Obviously, that depends on which century you're talking about:-)
The century from 1891 to 1990 turned a decade or
so ago. But yes, by the conventional usage of the word, it'll turn at
the end of next month (even if common usage implies it turned 11 months ago).
Tet (currently tearning his hair out trying to kick dg_xtrace(2) into giving
an accurate return value for a traced process' system calls -- anyone with DG/UX knowledge, please help!).
When I want to play a game I like a nice long plot/story and I usually can't find that in
most "classic" games.
Are you sure you want to play the game, rather than
just follow the storyline? Plot is utterly, utterly irrelevant when
it comes to gaming, and yes, most classic games have little
or no plot. But what they do have is buckets and buckets of playability.
At the end of the day, that's all that really matters (IMHO, of course).
I just wish modern games would concentrate more on gameplay. As it is, I can always use an emulator to go
back and play Battle Squardon or Paradroid or even Manic Miner.
One of the paradoxes of software engineering is that people with
bad ideas and low productivity often think of themselves as supremely capable.
Actually, this isn't unique to software engineering.
I recently read a fascinating paper on that very subject,
which shows that the least capable are not only unable to
perform a given task, but they lack the ability to judge their
competence at that task, and hence grossly overestimate their abilities.
See http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/ psp 7761121.html.
Introducing new TLDs as a short term solution won't work any better in the long run than
just maintaining the.com,.org,.net,.** system.
Indeed. All it will do is force companies to register more
domains to supposedly protect their trademarks.
What's needed is stricter enforcement of domain allocations, like the system in the UK. You cannot register
a.net.uk domain unless you can prove an entitlement to it
(i.e., you're company/organisation is related to network infrastructure), and you can't register a.ac.uk domain unless
you can prove you're part of the academic community. As it stands, too many people grab.com,.org and.net just because
they can. If this practice was forcibly stopped, we'd all be better off.
This is actually quite a serious issue. The first thing I do when
installing a new version of WINE is to disable to mapping of my home
directory to a Windows drive. Leaving it intact means that
any arbitrary Windows program I run under WINE has full write access
to my home dir -- and there are far too many viruses (whether macro or "traditional") loose in the
Windows world for me to be comfortable with that...
Censorware only really works on static sites, like political ones.... Free speech ones...
Very true. For example, I can't get to the Peacefire
statistical analysis -- it's blocked by our corporate Cyber Patrol filter:-(
The interesting thing is, that after looking at Cyber Patrol's
12 categories
under which a site may be blocked, I can't see that Peacefire falls into any of them...
It's a common word now, and it wasn't electronic-mail to begin with.
Precisely. It was never "electronic-mail", although it was once "electronic mail". Wired News, according to the article, didn't even
appear until 1996. I'd already been using email (without a hyphen) for
nearly a decade by then. A brief look at history would have told them that it was
only marketing departments that ever used e-mail. The rest of
us were quite happily communicating using email...
ObPedant: Of course, it should probably be "e'mail" if we're
being picky about it...
I wonder exactly where
the normal slashdot reader lies in terms of the whole Big Bang vs Creationism argument
I don't see how any rational thinker can believe anything other than both.
Big bang is certainly a valid explanation for the current state of our Universe.
However, why was there a pinhead to explode in the first place? Something must have
created it. Ultimately, though, there can never be an answer to why the Universe exists.
Even if a God (or Gods) of some form did create the Universe, that just pushes the question one
level higher: why do they exist to create the Universe in the first place, and who or what created them?
That's *NOT*
emulation. That's what SDL does, that's what OpenGL and OpenSound do.
The article is a bit sparse, but it implied binary compatibility, while
SDL, OpenGL and OpenAL only provide source compatibility.
But yes, they're more likely to be developing
a common API on all platforms,
which may well lead to their 25% reduction in development costs.
Note that there's no real benefit in true binary compatibility -- they still
have to ship seperate versions for each console anyway due to the media differences (CD, GD, DVD, cartridge, etc.)
I came to Linux from RISC OS, an OS
where user interface design was very important, and so I don't believe you should have to
spend any time at all learning how to use an editor [...]
I think you'd be surprised how many other `serious' programmers just can't be
arsed to mess around with customising their editors when there's real code to hack.
You're right, I would be. Given that text editing is what a serious programmer does
all day, every day, it's the one thing that really *has* to be right, and if that
means taking some time to get it working the way you want, then so be it.
You talk about UI design being important, but this is one area that nedit is lacking and vi really has right. The UI should make the common tasks as efficient as possible -- the ease with which it can be learned is very much a secondary consideration here. I've yet to meet anything that lets the user edit text as efficiently as vi.
i don't care if it's written using motif or gtk or qt or whatever as long as
it is fast and small and it does all I expect it to do. and nedit does it.
