I'm not calling anyone a loser, just saying that they're on a losing proposition. Right and wrong have little meaning when it comes to pronunciation - the one most people use is most likely to be understood.
I like and use OS X, but I don't think the official Apple pronunciation will stick because it's counter-intuitive.
Ever wonder where your sig came from? The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was originally a Radio 4 programme. I even used to leave the pub early to listen to it live on Saturday nights.
Re:He derives from good stuff too.
on
The Forever War
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· Score: 1
Anyone who thinks that "Starship Troopers" was advocating unrestrained jingoism totally missed the point of the book. I'm sure Haldeman was more perceptive than that. I see "Forever War" as more of an update, reiterating the *anti* jingoism sentiments of Heinlein's book for a later generation.
I do agree with you about "Forever Peace" being a weak follow-up. "Forever War" is strong enough to stand on its own without any sequels.
Just so you know, the E pager lets you drag windows around. I agree that this is something that's very useful and it's one of my favourite things about Enlightenment.
With a nice lightweight theme of my own invention E uses about 3.6MB on my machine - not tiny, but certainly not bloated.
>It's been a bit of pain for us being based in the UK, everyone uses C++ here!
Funny, I've seen it the other way around - I suppose it's just a matter of who you work with.
The best practices I've seen are where C++ extensions are used only where they're better than vanilla C for what needs to be done. Sadly, that's all too rare because some people seem to want to use every available feature just because it's there and to prove that they're up with the latest.
New graduates and old timers seem to be the worst offenders. I wish there was a compiler flag like -Wposeur which would produce warnings like :
proggy.cc:6236 warning:pretentious use of obscure syntax. You aren't fooling anyone.
Or maybe a competency level which restricted use of features by coders who don't know any better. I can think of a few people whose code would be improved by a --competence=newbie option to the compiler.
Sounds like an excellent way to reduce code bloat. I suppose it's too much to hope that they take the "better C than C" parts of C++ and leave it at that.
I'm actually half serious here. I've worked on large projects in both C and C++, and the ones which were most successful were the ones where people didn't get carried away, trying to use every new, buggy, inefficient, feature of C++ in an attempt to prove that they could.
I'm all in favour of a compiler which restricts its features to those it does well instead of providing half-baked implementations of C++'isms just to bump up the feature list.
You make a flawed analogy. The issue is simply that programmers produce something (software), which others, who do not produce it themselves find useful. Programmers may choose to give away some of the fruits of their labour, but should not be required to do so any more than an author of (say) a novel.
No new arguments there. My opinion is that there's room in the world for both open and closed source; sometimes one is appropriate and sometimes the other.
What I find disturbing is someone reasoning that because programmers are a minority their individual rights count for less than the rights of individual non-programmers. That's just wrong.
Discussions of rights and rules for software use have usually concentrated too much on the interests of programmers alone. Few people in the world program regularly [...]
And fewer than that earn their living by writing programs, so presumably it must be even more justifiable to ignore their rights.
I agree with many of the FSF's goals, but arguing that the welfare of a group of people is irrelevant just because that group is a minority betrays a very ugly mindset.
The ARM was originally a chip, not a company. The acronym definitely stood for Acorn RISC Machine, the processor designed for the successor to the Acorn BBC micro which was eventually named the Acorn Archimedes.
Re:Nothing much has changed
on
IT Unions?
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· Score: 1
>CEO compensation is tied to stock prices and thus tied to the market performance [...] If you look at current executive compensation in high tech you'll see that its a pretty shitty deal.
Hahaha:-|
That's the theory, but it just doesn't work that way in practice, although I'm sure a lot of CEOs will be happy to know that they've got people fooled. Fact is that CEO compenstion comes in so many different forms (stock, "performance" bonuses, salary, perks etc., etc.) that the *total* can continue to rise even while said CEO professes to be suffering along with everyone else.
The ones who have the grip are the ones who get to squeeze. Any time upper management starts talking about cutbacks and belt tightening you can bet that they don't mean their own jobs and their own belts.
Oh yes! They're one of the best things about the books, somehow more honest than trying to sneak an explanation into the dialogue.
Reminds me of Pratchett's stuff, and now that I come to think of it the first two Discworld novels bear more than a passing resemblance to the Dying Earth stories. Rincewind has definite echoes of Cugel in his character, at least in the early stories.
Part of Vance's genius is the way he almost plays with language, inventing words on the spot and writing with an almost formal, mannered style. The Dying Earth books are some of the best examples of this, and there's an underlying mischievousness which really makes the books a joy to read.
On the other hand, inventing words can have it's problems, as anyone in the UK will realise when shown a copy of Vance's "Servants of the Wankh"...
You can connect to a linux box and use standard apps to sync your files. There isn't a point'n'drool version for linux, but rsync works just fine.
