I've got to agree with you completely. Just because something validates does not mean that it is well written. That's almost as saying that a program doesn't have any bugs because it compiles. A validator or compiler each only catch certain classes of problems.
Sure, HTML/XHTML are not meant to be layout or style languages, but people have looked at them that way for so long that the original semantic value of the tags has nearly been lost. So when people hear that it's no longer fashionable to use HTML for layout, they not only stop using lots of tags for layout, they stop using them altogether, instead substituting <div> tags with lots of CSS for everything, thinking of <div> as essentially a blank tag that they can assign any sort of layout to.
I see this all the time; <div>'s for paragraphs, <div>'s for blockquotes, lots of <div>'s for a list and its items, etc, etc. I suspect many folks think up the way they want a page to look, then write the markup with that in mind, even when they have nominally abandoned the layout-based HTML. So the result ends up being the infamous <div> salad.
It's worth noting that according to finance.yahoo.com, which you cite, the only analyst they mention has SCOX rated a strong sell. I've seen several other analyst opinions as well, and without exception they rate SCOX a poor buy, usually using phrases like "will significantly underperform the market" and "no long term prospects". So obviously the smart folks know what is going on. Apparently, the stock is being driven up by speculators, who are almost certainly going to get burned. I guess these people didn't learn anything from the tech bubble bursting. The fools and their money will soon be parted; its a shame that it will probably end up lining the pockets of SCO execs, though.
I never was able to pin down exactly what it was about the style that I disliked.
Out of curiosity, I just checked out the BitTorrent code, and I can offer some concrete examples of what I don't like about it:
Almost no comments. Python has very good built in documentation features, and they are completely unused here.
Frequent use of single-letter variable names, or names that are abbreviated so heavily that someone unfamiliar with the code has no idea what they mean.
Very long lines. I saw a few that were about 160 characters long, twice what they should be.
Deeply nested code blocks. I'll have to agree with Linus Torvalds here, who said that if you're nesting more than three layers deep, you probably need to rethink what you're doing. Though I'd increase this to four layers for OOP languages like python.
I'm sure others can think of more. I don't mean to give this guy a hard time, though; I've definitely seen much worse, and some areas of the code actually seem fairly clean to me. Also, for anyone interested, there, is a good, standard for python coding style in PEP 8
While I generally agree with your post, you gave this incorrect information several times. Python is not licensed under the GPL. It uses its own unique license that is more similar to the LGPL or BSD than the GPL.
Just a small nit-pick: I believe you mean Y chromosome, not X. All men get their X chromosome from their mother, and can only pass it on to their daughters. Y chromosome inheritance works as you described, though.
there are laws in this country that forbid even private organizations from discrimating based on race, religion, sex, disability, etc...All forms of discrimination are illegal in America.
You are wrong. It is perfectly legal for private clubs to bar membership to anyone, for whatever reasons they choose. Private businesses, though, are not allowed to discriminate in hiring on the basis of race and sex. There are currently no federal laws prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals, unless one has been passed recently (with the GOP controlling the presidency and congress, that is pretty unlikely). I'm not sure if discrimination on the basis of age or religion has been made illegal or not.
Anyway, you overstate your case in saying no forms of discrimination are legal, even for businesses. If you are hiring one person from an applicant pool of two, you have to make a value judgment somewhere. Last I heard, discrimination against unqualified applicants is still legal. And even in the case of race and gender, I can think of plenty of examples where it is okay. For instance, actors trying to get a specific role are usually rejected if they aren't the same race or gender as the character.
You seem to be misinformed about the ACLU's involvement in these two controversies. The ACLU lawsuit regarding the Augusta National Golf Club is not against the club itself, but against the city, which limited the rights of the public to protest over the issue. The ACLU feels, and I think rightly, that while the golf club may have the right to refuse admission of women, they are not immune from public pressure to reform. The city's laws, enacted in anticipation of protests at Augusta National, violate the 1st amendement.
Regarding the Boy Scouts, the ACLU filed suit, once again, against the government, trying to end public subsidy of the group. The Boy Scouts, since they bar admission to athiests and require members to proclaim their belief in God, are a religious group. Therefore, they should not get special treatment from the government, in accordance with the 1st amendment.
