OK. Listen now. Your god does not exist (no other god exists either) and you are sadly deluded and blinded by your religious zeal. Just let go of it and you'll feel much better.
There is no god and I am his prophet.
Deep in the heart of hearts you know that what I just wrote is true.
It is becoming clear that IBM is betting the farm on Open Source. It is in our interest that IBM doesn't lose this bet. I wonder whether there is anything that Open Source developers (and users) could do to pay IBM back for their support.
By "paying" I'm mostly talking about indirect support such as writing software that plays nice with IBM's offerings...
Now, if one is inclined to buy a Thinkpad as a "thank you" note to IBM then I'm sure IBM would have nothing against that.
Is it even worth conciously debating the forms in which we could "reward" IBM for helping OSS so much over the last few years?
"Those guys hadn't even started to give a damn about working conditions or ecology."
I see you haven't been to Saint John, New Brunswick (Canada). Come see this clean western city for an eye opening experience. Fucking Rhurha valley has got to have less pollution than this fucked up town.
You're right on the money (no pun intended). There was a funny song in the early eighties titled "I'll build myself a greenhouse". It was about this guy who bragged that he had no education whatsoever but was gonna make a fortune by growing flowers in a greenhouse. For some reason flower growing was about as lucrative as ventures got in communist Poland.
My dad who had university education gave up his pittance of a salary as a civil engineer designing high rise tower buildings to become... a plumber. When he was a plumber we ate out at restaurants every other week and I had the trendiest clothes in my class.
Sorry to bust your preconception but I grew up in communist Poland and as a kid who loved Math I was "branded as a nerd or freak and subjected to the heavy beating by the other kids.".
The "cool" kids didn't become lawyers or business sleaze, they went on to become plumbers, car mechanics or professional tramps.
Sorry to have busted this myth but there was no glorification of science of Math in the society. To the contrary, trade jobs were considered "real" jobs while office jobs were viewed as something "artsy fartsy" even if they were engineering!
The reason why Eastern Europe has a higher standard of Math education than the West is that behind the iron curtain everyone oppressed everyone else and schools were no exception and graduating with semi decent marks was no mean feat. Then followed a tough university exam which eliminated like 80% of high school graduates (only about 20% of the society in Easter Europe has tertiary education). The end game was that university graduates were either the creme-de-la-creme of the society or in some cases got their degree through the right connections.
So most of those that funneled through the entire system were actually really good at what they wanted to do. Hmm... on a second thought maybe this is something the West could learn from us.
So.... I should make my next platform decision based on some guy's blog where he quotes some suspicious looking numbers within some unknown domain space and refuses to open the source code for public scrutiny? The Ruby trolls are really out in full force lately.
I'm a fan of furl.net not because of its bookmark sharing but mostly because of the bookmark search capability. I tend to bookmark lots of pages (hundreds per year) and no built in bookmarking is sufficient.
The main reason why those services are so useful is bookmark searching. They allow you (at least furl does) to search for keywords within the pages you bookmarked effectively turning it into your "personal Google". It changes the way you work with bookmarks.
As for sharing bookmarks, furl gives you a preference option where you can have all your bookmarks private by default if it bothers you when they are shared.
This is the nature of society my friends. People are not supposed to know how to fix everything they own.
They say I'm a pretty smart guy overall and quite handy with power tools. But when it came to refinishing hardwood floors in my house I chose to pay someone to come and do it. I sure could have rented the tools taken some practice in less visible areas and breathed dust for a week and maybe saved a few hundred bucks. Instead I was more than happy to pay a guy $2K to do all the messy work for me leaving me with brand new looking floors after my vacation.
That's called division of labour and it's a good thing. What seems like a trivial computer issue to me is probably dumbfounding to my floor repairman. But he knows everything there is to know about wood floors and I'm sure he's not any less smart than me. It is all about what we choose to specialize in.
I thought "We can build you" was weak. But you should read it anyway because one man's trash is another man's treasure. However, if you haven't read things like "Ubik" or "Three Stigmata" or "Martian Time slip" return the book and pick up "Ubik". It's PKD at it's finest.
Thanks for pointing out Lem. He's one of my favourites as well as my fellow countryman. Besides his writing he is also credited with bringing to focus the works of Philip K Dick who was a relatively obscure writer in Europe until Lem started to pimp him in all respected Sci-Fi magazines.
True enough. I was also surprised he wasn't there. To me the guy made sci-fi into a respectable genre. Before him it was mostly flying saucers and men in sliver suits firing guns with light bulbs.
That said, I find his work a mixed bag. From absolute total brilliance (Ubik, Three stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Martian Timeslip) to some pretty lame crap (Clans of the alphane Moon, We can build you). He was a very prolific writer but he also has his share of crap.
On average though he's probably #1 in Sci-Fi in my opinion. Oh, and his short stories are totally mind blowing.
Holy shit! I really hope none of the slashdot editors are subscribers of "Fine Woodworking".
