A lot of people say that. The problem with "try before you buy" using the full version of the game is that you really have very little incentive to buy. Even if you honestly intended to, it's easy just never to forget, or to talk yourself into believing that the game isn't quite good enough to be worth the money.
I suppose it is possible that you are the one person who actually does what you claim, but please forgive me if I am skeptical.
But more problematically, exactly who is going to choose to play as Jar Jar? And who is going to want to play multiplayer with the kind of person who would choose to play as Jar Jar?
I find it amusing that by your definition of socialism, famous socialists of the 20th century include, alongside Stalin and Mao, such well-known left wing figures as George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and Richard Nixon.
In fact, by your definition I estimate there are approximately eight hundred people in the entire world who are not socialists.
Humanities and soft sciences, in my experience, tend to be taught in courses whose grading depends much more on take-home essays than in class exams.
That is the fault of the courses. I read English at a university that cares more about standards than about reducing adminstrative costs. I think something like 80% of my final grade was based on formal, strictly-moderated exams. Not so much scope for cheating.
Similarly, I am unable to understand how people are allegedly getting away with having graduate theses written for them. How do you successfully defend a thesis you did not write? It doesn't sound like something you could do at an institution that cared about examining theses rather than just weighing them.
in the real world, none of this is considered cheating
That depends what you're talking about. Is a job interview "in the real world"? Is a bid for a contract "in the real world"? Sometimes you do want assurances that the work you are looking at was done by the person who is showing it to you.
I'm a software engineer. I consider the lone wolf programmer who does everything in secrecy on his own to be a bad fit for my team. I want people to work together. I want people to compare notes and review each other's code. I want multiple people to be involved in working on one cohesive application.
Yes, but you also want to know that everyone on your team could in theory have done their parts without help, given enough time. It's the difference between being a valuable part of the team and being dead wood.
It may be the case that about 40% of people are willing to tolerate only having the same 10% of features because the feature they value most is "looking cool in front of my friends", but there's a reason why the iPhone does not have 90% market share -- it simply does not meet that many people's needs.
Installing software on linux is easier than on windows or osx.
For software that is in the package manager, yes.
Where something like this "CDE" might be handy is for software that is not in the package manager. Suppose you've written a program that is only of interest to a handful of users. There's no way it's going to find package maintainers for every major distro, and your users might not be happy building from source code.
There are also classes of software that are not allowed in the main repositories for some major distros like Fedora and Debian. For example, the authors of indie games might want to let Linux users play without making the whole game open source. Even if they open-sourced the engine, some distros will not permit it in the repos if its only use is to access non-free data.
Basically, "package once, run everywhere" is very appealing to a certain class of software distributor.
What I don't see is what CDE offers over any of the dozens of existing autonomous packagers. Or why they chose to confuse people by using the same name as the standard UNIX desktop environment.
Did anybody, for even a second think it's kinda weird for a program to splatter its parts all over the disk and into every directory it can find?
It's no weirder than the opposite, which is for your documentation to be scattered all over the disk in a whole bunch of different directories, and your commands to be scattered all over the disk in a whole bunch of different directories, and then when you want to fix a major security hole in a common library you have to completely reinstall 50 programs from scratch instead of just updating one single file.
Open your mind. Just because something is different from what Apple does, doesn't mean it's necessarily a stupid thing to do. Sometimes there is more than one mutually-exclusive right answer, and Apple can only choose one of them.
That would all be nice if not for each program replacing shared libraries with its own and breaking the other programs.
Do, please, show me just one widely-used program that does this on a recent UNIX or Unix-like platform.
A program should not disturb the system or mess with its libraries.
Right. That's why you should put programs you install under/usr/local, not straight under/usr. Or of course many programs like to be installed in their own self-contained directories under/opt, which is, er, basically exactly what you're asking for and has been common practice for decades.
I am still waiting for Gnome or KDE to catch up with the efficiency and usability of these older environments.
KDE is getting closer now that it's possible for the desktop menu to present a list of applications rather than a handful of useless wallpaper-changing commands, but both major environments seem to be stuck on the stupid Windows 95-derived taskbar paradigm. Give me spatial management of running applications dammit! I want to develop muscle memory, not scan slowly across a list of tiny icons that are never in the same place twice.
Whom (sic) do you think is more likely to be a threat, the young male or the near-deaths-door wheelchair bound female?
