I asked this in a post yesterday, but I was moderated down as offtopic; yet you get +3 Insightful... hmm, moderators are fickle (as if we didn't know that already!) Mind you, I suppose this story is a little more general so more posts will slip through.
What we need is a weekly (or whatever) story on the 'state of/.' where we can post about how much it sucks and how to improve it and so on.
Err, anyway, regarding the DDOS... it seems strange trying to get news on it from other sites when/. is usually the first to report this sort of thing. Tell us what's going on please!
Perhaps Taco can't bear the thought of all those posts discussing conspiracy theories about M$ slashdotting/., coming so soon after the legal threat. I admit that that will be quite painful, but I'd still rather see the discussion.
IQ tests are a very poor test of intelligence, I admit. I joined Mensa for a while, but most of them were thicker than pigshit. The tests are very subjective, like finding the odd one out of a list; creativity is actually a penalty.
However, that wasn't the point I was making; basically that even if you are intelligent, the general/. readership are almost invariably more intelligent than you are.
And top-1% scores aren't much to boast about either: that means that (6 billion * 0.01 =) 60 million people in the world are more intelligent.
The most annoying (and the best) part of/. is that the people who read it are so intelligent. My IQ has been measured as well into the top 1%, but that still means that there are thousands of people on/. who are cleverer than I am. This makes for some very interesting discussions, but it's a bit frustrating:)
Also, any subject I consider myself to have some expertise on is always bettered by someone else. If I quote a fact eg from an obscure book in a post, then usually someone else will expand upon it, tell me its history and point out a few exceptions to it. Sometimes it'll be the author. Its a great forum, but hard to get noticed, even if you deserve to be.
I doubt that's true. If you said of all apps were written in the English-speaking world, you might be correct, but I certainly dispute that of them are written in the US. Significantly less than ½ IMHO. Look at the UK, Canada, Australia etc etc. In fact I'm not at all sure about the English-speaking world; just look at what Japan, China, India, Russia produce.
Re:Google's syntax is really nasty
on
Hump Day Quickies
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· Score: 1
Why even bother with a web site? Just hack the URL if you really want to lose kb...
Stick it in quotes? What do you mean?
eg...
Search: [ tutorial "how to hack perl" ]
Results: (how, to ignored as these are common words. Use + to include these in a search)...
Search: [ tutorial "+how +to hack perl" +string ]
Results (how, to ignored as these are common words. +'s stripped from your search as you included it in front of a non-common word)...
IANAPH, (well, I've done a little bit), but surely the the whole point of Perl is that it's obfuscated and hard to understand?
Actually, that sounds a bit strange... it seems to me that Perl is very programmer-oriented, rather than mantainer-oriented, what with TMTOWTDI an' all; the ability to write powerful programs quickly seems to be more valued than for someone to come along and understand it. If I was writing some code for a large project that needed to be quickly understood, I'd do it in Java or something.
It "helpfully" filters common words out of your searches, making it a real bitch to look for some phrases. You can get around this by adding a + to the common words... but if you use one in front of a non-common word, it strips them all out. This alone has got me searching for a new engine: I think I may have found it. I can live with no caches and non-intelligent searches.
By the time I've posted this, I bet there'll be half a dozen posts saying that Java is crap, Java is slow, moan, groan, Java can't be used for low-level system programming etc. Oh well, if you can't beat them, join them... Java is great, it'll replace C for all high level programs:)
Seriously, I wonder how much of the opposition to Java from many C programmers is due to the amount of experience they've accumulated in C? It's bound to make people resentful [disclaimer: I've spent the last 18 months learning Java in university]
The difference is, it's hard to think of a situation where two men having sex in private would hurt anyone. However, if my next-door neighbour owns a gun, he could easily shoot me by accident if he was an ignoramus.
Surely if thousands of people around me owned guns, that would make me less safe? Then I would be obliged to get a gun to protect myself, thereby compromising my right/not/ to own a gun.
Legislating against firearms is not a matter of morality; it's a matter of pragmatics.
