I'm not the one who pointed it out, but I guess the "expression" should be "hear, hear". "Here, here" is however, as you point out quite indicative; Only usually what it indicates is that someone got it wrong.
There, there.
No, "here" is a misuse of a homonym. Who cares where you are? The correct expression is "Hear", as in "Hear this!". Then again, you also "gin up", not "jin up". I don't know the origin of that one, but considering the topic, I'd definitely add more liquor.
The difference between OOXML and ODF is that if two programs give different results in 2 different software products, at least one of them is non-compliant[*]. OOXML, on the other hand, was non-compliant with the only software product it was developed for.
Actually, the most innovative thing Microsoft has done in recent years has been the Kinect. Give them credit for that. Also for being kind enough to open it up to non-Windows developers.
Some of the other Microsoft innovations may be wonderful, but anything Windows-only is lost to me.
* If you are expecting pixel-for-pixel correspondence in your word-processing documents, forget it. That's the difference between word processing and desktop publishing, between Word-format files and PDFs. The typesetting in most word processing is getting its metrics from the currently-selected printer driver, which means that working with a system having different fonts - especially hardware-specific fonts - is going to rearrange the text.
If you want to know the truth, everything I need for technical word processing was in Word 95, so the only significant changes for me since then were getting rid of Clippy (+), having "infrequently" used options vanish from Word 2003 menus (e.g., File Print/Control-P) and the ribbon (-). And I don't use Word as though it was a typewriter, like most people do. My spacing is style-controlled, not brute-force blank lines. But Open/Libre Office is all I've ever needed for business use.
Censorship works for that too. Imagine the most hated nasty/cruel/monstrous enemy: wouldn't you want to restrict his internet?
Actually, no. Well, maybe. As a form of punishment by deprivation. And possibly to keep him from getting info on various ways to attack me. LIke you need the Internet for that. Where there's a Will...
It isn't strictly true that the better-informed you are the more civilized you are, but at least if you have the information and are ignoring it, you're just being a jackass. Whereas if you're walled off from it, your ignorance is understandable.
It's why I maintain that People of Religion who forbid their children to learn about "heretical" things are merely showing the weakness of their own faith. The little bastards generally learn anyway, frequently get it wrong, and often find it more attractive simply because it's forbidden. Whereas a straight-up honest comparison against The Truth is more likely to end with a stronger faith. Providing that "The Truth" is actually true.
Being a complete jackass doesn't guarantee a person has ambition. I've known an awful lot of lazy jackasses.
But you can be a fat, lazy, drug-sozzled idiot who spends 2 hours a day or so yakking on the radio and own a mansion in Palm Beach. We have living proof of that!
Benchmarks have been done and Java can often out-perform C
Cite? I've often seen that claim but don't recall many benchmarks. Maybe somebody found a ten line loop that a JIT optimizes the hell out of, but I'm very skeptical that Java can regularly outperform C.
Lies, Damn Lies, and Benchmarks, as they say. Actual mileage may vary. For short runs, the sheer overhead of setting up a JVM puts it out of the running. For server systems running more or less continuously, the startup time becomes negligible. Loop optimization is probably not one of the things that Java can optimize better than C. On the other hand, on a lot of systems, there's a significant difference in the amount of time that it takes a conditional branch instruction to take the branch versus going straight. A C compilation produces static code and if the worst-case optimization (branch taken) is selected, that's the end of the story. A JVM monitoring performance can detect this sort of thing and rewrite the code to minimize the number of times the branch is taken. Needles to say, a 10-iteration loop run once a day isn't going to benefit, but a routine that runs millions of times an hour will.
For some actual numbers, I asked my friend Google and managed to find some cases where people did a head-to-head with a greater or lesser degree of honesty (Lies, Damn Lies,...).
Something I read a while back and cannot recall now asserted that Java won most of their benchmarks except for those involving floating-point numbers. The reason being that C could use the processor's native FPU, but Java's "Write Once/Run Anyware" requirements forced it (unless overridden) to use IEEE Floating-point, which often had to be done in software.
