Libertarians are about personal freedom. You can't legislate religion and/or morality because morality is essentially about choice and legislation is about restricting choice (a man who would sin given the chance is no more moral than the man who actually does. The Bill of Rights does not say for example, what we can do, but what our government cannot do). If we choose to be an immoral people and thus destroy our government, a libertarian would say we have that choice.
I personally don't agree with everything you or what I have just said, I'm just arguing from a POV which would accept both libertarian POV as well as your POV.
This is a politcal discussion. Not everything is going to be unbiased I'm afraid. Slashdot posts stories about RMS on open source. Is it going to present a biased view towards MS? But it also posts stories about/by Gates/Balmer. Frankly it's nice to have an article that presents a strong position and supports its points. That's why I'm not voting for John Kerry. (I'm probably going to write-in Howard Dean at this point, since he's the last polician I agreed with and actually did what he talked about).
I work for state HR (everyone here does the tech side of things). We use PeopleSoft and Oracle. Everyone here is also adamantly against the merger.
First, Oracle's ERP software sucks a lot. We worry PS will die (be swallowed) and be forced to use inferior tools.
Second, we have our choice of DBs right now. We may choose Oracle, but we could choose DB2 as well. If the conditions were to change (software price/quality/etc) we could change. We like having that freedom. I doubt PS post-Oracle would release a DB agnostic product.
His argument is flawed for three reasons, one moral, one selfish, one pramatic.
1) Why is an American job better than an Indian (or other foreign country job). From a global perspective, the best outcome is a maximization of jobs and real wages. Sure Indian programmers get paid $10/hr (well I do too and I work in the US in IT but that's beside the point), but $10 buys more in India.
2) Trade is bi-directional If we were to restrict outsourcing of labor, other countries will may complain to the WTO resulting in sanctions. Even thinking as a completely selfish nation, I do not think the sanctions would be worth the slight boost to productivity.
3) Some companies need outsourcing to survive Numerous company CEOs have reported that without being able to outsource some of their IT section, their company would've gone under. In essense, the company outsources maybe 300 lower skill IT jobs to save 1000 higher skill IT jobs in the US.
For anyone not living in the US who doesn't like the decidely American graphical slant, RTFM.
This sub-section was created to cover the US presidential election and may be deleted after that. At which point it's not covering the US presidential election, then start griping about the logo. Until then, seeing as this section is about the US presidential election, the US flag is appropriate.
Maybe I'm taking a shot in the dark, but could this really all be dependent on hardware?
I recall for example, the x64 extensions really help in database work in a very big way. The select queries especially. Perhaps they're just waiting for really good DB performance.
The internet, instant messaging, and webpages are just new methods of delivering content. Why would we expect new media to have different content than previous media? It'd be like creating a new type or method of picture creation and then being surprised when someone uses it to show pr0n.
Bullies bully in real life. Bullies are going to bully on the internet.
Very nice rational analysis of the music industry that doesn't resort to flaming. I'm thought the same thing myself, but have never seen it expressed so clearly and concisely. Adding you as a friend now.
OO does not mean not elegant. Ruby is pure OO and also elegant. So OO isn't necessarily the answer or the problem. Hello world in ruby is as follows:
print "Hello, world!\\n"
Which is every bit as elegant as Perl. Readability is a two-way street. Sure, you can write term papers using vocabulary words a 2 year old would understand. That's Java. Succinct syntax is harder for you to read initially, but after looking it up just once, you'll remember it. Think of it like the abbreviation "TCP/IP". Yes we know what it means, but would writing it out each time really increase readability? I've not worked on "large" systems, but I'd imagine the most important thing is the existance of functional contracts between component parts (i.e. black box descriptions of functions/objects) and testing to make sure the IO is what its contract stipulates rather than necessarily reading everyone's code (which, I'd rather have be fewer overall characters, but that's a personal preference from literature that's carried over).
(As a parenthetical expression, but responding to some of the people not you, it bugs me when people talk about the $ and % in Perl as making it less readable. Once you figure out what they mean (which takes approximately 1 minute), I find that they substantially increase readability as you can now tell variable names and types from anything else. Like how all nouns in German are capitalized (no one complains capitalizing nouns makes it harder!))