The ACLU certainly has a political agenda, but they defend groups even if they disagree with them. Take, for instance, the ACLU's defense of the KU Klux Klan's rights to hold public demonstrations. To be fair, ACLU has not been perfect in this regard. They do not oppose firearm restriction, for instance. I guess they care more about the 1st amendment than the 2nd.
Internet Explorer runs with Adminstrator privileges. So does Windows Media Player. And Microsoft Office. Including Outlook.
Not that I think you're lying or trolling or anything, but do you have any evidence to back up that assertion? A link perhaps? Maybe I'm too skeptical for my own good, but accepting a statement from some random person on slashdot with nothing to back it up seems a little dumb. I guess at least one moderator disagrees with me though.
Yeah, Department of Defense is a stupid name, a ridiculous euphemism. We originally had a Department of War, which had a more honest name, but in a previous big gov't reorganization sometime after WWII, we ended up with the DoD. Interesting that since the Department of War was subsumed into the DoD, our wars have only been waged without a declaration from Congress, which would seem to go against the Constitution. It seems that the gov't has been trying to remove any official mention of the word war when it refers to a real war, but uses it all the time in things like the "War on Drugs", "War on Poverty" etc.
Also, being an American institution, they would never spell offense or defense with a c.;^)
he's written the license to make it very difficult for anyone but him to distribute modifications
I was under the impression that qmail (and all of djb's software) was completely unlicensed. He doesn't believe that software licenses would stand up in court, so he just relies on his copyright on the software. Basically, if you do violate his copyrights in a way he doesn't like, he'll sue you for copyright infringement. He has neither the right (under US law), nor the desire to prevent people from distributing modifications , as long as they keep them in patch form only. This is only a little bit inconvenient, not "very diffcult" as you say. In fact, a very large number of people have contributed patches.
Your complaints are mostly correct, and I could name several more of my own. My point, though, is that Petreley did not bring up any of this, he just flamed. If he had given some concrete examples such as these, his article could be called constructive criticism. As it is, it is just a troll.
GNOME made the big mistake in listening to bashers. The bashers (= non GNOME users) said GNOME was too complicated
No, they didn't listen to bashers. They listened to the usability tests that Sun and Ximian have done, with user skills from beginners to those very experienced with UNIX.
Yes, in theory many non-C language bindings exist, but in the real world none of them are used for any non-trivial project.
Not true again. Galeon is written in C++. A large portion of redhat's system tools, including their installer, are written with the python bindings. Sawfish is mostly written in a weird dialect of Lisp called Rep. None of these are trivial apps.
I think your idea that Gnome is very politically oriented is a bit off. After all, they've refused to elect Richard Stallman to the Gnome Foundation Board:^)
So can you give examples of this "sensationalistic flamage"?
You don't think referring to GNOME as LAME is flamage?
I personally think he has some very good points.
I'd say he has one good point: GNOME's file selection dialog sucks, and KDE's is much better. One thing I like about the Gtk file dialog is that it has tab completion. I don't know if KDE's does or not. The bookmarks rock, though.
Beyond that, Petreley just seems to harp on consistency, though he doesn't give any concrete example of how KDE is consistent and GNOME is not. He seems to imply that KDE is consistent because it uses a bunch of small tools from a common framework. But Gnome is the same way. I fail to see what his point is.
Further, he criticizes Gnome and Bonobo for not fully exploiting CORBA's network transparency, yet he doesn't explain how this makes it worse than KParts. He also ridicules Gnome's efforts at language indepence, though doesn't really explain why their efforts are bad.
He also briefly criticizes a few other components:
GConf is like the windows registry - This old chestnut has been thouroughly debunked by Havoc Pennington in a number of places. I won't recount them here. Google is your friend.
Metacity and Nautilus are lacking features - Of course, he doesn't say what these missing features are, though.
Beyond that, he incessantly spins things as negatively for Gnome as possible. I love this passage: "New holes are appearing, as well. Read my lips: no new file-pickers." When did not fixing a problem become equivalent to a new problem emerging?
