Seriously, between crap like this and dupes is there any wonder why hardly anyone who reads Slashdot actually subscribers?
I read Slashdot every day. If there was ever any website I should pay for just to read it's probably this one. But I just can't. Other than bandwidth the group that actually runs Slashdot contributes so little to it it's almost laughable.
The code is from the dark ages (HTML 3.2? C'mon!), the search sucks, they willfully blast small websites out of existence (if only temporarily). Unless they've changed the terms they use the idiotic model of selling page views instead of monthly/yearly deals for subscriptions. Most of all, they never listen to any of the numerous suggestions that have been made to improve the site.
I can only wonder how much money Slashdot has lost since they started selling subscriptions because of this total disregard for the people that actually read and contribute to the site. If any editors actaully read this post (doubtful, Jaime is about the only one who actually reads anything here) wake up and take a look around. Decent management should have fired the lot of you a long time ago for keeping Slashdot from ever rising above the level of mediocrity.
while I'm glad that Bill G is donating his money to worthwhile causes, the ends do not justify the means.
Given the choice, I'd rather that the US government had done it's job and smacked down the Microsoft monopoly a long time ago, which likely would have save the software consuming world at least an order of magnitude more money than the $750 M that Gates is donating. Governments could have collected part of this money through taxes and giving it as foreign aid, giving what could easily be a larger lump sum of aid while simultaneously taking less money (on average) from taxpayers/consumers. I'm sure libertarians as well would have just liked to have the choice of saving money not spent on an illegal monopoly's products and donated at their own choice.
As generous as this donation appears, the tremendous amount of money still in Gates' coffers shows the size of the sinkhole created that would not exist in a truly competetive marketplace.
Yes, logic errors are always possible, this it what makes the on the fly execution in Subtext seem like such a good idea.
In the demo one example was making a recursive factorial function, and it started with a default parameter which could be changed during editing and the results calculated immediately. If the recursion did not terminate it displayed a "too deep" error (or something similar). As soon as the correct base case was added to terminate recursion, along with another necessary bit for the function, this error went away.
BTW, I have no idea what underlying representation Subtext uses, but AKAIK it has nothing to do with XML. I just check out the demo linked in an above post and found it to be a pretty neat idea.
Guys, for everyone complaining aboutn the ideas discussed here, check out the demo. I did and it's quite fascinating, even if it does have limitations it shows a model of programming that is quite intriguing. Some notes:
A program is runnable at all times, no syntax errors are possible
The program executes modifications tothe program as you make them, making debugging completely integrated with programming
Message passing (using a model that looks similar to the signals and slots in Qt) is essentially built into Subtext, code is executed directly in response to changes in state (such as a value being modified), ideal for event driven programming
One drawback is that it probably cannot be programmed using a standard text editor. This may be true, but lots of computational feats require special tools. Photoshop is one that has been mentioned, CAD modeling, music composition, etc. If a new way of programming is better (and I'm not claiming that Subtext necessarily is, I've only just watched the Flash demo myself) than isn;t that worth the dependency of some specialized tools?
The internet can be used as a news medium, but only when traffic permits.
This is really only true when a site is not properly designed for the differences between normal traffic and unusual peak traffic. CNN.com and others were simply not prepared for the massive traffic spike 9/11 brought, but that doesn't mean that preparing for such a spike is not possible.
I feel quite confident that better techniques for load balancing, automatic switchover from normal dynamic content to more resilient static content and clever caching methods can and will improve how websites handle massive traffic spikes in the future.
I don't think you understood the question you answered. I'm pretty sure that KidSock wanted to know if it is possible to implement custom file dialogs on a per application basis and also different dialogs within a single application, not changing the core Gtk file selector for everything, which seems to be what you are suggesting.
As much as I hated programming in MFC (Windows C++ toolkit), this was definitely doable there, if poorly documented. This should be possible in Gtk, I would hope. A quick Google search doesn't bring up any direct advice, but the GtkFileSelection docs seem to imply (at the bottom) that you can use the GtkDialog interface to add controls to the dialog.
Huh, when I was an undergrad I felt that 4th year was the time to finally take the most interesting classes (regardless of difficulty) now that prerequisits were completely out of the way.
I think that the better approach might have been to not worry about cross-platform capabilities too much unless you want to use the application cross-platform, or are working with others on the application who want to run it on different platforms.
