Seriously - I fail to see why I shouldn't be responsible for the software that I create. If the software I create crashes a system and causes massive dataloss or worse, why shouldn't I be responsible?
Before I was laid of and went back to university to get a bachelors in computer science, I was writing software for a living. My last project was to write software that controlled HVAC's in office buildings and the like. Suppose that due to a bug it decided to increase the indoor temperature to, say, 40 C forcing the entire workforce of an office building to take the day off because it was impossible to work, why shouldn't my company be responsible for their losses? I can guarantee that if it happened, even if my company couldn't be held responsible, I'd be out of a job anyway.
If I did it in my spare time for free, why shouldn't I be held responsible? If it is beta-software then sure, it's their fault for using it. But if I'm letting other people use my software, it'd damn well better behave the way I say it should or I should be able to be held accountable.
If I build a car, give it away for free and its brakes fail while going 40 mph in a city and it plows through a kindergarten on an excursion, shouldn't I be held responsible? Why shouldn't I be held responsible, even though I didn't get any money from it?
Yes, software creators should be held responsible for their products. Yes, I plan on creating software for a living again after getting my degree. I fail to see why it shouldn't be this way.
as are those of you, who use somewhat intelligent clients.
I have one account that's on the receiving end of this worm, and I can only access it via webmail. A slow webmail. When I only have 20 messages (in all) it takes 35 seconds to load the page; when I have 472 unread messages it takes waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long to load the page.
Oh, yeah - it gets better. I actually need this account, as it's the main communication with the rest of the school. Oh, yeah - a bunch of administrators who don't give a rats ass about this, and don't see the need to do a virus scan on the server - even though the university has 15,000 users, 5,000 computers (~4,000 running windows), hot spots in all buildings and gigabit internet. I can't wait for just one computer to get infected and set off a violent chain reaction.
Oh - just to spice things up - the university lent a helping hand in knocking the root servers off the internet a while back, but hey - that's okay - it's not a problem for the administrators, because "we're using unix, so we aren't in harms way", which was an actual response, when I called and gave them a heads up yesterday morning, when I received 124 emails in an hour...
Jumping the gun a bit? (Which is the polite way to say 'read the freaking article)
Sun has done a nice job in extending the desktop's theme to every application and widget I tried including Sun's own Java applications and familiar Open Source offerings like
gtkam and CD Player. The Nautilus file browser
and of curse Star Office 7.
Just to exercise your brain cells - Linux (and XFree) is written in C - does this prevent you from running programs written in other languages?
Hey - they paid good money for the right to do this. Why shouldn't they be allowed to do so?
I mean, if some company paid good money to police my town, and they arrested or refused to arret whomever they wanted, I wouldn't complain. After all - they paid for the right to do so.
Actually LyX is a pain... hardly any keyboard shortcuts, meaning you have to move your hand to the mouse all the time, and you can't change the font inside of a paragraph.
For instance, you could dump all your media files of any kind into one folder, and simply use "virtual" folders to sort them for you. Same for e-mail and pretty much anything you can think of.
Well, that's fine and dandy, but I was thinking more in the lines of trying it with my dvd's...
last I checked I didn't have access to a dvd-burner, and it seems VERY overkill to rip your movies, then burn them to another media just to watch them. Not to mention a huge waste of media...
There's actually some fairly solid UI research that says the OK button should usually be on the RHS of a dialog. People who speak and read left-to-right languages like English tend to scan a dialog box from upper-left to lower-right, and their brains really want to click on whatever is in the lower-right corner of the dialog. Thus, the default button (usually OK) should almost always go there.
This is true. However - in the last 10 to 15 years people have been indoctrinated into having their OK button on the left, and the Cancel button on the right. End of story.
It's just like driving on the right hand side of the road. It's more dangerous when shit happens, because nine times out of ten, you'll pull to the left - into oncomming traffic. Driving on the left hand side of the road fixes this, as you'll be pulling off the road. It's just that pretty much everyone is used to driving on the right hand side of the road and changing that is not going to go over well with the general public.
Another example is how you open a door. Here in Denmark almost all doors open inwards, which is extremely stupid in an emergency situation, because in a panic and/or stampede you'll be unable to open the door. In most public buildings the doors open outwards for safety reasons, but it's a pain in the ass to get used to, when you're not dealing with automated doors.
(2-2)*2 = 2 because the ()'s take priority over anything else
excuse me?!
(2 - 2) * 2 == 0 0 * 2 == 0
True - that one was an obvious error on my behalf.
However:
Perhaps i'm missing something, but isn't -2^2 expanded -2 * -2?, that equals 4.
Now 2 * -2 would be -4.
-2^2 is a combination of two operators: - and ^.
a^b means a is multiplied with itself b times; it's a multiplication.
- is a subtraction.