IBM is a big Java proponent. The modern zSeries machines include 2 FPUs. One for the original, rather strange S/360 FP format and the other for IEEE. Not a co-incidence, I suspect. Reminds me of how a group of Honeywell engineers got together with an OS that had been written under government contract for NASA (thus available for public use), and designed a computer whose instruction set was optimized to run FORTRAN. They called they company Prime Computer.
If I pour crude oil into the ocean, destroy the livelyhoods of fishing communities and kill a few of people on an oil platform in a gas fire (and destroy some evidence), I'll get a couple of hundred $k fine. If I buy a gun and go out and shoot the same number of people (and survive the manhunt) I'll get the rest of my life being a jailhouse bitch. Now, I wonder which I would choose?? Haliburton, do you have any vacancies???
Dear phydes,
We're sorry, your previous experience as a mass-murder is impressive, but you do not meet the minimum evil standards required to work at Halliburton.
That's not over-engineering so much as a lack of decent functionality in the JDK. Having things just work right out the box is one of the things I miss the most after I switched to java.
Java is over-engineered in large part because it's used on large-scale projects where the quick-and-dirty approach doesn't hold up. From time to time, I've had to chastise people for attempting to use J2EE for stuff that doesn't deserve to be written in anything more complex than PHP.
Then again, Sun made some really wretched design decisions. They're (as Oracle) now about to institute the third attempt to get dates, times, and calendars made easily usable. Although part of what made the first attempt so bad was that they DIDN'T over-engineer it. When you're programming for the World-Wide Web, you need support for multiple timezones and things like countries which use lunar calendars.
3) A lot of banking systems are build as layers after layer of ETL/batch. The systems often work but are grotesque in design and overall efficiency. They often would be no less efficient in Perl than Java.
Machine efficiency isn't the issue these days. The old equation where the machine was a major expense and programmers were relatively cheap has long since been reversed, even though we now expect programmers to be insanely cheap.
If you want cheap programmers, though, don't expect them to be working in Perl. Only APL ranks higher in terms of "write-only programming languages". At least go with Python or something that doesn't take 3 days to comprehend before making any changes to the code.
And I say that as a person who uses Perl as my preferred weapon - for short, one-shot regex-based tasks.
So, 6,000,000 orders per second on a single Java thread on commodity hardware isn't good enough for you?
http://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html
Java does major heavy lifting, and is extremely fast, if you know what you're doing.
You can try to make minor parts of the program faster by calling C++ via JNI, but you risk harming performance in the long run, because then the JIT compiler can't inline or otherwise optimise that part of the code.
Of course, you can make any language slow if you mess up enough.
Benchmarks have been done and Java can often out-perform C (and C purists will point out that C++ has its own inefficiencies). The reason being that in addition to garbage collection, modern-day JVMs often "waste" time analysing code execution and re-optimizing dynamically, which is something that C cannot do.
A lot of things that are more efficient done small-scale become relatively less efficient when done large-scale. So much that the large-scale applications can actually benefit even further from processes that would be prohibitive on the small scale (such as on-the-fly re-optimization).
Even memory management can sometimes be more efficient when garbage-collected if the dynamic memory base is large enough and organized in the right way, replacing thousands of small memory transactions with one big one that reclaims whole blocks of memory at a swoop.
There's simply no one absolute answer. Only fools look for silver bullets or the One True Religion. But Java found its niche in high-performance, high-reliability backends and so it has received a lot of attention over the years towards making it handle that sort of stuff well.
Sure the classic discussion is in Mythical Man Month. Here (http://sequoia.cs.byu.edu/lab/files/pubs/Delorey2007a.pdf) is a paper from 2007 which has references to many of the classic discussion. And Brooks I believe cites the original FORTRAN vs. assembler tests.
When The Mythical Man-Month was written, IBM FORTRAN was compiled by brute force and depended on a sizeable (for its day) runtime support library.
