and so on. They flat-out state that their motivation is "recurring revenue" that comes from monthly and yearly subscriptions to their hosted apps (and, by the way, access to your files).
This is a revenue model 100%, and even the companies doing things like this seem to be comfortable admitting it. Probably because shareholders are drooling over stuff like this.
Now, the small-time developer can be very much a victim, but this doesn't look like a case of that, to me. It sounds like an honest mistake by a small-time company that got blown WAAAY out of proportion by a greedy developer.
According to his license, for-profit distribution of his free program was prohibited. Essentially, it's the "I'm not making money so you can't use it to make money either" license. Yet the company did exactly what his license prohibited. So I think you have it backwards: it does look like the developer is the victim, and it looks like it is the small-time company who is being dishonest and greedy.
I feel for the guy, and think he should sue them into the ground on principle alone.
He's the perfect anti-technology hero in a technological age, but like this movie, and like others in the genre, isn't blowing up box offices.
Huh? I don't understand your comment about the box offices, considering this. (as an aside for people who might read this weeks or months from now -- the link goes to last week's box office returns which right now has Exit Wounds at number 1).
Somebody mod up the post I am replying to. He's got links to tests and actual numbers and his own testing as well. This is good. I would love to see this study re-done using JRun for the Java implementation and Zend for PHP. I think both technologies would come out better. But clearly, this disproves some other posts here saying that PHP isn't so fast. Surprising.
it'll be fun to watch religious zealots and other anti-science nuts scramble to (yet again) "refute" the assertion that life could be elsewhere.
Sigh. I tire of hearing this, when I don't actually see much of it on slashdot. For instance, you just made this accusation, and rather than getting a bunch of religious nuts chanting "damn right, there is NO other life" you've got people saying "huh? God will do whatever He wants, including creating lots of other life."
These "religious zealots" appear to adapt to scientific discoveries quite well. Look, the bottom line is that almost every religion -- Christian, Jewish, you name it -- only believes that God exists. What God did with the universe, and the details of that universe, are rarely mentioned. In fact, the only religions I've seen that do get into specifics about the universe are Christian Science and some cults. Jewish tradition, for instance, merely has a few paragraphs in religious texts that assert that God created the sun and stars. That provides no details on the mechanics of it -- the planets could be 6 days old or 6 trillion, the whole thing could be built as an evolutionary system or it may be that everything was preprogrammed and God just hit the button last month and boom here we are with pre-made memories and history and so on. Perhaps we were restored from backup just yesterday. But my hope is for evolution and other forms of life all over the place. That would mean God gave us a whole lot of mysteries to unravel over the coming centuries.
I agree with sulli's post. I too was a student-editor, of the Carmel High School newspaper. I too was called into the principal's office on a number of occassions -- once for "allowing" a student to review the band "cycle sluts from hell". Another time for reprinting a pro-life article, which oddly, was about the Vietnam war and not wanting to shoot people, but which was misinterpreted to be anti-abortion. I stood by everything published, regardless.
But there are two points. First, don't back down if you have reason to think that you are operating within the law. I never did. I was told these "black marks" would go on my "permanent record." It never impacted me, and if it had, I may have had a good legal case against the school. So know the laws, know your rights, and act intelligently.
Second, don't forget that there is a great history of independent, student-run newspapers. They're often called "underground" newspapers, because the authors remain anonymous. Usually to avoid censorship by a school administration. I ran not one, not two, but THREE such newspapers back in high school. I distributed them late at night, walking onto the open campus around 1 a.m. and shoving the things though the vents of the student lockers. I never published anything libelous. I tried to stick to the facts, although on articles clearly marked as opinion pieces, I did let the writers have some room to vent. Don't limit yourself to school-sponsored publishing. There is a whole other world out there. You just have to create it.
I think most everyone who codes understands fully that a complex piece of code is more beautiful than any poem or sonnet
I code. And I've published a book of poetry. And no, I don't agree that a complex piece of code is more beautiful than any poem or sonnet. It might be equal in beauty, but even that I have a hard time saying. For two reasons.
First, the code that I find most beautiful is not "beautiful because it's complex" -- that sounds like some snobbish "I can figure it out, I'm part of the 3133t" kind of thing. The most beautiful piece of code I ever read was posted on slashdot about a year ago. It was about 20 lines long, posted by a programmer who had been coding for over a decade, and the code, even though it was from the 80s and was written in a badly outdated language, almost read like perfect English. I mean, the care he put into naming his variables sensibly, so that "if" statements made intuitive sense, man that was impressive. And the way it illuminated how that part of the game worked -- I mean, that code would have been easy to maintain. I think the most beautiful code is not the complex crap that so many amateurs barf out, it is the thoughtful, streamlined code that I find to be most like poetry.
