Then there's his religious background. Even if you are willing to ignore his Muslim heritage (and, yes, I know the madrassa thing was overblown)
I am a white conservative Christian Republican. Obama is none of those. And yet I still think you're talking out your ass. Your allusion to "his Muslim heritage" fails in two huge ways:
It's been proven time and time again that he isn't a Muslim, so why bring it up?
It implies that there's a set of acceptable religions for those in government and a corresponding set of unacceptable ones. As a Baptist, I don't want Baptists added to the "bad list". Therefore, neither can I tolerate another religion added to that list. I don't agree with Islam and I'm not particularly in favor of Muslims in high office here, but intellectually I understand that I can't deny anyone that freedom while expecting to retain it myself. So drop it already, OK?
his current church is known for running astroturfing campaigns against telecoms, and astroturfing for Comcast.
Obama owns a church? Wow! That's more impressive than I'd given him credit for. Back in reality, it's pretty much guaranteed that every religious group has members that do something unappealing, and equally guaranteed that the other members have nothing to do with it.
I didn't. I think he's a really great person but I can't get behind his politics. McCain-Feingold is still a sore spot with a lot of Republicans, including me. Again, I like McCain - I just don't want to vote for him.
On the Democratic side I was undecided for a long time with leanings towards Edwards.
Except for the fact that he's a pretty boy and a personal injury lawyer, he's probably not so bad.
In the last week or so I've jumped on the Obama bandwagon.
At last, a Democrat candidate who doesn't make me want to shoot the TV. As with McCain, while I disagree with him politically, I believe he's a decent, sincere person. I think we could do a lot worse than this man who genuinely seems to want to do the right thing for his country and fellow citizens.
I'm casting my lot with Ron Paul. Failing that, McCain would be OK, I guess, and if not McCain then Obama is probably the best of the remainder.
It would be nearly impossible to filter out copyrighted material.
s/nearly/utterly, completely/
Because of the Berne Convention, pretty much everything is copyrighted. Your post is, for instance (see the notice at the bottom of the page which just restates what the law already says). Therefore, code like if(copyrighted){block();} will filter almost everything save but for Shakespeare and some explicitly public domain software.
Because as we all know, manual memory allocation is hard to understand.
For me, memory allocation is dead simple. It's knowing when to free it that's the bear. In trivial cases where malloc() and free() are in the same function, that's a piece of cake. In more involved cases where buffers are working their way through multi-threaded code and it's not immediately clear which function will be the last one to touch a buffer (and therefore responsible for freeing it), it's a freakin' nightmare.
I openly admit that I'm a flawed programmer. When everything's going well, I'm very, very good at what I do. Sometimes I'm not at 100%, though. Maybe the baby kept me up last night. Maybe I drank too much coffee and now I'm jittery. Maybe a deadline is hanging over my department's collective head. At those times, maybe I'm only at 95% of my potential.
It's at times like these when I'm really glad we use $garbage_collected_language and I can concentrate on what my code is supposed to do and not every little detail of how it's supposed to do it. It's a computer. Its job in life is to keep me from having to repeat the same mind-numbing steps over and over and over. Why not let it do what it's good at so that I can work on the parts of the problem that a human can do best?
It's also worth noting that my family member is a practicing nurse, so her refusal to take vaccines isn't just risking her own health, but that of her patients. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Tough love. Does she work for a hospital? Tell the infectious disease control department what you told us. They are better educated and better equipped than you and I are to explain things to her. Additionally, they may also reassign her to a less patient-oriented position if they believe it's in the best interests of her and the people she cares for.
Yes, this would probably suck for her during the transitional phase. I don't think there's really a way around that. But look at it this way: if it takes 2 years to get her back into the swing of things, then this time two years from now she'll be back on track. If you do nothing, then 2 years from now she'll be no better off than she is today.
All he has to do is publish in a legal notice his intent and a clear means for any copyright holder in opposition to request removal of their work.
Does "git" have the equivalent of svn's "blame" command? And if so, does it have a past record of changes back to the original days? If so, the conversion could be even "safer": since you know exactly who wrote every line in the kernel, keep track of which authors have given you permission to switch licenses. When every contributor to a file has signed off, switch that file.
