Although the above was just a joke, I actually clicked on the link after I submitted it, and it turns out to be an old page from 2009. It provides the follows searches which it says "just don't work" on Bing (in 2009):
“Was Einstein married?” “What did Benjamin Franklin invent?” “What is the top selling album of all time?”
I did a quick comparison of those three between Bing and Google, and the results seemed pretty comparable. In fact, I thought Bing did a little better on the first two, and Google did a little better on the last one - primarily because it provided a nice blurb from Wikipedia in the results.
So, although I think we can all agree that Bing was "horrible" in the past, it's come a long ways. It's not like in the old days when Google was clearly the best - I think you could use any of the major search engines now and do just fine.
... this is just their latest way to get their hands on your data.
Unfortunately, they're all like this. Pretty soon, Facebook is gonna want to know who my friends are. After they get that data, they'll be using the data I report about what I had for breakfast to show my friends ads. Then, they'll be providing "Like" buttons to report the following breakfast data from my friends back to me: "Hey Mikey, he likes it!"
I dunno...I just put the following query into Bing: "is bing horrible", and it came up with Why Bing Sucks. Top 5 Reasons. So...it sucks, but it certainly isn't horrible.
You've somehow managed to simultaneously misunderstand and illustrate my point. My point was not that the GNU sense of "free software" does not pre-date "open source". My point is that the term itself is either confusing (to be charitable) or deliberately misleading (to be cynical).
In the Beginning, everybody understood the "free as in beer and free as in speech" thing.
I'm not sure who you mean by "everybody", but if you ask 100 people who don't know anything about GNU or its terminology, all 100 will tell you it means something like "software you don't have to pay for."
The fact that "free software" needs so much explaining, e.g. "free as in beer", "libre software", etc., illustrates what a confusing and/or misleading term it is. In comparison, "open source" needs very little explaining, and I don't even know of any alternative term for the concept that's clearer than the one the OSF has chosen for that.
Both the FSF and the OSF use their primary terms more-or-less as trademarks. In effect, the FSF wants you to believe that "free software" means whatever they say it means, which is basically software that's provided under a license they have created or approved. This is analogous to the fact that "Coca Cola" means whatever the Coca Cola Company says it means. The difference, though, is that "Coca Cola" is a valid trademark in the sense that it doesn't appear to mean something other than what they say it means. In contrast "free software" in the FSF sense could be software that you end up paying for! In fact, there's a whole industry built around the concept of charging for "free" software. Go figure. Oh, I forgot, it's really about "freedom".
So why not somehow just build that right into the term? Suppose the original term chosen by Stallman had been "Libre Software (tm)". I would have no problem whatsoever with that. Neither I nor the rest of the public would confuse that for free-of-cost software. We would never think that the main idea of it is that you don't have to pay for it. It also enough of a coined term that they might even be able to trademark it. (Stallman and Eben Moglen seem to just love to do jujitsu on intellectual property law, so I'm surprised they haven't trademarked anything like that yet.)
I don't speak Latin (except the pig kind), but if I wanted to know what "libre software" was supposed to be, I could research "libre", and it might make at least a little sense. Then again, free (as in "freedom") software wouldn't hold nearly as much initial attraction for me as free (as in "free of charge") software because I've never felt particularly enslaved by software. In fact, of all the things we have to worry about, software slavery ranks pretty far down on my personal list.
You've really got to hand it to Stallman for finding a new problem for us all to worry about so he could be in charge of solving the problem we didn't previously even know existed. Or, as the old saying goes, "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy." It's a wonderful way to get famous and become important.
BSD adherents take issue with Stallman's use of the word "free," as they believe software that you can do whatever you want with, even if it means making it less free later, is more "free," as it comes with fewer restrictions. To me, I think of "free" as a verb, rather than an adjective. Stallman, FSF type of "freedom" is about liberating themselves and others from restrictions, now and in the future. BSD "free" is an adjective, meaning "permissive." You're permitted to do whatever you want, including remove liberty later.
