Re:about the title
on
Practical C++
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Actually practicality is the only thing that C++ has going for it. It certainly is not the most elegant language, or the easiest to learn, or the fastest to write, or the least prone to programming errors. But it is powerfull and efficient, which is why it has been such a practical, popular language.
IMHO, is much more verbose than what you see in the current XF86 config file.
Why is more verbose a good thing? What matters is readability, and XML is a lot less readable than the format that XFree86 uses.
In fact, the XF86 config file would probably be better suited to XML than what it currently uses: XML is for structured data - have you read an XF86Config file lately? notice the structure?
Yes and the XFree86 file format is perfectly capable of representing structured data. How is
Section "Screen"
Driver "svga"
Device "My Video Card"
Monitor "My Monitor"
Subsection "Display"
Depth 32
Modes "640x480"
EndSubsection EndSection
XML is not the best data representation for human edited files, and on linux there is the unwritten policy that while we try to not require the user to edit files directly, we certainly want to make it easy if they choose to do so.
Even in OS X where XML is king, there are two supported formats for plists, and it is standatd convention to use XML for files that are primarily meant to be edited by the computer, and the other c-struct (old Next-Step?) style format for files that are primarily meant to be edited by humans.
You don't remember where you got those estimates do you? I have often used the argument that most software produced is custom in-house, or contracted software, and not shrink wrapped software, and it would be nice to have some numbers to back that up.
I don't think anyone was terribly surprised that the registry was upheld. There was a lot of public support and this is, after all, a big election year.
How does this apply to judges which are not elected?
When 2.4 was first released it was alot less stable than 2.2, whereas 2.6 is actually more stable than 2.4 is right now.
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po
on
Hackers Hall of Fame
·
· Score: 1
True, but this more like adding Micheal Jordan to the baseball hall of fame because he is really famous and was also a pro baseball player. Bill Gates was never famous for being a good hacker - while he was a definately good hacker, he is not in the top 10. What he is famous for is being a shrewd businessman.
I bet the discrepency comes from the fact that IDC is measuring installs and google is measuring hits. There are probably a lot of people who have Linux installed but still use Windows as their primary OS, and/or use Windows at work, and therefore visit google using Windows more often than using Linux.
Wow they really call canadian government id numbers SIN! That is awesome. Talk about mark of the beast:) I can't believe I haven't heard religous wacko's go off on that yet.
The ratio of profits to subsidy is completely meaningless number. For example, if they were to turn around next year and give their employees a small raise which cut into their profits in half, it would mean that we pay $60 for every dollar of profit they make, but that doesn't mean they are wasting twice as much money.
A more usefull number would be the ratio of revenue to subsidy. I couldn't find that in the report you linked, but assuming their profit margin is about 10%, then for every dollar I pay for ethanol another three dollars comes from the taxpayers.
Especially since Fedora has very agressively defined itself as the bleeding edge distro. I can understand debian stable and Red Hat Enterprise being compiled for i386 but not Fedora.
Is a ball of 100 human embryo cells a human being? One woman on the program was claiming - yes, this is so. I personally think that this is a bit extreme, almost "every sperm is sacred" extreme.
I don't think it is extreme - if one was to draw a line as to when to call something a human being this is really the only black and white place to do it. Conception marks the first time in my personal history where the entire genetic material for me existed. Before that there was no certainty that this particular genetic combination would happen. Afterwards, all (physical) development was simply the working out of the DNA which was created during conception (of course influenced by the environment).
Furthermore, it takes a deliberate action for conception to happen. People need not worry about embryos simple popping into existence inside of a woman's womb. It does not however take a deliberate action for a baby grow inside you, or be born. These things simply happen as a natural course once conception has taken place. (Of couse not all conceptions natually result in child birth, and there are things the mother can do to increase the likelyhood of a successful pregnancy).