After some time, you'd end up knowing precisely which parts would need to be rewritten or removed in order to be GPLv3-pure. If "git" supports per-file metadata, you could even store that information in the source repositories. People who wanted a pure v3 kernel could check out only that code, and Tivo-like companies could keep using v2-only code as long as it still works.
Your way is (claimed to be) riskier but easy, and my way is (probably) safer but more involved. Nonetheless, both are certainly possible, and having two distinctly different ways of handling the switch should put to rest the myth that it can't be done.
Vista shipped on 39% of PCs in 2007: (floor of Bill Gates's "more than 100 million copies" boast for 11¼ months) divided by (nine-month-old estimate of the last 12 months of PC shipments)
You're right - the author seems to have overestimated Vista's adoption rate. You can bet that 100 million is pretty close to the actual number or Gates would have said "nearly 110 million" or "over 110 million". Guaranteed. Also, since PC sales are accelerating, a nine-month-old estimate is actually likely to be quite a bit short.
Ergo, it's much more likely that Vista is on an ever smaller percentage of PCs than then author calculated. Thanks for pointing this out.
XP shipped on 67% of PCs in 2002: (14 months of XP sales) divided by (12 months of PC shipments)
Another good point. It's likely that XP just accounted for 60% of new sales in the first year, so it's only about 50% more popular than Vista.
Truth is that Vista's first year adoption rate are pretty much better than XP's.
BS. Computers have a higher replacement rate now, especially given how many people are running out to buy their first laptop now that they're becoming fashionable and relatively affordable. Above that, when XP came out it was quite possible to buy Windows 98 machines. XP was an upgrade - not the default - for some time.
Contrast with now when Vista is the default OS but still has far lower uptake rate than machine replacements should indicate. Sure, you could claim that everyone is on a 7-year upgrade cycle now, but we'll all laugh at you.
I don't have any illusion that Vista or Microsoft are dying, but the facts sure aren't in Vista's favor right now.
Microsoft will make the codecs for video and audio available to users of Moonlight from their web site. The codecs will be binary codecs, and they will only be licensed for use with Moonlight on a web browser
Sure these formats have been/will be reverse engineered, but with DRM out there in the world it will make decoding DRMed media with open source codecs illegal! So much for free!
Not to mention that the codecs will only run on IA32 or whatever other platform MS chooses to grace with their presence, and explicitly will be useless for anything outside the web.
This might be heresy, but I though Foxtrot was funnier as a daily. It's like Amend is trying to cram a week's worth of humor into a single strip. I still like it better than most other comics, but I think he's jumped the shark.
Gasoline Alley, Mary Worth, Rick O'Shay, etc. aren't =supposed= to be *funny*.
I recognize the difference between "unfunny" and "dramatic". Note that I didn't list Gil Thorp or Rex Morgan, MD or anything else like that. I think you're wrong about Gasoline Alley, though. Although it is basically a long-running serial, it tries to be funny quite often. For Better Or For Worse is in the same category except that its humor succeeds more often than not.
Is it just me or are the comics in newspapers COMPLETELY devoid of any humor?
It's just you. Well, OK, they're pretty awful as a whole but there are still some decent ones:
Pickles: Who knew crotchety old men could be funny?
Heart of the City: Ditto 7 year old girls and their geeky friends.
Non Sequitur: If Gary Larson chose to tell a story instead of a one-liner.
Doonesbury: No, really. Not everyday, but most of the time.
Zits: Almost always at least mildly amusing, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.
Baby Blues: For parents only, I think - a perfect reflection the middle class married with kids lifestyle.
Peanuts: Yeah, I said it. Now that they're running Chuck's old stuff before he forgot that adults buy the newspaper.
Still not funny:
Cathy: Irving, think Ike Turner. You know what to do.
Gasoline Alley: Does anyone like this?
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
·
· Score: 1
Admittedly, I've not used Office 2007 much because of an initial attempt at using the trial version corrupted *all* of my.doc files to be only compatible with the new Office 2007, essentially forcing users to upgrade and make the purchase.
...as opposed to Pages, which saves files it its own weird native format by default. If Pages used (or at least supported) ODT, I'd have bought it already. In it's current form, it's every bit as closed as Word but with maybe 2% the market share. Why oh why?