You've just put a nickel in me for one of my favorite gripes about "Free Software" (note the capital letters). If it's really about "freedom" than why isn't it called "Freedom Software" or maybe even "Freed (from shackles) Software". To me, this has always seemed like a classic bait-and-switch. Most users are initially attracted by the free-as-in-beer meaning of "free", then someone explains, "No, it's really about freedom - that's what's really important."
Perhaps Stallman and company could be forgiven for initially choosing a misleading term, but why haven't they made any effort to correct their terminology over the years? Note, in contrast, how vitally important precise and explicit terminology becomes to these folks when they want to receive what they believe to be adequate credit for "the GNU/Linux System". In that case, sloppy terminology like "Linux" simply cannot be tolerated.
If they took a consistent and logical approach to these things, the "Freedom Software Foundation" (my term) would not only be able to communicate their message better, they'd seem a lot more like people who really believed in a cause, rather than people who started something great and then got left behind, and are now wading in a pool of bitterness about that their loss of control over the movement they started which has now outgrown them. To me, their reaction to LLVM is the most telling sign I've seen yet of what's really important to them. It's all about ego.
It's a good thing we have Linus Torvalds and the BSD folks to really popularize open source software and to continually counterbalance idealism with practicality. Just think of all the folks who use Apple products who have benefited from Apple's freedom to meet their needs while simultaneously making a buck - or two. Don't you feel sorry for those all those poor, shackled Apple customers who have no choice but to by one Apple product after another?...
I'm guessing what he is referring to is the ongoing debate developers are having with Stallman over accessibility to GCC's abstract syntax tree.
I wonder what the young Richard Stallman who was first alienated by closed-source software at MIT would think of the old Richard Stallman's stance on this? It seems to me that the young idealist would have thought that if a little freedom to use and modify software in any way is good, more freedom would be better.
I honestly haven't been able to reconcile Stallman's stances on various recent issues with his stated philosophy. To me, a lot of what he's stated recently such as the LLVM thing and his insistence on specific terminology like "the GNU/Linux system" seem more like an expression of curmudgeonism and "not invented here" than any sort of quest for freedom. Or, maybe he just likes the attention now that he's no longer writing much code, and now that his newest license has been rejected by so many of his own admirers.
(Moderators please note: I'm not trolling, just stating my honest opinions. YMMV.)
Permissive open source licences allow freeloaders to choose if they should their modifications with the non-freeloaders who have already chosen to share with them.
Forgive me, but I've never understood what harm freeloaders do by freeloading on people who wanted their software to be "free" in the first place. I suppose you could claim that it's unfair or whatever, but in my own case, if I'm giving something away, I basically want people to take it. Isn't that axiomatic?
I've always thought that dynamically typed languages like Javascript are inherently slower compared to statically typed languages like Java, when running the same algorithms. Is that not true in the specific case of Javascript and Java? In other words does the V8 Javascript engine have some sort of special sauce that counteracts the overhead inherent in dynamic typing?
Not knowing anything about Node.js except various blurbs and hype I've read, here's something I don't understand about this so-called "epic battle": assuming Java generally has better run-time performance than Javascript, couldn't Node.js become "Node.java" and then the battle would be won by Java? Specifically, the good things I've read about Node.js seem to revolve around its architecture rather than the language it happens to be written in.
I'm really impressed with how effectively you analyzed and got to the bottom of all the bugs in that text. Would you be available to come write Linux kernel documentation for us? If you've already been doing that as a volunteer, then subsequently gotten hired elsewhere, then...well...never mind, we understand, thanks anyway.
Sorry it I was a little bit off. My apologies to you and all the other Anonymous Cowards of the universe. I wrote that stuff from memory based on some TV shows I saw. Also, please note that I specifically referenced the Special Theory of Relativity, which Wikipedia indicates was published in 1905. So relative to your information, perhaps I should have said "decade" rather than "decades". Again, I apologize.