All other meters of life for which I have heard are really gradients not hard lines. In particular, some mention that a baby is reliant on the mother until after birth. But often premature babies can survive without their mother. But you say they are dependant on doctors and technology - so are all the diabetics, and cronically ill. In fact every person on this planet is dependant on other people to some extent - how many people do you think could survive if complete isolated from society? So birth is just one point (admitedly, an import one) in the gradient of self-reliability. The best we can do is draw some line that says this fetus has 0.0x% chance of surviving - and therefore, what? I don't think this is a good metric for determining whether something is a human being, but could be usefull in how much value we should place in it relative to other concerns.
There are also definate stages in the growth from an embryo to a fetus to a baby, but the boundies between these are also fuzzy. There is no point at which I can say that yesterday it was an embryo but today it is a fetus. Furthermore the development each day is just as significant as the day before it. So picking some point in the middle of development and saying that is when it becomes human is not possible.
Lastly, the other two determinations of a human - when it becomes sentiant, or when it gains a soul are too far beyond our understanding to make any reasonable judgement.
In conclusion, conception is the most logical place to declare something a human being. What sort of rights a human being should have at that point, however, is a different matter.
How does this make telcos obsolete? The telcos are the ones that operate the entire backbone of the internet, as well as most of the last mile connections. They won't loose any jobs. They may loose money as people switch to VoIP, but that will simply mean that the price of data lines will go up to compensate for the dual role that they are playing.
On the point of OSS, it has created jobs, as well as replacing them. Furthermore, I hate to say this but we what we consider "normal" for the shrink-wrapped software industry, was really a boom, and it's getting ready to bust. By and large, the only reason people buy new versions of software is because they need to stay compatible with everyone else. The rest of the industry has dropped in prices in time, while software if anything has risen. Shrinkwrapped software is an industry waiting to be obsoleted. Lastly, the vast majority of software jobs are custom in-house or consulting work, and those jobs don't have anything to loose from OSS - in fact they are the very types of jobs which OSS is creating.
Technology is simply change. Throughout history, people have always been afraid of fact that technology will not provide the jobs it replaces, and they have always been proven wrong. There is nothing about these two particular advances which suggests that it will be any different.
It's a shame that these sites are going down so easily, otherwise they would force more schools to provide the information that your school does.
As other people already mentioned, by and large, only the most disgruntled students post to those sites. I know when I first found out about one of them I went and looked at the site, and saw a couple exeptional professors from my school with poor scores. My freinds and I were able to get them voted up to an average rating, but the point still stands. When you have a self-selected sample group you only get the extremes responding.
However, if these sites continued to exist (who by legal precedence should not be responsible for libel on behalf of their posters), then the best defence the schools would have against them is to make accurate information available to the students.
oh, and a couple of comments on the way your school presents the scores. It is extremely usefull, and although one improvement would be to list the number of students who dropped. They should also get rid of the A-F scale - it isn't meaningfull in many of the rankings, such as workload, expected grade, since the target point for those is subjective. Lastly, the average grade for a Calc II class was B+!? That is very high, unless a lot of people dropped.
Just a nit-pick, but their product is not "open-source like", it just based on open standards. The first has to do with the availability of the source code to the program, the second has to do with interoperability of the files the user creates between different products. Proprietary software and file formats both have the downside that they create vender lock-in.
I just don't want all the fresh blood that hear about free software for the first time slashdot to be too misinformed, although since they are reading slashdot it is inevitable:)
Our ACM chapter used to do this at our school and it was very benificial. First, for the publicity - all us computer geeks would setup machines showing off what cool things you could do with linux. Furthermore, you would see normal people walking in with their computers throughout the day and getting linux installed on it, by friendly people. These things drew alot more attention that a simple booth to pass out discs would have.
Secondly, having an event like this is a wonderful catalyst. Most of the people who brought in machines had been thinking about installing linux, but had reservations and doubts, or were busy and never got around to it. Having someone to help in the odd case that there are problems is very reassuring and is a good way make sure they get off on the right foot.
