Re:uh,, Black and White anyone?
on
Game with God
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· Score: 1
"However, I was referring to the current brand of Christianity. This tends to be more liberal, although any religion's purpose is to "convert the world." This is because the followers believe it to be the best way to live, so others should also join."
Actually, you'd be surprised at how few religions are on the 'convert the world' mission. Christianity (and it's myriad strange side religions like Mormons and Jehovahs Witnesses) are probably the most noticed simply because they are the only ones who do it.
Some religions believe that only members of that religion by birthright go to 'heaven' (or whatever the promised reward), and some do not have a concept of heaven at all (such as Buddhism) but through repeated reincarnation one can achieve a perfect state!
And now for an opinion piece - he folk who say that religions are all basically different ways to the same goal a) do not understand world religions very well and b) are essentially trying to self-forgive their own failings or doubts by simply passing them off as 'probably godly'
"I never got this argument. It always seemed like sour grapes to me. What's so generic about "Microsoft Windows XP" or "Microsoft Office 2003?""
There's nothing wrong with those names - it's the use of the words windows or office OUTSIDE the phrase incorporating the Microsoft name.
MS still seem to be setting themselves up for it - go here and check out all the use of the proper noun 'Office' without any off the 'Microsoft' or version qualifiers! That's where the issue has, does and will continue to lie.
Why not just use an external hard disk? In many cases, modern BIOSs can boot from USB media anyway, and this would provide a way to neatly carry about a large amount of data.
I wonder if you could boot off an Archos Jukebox? They are quite well padded for consumer use:)
The basic premise is this; in engineering everything works in millimetres. There are 25.4 millimetres in an inch. Therefore, millimetres per metre / millimetres per inch = inches per metre.
1000/25.4 = 39.370078740157
It's a basic enough conversion - a single division - and it confuses me that people seem to have such a difficult with these things.
I should, of course, take my cues from the article rather than personal opinion! Take this one for example:
"Sometimes they even abuse the physical metaphor of tabbed browsing by opening multiple pages - not subpages of the same web site! - in multiple tabs of a browser window. I even know few people who never open more than one browser window, viewing all pages in tabs; I hope they do not try to glue a daily set of newspapers together before reading them..."
Most everyone I know who uses tabbed browsing uses it to minimise the number of windows used rather than some shoddy 'temporary bookmark' system, but the way the author puts across his opinion is that this way of using a browser is OBVIOUSLY wrong - because he can't see PAST the real world metaphor and see that computers really aren't constrained to emulating 'real' objects.
How about this:
"Don't know how to use gconf? Then you shouldn't change the way Nautilitus works, I presume."
Yes, I can see how not wanting a new window for every mouse click is EXACTLY like navigating a Windows Registry style set of configuration data - just like it in fact. Except not at all.
It appears that this is worse than most opinion pieces on the subject as it assumes the one thing that opinion pieces should not - that the author's opinion is the 'correct' opinion and all else should listen up and realise their mistake.
Re:Using the right tool for the job
on
OpenGL in PHP
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· Score: 1
Sorry, just to clarify - all my comments refer to PHP 4.x. I realise that PHP 5 is supposed to be exactly the same as Java is every possible way (don't try to tell me it isn't - it's a blatant rip off to fix a fundamental broken technology) but very few people are using it in production servers. No hosting companies I know of are using better than current stable 4.x, and most large companies with PHP systems use PHP 4.0.x or 4.1.x.
Re:Using the right tool for the job
on
OpenGL in PHP
·
· Score: 1
Um, one or two corrections then.
1) Show me the exception 'thowing', never mind the exception 'handling'. Unless you mean PEAR::isError() which is actually a conditional check. Which leads me on to...
2) PHP is about as object oriented as a brick. As in, a brick is an object and lots of bricks is a house. That's about it. It does NOT support multiple inheritence. Hell, it doesn't even support proper pass by reference without explicitly telling it to! OO in PHP is like procedural in assembler - possible, you just don't wanna go there.
Believe me I'm in a position to know. I had the misfortune of inheriting a complete finance system written in web facing PHP. Obviously nobody ever heard of separating you mission critical, government audited systems from crap that web monkeys churn out. Suffice to say I recommended to the business that it get binned and we either buy something off the shelf or rebuild in Java or something. They agreed.
Dysons patent on the cyclonic vacuuming technology was pretty thorough and was upheld in court a number of times. You could not make one without licensing the technology from him. Of course, there are other ways of making bagless vacuum cleaners - but the current method of producing a cyclonic vacuum cleaner [which sucks more:)] is covered by Dysons patent. Remember - you can't simply reconfigure/reshape the plastic that creates the vortex and say its different. You would have to implement it in a different and non-obvious manner.
