"Then I tried to think of cases in recent decades where world opinion differed significantly from the US media's dominant spin. I can't think of a single one."
Umm, there was this tiny little thing called Iraq, where basically noone agreed with you, or believed your claims of evidence. That might not be the impression you got from your domestic media, though.
International opinion was also much quicker to oppose the Vietnam war than the domestic majority.
We all laughed our asses off at how it is possible to let a president's fling almost overthrow the country.
I think you might find also find that international opinion on your christian right and neocons is far less accepting than in the US.
Then it dawned on me. Thanks to satellite TV, now the whole world can watch US TV news.
Satellite makes it easier, but it's been a basically like this for way longer than that, and teh reasons run much deeper:
The point is that as the only superpower (or until recently one of two and everyone's ally unless you were already run by the soviets), what America does _matters_. Directly. To just about everyone. So if you know what's good for you, you better get wise about what it's doing.
Also, most countries are smaller and not spoilt with this kind of power themselves, they know that most of what "is happening" takes place outside your country, so even regular folks takes a certain interest in international affairs even beyond the superpowers, wheras in the US you don't really need to care much about what happens out side it, and are even encouraged to think that all that 'foreign stuff' is mainly irrelevant compared to what goes on in the US.
I'm European, but have lived in the US for a short while, and visited several times since, and I must say the dearth of international news (beyond whatever wars you guys are involved in at any given time) is simply shocking. The rest of us simply cannot afford to be that ignorant.
Amazing how conservatives are usually in support of companies pursuing their own profits above all else, except when the results are not to their liking.
The open source bit will count as positive for most developers. If it's work for hire at competititve rates, most people don't expect any ownership or even credit anyway. OSS gives them the credit and an incresesed chance that someone will actually see their work. We really like that. If the work itself is interesting too, you might be able to get rates noticably below the industry norm.
And finding coders/consultants that will work for hore is easy, if your pay is reasonable.
The difficult part is finding the really good ones. They tend to be otherwise occupied, and spend their extra-curricular coding on stuff that is fun to them.
For your project you probabaly need two really good ones: the chances of finding soeone who is really good at both programming the core of scientific programs _and_ making great guis is essentially zero. If someone feels offended by this: I'm not saying that they're inherently mutually exclusive, just that both are rare and a combination is rarer. Plus that for someone who specialises in usability and interaction, if they have a second speciality, it is unlikely to be number crunching, and vice versa. I'm sure they exist, and i'm equally sure they are all very well paisd doing very interesting jobs already. Both fields are entire scientific disciplines in their own right, and you can't get good at them without investing a whole lot of attention to studying them.
Trying to do dissertation work in the graphics lab at my uni, all the slackers playing doom on the SGIs with the sound on was really, really annoying.
But I had rsh access to all of them. Killing the game would have aroused suspicion. But noone figured out that the sound disapperaing all the time was anything but a bug.
OK, it's not quite as simple as this, but it is entirely possible to argue that the catholic branch was the one that wanted to reform things and 'broke off', and that the orthodox branch most represented the established tradition of the time, even though of course it too was changed by the event.
"all the words and ideas"? The only thing you mention that has anything remotely to do with socialism is taxes. But accepting the need for taxes does not make one a socialist, any more than building freeways makes you a nazi.
US taxes are at a historically low level. Returning to a level a bit more like what you had 70 years ago or more will not make you any more of a socialist country than you were back then.
Fear mongering of your type is always trite, but your attempt was particularly uninspired and sleep-inducing.
Lots of good advice already, but I want to add one thing:
There is a difference between frameworks and other libraries. Libraries are a no-brainer; you just don't go and write a replacement unless you have very weird requirements.
But frameworks tend to dictate how your app is structred, and to some degree even what it does, and that can be severely limiting. Frameworks vary in how easy it is to deviate from the assumed flow of things, but you can indeed find yourself spending a lot of the time fighting a template that just doesn't fit your task.
Before you drop it, especially if it is much respected by other good developers, make sure you really understand it and what freedoms it does offer you. But if you discover it simply has a different goal than you, the sooner you get out the less waste you have to grieve about later.
Well, you should of course not write sophisticated extension abstractions before you need to.
But you _should_ lots of _simple_ and low-cost abstractions that make sense, and make it easier to add that extensibility if you need it. Even the dirty shortcuts we all have to make sometimes can be done in good ways and dumb ways. At least put a dirty implementation behind a simple but clean API so you can fix it without changing the rest of the code.