Also I heard in the past that there was someone who would every year bring in some machine which they just could not get linux installed on, as a challenge. We had some mad skill kernal hackers, who would go so far as modifing the drivers to get the thing to work, and most of the time they succeeded. One of the guys there gained the reputation as "the guy who could get linux to run on a paperclip wrapped around a pencil".
Third, I can't understate the fact that people like dealing with other people. It was a good time, and everyone walked away with a favorable impression of the free software community.
Oh yeah, I forgot about that one. Does it have any sort of GUI library though? I didn't think it did. Qtiopia on eCos is immature, and would make the system as a whole heavyweight, although not so much as Linux.
For example take the entire hypothetical situation in which the OS on which your business depended suddenly becomes under the control of your business rival.
Wouldn't it have been nice to have your own OS, or at least an open one. Or you can just trust that your business rival will play fair and make sure that the OS can be made to work on your platform. It could happen.
If the RIAA and MPAA can't find the fake WHOIS record owners, how is the government going to track down the WHOIS record owners and punish them?
Very simple. If the registrar can't contact you because you gave them bogus info then the registration gets dumped. Quite an effective and fair punishment - you are abusing a priviledge so that priviledge gets revoked.
Although I do understand where you are comming from with regard to address harvesting from public WHOIS records. If you were to implement this policy you would have to provide the option for registrants info to remain private to the registrar. Then it wouldn't be such a burden for honest people to provide the correct information.
Exactly. Or even better, do the one thing that is almost garenteed to get you better placement: provide meaningfull content which deserves to be ranked highly in a search. If your site is the best source of information about foo, then more people will know that you sell foo, and will trust that you know what you are doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually practicality is the only thing that C++ has going for it. It certainly is not the most elegant language, or the easiest to learn, or the fastest to write, or the least prone to programming errors. But it is powerfull and efficient, which is why it has been such a practical, popular language.
Why is more verbose a good thing? What matters is readability, and XML is a lot less readable than the format that XFree86 uses.
In fact, the XF86 config file would probably be better suited to XML than what it currently uses: XML is for structured data - have you read an XF86Config file lately? notice the structure?
Yes and the XFree86 file format is perfectly capable of representing structured data. How isless readable or less expressive than this:?XML is not the best data representation for human edited files, and on linux there is the unwritten policy that while we try to not require the user to edit files directly, we certainly want to make it easy if they choose to do so.
Even in OS X where XML is king, there are two supported formats for plists, and it is standatd convention to use XML for files that are primarily meant to be edited by the computer, and the other c-struct (old Next-Step?) style format for files that are primarily meant to be edited by humans.
You don't remember where you got those estimates do you? I have often used the argument that most software produced is custom in-house, or contracted software, and not shrink wrapped software, and it would be nice to have some numbers to back that up.
I don't think anyone was terribly surprised that the registry was upheld. There was a lot of public support and this is, after all, a big election year.
How does this apply to judges which are not elected?
Yeah I was going to name my spyware removal program Windex because it, you know, cleans Windows.
When 2.4 was first released it was alot less stable than 2.2, whereas 2.6 is actually more stable than 2.4 is right now.
True, but this more like adding Micheal Jordan to the baseball hall of fame because he is really famous and was also a pro baseball player. Bill Gates was never famous for being a good hacker - while he was a definately good hacker, he is not in the top 10. What he is famous for is being a shrewd businessman.
I bet the discrepency comes from the fact that IDC is measuring installs and google is measuring hits. There are probably a lot of people who have Linux installed but still use Windows as their primary OS, and/or use Windows at work, and therefore visit google using Windows more often than using Linux.
Wow they really call canadian government id numbers SIN! That is awesome. Talk about mark of the beast :) I can't believe I haven't heard religous wacko's go off on that yet.
The ratio of profits to subsidy is completely meaningless number. For example, if they were to turn around next year and give their employees a small raise which cut into their profits in half, it would mean that we pay $60 for every dollar of profit they make, but that doesn't mean they are wasting twice as much money.