Regardless of your anonymous and cowardly nitpicking, my basic point remains that no "new kind of science" gets accepted instantly. That requires some experimental proof, as well as the passage of time. In Wolfram's case, since "A New Kind of Science" was published in 2002, it's had enough time to at least begin to be accepted, if it will be - though I personally haven't seen much evidence of that.
Besides the Special Theory of Relativity, another comparison might be "cold fusion", which was met with a lot of initial excitement and publicity, but quickly received a lot of suspicion and eventually became widely discredited within (about) a decade.
Then why do we have HTTP/2? Well, because it's good for Google....HTTP/2 is in fact a protocol by Google, for Google.
Those are interesting points, but I don't understand why Google would ever be able to hijack a standard like this when there are plenty of other big players such as Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon to counteract their Machiavellian schemes. I could believe that HTTP/2 might benefit big organizations more than a typical little guy like me who uses shared web hosting (and not even a CDN), but is there something about HTTP/2 that uniquely favors Google over all the other big players?
Your idea of "A New Kind of Science" received a lot of publicity when it first came out, but doesn't seem to have really caught on in the years since. Is the idea wrong, or has the rest of the science world simply not caught up with you? Do you know of any serious scientific investigations or developments that have resulted from it so far?
In comparison, Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity took a few decades to find its first experimental proof, and to eventually be fully accepted by science. Do you see that sort of process occurring with your idea, or is it dying on the vine?
I've tried Wolfram Alpha several times over the years, and I have never been able to find any value in it. For example, I've just put in "FIR filter", and it comes up with nothing, saying only "Development of this topic is under investigation..." However, every major search engine provides lots of information about that topic.
Next, I tried one of the examples provided by retrieving stock information about GE. I then selected "Ratios", and most of the resulting output fields were blank. This correlates with my overall impression that whatever potential Wolfram Alpha may have, it currently is half-baked, at best.
To be fair, perhaps I haven't been using it as intended. So, does Wolfram Alpha currently have any value, and if so, what is it? Can you provide some examples of things it currently does better than any other online system?
I may have misunderstood your post, but without licenses like the GPL the people using the Linux kernel in proprietary devices would simply never make their code available. I'm not sure you made a point, or that the one you made is valid.
Which makes me wonder: would Google leave Android as open source if they didn't have to due to key components being GPL'ed? I think the answer is yes, because there's a clear business case for them doing so. The ability of phone makers to customize Android is necessary to commoditize the Android phones themselves so that Google can profit from related services.
Coincidentally, I did pursue the lawsuit idea when I was first hired, but I wasn't able to find a lawyer who would take the case. [sigh]
Actually, although I hated the Whitesmiths style at first and had a lot of trouble reading it, I was eventually able to adapt. Ironically, once I realized that it was similar to Python except with (seemingly) unnecessary braces, it became easy for me to read.
You can get use to any style that's applied consistently, and I eventually found a certain kind of clunky beauty in my employer's prescribed style. The entire organization uses it very consistently, which turns out to be more important than the fact that the style itself is basically dopey. Of course, the term "dopey" is subjective, but in this case I define it as meaning "non-minimal and not similar to any of the several established industry standards." It certainly qualifies under that definition.
Tattoos and piercings have existed for about as long as Christianity. I'll expect that "trend" to end as soon as the religious "trend".
Certainly, they've existed over the ages, particular in primitive tribes, including sailors and bikers. What's new - in my lifetime, at least - is that it's become such a mainstream thing. They're not just for sailors, bikers, and aboriginals anymore. But they will be again. And probably before bell-bottoms come back.
Tattoos used to be about being a rebel - they were a clear statement that you weren't a conformist. So, look for the sailors and bikers to start demonstrating that they're outside the mainstream by having their tattoos removed. Maybe the aboriginals will, too.