Second, poetry has often had a whole string of criteria for a "good" poem -- these are the kinds of things your teachers and professors likely grade on. These are technical things, like meter and rhyme. But there are other criteria that code will have a hard time matching. For example, poetry is often defined as "impactful" and "relevant" -- or at least, good poetry often has those qualities. Think about poetry's roots. This is how much of our history was passed down. There was a point where a "bard" was not only a poet, but a historian too. And here, I think, code will always pale in comparison to poetry. It has no hope of having the relevance of a good poem -- code cannot be understood by 95% of the population, so its relevance factor gets hammered right there. Code can indeed have a great impact on people, though. I give you that. But that is almost always due not to the source code being read, but the code being compiled and used. It's the application that has the impact.
And I think this is part of the problem you're having with your teacher. She is going to be able to get up in front of that class and recite a poem that makes the class laugh, or makes the class cry, or sways them somehow. That's relevance. And you and I cannot match that with programming code unless we pick our audiences extremely carefully.
There are two ways to view adultery. Most people seem to view it as "getting together with someone else." And by someone else, I mean, someone who is not your spouse.
However, there is another way to look at it. And that is, "going outside your marriage." It's about betrayal, the state of the heart. The first view is all about who you did it with. The second view is all about who you didn't do it with. If you believe the first view correctly describes adultery, then "getting together with a bot" hardly sounds like adultery. But if you believe in the second view, then "leaving behind the spouse" is still leaving behind the spouse. Regardless of whether it's a bot, a chat, a dog, or Penthouse magazine.
Just to confuse things, I personally believe the most accurate definition of adultery is a mix of both. I think mutual consent weighs heavily. If my wife not only doesn't care about a porno here or there, but also likes it, then I have a hard time considering that adultery. But if she feels betrayed when I look at that stuff, then it may in fact be a betrayal.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux Messenger
Open Source Messenger (OSM, nice ring to it)
Free Speech (as in, "free, as in speech")
Hmmm. You might read more /. Here are some of the stories over the past few months:
Companies lay claim to your DNA
UK DNA database now tracks innocent people
Railroad company violates civil rights in genetic tests
British citizens denied coverage based on unapproved genetic screening
British government allows genetic screening
You see, when it comes to Gattaca, you are right that "we're not there... yet." But I only said that much of Gattaca is already happening. With the British government allowing insurers to deny coverage based on genetics, it is only a very few small steps away from having an underclass that can't get health insurance, while genetically lucky (and soon, engineered) people form a privileged class. In my eyes, Gattaca is already happening.
Have you actually seen Gattaca?
By not engaging in genetic engineering, we deprive our children of a brighter future? Like in that movie you mentioned?
...if much of Gattaca has already come to pass?
...is that, depite going to these pages and seeing the technology, I really feel in my gut that much of this is decades away. These agencies (NASA, JPL) seem so slow-moving. It seems crazy, but more and more I find I am pinning my dreams of space onto civilians like "Rocketguy" and Dennis Tito. It is frustrating to look at the new technologies and be so jaded about them, but what normal people are doing to get into space soon excites me in ways that NASA can't match.
Well, you make a really great point about Internet Startups in general, but maybe not such a great point about these particular sites (Suck, etc.). From what I've read, Suck ran on a staff of seven. The whole site, everything from start to finish, was done by seven people. I don't know about you, but that is not a bloated Internet Startup. Sure, smart people can do even better -- probably a quarter of the people reading slashdot can create a similar site and run it well with just a staff of maybe 3. But that's barebones and assumes you get lucky putting 3 very skilled people together. Suck's numbers were reasonable. I don't think they burned through cash irresponsibily. Rather, I suspect that there just wasn't much cash in the first place.
Well thanks for that bit of info. I assume that implies a GUI in a very small RAM space -- if it's running well on a 386, I suspect it's able to do X and blackbox in perhaps 4 megs of RAM? I could go check their site, but I'm very tired of checking *nix sites. Besides, I suspect I will be the only to read this, considering how long ago the OP was made.