What's really fun is using nfs to mount a remote drive on the Agenda (or vice-versa) and exporting $DISPLAY one way or the other. Running Agenda apps displayed on a PC monitor (or vice-versa again) is useful as well as having a high geek quotient.
This little unit really is running a full version of linux and X, and if that's good enough for the internet it's good enough for a PDA:P
>does this mean that all of the software on the machine is GPL or something similar
Yes, the built in apps are all open source.
Re:Are there Free X-Servers for Windows.
on
Low-Bandwidth X
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· Score: 1
MicroImages MI/X used to be free, but they're charging $25 for the latest version. A hunt around the web should turn up the earlier version on a few ftp sites. For example, I found it here.
Wrong. If something is freely given to you then you can do whatever you want with it. The GPL specifically denies you this freedom by setting out limitations on what you can and cannot do with GPL'd software. I'm not arguing that this is wrong (in fact I tend to agree with it), but it does mean that GPL'd software isn't free. In fact any licence at all restricts freedom in some way - the only truly free software is that which is released into the Public Domain.
What kills me overall is the decline in the overall quality of USENET. Too much good content has gone to crap, non-archived, non-searchable web forums
I find that USENET has been getting better recently. True, it was pretty bad for a while, but now all the kiddies have moved over to (ahem) web forums the S/N ratio in the newsgroups has improved drastically.
You could say, though, that when the 'building blocks' become a certain size, then new things can happen.
A fair point, and I think this is what they are trying to claim has happened. Personally I disagree, but there's no denying that the Forth threaded-interpreted model is very good at getting a lot out of limited resources. The PR fluff is just a bit overblown.
I wonder how applicable what 180 has developed is to writing efficient code on VLIW machines? Hmm, time to do some looking around.
the only difference in the applications being in the sequence in which the 'software procedures' are processed.
This begins to sound less revolutionary when you consider that every instruction supported by a CPU is a 'software procedure' (often literally so, written in microcode).
Some of the more complex instructions supported by a CISC processor would need, oh, perhaps dozens of bytes to implement on a RISC processor, and guess what - by arranging them in different ways you can make lots of different 'programs' as we call them in modern terms.
I hate to seem cynical but this just doesn't sound like anything new.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not calling anyone a loser, just saying that they're on a losing proposition. Right and wrong have little meaning when it comes to pronunciation - the one most people use is most likely to be understood.
I like and use OS X, but I don't think the official Apple pronunciation will stick because it's counter-intuitive.
Yeah, right. And "vi" is pronounced "vee eye". Anytime someone gives pronunciation instructions that go against common usage they're on a loser.
And besides, everyone knows "OS X" is pronounced "yoo-nix"
>btw, is it only me, or does Radio 1 really suck?
It's not just you; Radio 1 is truly awful. If the BBC has a fault it's that it doesn't have a good popular music radio station.
Ever wonder where your sig came from? The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was originally a Radio 4 programme. I even used to leave the pub early to listen to it live on Saturday nights.
Anyone who thinks that "Starship Troopers" was advocating unrestrained jingoism totally missed the point of the book. I'm sure Haldeman was more perceptive than that. I see "Forever War" as more of an update, reiterating the *anti* jingoism sentiments of Heinlein's book for a later generation.
I do agree with you about "Forever Peace" being a weak follow-up. "Forever War" is strong enough to stand on its own without any sequels.
>Wodehouse wrote in the mid-30's. He's not really read anymore
Wrong.
>what about Allen?
For writing most of MS Basic while Gates was out playing poker? I'm not sure an award is the best way to recognise that particular achievement.
Just so you know, the E pager lets you drag windows around. I agree that this is something that's very useful and it's one of my favourite things about Enlightenment.
With a nice lightweight theme of my own invention E uses about 3.6MB on my machine - not tiny, but certainly not bloated.
>It's been a bit of pain for us being based in the UK, everyone uses C++ here!
Funny, I've seen it the other way around - I suppose it's just a matter of who you work with.
The best practices I've seen are where C++ extensions are used only where they're better than vanilla C for what needs to be done. Sadly, that's all too rare because some people seem to want to use every available feature just because it's there and to prove that they're up with the latest.
New graduates and old timers seem to be the worst offenders. I wish there was a compiler flag like -Wposeur which would produce warnings like :
proggy.cc:6236 warning:pretentious use of obscure syntax. You aren't fooling anyone.
Or maybe a competency level which restricted use of features by coders who don't know any better. I can think of a few people whose code would be improved by a --competence=newbie option to the compiler.
>the current version of VectorC is plain C only
Sounds like an excellent way to reduce code bloat. I suppose it's too much to hope that they take the "better C than C" parts of C++ and leave it at that.
I'm actually half serious here. I've worked on large projects in both C and C++, and the ones which were most successful were the ones where people didn't get carried away, trying to use every new, buggy, inefficient, feature of C++ in an attempt to prove that they could.
I'm all in favour of a compiler which restricts its features to those it does well instead of providing half-baked implementations of C++'isms just to bump up the feature list.