A more usefull number would be the ratio of revenue to subsidy. I couldn't find that in the report you linked, but assuming their profit margin is about 10%, then for every dollar I pay for ethanol another three dollars comes from the taxpayers.
Following in his footsteps I have implied the same level of detail and journalistic integrity in finding these facts about W Russell Jones:
russell jones is the scarecrow
russell jones is what the police call him
russell jones is a member of the rap group wu
and my favorite:
russel jones is a Welsh Super-Featherweight Champion
Especially since Fedora has very agressively defined itself as the bleeding edge distro. I can understand debian stable and Red Hat Enterprise being compiled for i386 but not Fedora.
Is a ball of 100 human embryo cells a human being? One woman on the program was claiming - yes, this is so. I personally think that this is a bit extreme, almost "every sperm is sacred" extreme.
I don't think it is extreme - if one was to draw a line as to when to call something a human being this is really the only black and white place to do it. Conception marks the first time in my personal history where the entire genetic material for me existed. Before that there was no certainty that this particular genetic combination would happen. Afterwards, all (physical) development was simply the working out of the DNA which was created during conception (of course influenced by the environment).
Furthermore, it takes a deliberate action for conception to happen. People need not worry about embryos simple popping into existence inside of a woman's womb. It does not however take a deliberate action for a baby grow inside you, or be born. These things simply happen as a natural course once conception has taken place. (Of couse not all conceptions natually result in child birth, and there are things the mother can do to increase the likelyhood of a successful pregnancy).
All other meters of life for which I have heard are really gradients not hard lines. In particular, some mention that a baby is reliant on the mother until after birth. But often premature babies can survive without their mother. But you say they are dependant on doctors and technology - so are all the diabetics, and cronically ill. In fact every person on this planet is dependant on other people to some extent - how many people do you think could survive if complete isolated from society? So birth is just one point (admitedly, an import one) in the gradient of self-reliability. The best we can do is draw some line that says this fetus has 0.0x% chance of surviving - and therefore, what? I don't think this is a good metric for determining whether something is a human being, but could be usefull in how much value we should place in it relative to other concerns.
There are also definate stages in the growth from an embryo to a fetus to a baby, but the boundies between these are also fuzzy. There is no point at which I can say that yesterday it was an embryo but today it is a fetus. Furthermore the development each day is just as significant as the day before it. So picking some point in the middle of development and saying that is when it becomes human is not possible.
Lastly, the other two determinations of a human - when it becomes sentiant, or when it gains a soul are too far beyond our understanding to make any reasonable judgement.
In conclusion, conception is the most logical place to declare something a human being. What sort of rights a human being should have at that point, however, is a different matter.
How does this make telcos obsolete? The telcos are the ones that operate the entire backbone of the internet, as well as most of the last mile connections. They won't loose any jobs. They may loose money as people switch to VoIP, but that will simply mean that the price of data lines will go up to compensate for the dual role that they are playing.
On the point of OSS, it has created jobs, as well as replacing them. Furthermore, I hate to say this but we what we consider "normal" for the shrink-wrapped software industry, was really a boom, and it's getting ready to bust. By and large, the only reason people buy new versions of software is because they need to stay compatible with everyone else. The rest of the industry has dropped in prices in time, while software if anything has risen. Shrinkwrapped software is an industry waiting to be obsoleted. Lastly, the vast majority of software jobs are custom in-house or consulting work, and those jobs don't have anything to loose from OSS - in fact they are the very types of jobs which OSS is creating.
Technology is simply change. Throughout history, people have always been afraid of fact that technology will not provide the jobs it replaces, and they have always been proven wrong. There is nothing about these two particular advances which suggests that it will be any different.
they are going to pay for it by not providing soap and not cleaning the toilets twice a month? :)
we'd have to start replacing it with 802.45 :)
It's a shame that these sites are going down so easily, otherwise they would force more schools to provide the information that your school does.