Always think in terms of interfaces: The important point of a piece of functionality is _not_ the current implementation (as long as it works) but how the rest of the system sees and needs to see it. What is the "contract" that the module and its clients agree on? You don't have to design it with every future need in mind, but it should be well-defined and clear, and require as little knowledge as possible to use right. That way so you can think more clearly about one of the parts at a time, and you can easily add what you need later. Program like you're writing a library, so when you're using one of your own modules but not working on it, you should not have to think much about how it works.
If you need to solve equations and set the result in tex, put the solving and the rendering in different single-purpouse modules that will be easier to reuse.
Don't write a full plugin system with auto-update infrastructure which you won't use. But you do want to isolate and localize the entry points that such a system might use, because that inevitably also expresses the structure of the problem you're trying to solve. This will make your code more efficient to work with too, even if there never is a version 2.
Not all of them. The orthodox churches are older, and there are gnostic christians who claim to trace their faith even further back. That last claim may be dubious, but hey do not at any rate descend from catholicism.
Hard disks are up to 1.5TB. That's maybe a hundred times what they were when Napster first became popular. FLAC is typically, what, ten times the size of an MP3? Seems to me the time for lossless compression is here.
The problem is that it is only about half the sized of the raw uncompressed track. So by the same kind of logic as above, and as has been apparent ever since the performance of lossless audio compression stabilized many years ago:
The point at which lossless compression (of music) becomes useful, is about ten minutes before it becomes pointless.
It might make a difference for slow transfers like torrents, but as for storage: If you can spend that much space, just double it and get rid of the whole encoding and conversion step.
But unlike YouTube, Sony has a _lot_ of imaginary property they want to protect. It would not go down well with the rest of the corporation to be lax on copyright. Hell, if Sony sold crayons they would come with a draconian EULA.
The thing is that if you're internet-literate, reporting about Twitter is like reporting about the different sizes of paper your adversary might use to send a letter.
No, it's more like a medium that used to be only useful for propaganda (like say, cinema) has mutated and is can now also take on the role of rapid person-to-person message-oriented channel.
No, it is not the greatest insight ever, but I'm sure there are people with important roles that need to be told this in order to get priorities straight. Good old spying and infiltration is still a much more efficient tool for many objectives than automated mass-surveillance, so it is not just 'all the internet'. It does pay to be aware of how the enemy communicates and how they could communicate. Doesn't mean the goal is to stop the channels involved.
Re:MPG is an obsolete measurement
on
1000-mph Car Planned
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If it was really powers of 2 based, sure, but it has lots of 3s too, meaning the practical difference is marginal.
Sure, 10 is a really crappy base, but we're pretty much stuck with that by now, it so it makes sense to have the measurement system match the numeric system.
For computing, a base with only 2s as factors (e.g. 8 or 16) would be "better", but then the whole point of computers is to make things easier for _us_, so that's not really a concern.
What would be the most useful for us (as a counting base _and_ measurement base)?
12.
It's in the right order of magnitude for us to handle mentally, and it has the very everyday-useful factors of 2, 3 and 4. Counting on your fingers would be slightly harder, but most people seemed to be able to deal just fine with dozens long before any education was widespread, so that can't be that bad.
10 only has the factors 2(very useful) and 5 (mostly useless except for stuff that arises directly or indirectly from its role in our base number)
Now I know imperial measures does employs 12, but not repeatedly and consistently, and neither it nor the others are consistent with our numeric system, so it remains hell to work with.
Now, I get the point of getting something to go that fast. I understand the point of getting a manned vehicle tho got hat fast. I get the point of getting one of the two to go that fast close to the ground.
It's just the wheels bit that seems patently silly to me. It is simply not a rational choice at those speeds, and the only reason to have them is because it supposedly 'makes it a car' so you can compete in that category in stead of as a rocket or plane.
I makes no sense. It's like setting a world record in the category "speed skating with a double-bass strapped to your ass". No, it does not further humanity. The necessary tech and theory probably did, but they could easily be employed in, and prompted by, a more sane project in stead.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean to say Windows 7 does not actually upgrade your CPU? Ye gods! Whatever will they discover next?
Oh, and one more thing:
"Then I tried to think of cases in recent decades where world opinion differed significantly from the US media's dominant spin. I can't think of a single one."
Umm, there was this tiny little thing called Iraq, where basically noone agreed with you, or believed your claims of evidence. That might not be the impression you got from your domestic media, though.
International opinion was also much quicker to oppose the Vietnam war than the domestic majority.
We all laughed our asses off at how it is possible to let a president's fling almost overthrow the country.
