I've found myself addicted many times in the past - Civ, Quake and Nethack are probably my biggest nemeses. The only solution I've ever found to the problem is just to quit, cold turkey. Delete the binaries and swear I'll never install them again. While I've gone back to the trough many times, quitting becomes easier each time.
If your partner is accusing you of being addicted, prove that you're not--- set a goal-- 1 day, 3 days, a week, whatever, and just don't play. After all, it won't kill you to get some nookie and sunshine..
Before we all jump to any conclusions, read islamway's response first. If Timothy McVeigh had posted to a slashdot discussion about the right to bear arms and started recruiting young libertarians, would people have called for slashdot to be shut down?
I fought a long battle with our university administration over IP rights for students and profs. It took a while for them to 'get it' when it came to the GPL, but anyone at McGill, prof, student, whoever, can GPL their work.
Ownership was another issue.
In the end they ceded to students the rights to their work. However, grad students are in a complicated situation, where their work becomes jointly owned with the univ. and their prof. And profs are pretty much obligated to share ownership of their IP with the uni.
I'm not sure it would be so dicey-- imagine how much harder (or at least taxing) it would be to control a ground-based rover. Put yer blimp on autopilot, get it to take lots of pictures and contact ground control in a few hours. That seems like a good idea..
The first I heard of this idea was during the FTAA summit in Quebec City a few months ago.. on a televised debate on CBC Naomi Klein shouted out that multinationals that do things like employ children and poison local drinking water should face the 'death penalty'. Imagine what the world would be like w/o Nike and Monsanto. It struck me as odd at the time, but haven't we all called for Microsoft's demise before? and afaik, they don't even employ child laborers.;-)
I upgraded my P133 to the recent ximian/eazel distro and now I have a machine that can barely open terminals. Everything I do to try to turn off the Nautilus bloatware, save removing it entirely, has failed miserably. I was quite happy with the helix gnome distro which was light enough to still make my machine useful. I give up. I'm going back to TWM.
I did my undergraduate degree in comp eng, my master's in comp sci, and now I'm doing a PhD in comp sci.
The differences? At most schools, the admissions requirements are much higher for comp eng. There is a much stronger focus on applied math, digital design and signal processing in comp eng, whereas comp sci focuses on software engineering and theoretical comp sci (ie, Turing machines,etc). In either degree you'll learn how to program. Again, the kinds of programming skills you pick up are different-- I'm a great systems and OS programmer but ask me to implement quicksort and I'll say "It's already in libc!"
So why did I switch programs? The short answer is that the supervisor I wanted to work with is in CS. I'd be doing the same research (robotics and computer vision), irregardless of what grad program I'm registered in. It probably means I'll have to be a CS prof rather than and Eng prof, if and when I graduate..
If you've got the marks, go for the comp eng program-- it's more rigorous and demanding and you'll learn more useful stuff.
Montreal is most definitely the most European of all North American cities. It's a great place to live, if you can tolerate snow for most of the year and then 3 amazing summer months. Great beer, late call time, amazing jazz fest, the best skiing on the east coast, etc, etc. Tech-wise, you've got Nortel, Softimage, Zero Knowledge, Discrete Logic, lots of medium-sized startups -- Openface.ca, Hasc.com, etc, etc.. not to mention great talent coming out of McGill and Ecole Polytechnique.
Go ahead, outlaw napster, I'll just write a program that implements the highly sophisticated "Hyper-text Transfer Protocol" and use it to share my files. Then I'll write a bloatware client that can even be used to *search* for the files I'm looking, even *based on content*!!! Oh my god!
Clearly, Napster is nothing new. it's just a specialized web server/client.
I'm 26 and I've never, ever, seen a handgun in real life. In fact, that vast majority of Canadians can say the same.. you people have the sickest preoccupation with . I live in inner-city montreal, and I have never, ever felt unsafe walking home at 3:00am (which, in fact, is the time that our bars close and everyone stumbles home). you've got to give up this idea that guns==a higher standard of living.
that you should mention stability. I just wrestled a 2.2 kernel bug to the ground that was causing my dual processor machines to crash- ok, actually, RedHat beat me to the punch, and it was their custom 2.2.14 kernel that was the problem. So they provide an updated version, also labelled 2.2.14. What gives? Why is redhat providing patched kernels of the same minor version? Why not just provide the *official* 2.2.14 kernel and send bug-fixing patches to AC? Talk about miffed- everyone's getting excited about 2.4 and we're still facing 2.2 bugs.
How many slashdot readers spent more time last week with their families than they did at the console? We're already captives of technology, and at the mercy of economics (when was the last time your boss told you to work less?) Don't be fooled into believing we're building a better world for ourselves- someone's going to have to run on the treadmill to keep the lights on.
As I recall, this question circulated on slashdot sometime last year. I don't remember the details, but I do remember that everyone was concerned about whether or not Beowulf would be classified as munitions. It seems to me that this question has already been resolved, hence the great preponderance of beowulf outside the US.
