No competent lawyer (no, this isn't a "no true Scotsman" fallacy) would bother adding a silly disclaimer like that - it conveys no information that's not already assumed by the reasonable person.
A reasonable person would assume that anyone talking about patent law on Slashdot was a patent lawyer?
The effect is subtle, and I don't mind it myself, but others may disagree.
Subtle? Last time I tried an S-PVA monitor I found the effect too distracting for words. Any darkish shade of grey, anywhere on the screen, seemed to shimmer, because each of my eyes perceived it as a slightly different shade. Games were a particular nightmare -- the smooth motion you get in games made the "sphere of darkness" effect painfully obvious in any game that used darker colours. Clearly either you sit on the other side of the room from your screen, or I'm more sensitive to the effect than you are...
Still, if it comes to dealing with that slightly worse black level in order to get consistent colours, I'll deal with it. I don't use my monitor at night with the lights off. To each his own, and I hope you enjoy having got a monitor you love for half the price I had to pay, you bastard.:)
the widescreen layout is fairly useless for any programming/web&graphics design work.
You think so? I find it rather useful to be able to have my HTML source, my CSS source, and the final web page, all displayed side by side, maximised vertically, on a single monitor.
I have the 2407 WFP (the pre-HC, they released the wider color gamut HC model two months later). Best monitor I have ever used.
You got lucky. The HC model has nasty issues. I had one briefly. Even after calibration, the ghosting was incredibly distracting just dragging icons across my desktop, and games were all but unplayable.
(And frankly I was glad I had the ghosting as an obvious reason to return it. It also suffered badly from the colour shifting problem that all PVA displays have: the contrast decreases where you're looking at the display head-on, so there's a kind of circle in the centre of the screen where you can't see any detail in dark pictures. Not a problem for office work, but very annoying in games and movies. The 30" models have generally used IPS panels which don't suffer from this problem.)
That might be today. Check out the OSx86 project. It might not work for you but it's worth a shot.
Yeah, very nice, I'm sure. But I can run Linux on my hardware legally. Unlike some people, I prefer to respect copyright holders' wishes and only use their intellectual property in the way they desire. Come back when I can run OS X on my hardware without violating the EULA.
How, exactly, are these names worse than "iPod", other than the fact that the "iPod" name is now familiar enough that its weirdness is no longer obvious?
(Apart from "Gimp", which is stupid and offensive. But Krita is a better program anyway for many purposes, and Photoshop - still the only option for professionals - runs fine with Wine.)
Ultimately this is another nail in the coffin for MS for it proves that you can't use ANY MS Office file format for reliable long term storage unless you are prepared to walk the MS Upgrade Treadmill.
Or, you know, just follow the instructions in the KB article.
But the real issue is that most of the world apparently is prepared to walk the MS Upgrade Treadmill. Most of the world appears not even to be aware that there's any alternative... look at all the people complaining about the way they think Microsoft is going to "make" them upgrade to Vista. You and I may know better, but that doesn't alter the fact that most people don't.
With a serious credit-crunch looming, I suspect that more and more people will be having a long hard look at cheaper, reliable office alternatives.
With a serious credit crunch looming, I suspect that decision-makers will continue to drink up Microsoft's TCO advertising, and continue to reject any suggestion of switching to a cheaper alternative. After all, Microsoft-funded studies have "proven" that even completely free software is more expensive than Office, haven't they? Who's going to risk the massive expense of switching to OpenOffice.org when there's a credit crunch looming?
Don't get me wrong. I hate MS Office and go to extraordinary lengths to avoid using it whenever possible. But I'm not so deluded as to imagine I'm anything but unusual in this. Yeah, maybe this is another nail in Microsoft's coffin... but there's not much point nailing up a coffin when its supposed occupant is still walking round outside, is there?
The built-in classes support functional-style programming. That is, the default action is generally to return a modified copy of the object being acted upon, so you can chain method calls together. [...] Obviously the Python code is fine, but from a functional programming viewpoint, it looks awkward.
This is indeed a useful feature, but it's not really functional programming, just a different style of object oriented design. The complete absence of any functions in your example might have served as a clue.:)
Functional programming has nothing to do with objects: it's when you take advantage of first-class functions and higher-order functions in your code. In Ruby this is usually done with code blocks. In Perl it's done with anonymous subs. It can be done in Python with lambdas (which are rather limited) or by using a scoped named function, so Python's support is slightly less convenient than Ruby's or Perl's, though its list comprehensions (another functional feature) are rather nice.
