So, you're complaining that a software company that gives away it's software and services for free, doesn't also give away it's code for free? Remind me to never give you a Christmas present.
Do you know what the phrase "undeserved sense of entitlement" means?
You believe in limiting government to the point that society would inevitably collapse. The libertarians I've heard from want to get rid of the FDA (which insures food quality), the EPA (which insures water and air quality), and the IRS (which you can't run a nation of 300 million people without).
>As to Iraq, although the liberal media doesn't tell you about it, >it appears that commerce is flourishing there, even with the violence.
You call 60% unemployment flourishing? The last time that happened here, we called it the great depression.
How can you say things like that and expect me to take you seriously? The economy can't flourish if people can't get to work without getting hit by sniper fire.
You need to think more clearly about what the world you are trying to create would really be like given the changes you are trying to make, and not what you *want* it to be like. Communists think they have a great system too, but in practice it always fails.
I suggest you take a look at how real world successful societies work, such as in Europe and Japan. They do not follow the model you are suggesting, but embrace a mixture of free market economy and social government social programs. There are numerous societies without a government to maintain law and order, but they are all miserable third world nations wracked by violence.
>What do you think are the most important obstacles barring the big >game publishers from reaching out to the Linux market more than they already do?
Why would anyone port gaming software to a platform that 1. Has a tiny desktop user base (servers aren't used for games). 2. Has crappy video card drivers, so all games will be slower than on windows. 3. Has users who have shown a strong resistance to paying for software. 4. Is on a platform that everyone can just dual boot into windows with. 5. Has wine. 6. Requires that every application be tweaked to work with each specific distro. 7. Regularly breaks backwards compatibility (the C++ ABI has changed a number of times in recent history. Sound has changed a number of times, and still isn't really standardized.). Who wants to buy a game that will stop working when you upgrade your distro?
Linux really isn't for games. Linux has it's own market on the server side and the embedded space, but it is not, and is unlikely to ever be a viable commercial gaming platform.
Even MACOSX, which has solved a number of the problems that Linux game developers face, still doesn't have nearly the game market that windows has. Games are usually ports that come out as much as a year or two after they come out for windows. Additionally, games usually run faster on windows.
In the 90's and 80's, there was a strong industry creating games that were only for Macintosh, as at one point Macintosh held a very strong marketshare and competed pretty effectively with does and windows 3.1. Bungie was originally a mac developer, and halo was originally planned as a mac first game. Various developers like Ambrosia software (of maelstrom and escape velocity), spiderweb software (of Exile), and DeltaTao software (of spaceward ho) created awesome games for the mac, but eventually started making their games for windows as well, or switched over to porting windows games to mac more than making original games.
That said, you should check out Nethack and Freeciv the next time you are on Linux. They aren't in the same tier as blockbuster commercial games, but I find Nethack in particular to be pretty enjoyable.
>I'm not certain of what you mean by "self-governance" but I would not >describe the United States as a having a system of self-governance.
>However if you want a system of economic domination, >a reinvigorated-feudalism for the 19th and 20th century
So you're saying that the US is a despotic and feudal society? I have to say that you either don't know what it's like to live in the US, or more likely, you don't know what despotic and feudal mean.
The US is far from perfect, but we select our leaders by universal suffrage, and so by definition we are "self-governed."
And feudalism? Everyone in our society has the right of travel, so we aren't serfs bound to our land. We have recognized human rights, and we can't be killed by someone of higher rank just because we piss them off (in fuedal societies, it is generally not illegal, or if so only a minor offense, to kill someone of lower rank). We can quit our jobs at will and work for someone else. Because of all these reasons the US is not feudal, and it ridiculous to call it so, and just makes you sound like you're being a cynical whiner.
I work because I have to to survive, and so does everyone I know, except for the lazy bums who try to live off of their parents indefinitely. However, I resent the implication that this makes me some kind of serf in a feudal society. In a healthy society, everyone works. Something like 95% of people of employment age work in our country. Even the very rich usually work in a professional capacity, although it may not be manual labor. But then, writing code wasn't considered manual labor the last time I checked, so I don't see how I can resent them for having a desk job.
Libertarians are anarchists that don't like to call themselves anarchists. They favor dismantling the government, but imagine that doing so would somehow lead to an idyllic society. They think that the "invisible hand of the market" will regulate all aspects of society.
The problem is that in the real world societies that lack strong government institutions and services are less utopia, and more lord of the flies. Industry and commerce cannot exist without law and order. Libertarianism tends to come from people who have read a little Adam Smith, and not enough Thomas Hobbes.
Iraq and Afghanistan are good example's of countries suffering from the power vacuum created by the destruction of strong government institutions. In Iraq, it was the institutions of the central government that made commerce possible by preventing the widespread violence that we see today. When they were demolished, what followed was inevitable.
really seems to be kicking ass at 90%; granted it is from a nightly build and not an official release.