From my personal point of view, it *doesn't* do that.
Although it is reasonably fast,
it's significantly slower than, say, vim, particularly when editing large files.
It also doesn't allow editing of binary files.
Don't get me wrong, it's a great program -- it's just not
for me. And while I agree that the choice of toolkit doesn't affect the end user,
it does potentially mean you have a smaller pool of developers that could enhance the program.
Sure, this is a good idea, but the problem with many
of the patents (at least in the computers section) is not prior art. It's that they
shouldn't have been issued because they're obvious to
anyone working in the field, not because someone else did it earlier.
the ones that come
from socialist countries (like Eric Clapton and John Lennon) emigrate to a capitalistic
country without confiscatory tax policies as soon as they can.
OK, I'll bite. Both Clapton and Lennon had their heydays
in times when Britain was ruled by a Conservative government.
Britain has never really been a socialist country, although the Labour governments
of the mid-60s and mid-70s definitely had socialist taxation policies...
There is no explicit limit to the # of CPUs Linux kernel can handle.
Actually, yes there is. Linux currently uses a bitmask to specify certain
CPU operations, so the number of CPUs is limited to the word length.
In other words, Linux supports up to 32 CPUs on 32-bit platforms, and
up to 64 CPUs on real machines (Sparc64, Alpha, Itanium (and MIPS64?)).
Of course the fact that it supports that many CPUs doesn't
mean that it scales linearly, but it looks like the 2.4 kernel will be good for at least 16 CPUs before performance starts dropping off.
Various people (Dave Miller, Ralf Baechle and others) are working to remove the
bitmask, and allow more CPUs than the word length. SGI in particular need Linxu to be able to support more than 64 CPUs for some of their machines.
Bodies of Anna Nicole Smith and Ronald Goldman (Brentwood, California, 1994)
The body of Anna Nicole Smith in 1994? If so, then how did she manage to
inherit nearly half a billion dollars last month?
Methinks you mean Nicole Brown-Simpson.
I still remember the look the techs here (St. Andrews university) gave me when I said I
had an Amiga hooked up to the LAN.
Indeed. I was one of the lucky ones to get a terminal
port in my room when I was at University (UKC),
and I connected up my Amiga. They were quite happy for me to do that,
but they wouldn't support it. Of course, that was in days gone by, and the Amiga was
effectively being used as a dumb terminal, eventually connected to the LAN via some
proprietary hardware. I don't know if they'd allow a direct TCP/IP connection to their LAN (which these
days is much bigger).
Mandating laptops is all well and good, but for what?
Will they insist that it's from one particular manufacturer, and that
it runs their mandated OS and software (and we all know what that'll be),
or will students be given the choice? Ideally, it'd be something like:
You can have anything
you want so long as it is able to connect to our TCP/IP network and
speaks SMTP -- if opt to go for anything other than our
recommended system, you don't get support.
Sadly, I think they're far more likely to go with the first option.
Essentially, yes. In the western world, God is pretty firmly associated
with Christianity. Sure, Jews and Moslems all believe in the same guy,
but at the end of the day, that just proves they're all
factions of the same religion (now that's *really* going to make me popular:-)
"No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be
considered as patriots. This is one nation under God." George Bush
But at what point did it become one nation under God? "The government of the United States is not in any sense founded upon the Christian Religion."
This quote was not by George Washington (as is widely claimed), but it was
in a treaty ratified by the senate in a unanimous vote during his second
term of office, and signed by John Adams in 1797.
It's interesting to see the Natural Law party listed -- I'd
assumed they were just a UK penomenon until now. I wonder how
many other polital parties are international, and what would
happen should they come to power in multiple countries
simultaneously. Scary thought.
Sidenote: anyone else amused by Monica G. Moorehead's bio
where she's listed as a religious atheist? So how does
that work, then?:-)
For the first time in while, I got stuck interviewing job applicants and reviewing loads
of resumes. Thirty-one of 53 people had laser-printed business cards.
Hello? Am I missing something? Here in the UK, business cards are
used for giving your contact details to others you meet in the course of business. I've never heard of them being
sent with a CV (resume). Is this common in the US? Surely all
your details are on the resume anyway -- why would you
need to supply a business card?
Neish notes that none of the latest codecs are not compatible with Unix so only Mac
and Windows users get to take advantage of the latest in digital video formats.
Regardless of the grammatical correctness discussed elsewhere,
I'm curious as to how a codec can be incompatible with Unix.
Not currently implemented for Unix, yes, but incompatible, no.
It's just a stream of bytes at the end of the day -- and that's *very* compatible with Unix.