BTW - His patent on the cyclonic vacum has now expired.
The difference here is that Dyson was using the patent office as it was intended. He had an idea, created it, and patented it. Once he had the patent he built the Dyson business on it, and now it has expired.
The reasoning used was that he needed some protection against others (e.g. Hoover) simply taking the market for his invention. Once he had made himself a place in the market, he doesn't need the patent any more. It's done it's job.
Microsoft, however, and Amazon like them, use patents simply to screw money out of people by patenting things that people already do, and making them somehow 'inaccessible'. There is a difference between protecting your idea and screwing someone elses.
"Have you tried Gentoo at all? I've found that they have done a very good job encapsulating all of the software installation and configuration away from the user (if that is what you want of course)."
Um, have you tried Gentoo? Installation, step one, using fdisk and mke2fs. Step two, manually downloading and uncompressing the base system onto a mounted partition. Step three, chroot.
The install forces the user to manage a chroot, learn the nano editor, and create a fstab by hand. Not particularly well encapsulated, I feel.
Of course, I run Gentoo all over the place and think it's fantastic, but I like things raw and wriggling.
I particularly like rox (http://rox.sf.net) which has is small, light, does thumbnails and...
has tab completion. Simply hit / in any window, and it pops up a directory on the bottom. backspace takes you up a level, and there is tab completion for files/folders.
I was working in software development when both my children were born, and I did wonder about changing career. However, the more I looked into it, the more I realised that the career I have built up so far would take a long time to match if I did something else, both financially and stability.
In the end, there is some trade off. Yeah, I might need to work longer hours during major project roll outs, and I might get stressed by the apparent ineptitude of our project planning department (you know the story, 3 months work, 2 man days) but in the end it's what I'm good at, I get paid well for it, and it provides the necessaries for life.
I still see the kids for at least 3 hours a day if they're bad (no going to bed when they're supposed to) but I see them all day on the weekends.
When I was young my dad worked as an electrician (actually, he still does), and he worked a lot of nights. The problems programmers have with not seeing their families is nothing compared to what working nights does for family life! I could spend a week and not see my dad because he was in bed when I got up, busy when I got home from school and then he went to work before I went to bed.
Not quite. There are windowmanagers out there designed to be exclusively used with the keyboard (ratpoison for one, evilwm for another). X itself is input device agnostic. The window managers assume to much.
It appears that this teacher didn't actually know what structured programming was. Changing the mechanics of a for loop is not structured programming. There's no difference between a 'for(a;b;c)' loop and a 'for a = b to c' loop for any practical purpose.
Even back in the days of BBC BASIC (my favourite BASIC) I could have functions and procedures. This is the basic concept of structured programming, not fancy schmancy ways of writing one liners in 143 lines.
The problem is not the language - BASIC is perfectly useable as a structured language complete with sensible factorisation of functions. It's just that many of the people teaching it don't actually know what structure programming is - they just heard the word somewhere and figured that they must be doing it. They're great programmers, right?
I'm pretty neutral on it, as are many people. A lot of people I know use it only because of its 'cross platform' (QT/GTK) capabilities that its actual look and feel.
As far as the look and feel, it has that wonderful blandness that make the Win98 to Win2k GUIs popular and WinXP to be universally despised. However, it's not really to my taste.
There's always someone trying to push one of these. Right:
XML - It's markup. That's it. STOP IT WITH THE ROUND PEGS AND SQUARE HOLES!
'Unix command line' -> 'Windows COM' - Yeah, I can see how people are abandoning:
while read name; do convert ${name} -resize 100x100 ${name}_thumb; done
into COM because COM it so much EASIER and so POWERFUL. Please. No.
One more then, macros to convert one to another. New idea this. Not at all like:
#define loop(i,m) for (i = 0; i m; i++)
then?
There's nothing new or revolutionary here. Nor is there much coherence or common sense in the first part. Languages will evolve the same way they always have, and no amount of shouting 'but.. but.. XML! and.. and.. MODULAR' is going to change it.
End of rant. Flame retardent underpants on (you never know around here...)
but once my cable TV went off, so I called tech support to find out the issue. They said that they couldn't see any fault at their end, and we spend a good ten or fifteen minutes resetting various bits of equipment at either end to no avail.
However, after about 20 minutes on the line, the support agent I was speaking to obviously found out some information previously unavailable (frantic typing, 'oooh!' of realisation). It turns out that all cable TV in the ENTIRE AREA had gone off, and every single agent was doing EXACTLY the same as the one I was speaking to because no-one had told them there was an outage.
