One thing that was done back in the 8 bit home computer era, and is never done now (for pretty obvious reasons) is typing in games from computer magazine listings. While these 2, 3 and 4 page wonders weren't up to commercial standard, they also weren't an order of magnitude (or several orders of magnitude) worse than many of the commercial games of the time, as they would be today. It also had the effect of exposing numerous kids to code, for no other reason than than wanting to increase their game library. Such an idea is laughable now, but it was reality back then. Not saying it was better or anything, just that it created an environment where people were routinely exposed to programming. Even in the modern era with "open source", most people who download the source just compile it, and are never exposed to the internals.
I read that your eyes do some kind of automatic "hovering" when they look at something rather than staying motionless. Presumably to bump up the resolution as you say. You can also spread the resolution out over time I would guess.
Per crossing the road instance, the odds of dying are about the same as per commercial airline trip that an individual takes as far as I can make out. And that's giving a generous number to the average daily crossing figure. If it's lower, then the safety is worse for road crossing than I calculate, but anyway....
It's the number of times that you cross the road relative to taking a flight that make it more likely to die that way. The chance of specifically dying because of air terrorists is much lower than for air travel in general of course.
The difference in fear factor is because crossing the road is for the most part within our control, or we like to think so, though obviously many people are wrong about that each year. Travelling by plane is known to be completely outside of your control. You can do nothing to influence events if something goes wrong. That's what's terrifying. Statistically it's irrational, but man is not a statistical animal.
You can't change (or see) a file extension with the standard Windows install options. You have to change some options in windows explorer.
It's even tricky to change it by doing "file-save as..." unless you know what you are doing, most likely you will end up with hello.vbs.txt
So it's not as straightforward as you make out. In fact they have made it deliberately difficult to do what you describe. They seem to want to preserve some sort of idea of the intrinsic nature of different types of files for users.
The only thing that could make it easier was if they had added "vbs file" as a new document template. I don't think it's lack of availability that's the problem...
Given that it's one of the standard ways to create a new file of the type you want, it's exactly what they should have done if they wanted average people to program. It's precicely lack of availability that's the problem. You could hunt using the standard windows interface and never discover that there was a way to do what you describe (trivial though it is).
Ask yourself why it's legal for corpoate donors (supposedly excluded from the electoral process) to influence your lawmakers to a far greater degree than your vote ever would. Let me know if you come up with a good answer. As far as I can see it is a betrayal of any notion of democratic principles, and is nothing more than graft.
Slackware is free. Windows is not. Microsoft can afford to pay thousands of employees. Slackware cannot. It's a tradeoff, and in fact "users" (that would be brought by marketing) hurt OSS. Developers are the lifeblood of free software. Users who are the lifeblood of commercial software. They are fundamentally different models.
I also have to sort my garbage into 5 different ways in Japan. Unfortunately it turns out that in my city that with the exception of amuminium, they actually just burn the lot, no matter which pile it comes in (although they do charge differntly). I wonder what are the energy costs of all that sorting.
You are cutting Apple slack because of a historical system (CD sales) that they have nothing to do with. Apple's sales are DRMed. CD sales are not (well, more or less) Apple seeks to replace CD sales with iTunes sales. Apple seeks to replace DRM free sales with DRM sales. And it's precicely the slashdot crowd that is not inconvenienced by DRM. It's those who don't know any better.
The thing is though that those from the "poor" countries are actually rich in comparison to colleagues form the "rich" countries. My co-workers (colleagues at the same job grade) whenever they go home to India will be able to afford a nice house and some servants. I cannot go home because I cannot afford a house, nice or otherwise. Even in the USA things are much cheaper. I was looking at the property prices in various US cities where I could concievably get a job, and the prices are astoundingly low.
If you've been in the UK for a decade, are you not entitled to change your citizenship, or at least some form of permanent rezident status? While I appreciate you might not want to change nationality (I don't want to become a Japanese citizen for example, despite the benefits it would bring me and my family), if you are concerned about employment and entrepreneurship it is surely worth considering.
Secondly is it really true that you need 200k to start a business (as a foreigner?). A PLC perhaps, but a Ltd. company usually only requires something like 40 quid and a form. I doubt that the many many small businesses run by foreigners in the UK have 200k as capital investment.
