Seconded. I used to be a gamer; grew up on NES (FF1, Solar Jetman, DW1, etc), then SNES (FF2, etc), then DOS (Ultima UW 1&2, Dark Legions, MOO 1&2, etc), PlayStation (FF7), then Linux (HoMM3, JA2, NWN, etc). Lately, though, I just can't bring myself to play video games much anymore. I'm just too busy and there's no appeal. Why go on virtual quests when I can go rescue someone for real? Why pretend to play a guitar when I can go play in a real band for real fans? I'm not slagging games, I loved them when I was into them, but there's so much more to the world, and most of the games these days are bug-ridden, DRM-ridden, overpriced "moneymakers" that aren't released for Linux, and I'm not about to fsck around with getting them to run in WINE; I've got better things to do (see above).
The article notes that professionals in telecom and IT are left out from getting a Nobel Prize. I don't think of professionals in IT as scientists. A researcher at a company that does IT and telecom maybe (Bell Labs comes to mind), but "IT professional" makes me think of Larry the sysadmin lamenting that he'll never get a Nobel Prize.
Yeah, that perplexed me as well. IT professionals? Sysadmins? All due respect to them, but I don't think they are worthy of a Nobel prize unless they actually did something that will have lasting positive impact beyond their lifetime. Now Turing, Dijkstra or Hoare (you know, actual computer SCIENTISTS) on the other hand . . .
Things like "god bless" and "he's in a better place" are just like "gesundheit" for sneezing.
No, they're not the same thing; gesundheit is used to wish good health. That's why, as an atheist, I feel comfortable saying it instead of "bless you". It may be pointless, but it's also considered rude not to respond to someone sneezing.
As for non-believer responses to someone dying, you can with some certainty say that the person will not suffer anymore.
So it's not an actual religious statement, but a semi-farcical one, acknowledging that we atheists do seem to be at a loss for words when it comes to comforting and consoling people over the recently departed.
I'm an atheist who recently had to put a cat down. She had terminal cancer, and was basically a member of the family. Very loving, and we loved her. What it came down to was that she was suffering. She couldn't stand on her hind legs, had to be carried to the litter box. She wasn't eating or drinking, and even when she did, she couldn't keep it down, and even when she could, it hurt her to go to the bathroom. She seemed mostly content and happy (slept a lot the last few days), but it was obvious what had to be done. My wife is a christian, and even though we don't share beliefs on the afterlife, one thing we can agree upon is that our cat is no longer suffering.
As an atheist, I haven't seen any evidence of life after death. We only have so much time, so we better make the best of it. And we have to recognize when that time is no longer "quality" time. Heaven may not be real, but hell can exist here on earth; just ask any cancer patient.
However, my concern is that if doctor assisted suicide is legalized, the insurance companies will be significantly less motivated to treat seriously ill patients who choose to live. And eventually, even before they get to this stage.
This is an argument against for-profit insurance companies, not euthanasia. Though as others have pointed out, even socialized medicine has to take costs into account, but at least "profit" won't have a factor in that case.
What fool would buy a Nokia smartphone after all the jerking around of customers and developers?
I'm actually severely tempted to get another N900 as a backup. Seriously. It's that fucking good. The only reason I haven't is that, going by my previous rate of phone replacement, *something* as open as the N900, with much better hardware, will be out by the time I'm looking to replace my current one. Here's hopin'.
Make is changing this, of course, but we *all* turned into appliance operators over the last 50 years; no surprise Rat Shack went with the flow...
WTF are you talking about? Maybe *you* turned into an appliance operator, but the first thing I do when I enter a room and see something with screws is pull out my pocket knife with screwdriver (what? you don't have one? poor soul . . . ). I used to go to Radio Shack all the damn time in high school, picking up parts to plug in to breadboards for designs out of Forrest Mims books. Then Radio Shack started carrying cheap crap, crappier than the shit you could get at The Sharper Image, and I could never find what I needed in Radio Shack, so I started ordering online. Radio Shack kneecapped themselves, plain and simple.
Thomas A. Edison was a really awesome businessman, opportunist, and quite possibly the world's first patent troll. Very few of the inventions he has been credited for were actually invented by him, the person. Sometimes by employees of Edison, and sometimes these were foreign inventions, bought or outright filched, and then patented in the US by Edison.