Still, Safari seems to have been ahead of the game on standards and features for a while. Weren't they the first ones to pass acid2? Also, they were the first to implement various extensions to HTML which have become prevalent, such as the CANVAS tag, which was later added to firefox and others.
Now, there's a version of safari for windows that I've been meaning to try, but it seems to still be in public beta, and has been there for quite a while. My question for anyone in the know, is whether the safari windows build is still progressing.
>They claim that falling profits is directly related to piracy.
It doesn't really matter if MPAA profits are going up or down. The point is that theft is occurring. It is probably worse to steal from the poor than the rich, but it is still wrong and illegal to steal from the rich.
Politically speaking, the MPAA has to claim profit losses due to piracy to get traction in their fight against it. Everyone going to congress exaggerates their claims, that's the name of the game. That doesn't undermine that fundamentally the movie studios have had their legally established property rights violated and deserve the protection of the law.
>But theft from the artist starts before the movie is released.
And that is an excuse for pirating movies how?
Also, that's a bullshit argument. The artist enters into a legally binding contract, that some may say is not as favorable as possible. However, this is not theft. Theft is when you take someone else's possession without their consent.
Finally, I think you are confusing the MPAA with the RIAA in terms of "theft from content makers." The directors, actors, and writers for large movies all tend to get a pretty fare shake. The MPAA is more just an alliance of major studios to appeal to the legal interests of those studios.
If you look at what was added to java 1.5 (generics, for each loops, enums) and the stuff planned for java 1.7 (closures, method references), it's obvious that in many ways java is responding to language enhancements made to c#.
The point is that this competition pushes the status quo, and forces everyone to play catch up. Without it, sun may never have reason to add features like generics.
I'm also looking forward to silverlight, not so much for silverlight itself, but because silverlight is designed to allow you to program your client side code in the same language you write your server side code. Thus, you can share common code between both sides, and talk between server and client with simple RCP. I'm hoping that this will eventually become standard for client side technologies in response to silverlight, even if silverlight isn't picked up en masse.
The MPAA isn't the bad guys here, no matter how much you want them to be. Theft is theft. Putting quotes around the words "lost," doesn't mean that money isn't legally owed to movie producers for goods pirated.
Just because someone else's property is inconvenient, doesn't mean that violating it is some kind of civil disobedience, you stupid fucking highschool dropout jobless losers.
I don't agree with some of the filtering requirements they are talking about, but I'm sick of a bunch of fanboys living in their mom's basement trying to find excuses for stealing by taking shots at people who work for a living.
>I wouldn't go holding up FDR as a shining example of liberal success -- >his constant fiddling and abysmal monetary policy ended up stretching >the great depression out for a decade.
This is nonsense propaganda that is not backed up by historical fact. Do you even know what "economic meddling" FDR did?
The FDIC, the SEC, social security. All of these are core institutions in modern america, not "economic meddling." Why do you think the depression occured anyway? This wasn't some ordinary "economic cycle." The economy was *broken*, *no one* was employed, you couldn't retrieve your money from the bank, and people were starving to death en mass. Iraq has a better economy than we had.
FDR instituted the necessary reforms to *have* the kind of economy we have now, including *insuring your money in the bank* so that if the banks screw up (are you aware of the current sub prime loan crisis?) the banking industry still *exists* afterwards.
There a number of failed FDR programs that were repealed, which he can be rightly criticized for, but he basically *built* america's modern economy, which was *shit* prior to it. We weren't exactly an economic powerhouse *before* the depression, and without his reforms we couldn't be where we are today.
Next you're going to tell me that the Fed is the greatest evil to our money supply, like those ignorant ron paul wack jobs are always spouting off about.
my understanding is they provide something roughly equivalent to the "intro to programming" courses that most U's offer, along with some basic data structures, object oriented programming.
The algorithms stuff in intro to programming courses is often quite good, although not demonstrated in a systematic manner, since explaining the mathematical underpinnings and the general theory is way more than you can teach in a quarter.
The point is to get people solid experience programming, but also to give them experience program solving. Additionally a good school will make you actually write decent code, and get rid of that scripty one big main function style that most programmers start out with.
The value of this stuff can't be underestimated. Remember, *everyone* starts out a shitty programmer and only progresses to a decent programmer through a ton of work. Frankly, most people don't actually progress that far.
And the problem solving stuff! You can *never* get too much of that. Later on you can be more systematic about it, but honestly, ad hoc problem solving is good solid experience that caries forward into being about to handle both the theory and practice aspects later.
America has been under conservative control in *recent* history, say since 94 during the republican revolution, and in many ways this has already ended with the democratic congress. It is now conventional wisdom (aka nonsense) that it has always been a conservative country this way. FDR, JFK, and Lyndon Johnson were the big movers and shakers of the 20th century, and they left the lasting impression. Compare them to Reagan and his legacy, the national debt, and beating the soviet union by default.