I'm a beginning woodworker with not a lot of experience beyond the eternal stepstool and a winerack but I can honestly tell you that the workmanship on the laptop SUCKS ASS! cheap plywood with no joinery slapped on top of an old boxy laptop. Pretty embarrassing actually. At least he didn't use bird's eye maple for it or something...
This is exactly how talks collapsed with a startup that tried to poach me last year. The company was very small (about 5 people at the time) and they weren't willing to fork as much as a single share in the new company. I ended up walking away from the deal as it seemed ludicrous to go to a startup which still had a very high chance of failure yet not be able to participate in the rewards of ownership if the company takes off.
I wish them well. The founders are actually good friends of mine. But I felt I was being offered a very sour deal and they tried to take an advantage of me. It really did sour our relationship.
Bullcrap. The Nine out of Ten Startups Fail is actually an ubran legend. This statistic excluded all companies that got acquired by somebody bigger or merged with a competitor or split into unrelated branches. In reality around 50% of companies that got launched survive long term in some form of fashion. Only 10% of startups bring founders untold millions but in practice only about 50% are definitive failures.
Good API? The way I describe a good API is through a "how else" factor. Basically when an API makes me exclaim "Of course, how else would you do it" then it's good. APIs that I give me this feeling are many, among them QT, STL, JDBC, SDL, OpenGL and more.
On the opposite side of the spectrum are the "WTF" APIs and those are DirectShow (actually DirectAnything), SQL, w3c DOM and countless others.
I'm afraid that so far MS APIs mostly cause me to exclaim "WTF" rather than "how else". So by my definition they are crap.
Take my most recent experience DirectShow. What a mess! Lot's of incoherent interfaces, bad documentation, unintuitive method names and coupled with some legacy garbage from ActiveMovie to the point that you can't use DirectShow on its own. You have to learn about their old ActiveMovie API to be able to accomplish certain things.
Just go code something using MS APIs, something that can't be generated with a five step wizard. You'll have an idea of what I'm talking about.
I agree that it is a thin wrapper around (bad) Win32 APIs.
The one thing Microsoft has been consistently bad at is developing nice clean APIs. They often provided very good tools to help you cope with the sheer ugliness of their APIs but MS never managed to create an API that felt natural to use.
I had high hopes with.NET I thought MS was going to turn a new leaf in the API department and finally provide a programming environment that's usable without a gazillion wizards. No such luck. All of the OLE/COM crap sticks out of.NET like a sore thumb. The whole thing feels like a stovepipe patch on top of an old and crufty system and it just doesn't hang together as well as the Java runtime for example.
And that's still much too much legwork for most developers' tastes. I have worked with Hibernate for the past two years and know the library and the supporting tools inside out... and I still cringe every time I have to create this complicated setup just to have my OR working.
The Rails is such a great showcase of Ruby it really got me interested in the langauge itself. In particular looking at their Object Relational mapping tool it's very impressive how easy it is express your mappings with very little effort.
Have a look at this example
and compare it to a typical set of java classes with Hibernate tags. Then in case of Hibernate you have the extra build steps with Ant to generate the hbm files and so on. Don't get me wrong I like Hibernate and use it every day but Hibernate must operate within Java's syntactic limitations. With Ruby there is so much more flexibility that helps Rails achieve much more simplicity and expresiveness.
My grandfather (a farmer all of his life) told me he would always work without a shirt in the summer. Granted, he did say to always wear a hat in the sun but never thought much about exposing his skin to UV. He told me it was very common back then.
Melanoma tends to strike younger people as much as it strikes the elderly. And as for farmers covering up, most males used to work the field with bare torsos to ease the effect of the heat. With the undisturbed radiation levels before the ozone layer depletion this used to be a perfectly sensible thing to do (also see drawings depicting ancient Egypt labourers)
Melanoma is often called "young people's cancer" and with a good reason it's the leading cancer in people under 30 years of age. Living longer has nothing to do with the melanoma epidemic that we are experiencing.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no god and I am his prophet.
Deep in the heart of hearts you know that what I just wrote is true.
Now, if one is inclined to buy a Thinkpad as a "thank you" note to IBM then I'm sure IBM would have nothing against that.
Is it even worth conciously debating the forms in which we could "reward" IBM for helping OSS so much over the last few years?
I see you haven't been to Saint John, New Brunswick (Canada). Come see this clean western city for an eye opening experience. Fucking Rhurha valley has got to have less pollution than this fucked up town.
My dad who had university education gave up his pittance of a salary as a civil engineer designing high rise tower buildings to become... a plumber. When he was a plumber we ate out at restaurants every other week and I had the trendiest clothes in my class.
The "cool" kids didn't become lawyers or business sleaze, they went on to become plumbers, car mechanics or professional tramps.
Sorry to have busted this myth but there was no glorification of science of Math in the society. To the contrary, trade jobs were considered "real" jobs while office jobs were viewed as something "artsy fartsy" even if they were engineering!
