The sad thing is that by digging it up he's destroyed the archaeological context which might have shown why it was buried, when, and, to some extent, who by. The end of the Roman period in Britain is a very interesting period of history, but one about which we have far too little information. Yes, it's great that these things get found, but when you've found something, for heaven's sake leave it in the ground and alert the county archaeologists (or, technically, the coroner who will in turn alert the archaeologists, but...). You'll still get the 'treasure trove' value as the finder, and the context will get recorded.
Given the timing I can't help but feel we gave them Abu Hamza and the other 4 'terror' suspects in return for them letting this go without a major fuss. That both your premise and mine both are based on the assumption that actual human rights and morality were largely irrelevant says something about our countries politics.
I have to confess that, while I don't think Gary McKinnon should be extradited to the US to face trial for an alleged offence committed in England, I can't help suspecting that the 'medical condition' which he has which gave rise to this decision was 'white skin syndrome'.
It is simply not right that one must know the laws of an artibray number of other countries even if you've never visited them.
Hacking into systems you don't have official access to is illegal in the UK just as much as it is in the US. So he didn't need to know the laws of another country to know that what he did was illegal.
Right. So, as a Scot, when in England, he allegedly committed a crime in England which was against English law. So he should be tried in England, and, if found guilty, imprisoned in Scotland (because he's one of our citizens, and in Europe there's a general presumption that people should be imprisoned in their own country). The USA has no role in this, other than to sit quiet and await the outcome of the trial.
I've always thought that someone should be prosecuted in England for alleged crimes allegedly committed in England. The US may be the alleged victim in this case but I don't see that it has any other role.
Fifteen years from now food shortages, triggered by the combination of climate change and population explosion, will impact significantly on even advanced western societies. Crops will fail widely, on a regular basis. The cost of food will be relatively a lot more than it is now, and the availability of it a lot less dependable. Cereals in the morning? Don't depend on it. We could, of course, limit climate change if we drastically limited our consumption of energy, but our politicians don't have the bottle to do that, so we probably won't. Which means your shower probably will come on automatically at the comfortable temperature you prefer.
But I'm very sceptical about whether most knowledge workers will get in a car and drive to work. With ubiquitous networks, why drive anywhere? You can work equally effectively wherever you happen to be. You probably work in your own home, or go round the corner to a local cafe/shared workspace. And I doubt anyone will have a screen on their desk. We'll all wear information displays discreetly integrated with glasses or even contact lenses, which will simulate an effectively infinite 3d display when needed, and will simply fade out to give us a clear view of the world when the data display is not needed. Some form of wearable device, probably built into your clothing, will provide local compute power, but will function most of the time as a thin client onto servers elsewhere. You won't own any special purpose information devices - no phone, no MP3 player, no television, no playstation, no ebook reader, no wristwatch, no GPS, certainly no laptop or desktop computer. Your local device will provide you with all the functionality of all those things and more. Younger people won't use a physical keyboard, mouse or pen to input data. Muttering in a shared workspace will probably be considered uncool (although your device will of course respond intelligently to voice input), but if you simulate the motions of writing with a pen or typing on a keyboard, your device will interpret your gestures as though you had written or typed or spoken. Older people may still prefer to use legacy input devices. And it's possible that increasingly we will have direct interface between our brains and our devices, although I think that's probably beyond the fifteen year horizon.
As for having a hardware token as proxy for your identity, I really don't see that surviving in the medium term. Some form of biometric identity will be more convenient and much more secure. If your interface with the network is built into your glasses, then it seems reasonable to use an iris scan.
I think it's more nearly the truth that Tolkien (like many men of his class and generation) was quite alienated from women. I don't think you'd exactly call him a misoynist - although many of his attitudes look very misoynistic to modern eyes - but he had no sympathetic ability to understand what it was to be a woman, not to write from a woman's view point. His understanding of women is pretty much as sexless and passive creatures. The outstanding exceptions to passivity are Eowyn and perhaps Luthien, but Eowyn at least is clearly unable to express the sexuality of her feeling for Aragorn[1], and is apparently virgin until her marriage to Faramir. I don't remember the Luthien narrative in detail, but my memory of it is that he pursues her, not the other way around; so again there's little evidence of any erotic feeling on her part. The only couple in the whole damned epic (I include the Silmarillion and the Hobbit) to appear to have anything approaching what we'd describe as a normal healthy sex-life are Sam and Rosie Gamgee, and that happens in a few pages at the very end of the text.