I've been using Mandrake since the very early days of its existance. It's biggest problem is that each version comes with really great looking GUI tools (distro specific ones) and interface which lack stability and polish. Rather than polishing the tools with each release and deciding on something stable, they decide to make it completely new and different looking for the next release. This is fine, if say, you're making a movie trilogy (maybe George Lucas should call them!) but it's bad if you're trying to design an interface.
My dislike of Java has nothing to do with slowness. It has to do with control and succinctness. Trivial example:
// Must be stored in a file called "hello.java" public class hello {
static public void main(String[] argv) {
System.out.println("Hello world!");
} }
Since everyone likes readability, I'd like to ask what part of "static public void" helps you to understand the program. Let's compare this to, oh say Perl.
print "Hello World\n";
Which, as Perl's reputation precedes it, is obviously harder to understand.
Javs relies on vast ammounts of knowledge drilled into the heads of students. If the OO paradigm wasn't so popular, Java would be entirely obtuse. Anything not memorized must be looked up. You wanted to add that integer to the float? Too bad. Go look it up type converting. Additionally I'd like to conjecture that the human mind is better at remembering small things than large ones. Therefore, system.out.println() is more difficult to remember than print. I'd rather remember something like "-e" (Perl) to test for file existance, than the Java equivalent, which I have looked up and since forgotten (though I've used each the same number of times).
While C may be verbose, it allows you to have near complete control of the physical operations of the hardware (e.g. when you delete memory or use a pointer, this has a physical analogue).
Java is both verbose (lots of commands to do simple stuff), clunky (really long commands), and forces you to use the OO paradigm whether or not the problem demands it. It's these reasons why I dislike it.
The article is clearly inconsistant even with itself: As much as few professional NASCAR drivers drive Dodge Neons, a negligible amount of skilled hackers use Windows as their primary OS.
Later in the same paragraph, it decides to insult OS X as being insecure: As clearly demonstrated, other than the toy OS Mac OS X, Windows has the lowest TC0 on the market.
The article is at best childish propaganda. Why was this posted?
Just because there aren't as many women in CS doesn't show discrimination. There are biological or cultural reasons (depending on your camp) for this. Women are generally more people-oriented and are more interested in building relationships/interacting with people than technical achievements (thus why there are more female teachers and whatnot).
I don't think there's a lot explicit discrimination in CS. We're taught in history class about women in fields like flight and politics and how being the first woman to do something is significant. CS is pretty unique in that the first Computer Programmer happened to be a woman (Ada Lovelace).
Even in a utopia, I think fewer women would choose to be CS majors due to personal preferences. The only question that remains is why is this a bad thing as seems to be implied?
I'll say it once and I'll say it again: Pop-up blocking in IE is a bad thing at least for Mozilla users.
Why? Advertisers wants to get their ads to market. Pop-ups allow such a means. If their target audience is suddenly immune to pop-ups, it'll just mean more insiduous forms of advertising. Right now, at least, I don't have to deal with it. While no adverising for anyone is the preference, it can't happen, so I opt for no advertisements for me.
Generally you pay 2X for a laptop what you'd pay for a PC equivalent. For $2000, you'd be better off just buying a $1500 gaming PC and a $500 laptop to do work on. Towers, especially with LCD displays, can typically be carried in a backpack (normal cases) or smaller (small form factor). Battery life really isn't an issue since a gaming laptop dies after about an 1-2 hours anyway.
That, and you can't upgrade laptops easily. It's cheaper to go buy a reasonable GFX card (~$200) and then buy a new one when you need it for a game than buying $600 card to start out with. You don't have that freedom with a laptop.
If I were an e-retailer, I'd pay much morefor a geek over a soccer mom to visit my website. The geek would actually know how to use the site once they got there and feel comfortable making purchases.
Additionally, who spends more time on the web? A geek or a soccer mom? Is search measure in volume or number of unique people?