I don't see why it would need a branch. How about just including 2 or 3 installation files; a tiny one for us who like simplicity, or larger for those who prefer all the plugins to come in the box.
why would a company who makes spyware (whose very nature is to be secretive and hard to remove) want to follow Google's principles?
Because people trust Google, and if the spyware in question keeps to these principles and includes reference to them at google.com then people will be more likely to install them.
'backdoor' and 'stealth' installers only work as long as the mass populace doesn't know about software such as SpyBot. Even the most clueless user these days may well have a friend or relative with enough clue to sort stuff out for them. I know all mine do! Remember how popups used to be everywhere until every decent browser came with a popup blocker built right in there. Only open and honest (I can't believe I just used that phrase) installers will be exempt from the 'get it off my system' panic induced in many people by shock reports of virus activity in the tabloids.
** - Fuck off, it _IS_ stealing. Let's see you work your job for 6 months and have someone come along an take all the great ideas for themselves, leaving you with no recognition. Would you be pissed?
Although I don't personally partake in the P2P thing, there is a flaw to this argument. If I went out and downloaded Dire Strait's 'Money for Nothing' and then left it on my hard disk for others to get, I am in no way leaving the artist without recognition. In fact, it would be downloaded from me BECAUSE of the artist recognition. I doubt if anyone would want to hear my cover version...
You seem to have your arguments back to front. What you have described as Theft is actually copyright infringment; trying to pass anothers work off as your own.
Theft is to take something without right or permission. The bizarre thing about the copying of this music is that the artist still has a copy, and the person who you got it off still has a copy. And, thanks to digital transfer, the copy you copied are absolutely identical.
In actual fact, the copying of copyrighted material is more akin to trespass than theft:
"To commit an unlawful injury to the person, property, or rights of another" Dictionary.com
Slashdot Mirror
"However, I was referring to the current brand of Christianity. This tends to be more liberal, although any religion's purpose is to "convert the world." This is because the followers believe it to be the best way to live, so others should also join."
Actually, you'd be surprised at how few religions are on the 'convert the world' mission. Christianity (and it's myriad strange side religions like Mormons and Jehovahs Witnesses) are probably the most noticed simply because they are the only ones who do it.
Some religions believe that only members of that religion by birthright go to 'heaven' (or whatever the promised reward), and some do not have a concept of heaven at all (such as Buddhism) but through repeated reincarnation one can achieve a perfect state!
And now for an opinion piece - he folk who say that religions are all basically different ways to the same goal a) do not understand world religions very well and b) are essentially trying to self-forgive their own failings or doubts by simply passing them off as 'probably godly'
"I never got this argument. It always seemed like sour grapes to me. What's so generic about "Microsoft Windows XP" or "Microsoft Office 2003?""
There's nothing wrong with those names - it's the use of the words windows or office OUTSIDE the phrase incorporating the Microsoft name.
MS still seem to be setting themselves up for it - go here and check out all the use of the proper noun 'Office' without any off the 'Microsoft' or version qualifiers! That's where the issue has, does and will continue to lie.
Jam and hockey are mutually exclusive? Damn, I'd better shut down 'jockey' plants quick!
Of course BSD is dying! It's always been dying, and will continue to be dying for a good long while yet :)
I'm sure Galeon already does this, or something very similar anyway.
Why not just use an external hard disk? In many cases, modern BIOSs can boot from USB media anyway, and this would provide a way to neatly carry about a large amount of data.
:)
I wonder if you could boot off an Archos Jukebox? They are quite well padded for consumer use
I'd just like to say that 'thing-nanny' has just become my favourite phrase.
The basic premise is this; in engineering everything works in millimetres. There are 25.4 millimetres in an inch. Therefore, millimetres per metre / millimetres per inch = inches per metre.
:)
1000/25.4 = 39.370078740157
It's a basic enough conversion - a single division - and it confuses me that people seem to have such a difficult with these things.
Now, mod me down for spelling 'metre' correctly
I should, of course, take my cues from the article rather than personal opinion! Take this one for example:
"Sometimes they even abuse the physical metaphor of tabbed browsing by opening multiple pages - not subpages of the same web site! - in multiple tabs of a browser window. I even know few people who never open more than one browser window, viewing all pages in tabs; I hope they do not try to glue a daily set of newspapers together before reading them..."