Well, one of them has less to live for, has a large heavy difficult-to-scan metal device that could easily be concealing weapons, and is more likely to get away with pleading ignorance if caught...
If you're going somewhere Amtrak goes, it is quicker than driving, takes you to city centers instead of airports, and still has wifi and no virtual strip searches.
Ironically, this is similar to what people were saying about Java when it was new. Oh, it's cute and good for little whizzy web apps, but it will never cut it on the server.
Yes, and then JVM technology improved to the extent that Java performance is within an order of magnitude of C++ for most common server tasks.
Java was faster than Perl/Python/Ruby to begin with, and now it is vastly faster. Meanwhile every new popular scripting language actually seems to be slower than the last. And time and time again a startup tries to use something like Ruby or PHP on their servers, runs into massive problems, and ends up either sinking vast sums of money into trying to compile PHP to native code, like Facebook does, or completely rewrites their website in a JVM-based language, like Twitter did.
Well guess what Matilda, as machines get more powerful people program in higher level languages.
No, it is more that the higher-level languages are getting more efficient. C++ became popular when C++ compilers got good at optimizing C++. Java became popular when the JVM got good at JITting Java. Hobbyists and academics have always used high-level interpreted languages -- Python today occupies much the same niche as BASIC did in the 1980s. It's got less to do with hardware than you think.
The hardware argument made sense briefly in the 1990s, when machines suddenly got powerful enough for it to be briefly possible to consider writing everything in an interpreted language. But now it's the 2010s, and we are increasingly moving to less powerful mobile devices with limited battery life, and looking for ways to shrink our servers to reduce the financial and environmental cost of supplying all those machines with power and cooling.
Welcome to the modern world, where suddenly efficiency matters again. If your favourite language is stuck in the 1990s, maybe you'd better start learning something else.
Re:Oracle is doing everything they can to fuck up
on
Oracle To Monetize Java VM
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· Score: 5, Insightful
"Guys, Java is dead because it was bought by a litigious patent-loving company with monopolistic ambitions and a history of screwing its customers."
"Fear not! We'll just switch to a semi-compatible clone of a semi-closed platform owned by a different litigious patent-loving company with an actual monopoly and an even longer history of screwing its customers. Problem solved!"
You are confusing the theoretical cost of ideal garbage collection with the actual cost in a particular implementation.
I have worked on optimizing real-world Java applications that really were running too slowly. The problem really was that they were allocating too many short-lived objects in a modern JVM, and reducing the number of allocations really did improve performance significantly. Sorry if reality doesn't match your fashionable assumptions, but that's just the way it is.
Just look at some benchmarks some time. Scala performance is closer to Python than Java. Yes, often that's fast enough. No, it is not always possible to throw hardware at the problem when it isn't.
In contrast, I can't always read the MS Word files -- an example of an extended character set -- from even a few years ago, and I sure as hell can't view them in almost any editor. Sure, with enough time, I can or could, figure out how to read them, but, as the wise professor rightly pointed out, time is scarce.
antiword is your friend. It converts MS Word files to ASCII.
There are a few issues with Unicode, in that CJK characters are lumped together by semantics, while LGC are not. Thus, while simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, and Japanese may all write the same "character" differently, they are all represented by the same codepoint, while "o" despite being pronounced identically from the most common Latin-based written languages to Cyrillic are written with different codepoints, even despite having identical appearances.
One design principle behind Unicode is that there should be round-trip conversions available for every common legacy encoding. There already existed character encodings that included complete Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, so Unicode had to include those separately as well. There were no character sets that distinguished between the Japanese way of writing a character and the traditional Chinese way of writing it, so it was not necessary to duplicate it.
The simplified Chinese characters generally do have separate code points, BTW. It's just traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean variants that are unified. This is comparable to the way that there is only one encoding of the Arabic numerals, even though there are different ways of writing them (is 4 joined at the top? does 7 have a cross-stroke? etc).
You're a bit confused---Classical Chinese had the 'one word one character' thing
And was an entirely written language, never natively spoken by anyone. In spoken Chinese, most words require at least two characters to write.
Unfortunately most Chinese people believe that their language has this unique one-word-one-character property, and understandably get rather upset when some foreign scholar comes along and tells them he knows better -- so this myth is going to take a long time to die...
If by "had worked for us for centuries" you mean "had been used for a handful of short inscriptions", yeah. It's hard to call a writing system a success when the society that used it was not literate.