I'm asking out of ignorance, so please don't flame me:
What's the point in replacing one symbol ("God") for, well, God, with another symbol ("G-d")? I've heard people say that you're not supposed to write his name, but whatever that is it surely isn't "God". So why the 1:1 replacement?
It's all a geek dream anyway, that people doing work for free is going to somehow outperform people who do their jobs to get paid and rely on that payment to sustain the quality of living they are used to.
People are still pouting that lie? In reality, IBM, Sun, Google, and many other megacorps are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in Free Software in general and Linux in particular. It's not the work of the hypothetical basement-dwellers any more, and hasn't been in about a decade. Linux is mainstream and probably more heavily financed than every other OS put together.
Microsoft is bigger than Red Hat and Novell. It's not bigger than Red Hat, Novell, IBM, Wal-Mart, and every other major corporate sponsor. Even Apple is along for that ride since they have everything to gain when Unix picks up momentum.
In saying that MS and Apple are bigger than Linux amateurs, you're building a nice little strawman. Linux isn't an amateur's game, and people who think it is are setting themselves up for a nasty shock.
Now, it might require a computer the size of a small planet to run the estimated 10^42 ops/second that modeling our universe may require, but it is not totally unbelievable that 200-500 years from now we, as a species, will harness this type of computer power.
Two things:
How do we know anything outside our immediate environment is being modeled? I mean, even what we think of as satellites could have been replaced with virtual objects that stream the feed of data the Powers That Be think we should be seeing. Ever played with a video game engine or a 3D modeling program? You can vastly simplify rendering if you don't care about everything not being observed by a camera.
Who says our simulation is running in realtime? Since the simulation is responsible for updating the time counter, it won't get updated until the simulation is ready to push out another frame. It could be cranking away on a god's equivalent of a dusty old VAX at 1/100,000,000th speed, but with millenia of uptime.
Even if you come up with a clever test that would pierce the illusion, one would have to assume whoever maintains the illusion would simply fix it so that didn't work a second time. Nothing would be repeatable.
"Luminiferous aether" used to make a lot of sense to some pretty intelligent people. If this were a simulation, then perhaps the sysadmins realized that "we" were getting close to exploiting some crappy code (like discovering that your performance counter is about to overflow a uint) and replaced it with a more robust version. Like, say, defining the old getLightspeedInReferenceFrame(vector velocity) function to return c instead of a computed value.
It's not that I disagree with you, but you can't dismiss some of the ideas that easily.
I belive that they skipped the 64-bits address to be able to fit the 48-bit MAC (Level 2) address inside the IP (Level 3/4) address, and thus avoiding the need for the router to use ARP to find the MAC address corresponding to a local IP address.
Not even close. Those bottom bits are used for the completely optional autoconfiguration feature. You're equally welcome to hand-configure hosts or use DHCP6 to assign network::1, network::2, network::3 and so on without regard to MAC.
To amplify what gEvil said, you're smoking crack. You can mount an iPod as a USB drive and copy MP3s to it to your heart's content. iTunes will even automate this for you if you don't want to do it manually.
Seriously, where do people get these ideas? Here, I want to start my own trivially disproven but still spreadable rumor and you can help: "Internet Explorer can no longer display JPEGs." Pass it on.
else you might as well be tunelling the old way anyhow.
What's so awful about that? OK, so it's not native, but none of your apps or services can tell the difference. The advantage is that when you do get native connectivity, you've already done your testing and you're ready for the world.
Two Slashdot staffers in the same thread? Nothing's left but to point out my improbably low UID, prompting others with lower UIDs to show up and call me a newbie.
Slashdot Mirror
I am a white conservative Christian Republican. Obama is none of those. And yet I still think you're talking out your ass. Your allusion to "his Muslim heritage" fails in two huge ways:
- It's been proven time and time again that he isn't a Muslim, so why bring it up?
- It implies that there's a set of acceptable religions for those in government and a corresponding set of unacceptable ones. As a Baptist, I don't want Baptists added to the "bad list". Therefore, neither can I tolerate another religion added to that list. I don't agree with Islam and I'm not particularly in favor of Muslims in high office here, but intellectually I understand that I can't deny anyone that freedom while expecting to retain it myself. So drop it already, OK?
his current church is known for running astroturfing campaigns against telecoms, and astroturfing for Comcast.Obama owns a church? Wow! That's more impressive than I'd given him credit for. Back in reality, it's pretty much guaranteed that every religious group has members that do something unappealing, and equally guaranteed that the other members have nothing to do with it.