Motivation or lack thereof is probably the most important factor in determining the success of an open source app, and it's harder to be really motivated to make an app work on a platform you don't primarily use. Plus it makes the project bigger and more difficult to manage to make it cross-platform for uncertain gains in popularity and usage. Big cross-platform projects like Firefox have large teams of developers who are enthusiastic about actually using the software on many different platforms and can distribute the work of development and maintaining ports.
If you app is really good there's a good chance that someone else may want to port it. Otherwise I would just concentrate on making good apps with good code on one platform (you can and probably should still use portable toolkits to leave the door for porting wide open), especially if you are a lone coder for the project.
Things will slow down sooner or later, but frankly I'd prefer later. As long as we have the luxury of doubling performance every few years I say lets do the most we can with it.
Eventually things will settle down, and people wishing to perform even greater computational feats will be pining for the rapid technological pace we have today.
In any case there's no use fighting progress, and if the market truly decides to demand stability over performance products will be made available. it's already ahppening as comapnies are getting less and less return on shiny new 3 GHz PCs. There will probably be a divergence between everyday desktop systems and high end workstations used in scientific computing and related areas (like the old days coming back again, just with more computers all around).
I used to have the same issues with tar and gzip, I neveer used them often enough it seemed to get the various options and syntax memorized.
However, now that I use a more modern Linux system (Debian through Knoppix hard drive install, so my software is pretty recent) I rarely use the terminal except for software development. For archives in KDE I can use konqueror and Ark. Konqueror can browse and extract from tarballs (including gzipped ones) like they are normal directories. If I right click on a tarball in Konq I can open Ark, which is basiclly like WinZip for KDE. I can drag and drop from Konqueror to Ark to create new archives.
In all, I'd say most KDE applications support things like drag and drop between each other nearly as well as Windows does (not as sure about the KDE office apps), and OpenOffice is pretty good also, and I'd image it's similar between GNOME apps. It is a bit more problematic moving things around between different desktop apps, like from a KDE app to a GNOME one, but this should improve over time as well.
To summarize most modern Linux installs do not require much command line use, as the GUI apps which duplicate or encapsulate such functionality is really starting to mature nicely. I'd suggest burning a Knoppix live CD, just to get a feel for what an up to date Linux distro can do. Then if you like it try out a newer distro that supports the features you like. I haven't tried Ubuntu myself, but seeing as it's Debian based I bet I would like it t lot, and it's supposed to support a lot of the niceties missing in some other distros.
A ll right, that was a nice, insightful comment, but what the hell is worng with the way you write? I know your 'O' and SPACE keys work, so what's with the idiotic tthis and tthat. It doesn't look cool, if that's what you think. It makes you look unsuitable for anyplace on the net other than AIM or IRC chatrooms.
Regardless of irrational fears about irradiation of food, there is a good argument against irradiation IMHO. And that is that if foor producers are allowed to use radiation to kill any harmful bacteria in meat, they will take even less care than they already do in making sure that the meat is processed safely and cleanly.
In other words, irradiated beef may be safe, but it also will have more shit (and I do mean this literally) in it than beef made safe without the use of radiation.
Thanks for your input. There are probably more details on the specifics in eye strain in the paper on cybersickness we read this semester. I had thought that the eyes focused exclusively based on the perceived distance to the virtual image, but I can kinda see how this wouldn't be the case. Just need to think about it a bit more to fully get my mind around the idea.
One of the current, biggest issues with VR technology, that we have yet to overcome, is the issue that when you design a VR HMD (or a CAVE, or anything else where 3D is a 2D representation on a flat image plane), is that the eye focuses on that image plane (ie, the screen in a CAVE, or the LCD/CRT of an HMD), even if the optics are designed to be "focused at infinity"
I don't believe this statement is accurate. In HMDs where the the focus is fixed at infinity cybersickness (the symptoms you mentioned) is believed to be more strongly related to mismatches in perception, particularly accomodation (the eye is focused at infinity) and depth perception (the user sees objects closer than infinity). Eye strain itself is not a significant factor here. At least this is my understanding from the class in Virtual Environments I'm taking this semester. If you have a further argument contrary please elaborate.