Realistically, even if we suppose that runes were inherently better suited to the writing of Old English, and even if they had somehow managed to survive even through the Norman Conquest, our orthography would still have been largely fixed by the introduction of printing, so they would still suck for writing modern English.
The traditional approach works well enough: can anyone demonstrate that it existed before the claimed moment of invention? If nobody disputes that it is new, then we assume for legal purposes that it is new.
Yes, it is theoretically possible that exactly the same design of wrench has been in use for millenia on the planet Zog, but that is of no practical relevance.
In the case of genes isolated from living organisms, it is patently obvious that prior art exists, because the organism containing the exact same gene is like right there. Hence it is not new and should not be patentable.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of people say that. The problem with "try before you buy" using the full version of the game is that you really have very little incentive to buy. Even if you honestly intended to, it's easy just never to forget, or to talk yourself into believing that the game isn't quite good enough to be worth the money.
I suppose it is possible that you are the one person who actually does what you claim, but please forgive me if I am skeptical.
Or more likely let us.
But more problematically, exactly who is going to choose to play as Jar Jar? And who is going to want to play multiplayer with the kind of person who would choose to play as Jar Jar?
You mean, it was lost thousands of years ago and anyone who finds it is likely to die a horrible death?
I find it amusing that by your definition of socialism, famous socialists of the 20th century include, alongside Stalin and Mao, such well-known left wing figures as George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and Richard Nixon.
In fact, by your definition I estimate there are approximately eight hundred people in the entire world who are not socialists.
That is the fault of the courses. I read English at a university that cares more about standards than about reducing adminstrative costs. I think something like 80% of my final grade was based on formal, strictly-moderated exams. Not so much scope for cheating.
Similarly, I am unable to understand how people are allegedly getting away with having graduate theses written for them. How do you successfully defend a thesis you did not write? It doesn't sound like something you could do at an institution that cared about examining theses rather than just weighing them.
That depends what you're talking about. Is a job interview "in the real world"? Is a bid for a contract "in the real world"? Sometimes you do want assurances that the work you are looking at was done by the person who is showing it to you.
Yes, but you also want to know that everyone on your team could in theory have done their parts without help, given enough time. It's the difference between being a valuable part of the team and being dead wood.
Extra! Extra! Slashdotter vows to avoid Microsoft product! Read all about it!
That is simply not true.
It may be the case that about 40% of people are willing to tolerate only having the same 10% of features because the feature they value most is "looking cool in front of my friends", but there's a reason why the iPhone does not have 90% market share -- it simply does not meet that many people's needs.
Which distro is "your" distro? And what are people who use a different distro supposed to do? Write their own packages?
For software that is in the package manager, yes.
Where something like this "CDE" might be handy is for software that is not in the package manager. Suppose you've written a program that is only of interest to a handful of users. There's no way it's going to find package maintainers for every major distro, and your users might not be happy building from source code.
There are also classes of software that are not allowed in the main repositories for some major distros like Fedora and Debian. For example, the authors of indie games might want to let Linux users play without making the whole game open source. Even if they open-sourced the engine, some distros will not permit it in the repos if its only use is to access non-free data.
Basically, "package once, run everywhere" is very appealing to a certain class of software distributor.
What I don't see is what CDE offers over any of the dozens of existing autonomous packagers. Or why they chose to confuse people by using the same name as the standard UNIX desktop environment.
It's no weirder than the opposite, which is for your documentation to be scattered all over the disk in a whole bunch of different directories, and your commands to be scattered all over the disk in a whole bunch of different directories, and then when you want to fix a major security hole in a common library you have to completely reinstall 50 programs from scratch instead of just updating one single file.
Open your mind. Just because something is different from what Apple does, doesn't mean it's necessarily a stupid thing to do. Sometimes there is more than one mutually-exclusive right answer, and Apple can only choose one of them.
Do, please, show me just one widely-used program that does this on a recent UNIX or Unix-like platform.
Right. That's why you should put programs you install under /usr/local, not straight under /usr. Or of course many programs like to be installed in their own self-contained directories under /opt, which is, er, basically exactly what you're asking for and has been common practice for decades.
I am still waiting for Gnome or KDE to catch up with the efficiency and usability of these older environments.
KDE is getting closer now that it's possible for the desktop menu to present a list of applications rather than a handful of useless wallpaper-changing commands, but both major environments seem to be stuck on the stupid Windows 95-derived taskbar paradigm. Give me spatial management of running applications dammit! I want to develop muscle memory, not scan slowly across a list of tiny icons that are never in the same place twice.