These days, compilers are much, much better at code optimization and a lot of the things that required runtime support infrastructure for are now handled in the OS or even in basic hardware.
Back before decent debuggers and IDEs were developed. Ran through miles and miles of Teletype paper over trivialities. Then had to make a 1-line change, recompile/link and do it all over again.
No thanks. I also have a carton or two of punched cards over in the corner and I'm not going back to THEM either.
Yep! All those sweatshop programmers in China and India are more efficient than the three people left at RIM's office in Canuckistan.
Next week, they'll announce that they're moving their office to the local StarSchmucks'.
Of course the sweatshop programmers are different in one way from the 100 North American people. They cannot afford to actually buy BlackBerries on sweatshop salaries.
Then again, neither can the people who are now jobless.
It seems that the way we use digital methods to publish even these silly posts on Slashdot would qualify as a free press. Whenever you hit "submit", you are publishing. Period. Even if you're a complete jackass, a troll, a spammer, or a botnet.
And, in fact, look at the bottom of the page, and you'll notice that whatever you post is copyrighted.
Although a really complete jackass shouldn't be wasting time here. That's what talk radio is for. Why be a jackass for free when you can make millions doing it?
Well no, unfortunately the US has things such as laws and prisons that prevent it from being a 'free society'. If you truly want to live in a free society, where citizens are free to di as they please, try Somalia or something.
Most of us think of "free society" as meaning "free to do as you please, and travel where you want". You're still a member of a free society if you impinge on other people's freedoms and they take your own freedom in response. I.e.: if you deprive someone else of life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness (including their accumulated material goods), you disrupt the equation and a balance is demanded.
"Travel where you want" is rather shaky in the USA these days, however, since "free society" does NOT imply having to strip naked and present your papers to travel within the boundaries of your own country. Or have invisible agencies collect data on you with no probably cause. Because that sort of stuff makes one think twice about exercising your freedom. And if you have to think about it, you're not really free anymore.
That's because in Latin it means "new" and Portuguese, like Spanish, is a Romance language, descended from Latin.
I think it's also important to note that Portuguese is much closer to Latin than Spanish is, so it's not surprising that "nova" (new) is common to both Latin and Portuguese and not Spanish. I wouldn't be surprised if "nova" is also used in Galician.
Or something similar. After all, Spanish kept "nova" for new, but mutated it into "nuevo", leaving the original Latin form for astronomers.
The problem is that Gnome's creator, Miquel de Icaza is a bitch for Windows. Among his sins you can include something like, but even more horrible than, the Windows Registry.
That wasn't him. I also accused him of gconf, on this very website, and he replied that it wasn't him but another of the gnome group that came, set up that travesty, and left it half finished. The facts checked out. I suspect that gconf is completely dead now with gnome3 and good riddance to it, whether the idea was sound or not is immaterial since the execution was not sound.
It's possible that Icaza's name has been used in vain these many years, but I've read enough news reports about his baby where he seemed to be taking credit for Windows-like features.
Truthfully, I'm not sure if there's a distinction between "gconf" and the underlying configuration data. To me, "gconf" is the app that was supposed to maintain them, and I'm not sure if it existed way back when I discovered that my home account was unusable thanks to some obscure uncorrectable corruption in the gnome configuration. I'm not an expert on the internals of gnome. Partly because there were never decent design docs on it.
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free." - Ronald Reagan.
That's a great quote. Too bad he had to ruin it by destroying the "Innocent until Proven Guilty" component of US freedom. It was under Reagan's watch that we started having to prove that we were neither illegal aliens (proof of citizenship required) nor drug addicts (test required) before we could hired in most jobs.
It's also the same period of time when the Communications Act of 1934 was broken by the mobile phone lobby. Under the original act it was legal to listen to anything on the radio on any frequency, as long as you didn't divulge non-public information. Under the Reagan-era revision, it became illegal to listen to designated frequencies. Of course, back then, you could also listen to most public service radio systems. Now they're increasingly encrypted for even the most trivial applications. The more your local, state and and federal government insist that innocent people have nothing to hide, it seems the more they hide themselves.