If it was a moral question, then the pro-gun laws of the USA would allow people to carry fully automatic rifles (do they already?), grenade launchers, Stinger missiles, Cruise missiles, nuclear warheads. At some point you have to draw the line; is this "moral" legislation?
The rate of violent crime in Britain is significantly higher than in the USA; yet homicide is far, far higher in the US, most of it gun-related. Gun-related accidents in the US are more common than deaths by firearms used in anger. Is it really a question of morals or pragmatics?
Yeah, I think they did learn about Pearl Harbour at Bletchley. At least, from what I can remember from The Code Book by Simon Singh. Apparently the British warned the Americans, but the Americans refused to act on it, thinking it was a British plot to get them to come into the war.
However, one of the most surprising things I learnt from the book was that one of the scientists from Bletchley invented private-key-public-key years before the Americans did.
that was part of the question. When will Gnome be as sophisticated as KDE?, sophisitication being open to Miguel's interpretation. But it doesn't really matter because no-one else seemed to want it asked:)
Perhaps a better question would have been "How long do you think it will be (if ever) until Gnome is sophisticated enough to gain a larger user base than KDE?
I buy pizzas and then let them go cold before I eat them. I just love cold pizza. My flatmates think I'm weird. Come on, there must be someone else out there who does this? Maybe we should have our own support group...
HTML should be the man page format. There's no reason why it shouldn't be in one page; just have an internal list of href's at the top. This would make things much easier. And there's no reason why you couldn't have traditional man pages as well - just use an option like -m to view the old style. Oh, -m is used for something else; how about -o?
I agree that man pages are horrific to learn things from, tar being one of the worst. I suggest that they should be in the following format:
_very_ brief list of the options etc., just for quick reference for experienced users
examples (lots and lots!) All the man pages I've seen don't have nearly enough
overview (saying in which situations you'd want to use the command as well as how to use it)
If I write some GPL'ed code I don't want anyone releasing it with a more obscured form than I'm giving it to them!
Surely by *not* releasing it under the GPL, the person who is releasing the binaries only is compromising the freedom of whoever they are releasing it to, eg the freedom to modify the source code (surely the whole point?)
Worth watching, and has some nice dialogue in the middle. The ending is pretty crap though.
Original in general, but there's a few plot twists that are signposted. Worth watching if you've nothing better to do and are bored of the usual style Hollywodd films.
There seems to be an assumption in the post of the story that as computational power increases, we get closer to conscious computers... of course, this is false. We can't run anything on today's supercomputers that can't be run on my 1988 Spectrum. Or, for that matter, with paper and pencil. I think we need to learn a lot more about what consciousness is before we can speculate on whether we can create it. It seems like consciousness is some sort of fundamental property of the universe... however, the brain manages to access, or link, or mould it... Not quite sure what I think.
Anyway, I just had a thought; if we do figure out consciousness, maybe students will create life in labs for assignments. Of course, then there'll be protests about the creation and destruction of life: 'AI is cruel!' 'Machines have feelings too!' etc.
Why in the name of sanity does Coca Cola want to coke.ch for anyway? As if someone was looking for Coke, and would think, "Hmm. I wonder what the URL of Coke's website is? I think I'll try cocacola.com. No! Wait! It's probably at coke.ch!"
It might be different if it was an "I hate Coke" site or there was a site that looked like it was endorsed by Coca Cola, but this is madness.
I'm not sure that the geeks are very well paid as a group. It's the managers that get all the cash, while the workers do all the work. I've never really understood why that is; it's usually the skilled programmers who are more valuable to the company, yet they get paid the least and have the smallest voice. I think that's changing, however - look at Carmack's influence. Admittedly, mainly in the geek community but I'm often surprised how many normal people know about him.
How much (in todays terms) did it cost to get to the Moon? How about an estimate of the cost to reach Mars now? Surely with the exponential advance in technology and computing power the costs must be at least equal?
OK, I take your point about the batteries, but why does an eBook have to flexible and disposable? I don't think I've ever thrown a book away (unless it got really manky, in which case having it in digital form is a plus) and I don't sit there bending a book either.