I think you might find also find that international opinion on your christian right and neocons is far less accepting than in the US.
Then it dawned on me. Thanks to satellite TV, now the whole world can watch US TV news.
Satellite makes it easier, but it's been a basically like this for way longer than that, and teh reasons run much deeper:
The point is that as the only superpower (or until recently one of two and everyone's ally unless you were already run by the soviets), what America does _matters_. Directly. To just about everyone. So if you know what's good for you, you better get wise about what it's doing.
Also, most countries are smaller and not spoilt with this kind of power themselves, they know that most of what "is happening" takes place outside your country, so even regular folks takes a certain interest in international affairs even beyond the superpowers, wheras in the US you don't really need to care much about what happens out side it, and are even encouraged to think that all that 'foreign stuff' is mainly irrelevant compared to what goes on in the US.
I'm European, but have lived in the US for a short while, and visited several times since, and I must say the dearth of international news (beyond whatever wars you guys are involved in at any given time) is simply shocking. The rest of us simply cannot afford to be that ignorant.
Amazing how conservatives are usually in support of companies pursuing their own profits above all else, except when the results are not to their liking.
The open source bit will count as positive for most developers.
If it's work for hire at competititve rates, most people don't expect any ownership or even credit anyway. OSS gives them the credit and an incresesed chance that someone will actually see their work. We really like that. If the work itself is interesting too, you might be able to get rates noticably below the industry norm.
And finding coders/consultants that will work for hore is easy, if your pay is reasonable.
The difficult part is finding the really good ones. They tend to be otherwise occupied, and spend their extra-curricular coding on stuff that is fun to them.
For your project you probabaly need two really good ones: the chances of finding soeone who is really good at both programming the core of scientific programs _and_ making great guis is essentially zero. If someone feels offended by this: I'm not saying that they're inherently mutually exclusive, just that both are rare and a combination is rarer. Plus that for someone who specialises in usability and interaction, if they have a second speciality, it is unlikely to be number crunching, and vice versa. I'm sure they exist, and i'm equally sure they are all very well paisd doing very interesting jobs already. Both fields are entire scientific disciplines in their own right, and you can't get good at them without investing a whole lot of attention to studying them.
On real unix it does (or at least used to) match '..'
And when the recursive flag is on...
Bollocks. The people contributing the commands shouldn't be allowed to without writing proper man pages to go with them.
BTW: How does one ork a cow?
Threel-egged spool and a tail
Trying to do dissertation work in the graphics lab at my uni, all the slackers playing doom on the SGIs with the sound on was really, really annoying.
But I had rsh access to all of them. Killing the game would have aroused suspicion. But noone figured out that the sound disapperaing all the time was anything but a bug.
Do nothing really fast:
cat /dev/urandom > /dev/null
The support guy closed his eyes, opened them again, saw the sheep was white and promptly forgot about the whole thing.
alias cd pushd
alias sa 'alias > ~.alias'
All 1337 sysadmins
Does not compute. People who write "1337" are at best "n00b"s in the world of sysadmins.
Here's a classic blunder I've both done and seen others who really should know better do:
"OK, let's just clear this whole dir tree so we know
what we're testing."
# rm -rf *
"Damn, all those pesky dot-files and -dirs are still there."
# rm -rf .*
OK, it's not quite as simple as this, but it is entirely possible to argue that the catholic branch was the one that wanted to reform things and 'broke off', and that the orthodox branch most represented the established tradition of the time, even though of course it too was changed by the event.
"all the words and ideas"? The only thing you mention that has anything remotely to do with socialism is taxes. But accepting the need for taxes does not make one a socialist, any more than building freeways makes you a nazi.
US taxes are at a historically low level. Returning to a level a bit more like what you had 70 years ago or more will not make you any more of a socialist country than you were back then.
Fear mongering of your type is always trite, but your attempt was particularly uninspired and sleep-inducing.
I honestly believe he'll be able to avoid doing most of the really monumentally stupid shit.
That's a quite lot of change.
Lots of good advice already, but I want to add one thing:
There is a difference between frameworks and other libraries.
Libraries are a no-brainer; you just don't go and write a
replacement unless you have very weird requirements.
But frameworks tend to dictate how your app is structred,
and to some degree even what it does, and that can be severely
limiting. Frameworks vary in how easy it is to deviate from
the assumed flow of things, but you can indeed find yourself
spending a lot of the time fighting a template that just
doesn't fit your task.