The brief republican majority was largely a historical accident, and had more to do with disorganization within the democratic party, Rush Limbaugh, and Monica Lewinsky than any underlying demographic trend towards conservatism.
>The youth vote >is ALWAYS overrated - it hasn't made an impact since JFK,
Apparently you are pretty out of touch because young people have been turning out in enormous numbers during the past couple of elections. Also, there's a *reason* why people compare obama to JFK, and the youth vote is *part* of it.
>I'm not at all certain that Obama is the tougher candidate to beat >-- he's looked good so far, but that's partially because the press >hasn't been hounding him. That's beginning to change.
Obama's strength in beating Mccain is tactical in nature and has nothing to do with "how the press is treating him."
Obama and Hilary are extremely similar candidates in that they both have very little experience compared to Mccain; however, Obama has a number of strong points that work well in a general election.
1. He delivers better speeches than either candidate. (btw, It's ridiculous Hilary deprecates this considering what an important skill this is for a head of state). 2. He has strong appeal to centrist voters which are typically Mccain's base. Without the centrist voters, Mccain has to rely entirely on the party base which has already made moves to desert him. 3. He appeals to the young vote, and so is likely to bring more total voters into the democratic side, many of whom despise Hilary over her stance over net neutrality, video game censorship, and general hostility towards the baby boomer generation. In contrast, Hilary's elderly party regulars voting for her in the primary can be counted on to show up at the polls no matter what democratic candidate ends up in the general election. 4. He's demonstrated that he can raise way more money than any other candidate out there, and has run a much better organized campaign than Hilary, despite all of her claimed political experience. 5. He can honestly say he was opposed to the war from day one. Hilary on the other hand is going to get *nailed* for flip flopping in the general election the same way it happened in the 2004 election. After all, if the war was a mistake, it was *her* mistake, and that is not an endorsement for presidency.
Hilary complains that the media went after her more harshly than Obama in part because she is a genuinely weak candidate with lots of points to attack her on. If this were any year other than 2008, when the general election may just be handed to the democrats, no one would take her candidacy seriously. She's just not that strong.
if a temporary jam occurs, like a traffic accident, the traffic congestion will propagate backwards along the road long after the obstruction has been cleared. Sometimes you will observe gridlock on the freeway, as if people were waiting to move past a crash. Once you get to the point where the crash should be, there's nothing there and people speed away from a mass of gridlocked cars.
I read an article way back in 2003 (which I can no longer find) about how the proper way to remedy this was to convince people to keep significant space in front of their car, even when traffic is heavy. When traffic is heavy people have the instinct of moving up to just behind the car in front of them, but this doesn't actually make them go any faster, since they are moving the same speed relative to the car in front of them no matter what. In fact, it slows them and the people behind them down because if the car in front needs to slow down for a moment and there is no buffer of space between the two cars, then the car in back must also slow down for a moment. Since acceleration isn't instant, the time the car must be slowed down for increases as it moves down the line of cars.
Again, this stupid behavior disappears when people stop freaking tailgating each other, a practice which is bad for sooo many reasons.
from wikipedia "Mathematical theories
Some traffic engineers have attempted to apply the rules of fluid dynamics to traffic flow, likening it to the flow of a fluid in a pipe. Congestion simulations and real-time observations have shown that in heavy but free flowing traffic, jams can arise spontaneously, triggered by minor events ("butterfly effects"), such as an abrupt steering maneuver by a single motorist. Traffic scientists liken such a situation to the sudden freezing of supercooled fluid.[3] However, unlike a fluid, traffic flow is often affected by signals or other events at junctions that periodically affect the smooth flow of traffic; matrix entropy models consider the effects of this by "platooning" groups of vehicles and by randomising the flow patterns within individual segments of the network."
shows how much youtube has stagnated under google ownership. In the mean time sites like stage6, veoh, and daily motion have popped up with much higher video quality, and sometimes better organization of videos.
Youtube seems increasingly irrelevant compared to the multitude of competitors out there doing a better job.
>During the windows 3.x era, OS/2 WARP was touted as 'a better windows than Windows' >and this was largely true. Yet OS/2 had a very poor takeup (outside of vertical markets >like banks) compared to MS Windows.
OS/2 was developed by microsoft along with IBM. Microsoft even promoted OS/2, but found that it couldn't compete with windows 3.0.
According to wikipedia "Much of its success was due to the fact that Windows 3.0 (along with MS-DOS) was bundled with most new computers.[11] OS/2, on the other hand, was only available as an expensive stand-alone software package. In addition, OS/2 lacked device drivers for many common devices such as printers, particularly non-IBM hardware.[12] Windows, on the other hand, supported a much larger variety of hardware. The increasing popularity of Windows prompted Microsoft to shift its development focus from cooperating on OS/2 with IBM to building a franchise based on Windows.[13] Several technical and practical reasons contributed to this breakup:"
I've heard the OEM deals were seen as scummy by some, and may have been. However, one microsoft product beating another microsoft product by unfair microsoft market practices seems like a poor argument for showing how evil microsoft is. It's disappointing that the product which was technically superior in most ways didn't succeed, but the market clearly didn't want it as sold, and that's that.