I am also an EE by training, but now write software exclusively, mostly embedded software, and I also dabble in some web development on the side. To me, the general value of any kind of engineering education is that it trains you extensively in problem solving. Although I learned a lot of specific things that I use on the job, the general thing I learned was how to solve problems. I also gained the confidence that problems which seem unsolvable at first could always be solved with a systematic approach and persistence.
I'm not claiming that learning problem solving skills is exclusive to an engineering education, but just that it's a particular emphasis of that. It's a very general and valuable skill that's applicable to many fields. In this example, perhaps you "solved the problem" of doing web development by taking a systematic approach to acquiring the skills needed, and persisting until you mastered them. Of course, anyone can do that, and there are plenty of capable self-taught web developers who aren't engineers, but your EE training certainly doesn't hurt.
I keep wondering what will happen when the fashion for tattoos fades away but the tattoos themselves don't. The (mainstream) people who get tattoos don't seem to realize that today's fashion generally looks stupid after a decade or so. But unlike other fashions, tattoos are intended to be permanent. In fact, that's the primary selling point. Fortunately, if necessity is the mother invention, maybe technology like that described in TFA will provide answers.
Another thing in this category is gauges. Even if one assumes that people with gauges look cool now, they're unlikely to look cool in a decade. (Witness bell bottom pants from the 1970s as seen from the 1980s or later.) Won't they look stupid in the future with either a gauge or a giant hole in their dangling earlobes?
As an old timer, the whole idea of body graffiti seems a bit strange to me. Usually, graffiti is applied to someone elses' property, not your own. At best, graffiti is art, but at worst, it is just vandalism. So why would you vandalize the single-most valuable piece of property you own - your body?
I've used "indent" many times in the past, and although it's better than nothing, it isn't really a solution for this problem. You have to go fix numerous other small style issues. For example, my employer has a very detailed - though quite eclectic - style. So, indentation and other issues that "indent" can deal with are only a small part of the problem. Also, K&R is my preferredstyle (I personally think Whitesmiths is dopey, but YMMV.) I'll concede my artistic integrity for pay at work, but not for free at home.
Regardless, my primary point (and Guido's, in Python) is that braces lead to a variety of defensible styles. We all have our preferences, but there's really no way to determine which is "best".
Also, for the record, I should mention that Python allows indentation to be any consistent level, with hard tabs counting as 8 spaces. Though it's seemingly contary to the aforementioned principle, that one can be filed under "practicality beats purity."
Tim Peters once said explained such contradictions with something like "the key to any successful philosophy is to allow yourself enough wiggle room to do what you really wanted to do in the first place." [wink]
Exactly. Imagine a brand of beer whose primary selling point was that it came in a bottle so small that you could drink an entire bottle in one gulp. Although that might be a nice novelty, the beers that come in a larger bottle probably are more enjoyable overall.
In my own case, I have always used the K&R style, but my employer requires the Whitesmiths style. I have a large base of code at home that I wrote and maintain in the K&R style, and it's hard to switch back and forth between the two on a daily basis [sigh].
Python's indentation is utterly Pythonic because it is compact, yet meaningful. It carries blocks to their logical conclusion. I started in Pascal with begin/end, then learned that braces were better in C, then learned that no braces were best in Python. QED.
Although I enjoy a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy, I can't figure out why McAfee, which is based in the US, and Kaspersky, which is based in Moscow, would work together to conceal each others' government spyware from us via some sort of universal white list. You'd think everybody would have a different white list to serve their own governments' conspiracies.
Hey...wait a minute...I just realized how naive I've been not to have realized that all world governements actually are conspiring together to oppress us. Now that's one whoppin' good conspiracy!
Each computing device has much greater responsibility nowadays, but the security has made NO advances.
I've noticed the same problem with cats and mice. No matter what advances the cats make, the mice remain. One can only assume that the mice make advances at about the same rate as the cats.
Slashdot Mirror
Although the above was just a joke, I actually clicked on the link after I submitted it, and it turns out to be an old page from 2009. It provides the follows searches which it says "just don't work" on Bing (in 2009):
“Was Einstein married?”