Slashdot Mirror
At least, according to a wired story. Thing is, I'd rather get my news from /. than Wired.
I asked this in a post yesterday, but I was moderated down as offtopic; yet you get +3 Insightful ... hmm, moderators are fickle (as if we didn't know that already!) Mind you, I suppose this story is a little more general so more posts will slip through.
/.' where we can post about how much it sucks and how to improve it and so on.
/. is usually the first to report this sort of thing. Tell us what's going on please!
/., coming so soon after the legal threat. I admit that that will be quite painful, but I'd still rather see the discussion.
What we need is a weekly (or whatever) story on the 'state of
Err, anyway, regarding the DDOS... it seems strange trying to get news on it from other sites when
Perhaps Taco can't bear the thought of all those posts discussing conspiracy theories about M$ slashdotting
IQ tests are a very poor test of intelligence, I admit. I joined Mensa for a while, but most of them were thicker than pigshit. The tests are very subjective, like finding the odd one out of a list; creativity is actually a penalty.
/. readership are almost invariably more intelligent than you are.
However, that wasn't the point I was making; basically that even if you are intelligent, the general
And top-1% scores aren't much to boast about either: that means that (6 billion * 0.01 =) 60 million people in the world are more intelligent.
And I agree with the © thing as well. It's almost as if M$ were waiting for something like that to happen before threatening legal action...
The most annoying (and the best) part of /. is that the people who read it are so intelligent. My IQ has been measured as well into the top 1%, but that still means that there are thousands of people on /. who are cleverer than I am. This makes for some very interesting discussions, but it's a bit frustrating :)
Also, any subject I consider myself to have some expertise on is always bettered by someone else. If I quote a fact eg from an obscure book in a post, then usually someone else will expand upon it, tell me its history and point out a few exceptions to it. Sometimes it'll be the author. Its a great forum, but hard to get noticed, even if you deserve to be.
I hope that's a lance Tux is using to fight that lion on Roblimo's t-shirt.
I doubt that's true. If you said of all apps were written in the English-speaking world, you might be correct, but I certainly dispute that of them are written in the US. Significantly less than ½ IMHO. Look at the UK, Canada, Australia etc etc. In fact I'm not at all sure about the English-speaking world; just look at what Japan, China, India, Russia produce.
Why even bother with a web site? Just hack the URL if you really want to lose kb...
...
...
Stick it in quotes? What do you mean?
eg...
Search: [ tutorial "how to hack perl" ]
Results: (how, to ignored as these are common words. Use + to include these in a search)
Search: [ tutorial "+how +to hack perl" +string ]
Results (how, to ignored as these are common words. +'s stripped from your search as you included it in front of a non-common word)
AAAAAAAaaaaaaarrrggghh!!!
IANAPH, (well, I've done a little bit), but surely the the whole point of Perl is that it's obfuscated and hard to understand?
Actually, that sounds a bit strange... it seems to me that Perl is very programmer-oriented, rather than mantainer-oriented, what with TMTOWTDI an' all; the ability to write powerful programs quickly seems to be more valued than for someone to come along and understand it. If I was writing some code for a large project that needed to be quickly understood, I'd do it in Java or something.
It "helpfully" filters common words out of your searches, making it a real bitch to look for some phrases. You can get around this by adding a + to the common words... but if you use one in front of a non-common word, it strips them all out. This alone has got me searching for a new engine: I think I may have found it. I can live with no caches and non-intelligent searches.
By the time I've posted this, I bet there'll be half a dozen posts saying that Java is crap, Java is slow, moan, groan, Java can't be used for low-level system programming etc. Oh well, if you can't beat them, join them... Java is great, it'll replace C for all high level programs :)
Seriously, I wonder how much of the opposition to Java from many C programmers is due to the amount of experience they've accumulated in C? It's bound to make people resentful [disclaimer: I've spent the last 18 months learning Java in university]
The difference is, it's hard to think of a situation where two men having sex in private would hurt anyone. However, if my next-door neighbour owns a gun, he could easily shoot me by accident if he was an ignoramus.