Those crazy scientists should just have used a different word to planet. "Astronomertlet" or some stupid jargon like that. Planet is an ancient word in widespread general usage, so of course people are going to complain. It's not like the astronomers had a previous definition of planet that was being violated.
The big glaring hardware problem on IBM thinkpads is the lack of the "Windows" key, making the OS a big pain to use for lack of convenient keyboard shortcuts.
True, though just because they tried different models before and then revised their opinion doesn't mean that they won't eventually hit on the right one. The brain is not irreducibly complex. Also, the computational model of the brain has (or so I've read) allowed huge practical progress to be made in brain research.
A pointer assigned to 0 (or NULL, which is 0) is not a valid memory address in the C language. There doesn't seem to be much justification other than laziness for not generating at least a warning.
Not knowing what's happening behind the scenes (withing reason) is the whole point of abstraction. They aer hiding it, so they can change it! Just because you know today, doesn't mean you know tomorrow when you have to rewite all that code that takes advantage of how it really worked yesterday. Tomorrow will come sooner than you think for any given application domain, so unless you absolutely must really truly have fast code, it's best to stick with the generic portable way.
Compare the efficiency of GCC at auto-vectorising FORTRAN (which has a primitive vector type) and C (which doesn't), if you don't believe me.
You see this all the time in SW Engineering. If there is a well defined high level API specifying what something is trying to do rather than how it should be efficiently (at the time) done, it will eventually be far more efficient to use the API because it will be get dedicated instructions in the chipset or even be completely implemented in a dedicated HW device whereas the how to do it version will be forever limited by how it's doing it.
For PCs this isn't so obvious, since generic hardware + biggest CPU going tends to get used, but in embedded devices the dedicated hardware is much more often the way to go than the processor upgrade. My last project I can think of two APIs that gave us this benefit immediately without SW effort on our part, and a third area that benefitted by ripping out all the "optimized" code that bypassed the API, and using the (now HW accelerated) API directly.
I think that if you don't get the project out the door ASAP, then there will be no money coming in to pay for all those expensive maintenance programmers. Besides which, unless someone is actually using the project, how are you going to know what to maintain?
Now, there is certainly justification for the maintenance team refusing to accept code until it meets certain criteria, but there is no need for those criteria to get in the way of customer release. They are two seperate issues.
Well, first of one Geoffrey, first of one. I'll also point out that there is also a wikipedia article about the Myth of Jesus:)
Anyway, even though I obviously don't agree, let me accept, your point that the Bible is just as worthwhile a source as the Roman historians, especially when discussing Jesus.
What do we see in the Bible? We see the "story of Jesus". It's kind of confused and a bit implausible, but well, it more or less hangs together. But this narrative view is unfortunately just not the way it was written.
Paul is the first Christian to write, in the 50s or thereabouts. There is nothing before him. Everything after him is at the very edge or outside of living memory of the 30s. In Paul's writings (and he is a Christian, arguing for Christ remember?), there is a complete absense of a historical Jesus. Sure, there is his belief in Jesus Christ son of God, but the son of man nonsense is nowhere to be seen. All the "events" in the story of Jesus on earth are completely absent. Hell, he even says that the Jesus he knows has been made known to him through divine revelation, and reading the scripture. Jesus the historical man just does not exist in his world view. And not just Paul, the historical Jesus is absent in many other early Christian writings both inside and outside of the Bible. He gets grafted on to mainstream Christian thought sometime in the early second century, (though you still have Christians denying anything of the sort well into the middle of it), and his story is lifted pretty much wholesale from existing passages in scripture.
For me, the idea that he didn't exist is a sort of historical curiosity. I don't particularly care if it is true or not, but I think it fits the facts more neatly than the "he was just a good man" brigade. If you follow him as a philosopher, well, the philosophy, inconsistent though it is, is not invalidated by being a literary construct. If you are a Christian, I don't see as if it should make a whole deal of difference. If he was Son of God to Paul and a whole lot of others, who knew he didn't exist on earth, but still believed in him, I don't see why his absense should make a huge difference to any other believer. After all, he still died to save you, just not here on earth:)
now have perfect vision in one eye and better than perfect vision in the other.