It is sad, in a way, although not surprising to me.
Sad, because it was once so promising; GNOME was once my absolute favourite desktop, but when they started becoming more and more a Windows clone, I lost my faith in them. And then they started removing useful features, upsetting their core community - those who were on Linux because it is OPEN, extremely configurable, very inclusive etc - and the GNOME developers became more and more unapproachable and sectarian. I suppose, in a way they chose to follow their own closed set of ideals and lost their way.
Now I use KDE - it is not perfect, but I don't need perfect, I only need good enough, and KDE is good enough for my purposes.
The problem is that Gnome's creator, Miquel de Icaza is a bitch for Windows. Among his sins you can include something like, but even more horrible than, the Windows Registry. Add to that the hubris of the Gnome 3 team and it's a recipe for something that looks good but doesn't do what you want it do do.
KDE's bouncing icons were its biggest turn off for me. I want GUI that "just works" and doesn't attempt to be an art form or a distraction and doesn't require switching off "vanity features" before I can use it.
As a developer, it's also rather important that the UI toolkit is easy to inject into projects, doesn't have bizarre interactions with other subsystems (or itself), supports multiple languages in a developer-friendly way, and last, but not least, has usable documentation. Including sample code and instruction manual. A set of "javadocs" isn't enough.
Please, not that Nova urban legend again. Geeze, when will it die?
In portuguese it means "new", btw.
That's because in Latin it means "new" and Portuguese, like Spanish, is a Romance language, descended from Latin.
However, the word "nova" is only a Spanish word in the sense that it's also an English word - both languages have adopted the astronomical term which was originally "stellum nova", meaning "new star". Which in turn was created to describe stars which suddenly appeared or became brighter.
"No va", however, is a perfectly good cynical term to apply to an automobile and I can think of plenty of English word and acronyms that are equally snarky (Fix Or Repair Daily, for example).
Re:KDE and Gnome are still comparable
on
The Last GUADEC?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
And of course Google Trends is a totally unbiased source.
Do no evil and all that shit, right?
I was hoping for confirmation from Netcraft, myself.
"Maybe they'll start making... (gasp)... actual plots to accompany those stars/explosions/special effects?"
They think they've found some "formulas" that are common to blockbuster movies... and maybe they're right. BUT... as much as I hate to say this again, correlation does not equal causation. The fact that many blockbusters may have followed particular patterns does not mean that following those patterns will automatically make a good movie.
All formulas aside... it STILL has to be a good movie.
Here's you a formula: fast movement, slow movement, scherzo, fast movement. The classical formula for a symphony. In the hands of a Beethoven, even the worst is good. In the hands of a Harvey Blorkfarter... Hey, who remembers Harvey Blrokfarter?
Here's another formula: pairs of rhyming lines in iambic Pentameter.
Formulas are just the framework. It's what you put on the framework that counts. You can use the best materials (paints, words, musical themes, star-grade actors) and it's still going to be piece of putrid trash if the spark isn't there.
The downside of the computer era is that we think that everything can be digitized, reduced, run through mathematical processes and produce gold. It's just the modern-day philosopher's stone, in a way. But computers are just tools and no customer survey can ever replace actually being in touch with your customers. No formula can replace a creative inner Muse. Art is art, not science, and it is better so, or all the artists would be replaced by kaleidoscopic art generation machines a la 1984 and the human touch would be lost.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not the one who pointed it out, but I guess the "expression" should be "hear, hear". "Here, here" is however, as you point out quite indicative; Only usually what it indicates is that someone got it wrong.
There, there.
No, "here" is a misuse of a homonym. Who cares where you are? The correct expression is "Hear", as in "Hear this!". Then again, you also "gin up", not "jin up". I don't know the origin of that one, but considering the topic, I'd definitely add more liquor.