I would tend to agree with the sense that there's an extremely steep curve one needs to climb in order to get on board.
I've downloaded and compiled sporadically over the last year or so, and I've even submitted patches. The trouble is, it's just so durn huge. You need an appropriate amount of hardware and bandwidth just to get the ball rolling, and even then, you're best off typing make and reading war and peace while you wait for your one-line change to be built.
I must say that I'm still optimistic. The important point is that the browser will be standards-compliant. If this means that IE adopts gecko, then I think we can say mission accomplished. the xpfe can rot, for all I care, although we might even see it adopted in other projects. There's some good engineering in there which should be taken advantage of.
One interesting thing about the project is that the lack of outside support has given us an interesting view into the internals of a large software engineering business complete with dirty laundry, and some great examples of Larry Wall's programmer's virtues- laziness, impatience and hubris.
Win or lose, the open sourcing of navigator was a pivotal moment in open-source history, and we'll be learning lessons from this experience for some time yet.
Well, the predicted crash never really happened- as of 11:00 MSFT was down only $2. The real winner today is RHAT which is up $17. Sweet!
Let's face it, there's still an awfully long road ahead for the DOJ and for linux as well. The news was more or less a buying opportunity for investors who managed to snatch up some discount shares when the stock bottomed out at -$6.
Dude.. don't kid yourself. The 'talented' people who drive the net are just as stupid and worthless as the dorks who run the auto industry (that is to say, that people are people). Your friend is an exception to this well understood rule. The big difference about the net is that it's an exceptionally efficient tool- it lets us collaborate in ways that were never before possible, the net result being rapid growth in net-related projects, but no improvement to your public health-care system or roads. Believe me, if open-source development applied to government or space exploration, we would have been to europa and back several times over, and maybe, just maybe Linus would be president. But, people being people, we'd probably end up electing Bill. (gasp!)
Note that checking n strands in linear time produces an n^2 algorithm. Perhaps not linear, but definitely P. It's pointless to argue P vs NP when you're dealing with a 'computer' that can't be represented by a Turing machine- if DNA strands can perform an exponential number of operations in polynomial time, then NP problems will become tractable- but they will still be NP (and probably not P) problems.
zeroknowledge.com has a beta client out that supports encryption and anonymous remailing. These guys tend to get quoted in wired frequently when privacy issues come up.
Slashdot Mirror
If your partner is accusing you of being addicted, prove that you're not--- set a goal-- 1 day, 3 days, a week, whatever, and just don't play. After all, it won't kill you to get some nookie and sunshine..
Before we all jump to any conclusions, read islamway's response first. If Timothy McVeigh had posted to a slashdot discussion about the right to bear arms and started recruiting young libertarians, would people have called for slashdot to be shut down?
Why do I suddenly have visions of the destruction of Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass? 42!
Ownership was another issue. In the end they ceded to students the rights to their work. However, grad students are in a complicated situation, where their work becomes jointly owned with the univ. and their prof. And profs are pretty much obligated to share ownership of their IP with the uni.
Our brand new IP policy can be found online here.
I'm not sure it would be so dicey-- imagine how much harder (or at least taxing) it would be to control a ground-based rover. Put yer blimp on autopilot, get it to take lots of pictures and contact ground control in a few hours. That seems like a good idea..
The first I heard of this idea was during the FTAA summit in Quebec City a few months ago.. on a televised debate on CBC Naomi Klein shouted out that multinationals that do things like employ children and poison local drinking water should face the 'death penalty'. Imagine what the world would be like w/o Nike and Monsanto. It struck me as odd at the time, but haven't we all called for Microsoft's demise before? and afaik, they don't even employ child laborers. ;-)
I upgraded my P133 to the recent ximian/eazel distro and now I have a machine that can barely open terminals. Everything I do to try to turn off the Nautilus bloatware, save removing it entirely, has failed miserably. I was quite happy with the helix gnome distro which was light enough to still make my machine useful. I give up. I'm going back to TWM.
I did my undergraduate degree in comp eng, my master's in comp sci, and now I'm doing a PhD in comp sci.
The differences? At most schools, the admissions requirements are much higher for comp eng. There is a much stronger focus on applied math, digital design and signal processing in comp eng, whereas comp sci focuses on software engineering and theoretical comp sci (ie, Turing machines,etc). In either degree you'll learn how to program. Again, the kinds of programming skills you pick up are different-- I'm a great systems and OS programmer but ask me to implement quicksort and I'll say "It's already in libc!"
So why did I switch programs? The short answer is that the supervisor I wanted to work with is in CS. I'd be doing the same research (robotics and computer vision), irregardless of what grad program I'm registered in. It probably means I'll have to be a CS prof rather than and Eng prof, if and when I graduate..
If you've got the marks, go for the comp eng program-- it's more rigorous and demanding and you'll learn more useful stuff.