/not/ to own a gun.
Surely if thousands of people around me owned guns, that would make me less safe? Then I would be obliged to get a gun to protect myself, thereby compromising my right
Legislating against firearms is not a matter of morality; it's a matter of pragmatics.
If it was a moral question, then the pro-gun laws of the USA would allow people to carry fully automatic rifles (do they already?), grenade launchers, Stinger missiles, Cruise missiles, nuclear warheads. At some point you have to draw the line; is this "moral" legislation?
The rate of violent crime in Britain is significantly higher than in the USA; yet homicide is far, far higher in the US, most of it gun-related. Gun-related accidents in the US are more common than deaths by firearms used in anger. Is it really a question of morals or pragmatics?
Yeah, I think they did learn about Pearl Harbour at Bletchley. At least, from what I can remember from The Code Book by Simon Singh. Apparently the British warned the Americans, but the Americans refused to act on it, thinking it was a British plot to get them to come into the war.
However, one of the most surprising things I learnt from the book was that one of the scientists from Bletchley invented private-key-public-key years before the Americans did.
that was part of the question. When will Gnome be as sophisticated as KDE?, sophisitication being open to Miguel's interpretation. But it doesn't really matter because no-one else seemed to want it asked :)
Perhaps a better question would have been "How long do you think it will be (if ever) until Gnome is sophisticated enough to gain a larger user base than KDE?
How long do you think before Gnome catches up KDE in terms of sophistication?
I buy pizzas and then let them go cold before I eat them. I just love cold pizza. My flatmates think I'm weird. Come on, there must be someone else out there who does this? Maybe we should have our own support group...
I agree that man pages are horrific to learn things from, tar being one of the worst. I suggest that they should be in the following format:
Why can't they release a text version as well?
If I write some GPL'ed code I don't want anyone releasing it with a more obscured form than I'm giving it to them!
Surely by *not* releasing it under the GPL, the person who is releasing the binaries only is compromising the freedom of whoever they are releasing it to, eg the freedom to modify the source code (surely the whole point?)
Worth watching, and has some nice dialogue in the middle. The ending is pretty crap though.
Original in general, but there's a few plot twists that are signposted. Worth watching if you've nothing better to do and are bored of the usual style Hollywodd films.
There seems to be an assumption in the post of the story that as computational power increases, we get closer to conscious computers... of course, this is false. We can't run anything on today's supercomputers that can't be run on my 1988 Spectrum. Or, for that matter, with paper and pencil. I think we need to learn a lot more about what consciousness is before we can speculate on whether we can create it. It seems like consciousness is some sort of fundamental property of the universe... however, the brain manages to access, or link, or mould it... Not quite sure what I think.
Anyway, I just had a thought; if we do figure out consciousness, maybe students will create life in labs for assignments. Of course, then there'll be protests about the creation and destruction of life: 'AI is cruel!' 'Machines have feelings too!' etc.
Why in the name of sanity does Coca Cola want to coke.ch for anyway? As if someone was looking for Coke, and would think, "Hmm. I wonder what the URL of Coke's website is? I think I'll try cocacola.com. No! Wait! It's probably at coke.ch!"
It might be different if it was an "I hate Coke" site or there was a site that looked like it was endorsed by Coca Cola, but this is madness.
I'm not sure that the geeks are very well paid as a group. It's the managers that get all the cash, while the workers do all the work. I've never really understood why that is; it's usually the skilled programmers who are more valuable to the company, yet they get paid the least and have the smallest voice. I think that's changing, however - look at Carmack's influence. Admittedly, mainly in the geek community but I'm often surprised how many normal people know about him.
How much (in todays terms) did it cost to get to the Moon? How about an estimate of the cost to reach Mars now? Surely with the exponential advance in technology and computing power the costs must be at least equal?
OK, I take your point about the batteries, but why does an eBook have to flexible and disposable? I don't think I've ever thrown a book away (unless it got really manky, in which case having it in digital form is a plus) and I don't sit there bending a book either.