The difference between OOXML and ODF is that if two programs give different results in 2 different software products, at least one of them is non-compliant[*]. OOXML, on the other hand, was non-compliant with the only software product it was developed for.
Actually, the most innovative thing Microsoft has done in recent years has been the Kinect. Give them credit for that. Also for being kind enough to open it up to non-Windows developers.
Some of the other Microsoft innovations may be wonderful, but anything Windows-only is lost to me.
* If you are expecting pixel-for-pixel correspondence in your word-processing documents, forget it. That's the difference between word processing and desktop publishing, between Word-format files and PDFs. The typesetting in most word processing is getting its metrics from the currently-selected printer driver, which means that working with a system having different fonts - especially hardware-specific fonts - is going to rearrange the text.
If you want to know the truth, everything I need for technical word processing was in Word 95, so the only significant changes for me since then were getting rid of Clippy (+), having "infrequently" used options vanish from Word 2003 menus (e.g., File Print/Control-P) and the ribbon (-). And I don't use Word as though it was a typewriter, like most people do. My spacing is style-controlled, not brute-force blank lines. But Open/Libre Office is all I've ever needed for business use.
in need of constant correction
Censorship works for that too. Imagine the most hated nasty/cruel/monstrous enemy: wouldn't you want to restrict his internet?
Actually, no. Well, maybe. As a form of punishment by deprivation. And possibly to keep him from getting info on various ways to attack me. LIke you need the Internet for that. Where there's a Will...
It isn't strictly true that the better-informed you are the more civilized you are, but at least if you have the information and are ignoring it, you're just being a jackass. Whereas if you're walled off from it, your ignorance is understandable.
It's why I maintain that People of Religion who forbid their children to learn about "heretical" things are merely showing the weakness of their own faith. The little bastards generally learn anyway, frequently get it wrong, and often find it more attractive simply because it's forbidden. Whereas a straight-up honest comparison against The Truth is more likely to end with a stronger faith. Providing that "The Truth" is actually true.
Being a complete jackass doesn't guarantee a person has ambition. I've known an awful lot of lazy jackasses.
But you can be a fat, lazy, drug-sozzled idiot who spends 2 hours a day or so yakking on the radio and own a mansion in Palm Beach. We have living proof of that!
Benchmarks have been done and Java can often out-perform C
Cite? I've often seen that claim but don't recall many benchmarks. Maybe somebody found a ten line loop that a JIT optimizes the hell out of, but I'm very skeptical that Java can regularly outperform C.
Lies, Damn Lies, and Benchmarks, as they say. Actual mileage may vary. For short runs, the sheer overhead of setting up a JVM puts it out of the running. For server systems running more or less continuously, the startup time becomes negligible. Loop optimization is probably not one of the things that Java can optimize better than C. On the other hand, on a lot of systems, there's a significant difference in the amount of time that it takes a conditional branch instruction to take the branch versus going straight. A C compilation produces static code and if the worst-case optimization (branch taken) is selected, that's the end of the story. A JVM monitoring performance can detect this sort of thing and rewrite the code to minimize the number of times the branch is taken. Needles to say, a 10-iteration loop run once a day isn't going to benefit, but a routine that runs millions of times an hour will.
For some actual numbers, I asked my friend Google and managed to find some cases where people did a head-to-head with a greater or lesser degree of honesty (Lies, Damn Lies, ...).
Here's one:
http://keithlea.com/javabench/
A Wikipedia discussion, for contemplation by those who don't knee-jerk reject Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_performance
And something a bit more scholarly:
http://scribblethink.org/Computer/javaCbenchmark.html
And something from IBM on Java's memory-management performance:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp09275/index.html
Something I read a while back and cannot recall now asserted that Java won most of their benchmarks except for those involving floating-point numbers. The reason being that C could use the processor's native FPU, but Java's "Write Once/Run Anyware" requirements forced it (unless overridden) to use IEEE Floating-point, which often had to be done in software.