Multiplications takes precident.
-2^2 and -(2^2) is the same thing. You can remove the ()'s and not change the result. Another way of viewing this problem is like this:
-2^2 is the same as (-1) * 2 * 2 which is the same as (-1) * 2^2.
If you want it to be the square of minus two, you have to indicate that -2 is a number and not an operator and an operand, and this is done by placing it in a set of ()'s. Since no ()'s were placed around -2, the standard rules of operator precedent are used, and multiplication has a higher priority than subtraction.
But there's no need to get up in arms over this. Go ask your 7th grade math teacher. Or any teacher who teaches math at that grade or higher. Or read up on operator precedent.
If you write on paper -2^2=4, it's right. So spreadsheets usually do the same thing. What's wrong with that approach?
It's NOT right. That's the whole point. When doing math you follow the RULES of math. The reason "-2^2" is -4 is because of the RULES of math. "2+2" isn't the same as "2/2".
An example:
2-2*2 = -2 because multiplying takes priority over subtracting (2-2)*2 = 2 because the ()'s take priority over anything else.
-2^2 is EXACTLY the same as "0 - (2^2)" and EXACTLY the same as "0 - (2*2)" but NOT the same as "(0-2) * (0-2)". This is about 7th grade math.
So no, -2^2 != 4 on paper. It never did, and it never will.
Slashdot Mirror
I study at a Danish university, and quite a lot of the text books we use havewritten either directly on the cover or on a sticker that is next to impossible to remove.
Still haven't figured out what the hell the point is in that though.
The Danish keymap is the same on all PC's (and Sun Boxen as well), and we need Alt Graph to access the following characters:
\@${[]}|~?
Not sure about the US keymap, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to go without Alt Graph.
bring a towel to the opening premiere.
Better yet - buy one for me.
92", 6400x1200 pixels, 13 ms response time.
And the problem with this is ... what?
Seriously - I fail to see why I shouldn't be responsible for the software that I create. If the software I create crashes a system and causes massive dataloss or worse, why shouldn't I be responsible?
Before I was laid of and went back to university to get a bachelors in computer science, I was writing software for a living. My last project was to write software that controlled HVAC's in office buildings and the like. Suppose that due to a bug it decided to increase the indoor temperature to, say, 40 C forcing the entire workforce of an office building to take the day off because it was impossible to work, why shouldn't my company be responsible for their losses? I can guarantee that if it happened, even if my company couldn't be held responsible, I'd be out of a job anyway.
If I did it in my spare time for free, why shouldn't I be held responsible? If it is beta-software then sure, it's their fault for using it. But if I'm letting other people use my software, it'd damn well better behave the way I say it should or I should be able to be held accountable.
If I build a car, give it away for free and its brakes fail while going 40 mph in a city and it plows through a kindergarten on an excursion, shouldn't I be held responsible? Why shouldn't I be held responsible, even though I didn't get any money from it?
Yes, software creators should be held responsible for their products. Yes, I plan on creating software for a living again after getting my degree. I fail to see why it shouldn't be this way.
Well, I heard neat things about Microsoft working together with the CIA, NSA and the Russian Mafia to create a cool new Workstation OS ...
From The BeOS Journal:
The hardware choices that come bundled with Zeta Deluxe Edition RC1 are two desktop systems, and a laptop offering.
faet VX notebook (EUR 1,491.47)
- Intel Pentium M 1.3 through 1.7 GHz CPU (all 400 MHz FSB)
- 256, 512, or 768 MB DDR RAM (all 333 MHz)
- 30, 40, 60 or 80 gig drive
- 8/24 DVD/CD, or 24/10/8 CDR/CDRW/CD, or 2/1/16/10/8/24 DVDR/DVDRW/CDR/DVD/CD
- Intel 802.11b Wireless LAN or none
- Home Edition, or Developer Edition, or Deluxe Edition
Zeta PC Power (EUR 549.00)
Midi Tower; Lan; USB 2.0
- AMD Athlon XP 2000+ - 1,800 GHz - 266 MHz FSB
- ATI Radeon 9000 - 64MB DDR
- 256 MB DDR RAM (1x256 MB) - 266MHz
- 60 GB - 7.200u Harddrive
- 48x CD-R / 24x CD-RW / 48x CD / 16x DVD Drive
- Zeta Deluxe edition
- 24 Month Warranty
Zeta PC Deluxe (EUR 799.00)
Midi Tower; Lan; USB 2.0;
- Intel Pentium 4 - 2,66 GHz - 533 MHz FSB - 512kB Cache
- ATI Radeon 9000 - 128 MB DDR - DVI
- 512 MB DDR RAM (1x512 MB) - 266MHz
- 120 GB - 7.200 rpm Harddrive
- 16x DVD / 48x CD Drive
- 52x CD-R / 24x CD-RW / 52x CD Drive
- Zeta Deluxe Edition
- 24 Month Warranty
Did anyone manage to get to the specs and pricings of their hardware-offers before the site died?