The reason why Eastern Europe has a higher standard of Math education than the West is that behind the iron curtain everyone oppressed everyone else and schools were no exception and graduating with semi decent marks was no mean feat. Then followed a tough university exam which eliminated like 80% of high school graduates (only about 20% of the society in Easter Europe has tertiary education). The end game was that university graduates were either the creme-de-la-creme of the society or in some cases got their degree through the right connections. So most of those that funneled through the entire system were actually really good at what they wanted to do. Hmm... on a second thought maybe this is something the West could learn from us.
So.... I should make my next platform decision based on some guy's blog where he quotes some suspicious looking numbers within some unknown domain space and refuses to open the source code for public scrutiny? The Ruby trolls are really out in full force lately.
Don't judge the book by its cover... is all I have to say to you.
The main reason why those services are so useful is bookmark searching. They allow you (at least furl does) to search for keywords within the pages you bookmarked effectively turning it into your "personal Google". It changes the way you work with bookmarks.
As for sharing bookmarks, furl gives you a preference option where you can have all your bookmarks private by default if it bothers you when they are shared.
They say I'm a pretty smart guy overall and quite handy with power tools. But when it came to refinishing hardwood floors in my house I chose to pay someone to come and do it. I sure could have rented the tools taken some practice in less visible areas and breathed dust for a week and maybe saved a few hundred bucks. Instead I was more than happy to pay a guy $2K to do all the messy work for me leaving me with brand new looking floors after my vacation.
That's called division of labour and it's a good thing. What seems like a trivial computer issue to me is probably dumbfounding to my floor repairman. But he knows everything there is to know about wood floors and I'm sure he's not any less smart than me. It is all about what we choose to specialize in.
I thought "We can build you" was weak. But you should read it anyway because one man's trash is another man's treasure. However, if you haven't read things like "Ubik" or "Three Stigmata" or "Martian Time slip" return the book and pick up "Ubik". It's PKD at it's finest.
Thanks for pointing out Lem. He's one of my favourites as well as my fellow countryman. Besides his writing he is also credited with bringing to focus the works of Philip K Dick who was a relatively obscure writer in Europe until Lem started to pimp him in all respected Sci-Fi magazines.
That said, I find his work a mixed bag. From absolute total brilliance (Ubik, Three stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Martian Timeslip) to some pretty lame crap (Clans of the alphane Moon, We can build you). He was a very prolific writer but he also has his share of crap.
On average though he's probably #1 in Sci-Fi in my opinion. Oh, and his short stories are totally mind blowing.
Definately.
I'm a beginning woodworker with not a lot of experience beyond the eternal stepstool and a winerack but I can honestly tell you that the workmanship on the laptop SUCKS ASS! cheap plywood with no joinery slapped on top of an old boxy laptop. Pretty embarrassing actually. At least he didn't use bird's eye maple for it or something...
I wish them well. The founders are actually good friends of mine. But I felt I was being offered a very sour deal and they tried to take an advantage of me. It really did sour our relationship.
Bullcrap. The Nine out of Ten Startups Fail is actually an ubran legend. This statistic excluded all companies that got acquired by somebody bigger or merged with a competitor or split into unrelated branches. In reality around 50% of companies that got launched survive long term in some form of fashion. Only 10% of startups bring founders untold millions but in practice only about 50% are definitive failures.
On the opposite side of the spectrum are the "WTF" APIs and those are DirectShow (actually DirectAnything), SQL, w3c DOM and countless others.
I'm afraid that so far MS APIs mostly cause me to exclaim "WTF" rather than "how else". So by my definition they are crap.
Just go code something using MS APIs, something that can't be generated with a five step wizard. You'll have an idea of what I'm talking about.
The one thing Microsoft has been consistently bad at is developing nice clean APIs. They often provided very good tools to help you cope with the sheer ugliness of their APIs but MS never managed to create an API that felt natural to use.
I had high hopes with
And that's still much too much legwork for most developers' tastes. I have worked with Hibernate for the past two years and know the library and the supporting tools inside out... and I still cringe every time I have to create this complicated setup just to have my OR working.
The Rails is such a great showcase of Ruby it really got me interested in the langauge itself. In particular looking at their Object Relational mapping tool it's very impressive how easy it is express your mappings with very little effort. Have a look at this example and compare it to a typical set of java classes with Hibernate tags. Then in case of Hibernate you have the extra build steps with Ant to generate the hbm files and so on. Don't get me wrong I like Hibernate and use it every day but Hibernate must operate within Java's syntactic limitations. With Ruby there is so much more flexibility that helps Rails achieve much more simplicity and expresiveness.
My grandfather (a farmer all of his life) told me he would always work without a shirt in the summer. Granted, he did say to always wear a hat in the sun but never thought much about exposing his skin to UV. He told me it was very common back then.
Melanoma tends to strike younger people as much as it strikes the elderly. And as for farmers covering up, most males used to work the field with bare torsos to ease the effect of the heat. With the undisturbed radiation levels before the ozone layer depletion this used to be a perfectly sensible thing to do (also see drawings depicting ancient Egypt labourers)
Melanoma is often called "young people's cancer" and with a good reason it's the leading cancer in people under 30 years of age. Living longer has nothing to do with the melanoma epidemic that we are experiencing.
I think most farmers would disagree with that premise.