Well, one of them has less to live for, has a large heavy difficult-to-scan metal device that could easily be concealing weapons, and is more likely to get away with pleading ignorance if caught ...
If you're going somewhere Amtrak goes, it is quicker than driving, takes you to city centers instead of airports, and still has wifi and no virtual strip searches.
Yes, and then JVM technology improved to the extent that Java performance is within an order of magnitude of C++ for most common server tasks.
Java was faster than Perl/Python/Ruby to begin with, and now it is vastly faster. Meanwhile every new popular scripting language actually seems to be slower than the last. And time and time again a startup tries to use something like Ruby or PHP on their servers, runs into massive problems, and ends up either sinking vast sums of money into trying to compile PHP to native code, like Facebook does, or completely rewrites their website in a JVM-based language, like Twitter did.
No, it is more that the higher-level languages are getting more efficient. C++ became popular when C++ compilers got good at optimizing C++. Java became popular when the JVM got good at JITting Java. Hobbyists and academics have always used high-level interpreted languages -- Python today occupies much the same niche as BASIC did in the 1980s. It's got less to do with hardware than you think.
The hardware argument made sense briefly in the 1990s, when machines suddenly got powerful enough for it to be briefly possible to consider writing everything in an interpreted language. But now it's the 2010s, and we are increasingly moving to less powerful mobile devices with limited battery life, and looking for ways to shrink our servers to reduce the financial and environmental cost of supplying all those machines with power and cooling.
Welcome to the modern world, where suddenly efficiency matters again. If your favourite language is stuck in the 1990s, maybe you'd better start learning something else.
"Guys, Java is dead because it was bought by a litigious patent-loving company with monopolistic ambitions and a history of screwing its customers."
"Fear not! We'll just switch to a semi-compatible clone of a semi-closed platform owned by a different litigious patent-loving company with an actual monopoly and an even longer history of screwing its customers. Problem solved!"
You are confusing the theoretical cost of ideal garbage collection with the actual cost in a particular implementation.
I have worked on optimizing real-world Java applications that really were running too slowly. The problem really was that they were allocating too many short-lived objects in a modern JVM, and reducing the number of allocations really did improve performance significantly. Sorry if reality doesn't match your fashionable assumptions, but that's just the way it is.
Just look at some benchmarks some time. Scala performance is closer to Python than Java. Yes, often that's fast enough. No, it is not always possible to throw hardware at the problem when it isn't.
The services are so successful that they're packed with travellers and those who don't reserve seats often don't get one.
What's your definition of success?
Hey, you left out the figure shift and the letter shift. And you should really have rung the bell at the end.
I guess Slashdot doesn't support those characters ...
antiword is your friend. It converts MS Word files to ASCII.
One design principle behind Unicode is that there should be round-trip conversions available for every common legacy encoding. There already existed character encodings that included complete Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, so Unicode had to include those separately as well. There were no character sets that distinguished between the Japanese way of writing a character and the traditional Chinese way of writing it, so it was not necessary to duplicate it.
The simplified Chinese characters generally do have separate code points, BTW. It's just traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean variants that are unified. This is comparable to the way that there is only one encoding of the Arabic numerals, even though there are different ways of writing them (is 4 joined at the top? does 7 have a cross-stroke? etc).
And was an entirely written language, never natively spoken by anyone. In spoken Chinese, most words require at least two characters to write.
Unfortunately most Chinese people believe that their language has this unique one-word-one-character property, and understandably get rather upset when some foreign scholar comes along and tells them he knows better -- so this myth is going to take a long time to die ...
If by "had worked for us for centuries" you mean "had been used for a handful of short inscriptions", yeah. It's hard to call a writing system a success when the society that used it was not literate.
Realistically, even if we suppose that runes were inherently better suited to the writing of Old English, and even if they had somehow managed to survive even through the Norman Conquest, our orthography would still have been largely fixed by the introduction of printing, so they would still suck for writing modern English.
The traditional approach works well enough: can anyone demonstrate that it existed before the claimed moment of invention? If nobody disputes that it is new, then we assume for legal purposes that it is new.
Yes, it is theoretically possible that exactly the same design of wrench has been in use for millenia on the planet Zog, but that is of no practical relevance.
In the case of genes isolated from living organisms, it is patently obvious that prior art exists, because the organism containing the exact same gene is like right there. Hence it is not new and should not be patentable.