Before you drop it, especially if it is much respected
by other good developers, make sure you really understand it
and what freedoms it does offer you. But if you discover
it simply has a different goal than you, the sooner you
get out the less waste you have to grieve about later.
Well, you should of course not write sophisticated extension abstractions before you need to.
But you _should_ lots of _simple_ and low-cost abstractions that make sense, and make it easier to add that extensibility if you need it. Even the dirty shortcuts we all have to make sometimes can be done in good ways and dumb ways. At least put a dirty implementation behind a simple but clean API so you can fix it without changing the rest of the code.
Always think in terms of interfaces: The important point of a piece of functionality is _not_ the current implementation (as long as it works) but how the rest of the system sees and needs to see it. What is the "contract" that the module and its clients agree on? You don't have to design it with every future need in mind, but it should be well-defined and clear, and require as little knowledge as possible to use right. That way so you can think more clearly about one of the parts at a time, and you can easily add what you need later. Program like you're writing a library, so when you're using one of your own modules but not working on it, you should not have to think much about how it works.
If you need to solve equations and set the result in tex, put the solving and the rendering in different single-purpouse modules that will be easier to reuse.
Don't write a full plugin system with auto-update infrastructure which you won't use. But you do want to isolate and localize the entry points that such a system might use, because that inevitably also expresses the structure of the problem you're trying to solve. This will make your code more efficient to work with too, even if there never is a version 2.
Not all of them. The orthodox churches are older, and there are gnostic christians who claim to trace their faith even further back. That last claim may be dubious, but hey do not at any rate descend from catholicism.
Hard disks are up to 1.5TB. That's maybe a hundred times what they were when Napster first became popular. FLAC is typically, what, ten times the size of an MP3? Seems to me the time for lossless compression is here.
The problem is that it is only about half the sized of the raw uncompressed track.
So by the same kind of logic as above, and as has been apparent ever since the performance of lossless audio compression stabilized many years ago:
The point at which lossless compression (of music) becomes useful, is about ten minutes before it becomes pointless.
It might make a difference for slow transfers like torrents, but as for storage: If you can spend that much space, just double it and get rid of the whole encoding and conversion step.
But unlike YouTube, Sony has a _lot_ of imaginary property they want to protect. It would not go down well with the rest of the corporation to be lax on copyright.
Hell, if Sony sold crayons they would come with a draconian EULA.
The thing is that if you're internet-literate, reporting about Twitter is like reporting about the different sizes of paper your adversary might use to send a letter.
No, it's more like a medium that used to be only useful for propaganda (like say, cinema) has mutated and is can now also take on the role of rapid person-to-person message-oriented channel.
No, it is not the greatest insight ever, but I'm sure there are people with important roles that need to be told this in order to get priorities straight. Good old spying and infiltration is still a much more efficient tool for many objectives than automated mass-surveillance, so it is not just 'all the internet'. It does pay to be aware of how the enemy communicates and how they could communicate. Doesn't mean the goal is to stop the channels involved.
If it was really powers of 2 based, sure, but it has lots of 3s too, meaning the practical difference is marginal.
Sure, 10 is a really crappy base, but we're pretty much stuck with that by now, it so it makes sense to have the measurement system match the numeric system.
For computing, a base with only 2s as factors (e.g. 8 or 16) would be "better", but
then the whole point of computers is to make things easier for _us_, so that's not really a concern.
What would be the most useful for us (as a counting base _and_ measurement base)?
12.
It's in the right order of magnitude for us to handle mentally, and it has the very everyday-useful factors of 2, 3 and 4. Counting on your fingers would be slightly harder, but most people seemed to be able to deal just fine with dozens long before any education was widespread, so that can't be that bad.
10 only has the factors 2(very useful) and 5 (mostly useless except for stuff that arises directly or indirectly from its role in our base number)
Now I know imperial measures does employs 12, but not repeatedly and consistently, and neither it nor the others are consistent with our numeric system, so it remains hell to work with.
I know many will scream "whats the point".
WHAT IS THE POINT?
Now, I get the point of getting something to go that fast. I understand the point of getting a manned vehicle tho got hat fast. I get the point of getting one of the two to go that fast close to the ground.
It's just the wheels bit that seems patently silly to me. It is simply not a rational choice at those speeds, and the only reason to have them is because it supposedly 'makes it a car' so you can compete in that category in stead of as a rocket or plane.
I makes no sense. It's like setting a world record in the category "speed skating with a double-bass strapped to your ass". No, it does not further humanity. The necessary tech and theory probably did, but they could easily be employed in, and prompted by, a more sane project in stead.