Most everyone I know who uses tabbed browsing uses it to minimise the number of windows used rather than some shoddy 'temporary bookmark' system, but the way the author puts across his opinion is that this way of using a browser is OBVIOUSLY wrong - because he can't see PAST the real world metaphor and see that computers really aren't constrained to emulating 'real' objects.
How about this:
"Don't know how to use gconf? Then you shouldn't change the way Nautilitus works, I presume."
Yes, I can see how not wanting a new window for every mouse click is EXACTLY like navigating a Windows Registry style set of configuration data - just like it in fact. Except not at all.
It appears that this is worse than most opinion pieces on the subject as it assumes the one thing that opinion pieces should not - that the author's opinion is the 'correct' opinion and all else should listen up and realise their mistake.
Sorry, just to clarify - all my comments refer to PHP 4.x. I realise that PHP 5 is supposed to be exactly the same as Java is every possible way (don't try to tell me it isn't - it's a blatant rip off to fix a fundamental broken technology) but very few people are using it in production servers. No hosting companies I know of are using better than current stable 4.x, and most large companies with PHP systems use PHP 4.0.x or 4.1.x.
Um, one or two corrections then.
1) Show me the exception 'thowing', never mind the exception 'handling'. Unless you mean PEAR::isError() which is actually a conditional check. Which leads me on to...
2) PHP is about as object oriented as a brick. As in, a brick is an object and lots of bricks is a house. That's about it. It does NOT support multiple inheritence. Hell, it doesn't even support proper pass by reference without explicitly telling it to! OO in PHP is like procedural in assembler - possible, you just don't wanna go there.
Believe me I'm in a position to know. I had the misfortune of inheriting a complete finance system written in web facing PHP. Obviously nobody ever heard of separating you mission critical, government audited systems from crap that web monkeys churn out. Suffice to say I recommended to the business that it get binned and we either buy something off the shelf or rebuild in Java or something. They agreed.
Dysons patent on the cyclonic vacuuming technology was pretty thorough and was upheld in court a number of times. You could not make one without licensing the technology from him. Of course, there are other ways of making bagless vacuum cleaners - but the current method of producing a cyclonic vacuum cleaner [which sucks more :)] is covered by Dysons patent. Remember - you can't simply reconfigure/reshape the plastic that creates the vortex and say its different. You would have to implement it in a different and non-obvious manner.
BTW - His patent on the cyclonic vacum has now expired.
The difference here is that Dyson was using the patent office as it was intended. He had an idea, created it, and patented it. Once he had the patent he built the Dyson business on it, and now it has expired.
The reasoning used was that he needed some protection against others (e.g. Hoover) simply taking the market for his invention. Once he had made himself a place in the market, he doesn't need the patent any more. It's done it's job.
Microsoft, however, and Amazon like them, use patents simply to screw money out of people by patenting things that people already do, and making them somehow 'inaccessible'. There is a difference between protecting your idea and screwing someone elses.
"Have you tried Gentoo at all? I've found that they have done a very good job encapsulating all of the software installation and configuration away from the user (if that is what you want of course)."
Um, have you tried Gentoo? Installation, step one, using fdisk and mke2fs. Step two, manually downloading and uncompressing the base system onto a mounted partition. Step three, chroot.
The install forces the user to manage a chroot, learn the nano editor, and create a fstab by hand. Not particularly well encapsulated, I feel.
Of course, I run Gentoo all over the place and think it's fantastic, but I like things raw and wriggling.
"Oh, and dude, lose the ntnHungarian. One-character sigils are one thing, but
three-letter two-syllable prefixes like tbl are *entirely* too much."
Well said. I've got coding standards Nazis at work who insist on these stupid things.
The funniest one, though, is the unk prefix, i.e. unkReturnValue, where the coder is too lame to be able to figure out what type the variable is.
And yes, it's in use.
I particularly like rox (http://rox.sf.net) which has is small, light, does thumbnails and...
has tab completion. Simply hit / in any window, and it pops up a directory on the bottom. backspace takes you up a level, and there is tab completion for files/folders.
It's fantastic.
I was working in software development when both my children were born, and I did wonder about changing career. However, the more I looked into it, the more I realised that the career I have built up so far would take a long time to match if I did something else, both financially and stability.
In the end, there is some trade off. Yeah, I might need to work longer hours during major project roll outs, and I might get stressed by the apparent ineptitude of our project planning department (you know the story, 3 months work, 2 man days) but in the end it's what I'm good at, I get paid well for it, and it provides the necessaries for life.
I still see the kids for at least 3 hours a day if they're bad (no going to bed when they're supposed to) but I see them all day on the weekends.