You know what's really cool about my N900? I can export it's display across the network. I can also run graphical programs on my N900 off my laptop, file/print server or web/email server. Without tweaking, without rebooting, without having to start an X server or X server "compatibility mode" and without having to start some "remote desktop viewer". You know why? Because it runs X. I don't really have much of a problem with Wayland, except that they seem to think dumping network transparency is a good thing. Similarly, I don't have much of a problem with MeeGo, except they think that dumping apt-get and.debs in favor of RPMs is a good thing. "Those who don't understand UNIX . .."
Yeah, we've had loop-back filesystems in UNIX/Linux for quite some time. Of course, the handy thing is that we can pick any filesystem we want, including ones with case sensitivity. We've even got filesystems in userspace to have all sorts of cool things like encryption or Flickr "filesystems". It's not automatic in the GUI (that I've seen); perhaps that's something I should work on . . .
I know nobody likes to admit this may be a possibility these days, but maybe Google is, you know, trying to do no evil. Maybe they are trying to win through honesty and technical superiority instead of backroom deals.
Yeah, it seems to me that if some assholes are in favor of censorship, then they should have no problem with having their Facebook group deleted. What's that? Freedom of speech should only apply to speech they approve of? Fucking hypocrites.
And don't start about "freedom of speech doesn't apply to companies"; I'm all in favor of Facebook censoring anyone and everything. So let them delete the pro-porn group. Then, let's petition Facebook to permanently delete this anti-porn group. And the christian group. And the muslim group. Repeat ad naseum until somebody at Facebook gets the point.
I don't see myself buying a new box or a new TV with the tech built in anytime soon.
Neither did the wife and I; we kept our 8yo old 27in CRT (!) TV until it started having color issues. I had a MythTV box hooked up to it, but some caps on the motherboard popped, then I hooked up an old gaming rig. When the old TV started dying, my wife and I picked out a new 42in LCD based on Consumer Reports. Google Earth looks nice on it:) But as I was browsing the TV menus, I came across the one with the developer code and was giddy as a schoolboy! I keep the gaming rig in case I ever pick up WoW again, but quite frankly I'm having more fun learning to write software for the TV:)
What if you could write software for your TV? I started learning Javascript because I have a TV that can be programmed with it, and I want to be able to stream music from my fileserver to it, instead of having to hook up a separate box. The TV already plays Netflix just fine, and has apps avaiable (although I haven't used them) for Hulu, Amazon, Blockbuster, Vudu, Vimeo, etc, etc. As far as I can tell, the TV is basically a display with a builtin Linux computer that runs apps written in Javascript.
Sounds like a headache for developers: "these are the permissions you can ask for, but it's not sure they'll actually be granted." Then you'd have to build in checks absolutely everywhere because you can't rely on anything.
If a developers aren't checking to make sure argc is greater than zero and argv[0] isn't NULL, they shouldn't be shipping production code. "Checking absolutely everywhere" should be standard programming practice, because the one time something isn't checked is the one time it will fail.
Got an Android phone? You'd better stop depending on Skype, as quickly as you can, because you can bet your bottom dollar one of the first things that will happen is that "chat with all your friends on Skype!" will become a unique selling point of the Microsoft Windows Phone platform.
This. And just as a little reminder, if Skype had been open source, no one would be worried about Microsoft buying the company. Just sayin'.
If google were to make a ton of source code examples in everything from C to Visual Basic to Lisp or DOS showing how to read, write and save, and make many free programs to do conversion, then programmers might start using them.
This isn't a bad idea, and with the talent Google has, it wouldn't be hard. Heck, it could be a competition (internal or external) to write the reference library in every computer language, sort of 99 bottles. And while I'm a fan of GPLv3, making the source public domain probably wouldn't hurt either.
Unfortunately often devel tools to embedded platforms are windows-only (and so deeply rooted in the system that forget about WINE).
Are you kidding me? An embedded Linux dev environment that won't run on Linux? What genius thought that one up? If you're paying them, *they* should have had the professionalism to make it work properly, or included a proviso in the README that says "do not use on case-insensitive filesystems (such as FAT and HFS+); NTFS or UFS* should be used instead." And again, why wouldn't emulation/virtualization work? Or loopback filesystems? Please tell me at least OSX supports loopback filesystems?