..for that baby polar bear to escape the zoo and maul all the core KDE developers at a cocktail hosted by the Gnome Foundation...
Montreal is most definitely the most European of all North American cities. It's a great place to live, if you can tolerate snow for most of the year and then 3 amazing summer months. Great beer, late call time, amazing jazz fest, the best skiing on the east coast, etc, etc. Tech-wise, you've got Nortel, Softimage, Zero Knowledge, Discrete Logic, lots of medium-sized startups -- Openface.ca, Hasc.com, etc, etc.. not to mention great talent coming out of McGill and Ecole Polytechnique.
Shameless plug!!
Go ahead, outlaw napster, I'll just write a program that implements the highly sophisticated "Hyper-text Transfer Protocol" and use it to share my files. Then I'll write a bloatware client that can even be used to *search* for the files I'm looking, even *based on content*!!! Oh my god!
Clearly, Napster is nothing new. it's just a specialized web server/client.
I'm 26 and I've never, ever, seen a handgun in real life. In fact, that vast majority of Canadians can say the same.. you people have the sickest preoccupation with . I live in inner-city montreal, and I have never, ever felt unsafe walking home at 3:00am (which, in fact, is the time that our bars close and everyone stumbles home). you've got to give up this idea that guns==a higher standard of living.
that you should mention stability. I just wrestled a 2.2 kernel bug to the ground that was causing my dual processor machines to crash- ok, actually, RedHat beat me to the punch, and it was their custom 2.2.14 kernel that was the problem. So they provide an updated version, also labelled 2.2.14. What gives? Why is redhat providing patched kernels of the same minor version? Why not just provide the *official* 2.2.14 kernel and send bug-fixing patches to AC? Talk about miffed- everyone's getting excited about 2.4 and we're still facing 2.2 bugs.
How many slashdot readers spent more time last week with their families than they did at the console? We're already captives of technology, and at the mercy of economics (when was the last time your boss told you to work less?) Don't be fooled into believing we're building a better world for ourselves- someone's going to have to run on the treadmill to keep the lights on.
As I recall, this question circulated on slashdot sometime last year. I don't remember the details, but I do remember that everyone was concerned about whether or not Beowulf would be classified as munitions. It seems to me that this question has already been resolved, hence the great preponderance of beowulf outside the US.
How's that for DoS? ;-)
I would tend to agree with the sense that there's an extremely steep curve one needs to climb in order to get on board.
I've downloaded and compiled sporadically over the last year or so, and I've even submitted patches. The trouble is, it's just so durn huge. You need an appropriate amount of hardware and bandwidth just to get the ball rolling, and even then, you're best off typing make and reading war and peace while you wait for your one-line change to be built.
I must say that I'm still optimistic. The important point is that the browser will be standards-compliant. If this means that IE adopts gecko, then I think we can say mission accomplished. the xpfe can rot, for all I care, although we might even see it adopted in other projects. There's some good engineering in there which should be taken advantage of.
One interesting thing about the project is that the lack of outside support has given us an interesting view into the internals of a large software engineering business complete with dirty laundry, and some great examples of Larry Wall's programmer's virtues- laziness, impatience and hubris.
Win or lose, the open sourcing of navigator was a pivotal moment in open-source history, and we'll be learning lessons from this experience for some time yet.
we have better beer!
Well, the predicted crash never really happened- as of 11:00 MSFT was down only $2. The real winner today is RHAT which is up $17. Sweet!
Let's face it, there's still an awfully long road ahead for the DOJ and for linux as well. The news was more or less a buying opportunity for investors who managed to snatch up some discount shares when the stock bottomed out at -$6.
The war's not over!
Dude.. don't kid yourself. The 'talented' people who drive the net are just as stupid and worthless as the dorks who run the auto industry (that is to say, that people are people). Your friend is an exception to this well understood rule. The big difference about the net is that it's an exceptionally efficient tool- it lets us collaborate in ways that were never before possible, the net result being rapid growth in net-related projects, but no improvement to your public health-care system or roads. Believe me, if open-source development applied to government or space exploration, we would have been to europa and back several times over, and maybe, just maybe Linus would be president. But, people being people, we'd probably end up electing Bill. (gasp!)
Now there's a great new signature. I'm gonna put that in my .plan, *and* on my home page *and* on every post I ever make ever ever again.
Ok, maybe not.
R
this strikes me as an Ask Slashdot piece... but it's not listed under the Ask Slashdot category.
poopie.
Note that checking n strands in linear time produces an n^2 algorithm. Perhaps not linear, but definitely P. It's pointless to argue P vs NP when you're dealing with a 'computer' that can't be represented by a Turing machine- if DNA strands can perform an exponential number of operations in polynomial time, then NP problems will become tractable- but they will still be NP (and probably not P) problems.
Try zeroknowledge.com again.
zeroknowledge.com has a beta client out that supports encryption and anonymous remailing. These guys tend to get quoted in wired frequently when privacy issues come up.