“What did Benjamin Franklin invent?”
“What is the top selling album of all time?”
I did a quick comparison of those three between Bing and Google, and the results seemed pretty comparable. In fact, I thought Bing did a little better on the first two, and Google did a little better on the last one - primarily because it provided a nice blurb from Wikipedia in the results.
So, although I think we can all agree that Bing was "horrible" in the past, it's come a long ways. It's not like in the old days when Google was clearly the best - I think you could use any of the major search engines now and do just fine.
... this is just their latest way to get their hands on your data.
Unfortunately, they're all like this. Pretty soon, Facebook is gonna want to know who my friends are. After they get that data, they'll be using the data I report about what I had for breakfast to show my friends ads. Then, they'll be providing "Like" buttons to report the following breakfast data from my friends back to me: "Hey Mikey, he likes it!"
I dunno...I just put the following query into Bing: "is bing horrible", and it came up with Why Bing Sucks. Top 5 Reasons. So...it sucks, but it certainly isn't horrible.
If you want my data just ask for it.
OK, let's start with this: is "ProzakLord" your real first name or your last? Either way, can you provide us with the other one?
You've somehow managed to simultaneously misunderstand and illustrate my point. My point was not that the GNU sense of "free software" does not pre-date "open source". My point is that the term itself is either confusing (to be charitable) or deliberately misleading (to be cynical).
In the Beginning, everybody understood the "free as in beer and free as in speech" thing.
I'm not sure who you mean by "everybody", but if you ask 100 people who don't know anything about GNU or its terminology, all 100 will tell you it means something like "software you don't have to pay for."
The fact that "free software" needs so much explaining, e.g. "free as in beer", "libre software", etc., illustrates what a confusing and/or misleading term it is. In comparison, "open source" needs very little explaining, and I don't even know of any alternative term for the concept that's clearer than the one the OSF has chosen for that.
Both the FSF and the OSF use their primary terms more-or-less as trademarks. In effect, the FSF wants you to believe that "free software" means whatever they say it means, which is basically software that's provided under a license they have created or approved. This is analogous to the fact that "Coca Cola" means whatever the Coca Cola Company says it means. The difference, though, is that "Coca Cola" is a valid trademark in the sense that it doesn't appear to mean something other than what they say it means. In contrast "free software" in the FSF sense could be software that you end up paying for! In fact, there's a whole industry built around the concept of charging for "free" software. Go figure. Oh, I forgot, it's really about "freedom".
So why not somehow just build that right into the term? Suppose the original term chosen by Stallman had been "Libre Software (tm)". I would have no problem whatsoever with that. Neither I nor the rest of the public would confuse that for free-of-cost software. We would never think that the main idea of it is that you don't have to pay for it. It also enough of a coined term that they might even be able to trademark it. (Stallman and Eben Moglen seem to just love to do jujitsu on intellectual property law, so I'm surprised they haven't trademarked anything like that yet.)
I don't speak Latin (except the pig kind), but if I wanted to know what "libre software" was supposed to be, I could research "libre", and it might make at least a little sense. Then again, free (as in "freedom") software wouldn't hold nearly as much initial attraction for me as free (as in "free of charge") software because I've never felt particularly enslaved by software. In fact, of all the things we have to worry about, software slavery ranks pretty far down on my personal list.
You've really got to hand it to Stallman for finding a new problem for us all to worry about so he could be in charge of solving the problem we didn't previously even know existed. Or, as the old saying goes, "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy." It's a wonderful way to get famous and become important.
BSD adherents take issue with Stallman's use of the word "free," as they believe software that you can do whatever you want with, even if it means making it less free later, is more "free," as it comes with fewer restrictions. To me, I think of "free" as a verb, rather than an adjective. Stallman, FSF type of "freedom" is about liberating themselves and others from restrictions, now and in the future. BSD "free" is an adjective, meaning "permissive." You're permitted to do whatever you want, including remove liberty later.