>The reasons why Microsoft were so successful (in a business sense) are manifold, but >one is not that their products were great, but that they were good enough.
Yes... and the competitors products were not good enough. Apple had a shot at the desktop market for a while, but they failed to measure up to windows 95, which while sucky by todays standards was vastly technically superior to macos of the time which lacked virtual memory and preemptive multitasking that win 95 offered. Linux had a shot for a while on the desktop during the win 3.1 through ME period due to stability issues, but then they failed to address usability issues, meanwhile windows XP was introduced. Now those wars are over and done with, but the losers can't get over their bitterness and the deep seated feeling that their opponent somehow cheated.
And what's the charge that gets leveled against Microsoft? That they have a monopoly? That they use "unfair" business practices. That's like suing a competitor for being *too* successful, and for being a better businessman than you.
is that the sort to order people is O(n * log (n)), whereas if you just have people file into the plane, the worst case time is O(n), so this solution won't scale up as well on very large planes, say with a few million people, depending on what constant time it takes to seat an individual person.
Of course, since we have n processing elements, we can potentially use parallelism to increase asymptotic complexity. For instance, if you put out n signs with seat numbers 1 though n outside the plane, and had each person walk to the sign with their name, and assumed that there was plenty of space so that people couldn't block each other as they do on board the plane, than it will only take each person n time to find their sign (indexing isn't a constant time operation in this case), and since this occurs in parallel the entire sort will be O(n). In this case the complexity will be no worse for very large planes.
the X61s by far the best designed laptop I've seen. It isn't pretty, but it is high powered processor wise and light. I think it is a shame that more companies don't look after the practical usability of laptops, but instead tend to focus on making 6+ pound behemoths with huge screens that you will never be able to move off your desk.
Really, if you want that kind of hardware, get a desktop. As far as real laptops for mobile users go, thinkpad is the reigning king.
"There needs to be more detail on what a "Great Programmer" is. Is a great programmer a good code monkey capable of following instructions but turning out high amounts of bug free code? Is a great programmer a person that knows how to work without a specification but still do what the company or client needs? Is a great programmer a person who is great at coming up with new and unique software projects that may eventually be profitable"
In short, a great software developer needs to be able to do all of these things and more. You also need to have your own specialty to bring to the team, so you can distinguish yourself from the other great programmers.
>Oh and great programers do not necessarily come from formal education programs. >Most of the truly great programs, whether they went to college or not, >learned there skills through practice and self education.
The vast majority of people come from formal education. You also need professional experience, but you'd be doing a disservice if you suggested that college isn't important. CS coursework teaches theory and mathematics that you won't get in the industry, and which is important in high level work. A lot of the good people in the industry who are self taught end up going back to school later after they realize they've hit a wall in what they can teach themselves.
This may be an unpopular thing to say on slashdot, where everyone is convinced that they are uber leet HAXORS even all they do is dick around with their linux install, code a little python, and live out of their mom's basement.
there are plenty of self taught programmers, but there are few self taught computer scientists and software developers.
I have met brilliant people who are self taught, but those people are few and far between. Also, most of the brilliant self taught people I met at college, where they were going back to get their degree, even though they've been successful in the field for years.
There are plenty of people out there who have read some "how to program" book out there and think they have the equivalent of a college degree in computer science, but most of them are garbage. The truth is a CS degree covers a lot more than programming, and a software developer needs to know a lot of theory and mathematics to do good work.
Even if someone is self taught, they are always better off going back to college.
so, it's a tax that is specifically designed to put commercial software entities out of business on behalf of open source software.
Is this how desperate the open source community has gotten? I mean, we're already giving away the software for *free*, but that isn't working, so now you think we should just hijack the government and use it to enforce open source on the industry via taxation of anything that isn't open source?
Or are we going to tax the value of open source software as well and destroy not just commercial, but all software development?
Sometimes I listen to people talk, and I get the impression that they are broken. Sound comes out, but there's no rational thought behind it. Would people please stop posting stuff like this? It makes me lose faith in humanity.
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So, you're complaining that a software company that gives away it's software and services for free, doesn't also give away it's code for free? Remind me to never give you a Christmas present.
Do you know what the phrase "undeserved sense of entitlement" means?
>We believe in LIMITED government, not anarchy.
You believe in limiting government to the point that society would inevitably collapse. The libertarians I've heard from want to get rid of the FDA (which insures food quality), the EPA (which insures water and air quality), and the IRS (which you can't run a nation of 300 million people without).
>As to Iraq, although the liberal media doesn't tell you about it,
>it appears that commerce is flourishing there, even with the violence.
