Problem: paper copy is only a workaround until the folks that be decide that a book IS a machine-readable form (courtesy of OCR), at which point we're really screwed, yeah? Let's hope they get round to changing the somewhat broken law in the first place, before they realise that much...
Really interesting idea: what about shipping it out as java.class files? They're not hard to convert back into.java source, for starters:)
Actually there are differences. Unless you have a linker's.map file, you can't really convert back into logical variable / symbol names. There's at least one thing out there that mangles java class & variable names, too, so you can generate.class files that work and decompile with, eg Mocha, but aren't really legible.
Maybe it comes from the other end: if someone's written it, then it *is* source code. The choice of language doesn't really define source or not?:)
Re:KDE, browsers, and reinventing the wheel.
on
KDE Looks Ahead
·
· Score: 1
Hmmm. Have you got KDE 1.1.2? It took a little bit of persuading (accepting cookies) but I've got it logged in now and posting quite happily as me - this is written using Konqueror.
At the moment the annoying thing is that it doesn't do javascript - there are one or two sites I frequent, and one of work's products is very javascript-intensive, so I can't use it for exactly everything yet.
OTOH, if KDE2's Konqueror produces the goods and does support it properly & stably, then I'll be more than happy to abandon Mozilla and Netscape altogether...
In the Open-Source world, who do we ask for a browser that's both fully-featured AND stable? Erm: DIY;)
Imagine what it's like if you've never used Netscrape before and are using it as A Big Application in order to get to grips with Linux... if you don't know your Message Centre from your Communicator from your eggwhisk, the timestamp reduction methodology (no date if it's today, no number of day in the date if it's this week...) can really cause some confuddlement. *I* know fine well how these operate, and don't even have to think about it; but someone who doesn't know, and approaches it for the first time... how much should we go out of our way to explain these things compared to letting them work them out for themselves?
Because the thing is, a webpage like this one actually encourages me to try to justify the somewhat maligned "programmers"; OK so bungles like the wrong icon in a modal dialog, or 'yes/yes/cancel' buttons, should be avoided; but there are plenty enough examples where the programmer's done something for a perfectly good reason, whereas the "complaint" really boils down to "I don't understand it! Mummi, help!", with no reason at all. Grr! So as ever, it's a tie-off between user-incompetence and designers thinking of real live users.
How sad! You're not even prepared to go right-click, Themes, Ice in order to make it look palatable? How long does your Icewm config stay looking like its default? If you've configured it at all, you've been unfair in dismissing E because of a non-wonderful default.
And of course, I find E considerably more configureable and friendly than ice, but that's just me - and I've actually played around with it for a while, too...
Do you know how it treats PNGs, ie as distinct from GIFs? (For an example, check out my listed webpage: if the top-left most PNG block doesn't come out as purple on transparent, it's bugged.)
Also, anyone have any ideas on how commercial it'll be? It's hardly as though I *want* to pay to use something, on linux, but if it's very VERY good and the only one in its field, I'll consider it... Open Source?:)
Interesting idea. From my point of view, then: the original questioner wants to end up doing geeky IT-type things, hacking unix, some internet (java), some coding, whatever. These are the mainstay of any decent (defined in an "is-geek, is-not-manager" sense) job in the IT sector these days, surprisingly enough. To set yourself out above the crowd, one should know about something *other* than the run of the mill stuff. Hence try becoming a computational physicist - ie someone who's interested in physics and uses The Computer to do things like plot planetary orbits (gravitation) or solve some of the differential equations shooting off from Schroedinger's equation, all that kind of stuff. There are other projections of the same idea into maths - stats - astronomy - engineering - whatever. The basic principle is something like 'get a life, then get computing'.
Go somewhere where there are trees, both outside *as well as* the email clients;)
Your point 1 is not the only way in which God could have some hand in evolution, either.
Your point 2 is slightly confuddled: it's Revelation, singular, but it's not that anyway, it's actually a quote from 2 Peter (3:8). But hey. Your point that it doesn't have to be 7 lots of the 24hr 'day's we have today is eminently valid - I'm no scholar but the original Hebrew for Genesis needs some looking into before anyone starts ranting on about literalism.
