The last count I saw (on linux-kernel) showed that Linux supported more than twice as many devices as Win2k. Windows is ahead on supporting new hardware and way behind on supporting old hardware.
My scanner hasn't worked under windows since Windows 95/98 (the 95 driver kind of worked under 98, but locked up occasionally), but SANE supports it just fine under Linux; I see no reason to replace it since it's a quite nice true 600dpi flatbed. Indeed, I wound up with it because Windows stopped supporting it (my parents were forced to "upgrade" to a much inferior but newer model about 3 years ago).
you go back to netscape 2 and try to browse the web you will see where a lot of the bloat went to
client-side scripting, layers, and a bunch of other crap that turned HTML from a markup language useful for conveying content to a layout language useful for conveying ads.
Seriously, there's nothing on Slashdot, or Amazon, or my online bank, or ESPN, or Google, or any other site I visit that couldn't be well served by the HTML of that era in a tenth of the memory footprint if Web developers were interested in putting out clean, readable pages rather than crappy glitzy interfaces that are buggy as heck in various browsers.
Most of the password hacking programs have options to try w/ the left and/or right hands shifted 1 or more keys either way (and to use the qwerty row as the home row). I haven't seen any that try this for dvorak layouts yet.
If I send you a BS bill for $50 and you pay it, it's your fault, not mine
That's a seperate issue. The assertion was that an invalid patent has zero value, and that's demonstrably untrue. Who's fault that is is up for debate. Though...
I understand that it's pretty standard practice to have the litigant pay the defense fees if the case is thrown out of court
...that is absolutely untrue. It's almost unheard of unless the defense can demonstrate that the litigant knew the patent was invalid, which is pretty difficult to prove even when it's "obviously true".
Two of the ideas are already sunk, as they'd require the patent office to spend even more money on reviewing patents. But since they're already out of money, there's nothing more they can do there.
ObRTFA: the article points out that the USPTO is actually a US government profit center which contributes hundreds of millions of dollars to the treasury (above and beyond funding its own employees).
Guess what a patent is worth outside of a courtroom? $0. Guess what a flimsy patent is worth inside a courtroom? $0.
That's BS. A lot of small companies will settle a patent dispute even when the patent they have allegedly infringed is a flimsy one, especially if the requested licensing fees are substantially lower than the cost of going to court and getting the patent invalidated. Result: $$$ for the patent holder of a flimsy patent, without setting foot in the courtroom.
There's an apocryphal story about a thief who was breaking into a school. He was on the roof, and fell through a skylight, injuring himself. He then sued the school district because they didn't have a "Don't walk on the skylight" sign, and allegedly he won.
From http://www.prospect.org/print/V6/21/bogus-c.html:
Ronald Reagan recounted how a cat burglar sued a homeowner for injuries incurred while falling through the homeowner's skylight. When the real case was identified, it turned out that the plaintiff was not a cat burglar at all. He was a high school student who had been sent to retrieve athletic equipment stored on the roof of the school and had fallen through a skylight that had been painted black.
I think that both having been sent onto the roof and the skylight being painted black change the liability scene dramatically.
So now someone's going to write a program that ALWAYS capitalizes "I" and when you try to write "Hassan i Sabbah" you're going to have to turn the bloody thing off just to get the case right.
Such a "feature" is what turned me to Linux in the first place. The new version of Microsoft Word at the time (1994) had autocorrect of spelling turned on. My name is "Sumner". I literally couldn't write my name in their product without it being mangled.
Well, I guess the fact that it was impossible to open 2 network connections without crashing the machine (Trumpet winsock was kind of "beta"...) had something to do with the switch as well. But it certainly didn't help matters.
I know a lot of photographers have been saying the same thing for a few years now, almost invariably quoting resolutions a few megapixels ahead of the bleeding edge of available technology at the time.
The number I've heard has been stable for years: 24 megapixels to get the theoretical border of ASA 400 35mm film, one quarter to half that to get it human-indistinguishable, and ASA scaling less than linear (ie ASA 200 doesn't get twice the theoretical resolution of 400).
By those numbers, the high-end digitals are now at least borderline competitive with 35mm ASA 100 even for largish prints (8x10" or more) on resolution issues (debate over low-light sensitivity aside). For 5x7" prints of ASA 200, it's been a couple of years at least since film had any real resolution edge.