I didn't. I think he's a really great person but I can't get behind his politics. McCain-Feingold is still a sore spot with a lot of Republicans, including me. Again, I like McCain - I just don't want to vote for him.
On the Democratic side I was undecided for a long time with leanings towards Edwards.Except for the fact that he's a pretty boy and a personal injury lawyer, he's probably not so bad.
In the last week or so I've jumped on the Obama bandwagon.At last, a Democrat candidate who doesn't make me want to shoot the TV. As with McCain, while I disagree with him politically, I believe he's a decent, sincere person. I think we could do a lot worse than this man who genuinely seems to want to do the right thing for his country and fellow citizens.
I'm casting my lot with Ron Paul. Failing that, McCain would be OK, I guess, and if not McCain then Obama is probably the best of the remainder.
But not Clinton. Dear God, please not that again.
s/nearly/utterly, completely/
Because of the Berne Convention, pretty much everything is copyrighted. Your post is, for instance (see the notice at the bottom of the page which just restates what the law already says). Therefore, code like if(copyrighted){block();} will filter almost everything save but for Shakespeare and some explicitly public domain software.
On second thought, that might be an improvement.
For me, memory allocation is dead simple. It's knowing when to free it that's the bear. In trivial cases where malloc() and free() are in the same function, that's a piece of cake. In more involved cases where buffers are working their way through multi-threaded code and it's not immediately clear which function will be the last one to touch a buffer (and therefore responsible for freeing it), it's a freakin' nightmare.
I openly admit that I'm a flawed programmer. When everything's going well, I'm very, very good at what I do. Sometimes I'm not at 100%, though. Maybe the baby kept me up last night. Maybe I drank too much coffee and now I'm jittery. Maybe a deadline is hanging over my department's collective head. At those times, maybe I'm only at 95% of my potential.
It's at times like these when I'm really glad we use $garbage_collected_language and I can concentrate on what my code is supposed to do and not every little detail of how it's supposed to do it. It's a computer. Its job in life is to keep me from having to repeat the same mind-numbing steps over and over and over. Why not let it do what it's good at so that I can work on the parts of the problem that a human can do best?
Tough love. Does she work for a hospital? Tell the infectious disease control department what you told us. They are better educated and better equipped than you and I are to explain things to her. Additionally, they may also reassign her to a less patient-oriented position if they believe it's in the best interests of her and the people she cares for.
Yes, this would probably suck for her during the transitional phase. I don't think there's really a way around that. But look at it this way: if it takes 2 years to get her back into the swing of things, then this time two years from now she'll be back on track. If you do nothing, then 2 years from now she'll be no better off than she is today.
Does "git" have the equivalent of svn's "blame" command? And if so, does it have a past record of changes back to the original days? If so, the conversion could be even "safer": since you know exactly who wrote every line in the kernel, keep track of which authors have given you permission to switch licenses. When every contributor to a file has signed off, switch that file.
After some time, you'd end up knowing precisely which parts would need to be rewritten or removed in order to be GPLv3-pure. If "git" supports per-file metadata, you could even store that information in the source repositories. People who wanted a pure v3 kernel could check out only that code, and Tivo-like companies could keep using v2-only code as long as it still works.
Your way is (claimed to be) riskier but easy, and my way is (probably) safer but more involved. Nonetheless, both are certainly possible, and having two distinctly different ways of handling the switch should put to rest the myth that it can't be done.
You're right - the author seems to have overestimated Vista's adoption rate. You can bet that 100 million is pretty close to the actual number or Gates would have said "nearly 110 million" or "over 110 million". Guaranteed. Also, since PC sales are accelerating, a nine-month-old estimate is actually likely to be quite a bit short.
Ergo, it's much more likely that Vista is on an ever smaller percentage of PCs than then author calculated. Thanks for pointing this out.
XP shipped on 67% of PCs in 2002: (14 months of XP sales) divided by (12 months of PC shipments)Another good point. It's likely that XP just accounted for 60% of new sales in the first year, so it's only about 50% more popular than Vista.
...which does nothing to protect them from patent or other bogus IP-based assaults.
however, you've been able to download them for free for IA32 for quite some time from Microsoft's Web site for free.That's exactly what I said.