Your point 3, as with 1, is good. It's considerably easier to have God guiding / allowing / whatevering the process of evolution (which we haven't got beyond theorising about - hint!) than it is to force Him into the theory.
As far as teaching things in schools go, I vote for the honest approach: * "Theory of evolution exists, and says this, and has these ramifications" * "Creation (no 'ism' please, that means it's a bandwagon) exists, and says this, and has this set of ramifications" * The role of religion is to explain why, not how. * One, or other, or both, or neither, of these, needs to be the way Life got established. You'll find people who believe one or other, or an interesting mix of the two, but it's up to you to think for yourself.
~~ I don't think the folks in Mexico have got it right at all, unfortunately - theirs is a biassed position away from what I see to be the simple facts. Creation must be "taught" in schools, because a lot of folks believe it, to some extent or other, and the job of religious education in schools is simply to explain others' beliefs and provoke some constructive discussion about them, to get the kids to think for themselves about the merits or otherwise of any particular view, that they're equipped to deal with having to think of such things for themselves.
~~ You're absolutely right - the two things aren't diametrically polarised, so folks shouldn't really need to get so worked-up about them all. Frankly, the C versus E debate has lost all heat with me anyway.
It just occurred to me - all this, just so the government can spy on my Reversi scores?;)
(It was something I noticed about the first 486 I ever played on - a DX25, them were the days, where it was so fast that in the space of a click, reversi thought I was double-clicking the square and told me to go elsewhere. I had to play it with the keyboard instead!) Don't spoil my fun. I know it was a buggy mouse driver, but it was fun.
Good (essential news) to hear it's looking up at least in terms of speed then. Erm... as far as profiles go, I think it depends on how many people you want to impersonate - like here, I have my work 'hat' and the normal PigleT persona to maintain, and one of the things I've never seen either netscrape nor mozilla do properly, is auto-detect which identity to use to reply to mail / news. I also tend to want to flip between them on the fly - both that and the auto-change-on-response thing are things MS OE5 can do(!). So some form of profiles, possibly a two-tier form where one is the system user, the other is "within" that, would be a good thing.
"the best distribution"?.tar.bz2 files are not a distro, you know;)
Actually what I like about it is that it feels so 'clean' compared to having to go out an buy something, with like, money... you can get everything at the drop of a hat of any colour you like, 'cos on planet of ~6bn inhabitants, someone's likely thought of it already.
Re:The article is essentially correct [formatted]
on
Managing Geeks
·
· Score: 1
I don't actually like that much of the article, come to think of it.
Which card did they have in mind for "Schmidt, 44, is a card-carrying geek himself:"?
How does it go from talking about geeks to talking about him having been CTO at Sun?
As we all know, geeks use find . | cpio -pdv dest-dir to copy stuff back & forth, 'cos nothing else kicks like cpio. They don't hire someone else to do it for them!;8]
Indeed. And what we all know is that they should put a trigger in the database so that that field automatically gets changed to -17 when a 0 happens...;)
Different idea: did you know that in Ingres, you can declare a field to be 'not null' and go right ahead and insert a NULL into it? Causes no end of fun with Access, ODBC and key fields etc...
Er... Lessee. IE5 came out, with XML support and some relatively good CSS and CSS2 support, quite a while ago, and netscrape has been on 4.5 - 4.7 ever since. So.. if we netscapers were to up the version to 5, we'd be making a pretty loud point that NS is as good as IE (at receiving anything that happens to come over HTTP, be it html/css/xml or whatever), and of course the product wouldn't deliver. Much better to get their fingers out and keep with the idea of a "Generation 5 browser", I think - concentrating far more on standards compliance than any of this Instant Messaging hoo-har.
Oh that's OK. I was there for the Wednesday bit of it, and I can hardly say Alan was "swamped by adoring fans" and all that crap. It's such bullshit it's unbelievable. ZDnet going in my 'never again' file...
Yup... I'm pretty sure I do remember some comment from Linus a while ago about getting fewer development versions per stable, or something to that effect. The question is more, though, whether the number of features per version is staying the same or not. I suspect it is, and the version numbers are just moving faster than the actual code. Certainly 13 x 2.2.X + 18 x 2.3.X is not a vast number of things compared to 38 x 2.0.X + 130odd x 2.1.X...