In any case, VR displays are just one possible solution. I was mainly concerned with the image capture process. The nice thing about digital polygon mesh capture and similar methods is that it decouples video capture from display. A digital computer graphics representation of real 3D video can be displayed on one of those 3D projections systems you mention (I assume that is one of those bubble dome type devices). A hologram cannot be used with such a device.
One other issue worth mentioning is color. AFAIK all holograms are monochrome, because lasers are monochrome. I suppose a color representation could achieved in video with high speed alternation of holograms captured with red, green and blue lasers, but this could get tricky.
Before reading to much into my subject line, I want to make it clear that I'd love to have fully immersive, true 3D imaging and video as much as anyone. But are holograms the best way to do it?
Holograms are synonymous with "real" 3D images. They've been around a long time because they don't rely on computer tech like almost everything in 3D imaging. They also provide a closed loop solution, they cover both image capture and display in a single medium, which has an elegant appeal to it.
The problem is theat they've been around such a long time and we haven't figure out a way to get around some very difficult limitations. The article points out that holographic video is years away at best. Live image capture will be very difficult. Meanwhile huge advances are being made in other 3D image captue methods. Real time surface capture is becoming a reality. Alternate the structured light patterns with natural light at about 120 FPS and you have full color 3D video. This requires a digital projector and digital video camera which are synchronized, a standard PC, and not much more. Other methods use laser, invisible infra red light patterns, and so on. Reasearch projects exist which seek to combine human 3D image capture and virtual reality display already exist. Holography was likely not even a consideration.
Holography is synonymous with real 3D in many people's minds, but there are many other ideas out there that could
hold much more potential. Display is an issue, but even today's VR displays are likely better than any true holographic technology, and quickly improving.
Probably because it's not a security hole. This does not allow remote exploits, no ones, lives, passwords, SSN or credit card numbers can be compromised by this.
Second, we've as a society had remote controls in the mainstream for at least 20 years and never had any significant problems with abuse. Unlike computer security, which although has only recently become widely discussed in the mainstream (within the last 5 years) has been a known issue for computer and software developers for much longer, and where much more is at stake.
Summary: no ones ever had problems with TV remotes before, while Microsoft has written crappy software for long after other software developers knew they had to do better.
You can call C++ code just from from what is essentially C code, except for these calls. While that technically makes it C++ code, it doesn't require specific changes to existing C code except where you choose to use you C++ library.
C++ and C mix just fine. If a programmer afraid to call C++ code from mostly C code without a wrapper for some reason of language purity, I suspect that the problem is with that programmer and not the languages, which work just fine together.
Wrong. Condorcet is the antithesis of the "lesser of all evils" approach.
The current US system is the lesser of evils approach because voting for a third party candidate you truly believe in hurts the chances of the major party lesser of 2 evils candidate you'd rather not lose. In Condorcet this is not the case.
An example. Say I really like Nader, but knowing that he has no real chance I would prefer Kerry over Bush. In our current "first past the post" system I can vote my conscience and choose Nader, hurting Kerry's chances, or vote Kerry, e.g. the lesser of two evils in my opinion. Neither is really a good alternative, I'm giving up something, either ideology or pragmatism. Can't have both.
Now look at Condorcet. The vote is simple (and identical to the ballot I would cast for IRV, I might add), here assuming no other candidates and all nominees listed.
1. Nader 2. Kerry 3. Bush
The difference is that the ordering of Nader and Kerry does not affect the outcome between Kerry and Bush. With IRV, this is not necessarily the case. In fact, even if I place Kerry first, it would be possible for a situation to occur that Kerry would win, but my going to the polls and voting for him could CAUSE HIM TO LOSE. Think about that for a moment. This is the reality of the deeply flawed IRV system. See electionmethods.org for a complete example illustrating this flaw.
From what I read from the linked site concerning the C&D (which it is never called on said site) Google did not even ask that the code for the gnews2rss be removed, just that the results of the program not be duplicated on another website.
So basically the way I understand it is that Google has no problems with code that scrapes their site and condenses it into an RSS feed for personal use. They did have a problem with their news aggregations being basically rebroadcast.
Note that if my understanding is correct that this is fundamentally different from what Google News itself does, which is actually process news HEADLINES and SUMMARIES from MULTIPLE third parties. Google does not simply copy data from another single site carte blanche.