I'm not saying that film has no place, though; resolution isn't the only consideration, and there are still large-format cameras that excel at certain kinds of productions. And at 8x10" or better, maybe the resolution makes ASA 100 (or slower) worthwile.
I'm from Canada you insensitive clod! The American History category is crappy enough to make us take hours upon end to find one that's easy enough to answer
Now imagine how hard it is if you were educated in the American public school system...
Zelda was great. I never really got into sports games too much, and I never had an N64 (nothing between original NES and PS2).
I agree that Quake sucked compared to Doom. Doom was great because the controls were simple and it ran on any machine, but it still looked great and had great repeat value. Quake wouldn't run on a lot of machines and just didn't feel as fun.
Tetris was good but it's not something I go back and play a lot (unlike, say, civ or nethack).
Contra w/o the code was pretty easy once you played it enough, but still fun enough to play every week for years.
Civ is great (I use freeciv). I'd put it in my top 10 all-time, but nethack I still play after 15 years.
Top nine ('cause I can't think of a clear 10th) in no particular order starflight autoduel civilization x-com ufo defense grand theft auto (3/SA) nethack doom contra ultima IV
I still have yet to find a game with a longer lifespan than Nethack.
Re:"Could this be it?" NO.
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 1
While I don't intend to convert this into a my-disease-is-more-dangerous-than-yours competition:-), I don't think you've been in any affected region during last year's SARS crisis. I was, and boy was it scary; streets once lively even at 3AM, turned ghostly
Which is a sign that people aren't rational. The death rate for SARS in countries with advanced medical care is far lower than for many diseases; indeed, as far as I know there are zero deaths to date from SARS in the US a couple hundred known cases. There's good reason to believe that SARS is less deadly (and less infectious) than influenze when it's treated with modern medical techniques--though it's maybe twice as lethal as originally believed (bear in mind that many countries only classify someone as having SARS if they have a severe case coupled with pneumonia, thereby greatly inflating the death rates reported).
Even in the worst hit areas, SARS is far less daunting than smallpox, ebola, yellow fever, dengue fever, etc. HIV might be worse because of the long time between infection and death; its spread is not nearly as controlled. Diseases that show fast symptoms and kill quickly tend to remain more contained.
I'd go with smallpox, influenza, and typhoid as the most daunting diseases we've faced in terms of ability to kill large numbers of people (tb and malaria are pretty daunting themselves). Smallpox we basically got lucky with a naturally ocurring vaccine, so it's not as daunting from an ability to control once it's identified standpoint. HIV is proving horribly difficult to contain from that POV.
First, if you've already done the right import then its:
for file in sorted(glob("/tmp/*")): print file
which comes to: for file in sorted glob print file
which is much easier for an English speaker to understand than the perl, IMO: print for each sorted glob
second, I'm not really sure how else you'd want to express this. But if you're building a list for more complicated manipulations, Python provides many styles to do it.
When you run the python code, it seems to work. There's no sign that something's wrong, and you could randomly clobber an arbitrary amount of data with a bug like that.
pylint will easily catch that error (and a lot more). It's trivial to have an import hook that automatically lints modules before loading them.
I'm thinking the same thing. I'll admit H&R Block though obvious in retropect wouldn't have imediately come to mind to me, but Fed-Ex?
Then what? Ken obviously had no idea, watching him try to think during Final Jeopardy. I think he knew it wasn't Fed Ex, but when you run out of time you write down whatever you can.
In the same vein, Abiword and Gnumeric, while admittedly not as good as OpenOffice or Microsoft Office
Gnumeric is worlds ahead of OpenOffice. I haven't used Excel recently enough to comment on that.
And I still use Abiword rather than OpenOffice to open the occasional.doc attachment I get; I've never seen what the hype was about StarOffice/OpenOffice aside from opening really complex Word documents (very important when required, but rarely required in my experience--it's amazing how many.doc attachments are just text files wrapped in an inscrutable format).
Slashdot Mirror
The last count I saw (on linux-kernel) showed that Linux supported more than twice as many devices as Win2k. Windows is ahead on supporting new hardware and way behind on supporting old hardware.