IBM is a big Java proponent. The modern zSeries machines include 2 FPUs. One for the original, rather strange S/360 FP format and the other for IEEE. Not a co-incidence, I suspect. Reminds me of how a group of Honeywell engineers got together with an OS that had been written under government contract for NASA (thus available for public use), and designed a computer whose instruction set was optimized to run FORTRAN. They called they company Prime Computer.
If I pour crude oil into the ocean, destroy the livelyhoods of fishing communities and kill a few of people on an oil platform in a gas fire (and destroy some evidence), I'll get a couple of hundred $k fine. If I buy a gun and go out and shoot the same number of people (and survive the manhunt) I'll get the rest of my life being a jailhouse bitch. Now, I wonder which I would choose?? Haliburton, do you have any vacancies???
Dear phydes,
We're sorry, your previous experience as a mass-murder is impressive, but you do not meet the minimum evil standards required to work at Halliburton.
That's not over-engineering so much as a lack of decent functionality in the JDK. Having things just work right out the box is one of the things I miss the most after I switched to java.
Java is over-engineered in large part because it's used on large-scale projects where the quick-and-dirty approach doesn't hold up. From time to time, I've had to chastise people for attempting to use J2EE for stuff that doesn't deserve to be written in anything more complex than PHP.
Then again, Sun made some really wretched design decisions. They're (as Oracle) now about to institute the third attempt to get dates, times, and calendars made easily usable. Although part of what made the first attempt so bad was that they DIDN'T over-engineer it. When you're programming for the World-Wide Web, you need support for multiple timezones and things like countries which use lunar calendars.
1) That's not really a lot.
2) Did they meet the 5 9s requirements?
3) A lot of banking systems are build as layers after layer of ETL/batch. The systems often work but are grotesque in design and overall efficiency. They often would be no less efficient in Perl than Java.
Machine efficiency isn't the issue these days. The old equation where the machine was a major expense and programmers were relatively cheap has long since been reversed, even though we now expect programmers to be insanely cheap.
If you want cheap programmers, though, don't expect them to be working in Perl. Only APL ranks higher in terms of "write-only programming languages". At least go with Python or something that doesn't take 3 days to comprehend before making any changes to the code.
And I say that as a person who uses Perl as my preferred weapon - for short, one-shot regex-based tasks.
So, 6,000,000 orders per second on a single Java thread on commodity hardware isn't good enough for you?
http://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html
Java does major heavy lifting, and is extremely fast, if you know what you're doing.
You can try to make minor parts of the program faster by calling C++ via JNI, but you risk harming performance in the long run, because then the JIT compiler can't inline or otherwise optimise that part of the code.
Of course, you can make any language slow if you mess up enough.
Benchmarks have been done and Java can often out-perform C (and C purists will point out that C++ has its own inefficiencies). The reason being that in addition to garbage collection, modern-day JVMs often "waste" time analysing code execution and re-optimizing dynamically, which is something that C cannot do.
A lot of things that are more efficient done small-scale become relatively less efficient when done large-scale. So much that the large-scale applications can actually benefit even further from processes that would be prohibitive on the small scale (such as on-the-fly re-optimization).
Even memory management can sometimes be more efficient when garbage-collected if the dynamic memory base is large enough and organized in the right way, replacing thousands of small memory transactions with one big one that reclaims whole blocks of memory at a swoop.
There's simply no one absolute answer. Only fools look for silver bullets or the One True Religion. But Java found its niche in high-performance, high-reliability backends and so it has received a lot of attention over the years towards making it handle that sort of stuff well.
Java was a GOOD language, because before we had C++.
One of my favorite definitions: "Java is like C++. But without the mace and knives."
Sure the classic discussion is in Mythical Man Month. Here (http://sequoia.cs.byu.edu/lab/files/pubs/Delorey2007a.pdf) is a paper from 2007 which has references to many of the classic discussion. And Brooks I believe cites the original FORTRAN vs. assembler tests.