Honestly, from blog of the guy who wrote gnews2rss even he doesn't sound too upset over the deal, and he never mentions any threat of lawsuit or other legal action, so I think that a mountain is being made out of a molehill here.
Probably because Microsoft has been shown in the past to threaten or punish vendors (that pesky monopoly thing again) that do things that MS doesn't like, say try to include a second OS on the computer.
Forcing MS to remove WMP is probably the only way to guarantee that vendors are able to not include it without facing repurcussions.
There are VR headsets that do 1280x1024 nowadays. I'm taking a Virtual Environments class at the University of Minnesota, and our lab has one with that resolution. The display is very nice.
Of course it could be better, and future HMDs with wider fields of view will require even greater resolution to keep the same simage quality, but things really are a lot better than they were in the initial VR push of the mid 90s.
Re:'Flaws' Not that big of a deal
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Why would microsoft care one way or the other about a website whose readers are 1) a minority of windows users and 2) heavily biased towards linux.
Well, they seem to care enough to advertise their development tools on a pretty much permanent basis here.
it's been well established that the safest drivers are the 85th percentile by speed, which is usually above speed limits on American roads. [Emphasis Mine].
I think you have misinterpreted the 85th percentile rule. The way I understand it is that the speed limit (i.e. the maximum allowed speed, not the safest speed) should be set at the speed at which 85% of drivers would naturally drive below on the given road.
I believed there were US DOT studies that showed this but this Wikipedia article claims otherwise. A slight amount of cursory Googling seemed to show that while there have been studies on 85th percentile speed limit traffic flow effects there are probably not conclusive studies that show that the 85th percentile is definitely safer. This is likely a judgement made by analysis of traffic flow rather than actual accident statistics (which would seem to require much longer term and widespread studies).
Modular design is important for big projects, and it's something I strive for in most projects, but it should be seen as an end and not a means.
One thing I've noticed with my own hobby apps is that the most sucessful ones (in terms of actually getting something running somewhat decently) are ones where I just sit down and code. The ones which I spend a lot of time "architecting" tend to be the ones where I have less enthusiasm, and code more tentatively, almost like I'm afraid of making mistakes. Even if I don't lay down a good framework if I can just get a lot of good code written quickly I might find my mistakes sooner and be able to refactor effectively, rather than putting a lot of effort into an architecture that may not be optimal (after all, most hobby projects are about learning, so if I already knew what I was doing I might not be doing it).
It comes down to psychology. Effective hobby coding requires continuous enthusiasm for the project. If the motivation isn't there, the project will stagnate, so the best approach is the one that makes every step enjoyable. For me this means seeing new results every day. If the project turns into something worthwhile it will be worth refactoring later. If not, then the beautiful framework was all for naught anyways.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, between crap like this and dupes is there any wonder why hardly anyone who reads Slashdot actually subscribers?
I read Slashdot every day. If there was ever any website I should pay for just to read it's probably this one. But I just can't. Other than bandwidth the group that actually runs Slashdot contributes so little to it it's almost laughable.
The code is from the dark ages (HTML 3.2? C'mon!), the search sucks, they willfully blast small websites out of existence (if only temporarily). Unless they've changed the terms they use the idiotic model of selling page views instead of monthly/yearly deals for subscriptions. Most of all, they never listen to any of the numerous suggestions that have been made to improve the site.
I can only wonder how much money Slashdot has lost since they started selling subscriptions because of this total disregard for the people that actually read and contribute to the site. If any editors actaully read this post (doubtful, Jaime is about the only one who actually reads anything here) wake up and take a look around. Decent management should have fired the lot of you a long time ago for keeping Slashdot from ever rising above the level of mediocrity.
while I'm glad that Bill G is donating his money to worthwhile causes, the ends do not justify the means.
Given the choice, I'd rather that the US government had done it's job and smacked down the Microsoft monopoly a long time ago, which likely would have save the software consuming world at least an order of magnitude more money than the $750 M that Gates is donating. Governments could have collected part of this money through taxes and giving it as foreign aid, giving what could easily be a larger lump sum of aid while simultaneously taking less money (on average) from taxpayers/consumers. I'm sure libertarians as well would have just liked to have the choice of saving money not spent on an illegal monopoly's products and donated at their own choice.