I'm genuinely curious: does Ruby have anything to offer for someone who's already very proficient in Python (and Django, so Rails is already covered)?
Yes. As a Python user, a follower of that very serpent who brought about the fall of Adam, your soul is forfeit and you face an eternity screaming in the fires of Hell. But there is hope at this season of Christalmas! For Matz so loved the world that He sent His only begotten language Ruby, that all who program in It shall not die, but have eternal life! Repent of your sins, accept Ruby Christal as your Language and Saviour, and you too can live forever with It in Paradise.
(Seriously, that's about the only real difference: the level of evangelistic fervour each language's advocates hold. Perl and Python have users; Ruby has missionaries.)
the ports tree does provide you with the ability to include the non-free software that is licensed with the GPL.
Describing BSD-licensed software as freer than GPL-licensed software is a reasonable point of view. Describing GPL-licensed softare as "non-free" is trolling. Please don't troll, this is meant to be the season of goodwill.
Of course, there could be a BSD license out there somewhere that does make such restrictions. I just haven't seen it or heard about it.
There was one a while back called something like the "BSD Protection License", though I don't think it was a BSD-style license in anything but name. Perhaps the GP was thinking of the old-style advertising clause or something?
plenty of people have been charged with doing 31 in a 30 zone, the percentage leeway depends on the police deciding if they like you or not
If there are police officers there to decide whether they like you or not, then clearly you haven't been caught by an automatic speed camera, so it's hard to see what such a case would have to do with your strange theory that speeding fines are a conspiracy involving the manufacturers of automatic speed cameras. Automatic speed cameras have fixed leeways which generally follow the ACPO guidelines, and certainly wouldn't go off for 31 in a 30 limit.
And please don't go accusing people of trolling just because they disagree with you. If you're old enough to have any emotional investment in speeding, you should be mature enough to cope with people holding different opinions from yours.
If you are defending the system, maybe you can tell me why the safe speed for any road never varies with time or weather but will always be exactly divisible by 10? Or am I right when I say that speeding is not the same as going dangerously fast?
You're right up to a point; speed limits are rounded down to multiples of 10 to simplify the system for motorists, and are (usually) fixed for the same reason. And in many cases they're set lower than some people think necessary, to mitigate problems caused by poor conditions.
But really, why do you care? So what if you have to drive slightly slower than you want to? If you want to drive fast, go to a racing track or buy a racing game or something. If you want to share the public roads, you can damn well play nice and slow down. It's really not that difficult a concept to grasp. Once you get used to not having to constantly look out for speed cameras, you might even learn to enjoy driving again.
Have you ever wondered who someone caught doing 31 mph in a non-residential area on an empty dual carriageway is charged with speeding but not dangerous driving?
Under the guidelines from the Association of Chief Police Officers, someone caught doing 31 in a 30 limit would not be charged with anything at all. They'd have to be doing 35 before they were fined at all, and they'd have to be doing 50 before they'd face court proceedings.
But of course this is Slashdot, where we don't like to get boring facts get in the way of a nice inaccurate rant.
IF TV is a major cause of obesity, then the Internet, computing and videogaming must be contributors too.
When you're browsing the web or playing a game, your hands are occupied. It's still worse than getting out and exercising, but it's vastly better than slumping in front of your TV with a beer in one hand and a fatty snack in the other.
I love it when someone with a UID in the millions acts like they've been here a long time.
I love it when someone with a UID in the hundreds of thousands erroneously assumes that there is a perfect correlation between UID and level of Slashdot experience.
Hint: we aren't all on our first user account, and we didn't all sign up the day we started reading.
or is the 7.37% difference between GiB and GB used as error correction nowadays?
No, it's just that nobody (outside a handful of geeks and pedants) uses "GiB" at all. Real people use "GB" exclusively, and just select which value to give the unit depending on the context: 1000-based for hard disks, 1024-based for RAM.
Late to the revolution? I'm younger than you are, and 2007 was the 10th anniversary of CPUs having more L1 cache than the entire memory of my first computer.
Unless I've missed something, RTS stands for real time strategy. Now, if the 'bring 10 guys back alive' mission is in real time and involves strategy it is an RTS.
Oh, please. This is like the people who argue that Madden is an RPG because you "role-play" being a football team. It's a fallacious argument because the fact that RTS stands for "real-time strategy" does not change the fact that RTS is a well-defined genre, not just a generic term for any real-time game that involves some form of strategy.