"Unemployment in Iraq has been between 60-70 percent over the last two years, according to the government in Baghdad."
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41284
You call 60% unemployment flourishing? The last time that happened here, we called it the great depression.
How can you say things like that and expect me to take you seriously? The economy can't flourish if people can't get to work without getting hit by sniper fire.
You need to think more clearly about what the world you are trying to create would really be like given the changes you are trying to make, and not what you *want* it to be like. Communists think they have a great system too, but in practice it always fails.
I suggest you take a look at how real world successful societies work, such as in Europe and Japan. They do not follow the model you are suggesting, but embrace a mixture of free market economy and social government social programs. There are numerous societies without a government to maintain law and order, but they are all miserable third world nations wracked by violence.
>What do you think are the most important obstacles barring the big
>game publishers from reaching out to the Linux market more than they already do?
Why would anyone port gaming software to a platform that
1. Has a tiny desktop user base (servers aren't used for games).
2. Has crappy video card drivers, so all games will be slower than on windows.
3. Has users who have shown a strong resistance to paying for software.
4. Is on a platform that everyone can just dual boot into windows with.
5. Has wine.
6. Requires that every application be tweaked to work with each specific distro.
7. Regularly breaks backwards compatibility (the C++ ABI has changed a number of times in recent history. Sound has changed a number of times, and still isn't really standardized.). Who wants to buy a game that will stop working when you upgrade your distro?
Linux really isn't for games. Linux has it's own market on the server side and the embedded space, but it is not, and is unlikely to ever be a viable commercial gaming platform.
Even MACOSX, which has solved a number of the problems that Linux game developers face, still doesn't have nearly the game market that windows has. Games are usually ports that come out as much as a year or two after they come out for windows. Additionally, games usually run faster on windows.
In the 90's and 80's, there was a strong industry creating games that were only for Macintosh, as at one point Macintosh held a very strong marketshare and competed pretty effectively with does and windows 3.1. Bungie was originally a mac developer, and halo was originally planned as a mac first game. Various developers like Ambrosia software (of maelstrom and escape velocity), spiderweb software (of Exile), and DeltaTao software (of spaceward ho) created awesome games for the mac, but eventually started making their games for windows as well, or switched over to porting windows games to mac more than making original games.
That said, you should check out Nethack and Freeciv the next time you are on Linux. They aren't in the same tier as blockbuster commercial games, but I find Nethack in particular to be pretty enjoyable.
>I'm not certain of what you mean by "self-governance" but I would not
>describe the United States as a having a system of self-governance.
>However if you want a system of economic domination,
>a reinvigorated-feudalism for the 19th and 20th century
So you're saying that the US is a despotic and feudal society? I have to say that you either don't know what it's like to live in the US, or more likely, you don't know what despotic and feudal mean.
The US is far from perfect, but we select our leaders by universal suffrage, and so by definition we are "self-governed."
And feudalism? Everyone in our society has the right of travel, so we aren't serfs bound to our land. We have recognized human rights, and we can't be killed by someone of higher rank just because we piss them off (in fuedal societies, it is generally not illegal, or if so only a minor offense, to kill someone of lower rank). We can quit our jobs at will and work for someone else. Because of all these reasons the US is not feudal, and it ridiculous to call it so, and just makes you sound like you're being a cynical whiner.
I work because I have to to survive, and so does everyone I know, except for the lazy bums who try to live off of their parents indefinitely. However, I resent the implication that this makes me some kind of serf in a feudal society. In a healthy society, everyone works. Something like 95% of people of employment age work in our country. Even the very rich usually work in a professional capacity, although it may not be manual labor. But then, writing code wasn't considered manual labor the last time I checked, so I don't see how I can resent them for having a desk job.
Libertarians are anarchists that don't like to call themselves anarchists. They favor dismantling the government, but imagine that doing so would somehow lead to an idyllic society. They think that the "invisible hand of the market" will regulate all aspects of society.
The problem is that in the real world societies that lack strong government institutions and services are less utopia, and more lord of the flies. Industry and commerce cannot exist without law and order. Libertarianism tends to come from people who have read a little Adam Smith, and not enough Thomas Hobbes.
Iraq and Afghanistan are good example's of countries suffering from the power vacuum created by the destruction of strong government institutions. In Iraq, it was the institutions of the central government that made commerce possible by preventing the widespread violence that we see today. When they were demolished, what followed was inevitable.
really seems to be kicking ass at 90%; granted it is from a nightly build and not an official release.
Still, Safari seems to have been ahead of the game on standards and features for a while. Weren't they the first ones to pass acid2? Also, they were the first to implement various extensions to HTML which have become prevalent, such as the CANVAS tag, which was later added to firefox and others.
Now, there's a version of safari for windows that I've been meaning to try, but it seems to still be in public beta, and has been there for quite a while. My question for anyone in the know, is whether the safari windows build is still progressing.