When The Mythical Man-Month was written, IBM FORTRAN was compiled by brute force and depended on a sizeable (for its day) runtime support library.
These days, compilers are much, much better at code optimization and a lot of the things that required runtime support infrastructure for are now handled in the OS or even in basic hardware.
That's going to alter the equation a bit.
I debugged with print statements.
Back before decent debuggers and IDEs were developed. Ran through miles and miles of Teletype paper over trivialities. Then had to make a 1-line change, recompile/link and do it all over again.
No thanks. I also have a carton or two of punched cards over in the corner and I'm not going back to THEM either.
Or anything else in COBOL.
-jcr
100 years? That's just about enough time to type in the ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
And COBOL wouldn't be found in Purgatory. Look someplace lower.
Yep! All those sweatshop programmers in China and India are more efficient than the three people left at RIM's office in Canuckistan.
Next week, they'll announce that they're moving their office to the local StarSchmucks'.
Of course the sweatshop programmers are different in one way from the 100 North American people. They cannot afford to actually buy BlackBerries on sweatshop salaries.
Then again, neither can the people who are now jobless.
> It's keeping it there after an update crashes everything and the user says, "Screw that, I'm going back to Windows because it works."
Going back to Windows because IT works?
Excuse me. My jaw just hit the floor. I've got to go find a shovel and retrieve it.
It seems that the way we use digital methods to publish even these silly posts on Slashdot would qualify as a free press. Whenever you hit "submit", you are publishing. Period. Even if you're a complete jackass, a troll, a spammer, or a botnet.
And, in fact, look at the bottom of the page, and you'll notice that whatever you post is copyrighted.
Although a really complete jackass shouldn't be wasting time here. That's what talk radio is for. Why be a jackass for free when you can make millions doing it?
Well no, unfortunately the US has things such as laws and prisons that prevent it from being a 'free society'. If you truly want to live in a free society, where citizens are free to di as they please, try Somalia or something.
Most of us think of "free society" as meaning "free to do as you please, and travel where you want". You're still a member of a free society if you impinge on other people's freedoms and they take your own freedom in response. I.e.: if you deprive someone else of life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness (including their accumulated material goods), you disrupt the equation and a balance is demanded.
"Travel where you want" is rather shaky in the USA these days, however, since "free society" does NOT imply having to strip naked and present your papers to travel within the boundaries of your own country. Or have invisible agencies collect data on you with no probably cause. Because that sort of stuff makes one think twice about exercising your freedom. And if you have to think about it, you're not really free anymore.
That's because in Latin it means "new" and Portuguese, like Spanish, is a Romance language, descended from Latin.
I think it's also important to note that Portuguese is much closer to Latin than Spanish is, so it's not surprising that "nova" (new) is common to both Latin and Portuguese and not Spanish. I wouldn't be surprised if "nova" is also used in Galician.
Or something similar. After all, Spanish kept "nova" for new, but mutated it into "nuevo", leaving the original Latin form for astronomers.
That wasn't him. I also accused him of gconf, on this very website, and he replied that it wasn't him but another of the gnome group that came, set up that travesty, and left it half finished. The facts checked out. I suspect that gconf is completely dead now with gnome3 and good riddance to it, whether the idea was sound or not is immaterial since the execution was not sound.
It's possible that Icaza's name has been used in vain these many years, but I've read enough news reports about his baby where he seemed to be taking credit for Windows-like features.
Truthfully, I'm not sure if there's a distinction between "gconf" and the underlying configuration data. To me, "gconf" is the app that was supposed to maintain them, and I'm not sure if it existed way back when I discovered that my home account was unusable thanks to some obscure uncorrectable corruption in the gnome configuration. I'm not an expert on the internals of gnome. Partly because there were never decent design docs on it.
Doesn't this mean bitcoin is now illegal?
No, it means that bitcoins are just like real money! You can commit real financial fraud with them.
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free." - Ronald Reagan.