* - damn, I had to dig for UFS; with Windows I expect that sort of thing; I'm surprised OSX doesn't support more filesystems; and people wonder why I prefer Linux. *sigh*.
Don't talk to me about cross-compiling, boy. I've been doing VxWorks and Linux embedded work for well over a decade. Of course you don't compile on the target platform! Except to try it out and have a giggle at how long it takes. But I just don't see the point in hacking on the Linux kernel under Windows or OSX, and this whole case-insensitivity mess just goes to show that Windows and OSX aren't suited for it. I've personally always used Linux to cross compile for Linux on other architectures.
If you really want to do Linux kernel work in Windows or OSX, run Linux in virtualization, or use a real filesystem. Or convince Apple and Microsoft that case sensitivity is a *good* thing. Because quite franky, I don't see how this is a *Linux* problem.
This requires that the kernel source be stored on a case insensitive file system, and will not work with Cygwin, nor with the default filesystem for OS X.
I don't think building under Cygwin or OSX is a high priority to the Linux kernel developers:) That being said, why should Linux kernel sources be forced to support building from antiquated filesystems? Also, I can understand Windows having this problem, but OSX? I thought they would have at least got that right. Wow. Add another item to the long list of reasons to avoid OSX.
When I tried to checkin the Kernel tree into Perforce,
Really? Seriously? I'm surprised anyone is even using Perforce.
Tell you what, why don't you do us a favor and file bug reports with Microsoft and Apple and tell them to try dragging their asses into (at least) the 20th century; UNIX has had case sensitive filesystems forever, so there's really no excuse. Hell, git works fine with mixed case on vfat under Linux. If case sensitivity is (supposedly) a user problem, well a) people mucking about with kernel sources should know better, and b) it should be solved in the DE/GUI/file manager (ie, application) level, not the kernel level.
There's a reason that all the big-hit startups over the past decade weren't standardizing on Windows as their web platform.
And quite frankly, it's not the licensing costs. If it were, and the quality were really there, you'd see tons of people pirating Winodws and setting up their own webservers on it, but AFAICT, the exact opposite is true: people largely setup webservers on Linux or FreeBSD because they work so much better at serving than Windows. Frankly, the only place I've seen people use Windows for web (or email, or ftp, etc, etc) is where it was forced down their throat by know-nothing management who was sold on it by marketeers from Microsoft.
Projects done with it will likely be much more expensive than strictly necessary, but you'll be able to easily do things that would otherwise need a decent understanding of electronics.
I've not played with Arduinos, but the thing that gets me is how many "professionals" look down on them. From a purely economic point of view, Arduinos are the perfect electronics prototype system. Sure, they may be more expensive than necessary, but I would think you buy one (or a couple) and rapid prototype something with them, then if you really want to mass produce, you use your "professional" skills to map the design to cheaper components and go from there. I'm no EE, but the EE's I know would easily be able to pick apart what is and isn't needed for final design, and furthermore, would know where to get cheap parts by the zillions.
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Seconded. I used to be a gamer; grew up on NES (FF1, Solar Jetman, DW1, etc), then SNES (FF2, etc), then DOS (Ultima UW 1&2, Dark Legions, MOO 1&2, etc), PlayStation (FF7), then Linux (HoMM3, JA2, NWN, etc). Lately, though, I just can't bring myself to play video games much anymore. I'm just too busy and there's no appeal. Why go on virtual quests when I can go rescue someone for real? Why pretend to play a guitar when I can go play in a real band for real fans? I'm not slagging games, I loved them when I was into them, but there's so much more to the world, and most of the games these days are bug-ridden, DRM-ridden, overpriced "moneymakers" that aren't released for Linux, and I'm not about to fsck around with getting them to run in WINE; I've got better things to do (see above).
Yeah, that perplexed me as well. IT professionals? Sysadmins? All due respect to them, but I don't think they are worthy of a Nobel prize unless they actually did something that will have lasting positive impact beyond their lifetime. Now Turing, Dijkstra or Hoare (you know, actual computer SCIENTISTS) on the other hand . . .