It's not even like it's difficult to design a game that would make everyone happy. Just make your game like before, and then wherever you have a "bring 10 guys back alive" mission, add a choice just before it where players can pick whether to do that or a regular base-building mission. Then the Cannon Fodder fans can enjoy their action, and the Dune II fans can enjoy their micromanagement. It's hardly rocket science.
From a more practical demonstration point of view, if there was a backdoor, governments would not need to get warrants for inserting hardware keyloggers or custom malware on systems to access system information. Governments both in the US and elsewhere do this, which suggests that no backdoor is available.
If you think that kind of argument is going to convince a conspiracy theorist, you're more nuts than they are. Clearly the governments only go through the motions of getting warrants in order to make people think there isn't a backdoor. Why else would they deny it?
Bearing in mind that the bill to pay off all the people involved in the moon landings hoax is decreasing every year now they've started to die off, it's likely that the US Dept of Coverups has plenty of budget to spare for this kind of thing now.
That said, there are a couple of necessary-evil apps at work that work better in IE, and for those I use it. For everything else, there's Firefox.
There are a couple of those where I work, too -- apps where the IT people go so far as to state flat out, "this app ONLY works in Internet Explorer", and have even put in browser ID checks to stop people trying things out for themselves.
I use Firefox anyway, of course; a combination of browser spoofing (to bypass braindead checks) and Greasemonkey (to fix the non-standards-compliant pages that actually cause the problems) can work miracles.
So, unless you're facing genuinely proprietary crap like ActiveX, I commend Greasemonkey to you as a potential solution to your workplace woes.
So yes, there are ways for the average user to log-out of their iDisk from a public terminal. They just simply have to use the existing facilities at their disposal.
Yes, if they're using a public terminal that provides Safari or Firefox. But how likely is that? Maybe things are different where you live, but I have never once seen a public terminal where the browser was anything other than Internet Explorer.
This is a nice thought, but you can eat fish and feed your family, if you so choose. It helps to be good at fishing, which I am not, but my skilled relatives give away extra fish whenever they have a chance because they have more than they need. As much as I enjoy video games, there are more useful ways to have fun, if that's what you're arguing against.
But feeding your family on fish alone wouldn't be a great idea - it's not a very balanced diet. You'd need an income of some sort to buy vegetables and so on, and I doubt you could sell the extra fish for that much money.
Likewise, is WoW really totally unproductive? I've never played it so can't really judge, but last I heard there were plenty of people making good money selling gold and loot -- so to me it seems quite plausible that playing WoW is potentially more profitable than fishing with a rod and line.
I don't mean to sound accusatory -- if anything, I hope to encourage somebody to go exploring. Under the day star. I know, I know, it burnss usss, but I promise you that the payoff can be greater than any game.
Personally I advocate a balanced lifestyle... getting out and doing stuff is great, and there's nothing quite like spending a night under sail in a yacht, or crossing a moor by torchlight in a snowstorm. But, equally, people who spend all their time in outdoor pursuits will never learn the joy of beating a really difficult boss or solving a really mind-bending puzzle.
I assure you, the elation I felt the first time I beat a Touhou game was every bit as great as the elation I feel when I reach the top of a mountain and drink in the glorious view. The experiences are equally intense, and I would be sorry to have gone without either.
If C-A-% is beyond your manual dexterity (what's C-A-M-%?) I'd recommend M-x replace-regexp...
I don't think the alt key is bound to anything in Emacs by default.* Certainly neither A-C-% nor A-C-M-% exist as default keybindings. You may be thinking of C-M-%, which is query-replace-regexp.
this approach is also somewhat helpful if you can't remember the shortcut key for a command but you maybe have a guess of what the command might be called...
If you know how the command starts, C-h w is more useful in that situation, as it tells you what the shortcut key is for future reference. If you don't know how the command starts, you can use C-h a to search for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Still, if it comes to dealing with that slightly worse black level in order to get consistent colours, I'll deal with it. I don't use my monitor at night with the lights off. To each his own, and I hope you enjoy having got a monitor you love for half the price I had to pay, you bastard.
(And frankly I was glad I had the ghosting as an obvious reason to return it. It also suffered badly from the colour shifting problem that all PVA displays have: the contrast decreases where you're looking at the display head-on, so there's a kind of circle in the centre of the screen where you can't see any detail in dark pictures. Not a problem for office work, but very annoying in games and movies. The 30" models have generally used IPS panels which don't suffer from this problem.)
How, exactly, are these names worse than "iPod", other than the fact that the "iPod" name is now familiar enough that its weirdness is no longer obvious?