>They claim that falling profits is directly related to piracy.
It doesn't really matter if MPAA profits are going up or down. The point is that theft is occurring. It is probably worse to steal from the poor than the rich, but it is still wrong and illegal to steal from the rich.
Politically speaking, the MPAA has to claim profit losses due to piracy to get traction in their fight against it. Everyone going to congress exaggerates their claims, that's the name of the game. That doesn't undermine that fundamentally the movie studios have had their legally established property rights violated and deserve the protection of the law.
>But theft from the artist starts before the movie is released.
And that is an excuse for pirating movies how?
Also, that's a bullshit argument. The artist enters into a legally binding contract, that some may say is not as favorable as possible. However, this is not theft. Theft is when you take someone else's possession without their consent.
Finally, I think you are confusing the MPAA with the RIAA in terms of "theft from content makers." The directors, actors, and writers for large movies all tend to get a pretty fare shake. The MPAA is more just an alliance of major studios to appeal to the legal interests of those studios.
If you look at what was added to java 1.5 (generics, for each loops, enums) and the stuff planned for java 1.7 (closures, method references), it's obvious that in many ways java is responding to language enhancements made to c#.
The point is that this competition pushes the status quo, and forces everyone to play catch up. Without it, sun may never have reason to add features like generics.
I'm also looking forward to silverlight, not so much for silverlight itself, but because silverlight is designed to allow you to program your client side code in the same language you write your server side code. Thus, you can share common code between both sides, and talk between server and client with simple RCP. I'm hoping that this will eventually become standard for client side technologies in response to silverlight, even if silverlight isn't picked up en masse.
at some point in the distant future I imagine.
The point is that competition spurs innovation.
The MPAA isn't the bad guys here, no matter how much you want them to be. Theft is theft. Putting quotes around the words "lost," doesn't mean that money isn't legally owed to movie producers for goods pirated.
Just because someone else's property is inconvenient, doesn't mean that violating it is some kind of civil disobedience, you stupid fucking highschool dropout jobless losers.
I don't agree with some of the filtering requirements they are talking about, but I'm sick of a bunch of fanboys living in their mom's basement trying to find excuses for stealing by taking shots at people who work for a living.
>I wouldn't go holding up FDR as a shining example of liberal success --
>his constant fiddling and abysmal monetary policy ended up stretching
>the great depression out for a decade.
This is nonsense propaganda that is not backed up by historical fact. Do you even know what "economic meddling" FDR did?
The FDIC, the SEC, social security. All of these are core institutions in modern america, not "economic meddling." Why do you think the depression occured anyway? This wasn't some ordinary "economic cycle." The economy was *broken*, *no one* was employed, you couldn't retrieve your money from the bank, and people were starving to death en mass. Iraq has a better economy than we had.
FDR instituted the necessary reforms to *have* the kind of economy we have now, including *insuring your money in the bank* so that if the banks screw up (are you aware of the current sub prime loan crisis?) the banking industry still *exists* afterwards.
There a number of failed FDR programs that were repealed, which he can be rightly criticized for, but he basically *built* america's modern economy, which was *shit* prior to it. We weren't exactly an economic powerhouse *before* the depression, and without his reforms we couldn't be where we are today.
Next you're going to tell me that the Fed is the greatest evil to our money supply, like those ignorant ron paul wack jobs are always spouting off about.
my understanding is they provide something roughly equivalent to the "intro to programming" courses that most U's offer, along with some basic data structures, object oriented programming.
The algorithms stuff in intro to programming courses is often quite good, although not demonstrated in a systematic manner, since explaining the mathematical underpinnings and the general theory is way more than you can teach in a quarter.
The point is to get people solid experience programming, but also to give them experience program solving. Additionally a good school will make you actually write decent code, and get rid of that scripty one big main function style that most programmers start out with.
The value of this stuff can't be underestimated. Remember, *everyone* starts out a shitty programmer and only progresses to a decent programmer through a ton of work. Frankly, most people don't actually progress that far.
And the problem solving stuff! You can *never* get too much of that. Later on you can be more systematic about it, but honestly, ad hoc problem solving is good solid experience that caries forward into being about to handle both the theory and practice aspects later.
>Americans are center-right as a rule, NOT center-left.
You are *way* off base. There are many more democrats than republicans in this country:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party_strength_in_U.S._states
and the democratic party is by far the largest.
America has been under conservative control in *recent* history, say since 94 during the republican revolution, and in many ways this has already ended with the democratic congress. It is now conventional wisdom (aka nonsense) that it has always been a conservative country this way. FDR, JFK, and Lyndon Johnson were the big movers and shakers of the 20th century, and they left the lasting impression. Compare them to Reagan and his legacy, the national debt, and beating the soviet union by default.