In any case, my complaint was more about Linux in particular than Unix in general. I know the BSDs are more refined (especially OpenBSD, now there is system security done right), but I've shied away from the BSDs for two reasons. First, I'm a Web developer, I want to concentrate on building Web pages. All I need is a text editor and a browser. So I don't want to geek out with the box itself -- I'm not a sysadmin and don't want to become one. And I just haven't found the rpm/deb friendliness on BSD. Second -- and I could probably only get away with saying this in a dead thread like this one -- but I really feel in my gut that I don't like the BSD community. This is not a community of people looking to grow. They're trigger-happy with the "rtfm" crap.
I know it doesn't have to be that way. Back when I played with Perl 4 in 1995, the community was quite friendly, but over the years got really exhausted (as a whole) by the influx of new users. Eventually their FAQs and massive, sprawling man-pages were used as weapons to shut up anyone with nearly any question. The Perl community stagnated, and started losing out to technologies like PHP, which has an absurdly friendly community (see phpbuilder.com). In recent weeks, the Perl community has begun to change -- starting a newbie mailing list (see perl.com) and a general trend toward new-user outreach. To see a mature technology and entrenched user-base deliberately decide to reasses and reengineer their group-mindset is an impressive thing. It gives me hope for BSD, but I don't see anyone in the BSD community following Perl's lead. And in the Open Source world -- and much of the point of the Cathedral and the Bazaar -- is that it's all about community.
Always enjoyed your sig, by the way.
Ummmm... if "everyone" is technically advanced enough to spoof the USER AGENT header, I suspect that "everyone" is technically advanced enough to change it again when viewing an "IE 6 not welcome here" message. I hardly think Webmasters need to worry about this class of people.
Basically, the original post said (paraphrase) "My God, it's an XML file!" And your rebuttal is (paraphrase) "Hey, it's just an XML file." Wow. Very compelling.
I think the original post makes sense. My mother does not know what XML is, typically takes the default settings of any program, and thinks changing preferences with a GUI is a pain in the ass. If I can't get her editing httpd.conf, there is no way she'll even know or understand how to do this.
This "feature" needs to be disabled by default. Or else I'm going to be doing a lot of stuff like "if (isIE6) { print('Not a compatible browser, sorry.'); }" -- and I hate that. It goes against the open nature of the Web. But then again, so does Microsoft.
Actually, I'm having trouble taking "that old machine in the corner" and loading Linux on it. Firsthand experience over the past month of reading, experimenting, and downloading distros has revealed that most 2000 and 2001 Linux distributions really don't work that well for old machines anymore. You can see it with Mandrake and others optimizing for 586 or even 686 processors now. You can see it in Debian 2.1 vs. 2.2 -- the memory requirements for 2.1 (1999) are 4 megs ram minimum (16 recommended), for 2.2 (2001) the minimum is 12 (64 recommended).
What I've found is for my older machines -- 486s, 586s, moderate amounts of RAM -- that I have to track down pre-2000 distributions, or settle for crippled distributions such as SmallLinux (very cool, can do X-Windows in 4 megs of RAM, but also states very clearly "this is not a complete distribution"). I think our convincing arguements about how good Linux is with old machines are becoming less convincing as older distributions become more obscured or drop off the Web entirely.
I've worked for some large companies (Borland, Actuate, SST), and my perception does not match yours. I got 4 Linux machines into Borland back in 1997, before they "got the gospel." My current company is a chip company -- fairly cyclical industry -- and in downturns, they are always interested in saving a quarter-million. If I can show them a small, 3 machine Linux cluster put together for $15,000, and have it work as well as the $90,000 E450 box, well they're interested in that.
I'm not saying it is easy. I have to sell the ideas and talk to the right people. But I am suggesting that if this guy gets his report in front of the right people, buying patterns can be altered. I've done it.
...I want to buy a new Palm. My old PalmPilot "Pro" model, from back before they numbered the things, is a little outdated. But I have a dilemma. The handwriting recognition, which has had 4 or 5 YEARS to improve since I bought my model, still requires me to use the "graffiti" system, and still has a box dedicated to text entry. What a misuse of space! I should be able to write anywhere on screen, and the area with the pre-drawn text entry box should be nothing but pixels, so that anything can be displayed there.
These issues -- the screen space and the handwriting recognition -- wouldn't be hurting Palm if it weren't for the fact that other companies have now licensed Apple's Newton technology, and their handwriting recognition is really, really good in comparison. And other handhelds cram many more pixels onto their screen space, resulting in sharper images.