That's a great quote. Too bad he had to ruin it by destroying the "Innocent until Proven Guilty" component of US freedom. It was under Reagan's watch that we started having to prove that we were neither illegal aliens (proof of citizenship required) nor drug addicts (test required) before we could hired in most jobs.
It's also the same period of time when the Communications Act of 1934 was broken by the mobile phone lobby. Under the original act it was legal to listen to anything on the radio on any frequency, as long as you didn't divulge non-public information. Under the Reagan-era revision, it became illegal to listen to designated frequencies. Of course, back then, you could also listen to most public service radio systems. Now they're increasingly encrypted for even the most trivial applications. The more your local, state and and federal government insist that innocent people have nothing to hide, it seems the more they hide themselves.
It is sad, in a way, although not surprising to me.
Sad, because it was once so promising; GNOME was once my absolute favourite desktop, but when they started becoming more and more a Windows clone, I lost my faith in them. And then they started removing useful features, upsetting their core community - those who were on Linux because it is OPEN, extremely configurable, very inclusive etc - and the GNOME developers became more and more unapproachable and sectarian. I suppose, in a way they chose to follow their own closed set of ideals and lost their way.
Now I use KDE - it is not perfect, but I don't need perfect, I only need good enough, and KDE is good enough for my purposes.
The problem is that Gnome's creator, Miquel de Icaza is a bitch for Windows. Among his sins you can include something like, but even more horrible than, the Windows Registry. Add to that the hubris of the Gnome 3 team and it's a recipe for something that looks good but doesn't do what you want it do do.
KDE's bouncing icons were its biggest turn off for me. I want GUI that "just works" and doesn't attempt to be an art form or a distraction and doesn't require switching off "vanity features" before I can use it.
As a developer, it's also rather important that the UI toolkit is easy to inject into projects, doesn't have bizarre interactions with other subsystems (or itself), supports multiple languages in a developer-friendly way, and last, but not least, has usable documentation. Including sample code and instruction manual. A set of "javadocs" isn't enough.
Please, not that Nova urban legend again. Geeze, when will it die?
In portuguese it means "new", btw.
That's because in Latin it means "new" and Portuguese, like Spanish, is a Romance language, descended from Latin.
However, the word "nova" is only a Spanish word in the sense that it's also an English word - both languages have adopted the astronomical term which was originally "stellum nova", meaning "new star". Which in turn was created to describe stars which suddenly appeared or became brighter.
"No va", however, is a perfectly good cynical term to apply to an automobile and I can think of plenty of English word and acronyms that are equally snarky (Fix Or Repair Daily, for example).
And of course Google Trends is a totally unbiased source.
Do no evil and all that shit, right?
I was hoping for confirmation from Netcraft, myself.
"Maybe they'll start making... (gasp)... actual plots to accompany those stars/explosions/special effects?"
They think they've found some "formulas" that are common to blockbuster movies... and maybe they're right. BUT... as much as I hate to say this again, correlation does not equal causation. The fact that many blockbusters may have followed particular patterns does not mean that following those patterns will automatically make a good movie.
All formulas aside... it STILL has to be a good movie.
Here's you a formula: fast movement, slow movement, scherzo, fast movement. The classical formula for a symphony. In the hands of a Beethoven, even the worst is good. In the hands of a Harvey Blorkfarter... Hey, who remembers Harvey Blrokfarter?
Here's another formula: pairs of rhyming lines in iambic Pentameter.
Formulas are just the framework. It's what you put on the framework that counts. You can use the best materials (paints, words, musical themes, star-grade actors) and it's still going to be piece of putrid trash if the spark isn't there.
The downside of the computer era is that we think that everything can be digitized, reduced, run through mathematical processes and produce gold. It's just the modern-day philosopher's stone, in a way. But computers are just tools and no customer survey can ever replace actually being in touch with your customers. No formula can replace a creative inner Muse. Art is art, not science, and it is better so, or all the artists would be replaced by kaleidoscopic art generation machines a la 1984 and the human touch would be lost.