The brief republican majority was largely a historical accident, and had more to do with disorganization within the democratic party, Rush Limbaugh, and Monica Lewinsky than any underlying demographic trend towards conservatism.
>The youth vote
>is ALWAYS overrated - it hasn't made an impact since JFK,
Apparently you are pretty out of touch because young people have been turning out in enormous numbers during the past couple of elections. Also, there's a *reason* why people compare obama to JFK, and the youth vote is *part* of it.
http://thehill.com/campaign-2008/poll-shows-youth-vote-boost-favoring-obama-giuliani-in-presidential-race-2007-04-19.html
"
Turnout among 18- to 24-year-olds grew by nearly one-third between 2000 and 2004, from 36 percent to 47 percent. And 2006 saw significant youth-vote gains for a midterm election as well.
"
>I'm not at all certain that Obama is the tougher candidate to beat
>-- he's looked good so far, but that's partially because the press
>hasn't been hounding him. That's beginning to change.
Obama's strength in beating Mccain is tactical in nature and has nothing to do with "how the press is treating him."
Obama and Hilary are extremely similar candidates in that they both have very little experience compared to Mccain; however, Obama has a number of strong points that work well in a general election.
1. He delivers better speeches than either candidate. (btw, It's ridiculous Hilary deprecates this considering what an important skill this is for a head of state).
2. He has strong appeal to centrist voters which are typically Mccain's base. Without the centrist voters, Mccain has to rely entirely on the party base which has already made moves to desert him.
3. He appeals to the young vote, and so is likely to bring more total voters into the democratic side, many of whom despise Hilary over her stance over net neutrality, video game censorship, and general hostility towards the baby boomer generation. In contrast, Hilary's elderly party regulars voting for her in the primary can be counted on to show up at the polls no matter what democratic candidate ends up in the general election.
4. He's demonstrated that he can raise way more money than any other candidate out there, and has run a much better organized campaign than Hilary, despite all of her claimed political experience.
5. He can honestly say he was opposed to the war from day one. Hilary on the other hand is going to get *nailed* for flip flopping in the general election the same way it happened in the 2004 election. After all, if the war was a mistake, it was *her* mistake, and that is not an endorsement for presidency.
Hilary complains that the media went after her more harshly than Obama in part because she is a genuinely weak candidate with lots of points to attack her on. If this were any year other than 2008, when the general election may just be handed to the democrats, no one would take her candidacy seriously. She's just not that strong.
I'm sorry, I couldn't hear what you were saying over that annoying cranking sound that you seem to be emanating.
Something about how ron paul could beat mccain? win the election?
Something about bullshit libertarian economics?
if a temporary jam occurs, like a traffic accident, the traffic congestion will propagate backwards along the road long after the obstruction has been cleared. Sometimes you will observe gridlock on the freeway, as if people were waiting to move past a crash. Once you get to the point where the crash should be, there's nothing there and people speed away from a mass of gridlocked cars.
I read an article way back in 2003 (which I can no longer find) about how the proper way to remedy this was to convince people to keep significant space in front of their car, even when traffic is heavy. When traffic is heavy people have the instinct of moving up to just behind the car in front of them, but this doesn't actually make them go any faster, since they are moving the same speed relative to the car in front of them no matter what. In fact, it slows them and the people behind them down because if the car in front needs to slow down for a moment and there is no buffer of space between the two cars, then the car in back must also slow down for a moment. Since acceleration isn't instant, the time the car must be slowed down for increases as it moves down the line of cars.
Again, this stupid behavior disappears when people stop freaking tailgating each other, a practice which is bad for sooo many reasons.
from wikipedia
"Mathematical theories
Some traffic engineers have attempted to apply the rules of fluid dynamics to traffic flow, likening it to the flow of a fluid in a pipe. Congestion simulations and real-time observations have shown that in heavy but free flowing traffic, jams can arise spontaneously, triggered by minor events ("butterfly effects"), such as an abrupt steering maneuver by a single motorist. Traffic scientists liken such a situation to the sudden freezing of supercooled fluid.[3] However, unlike a fluid, traffic flow is often affected by signals or other events at junctions that periodically affect the smooth flow of traffic; matrix entropy models consider the effects of this by "platooning" groups of vehicles and by randomising the flow patterns within individual segments of the network."
shows how much youtube has stagnated under google ownership. In the mean time sites like stage6, veoh, and daily motion have popped up with much higher video quality, and sometimes better organization of videos.
Youtube seems increasingly irrelevant compared to the multitude of competitors out there doing a better job.
>During the windows 3.x era, OS/2 WARP was touted as 'a better windows than Windows'
>and this was largely true. Yet OS/2 had a very poor takeup (outside of vertical markets
>like banks) compared to MS Windows.
OS/2 was developed by microsoft along with IBM. Microsoft even promoted OS/2, but found that it couldn't compete with windows 3.0.