In short, the Palm may be tricked out in wild, new ways like media cards and wireless technology, but it is far from competitive in the basics.
I also dealt with these issues in a /. post here. I felt that, although my company was solidly behind NT and Solaris, that the other pieces in the puzzle -- Apache, PHP, MySQL -- would be enticing to open source programmers. It turned out to be more difficult than I had imagined. I was flooded with ASP programmers, but PHP was a hard skill to come by. Eventually with the assistance of the article on /. I found my hire.
I have not regretted the decision to hire this person. This developer was programming in his spare time because he loves to build Web sites. He's proud of his work. Because of this, he has worked hard at his new job -- he'll stay late without being asked, simply because he's fascinated by an algorithm or particularly crafty bit of code. When the project gets reviewed, he cares about it. At one presentation, I stumbled across two bugs, big and ugly on a huge projection screen. As we left the presentation, he was jotting down notes and quickly headed off to fix everything without any prodding from me.
I would say the only issue to be aware of is code sharing. If the developer has projects outside of work, there is a good chance that modules from the outside may end up in the company code, or vice versa. I have to constantly remind my employee that GPL and "proprietary and confidential" don't mix. This is difficult, because no developer wants to reinvent the wheel when there are perfectly good wheels just an FTP site away. But other than that, things are going quite well. My next hire will be another open source developer I've had my eye on, if I have any luck.
I note that Linux Focus already uses md5 to allow mirrors to check for updates to the pages. See that here.
Did the patent office even try a Google search before stamping its approval on this patent?
Read this:
http://webhome.idirect.com/~andyt/tmas.html
I am not suggesting that these parents are correct in suing ID and others over the Columbine deaths. They must take responsibility. But I am suggesting that /. readers who hold the media blameless are ignoring their own science and psychological studies.
For more in-depth info, look up "werther effect" and "social proof" on Google.
I originally wired my house with a Netgear 10/100 switch, 4 ports plus an uplink (never used). We installed Novell's old/free MacIPX on the Macs and added a similar service to the Windows computers (built-in, part of the Network control panel), and then played Diablo 1 for hours and hours.
Just this past month, we re-wired with a SMC Barriade 10/100 with 7 ports plus an uplink (and other goodies). Before doing this, we evaluated wireless. Here are my observations from both the first and second wiring:
bdlinux13, you make your post as if to argue with the parent post. However, you've just agreed. His point was that a private police force would still have racism problems, and your counter, that "racism is everywhere dude" only confirms the point: a private police force would be just as miserably bad as a government police force.
Of course, Microsoft and other companies are not doing this as a benefit to the user. There are some benefits -- such as access-anywhere and edit-from-any-machine documents -- but you get those benefits with just about any centralized file server.
The real motivation is, of course, the licensing. You state: "This is just a plan to get us to get people hooked" as if it is a secret. It's not. The companies have published white papers and executives have made comments in interviews and so on. They flat-out state that their motivation is "recurring revenue" that comes from monthly and yearly subscriptions to their hosted apps (and, by the way, access to your files).
This is a revenue model 100%, and even the companies doing things like this seem to be comfortable admitting it. Probably because shareholders are drooling over stuff like this.
According to his license, for-profit distribution of his free program was prohibited. Essentially, it's the "I'm not making money so you can't use it to make money either" license. Yet the company did exactly what his license prohibited. So I think you have it backwards: it does look like the developer is the victim, and it looks like it is the small-time company who is being dishonest and greedy.
I feel for the guy, and think he should sue them into the ground on principle alone.
Huh? I don't understand your comment about the box offices, considering this. (as an aside for people who might read this weeks or months from now -- the link goes to last week's box office returns which right now has Exit Wounds at number 1).
Somebody mod up the post I am replying to. He's got links to tests and actual numbers and his own testing as well. This is good. I would love to see this study re-done using JRun for the Java implementation and Zend for PHP. I think both technologies would come out better. But clearly, this disproves some other posts here saying that PHP isn't so fast. Surprising.
Sigh. I tire of hearing this, when I don't actually see much of it on slashdot. For instance, you just made this accusation, and rather than getting a bunch of religious nuts chanting "damn right, there is NO other life" you've got people saying "huh? God will do whatever He wants, including creating lots of other life."