I think you mean "average" and "better than average". (sorry, I've just been reading this book which goes to great length to show how the human eye is not "perfect" by any stretch of the imagination)
It's the government who gives out the patent in the first place. Of course it's their job to do that. They have an obligation to ensure this system of monopolies that they are running is run for the benefit of the people.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that was done back in the 8 bit home computer era, and is never done now (for pretty obvious reasons) is typing in games from computer magazine listings. While these 2, 3 and 4 page wonders weren't up to commercial standard, they also weren't an order of magnitude (or several orders of magnitude) worse than many of the commercial games of the time, as they would be today. It also had the effect of exposing numerous kids to code, for no other reason than than wanting to increase their game library. Such an idea is laughable now, but it was reality back then. Not saying it was better or anything, just that it created an environment where people were routinely exposed to programming. Even in the modern era with "open source", most people who download the source just compile it, and are never exposed to the internals.
I read that your eyes do some kind of automatic "hovering" when they look at something rather than staying motionless. Presumably to bump up the resolution as you say. You can also spread the resolution out over time I would guess.
Per crossing the road instance, the odds of dying are about the same as per commercial airline trip that an individual takes as far as I can make out. And that's giving a generous number to the average daily crossing figure. If it's lower, then the safety is worse for road crossing than I calculate, but anyway....
It's the number of times that you cross the road relative to taking a flight that make it more likely to die that way. The chance of specifically dying because of air terrorists is much lower than for air travel in general of course.
The difference in fear factor is because crossing the road is for the most part within our control, or we like to think so, though obviously many people are wrong about that each year. Travelling by plane is known to be completely outside of your control. You can do nothing to influence events if something goes wrong. That's what's terrifying. Statistically it's irrational, but man is not a statistical animal.
It's even tricky to change it by doing "file-save as..." unless you know what you are doing, most likely you will end up with hello.vbs.txt
So it's not as straightforward as you make out. In fact they have made it deliberately difficult to do what you describe. They seem to want to preserve some sort of idea of the intrinsic nature of different types of files for users.
Given that it's one of the standard ways to create a new file of the type you want, it's exactly what they should have done if they wanted average people to program. It's precicely lack of availability that's the problem. You could hunt using the standard windows interface and never discover that there was a way to do what you describe (trivial though it is).
Ask yourself why it's legal for corpoate donors (supposedly excluded from the electoral process) to influence your lawmakers to a far greater degree than your vote ever would. Let me know if you come up with a good answer. As far as I can see it is a betrayal of any notion of democratic principles, and is nothing more than graft.
s/marketing/revenue/
Slackware is free. Windows is not. Microsoft can afford to pay thousands of employees. Slackware cannot. It's a tradeoff, and in fact "users" (that would be brought by marketing) hurt OSS. Developers are the lifeblood of free software. Users who are the lifeblood of commercial software. They are fundamentally different models.
I also have to sort my garbage into 5 different ways in Japan. Unfortunately it turns out that in my city that with the exception of amuminium, they actually just burn the lot, no matter which pile it comes in (although they do charge differntly). I wonder what are the energy costs of all that sorting.
There is no God and there was no Jesus, so don't sweat it. Life is what you make of it.
Money the War industry donated to politicians > Money the **AA donated to politicians > money hapless & helpless PC owners donated to politicians.
Of course the first two should be crimes, but anyway...
You are cutting Apple slack because of a historical system (CD sales) that they have nothing to do with. Apple's sales are DRMed. CD sales are not (well, more or less) Apple seeks to replace CD sales with iTunes sales. Apple seeks to replace DRM free sales with DRM sales. And it's precicely the slashdot crowd that is not inconvenienced by DRM. It's those who don't know any better.
The thing is though that those from the "poor" countries are actually rich in comparison to colleagues form the "rich" countries. My co-workers (colleagues at the same job grade) whenever they go home to India will be able to afford a nice house and some servants. I cannot go home because I cannot afford a house, nice or otherwise. Even in the USA things are much cheaper. I was looking at the property prices in various US cities where I could concievably get a job, and the prices are astoundingly low.
If you've been in the UK for a decade, are you not entitled to change your citizenship, or at least some form of permanent rezident status? While I appreciate you might not want to change nationality (I don't want to become a Japanese citizen for example, despite the benefits it would bring me and my family), if you are concerned about employment and entrepreneurship it is surely worth considering.