When I tried changing my background with one of the latest gnomes, I get this measly little window with three different picture boxes that don't help at all. I remember thinking how Spartan
Changing a background image is a simple procedure, why would you need a complex dialog? I've used the Gnome2 background picker as well, and I haven't found anything lacking. On the contrary, I think it is quite elegant.
Gnome just seems to be going in so many directions that it's turning into a mess.
This seems to contradict your previous observation of Gnome's spartan qualities. How can something be both spartan (simple and lacking luxuries) and a mess moving in many different directions? That said, I can see your point here. There are places where Gnome is a bit awkward, though these are mostly relics from Gnome 1.4 that haven't been fixed yet. This is not an indication that things are moving in many different directions, just that they are moving, and still need to move some more.
As an aside, I've noticed an increasing frequency in these anti-Gnome trolls. A while back, an Australian site did an interview with Shawn Gordon, and he came across as very arrogant and contemptuous of Gnome. The same interviewer tried to bait Gnome's Jeff Waugh into a flamewar over this, but he politely declined. Why have certain members of the KDE camp become so bitter? By the way, I don't mean to imply that your post was anything of the sort. Rather, I think it was honest and tactful. Petreley's article was a major league troll, though
<disclaimer>I do not use either Gnome 2.x or KDE 3.x, though I do follow the Gnome project closely and admire what they are trying to accomplish.</disclaimer>
Actually Dan Castellaneta has won two Emmys for playing Homer Simpson. But I agree with your main point: Andy Serkis also deserves recognition for his work in The Two Towers.
what I found most amazing was that Kasparov played so cautiously
Kasparov's cautious play was, I think, a deliberate thing, not due to his bad experience against Deep Blue (or, at least, not completely). After the first game, I think he realized what kind of game Junior plays. It is so strong at evaluating tactics that trying to play the open, attacking style that Kasparov usually prefers is very risky. However, it seemed to be fairly weak at evaluating more general, strategic thinking, so Garry played more defensive, positional, subtly developing games. This lead to him taking an advantage in the opening in every single game.
However, this also exposed a second strength of the computer: it is an impeccable defender that severely punishes any foolhardy attacks. It doesn't get demoralized, frustrated, or tired. It can't be intimidated and will never give up (at least, until its operators decide enough is enough). It's kinda like the Terminator in that sense:^).
All in all, that makes for an opponent who, although easy to gain an advantage over, is extremely difficult to beat. I think that, after the first three games, Kasparov was no longer playing to win, he simply wanted to avoid losing.
Re:Woohoo! More Gnome than you can shake a stick a
on
Gnome 2.2 Released
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· Score: 1
My question is what is the one thing that you wanted to see in Gnome 2.2 that did not get in?
Personally, I really wanted to see bug 73074 fixed.
Re:New operating System Features?
on
New Red Hat Beta
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· Score: 1
Red Hat has nothing to do with Mozilla
Not true. Actually, Red Hat pays Christopher Blizzard to hack on Mozilla. You may recall that Blizzard is largely responsible for the cool new xft2 support in recent mozilla builds.
the technology to bind 1216 pages did not exist at that time.
This is untrue. I have an edition of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich from 1960, only 6 years after The Fellowship of the Ring was published. It is over 1200 pages long, all in one volume. Also, I believe the Christian Bible is at least that long, and has been published for quite a long time as one big book. Perhaps Tolkien's publishers decided that it was economically unfeasible to publish LOTR as one book. It was certainly technologically possible, though.
analyse various pieces written by the chosen composer, find the common themes, and then use them to produce new pieces which would have the same "feel" as the originals.
Pastiches have been common in music and other art forms for hundreds of years. Common enough that they have a term for it, anyway.
XFT2 support was only checked in last week, so there's no way you have it working with Mozilla 1.0.
Christopher Blizzard has been releasing xft2-patched binaries of Mozilla for some time. They are available here. You're absolutely right that the new XFT2 font-architecture renders better. I'm using it in a patched Mozilla 1.0 right now, and the font quality rivals Windows. The quality of the old FreeType code was not too great.