My scanner hasn't worked under windows since Windows 95/98 (the 95 driver kind of worked under 98, but locked up occasionally), but SANE supports it just fine under Linux; I see no reason to replace it since it's a quite nice true 600dpi flatbed. Indeed, I wound up with it because Windows stopped supporting it (my parents were forced to "upgrade" to a much inferior but newer model about 3 years ago).
you go back to netscape 2 and try to browse the web you will see where a lot of the bloat went to
client-side scripting, layers, and a bunch of other crap that turned HTML from a markup language useful for conveying content to a layout language useful for conveying ads.
Seriously, there's nothing on Slashdot, or Amazon, or my online bank, or ESPN, or Google, or any other site I visit that couldn't be well served by the HTML of that era in a tenth of the memory footprint if Web developers were interested in putting out clean, readable pages rather than crappy glitzy interfaces that are buggy as heck in various browsers.
Most of the password hacking programs have options to try w/ the left and/or right hands shifted 1 or more keys either way (and to use the qwerty row as the home row). I haven't seen any that try this for dvorak layouts yet.
A random 8 characters password with mixed cased and numbers
And is only a 48-bit key if anyone ever gets into a situation where they can launch a brute-force attack. Which may or may not be a realistic concern.
if you block off the BIOS (so it can't boot from CD), then physical dismemberment may be required
Until someone puts a little PS2 or USB keystroke grabber on the machine.
That's a seperate issue. The assertion was that an invalid patent has zero value, and that's demonstrably untrue. Who's fault that is is up for debate. Though...
Two of the ideas are already sunk, as they'd require the patent office to spend even more money on reviewing patents. But since they're already out of money, there's nothing more they can do there.
ObRTFA: the article points out that the USPTO is actually a US government profit center which contributes hundreds of millions of dollars to the treasury (above and beyond funding its own employees).
Guess what a patent is worth outside of a courtroom? $0. Guess what a flimsy patent is worth inside a courtroom? $0.
That's BS. A lot of small companies will settle a patent dispute even when the patent they have allegedly infringed is a flimsy one, especially if the requested licensing fees are substantially lower than the cost of going to court and getting the patent invalidated. Result: $$$ for the patent holder of a flimsy patent, without setting foot in the courtroom.
From http://www.prospect.org/print/V6/21/bogus-c.html
Ronald Reagan recounted how a cat burglar sued a homeowner for injuries incurred while falling through the homeowner's skylight. When the real case was identified, it turned out that the plaintiff was not a cat burglar at all. He was a high school student who had been sent to retrieve athletic equipment stored on the roof of the school and had fallen through a skylight that had been painted black.
I think that both having been sent onto the roof and the skylight being painted black change the liability scene dramatically.
So now someone's going to write a program that ALWAYS capitalizes "I" and when you try to write "Hassan i Sabbah" you're going to have to turn the bloody thing off just to get the case right.
Such a "feature" is what turned me to Linux in the first place. The new version of Microsoft Word at the time (1994) had autocorrect of spelling turned on. My name is "Sumner". I literally couldn't write my name in their product without it being mangled.
Well, I guess the fact that it was impossible to open 2 network connections without crashing the machine (Trumpet winsock was kind of "beta"...) had something to do with the switch as well. But it certainly didn't help matters.
I know a lot of photographers have been saying the same thing for a few years now, almost invariably quoting resolutions a few megapixels ahead of the bleeding edge of available technology at the time.
The number I've heard has been stable for years: 24 megapixels to get the theoretical border of ASA 400 35mm film, one quarter to half that to get it human-indistinguishable, and ASA scaling less than linear (ie ASA 200 doesn't get twice the theoretical resolution of 400).
By those numbers, the high-end digitals are now at least borderline competitive with 35mm ASA 100 even for largish prints (8x10" or more) on resolution issues (debate over low-light sensitivity aside). For 5x7" prints of ASA 200, it's been a couple of years at least since film had any real resolution edge.
I'm not saying that film has no place, though; resolution isn't the only consideration, and there are still large-format cameras that excel at certain kinds of productions. And at 8x10" or better, maybe the resolution makes ASA 100 (or slower) worthwile.
Car wars.
--
Am I the only slashdot user that thought that Minority Report qualified as a horror movie?