I don't understand either. I all my Perl programming for Windows.
If anyone's interested, I've developed a hardware/software audit script entirely in Perl for Win32 (binaries included) that stores data in a centralized MySQL server. Vist here.
I'm really disappointed. I've been waiting and waiting for Batman: Year One directed by Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream). If there was anything he'd be able to bring to the film, it would be darkness and originality. Unfortunately the WB didn't like it very much.
I really liked the game, it's the most retro game I've seen as far as copy protection (was released last year, with a decent ammount of critical acclaim). I could burn the CD without problems and the game didn't even require the CD in the drive to play it. That said, it did have a CD key, which I don't mind so much. And although the game was stable on release, they added NEW features accessable if you had a unique CD key.
If we'd like to change things, perhaps it's time you voted with your wallet. That, and if you'd like to play a really good Turn-based strategy game.
Most people didn't RTFA and made the obvious comment about his being a big media company.
Quoth the article: "This wasn't necessarily bad for Turner Broadcasting; we had already achieved scale. But seeing these rules changed was like watching someone knock down the ladder I had already climbed."
To sum up the point that he made in the article, small media companies have more management freedom and thus a greater freedom to innovate. These innovations cause change in the greater world as larger conglomerates start "me-too" enterprises to compete with the new company. By changing rules to favor larger companies, it kills the innovation happening even at the large ones (since the practice of "me-too" requires someone to do it first).
He simply wants the same opportunities for other people that he had.
What's the most popular game ever made? GTA? Doom 2? Halo?
Tetris. Look at the GFX budget and how it's aged.
If you want to make money and impress people, concentrate on graphics. If you want to create a game with redeeming value, they're not really that important. Many people who read/. still play MUDs.
Slashdot Mirror
Libertarians are about personal freedom. You can't legislate religion and/or morality because morality is essentially about choice and legislation is about restricting choice (a man who would sin given the chance is no more moral than the man who actually does. The Bill of Rights does not say for example, what we can do, but what our government cannot do). If we choose to be an immoral people and thus destroy our government, a libertarian would say we have that choice.
I personally don't agree with everything you or what I have just said, I'm just arguing from a POV which would accept both libertarian POV as well as your POV.
This is a politcal discussion. Not everything is going to be unbiased I'm afraid. Slashdot posts stories about RMS on open source. Is it going to present a biased view towards MS? But it also posts stories about/by Gates/Balmer. Frankly it's nice to have an article that presents a strong position and supports its points. That's why I'm not voting for John Kerry. (I'm probably going to write-in Howard Dean at this point, since he's the last polician I agreed with and actually did what he talked about).
I work for state HR (everyone here does the tech side of things). We use PeopleSoft and Oracle. Everyone here is also adamantly against the merger.
First, Oracle's ERP software sucks a lot. We worry PS will die (be swallowed) and be forced to use inferior tools.
Second, we have our choice of DBs right now. We may choose Oracle, but we could choose DB2 as well. If the conditions were to change (software price/quality/etc) we could change. We like having that freedom. I doubt PS post-Oracle would release a DB agnostic product.
His argument is flawed for three reasons, one moral, one selfish, one pramatic.
1) Why is an American job better than an Indian (or other foreign country job). From a global perspective, the best outcome is a maximization of jobs and real wages. Sure Indian programmers get paid $10/hr (well I do too and I work in the US in IT but that's beside the point), but $10 buys more in India.
2) Trade is bi-directional If we were to restrict outsourcing of labor, other countries will may complain to the WTO resulting in sanctions. Even thinking as a completely selfish nation, I do not think the sanctions would be worth the slight boost to productivity.
3) Some companies need outsourcing to survive Numerous company CEOs have reported that without being able to outsource some of their IT section, their company would've gone under. In essense, the company outsources maybe 300 lower skill IT jobs to save 1000 higher skill IT jobs in the US.
For anyone not living in the US who doesn't like the decidely American graphical slant, RTFM.
This sub-section was created to cover the US presidential election and may be deleted after that. At which point it's not covering the US presidential election, then start griping about the logo. Until then, seeing as this section is about the US presidential election, the US flag is appropriate.