Secondly is it really true that you need 200k to start a business (as a foreigner?). A PLC perhaps, but a Ltd. company usually only requires something like 40 quid and a form. I doubt that the many many small businesses run by foreigners in the UK have 200k as capital investment.
Those crazy scientists should just have used a different word to planet. "Astronomertlet" or some stupid jargon like that. Planet is an ancient word in widespread general usage, so of course people are going to complain. It's not like the astronomers had a previous definition of planet that was being violated.
The big glaring hardware problem on IBM thinkpads is the lack of the "Windows" key, making the OS a big pain to use for lack of convenient keyboard shortcuts.
True, though just because they tried different models before and then revised their opinion doesn't mean that they won't eventually hit on the right one. The brain is not irreducibly complex. Also, the computational model of the brain has (or so I've read) allowed huge practical progress to be made in brain research.
A pointer assigned to 0 (or NULL, which is 0) is not a valid memory address in the C language. There doesn't seem to be much justification other than laziness for not generating at least a warning.
Not knowing what's happening behind the scenes (withing reason) is the whole point of abstraction. They aer hiding it, so they can change it! Just because you know today, doesn't mean you know tomorrow when you have to rewite all that code that takes advantage of how it really worked yesterday. Tomorrow will come sooner than you think for any given application domain, so unless you absolutely must really truly have fast code, it's best to stick with the generic portable way.
For PCs this isn't so obvious, since generic hardware + biggest CPU going tends to get used, but in embedded devices the dedicated hardware is much more often the way to go than the processor upgrade. My last project I can think of two APIs that gave us this benefit immediately without SW effort on our part, and a third area that benefitted by ripping out all the "optimized" code that bypassed the API, and using the (now HW accelerated) API directly.
I think that if you don't get the project out the door ASAP, then there will be no money coming in to pay for all those expensive maintenance programmers. Besides which, unless someone is actually using the project, how are you going to know what to maintain?
Now, there is certainly justification for the maintenance team refusing to accept code until it meets certain criteria, but there is no need for those criteria to get in the way of customer release. They are two seperate issues.
Well, first of one Geoffrey, first of one. I'll also point out that there is also a wikipedia article about the Myth of Jesus :)
:)
Anyway, even though I obviously don't agree, let me accept, your point that the Bible is just as worthwhile a source as the Roman historians, especially when discussing Jesus.
What do we see in the Bible? We see the "story of Jesus". It's kind of confused and a bit implausible, but well, it more or less hangs together. But this narrative view is unfortunately just not the way it was written.
Paul is the first Christian to write, in the 50s or thereabouts. There is nothing before him. Everything after him is at the very edge or outside of living memory of the 30s. In Paul's writings (and he is a Christian, arguing for Christ remember?), there is a complete absense of a historical Jesus. Sure, there is his belief in Jesus Christ son of God, but the son of man nonsense is nowhere to be seen. All the "events" in the story of Jesus on earth are completely absent. Hell, he even says that the Jesus he knows has been made known to him through divine revelation, and reading the scripture. Jesus the historical man just does not exist in his world view. And not just Paul, the historical Jesus is absent in many other early Christian writings both inside and outside of the Bible. He gets grafted on to mainstream Christian thought sometime in the early second century, (though you still have Christians denying anything of the sort well into the middle of it), and his story is lifted pretty much wholesale from existing passages in scripture.
For me, the idea that he didn't exist is a sort of historical curiosity. I don't particularly care if it is true or not, but I think it fits the facts more neatly than the "he was just a good man" brigade. If you follow him as a philosopher, well, the philosophy, inconsistent though it is, is not invalidated by being a literary construct. If you are a Christian, I don't see as if it should make a whole deal of difference. If he was Son of God to Paul and a whole lot of others, who knew he didn't exist on earth, but still believed in him, I don't see why his absense should make a huge difference to any other believer. After all, he still died to save you, just not here on earth
until they sell it at a fraction of face value to some black marketeer.
Yes and whatsmore, unlike RMS, Jesus actually existed!!
It's the government who gives out the patent in the first place. Of course it's their job to do that.
They have an obligation to ensure this system of monopolies that they are running is run for the benefit of the people.