I suppose.
I'm from Canada you insensitive clod! The American History category is crappy enough to make us take hours upon end to find one that's easy enough to answer
Now imagine how hard it is if you were educated in the American public school system...
I'm 3 years older than you.
Zelda was great. I never really got into sports games too much, and I never had an N64 (nothing between original NES and PS2).
I agree that Quake sucked compared to Doom. Doom was great because the controls were simple and it ran on any machine, but it still looked great and had great repeat value. Quake wouldn't run on a lot of machines and just didn't feel as fun.
Tetris was good but it's not something I go back and play a lot (unlike, say, civ or nethack).
Contra w/o the code was pretty easy once you played it enough, but still fun enough to play every week for years.
Civ is great (I use freeciv). I'd put it in my top 10 all-time, but nethack I still play after 15 years.
Top nine ('cause I can't think of a clear 10th) in no particular order
starflight
autoduel
civilization
x-com ufo defense
grand theft auto (3/SA)
nethack
doom
contra
ultima IV
That would be the other 49% of the budget. ;-)
Good point. Let's privatize the armed forces.
State of Emergency lasted about an hour.
I still have yet to find a game with a longer lifespan than Nethack.
While I don't intend to convert this into a my-disease-is-more-dangerous-than-yours competition :-), I don't think you've been in any affected region during last year's SARS crisis. I was, and boy was it scary; streets once lively even at 3AM, turned ghostly
Which is a sign that people aren't rational. The death rate for SARS in countries with advanced medical care is far lower than for many diseases; indeed, as far as I know there are zero deaths to date from SARS in the US a couple hundred known cases. There's good reason to believe that SARS is less deadly (and less infectious) than influenze when it's treated with modern medical techniques--though it's maybe twice as lethal as originally believed (bear in mind that many countries only classify someone as having SARS if they have a severe case coupled with pneumonia, thereby greatly inflating the death rates reported).
Even in the worst hit areas, SARS is far less daunting than smallpox, ebola, yellow fever, dengue fever, etc. HIV might be worse because of the long time between infection and death; its spread is not nearly as controlled. Diseases that show fast symptoms and kill quickly tend to remain more contained.
I'd go with smallpox, influenza, and typhoid as the most daunting diseases we've faced in terms of ability to kill large numbers of people (tb and malaria are pretty daunting themselves). Smallpox we basically got lucky with a naturally ocurring vaccine, so it's not as daunting from an ability to control once it's identified standpoint. HIV is proving horribly difficult to contain from that POV.
First, if you've already done the right import then its:
for file in sorted(glob("/tmp/*")): print file
which comes to:
for file in sorted glob print file
which is much easier for an English speaker to understand than the perl, IMO:
print for each sorted glob
second, I'm not really sure how else you'd want to express this. But if you're building a list for more complicated manipulations, Python provides many styles to do it.
print "$_\n" foreach (sort glob "/tmp/*")
I dare python lovers to write something like that in python in one line.
Why is one line better?
But anyway (assuming you've imported glob already--you'd need to do that for your Perl, too):
for f in glob("/tmp/*").sorted(): print f
(print already newline-terminates, but you could easily "print f+'\n'" or whatever)
Stackless python supports full continuations.
When you run the python code, it seems to work. There's no sign that something's wrong, and you could randomly clobber an arbitrary amount of data with a bug like that.
pylint will easily catch that error (and a lot more). It's trivial to have an import hook that automatically lints modules before loading them.
I'm thinking the same thing. I'll admit H&R Block though obvious in retropect wouldn't have imediately come to mind to me, but Fed-Ex?
Then what? Ken obviously had no idea, watching him try to think during Final Jeopardy. I think he knew it wasn't Fed Ex, but when you run out of time you write down whatever you can.
In the same vein, Abiword and Gnumeric, while admittedly not as good as OpenOffice or Microsoft Office
.doc attachment I get; I've never seen what the hype was about StarOffice/OpenOffice aside from opening really complex Word documents (very important when required, but rarely required in my experience--it's amazing how many .doc attachments are just text files wrapped in an inscrutable format).
Gnumeric is worlds ahead of OpenOffice. I haven't used Excel recently enough to comment on that.
And I still use Abiword rather than OpenOffice to open the occasional