BS. Computers have a higher replacement rate now, especially given how many people are running out to buy their first laptop now that they're becoming fashionable and relatively affordable. Above that, when XP came out it was quite possible to buy Windows 98 machines. XP was an upgrade - not the default - for some time.
Contrast with now when Vista is the default OS but still has far lower uptake rate than machine replacements should indicate. Sure, you could claim that everyone is on a 7-year upgrade cycle now, but we'll all laugh at you.
I don't have any illusion that Vista or Microsoft are dying, but the facts sure aren't in Vista's favor right now.
Sure these formats have been/will be reverse engineered, but with DRM out there in the world it will make decoding DRMed media with open source codecs illegal! So much for free!
Not to mention that the codecs will only run on IA32 or whatever other platform MS chooses to grace with their presence, and explicitly will be useless for anything outside the web.
...as long as it's politically convenient, i.e. until it becomes standard.
This might be heresy, but I though Foxtrot was funnier as a daily. It's like Amend is trying to cram a week's worth of humor into a single strip. I still like it better than most other comics, but I think he's jumped the shark.
I recognize the difference between "unfunny" and "dramatic". Note that I didn't list Gil Thorp or Rex Morgan, MD or anything else like that. I think you're wrong about Gasoline Alley, though. Although it is basically a long-running serial, it tries to be funny quite often. For Better Or For Worse is in the same category except that its humor succeeds more often than not.
Yep, and I still subscribe to one. I just wish I could pay half-price for a trimmed down local-only version with comics and the crossword.
It's just you. Well, OK, they're pretty awful as a whole but there are still some decent ones:
Still not funny:
...as opposed to Pages, which saves files it its own weird native format by default. If Pages used (or at least supported) ODT, I'd have bought it already. In it's current form, it's every bit as closed as Word but with maybe 2% the market share. Why oh why?
I'm asking out of ignorance, so please don't flame me:
What's the point in replacing one symbol ("God") for, well, God, with another symbol ("G-d")? I've heard people say that you're not supposed to write his name, but whatever that is it surely isn't "God". So why the 1:1 replacement?
People are still pouting that lie? In reality, IBM, Sun, Google, and many other megacorps are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in Free Software in general and Linux in particular. It's not the work of the hypothetical basement-dwellers any more, and hasn't been in about a decade. Linux is mainstream and probably more heavily financed than every other OS put together.
Microsoft is bigger than Red Hat and Novell. It's not bigger than Red Hat, Novell, IBM, Wal-Mart, and every other major corporate sponsor. Even Apple is along for that ride since they have everything to gain when Unix picks up momentum.
In saying that MS and Apple are bigger than Linux amateurs, you're building a nice little strawman. Linux isn't an amateur's game, and people who think it is are setting themselves up for a nasty shock.
Two things:
"Luminiferous aether" used to make a lot of sense to some pretty intelligent people. If this were a simulation, then perhaps the sysadmins realized that "we" were getting close to exploiting some crappy code (like discovering that your performance counter is about to overflow a uint) and replaced it with a more robust version. Like, say, defining the old getLightspeedInReferenceFrame(vector velocity) function to return c instead of a computed value.
It's not that I disagree with you, but you can't dismiss some of the ideas that easily.
Not even close. Those bottom bits are used for the completely optional autoconfiguration feature. You're equally welcome to hand-configure hosts or use DHCP6 to assign network::1, network::2, network::3 and so on without regard to MAC.
To amplify what gEvil said, you're smoking crack. You can mount an iPod as a USB drive and copy MP3s to it to your heart's content. iTunes will even automate this for you if you don't want to do it manually.
Seriously, where do people get these ideas? Here, I want to start my own trivially disproven but still spreadable rumor and you can help: "Internet Explorer can no longer display JPEGs." Pass it on.
What's so awful about that? OK, so it's not native, but none of your apps or services can tell the difference. The advantage is that when you do get native connectivity, you've already done your testing and you're ready for the world.
Two Slashdot staffers in the same thread? Nothing's left but to point out my improbably low UID, prompting others with lower UIDs to show up and call me a newbie.
I got the exact same one and you're 100% right. If you find out otherwise, drop me a line, would ya? I'll reciprocate.