You make a flawed analogy. The issue is simply that programmers produce something (software), which others, who do not produce it themselves find useful. Programmers may choose to give away some of the fruits of their labour, but should not be required to do so any more than an author of (say) a novel.
No new arguments there. My opinion is that there's room in the world for both open and closed source; sometimes one is appropriate and sometimes the other.
What I find disturbing is someone reasoning that because programmers are a minority their individual rights count for less than the rights of individual non-programmers. That's just wrong.
Does anyone else find this quote downright scary :
And fewer than that earn their living by writing programs, so presumably it must be even more justifiable to ignore their rights.
I agree with many of the FSF's goals, but arguing that the welfare of a group of people is irrelevant just because that group is a minority betrays a very ugly mindset.
The ARM was originally a chip, not a company. The acronym definitely stood for Acorn RISC Machine, the processor designed for the successor to the Acorn BBC micro which was eventually named the Acorn Archimedes.
>CEO compensation is tied to stock prices and thus tied to the market performance [...] If you look at current executive compensation in high tech you'll see that its a pretty shitty deal.
:-|
Hahaha
That's the theory, but it just doesn't work that way in practice, although I'm sure a lot of CEOs will be happy to know that they've got people fooled. Fact is that CEO compenstion comes in so many different forms (stock, "performance" bonuses, salary, perks etc., etc.) that the *total* can continue to rise even while said CEO professes to be suffering along with everyone else.
The ones who have the grip are the ones who get to squeeze. Any time upper management starts talking about cutbacks and belt tightening you can bet that they don't mean their own jobs and their own belts.
>I like his footnotes.
Oh yes! They're one of the best things about the books, somehow more honest than trying to sneak an explanation into the dialogue.
Reminds me of Pratchett's stuff, and now that I come to think of it the first two Discworld novels bear more than a passing resemblance to the Dying Earth stories. Rincewind has definite echoes of Cugel in his character, at least in the early stories.
Part of Vance's genius is the way he almost plays with language, inventing words on the spot and writing with an almost formal, mannered style. The Dying Earth books are some of the best examples of this, and there's an underlying mischievousness which really makes the books a joy to read.
On the other hand, inventing words can have it's problems, as anyone in the UK will realise when shown a copy of Vance's "Servants of the Wankh"...
Agree totally. If he's as obnoxious in RL as in his diary I wouldn't be surprised if the Sony guy was just winding him by saying :
"We don't really care about [the GPL]. Go ahead, sue us and see how far you get..."
People like that are so much fun (and so easy) to torment.
>the sync software only runs on Windows....
:P
You can connect to a linux box and use standard apps to sync your files. There isn't a point'n'drool version for linux, but rsync works just fine.
What's really fun is using nfs to mount a remote drive on the Agenda (or vice-versa) and exporting $DISPLAY one way or the other. Running Agenda apps displayed on a PC monitor (or vice-versa again) is useful as well as having a high geek quotient.
This little unit really is running a full version of linux and X, and if that's good enough for the internet it's good enough for a PDA
>All someone has to do is port X to it and that will change.
Uh, the Agenda already runs X as standard. The preferred toolkit is fltk, but low level X apps work just fine.
>does this mean that all of the software on the machine is GPL or something similar
Yes, the built in apps are all open source.
MicroImages MI/X used to be free, but they're charging $25 for the latest version. A hunt around the web should turn up the earlier version on a few ftp sites. For example, I found it here.
what was freely given to you in the first place.
Wrong. If something is freely given to you then you can do whatever you want with it. The GPL specifically denies you this freedom by setting out limitations on what you can and cannot do with GPL'd software. I'm not arguing that this is wrong (in fact I tend to agree with it), but it does mean that GPL'd software isn't free. In fact any licence at all restricts freedom in some way - the only truly free software is that which is released into the Public Domain.
What kills me overall is the decline in the overall quality of USENET. Too much good content has gone to crap, non-archived, non-searchable web forums
I find that USENET has been getting better recently. True, it was pretty bad for a while, but now all the kiddies have moved over to (ahem) web forums the S/N ratio in the newsgroups has improved drastically.
A fair point, and I think this is what they are trying to claim has happened. Personally I disagree, but there's no denying that the Forth threaded-interpreted model is very good at getting a lot out of limited resources. The PR fluff is just a bit overblown.
I wonder how applicable what 180 has developed is to writing efficient code on VLIW machines? Hmm, time to do some looking around.
This begins to sound less revolutionary when you consider that every instruction supported by a CPU is a 'software procedure' (often literally so, written in microcode).
Some of the more complex instructions supported by a CISC processor would need, oh, perhaps dozens of bytes to implement on a RISC processor, and guess what - by arranging them in different ways you can make lots of different 'programs' as we call them in modern terms.
I hate to seem cynical but this just doesn't sound like anything new.