Your understanding of heredity is a little bit off. The examples you give are perfectly consistent with red hair being recessive, black hair dominant. Here's a simplification of how it works: imagine we have a gene with two alleles, let's call one 'R' for red, the other 'B' for black. Each person has two copies, so the redheaded parent has RR, the black-haired parent has BR. If you look at all the combinations the children could have, 1/2 would be BR (and have black hair), and 1/2 would be RR (and have red hair). For more information, draw a Punnett square, which should spell it out more clearly.
Note, however, that in real life, things are not quite that simple. Hair color is determined by the interaction of a number of genes. Thus, people don't have either pure black, pure blond, or pure red hair. There are many subtle variations.
Also, the other poster, troll or not, was completely wrong about redhead genes fading out because they are recessive. Genes do not change frequency within a population because they are recessive or dominant. If you read up on Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium why this is true should be clear. Note that in very small populations (under say, 10,000), genetic drift and other random changes in the gene pool could wipe out some variants, but redheads number in the millions worldwide; their genes are not in danger of vanishing any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got to agree with you completely. Just because something validates does not mean that it is well written. That's almost as saying that a program doesn't have any bugs because it compiles. A validator or compiler each only catch certain classes of problems.
Sure, HTML/XHTML are not meant to be layout or style languages, but people have looked at them that way for so long that the original semantic value of the tags has nearly been lost. So when people hear that it's no longer fashionable to use HTML for layout, they not only stop using lots of tags for layout, they stop using them altogether, instead substituting <div> tags with lots of CSS for everything, thinking of <div> as essentially a blank tag that they can assign any sort of layout to.
I see this all the time; <div>'s for paragraphs, <div>'s for blockquotes, lots of <div>'s for a list and its items, etc, etc. I suspect many folks think up the way they want a page to look, then write the markup with that in mind, even when they have nominally abandoned the layout-based HTML. So the result ends up being the infamous <div> salad.
It's worth noting that according to finance.yahoo.com, which you cite, the only analyst they mention has SCOX rated a strong sell. I've seen several other analyst opinions as well, and without exception they rate SCOX a poor buy, usually using phrases like "will significantly underperform the market" and "no long term prospects". So obviously the smart folks know what is going on. Apparently, the stock is being driven up by speculators, who are almost certainly going to get burned. I guess these people didn't learn anything from the tech bubble bursting. The fools and their money will soon be parted; its a shame that it will probably end up lining the pockets of SCO execs, though.
You seem to be misunderstanding your own reference. First of all, it's misprision not misprison. Second, you should reread this part more carefully:
The elements of misprision of a feloney, both of which must be proved to support conviction, are:
- concealment of something, such as suppression of evidence or some other positive act; and
- failure to disclose.
Failure to disclose, without active concealment, is not a felony. [emphasis mine]Out of curiosity, I just checked out the BitTorrent code, and I can offer some concrete examples of what I don't like about it:
I'm sure others can think of more. I don't mean to give this guy a hard time, though; I've definitely seen much worse, and some areas of the code actually seem fairly clean to me. Also, for anyone interested, there, is a good, standard for python coding style in PEP 8
While I generally agree with your post, you gave this incorrect information several times. Python is not licensed under the GPL. It uses its own unique license that is more similar to the LGPL or BSD than the GPL.
Several years ago, Linus estimated that the kernel was about 4 million lines of code. It's probably somewhat more than that now.
Just a small nit-pick: I believe you mean Y chromosome, not X. All men get their X chromosome from their mother, and can only pass it on to their daughters. Y chromosome inheritance works as you described, though.
The Peace Corps and AmeriCorps web sites can answer your questions. I believe just about everyone qualifies for either of these organizations.
You are wrong. It is perfectly legal for private clubs to bar membership to anyone, for whatever reasons they choose. Private businesses, though, are not allowed to discriminate in hiring on the basis of race and sex. There are currently no federal laws prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals, unless one has been passed recently (with the GOP controlling the presidency and congress, that is pretty unlikely). I'm not sure if discrimination on the basis of age or religion has been made illegal or not.