The fact is that if you've had a DNA test and there's no problem then you will be getting
an advantage - companies will be more likely to insure you at a much cheaper rate.
For now, yes. But just to play devil's advocate for a minute, what else
are they doing with your genetic information? They claim they're testing for
one specific defect. But what if they keep your genetic information on file, and at sometime in the future, a test for some completely
separate defect is developed. You've alredy had an independent DNA test and verified that you're not susceptible to the
initial defect they're checking for, so you happily consent to the DNA test. But then at a later date, they
decide you're susceptible to something completely different, and hike up your premium (or even refuse cover completely).
As I understand it, this can't happen yet, because they can't get a complete mapping of your genes in a sensible timeframe -- they can only check for one given problem. But how long before they can? If we've already accepted genetic testing, how can we ensure ethical use of that information in the future?
The thing is, they're right... if you're one of the
lucky ones with the right genes. It'll mean lower premiums for the genetically "healthy"
and higher premiums for those more susceptible to certain diseases.
It's really just an extension of the existing system of higher premiums for smokers. The only
question is where do you draw the line? Eventually, we'll end up with a
system where the only people that can get life insurance are the
ones that aren't going to need it anyway...
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously, that depends on which century you're talking about :-)
The century from 1891 to 1990 turned a decade or
so ago. But yes, by the conventional usage of the word, it'll turn at
the end of next month (even if common usage implies it turned 11 months ago).
Tet (currently tearning his hair out trying to kick dg_xtrace(2) into giving an accurate return value for a traced process' system calls -- anyone with DG/UX knowledge, please help!).
Are you sure you want to play the game, rather than just follow the storyline? Plot is utterly, utterly irrelevant when it comes to gaming, and yes, most classic games have little or no plot. But what they do have is buckets and buckets of playability. At the end of the day, that's all that really matters (IMHO, of course). I just wish modern games would concentrate more on gameplay. As it is, I can always use an emulator to go back and play Battle Squardon or Paradroid or even Manic Miner.
Actually, this isn't unique to software engineering. I recently read a fascinating paper on that very subject, which shows that the least capable are not only unable to perform a given task, but they lack the ability to judge their competence at that task, and hence grossly overestimate their abilities. See http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/ psp 7761121.html.
Indeed. All it will do is force companies to register more domains to supposedly protect their trademarks. What's needed is stricter enforcement of domain allocations, like the system in the UK. You cannot register a .net.uk domain unless you can prove an entitlement to it
(i.e., you're company/organisation is related to network infrastructure), and you can't register a .ac.uk domain unless
you can prove you're part of the academic community. As it stands, too many people grab .com, .org and .net just because
they can. If this practice was forcibly stopped, we'd all be better off.
This is actually quite a serious issue. The first thing I do when installing a new version of WINE is to disable to mapping of my home directory to a Windows drive. Leaving it intact means that any arbitrary Windows program I run under WINE has full write access to my home dir -- and there are far too many viruses (whether macro or "traditional") loose in the Windows world for me to be comfortable with that...
Very true. For example, I can't get to the Peacefire statistical analysis -- it's blocked by our corporate Cyber Patrol filter :-(
The interesting thing is, that after looking at Cyber Patrol's
12 categories
under which a site may be blocked, I can't see that Peacefire falls into any of them...
Precisely. It was never "electronic-mail", although it was once "electronic mail". Wired News, according to the article, didn't even appear until 1996. I'd already been using email (without a hyphen) for nearly a decade by then. A brief look at history would have told them that it was only marketing departments that ever used e-mail. The rest of us were quite happily communicating using email...
ObPedant: Of course, it should probably be "e'mail" if we're being picky about it...
I don't see how any rational thinker can believe anything other than both. Big bang is certainly a valid explanation for the current state of our Universe. However, why was there a pinhead to explode in the first place? Something must have created it. Ultimately, though, there can never be an answer to why the Universe exists. Even if a God (or Gods) of some form did create the Universe, that just pushes the question one level higher: why do they exist to create the Universe in the first place, and who or what created them?
The article is a bit sparse, but it implied binary compatibility, while SDL, OpenGL and OpenAL only provide source compatibility. But yes, they're more likely to be developing a common API on all platforms, which may well lead to their 25% reduction in development costs. Note that there's no real benefit in true binary compatibility -- they still have to ship seperate versions for each console anyway due to the media differences (CD, GD, DVD, cartridge, etc.)
You're right, I would be. Given that text editing is what a serious programmer does all day, every day, it's the one thing that really *has* to be right, and if that means taking some time to get it working the way you want, then so be it. You talk about UI design being important, but this is one area that nedit is lacking and vi really has right. The UI should make the common tasks as efficient as possible -- the ease with which it can be learned is very much a secondary consideration here. I've yet to meet anything that lets the user edit text as efficiently as vi.