(Apart from "Gimp", which is stupid and offensive. But Krita is a better program anyway for many purposes, and Photoshop - still the only option for professionals - runs fine with Wine.)
But the real issue is that most of the world apparently is prepared to walk the MS Upgrade Treadmill. Most of the world appears not even to be aware that there's any alternative... look at all the people complaining about the way they think Microsoft is going to "make" them upgrade to Vista. You and I may know better, but that doesn't alter the fact that most people don't.With a serious credit crunch looming, I suspect that decision-makers will continue to drink up Microsoft's TCO advertising, and continue to reject any suggestion of switching to a cheaper alternative. After all, Microsoft-funded studies have "proven" that even completely free software is more expensive than Office, haven't they? Who's going to risk the massive expense of switching to OpenOffice.org when there's a credit crunch looming?
Don't get me wrong. I hate MS Office and go to extraordinary lengths to avoid using it whenever possible. But I'm not so deluded as to imagine I'm anything but unusual in this. Yeah, maybe this is another nail in Microsoft's coffin... but there's not much point nailing up a coffin when its supposed occupant is still walking round outside, is there?
Functional programming has nothing to do with objects: it's when you take advantage of first-class functions and higher-order functions in your code. In Ruby this is usually done with code blocks. In Perl it's done with anonymous subs. It can be done in Python with lambdas (which are rather limited) or by using a scoped named function, so Python's support is slightly less convenient than Ruby's or Perl's, though its list comprehensions (another functional feature) are rather nice.
(Seriously, that's about the only real difference: the level of evangelistic fervour each language's advocates hold. Perl and Python have users; Ruby has missionaries.)
And please don't go accusing people of trolling just because they disagree with you. If you're old enough to have any emotional investment in speeding, you should be mature enough to cope with people holding different opinions from yours.You're right up to a point; speed limits are rounded down to multiples of 10 to simplify the system for motorists, and are (usually) fixed for the same reason. And in many cases they're set lower than some people think necessary, to mitigate problems caused by poor conditions.
But really, why do you care? So what if you have to drive slightly slower than you want to? If you want to drive fast, go to a racing track or buy a racing game or something. If you want to share the public roads, you can damn well play nice and slow down. It's really not that difficult a concept to grasp. Once you get used to not having to constantly look out for speed cameras, you might even learn to enjoy driving again.
But of course this is Slashdot, where we don't like to get boring facts get in the way of a nice inaccurate rant.
Hint: we aren't all on our first user account, and we didn't all sign up the day we started reading.
Late to the revolution? I'm younger than you are, and 2007 was the 10th anniversary of CPUs having more L1 cache than the entire memory of my first computer.
THINK YOURE JOKING QUERY ASSURE YOU ALL TRUE STOP PUNCTUATION COSTS EXTRA STOP
And once again we run into Slashdot's charming lameness filter, forcing me to pad out the post with fluff to get it to pass.
It's not even like it's difficult to design a game that would make everyone happy. Just make your game like before, and then wherever you have a "bring 10 guys back alive" mission, add a choice just before it where players can pick whether to do that or a regular base-building mission. Then the Cannon Fodder fans can enjoy their action, and the Dune II fans can enjoy their micromanagement. It's hardly rocket science.
Bearing in mind that the bill to pay off all the people involved in the moon landings hoax is decreasing every year now they've started to die off, it's likely that the US Dept of Coverups has plenty of budget to spare for this kind of thing now.
I use Firefox anyway, of course; a combination of browser spoofing (to bypass braindead checks) and Greasemonkey (to fix the non-standards-compliant pages that actually cause the problems) can work miracles.
So, unless you're facing genuinely proprietary crap like ActiveX, I commend Greasemonkey to you as a potential solution to your workplace woes.
Problem unsolved.
Likewise, is WoW really totally unproductive? I've never played it so can't really judge, but last I heard there were plenty of people making good money selling gold and loot -- so to me it seems quite plausible that playing WoW is potentially more profitable than fishing with a rod and line.Personally I advocate a balanced lifestyle... getting out and doing stuff is great, and there's nothing quite like spending a night under sail in a yacht, or crossing a moor by torchlight in a snowstorm. But, equally, people who spend all their time in outdoor pursuits will never learn the joy of beating a really difficult boss or solving a really mind-bending puzzle.
I assure you, the elation I felt the first time I beat a Touhou game was every bit as great as the elation I feel when I reach the top of a mountain and drink in the glorious view. The experiences are equally intense, and I would be sorry to have gone without either.