Anyway, you overstate your case in saying no forms of discrimination are legal, even for businesses. If you are hiring one person from an applicant pool of two, you have to make a value judgment somewhere. Last I heard, discrimination against unqualified applicants is still legal. And even in the case of race and gender, I can think of plenty of examples where it is okay. For instance, actors trying to get a specific role are usually rejected if they aren't the same race or gender as the character.
You seem to be misinformed about the ACLU's involvement in these two controversies. The ACLU lawsuit regarding the Augusta National Golf Club is not against the club itself, but against the city, which limited the rights of the public to protest over the issue. The ACLU feels, and I think rightly, that while the golf club may have the right to refuse admission of women, they are not immune from public pressure to reform. The city's laws, enacted in anticipation of protests at Augusta National, violate the 1st amendement.
Regarding the Boy Scouts, the ACLU filed suit, once again, against the government, trying to end public subsidy of the group. The Boy Scouts, since they bar admission to athiests and require members to proclaim their belief in God, are a religious group. Therefore, they should not get special treatment from the government, in accordance with the 1st amendment.
The ACLU certainly has a political agenda, but they defend groups even if they disagree with them. Take, for instance, the ACLU's defense of the KU Klux Klan's rights to hold public demonstrations. To be fair, ACLU has not been perfect in this regard. They do not oppose firearm restriction, for instance. I guess they care more about the 1st amendment than the 2nd.
Not that I think you're lying or trolling or anything, but do you have any evidence to back up that assertion? A link perhaps? Maybe I'm too skeptical for my own good, but accepting a statement from some random person on slashdot with nothing to back it up seems a little dumb. I guess at least one moderator disagrees with me though.
Yeah, Department of Defense is a stupid name, a ridiculous euphemism. We originally had a Department of War, which had a more honest name, but in a previous big gov't reorganization sometime after WWII, we ended up with the DoD. Interesting that since the Department of War was subsumed into the DoD, our wars have only been waged without a declaration from Congress, which would seem to go against the Constitution. It seems that the gov't has been trying to remove any official mention of the word war when it refers to a real war, but uses it all the time in things like the "War on Drugs", "War on Poverty" etc.
Also, being an American institution, they would never spell offense or defense with a c. ;^)
I was under the impression that qmail (and all of djb's software) was completely unlicensed. He doesn't believe that software licenses would stand up in court, so he just relies on his copyright on the software. Basically, if you do violate his copyrights in a way he doesn't like, he'll sue you for copyright infringement. He has neither the right (under US law), nor the desire to prevent people from distributing modifications , as long as they keep them in patch form only. This is only a little bit inconvenient, not "very diffcult" as you say. In fact, a very large number of people have contributed patches.
Your complaints are mostly correct, and I could name several more of my own. My point, though, is that Petreley did not bring up any of this, he just flamed. If he had given some concrete examples such as these, his article could be called constructive criticism. As it is, it is just a troll.
No, they didn't listen to bashers. They listened to the usability tests that Sun and Ximian have done, with user skills from beginners to those very experienced with UNIX.
Not true again. Galeon is written in C++. A large portion of redhat's system tools, including their installer, are written with the python bindings. Sawfish is mostly written in a weird dialect of Lisp called Rep. None of these are trivial apps.
I think your idea that Gnome is very politically oriented is a bit off. After all, they've refused to elect Richard Stallman to the Gnome Foundation Board :^)
You don't think referring to GNOME as LAME is flamage?
I'd say he has one good point: GNOME's file selection dialog sucks, and KDE's is much better. One thing I like about the Gtk file dialog is that it has tab completion. I don't know if KDE's does or not. The bookmarks rock, though.
Beyond that, Petreley just seems to harp on consistency, though he doesn't give any concrete example of how KDE is consistent and GNOME is not. He seems to imply that KDE is consistent because it uses a bunch of small tools from a common framework. But Gnome is the same way. I fail to see what his point is.
Further, he criticizes Gnome and Bonobo for not fully exploiting CORBA's network transparency, yet he doesn't explain how this makes it worse than KParts. He also ridicules Gnome's efforts at language indepence, though doesn't really explain why their efforts are bad.