You've just put a nickel in me for one of my favorite gripes about "Free Software" (note the capital letters). If it's really about "freedom" than why isn't it called "Freedom Software" or maybe even "Freed (from shackles) Software". To me, this has always seemed like a classic bait-and-switch. Most users are initially attracted by the free-as-in-beer meaning of "free", then someone explains, "No, it's really about freedom - that's what's really important."
Perhaps Stallman and company could be forgiven for initially choosing a misleading term, but why haven't they made any effort to correct their terminology over the years? Note, in contrast, how vitally important precise and explicit terminology becomes to these folks when they want to receive what they believe to be adequate credit for "the GNU/Linux System". In that case, sloppy terminology like "Linux" simply cannot be tolerated.
If they took a consistent and logical approach to these things, the "Freedom Software Foundation" (my term) would not only be able to communicate their message better, they'd seem a lot more like people who really believed in a cause, rather than people who started something great and then got left behind, and are now wading in a pool of bitterness about that their loss of control over the movement they started which has now outgrown them. To me, their reaction to LLVM is the most telling sign I've seen yet of what's really important to them. It's all about ego.
It's a good thing we have Linus Torvalds and the BSD folks to really popularize open source software and to continually counterbalance idealism with practicality. Just think of all the folks who use Apple products who have benefited from Apple's freedom to meet their needs while simultaneously making a buck - or two. Don't you feel sorry for those all those poor, shackled Apple customers who have no choice but to by one Apple product after another?...
I'm guessing what he is referring to is the ongoing debate developers are having with Stallman over accessibility to GCC's abstract syntax tree.
I wonder what the young Richard Stallman who was first alienated by closed-source software at MIT would think of the old Richard Stallman's stance on this? It seems to me that the young idealist would have thought that if a little freedom to use and modify software in any way is good, more freedom would be better.
I honestly haven't been able to reconcile Stallman's stances on various recent issues with his stated philosophy. To me, a lot of what he's stated recently such as the LLVM thing and his insistence on specific terminology like "the GNU/Linux system" seem more like an expression of curmudgeonism and "not invented here" than any sort of quest for freedom. Or, maybe he just likes the attention now that he's no longer writing much code, and now that his newest license has been rejected by so many of his own admirers.
(Moderators please note: I'm not trolling, just stating my honest opinions. YMMV.)
Permissive open source licences allow freeloaders to choose if they should their modifications with the non-freeloaders who have already chosen to share with them.
Forgive me, but I've never understood what harm freeloaders do by freeloading on people who wanted their software to be "free" in the first place. I suppose you could claim that it's unfair or whatever, but in my own case, if I'm giving something away, I basically want people to take it. Isn't that axiomatic?
I've always thought that dynamically typed languages like Javascript are inherently slower compared to statically typed languages like Java, when running the same algorithms. Is that not true in the specific case of Javascript and Java? In other words does the V8 Javascript engine have some sort of special sauce that counteracts the overhead inherent in dynamic typing?
Not knowing anything about Node.js except various blurbs and hype I've read, here's something I don't understand about this so-called "epic battle": assuming Java generally has better run-time performance than Javascript, couldn't Node.js become "Node.java" and then the battle would be won by Java? Specifically, the good things I've read about Node.js seem to revolve around its architecture rather than the language it happens to be written in.
I'm really impressed with how effectively you analyzed and got to the bottom of all the bugs in that text. Would you be available to come write Linux kernel documentation for us? If you've already been doing that as a volunteer, then subsequently gotten hired elsewhere, then...well...never mind, we understand, thanks anyway.
Sorry it I was a little bit off. My apologies to you and all the other Anonymous Cowards of the universe. I wrote that stuff from memory based on some TV shows I saw. Also, please note that I specifically referenced the Special Theory of Relativity, which Wikipedia indicates was published in 1905. So relative to your information, perhaps I should have said "decade" rather than "decades". Again, I apologize.