No, they're not the same thing; gesundheit is used to wish good health. That's why, as an atheist, I feel comfortable saying it instead of "bless you". It may be pointless, but it's also considered rude not to respond to someone sneezing.
As for non-believer responses to someone dying, you can with some certainty say that the person will not suffer anymore.
I'm an atheist who recently had to put a cat down. She had terminal cancer, and was basically a member of the family. Very loving, and we loved her. What it came down to was that she was suffering. She couldn't stand on her hind legs, had to be carried to the litter box. She wasn't eating or drinking, and even when she did, she couldn't keep it down, and even when she could, it hurt her to go to the bathroom. She seemed mostly content and happy (slept a lot the last few days), but it was obvious what had to be done. My wife is a christian, and even though we don't share beliefs on the afterlife, one thing we can agree upon is that our cat is no longer suffering.
As an atheist, I haven't seen any evidence of life after death. We only have so much time, so we better make the best of it. And we have to recognize when that time is no longer "quality" time. Heaven may not be real, but hell can exist here on earth; just ask any cancer patient.
This is an argument against for-profit insurance companies, not euthanasia. Though as others have pointed out, even socialized medicine has to take costs into account, but at least "profit" won't have a factor in that case.
I'm actually severely tempted to get another N900 as a backup. Seriously. It's that fucking good. The only reason I haven't is that, going by my previous rate of phone replacement, *something* as open as the N900, with much better hardware, will be out by the time I'm looking to replace my current one. Here's hopin'.
WTF are you talking about? Maybe *you* turned into an appliance operator, but the first thing I do when I enter a room and see something with screws is pull out my pocket knife with screwdriver (what? you don't have one? poor soul . . . ). I used to go to Radio Shack all the damn time in high school, picking up parts to plug in to breadboards for designs out of Forrest Mims books. Then Radio Shack started carrying cheap crap, crappier than the shit you could get at The Sharper Image, and I could never find what I needed in Radio Shack, so I started ordering online. Radio Shack kneecapped themselves, plain and simple.
So pretty much like Gates and Jobs then?
You know what's really cool about my N900? I can export it's display across the network. I can also run graphical programs on my N900 off my laptop, file/print server or web/email server. Without tweaking, without rebooting, without having to start an X server or X server "compatibility mode" and without having to start some "remote desktop viewer". You know why? Because it runs X. I don't really have much of a problem with Wayland, except that they seem to think dumping network transparency is a good thing. Similarly, I don't have much of a problem with MeeGo, except they think that dumping apt-get and .debs in favor of RPMs is a good thing. "Those who don't understand UNIX . . ."
Yeah, we've had loop-back filesystems in UNIX/Linux for quite some time. Of course, the handy thing is that we can pick any filesystem we want, including ones with case sensitivity. We've even got filesystems in userspace to have all sorts of cool things like encryption or Flickr "filesystems". It's not automatic in the GUI (that I've seen); perhaps that's something I should work on . . .
I know nobody likes to admit this may be a possibility these days, but maybe Google is, you know, trying to do no evil. Maybe they are trying to win through honesty and technical superiority instead of backroom deals.
Yeah, it seems to me that if some assholes are in favor of censorship, then they should have no problem with having their Facebook group deleted. What's that? Freedom of speech should only apply to speech they approve of? Fucking hypocrites.
And don't start about "freedom of speech doesn't apply to companies"; I'm all in favor of Facebook censoring anyone and everything. So let them delete the pro-porn group. Then, let's petition Facebook to permanently delete this anti-porn group. And the christian group. And the muslim group. Repeat ad naseum until somebody at Facebook gets the point.
Wow. I wonder what Linus, RMS, ESR and DJB are doing with my personal information.
Neither did the wife and I; we kept our 8yo old 27in CRT (!) TV until it started having color issues. I had a MythTV box hooked up to it, but some caps on the motherboard popped, then I hooked up an old gaming rig. When the old TV started dying, my wife and I picked out a new 42in LCD based on Consumer Reports. Google Earth looks nice on it :) But as I was browsing the TV menus, I came across the one with the developer code and was giddy as a schoolboy! I keep the gaming rig in case I ever pick up WoW again, but quite frankly I'm having more fun learning to write software for the TV :)
What if you could write software for your TV? I started learning Javascript because I have a TV that can be programmed with it, and I want to be able to stream music from my fileserver to it, instead of having to hook up a separate box. The TV already plays Netflix just fine, and has apps avaiable (although I haven't used them) for Hulu, Amazon, Blockbuster, Vudu, Vimeo, etc, etc. As far as I can tell, the TV is basically a display with a builtin Linux computer that runs apps written in Javascript.