Maybe I'm just being picky, but doesn't slashdot usually point out that it's owned by VA Linux whenever it runs a story about them? Just FYI.
Maybe I'm taking a shot in the dark, but could this really all be dependent on hardware?
I recall for example, the x64 extensions really help in database work in a very big way. The select queries especially. Perhaps they're just waiting for really good DB performance.
For those of you who aren't Brits, a zebra crossing is a crosswalk. I say that, because I didn't get the joke the first time.
The internet, instant messaging, and webpages are just new methods of delivering content. Why would we expect new media to have different content than previous media? It'd be like creating a new type or method of picture creation and then being surprised when someone uses it to show pr0n.
Bullies bully in real life. Bullies are going to bully on the internet.
Very nice rational analysis of the music industry that doesn't resort to flaming. I'm thought the same thing myself, but have never seen it expressed so clearly and concisely. Adding you as a friend now.
OO does not mean not elegant. Ruby is pure OO and also elegant. So OO isn't necessarily the answer or the problem. Hello world in ruby is as follows:
print "Hello, world!\\n"
Which is every bit as elegant as Perl. Readability is a two-way street. Sure, you can write term papers using vocabulary words a 2 year old would understand. That's Java. Succinct syntax is harder for you to read initially, but after looking it up just once, you'll remember it. Think of it like the abbreviation "TCP/IP". Yes we know what it means, but would writing it out each time really increase readability? I've not worked on "large" systems, but I'd imagine the most important thing is the existance of functional contracts between component parts (i.e. black box descriptions of functions/objects) and testing to make sure the IO is what its contract stipulates rather than necessarily reading everyone's code (which, I'd rather have be fewer overall characters, but that's a personal preference from literature that's carried over).
(As a parenthetical expression, but responding to some of the people not you, it bugs me when people talk about the $ and % in Perl as making it less readable. Once you figure out what they mean (which takes approximately 1 minute), I find that they substantially increase readability as you can now tell variable names and types from anything else. Like how all nouns in German are capitalized (no one complains capitalizing nouns makes it harder!))
I've been using Mandrake since the very early days of its existance. It's biggest problem is that each version comes with really great looking GUI tools (distro specific ones) and interface which lack stability and polish. Rather than polishing the tools with each release and deciding on something stable, they decide to make it completely new and different looking for the next release. This is fine, if say, you're making a movie trilogy (maybe George Lucas should call them!) but it's bad if you're trying to design an interface.
My dislike of Java has nothing to do with slowness. It has to do with control and succinctness. Trivial example:
// Must be stored in a file called "hello.java"
public class hello {
static public void main(String[] argv) {
System.out.println("Hello world!");
}
}
Since everyone likes readability, I'd like to ask what part of "static public void" helps you to understand the program. Let's compare this to, oh say Perl.
print "Hello World\n";
Which, as Perl's reputation precedes it, is obviously harder to understand.
Javs relies on vast ammounts of knowledge drilled into the heads of students. If the OO paradigm wasn't so popular, Java would be entirely obtuse. Anything not memorized must be looked up. You wanted to add that integer to the float? Too bad. Go look it up type converting. Additionally I'd like to conjecture that the human mind is better at remembering small things than large ones. Therefore, system.out.println() is more difficult to remember than print. I'd rather remember something like "-e" (Perl) to test for file existance, than the Java equivalent, which I have looked up and since forgotten (though I've used each the same number of times).
While C may be verbose, it allows you to have near complete control of the physical operations of the hardware (e.g. when you delete memory or use a pointer, this has a physical analogue).
Java is both verbose (lots of commands to do simple stuff), clunky (really long commands), and forces you to use the OO paradigm whether or not the problem demands it. It's these reasons why I dislike it.
No one really (Who had enough say at Microsoft) had foresight of todays problems to make windows 98 still run in 1994.
I wouldn't have predicted it either. It's the first piece of software to travel back in time! Obviously, MS knows something we don't.