Rated R?
I fail to see what's wrong with that site. It's black text and blue links on a white background.
Oh, wait - this is Opera, I switched to User mode. Does wonders for your eyes.
as are those of you, who use somewhat intelligent clients.
...
I have one account that's on the receiving end of this worm, and I can only access it via webmail. A slow webmail. When I only have 20 messages (in all) it takes 35 seconds to load the page; when I have 472 unread messages it takes waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long to load the page.
Oh, yeah - it gets better. I actually need this account, as it's the main communication with the rest of the school. Oh, yeah - a bunch of administrators who don't give a rats ass about this, and don't see the need to do a virus scan on the server - even though the university has 15,000 users, 5,000 computers (~4,000 running windows), hot spots in all buildings and gigabit internet. I can't wait for just one computer to get infected and set off a violent chain reaction.
Oh - just to spice things up - the university lent a helping hand in knocking the root servers off the internet a while back, but hey - that's okay - it's not a problem for the administrators, because "we're using unix, so we aren't in harms way", which was an actual response, when I called and gave them a heads up yesterday morning, when I received 124 emails in an hour
and of curse Star Office 7.
Just to exercise your brain cells - Linux (and XFree) is written in C - does this prevent you from running programs written in other languages?
Jeez - the stupidity of some people.
Well, with variable bit rate encoding and plenty of covers of that "silence" piece, you could probably cram a few days worth into a 32 MB device ...
Hey - they paid good money for the right to do this. Why shouldn't they be allowed to do so?
I mean, if some company paid good money to police my town, and they arrested or refused to arret whomever they wanted, I wouldn't complain. After all - they paid for the right to do so.
Actually LyX is a pain ... hardly any keyboard shortcuts, meaning you have to move your hand to the mouse all the time, and you can't change the font inside of a paragraph.
BeFS (from BeOS) can do exactly that.
For instance, you could dump all your media files of any kind into one folder, and simply use "virtual" folders to sort them for you. Same for e-mail and pretty much anything you can think of.
I wouldn't be too sure about that. In a commentary about disater movies a few years back, the writer said "Bruce Willis survived Armageddon" ...
...
Not sure if he'd actually seen the movie or that he knew about a follow-up to that movie
Well, that's fine and dandy, but I was thinking more in the lines of trying it with my dvd's ...
last I checked I didn't have access to a dvd-burner, and it seems VERY overkill to rip your movies, then burn them to another media just to watch them. Not to mention a huge waste of media...
uhm ... what if you only have a single dvd-drive in your computer and nothing else? Can they run just fine without the "jukebox-cd" in the drive?
It's just like driving on the right hand side of the road. It's more dangerous when shit happens, because nine times out of ten, you'll pull to the left - into oncomming traffic. Driving on the left hand side of the road fixes this, as you'll be pulling off the road. It's just that pretty much everyone is used to driving on the right hand side of the road and changing that is not going to go over well with the general public.
Another example is how you open a door. Here in Denmark almost all doors open inwards, which is extremely stupid in an emergency situation, because in a panic and/or stampede you'll be unable to open the door. In most public buildings the doors open outwards for safety reasons, but it's a pain in the ass to get used to, when you're not dealing with automated doors.
True - that one was an obvious error on my behalf.
However:
-2^2 is a combination of two operators: - and ^.
a^b means a is multiplied with itself b times; it's a multiplication.
- is a subtraction.
Multiplications takes precident.
-2^2 and -(2^2) is the same thing. You can remove the ()'s and not change the result. Another way of viewing this problem is like this:
-2^2 is the same as (-1) * 2 * 2 which is the same as (-1) * 2^2.
If you want it to be the square of minus two, you have to indicate that -2 is a number and not an operator and an operand, and this is done by placing it in a set of ()'s. Since no ()'s were placed around -2, the standard rules of operator precedent are used, and multiplication has a higher priority than subtraction.
But there's no need to get up in arms over this. Go ask your 7th grade math teacher. Or any teacher who teaches math at that grade or higher. Or read up on operator precedent.
An example:
2-2*2 = -2 because multiplying takes priority over subtracting
(2-2)*2 = 2 because the ()'s take priority over anything else.
-2^2 is EXACTLY the same as "0 - (2^2)" and EXACTLY the same as "0 - (2*2)" but NOT the same as "(0-2) * (0-2)". This is about 7th grade math.
So no, -2^2 != 4 on paper. It never did, and it never will.
What does "-2^2" equal in Gnumeric? Excel claims it's 4 (as in (-2)^2) which is VERY wrong, as "-2^2" is actually "(-1) * 2^2".