>> 86 percent of Ubuntu machines use the proprietary NVidia driver, where only a mere sliver of Debian machines do
Should be corrected to:
86 percent of Ubuntu machines use the proprietary NVidia driver, where only a mere sliver of Debian machines could figure out how to install it... the rest is still trying.:)
The obvious reason is to provide a consistent I/O class hierarchy where standard output is inherited from some other general stream.
Another common reason (I don't know if directly applicable in this case) is to dynamically assign behavior. Say you have an object and you will call its method named m="f" (that value/method-name is resolved at execution time), so you may execute sort of object."f"(). If the concrete needed action is a data printing, then you could set m="print" and that's all. But being print a language statement (like for or other syntax constructs) disallows this useful practice.
Please note that this is just the general idea, nothing of actual Python syntax.
You have a point, for example when I remember a great big application like Lotus-1-2-3 that was really stable, fast and AFAIK pure assembly. But when you start with:
>> Consider writing self-modifying code, just to make the program require less memory? >> Make "clever" use of obscure, corner-case behavior of certain machine instructions...
You're talking about hacking (and currently virus writing); past programming doesn't mean convoluted coding. I remember those weird undocumented machine instructions applied in some cheap micros in order to boost graphical performance of some games, but these were singular cases. Nothing destined to live more than 5 years or some mayor platform upgrade.
In my work we live with a venerable COBOL environment and several Unixes/Linuxes. Of course there are Java and.NET applications doing several auxiliary works, but nothing like you are mentioning.
I'd be interested in a benchmark about degradation of responsiveness of Windows VERSUS a growing battery of annoying -but real world- typical software like antiviruses, animated wallpapers, defragmenter, etc. The compression/encoding/other-cpu-bound tests are good for talking about Intel vs AMD.
>> Why would a heading which states that David Morrison disputes the hypothesis mislead someone to think that he supports the hypothesis?
I think because "disputing" is not necessarily being against:
from Webster (abbreviated by me):
1.To make a subject of disputation; to argue pro and con; to discuss. 2.To oppose by argument or assertion; to attempt to overthrow; to controvert; to express dissent or opposition to...
So from the heading some/(most?) people may understand that he accepts the discovery as an argument towards the hypothesis.
Governments never agreed in a single worldwide way to generate trivial sequential numbers (for example, SSN are useless outside USA) and I find a bit impractical (from a political POV) that they can agree on a single scheme for something a lot more complex (and potentially dangerous) like SSL certs.
And in that hypothetical scenario, be ready for USA banning Cuba CA's (and all current enemies); same the other way against USA; and also more bans against several categories of immigrants (as currently happens with driving licenses and SSN.)
I think the problem is more complex so it demands from users some better criteria for decisions, instead of just delegating the decisions to the local government.
Finally, I don't agree with you that geeks understand SSL certs... common geeks just happen to know how to install or get some fingerprint on them but no more. So yes, the current implementation of certs is broken.
>> We know that if we see a driver's license or a passport, we can be reasonably certain the person holding said identification is who they claim. >> but seems to me we already have a long history of internationally recognized identification--both for business and personal use.
Apparently no. That's the reason the travel to USA is now a PITA with all that added biometric registrations.
And for developing countries, the passports never were enough: because immigration laws, most require visa applications that are also a PITA.
I'm not sure if this kind of inter-national burden can be added to IP data without converting Internet in a nightmare or clueless regulations.
Yes, after you read the full article, you realize the opinions of Mr. Morrison.
But when you read a heading citing somebody's positive comment (out of more context), everybody thinks that it is related to the main idea of the article (you can't say later that the citation was related to another idea or just to some aspect of it.)
The main idea of the article was a supportive evidence to a killer comet hypothesis (remember the title is "More evidence for a Clovis-Killer Comet")
So the way the heading was written was misleading, because the NASA guy obviously don't agree with that hypothesis despite a positive opinion about the nanocrystals properties or whatever other aspects.
A new and single sound stack (valid for the next 10 years); with the added promise of discontinuing (deleting from the main tree) all the others by 2010.
> The best advice I ever received for starting a company? Drop Powerpoint and your VC pitch. Write code instead.
Well, in order to "start" a company, you just need to do a trivial bit of paperwork, and go shopping (office? computers? recruits?).
The sad thing is that in order to maintain your company, you need a reasonable flux of money, and that's a difficult part for most people. Not everyone will be able (lucky/savvy/whatever) to create the new You-Tube, but everyone have to pay for rent, food, etc.
So you need to make some calculations beforehand... yes, that silly phrase, a "business plan". And of course, *if* your business plan does allow you to develop the new killer app with your own savings (you replace the VC), then congratulations!
But don't forget that most companies have to struggle for years with cash flow in order to get that "killer app" really thriving in the market, and many never archive that target, just remain satisfied with a steady growing revenue.
Instead of yet another great book, this Christmas I asked to Santa to bless me with an external hard disk with all those poor trees I already own, but in digital format. Yes, it is a lot of fun to read the hardcopy, but I actually can't cope with the allocated space nor the cloth moths.