He also briefly criticizes a few other components:
Beyond that, he incessantly spins things as negatively for Gnome as possible. I love this passage: "New holes are appearing, as well. Read my lips: no new file-pickers." When did not fixing a problem become equivalent to a new problem emerging?
Changing a background image is a simple procedure, why would you need a complex dialog? I've used the Gnome2 background picker as well, and I haven't found anything lacking. On the contrary, I think it is quite elegant.
This seems to contradict your previous observation of Gnome's spartan qualities. How can something be both spartan (simple and lacking luxuries) and a mess moving in many different directions? That said, I can see your point here. There are places where Gnome is a bit awkward, though these are mostly relics from Gnome 1.4 that haven't been fixed yet. This is not an indication that things are moving in many different directions, just that they are moving, and still need to move some more.
As an aside, I've noticed an increasing frequency in these anti-Gnome trolls. A while back, an Australian site did an interview with Shawn Gordon, and he came across as very arrogant and contemptuous of Gnome. The same interviewer tried to bait Gnome's Jeff Waugh into a flamewar over this, but he politely declined. Why have certain members of the KDE camp become so bitter? By the way, I don't mean to imply that your post was anything of the sort. Rather, I think it was honest and tactful. Petreley's article was a major league troll, though
<disclaimer>I do not use either Gnome 2.x or KDE 3.x, though I do follow the Gnome project closely and admire what they are trying to accomplish.</disclaimer>
Actually Dan Castellaneta has won two Emmys for playing Homer Simpson. But I agree with your main point: Andy Serkis also deserves recognition for his work in The Two Towers.
Kasparov's cautious play was, I think, a deliberate thing, not due to his bad experience against Deep Blue (or, at least, not completely). After the first game, I think he realized what kind of game Junior plays. It is so strong at evaluating tactics that trying to play the open, attacking style that Kasparov usually prefers is very risky. However, it seemed to be fairly weak at evaluating more general, strategic thinking, so Garry played more defensive, positional, subtly developing games. This lead to him taking an advantage in the opening in every single game.
However, this also exposed a second strength of the computer: it is an impeccable defender that severely punishes any foolhardy attacks. It doesn't get demoralized, frustrated, or tired. It can't be intimidated and will never give up (at least, until its operators decide enough is enough). It's kinda like the Terminator in that sense :^).
All in all, that makes for an opponent who, although easy to gain an advantage over, is extremely difficult to beat. I think that, after the first three games, Kasparov was no longer playing to win, he simply wanted to avoid losing.
Personally, I really wanted to see bug 73074 fixed.
Here's another quote from Emerson:
Not true. Actually, Red Hat pays Christopher Blizzard to hack on Mozilla. You may recall that Blizzard is largely responsible for the cool new xft2 support in recent mozilla builds.
Christopher Blizzard has been releasing xft2-patched binaries of Mozilla for some time. They are available here. You're absolutely right that the new XFT2 font-architecture renders better. I'm using it in a patched Mozilla 1.0 right now, and the font quality rivals Windows. The quality of the old FreeType code was not too great.
Your understanding of heredity is a little bit off. The examples you give are perfectly consistent with red hair being recessive, black hair dominant. Here's a simplification of how it works: imagine we have a gene with two alleles, let's call one 'R' for red, the other 'B' for black. Each person has two copies, so the redheaded parent has RR, the black-haired parent has BR. If you look at all the combinations the children could have, 1/2 would be BR (and have black hair), and 1/2 would be RR (and have red hair). For more information, draw a Punnett square, which should spell it out more clearly.
Note, however, that in real life, things are not quite that simple. Hair color is determined by the interaction of a number of genes. Thus, people don't have either pure black, pure blond, or pure red hair. There are many subtle variations.
Also, the other poster, troll or not, was completely wrong about redhead genes fading out because they are recessive. Genes do not change frequency within a population because they are recessive or dominant. If you read up on Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium why this is true should be clear. Note that in very small populations (under say, 10,000), genetic drift and other random changes in the gene pool could wipe out some variants, but redheads number in the millions worldwide; their genes are not in danger of vanishing any time soon.