Regardless of your anonymous and cowardly nitpicking, my basic point remains that no "new kind of science" gets accepted instantly. That requires some experimental proof, as well as the passage of time. In Wolfram's case, since "A New Kind of Science" was published in 2002, it's had enough time to at least begin to be accepted, if it will be - though I personally haven't seen much evidence of that.
Besides the Special Theory of Relativity, another comparison might be "cold fusion", which was met with a lot of initial excitement and publicity, but quickly received a lot of suspicion and eventually became widely discredited within (about) a decade.
Then why do we have HTTP/2? Well, because it's good for Google....HTTP/2 is in fact a protocol by Google, for Google.
Those are interesting points, but I don't understand why Google would ever be able to hijack a standard like this when there are plenty of other big players such as Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon to counteract their Machiavellian schemes. I could believe that HTTP/2 might benefit big organizations more than a typical little guy like me who uses shared web hosting (and not even a CDN), but is there something about HTTP/2 that uniquely favors Google over all the other big players?
Your idea of "A New Kind of Science" received a lot of publicity when it first came out, but doesn't seem to have really caught on in the years since. Is the idea wrong, or has the rest of the science world simply not caught up with you? Do you know of any serious scientific investigations or developments that have resulted from it so far?
In comparison, Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity took a few decades to find its first experimental proof, and to eventually be fully accepted by science. Do you see that sort of process occurring with your idea, or is it dying on the vine?
I've tried Wolfram Alpha several times over the years, and I have never been able to find any value in it. For example, I've just put in "FIR filter", and it comes up with nothing, saying only "Development of this topic is under investigation..." However, every major search engine provides lots of information about that topic.
Next, I tried one of the examples provided by retrieving stock information about GE. I then selected "Ratios", and most of the resulting output fields were blank. This correlates with my overall impression that whatever potential Wolfram Alpha may have, it currently is half-baked, at best.
To be fair, perhaps I haven't been using it as intended. So, does Wolfram Alpha currently have any value, and if so, what is it? Can you provide some examples of things it currently does better than any other online system?
I may have misunderstood your post, but without licenses like the GPL the people using the Linux kernel in proprietary devices would simply never make their code available. I'm not sure you made a point, or that the one you made is valid.
Which makes me wonder: would Google leave Android as open source if they didn't have to due to key components being GPL'ed? I think the answer is yes, because there's a clear business case for them doing so. The ability of phone makers to customize Android is necessary to commoditize the Android phones themselves so that Google can profit from related services.
Coincidentally, I did pursue the lawsuit idea when I was first hired, but I wasn't able to find a lawyer who would take the case. [sigh]
Actually, although I hated the Whitesmiths style at first and had a lot of trouble reading it, I was eventually able to adapt. Ironically, once I realized that it was similar to Python except with (seemingly) unnecessary braces, it became easy for me to read.
You can get use to any style that's applied consistently, and I eventually found a certain kind of clunky beauty in my employer's prescribed style. The entire organization uses it very consistently, which turns out to be more important than the fact that the style itself is basically dopey. Of course, the term "dopey" is subjective, but in this case I define it as meaning "non-minimal and not similar to any of the several established industry standards." It certainly qualifies under that definition.
Tattoos and piercings have existed for about as long as Christianity. I'll expect that "trend" to end as soon as the religious "trend".
Certainly, they've existed over the ages, particular in primitive tribes, including sailors and bikers. What's new - in my lifetime, at least - is that it's become such a mainstream thing. They're not just for sailors, bikers, and aboriginals anymore. But they will be again. And probably before bell-bottoms come back.
Tattoos used to be about being a rebel - they were a clear statement that you weren't a conformist. So, look for the sailors and bikers to start demonstrating that they're outside the mainstream by having their tattoos removed. Maybe the aboriginals will, too.