I'm sure that if they could cut the plug to XP, they would do (they have a lot of subtle ways to do that without officially dropping the OS.) Sadly they didn't give an viable alternative OS.
In the long run they should be angry and concerned since they're NOT providing innovation for their users in the OS front, so the users will search for it in Macs/Linux (and find it in many cases.)
The OS-related money is a permanent flow that does require continuous innovation, and at a very fast pace in the PC market.
>The way it is now, people as a whole will never be able to recognize homeopathy for the pathetic scam it is.
One of my best friends suffers of rosacea, so official doctors from time to time used to give him a battery of antibiotics in order to get a better face. After tired of several dermatologists, he tried with homeopathy, and with the provided substances he can get a similar effect for longer time and supposedly less collateral effects.
Of course, the homeopathic "doctor" may be giving some kind of antibiotic disguised as "zinc+salt" or that sort of weird mix, but the final effect is an improvement, so he just takes that medicine and tries to avoid thinking about the epistemology of the official medical sciences.
So, at least for my friend, he considers pathetic when people blindly believe just in the local health center specialist, and refuses to try another approach.
Yes, COBOL is (sadly) alive and well. But I agree with GP that is analogous to Masonry or similar societies:
* The are inside all big and important corporations/institutions * Nobody seems to note they are working silently between the rest of people (so most incorrectly assume they're disappearing) * Subject to absolutely weird (coding) customs * They never know the real agendas of their bosses
When I read "data loss", I think more of unrecoverable information (like crashed hard disks without backups, or forgetting passwords.) But the problem here seems to be more about "uncontrolled copies".
>> Seems to me like a situation that will sooner or later be ripe for Federal regulation or oversight.
At least in some domains, it is already. PCI for example puts restrictions for the duplication of sensitive data, and adds requirements forcing encription.
Slashdot Mirror
>> 86 percent of Ubuntu machines use the proprietary NVidia driver, where only a mere sliver of Debian machines do
Should be corrected to:
86 percent of Ubuntu machines use the proprietary NVidia driver, where only a mere sliver of Debian machines could figure out how to install it... the rest is still trying. :)
This week, in Slashdot:
1) Study finds that Ubuntu users have in average 51% more IQ than of Windows Users. The ratio rises when restricted to Vista.
2) fvnlkdjfvb55 reports that Debian restarts MySQL four times faster than XP restarts SQL/Server
3) Springfield college's students report that FOSS developers live longer than their Visual Basic peers because of greener food habits
4) Large-scale web interview study finds that nerds no longer like 'news for nerds' but rather something "more human"
>> "had no idea at the time he hatched this plot that if he killed his parents, they would be dead forever."
Maybe the problem is not the game but his Ubuntu box: he thought "kill parent" is harmless, since the real kill is with "kill -9 parent".
The obvious reason is to provide a consistent I/O class hierarchy where standard output is inherited from some other general stream.
Another common reason (I don't know if directly applicable in this case) is to dynamically assign behavior. Say you have an object and you will call its method named m="f" (that value/method-name is resolved at execution time), so you may execute sort of object."f"(). If the concrete needed action is a data printing, then you could set m="print" and that's all. But being print a language statement (like for or other syntax constructs) disallows this useful practice.
Please note that this is just the general idea, nothing of actual Python syntax.
You have a point, for example when I remember a great big application like Lotus-1-2-3 that was really stable, fast and AFAIK pure assembly. But when you start with:
>> Consider writing self-modifying code, just to make the program require less memory?
>> Make "clever" use of obscure, corner-case behavior of certain machine instructions...
You're talking about hacking (and currently virus writing); past programming doesn't mean convoluted coding. I remember those weird undocumented machine instructions applied in some cheap micros in order to boost graphical performance of some games, but these were singular cases. Nothing destined to live more than 5 years or some mayor platform upgrade.
In my work we live with a venerable COBOL environment and several Unixes/Linuxes. Of course there are Java and .NET applications doing several auxiliary works, but nothing like you are mentioning.
But faster USB = less holes, less chipsets, less price, less drivers, less trouble... for future machines.
In order to access my data, I have to pay the electricity bill at the end of the month.
I'd be interested in a benchmark about degradation of responsiveness of Windows VERSUS a growing battery of annoying -but real world- typical software like antiviruses, animated wallpapers, defragmenter, etc. The compression/encoding/other-cpu-bound tests are good for talking about Intel vs AMD.
>> Why would a heading which states that David Morrison disputes the hypothesis mislead someone to think that he supports the hypothesis?
I think because "disputing" is not necessarily being against:
from Webster (abbreviated by me):
1.To make a subject of disputation; to argue pro and con; to discuss.
2.To oppose by argument or assertion; to attempt to overthrow; to controvert; to express dissent or opposition to...
So from the heading some/(most?) people may understand that he accepts the discovery as an argument towards the hypothesis.
regards,
Governments never agreed in a single worldwide way to generate trivial sequential numbers (for example, SSN are useless outside USA) and I find a bit impractical (from a political POV) that they can agree on a single scheme for something a lot more complex (and potentially dangerous) like SSL certs.
And in that hypothetical scenario, be ready for USA banning Cuba CA's (and all current enemies); same the other way against USA; and also more bans against several categories of immigrants (as currently happens with driving licenses and SSN.)