As generous as this donation appears, the tremendous amount of money still in Gates' coffers shows the size of the sinkhole created that would not exist in a truly competetive marketplace.
Yes, logic errors are always possible, this it what makes the on the fly execution in Subtext seem like such a good idea.
In the demo one example was making a recursive factorial function, and it started with a default parameter which could be changed during editing and the results calculated immediately. If the recursion did not terminate it displayed a "too deep" error (or something similar). As soon as the correct base case was added to terminate recursion, along with another necessary bit for the function, this error went away.
BTW, I have no idea what underlying representation Subtext uses, but AKAIK it has nothing to do with XML. I just check out the demo linked in an above post and found it to be a pretty neat idea.
One drawback is that it probably cannot be programmed using a standard text editor. This may be true, but lots of computational feats require special tools. Photoshop is one that has been mentioned, CAD modeling, music composition, etc. If a new way of programming is better (and I'm not claiming that Subtext necessarily is, I've only just watched the Flash demo myself) than isn;t that worth the dependency of some specialized tools?
I feel quite confident that better techniques for load balancing, automatic switchover from normal dynamic content to more resilient static content and clever caching methods can and will improve how websites handle massive traffic spikes in the future.
I don't think you understood the question you answered. I'm pretty sure that KidSock wanted to know if it is possible to implement custom file dialogs on a per application basis and also different dialogs within a single application, not changing the core Gtk file selector for everything, which seems to be what you are suggesting.
As much as I hated programming in MFC (Windows C++ toolkit), this was definitely doable there, if poorly documented. This should be possible in Gtk, I would hope. A quick Google search doesn't bring up any direct advice, but the GtkFileSelection docs seem to imply (at the bottom) that you can use the GtkDialog interface to add controls to the dialog.
Huh, when I was an undergrad I felt that 4th year was the time to finally take the most interesting classes (regardless of difficulty) now that prerequisits were completely out of the way.
I think that the better approach might have been to not worry about cross-platform capabilities too much unless you want to use the application cross-platform, or are working with others on the application who want to run it on different platforms.
Motivation or lack thereof is probably the most important factor in determining the success of an open source app, and it's harder to be really motivated to make an app work on a platform you don't primarily use. Plus it makes the project bigger and more difficult to manage to make it cross-platform for uncertain gains in popularity and usage. Big cross-platform projects like Firefox have large teams of developers who are enthusiastic about actually using the software on many different platforms and can distribute the work of development and maintaining ports.
If you app is really good there's a good chance that someone else may want to port it. Otherwise I would just concentrate on making good apps with good code on one platform (you can and probably should still use portable toolkits to leave the door for porting wide open), especially if you are a lone coder for the project.
Things will slow down sooner or later, but frankly I'd prefer later. As long as we have the luxury of doubling performance every few years I say lets do the most we can with it.
Eventually things will settle down, and people wishing to perform even greater computational feats will be pining for the rapid technological pace we have today.
In any case there's no use fighting progress, and if the market truly decides to demand stability over performance products will be made available. it's already ahppening as comapnies are getting less and less return on shiny new 3 GHz PCs. There will probably be a divergence between everyday desktop systems and high end workstations used in scientific computing and related areas (like the old days coming back again, just with more computers all around).
I used to have the same issues with tar and gzip, I neveer used them often enough it seemed to get the various options and syntax memorized.
However, now that I use a more modern Linux system (Debian through Knoppix hard drive install, so my software is pretty recent) I rarely use the terminal except for software development. For archives in KDE I can use konqueror and Ark. Konqueror can browse and extract from tarballs (including gzipped ones) like they are normal directories. If I right click on a tarball in Konq I can open Ark, which is basiclly like WinZip for KDE. I can drag and drop from Konqueror to Ark to create new archives.
In all, I'd say most KDE applications support things like drag and drop between each other nearly as well as Windows does (not as sure about the KDE office apps), and OpenOffice is pretty good also, and I'd image it's similar between GNOME apps. It is a bit more problematic moving things around between different desktop apps, like from a KDE app to a GNOME one, but this should improve over time as well.
To summarize most modern Linux installs do not require much command line use, as the GUI apps which duplicate or encapsulate such functionality is really starting to mature nicely. I'd suggest burning a Knoppix live CD, just to get a feel for what an up to date Linux distro can do. Then if you like it try out a newer distro that supports the features you like. I haven't tried Ubuntu myself, but seeing as it's Debian based I bet I would like it t lot, and it's supposed to support a lot of the niceties missing in some other distros.