Erm... I also was there, and wasn't particularly happy with any of the commercial aspect of it. I did like what Bob Young had to say for himself and RedHat; but the lady I spoke with on the stall had to enlist the help of A Techie(TM) to answer the most brainlessly-phrased question, "so why RedHat as distinct from anything else?".
And the SuSE chap didn't so much answer his own question of "is linux for everyone?" but rather stood there and plugged SuSE sales figures at us. BORING!! As a matter of fact, SuSE has gone down in my estimation as a result - I'm glad I moved to Debian when I did, and hope it stays as [Ff]ree as ever for years to come (Corel debacles notwithstanding!).
Anyway. I think it's remarkably sloppy and 'overwritten' reporting on the part of ZDnet.
I agree entirely. I can't see what facts this author is basing his drivel on, as we've been able to use 'arp' to dump machines' IP# MAC address correlations for a while...
I also heard that IPv6 was going to be end-to-end encrypted, too - that wins big in my book any day.
I agree entirely. I can't see what facts this author is basing his drivel on, as we've been able to use 'arp' to dump machines' IP# MAC address correlations for a while... I also heard that IPv6 was going to be end-to-end encrypted, too - that wins big in my book any day.
That's OK. I refrain from actually *believing* any of the unintegrated & primitive poetry stuff too.
OTOH, an analogy for you, courtesy of a BBC proggie the other day: if I were a biologist, sitting alone at my computer all day, and some gorgeous female walked through the door with no clothing on, would I sit there thinking 'cor, think of what those cells there do' and a whole load of biological stuff, or would I just leave it at "rowwrf!"? Y'know, we're not beyond appreciating the pretty pictures too. It just helps to know what we're looking at, as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Problem: paper copy is only a workaround until the folks that be decide that a book IS a machine-readable form (courtesy of OCR), at which point we're really screwed, yeah?
Let's hope they get round to changing the somewhat broken law in the first place, before they realise that much...
Really interesting idea: what about shipping it out as java .class files? They're not hard to convert back into .java source, for starters :)
.map file, you can't really convert back into logical variable / symbol names. There's at least one thing out there that mangles java class & variable names, too, so you can generate .class files that work and decompile with, eg Mocha, but aren't really legible.
:)
Actually there are differences. Unless you have a linker's
Maybe it comes from the other end: if someone's written it, then it *is* source code. The choice of language doesn't really define source or not?
Hmmm. Have you got KDE 1.1.2?
;)
It took a little bit of persuading (accepting cookies) but I've got it logged in now and posting quite happily as me - this is written using Konqueror.
At the moment the annoying thing is that it doesn't do javascript - there are one or two sites I frequent, and one of work's products is very javascript-intensive, so I can't use it for exactly everything yet.
OTOH, if KDE2's Konqueror produces the goods and does support it properly & stably, then I'll be more than happy to abandon Mozilla and Netscape altogether...
In the Open-Source world, who do we ask for a browser that's both fully-featured AND stable? Erm: DIY
Yeah.
Imagine what it's like if you've never used Netscrape before and are using it as A Big Application in order to get to grips with Linux... if you don't know your Message Centre from your Communicator from your eggwhisk, the timestamp reduction methodology (no date if it's today, no number of day in the date if it's this week...) can really cause some confuddlement.
*I* know fine well how these operate, and don't even have to think about it; but someone who doesn't know, and approaches it for the first time... how much should we go out of our way to explain these things compared to letting them work them out for themselves?
Because the thing is, a webpage like this one actually encourages me to try to justify the somewhat maligned "programmers"; OK so bungles like the wrong icon in a modal dialog, or 'yes/yes/cancel' buttons, should be avoided; but there are plenty enough examples where the programmer's done something for a perfectly good reason, whereas the "complaint" really boils down to "I don't understand it! Mummi, help!", with no reason at all. Grr!
So as ever, it's a tie-off between user-incompetence and designers thinking of real live users.
> for me...first impresion is everything.
How sad!
You're not even prepared to go right-click, Themes, Ice in order to make it look palatable? How long does your Icewm config stay looking like its default? If you've configured it at all, you've been unfair in dismissing E because of a non-wonderful default.
And of course, I find E considerably more configureable and friendly than ice, but that's just me - and I've actually played around with it for a while, too...