I think the problem is more complex so it demands from users some better criteria for decisions, instead of just delegating the decisions to the local government.
Finally, I don't agree with you that geeks understand SSL certs... common geeks just happen to know how to install or get some fingerprint on them but no more. So yes, the current implementation of certs is broken.
can you change the resolution of your cellphone screen without changing your cell phone?
>> We know that if we see a driver's license or a passport, we can be reasonably certain the person holding said identification is who they claim.
>> but seems to me we already have a long history of internationally recognized identification--both for business and personal use.
Apparently no. That's the reason the travel to USA is now a PITA with all that added biometric registrations.
And for developing countries, the passports never were enough: because immigration laws, most require visa applications that are also a PITA.
I'm not sure if this kind of inter-national burden can be added to IP data without converting Internet in a nightmare or clueless regulations.
Yes, after you read the full article, you realize the opinions of Mr. Morrison.
But when you read a heading citing somebody's positive comment (out of more context), everybody thinks that it is related to the main idea of the article (you can't say later that the citation was related to another idea or just to some aspect of it.)
The main idea of the article was a supportive evidence to a killer comet hypothesis (remember the title is "More evidence for a Clovis-Killer Comet")
So the way the heading was written was misleading, because the NASA guy obviously don't agree with that hypothesis despite a positive opinion about the nanocrystals properties or whatever other aspects.
From the slashdot heading:
>> While disputing the current hypothesis, NASA's David Morrison allows, "They may have discovered something absolutely marvelous and unexplained."
From the article:
>> he said: "They may have discovered something absolutely marvelous and unexplained. But the impact hypothesis just doesn't make sense."
(bolds mine)
Ok, TFA is rubbish. You can get better rankings for the "coolest" by looking at the sourceforge stats (for example, the Project of the Month.)
A new and single sound stack (valid for the next 10 years); with the added promise of discontinuing (deleting from the main tree) all the others by 2010.
> The best advice I ever received for starting a company? Drop Powerpoint and your VC pitch. Write code instead.
Well, in order to "start" a company, you just need to do a trivial bit of paperwork, and go shopping (office? computers? recruits?).
The sad thing is that in order to maintain your company, you need a reasonable flux of money, and that's a difficult part for most people. Not everyone will be able (lucky/savvy/whatever) to create the new You-Tube, but everyone have to pay for rent, food, etc.
So you need to make some calculations beforehand... yes, that silly phrase, a "business plan". And of course, *if* your business plan does allow you to develop the new killer app with your own savings (you replace the VC), then congratulations!
But don't forget that most companies have to struggle for years with cash flow in order to get that "killer app" really thriving in the market, and many never archive that target, just remain satisfied with a steady growing revenue.
Instead of yet another great book, this Christmas I asked to Santa to bless me with an external hard disk with all those poor trees I already own, but in digital format. Yes, it is a lot of fun to read the hardcopy, but I actually can't cope with the allocated space nor the cloth moths.
I'm sure that if they could cut the plug to XP, they would do (they have a lot of subtle ways to do that without officially dropping the OS.) Sadly they didn't give an viable alternative OS.
In the long run they should be angry and concerned since they're NOT providing innovation for their users in the OS front, so the users will search for it in Macs/Linux (and find it in many cases.)
The OS-related money is a permanent flow that does require continuous innovation, and at a very fast pace in the PC market.
And in the credits a fat bearded guy yelling "I'm GNU/Linux".
>The way it is now, people as a whole will never be able to recognize homeopathy for the pathetic scam it is.
One of my best friends suffers of rosacea, so official doctors from time to time used to give him a battery of antibiotics in order to get a better face. After tired of several dermatologists, he tried with homeopathy, and with the provided substances he can get a similar effect for longer time and supposedly less collateral effects.
Of course, the homeopathic "doctor" may be giving some kind of antibiotic disguised as "zinc+salt" or that sort of weird mix, but the final effect is an improvement, so he just takes that medicine and tries to avoid thinking about the epistemology of the official medical sciences.
So, at least for my friend, he considers pathetic when people blindly believe just in the local health center specialist, and refuses to try another approach.
BTW, acupuncture didn't helped him, despite initial claims.
>> someone who considers a 9pt font shamelessly wasteful for anything but a presentation-quality final result.
Maybe using a bit bigger font size will save in your future ophthalmologist bills.
Yes, COBOL is (sadly) alive and well. But I agree with GP that is analogous to Masonry or similar societies:
* The are inside all big and important corporations/institutions
* Nobody seems to note they are working silently between the rest of people (so most incorrectly assume they're disappearing)
* Subject to absolutely weird (coding) customs
* They never know the real agendas of their bosses
But few ways so actively promoted by the language.
When I read "data loss", I think more of unrecoverable information (like crashed hard disks without backups, or forgetting passwords.) But the problem here seems to be more about "uncontrolled copies".
>> Seems to me like a situation that will sooner or later be ripe for Federal regulation or oversight.
At least in some domains, it is already. PCI for example puts restrictions for the duplication of sensitive data, and adds requirements forcing encription.