A ll right, that was a nice, insightful comment, but what the hell is worng with the way you write? I know your 'O' and SPACE keys work, so what's with the idiotic tthis and tthat. It doesn't look cool, if that's what you think. It makes you look unsuitable for anyplace on the net other than AIM or IRC chatrooms.
Regardless of irrational fears about irradiation of food, there is a good argument against irradiation IMHO. And that is that if foor producers are allowed to use radiation to kill any harmful bacteria in meat, they will take even less care than they already do in making sure that the meat is processed safely and cleanly.
In other words, irradiated beef may be safe, but it also will have more shit (and I do mean this literally) in it than beef made safe without the use of radiation.
Thanks for your input. There are probably more details on the specifics in eye strain in the paper on cybersickness we read this semester. I had thought that the eyes focused exclusively based on the perceived distance to the virtual image, but I can kinda see how this wouldn't be the case. Just need to think about it a bit more to fully get my mind around the idea.
I don't believe this statement is accurate. In HMDs where the the focus is fixed at infinity cybersickness (the symptoms you mentioned) is believed to be more strongly related to mismatches in perception, particularly accomodation (the eye is focused at infinity) and depth perception (the user sees objects closer than infinity). Eye strain itself is not a significant factor here. At least this is my understanding from the class in Virtual Environments I'm taking this semester. If you have a further argument contrary please elaborate.
In any case, VR displays are just one possible solution. I was mainly concerned with the image capture process. The nice thing about digital polygon mesh capture and similar methods is that it decouples video capture from display. A digital computer graphics representation of real 3D video can be displayed on one of those 3D projections systems you mention (I assume that is one of those bubble dome type devices). A hologram cannot be used with such a device.
One other issue worth mentioning is color. AFAIK all holograms are monochrome, because lasers are monochrome. I suppose a color representation could achieved in video with high speed alternation of holograms captured with red, green and blue lasers, but this could get tricky.
Holograms are synonymous with "real" 3D images. They've been around a long time because they don't rely on computer tech like almost everything in 3D imaging. They also provide a closed loop solution, they cover both image capture and display in a single medium, which has an elegant appeal to it.
The problem is theat they've been around such a long time and we haven't figure out a way to get around some very difficult limitations. The article points out that holographic video is years away at best. Live image capture will be very difficult. Meanwhile huge advances are being made in other 3D image captue methods. Real time surface capture is becoming a reality. Alternate the structured light patterns with natural light at about 120 FPS and you have full color 3D video. This requires a digital projector and digital video camera which are synchronized, a standard PC, and not much more. Other methods use laser, invisible infra red light patterns, and so on. Reasearch projects exist which seek to combine human 3D image capture and virtual reality display already exist. Holography was likely not even a consideration.
Holography is synonymous with real 3D in many people's minds, but there are many other ideas out there that could hold much more potential. Display is an issue, but even today's VR displays are likely better than any true holographic technology, and quickly improving.
Probably because it's not a security hole. This does not allow remote exploits, no ones, lives, passwords, SSN or credit card numbers can be compromised by this.
Second, we've as a society had remote controls in the mainstream for at least 20 years and never had any significant problems with abuse. Unlike computer security, which although has only recently become widely discussed in the mainstream (within the last 5 years) has been a known issue for computer and software developers for much longer, and where much more is at stake.
Summary: no ones ever had problems with TV remotes before, while Microsoft has written crappy software for long after other software developers knew they had to do better.
You can call C++ code just from from what is essentially C code, except for these calls. While that technically makes it C++ code, it doesn't require specific changes to existing C code except where you choose to use you C++ library.
C++ and C mix just fine. If a programmer afraid to call C++ code from mostly C code without a wrapper for some reason of language purity, I suspect that the problem is with that programmer and not the languages, which work just fine together.
Wrong. Condorcet is the antithesis of the "lesser of all evils" approach.
The current US system is the lesser of evils approach because voting for a third party candidate you truly believe in hurts the chances of the major party lesser of 2 evils candidate you'd rather not lose. In Condorcet this is not the case.