Ah. Thanks, yeah. In that case, I think it's bugged - check with IE5 - hopefully the linux version will be an improvement :)
Do you know how it treats PNGs, ie as distinct from GIFs?
:)
(For an example, check out my listed webpage: if the top-left most PNG block doesn't come out as purple on transparent, it's bugged.)
Also, anyone have any ideas on how commercial it'll be? It's hardly as though I *want* to pay to use something, on linux, but if it's very VERY good and the only one in its field, I'll consider it...
Open Source?
Interesting idea.
;)
From my point of view, then: the original questioner wants to end up doing geeky IT-type things, hacking unix, some internet (java), some coding, whatever. These are the mainstay of any decent (defined in an "is-geek, is-not-manager" sense) job in the IT sector these days, surprisingly enough.
To set yourself out above the crowd, one should know about something *other* than the run of the mill stuff. Hence try becoming a computational physicist - ie someone who's interested in physics and uses The Computer to do things like plot planetary orbits (gravitation) or solve some of the differential equations shooting off from Schroedinger's equation, all that kind of stuff. There are other projections of the same idea into maths - stats - astronomy - engineering - whatever. The basic principle is something like 'get a life, then get computing'.
Go somewhere where there are trees, both outside *as well as* the email clients
Oh absolutely, spot on!
Your point 1 is not the only way in which God could have some hand in evolution, either.
Your point 2 is slightly confuddled: it's Revelation, singular, but it's not that anyway, it's actually a quote from 2 Peter (3:8). But hey.
Your point that it doesn't have to be 7 lots of the 24hr 'day's we have today is eminently valid - I'm no scholar but the original Hebrew for Genesis needs some looking into before anyone starts ranting on about literalism.
Your point 3, as with 1, is good. It's considerably easier to have God guiding / allowing / whatevering the process of evolution (which we haven't got beyond theorising about - hint!) than it is to force Him into the theory.
As far as teaching things in schools go, I vote for the honest approach:
* "Theory of evolution exists, and says this, and has these ramifications"
* "Creation (no 'ism' please, that means it's a bandwagon) exists, and says this, and has this set of ramifications"
* The role of religion is to explain why, not how.
* One, or other, or both, or neither, of these, needs to be the way Life got established. You'll find people who believe one or other, or an interesting mix of the two, but it's up to you to think for yourself.
~~
I don't think the folks in Mexico have got it right at all, unfortunately - theirs is a biassed position away from what I see to be the simple facts. Creation must be "taught" in schools, because a lot of folks believe it, to some extent or other, and the job of religious education in schools is simply to explain others' beliefs and provoke some constructive discussion about them, to get the kids to think for themselves about the merits or otherwise of any particular view, that they're equipped to deal with having to think of such things for themselves.
~~
You're absolutely right - the two things aren't diametrically polarised, so folks shouldn't really need to get so worked-up about them all. Frankly, the C versus E debate has lost all heat with me anyway.
Anyway, just my thoughts on the matter too.
What about 'Octarine', as in the Pratchett Discworld series? ;)
;)
Colour of Magic, and all that - and it's red 'cos it overheats too?
It just occurred to me - all this, just so the government can spy on my Reversi scores? ;)
(It was something I noticed about the first 486 I ever played on - a DX25, them were the days, where it was so fast that in the space of a click, reversi thought I was double-clicking the square and told me to go elsewhere. I had to play it with the keyboard instead!)
Don't spoil my fun. I know it was a buggy mouse driver, but it was fun.
Good (essential news) to hear it's looking up at least in terms of speed then.
Erm... as far as profiles go, I think it depends on how many people you want to impersonate - like here, I have my work 'hat' and the normal PigleT persona to maintain, and one of the things I've never seen either netscrape nor mozilla do properly, is auto-detect which identity to use to reply to mail / news.
I also tend to want to flip between them on the fly - both that and the auto-change-on-response thing are things MS OE5 can do(!).
So some form of profiles, possibly a two-tier form where one is the system user, the other is "within" that, would be a good thing.
"the best distribution"? .tar.bz2 files are not a distro, you know ;)
Actually what I like about it is that it feels so 'clean' compared to having to go out an buy something, with like, money... you can get everything at the drop of a hat of any colour you like, 'cos on planet of ~6bn inhabitants, someone's likely thought of it already.