As other people already mentioned, by and large, only the most disgruntled students post to those sites. I know when I first found out about one of them I went and looked at the site, and saw a couple exeptional professors from my school with poor scores. My freinds and I were able to get them voted up to an average rating, but the point still stands. When you have a self-selected sample group you only get the extremes responding.
However, if these sites continued to exist (who by legal precedence should not be responsible for libel on behalf of their posters), then the best defence the schools would have against them is to make accurate information available to the students.
oh, and a couple of comments on the way your school presents the scores. It is extremely usefull, and although one improvement would be to list the number of students who dropped. They should also get rid of the A-F scale - it isn't meaningfull in many of the rankings, such as workload, expected grade, since the target point for those is subjective. Lastly, the average grade for a Calc II class was B+!? That is very high, unless a lot of people dropped.
Just a nit-pick, but their product is not "open-source like", it just based on open standards. The first has to do with the availability of the source code to the program, the second has to do with interoperability of the files the user creates between different products. Proprietary software and file formats both have the downside that they create vender lock-in.
:)
I just don't want all the fresh blood that hear about free software for the first time slashdot to be too misinformed, although since they are reading slashdot it is inevitable
Our ACM chapter used to do this at our school and it was very benificial. First, for the publicity - all us computer geeks would setup machines showing off what cool things you could do with linux. Furthermore, you would see normal people walking in with their computers throughout the day and getting linux installed on it, by friendly people. These things drew alot more attention that a simple booth to pass out discs would have.
Secondly, having an event like this is a wonderful catalyst. Most of the people who brought in machines had been thinking about installing linux, but had reservations and doubts, or were busy and never got around to it. Having someone to help in the odd case that there are problems is very reassuring and is a good way make sure they get off on the right foot.
Also I heard in the past that there was someone who would every year bring in some machine which they just could not get linux installed on, as a challenge. We had some mad skill kernal hackers, who would go so far as modifing the drivers to get the thing to work, and most of the time they succeeded. One of the guys there gained the reputation as "the guy who could get linux to run on a paperclip wrapped around a pencil".
Third, I can't understate the fact that people like dealing with other people. It was a good time, and everyone walked away with a favorable impression of the free software community.
Ecos: Mature, lightweight, entirely open
Oh yeah, I forgot about that one. Does it have any sort of GUI library though? I didn't think it did. Qtiopia on eCos is immature, and would make the system as a whole heavyweight, although not so much as Linux.
I think this is just as likely as changing to PocketPC. Look at the alternatives:
Symbian: Mature, Lightweight, Proprietary - controlled by competitor.
PalmOS: Mature, Lightweight, Proprietary - controlled by neutral third party.
PocketPC: Mature, Heavyweight, Proprietary - controlled by neutral third party.
Linux: Immature, Heavyweight, entirely open
For example take the entire hypothetical situation in which the OS on which your business depended suddenly becomes under the control of your business rival.
Wouldn't it have been nice to have your own OS, or at least an open one. Or you can just trust that your business rival will play fair and make sure that the OS can be made to work on your platform. It could happen.
That's kind of like the weather rock we used to have:
If it's wet - it's raining.
If it's swinging - it's windy.
If it's white - it's snowing.
If it's gone - you'd better get going.
If the RIAA and MPAA can't find the fake WHOIS record owners, how is the government going to track down the WHOIS record owners and punish them?
Very simple. If the registrar can't contact you because you gave them bogus info then the registration gets dumped. Quite an effective and fair punishment - you are abusing a priviledge so that priviledge gets revoked.
Although I do understand where you are comming from with regard to address harvesting from public WHOIS records. If you were to implement this policy you would have to provide the option for registrants info to remain private to the registrar. Then it wouldn't be such a burden for honest people to provide the correct information.
Exactly. Or even better, do the one thing that is almost garenteed to get you better placement:
provide meaningfull content which deserves to be ranked highly in a search. If your site is the best source of information about foo, then more people will know that you sell foo, and will trust that you know what you are doing.