When I was young my dad worked as an electrician (actually, he still does), and he worked a lot of nights. The problems programmers have with not seeing their families is nothing compared to what working nights does for family life! I could spend a week and not see my dad because he was in bed when I got up, busy when I got home from school and then he went to work before I went to bed.
Not quite. There are windowmanagers out there designed to be exclusively used with the keyboard (ratpoison for one, evilwm for another). X itself is input device agnostic. The window managers assume to much.
It appears that this teacher didn't actually know what structured programming was. Changing the mechanics of a for loop is not structured programming. There's no difference between a 'for(a;b;c)' loop and a 'for a = b to c' loop for any practical purpose.
Even back in the days of BBC BASIC (my favourite BASIC) I could have functions and procedures. This is the basic concept of structured programming, not fancy schmancy ways of writing one liners in 143 lines.
The problem is not the language - BASIC is perfectly useable as a structured language complete with sensible factorisation of functions. It's just that many of the people teaching it don't actually know what structure programming is - they just heard the word somewhere and figured that they must be doing it. They're great programmers, right?
I'm pretty neutral on it, as are many people. A lot of people I know use it only because of its 'cross platform' (QT/GTK) capabilities that its actual look and feel.
:)
As far as the look and feel, it has that wonderful blandness that make the Win98 to Win2k GUIs popular and WinXP to be universally despised. However, it's not really to my taste.
As for Aqua, it's bloomin' awful
There's always someone trying to push one of these. Right:
XML - It's markup. That's it. STOP IT WITH THE ROUND PEGS AND SQUARE HOLES!
'Unix command line' -> 'Windows COM' - Yeah, I can see how people are abandoning:
while read name; do convert ${name} -resize 100x100 ${name}_thumb; done
into COM because COM it so much EASIER and so POWERFUL. Please. No.
One more then, macros to convert one to another. New idea this. Not at all like:
#define loop(i,m) for (i = 0; i m; i++)
then?
There's nothing new or revolutionary here. Nor is there much coherence or common sense in the first part. Languages will evolve the same way they always have, and no amount of shouting 'but.. but.. XML! and.. and.. MODULAR' is going to change it.
End of rant. Flame retardent underpants on (you never know around here...)
but once my cable TV went off, so I called tech support to find out the issue. They said that they couldn't see any fault at their end, and we spend a good ten or fifteen minutes resetting various bits of equipment at either end to no avail.
However, after about 20 minutes on the line, the support agent I was speaking to obviously found out some information previously unavailable (frantic typing, 'oooh!' of realisation). It turns out that all cable TV in the ENTIRE AREA had gone off, and every single agent was doing EXACTLY the same as the one I was speaking to because no-one had told them there was an outage.
Classic.
I don't see why it would need a branch. How about just including 2 or 3 installation files; a tiny one for us who like simplicity, or larger for those who prefer all the plugins to come in the box.
why would a company who makes spyware (whose very nature is to be secretive and hard to remove) want to follow Google's principles?
Because people trust Google, and if the spyware in question keeps to these principles and includes reference to them at google.com then people will be more likely to install them.
'backdoor' and 'stealth' installers only work as long as the mass populace doesn't know about software such as SpyBot. Even the most clueless user these days may well have a friend or relative with enough clue to sort stuff out for them. I know all mine do! Remember how popups used to be everywhere until every decent browser came with a popup blocker built right in there. Only open and honest (I can't believe I just used that phrase) installers will be exempt from the 'get it off my system' panic induced in many people by shock reports of virus activity in the tabloids.
Surely the duration would be 'until the hiker checks back in'. I.e. all data is transient - only stored as long as the hiker is 'in the wild'.
** - Fuck off, it _IS_ stealing. Let's see you work your job for 6 months and have someone come along an take all the great ideas for themselves, leaving you with no recognition. Would you be pissed?
Although I don't personally partake in the P2P thing, there is a flaw to this argument. If I went out and downloaded Dire Strait's 'Money for Nothing' and then left it on my hard disk for others to get, I am in no way leaving the artist without recognition. In fact, it would be downloaded from me BECAUSE of the artist recognition. I doubt if anyone would want to hear my cover version...
You seem to have your arguments back to front. What you have described as Theft is actually copyright infringment; trying to pass anothers work off as your own.
Theft is to take something without right or permission. The bizarre thing about the copying of this music is that the artist still has a copy, and the person who you got it off still has a copy. And, thanks to digital transfer, the copy you copied are absolutely identical.
In actual fact, the copying of copyrighted material is more akin to trespass than theft:
"To commit an unlawful injury to the person, property, or rights of another" Dictionary.com