According to wikipedia
"Much of its success was due to the fact that Windows 3.0 (along with MS-DOS) was bundled with most new computers.[11] OS/2, on the other hand, was only available as an expensive stand-alone software package. In addition, OS/2 lacked device drivers for many common devices such as printers, particularly non-IBM hardware.[12] Windows, on the other hand, supported a much larger variety of hardware. The increasing popularity of Windows prompted Microsoft to shift its development focus from cooperating on OS/2 with IBM to building a franchise based on Windows.[13] Several technical and practical reasons contributed to this breakup:"
I've heard the OEM deals were seen as scummy by some, and may have been. However, one microsoft product beating another microsoft product by unfair microsoft market practices seems like a poor argument for showing how evil microsoft is. It's disappointing that the product which was technically superior in most ways didn't succeed, but the market clearly didn't want it as sold, and that's that.
>The reasons why Microsoft were so successful (in a business sense) are manifold, but
>one is not that their products were great, but that they were good enough.
Yes... and the competitors products were not good enough. Apple had a shot at the desktop market for a while, but they failed to measure up to windows 95, which while sucky by todays standards was vastly technically superior to macos of the time which lacked virtual memory and preemptive multitasking that win 95 offered. Linux had a shot for a while on the desktop during the win 3.1 through ME period due to stability issues, but then they failed to address usability issues, meanwhile windows XP was introduced. Now those wars are over and done with, but the losers can't get over their bitterness and the deep seated feeling that their opponent somehow cheated.
And what's the charge that gets leveled against Microsoft? That they have a monopoly? That they use "unfair" business practices. That's like suing a competitor for being *too* successful, and for being a better businessman than you.
slashdot has patented kneejerk reaction. Fox news contests.
is that the sort to order people is O(n * log (n)), whereas if you just have people file into the plane, the worst case time is O(n), so this solution won't scale up as well on very large planes, say with a few million people, depending on what constant time it takes to seat an individual person.
Of course, since we have n processing elements, we can potentially use parallelism to increase asymptotic complexity. For instance, if you put out n signs with seat numbers 1 though n outside the plane, and had each person walk to the sign with their name, and assumed that there was plenty of space so that people couldn't block each other as they do on board the plane, than it will only take each person n time to find their sign (indexing isn't a constant time operation in this case), and since this occurs in parallel the entire sort will be O(n). In this case the complexity will be no worse for very large planes.
Or maybe I should just RTFA?
the X61s by far the best designed laptop I've seen. It isn't pretty, but it is high powered processor wise and light. I think it is a shame that more companies don't look after the practical usability of laptops, but instead tend to focus on making 6+ pound behemoths with huge screens that you will never be able to move off your desk.
Really, if you want that kind of hardware, get a desktop. As far as real laptops for mobile users go, thinkpad is the reigning king.
"There needs to be more detail on what a "Great Programmer" is. Is a great programmer a good code monkey capable of following instructions but turning out high amounts of bug free code? Is a great programmer a person that knows how to work without a specification but still do what the company or client needs? Is a great programmer a person who is great at coming up with new and unique software projects that may eventually be profitable"
In short, a great software developer needs to be able to do all of these things and more. You also need to have your own specialty to bring to the team, so you can distinguish yourself from the other great programmers.
>Oh and great programers do not necessarily come from formal education programs.
>Most of the truly great programs, whether they went to college or not,
>learned there skills through practice and self education.
The vast majority of people come from formal education. You also need professional experience, but you'd be doing a disservice if you suggested that college isn't important. CS coursework teaches theory and mathematics that you won't get in the industry, and which is important in high level work. A lot of the good people in the industry who are self taught end up going back to school later after they realize they've hit a wall in what they can teach themselves.
This may be an unpopular thing to say on slashdot, where everyone is convinced that they are uber leet HAXORS even all they do is dick around with their linux install, code a little python, and live out of their mom's basement.
there are plenty of self taught programmers, but there are few self taught computer scientists and software developers.
I have met brilliant people who are self taught, but those people are few and far between. Also, most of the brilliant self taught people I met at college, where they were going back to get their degree, even though they've been successful in the field for years.
There are plenty of people out there who have read some "how to program" book out there and think they have the equivalent of a college degree in computer science, but most of them are garbage. The truth is a CS degree covers a lot more than programming, and a software developer needs to know a lot of theory and mathematics to do good work.
Even if someone is self taught, they are always better off going back to college.
so, it's a tax that is specifically designed to put commercial software entities out of business on behalf of open source software.
Is this how desperate the open source community has gotten? I mean, we're already giving away the software for *free*, but that isn't working, so now you think we should just hijack the government and use it to enforce open source on the industry via taxation of anything that isn't open source?
Or are we going to tax the value of open source software as well and destroy not just commercial, but all software development?
Sometimes I listen to people talk, and I get the impression that they are broken. Sound comes out, but there's no rational thought behind it. Would people please stop posting stuff like this? It makes me lose faith in humanity.