I don't actually like that much of the article, come to think of it.
;8]
Which card did they have in mind for "Schmidt, 44, is a card-carrying geek himself:"?
How does it go from talking about geeks to talking about him having been CTO at Sun?
As we all know, geeks use find . | cpio -pdv dest-dir to copy stuff back & forth, 'cos nothing else kicks like cpio.
They don't hire someone else to do it for them!
Yup...
I remember being introduced to Huffman compression in CS classes in Edinburgh...
Can't claim to have known the guy, but may he RIP, and condolances to those who did know him.
~Tim
Indeed. And what we all know is that they should put a trigger in the database so that that field automatically gets changed to -17 when a 0 happens... ;)
... :)
Different idea: did you know that in Ingres, you can declare a field to be 'not null' and go right ahead and insert a NULL into it? Causes no end of fun with Access, ODBC and key fields etc...
Lesseee.. that was the US navy, wasn't it?
Er...
Lessee. IE5 came out, with XML support and some relatively good CSS and CSS2 support, quite a while ago, and netscrape has been on 4.5 - 4.7 ever since.
So.. if we netscapers were to up the version to 5, we'd be making a pretty loud point that NS is as good as IE (at receiving anything that happens to come over HTTP, be it html/css/xml or whatever), and of course the product wouldn't deliver.
Much better to get their fingers out and keep with the idea of a "Generation 5 browser", I think - concentrating far more on standards compliance than any of this Instant Messaging hoo-har.
Oh that's OK.
I was there for the Wednesday bit of it, and I can hardly say Alan was "swamped by adoring fans" and all that crap. It's such bullshit it's unbelievable.
ZDnet going in my 'never again' file...
Yup... I'm pretty sure I do remember some comment from Linus a while ago about getting fewer development versions per stable, or something to that effect.
The question is more, though, whether the number of features per version is staying the same or not. I suspect it is, and the version numbers are just moving faster than the actual code.
Certainly 13 x 2.2.X + 18 x 2.3.X is not a vast number of things compared to 38 x 2.0.X + 130odd x 2.1.X...
Erm... I also was there, and wasn't particularly happy with any of the commercial aspect of it.
I did like what Bob Young had to say for himself and RedHat; but the lady I spoke with on the stall had to enlist the help of A Techie(TM) to answer the most brainlessly-phrased question, "so why RedHat as distinct from anything else?".
And the SuSE chap didn't so much answer his own question of "is linux for everyone?" but rather stood there and plugged SuSE sales figures at us. BORING!!
As a matter of fact, SuSE has gone down in my estimation as a result - I'm glad I moved to Debian when I did, and hope it stays as [Ff]ree as ever for years to come (Corel debacles notwithstanding!).
Anyway. I think it's remarkably sloppy and 'overwritten' reporting on the part of ZDnet.
I agree entirely. I can't see what facts this author is basing his drivel on, as we've been able to use 'arp' to dump machines' IP# MAC address correlations for a while...
I also heard that IPv6 was going to be end-to-end encrypted, too - that wins big in my book any day.
I agree entirely. I can't see what facts this author is basing his drivel on, as we've been able to use 'arp' to dump machines' IP# MAC address correlations for a while...
I also heard that IPv6 was going to be end-to-end encrypted, too - that wins big in my book any day.
Lesseee, it wasn't on Neighbours.. ;)
;(
Actually, I did say it was an *analogy*.. and it was from Horizon, about 6 years ago.
But otherwise I'd agree. There are no gorgeous females on the BBC...
Aren't we violating the stupid page by putting "PEZ®" everywhere on slashdot, as well? :)
Jolly hope so. Kick ass.
That's OK. I refrain from actually *believing* any of the unintegrated & primitive poetry stuff too.
OTOH, an analogy for you, courtesy of a BBC proggie the other day: if I were a biologist, sitting alone at my computer all day, and some gorgeous female walked through the door with no clothing on, would I sit there thinking 'cor, think of what those cells there do' and a whole load of biological stuff, or would I just leave it at "rowwrf!"?
Y'know, we're not beyond appreciating the pretty pictures too. It just helps to know what we're looking at, as well.