From my personal point of view, it *doesn't* do that. Although it is reasonably fast, it's significantly slower than, say, vim, particularly when editing large files. It also doesn't allow editing of binary files. Don't get me wrong, it's a great program -- it's just not for me. And while I agree that the choice of toolkit doesn't affect the end user, it does potentially mean you have a smaller pool of developers that could enhance the program.
At the time NEdit was started, there was no real alternative, but if you were starting again today, would you still choose to use Motif?
Sure, this is a good idea, but the problem with many of the patents (at least in the computers section) is not prior art. It's that they shouldn't have been issued because they're obvious to anyone working in the field, not because someone else did it earlier.
OK, I'll bite. Both Clapton and Lennon had their heydays in times when Britain was ruled by a Conservative government. Britain has never really been a socialist country, although the Labour governments of the mid-60s and mid-70s definitely had socialist taxation policies...
Actually, yes there is. Linux currently uses a bitmask to specify certain CPU operations, so the number of CPUs is limited to the word length. In other words, Linux supports up to 32 CPUs on 32-bit platforms, and up to 64 CPUs on real machines (Sparc64, Alpha, Itanium (and MIPS64?)). Of course the fact that it supports that many CPUs doesn't mean that it scales linearly, but it looks like the 2.4 kernel will be good for at least 16 CPUs before performance starts dropping off. Various people (Dave Miller, Ralf Baechle and others) are working to remove the bitmask, and allow more CPUs than the word length. SGI in particular need Linxu to be able to support more than 64 CPUs for some of their machines.
The body of Anna Nicole Smith in 1994? If so, then how did she manage to inherit nearly half a billion dollars last month? Methinks you mean Nicole Brown-Simpson.
Indeed. I was one of the lucky ones to get a terminal port in my room when I was at University (UKC), and I connected up my Amiga. They were quite happy for me to do that, but they wouldn't support it. Of course, that was in days gone by, and the Amiga was effectively being used as a dumb terminal, eventually connected to the LAN via some proprietary hardware. I don't know if they'd allow a direct TCP/IP connection to their LAN (which these days is much bigger).
Sadly, I think they're far more likely to go with the first option.
Essentially, yes. In the western world, God is pretty firmly associated with Christianity. Sure, Jews and Moslems all believe in the same guy, but at the end of the day, that just proves they're all factions of the same religion (now that's *really* going to make me popular :-)
But at what point did it become one nation under God? "The government of the United States is not in any sense founded upon the Christian Religion." This quote was not by George Washington (as is widely claimed), but it was in a treaty ratified by the senate in a unanimous vote during his second term of office, and signed by John Adams in 1797.
It's interesting to see the Natural Law party listed -- I'd assumed they were just a UK penomenon until now. I wonder how many other polital parties are international, and what would happen should they come to power in multiple countries simultaneously. Scary thought.
Sidenote: anyone else amused by Monica G. Moorehead's bio where she's listed as a religious atheist? So how does that work, then? :-)
Hello? Am I missing something? Here in the UK, business cards are used for giving your contact details to others you meet in the course of business. I've never heard of them being sent with a CV (resume). Is this common in the US? Surely all your details are on the resume anyway -- why would you need to supply a business card?
Regardless of the grammatical correctness discussed elsewhere, I'm curious as to how a codec can be incompatible with Unix. Not currently implemented for Unix, yes, but incompatible, no. It's just a stream of bytes at the end of the day -- and that's *very* compatible with Unix.
For now, yes. But just to play devil's advocate for a minute, what else are they doing with your genetic information? They claim they're testing for one specific defect. But what if they keep your genetic information on file, and at sometime in the future, a test for some completely separate defect is developed. You've alredy had an independent DNA test and verified that you're not susceptible to the initial defect they're checking for, so you happily consent to the DNA test. But then at a later date, they decide you're susceptible to something completely different, and hike up your premium (or even refuse cover completely). As I understand it, this can't happen yet, because they can't get a complete mapping of your genes in a sensible timeframe -- they can only check for one given problem. But how long before they can? If we've already accepted genetic testing, how can we ensure ethical use of that information in the future?
The thing is, they're right... if you're one of the lucky ones with the right genes. It'll mean lower premiums for the genetically "healthy" and higher premiums for those more susceptible to certain diseases. It's really just an extension of the existing system of higher premiums for smokers. The only question is where do you draw the line? Eventually, we'll end up with a system where the only people that can get life insurance are the ones that aren't going to need it anyway...