Yahoo isn't the only one, BTW.
On my N900, BatteryGraph keeps an SQLite database for charting past performance.
If a developers aren't checking to make sure argc is greater than zero and argv[0] isn't NULL, they shouldn't be shipping production code. "Checking absolutely everywhere" should be standard programming practice, because the one time something isn't checked is the one time it will fail.
This. And just as a little reminder, if Skype had been open source, no one would be worried about Microsoft buying the company. Just sayin'.
This isn't a bad idea, and with the talent Google has, it wouldn't be hard. Heck, it could be a competition (internal or external) to write the reference library in every computer language, sort of 99 bottles. And while I'm a fan of GPLv3, making the source public domain probably wouldn't hurt either.
It's Linux, it's already ahead of Mac OS ;P
Are you kidding me? An embedded Linux dev environment that won't run on Linux? What genius thought that one up? If you're paying them, *they* should have had the professionalism to make it work properly, or included a proviso in the README that says "do not use on case-insensitive filesystems (such as FAT and HFS+); NTFS or UFS* should be used instead." And again, why wouldn't emulation/virtualization work? Or loopback filesystems? Please tell me at least OSX supports loopback filesystems?
* - damn, I had to dig for UFS; with Windows I expect that sort of thing; I'm surprised OSX doesn't support more filesystems; and people wonder why I prefer Linux. *sigh*.
Don't talk to me about cross-compiling, boy. I've been doing VxWorks and Linux embedded work for well over a decade. Of course you don't compile on the target platform! Except to try it out and have a giggle at how long it takes. But I just don't see the point in hacking on the Linux kernel under Windows or OSX, and this whole case-insensitivity mess just goes to show that Windows and OSX aren't suited for it. I've personally always used Linux to cross compile for Linux on other architectures.
If you really want to do Linux kernel work in Windows or OSX, run Linux in virtualization, or use a real filesystem. Or convince Apple and Microsoft that case sensitivity is a *good* thing. Because quite franky, I don't see how this is a *Linux* problem.
I don't think building under Cygwin or OSX is a high priority to the Linux kernel developers :) That being said, why should Linux kernel sources be forced to support building from antiquated filesystems? Also, I can understand Windows having this problem, but OSX? I thought they would have at least got that right. Wow. Add another item to the long list of reasons to avoid OSX.
And from that link you provided:
Really? Seriously? I'm surprised anyone is even using Perforce.
Tell you what, why don't you do us a favor and file bug reports with Microsoft and Apple and tell them to try dragging their asses into (at least) the 20th century; UNIX has had case sensitive filesystems forever, so there's really no excuse. Hell, git works fine with mixed case on vfat under Linux. If case sensitivity is (supposedly) a user problem, well a) people mucking about with kernel sources should know better, and b) it should be solved in the DE/GUI/file manager (ie, application) level, not the kernel level.
And quite frankly, it's not the licensing costs. If it were, and the quality were really there, you'd see tons of people pirating Winodws and setting up their own webservers on it, but AFAICT, the exact opposite is true: people largely setup webservers on Linux or FreeBSD because they work so much better at serving than Windows. Frankly, the only place I've seen people use Windows for web (or email, or ftp, etc, etc) is where it was forced down their throat by know-nothing management who was sold on it by marketeers from Microsoft.
I've not played with Arduinos, but the thing that gets me is how many "professionals" look down on them. From a purely economic point of view, Arduinos are the perfect electronics prototype system. Sure, they may be more expensive than necessary, but I would think you buy one (or a couple) and rapid prototype something with them, then if you really want to mass produce, you use your "professional" skills to map the design to cheaper components and go from there. I'm no EE, but the EE's I know would easily be able to pick apart what is and isn't needed for final design, and furthermore, would know where to get cheap parts by the zillions.