I am also an EE by training, but now write software exclusively, mostly embedded software, and I also dabble in some web development on the side. To me, the general value of any kind of engineering education is that it trains you extensively in problem solving. Although I learned a lot of specific things that I use on the job, the general thing I learned was how to solve problems. I also gained the confidence that problems which seem unsolvable at first could always be solved with a systematic approach and persistence.
I'm not claiming that learning problem solving skills is exclusive to an engineering education, but just that it's a particular emphasis of that. It's a very general and valuable skill that's applicable to many fields. In this example, perhaps you "solved the problem" of doing web development by taking a systematic approach to acquiring the skills needed, and persisting until you mastered them. Of course, anyone can do that, and there are plenty of capable self-taught web developers who aren't engineers, but your EE training certainly doesn't hurt.
I keep wondering what will happen when the fashion for tattoos fades away but the tattoos themselves don't. The (mainstream) people who get tattoos don't seem to realize that today's fashion generally looks stupid after a decade or so. But unlike other fashions, tattoos are intended to be permanent. In fact, that's the primary selling point. Fortunately, if necessity is the mother invention, maybe technology like that described in TFA will provide answers.
Another thing in this category is gauges. Even if one assumes that people with gauges look cool now, they're unlikely to look cool in a decade. (Witness bell bottom pants from the 1970s as seen from the 1980s or later.) Won't they look stupid in the future with either a gauge or a giant hole in their dangling earlobes?
As an old timer, the whole idea of body graffiti seems a bit strange to me. Usually, graffiti is applied to someone elses' property, not your own. At best, graffiti is art, but at worst, it is just vandalism. So why would you vandalize the single-most valuable piece of property you own - your body?
I've used "indent" many times in the past, and although it's better than nothing, it isn't really a solution for this problem. You have to go fix numerous other small style issues. For example, my employer has a very detailed - though quite eclectic - style. So, indentation and other issues that "indent" can deal with are only a small part of the problem. Also, K&R is my preferredstyle (I personally think Whitesmiths is dopey, but YMMV.) I'll concede my artistic integrity for pay at work, but not for free at home.
Regardless, my primary point (and Guido's, in Python) is that braces lead to a variety of defensible styles. We all have our preferences, but there's really no way to determine which is "best".
Also, for the record, I should mention that Python allows indentation to be any consistent level, with hard tabs counting as 8 spaces. Though it's seemingly contary to the aforementioned principle, that one can be filed under "practicality beats purity."
Tim Peters once said explained such contradictions with something like "the key to any successful philosophy is to allow yourself enough wiggle room to do what you really wanted to do in the first place." [wink]
Exactly. Imagine a brand of beer whose primary selling point was that it came in a bottle so small that you could drink an entire bottle in one gulp. Although that might be a nice novelty, the beers that come in a larger bottle probably are more enjoyable overall.
Python's block structure isn't about saving characters or about saving typing. It's about "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it."
In C, for example, there are multiple ways to place braces. In fact, there's even a lengthy Wikipedia page on that very subject.
In my own case, I have always used the K&R style, but my employer requires the Whitesmiths style. I have a large base of code at home that I wrote and maintain in the K&R style, and it's hard to switch back and forth between the two on a daily basis [sigh].
Python's indentation is utterly Pythonic because it is compact, yet meaningful. It carries blocks to their logical conclusion. I started in Pascal with begin/end, then learned that braces were better in C, then learned that no braces were best in Python. QED.
Although I enjoy a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy, I can't figure out why McAfee, which is based in the US, and Kaspersky, which is based in Moscow, would work together to conceal each others' government spyware from us via some sort of universal white list. You'd think everybody would have a different white list to serve their own governments' conspiracies.
Hey...wait a minute...I just realized how naive I've been not to have realized that all world governements actually are conspiring together to oppress us. Now that's one whoppin' good conspiracy!
Each computing device has much greater responsibility nowadays, but the security has made NO advances.
I've noticed the same problem with cats and mice. No matter what advances the cats make, the mice remain. One can only assume that the mice make advances at about the same rate as the cats.