The article is clearly inconsistant even with itself:
As much as few professional NASCAR drivers drive Dodge Neons, a negligible amount of skilled hackers use Windows as their primary OS.
Later in the same paragraph, it decides to insult OS X as being insecure:
As clearly demonstrated, other than the toy OS Mac OS X, Windows has the lowest TC0 on the market.
The article is at best childish propaganda. Why was this posted?
Just because there aren't as many women in CS doesn't show discrimination. There are biological or cultural reasons (depending on your camp) for this. Women are generally more people-oriented and are more interested in building relationships/interacting with people than technical achievements (thus why there are more female teachers and whatnot).
I don't think there's a lot explicit discrimination in CS. We're taught in history class about women in fields like flight and politics and how being the first woman to do something is significant. CS is pretty unique in that the first Computer Programmer happened to be a woman (Ada Lovelace).
Even in a utopia, I think fewer women would choose to be CS majors due to personal preferences. The only question that remains is why is this a bad thing as seems to be implied?
I'll say it once and I'll say it again: Pop-up blocking in IE is a bad thing at least for Mozilla users.
Why? Advertisers wants to get their ads to market. Pop-ups allow such a means. If their target audience is suddenly immune to pop-ups, it'll just mean more insiduous forms of advertising. Right now, at least, I don't have to deal with it. While no adverising for anyone is the preference, it can't happen, so I opt for no advertisements for me.
Generally you pay 2X for a laptop what you'd pay for a PC equivalent. For $2000, you'd be better off just buying a $1500 gaming PC and a $500 laptop to do work on. Towers, especially with LCD displays, can typically be carried in a backpack (normal cases) or smaller (small form factor). Battery life really isn't an issue since a gaming laptop dies after about an 1-2 hours anyway.
That, and you can't upgrade laptops easily. It's cheaper to go buy a reasonable GFX card (~$200) and then buy a new one when you need it for a game than buying $600 card to start out with. You don't have that freedom with a laptop.
If I were an e-retailer, I'd pay much morefor a geek over a soccer mom to visit my website. The geek would actually know how to use the site once they got there and feel comfortable making purchases.
Additionally, who spends more time on the web? A geek or a soccer mom? Is search measure in volume or number of unique people?
I don't understand either. I all my Perl programming for Windows.
If anyone's interested, I've developed a hardware/software audit script entirely in Perl for Win32 (binaries included) that stores data in a centralized MySQL server. Vist here.
I'm really disappointed. I've been waiting and waiting for Batman: Year One directed by Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream). If there was anything he'd be able to bring to the film, it would be darkness and originality. Unfortunately the WB didn't like it very much.
See this site for more details.
I really liked the game, it's the most retro game I've seen as far as copy protection (was released last year, with a decent ammount of critical acclaim). I could burn the CD without problems and the game didn't even require the CD in the drive to play it. That said, it did have a CD key, which I don't mind so much. And although the game was stable on release, they added NEW features accessable if you had a unique CD key.
If we'd like to change things, perhaps it's time you voted with your wallet. That, and if you'd like to play a really good Turn-based strategy game.
Yeah I know. I recently changed servers and the permissions didn't carry over. If ssh wasn't blocked for my work I chmod it and be done with it.
That should be tonight sometime.
Most people didn't RTFA and made the obvious comment about his being a big media company.
Quoth the article:
"This wasn't necessarily bad for Turner Broadcasting; we had already achieved scale. But seeing these rules changed was like watching someone knock down the ladder I had already climbed."
To sum up the point that he made in the article, small media companies have more management freedom and thus a greater freedom to innovate. These innovations cause change in the greater world as larger conglomerates start "me-too" enterprises to compete with the new company. By changing rules to favor larger companies, it kills the innovation happening even at the large ones (since the practice of "me-too" requires someone to do it first).
He simply wants the same opportunities for other people that he had.
What's the most popular game ever made? GTA? Doom 2? Halo?
/. still play MUDs.
Tetris. Look at the GFX budget and how it's aged.
If you want to make money and impress people, concentrate on graphics. If you want to create a game with redeeming value, they're not really that important. Many people who read