These "religious zealots" appear to adapt to scientific discoveries quite well. Look, the bottom line is that almost every religion -- Christian, Jewish, you name it -- only believes that God exists. What God did with the universe, and the details of that universe, are rarely mentioned. In fact, the only religions I've seen that do get into specifics about the universe are Christian Science and some cults. Jewish tradition, for instance, merely has a few paragraphs in religious texts that assert that God created the sun and stars. That provides no details on the mechanics of it -- the planets could be 6 days old or 6 trillion, the whole thing could be built as an evolutionary system or it may be that everything was preprogrammed and God just hit the button last month and boom here we are with pre-made memories and history and so on. Perhaps we were restored from backup just yesterday. But my hope is for evolution and other forms of life all over the place. That would mean God gave us a whole lot of mysteries to unravel over the coming centuries.
I agree with sulli's post. I too was a student-editor, of the Carmel High School newspaper. I too was called into the principal's office on a number of occassions -- once for "allowing" a student to review the band "cycle sluts from hell". Another time for reprinting a pro-life article, which oddly, was about the Vietnam war and not wanting to shoot people, but which was misinterpreted to be anti-abortion. I stood by everything published, regardless.
But there are two points. First, don't back down if you have reason to think that you are operating within the law. I never did. I was told these "black marks" would go on my "permanent record." It never impacted me, and if it had, I may have had a good legal case against the school. So know the laws, know your rights, and act intelligently.
Second, don't forget that there is a great history of independent, student-run newspapers. They're often called "underground" newspapers, because the authors remain anonymous. Usually to avoid censorship by a school administration. I ran not one, not two, but THREE such newspapers back in high school. I distributed them late at night, walking onto the open campus around 1 a.m. and shoving the things though the vents of the student lockers. I never published anything libelous. I tried to stick to the facts, although on articles clearly marked as opinion pieces, I did let the writers have some room to vent. Don't limit yourself to school-sponsored publishing. There is a whole other world out there. You just have to create it.
I code. And I've published a book of poetry. And no, I don't agree that a complex piece of code is more beautiful than any poem or sonnet. It might be equal in beauty, but even that I have a hard time saying. For two reasons.
First, the code that I find most beautiful is not "beautiful because it's complex" -- that sounds like some snobbish "I can figure it out, I'm part of the 3133t" kind of thing. The most beautiful piece of code I ever read was posted on slashdot about a year ago. It was about 20 lines long, posted by a programmer who had been coding for over a decade, and the code, even though it was from the 80s and was written in a badly outdated language, almost read like perfect English. I mean, the care he put into naming his variables sensibly, so that "if" statements made intuitive sense, man that was impressive. And the way it illuminated how that part of the game worked -- I mean, that code would have been easy to maintain. I think the most beautiful code is not the complex crap that so many amateurs barf out, it is the thoughtful, streamlined code that I find to be most like poetry.
Second, poetry has often had a whole string of criteria for a "good" poem -- these are the kinds of things your teachers and professors likely grade on. These are technical things, like meter and rhyme. But there are other criteria that code will have a hard time matching. For example, poetry is often defined as "impactful" and "relevant" -- or at least, good poetry often has those qualities. Think about poetry's roots. This is how much of our history was passed down. There was a point where a "bard" was not only a poet, but a historian too. And here, I think, code will always pale in comparison to poetry. It has no hope of having the relevance of a good poem -- code cannot be understood by 95% of the population, so its relevance factor gets hammered right there. Code can indeed have a great impact on people, though. I give you that. But that is almost always due not to the source code being read, but the code being compiled and used. It's the application that has the impact.
And I think this is part of the problem you're having with your teacher. She is going to be able to get up in front of that class and recite a poem that makes the class laugh, or makes the class cry, or sways them somehow. That's relevance. And you and I cannot match that with programming code unless we pick our audiences extremely carefully.
There are two ways to view adultery. Most people seem to view it as "getting together with someone else." And by someone else, I mean, someone who is not your spouse.
However, there is another way to look at it. And that is, "going outside your marriage." It's about betrayal, the state of the heart. The first view is all about who you did it with. The second view is all about who you didn't do it with. If you believe the first view correctly describes adultery, then "getting together with a bot" hardly sounds like adultery. But if you believe in the second view, then "leaving behind the spouse" is still leaving behind the spouse. Regardless of whether it's a bot, a chat, a dog, or Penthouse magazine.
Just to confuse things, I personally believe the most accurate definition of adultery is a mix of both. I think mutual consent weighs heavily. If my wife not only doesn't care about a porno here or there, but also likes it, then I have a hard time considering that adultery. But if she feels betrayed when I look at that stuff, then it may in fact be a betrayal.