An example. Say I really like Nader, but knowing that he has no real chance I would prefer Kerry over Bush. In our current "first past the post" system I can vote my conscience and choose Nader, hurting Kerry's chances, or vote Kerry, e.g. the lesser of two evils in my opinion. Neither is really a good alternative, I'm giving up something, either ideology or pragmatism. Can't have both.
Now look at Condorcet. The vote is simple (and identical to the ballot I would cast for IRV, I might add), here assuming no other candidates and all nominees listed.
1. Nader
2. Kerry
3. Bush
The difference is that the ordering of Nader and Kerry does not affect the outcome between Kerry and Bush. With IRV, this is not necessarily the case. In fact, even if I place Kerry first, it would be possible for a situation to occur that Kerry would win, but my going to the polls and voting for him could CAUSE HIM TO LOSE. Think about that for a moment. This is the reality of the deeply flawed IRV system. See electionmethods.org for a complete example illustrating this flaw.
From what I read from the linked site concerning the C&D (which it is never called on said site) Google did not even ask that the code for the gnews2rss be removed, just that the results of the program not be duplicated on another website.
So basically the way I understand it is that Google has no problems with code that scrapes their site and condenses it into an RSS feed for personal use. They did have a problem with their news aggregations being basically rebroadcast.
Note that if my understanding is correct that this is fundamentally different from what Google News itself does, which is actually process news HEADLINES and SUMMARIES from MULTIPLE third parties. Google does not simply copy data from another single site carte blanche.
Honestly, from blog of the guy who wrote gnews2rss even he doesn't sound too upset over the deal, and he never mentions any threat of lawsuit or other legal action, so I think that a mountain is being made out of a molehill here.
Probably because Microsoft has been shown in the past to threaten or punish vendors (that pesky monopoly thing again) that do things that MS doesn't like, say try to include a second OS on the computer.
Forcing MS to remove WMP is probably the only way to guarantee that vendors are able to not include it without facing repurcussions.
There are VR headsets that do 1280x1024 nowadays. I'm taking a Virtual Environments class at the University of Minnesota, and our lab has one with that resolution. The display is very nice.
Of course it could be better, and future HMDs with wider fields of view will require even greater resolution to keep the same simage quality, but things really are a lot better than they were in the initial VR push of the mid 90s.
Why would microsoft care one way or the other about a website whose readers are 1) a minority of windows users and 2) heavily biased towards linux.
Well, they seem to care enough to advertise their development tools on a pretty much permanent basis here.
Yeah, then trend is: I hate movies based on video games, but I keep seeing them anyways.
Sheesh, with fans like you, do ever wonder why studios keep pumping out crap movies?
it's been well established that the safest drivers are the 85th percentile by speed, which is usually above speed limits on American roads. [Emphasis Mine].
I think you have misinterpreted the 85th percentile rule. The way I understand it is that the speed limit (i.e. the maximum allowed speed, not the safest speed) should be set at the speed at which 85% of drivers would naturally drive below on the given road.
I believed there were US DOT studies that showed this but this Wikipedia article claims otherwise. A slight amount of cursory Googling seemed to show that while there have been studies on 85th percentile speed limit traffic flow effects there are probably not conclusive studies that show that the 85th percentile is definitely safer. This is likely a judgement made by analysis of traffic flow rather than actual accident statistics (which would seem to require much longer term and widespread studies).
Modular design is important for big projects, and it's something I strive for in most projects, but it should be seen as an end and not a means.
One thing I've noticed with my own hobby apps is that the most sucessful ones (in terms of actually getting something running somewhat decently) are ones where I just sit down and code. The ones which I spend a lot of time "architecting" tend to be the ones where I have less enthusiasm, and code more tentatively, almost like I'm afraid of making mistakes. Even if I don't lay down a good framework if I can just get a lot of good code written quickly I might find my mistakes sooner and be able to refactor effectively, rather than putting a lot of effort into an architecture that may not be optimal (after all, most hobby projects are about learning, so if I already knew what I was doing I might not be doing it).
It comes down to psychology. Effective hobby coding requires continuous enthusiasm for the project. If the motivation isn't there, the project will stagnate, so the best approach is the one that makes every step enjoyable. For me this means seeing new results every day. If the project turns into something worthwhile it will be worth refactoring later. If not, then the beautiful framework was all for naught anyways.