I have very conflicted feelings about Tolkien, and this is one of the issues. In the end he's telling a very reactionary story, a story of primogeniture, divine right, and male supremacy. A story, undoubtedly, influenced both by his Catholicism and his experience of the Great War. But seriously, do you see Arwen as good in the sack? Do images of Galadriel have you writhing in the night? No, didn't think so. Me neither. And, actually, I think the story would be stronger if they did.
Perhaps the reason that the population of Middle Earth is so small and doesn't grow in anything like a natural way is that Middle Earth women just don't like sex very much? Or perhaps Middle Earth men just aren't very good at it?
[1] I'm not suggesting that Eowyn 'ought' to have made an unsubtle pass at Aragorn; there are plenty of societies in which young women are very inhibited from doing that, although it's a little surprising in the robust horse-nomad society of the Rohirrim: but there are plenty of subtle ways in which Eowyn could have made a pass at him, and she just doesn't. She mopes about waiting for him to make a pass, and then when he doesn't goes all fey and suicidal.
If you have around $3-6M (USD) to spare, I could have a 25mm x 25mm chip fabricated, using 28nm CMOS technology at either TSMC or GlobalFoundaries, with a 2-core ARM Cortex-A9 and a custom 384-core MIMT architecture, the latter of which would hit above 500 GFLOPS in single-precision peak performance.
MIMT? Do you mean MIMD, or is this some new acronym I don't know about (and probably should)?
seriously, though, what does it run? the article doesn't say except to use the nebulous term "open source". or are they planning on schlepping off the initial software development to the open source community too? (good luck with that)
Seriously, though, UN*X-like operating systems for massively parallel architectures have been written in the past - one I'm familiar with is Helios. The Linux kernel is not optimised for massively parallel architectures, so that I doubt it would be easy to port Linux in such a way that it made efficient use of the parallelism of the Epiphany architecture. But the kernel is a relatively small part of a distribution. However, writing a new kernel is not an unfeasible task: Linus, after all, wrote the original Linux kernel (up to 0.99) largely by himself in less than two years, and it worked - I know, I used it. So something like an OpenHelios project, given that the documentation exists, would not be an over-ambitious open source project.
OK, I'm giving up my power to moderate on this story to ask a few questions. Let's hope the answers are worth it...
I'm assuming this thing is MIMD. Separate processors with separate memory seems to me to imply that. Am I right?
How does this design relate to the old Inmos Transputer, which, from what I recall, was conceptually fairly similar? Is it a development of the same ideas, or is it something completely different? How does it compare to the Meiko Computing Surface, which was a system built on transputers?
How feasible would it be to implement a JVM on top of Epiphany, such that new JVM threads were mapped where possible to currently-idle cores?
My understanding, so far, for what it's worth, is that the key features of the Epiphany architecture are:
Each processor is able to address four other processors directly, through its own router, implying a grid or surface architecture rather than a cube or hypercube architecture.
There is a single flat memory map, of which each processor 'owns' a local page; but each processor can read from (? and write to ?) pages belonging to other processors. There is presumably some overhead in accessing other node's memory(?)
There was some good news for Microsoft from the survey though, as the Windows 8-based Microsoft Surface was more popular than Android tablets and the iPad. Around 35 percent of respondents said the Surface would be their tablet of choice.
Right. Around 35% of Microsoft fanbois on a Microsoft fanboi site would prefer Surface to Android of I pad, and that's good news for Microsoft? If they can't get more than 35% of their own fanbois on board, it's dead.
Started with SLS. Then Slackware. Stayed with Slackware for a considerable while, then early RedHat, then Caldera (remember them? - the distribution included licensed OSF/Motif), then Mandrake (again for a good while) then by 1997 I was onto Debian and I've kept my servers on Debian ever since. My desktops run Ubuntu these days after a brief flirtation with Mint, but it's a heavily customised Ubuntu - Unity really does not do it for me. Before Linux I used BSD4.2 on 68000, SPARC, MIPS and Acorn RISC hardware, and System V.4 (and later UnixWare) on PowerPC and Intel hardware.
One of the really nice applications on Linux back in the 1990s was an office productivity suite called Applixware. It was commercial, for pay, and I don't think it sold well, which is a shame because it was really good - particularly for the time. LibreOffice is pretty good these days, but I might just download an evaluation of Applixware tonight to see if it's still as good as I remember.
Back in those days there was a sort of toy operating system called Microsoft Windows, but it was shockingly bad - fragile as hell and full of security holes. I've kept looking it over the years and thinking 'the next release of this might actually be good enough for commercial use'. I still think that, but now it's really too late - the PC is more or less dead, and various flavours of UN*X have, for the time being anyway, won in the server and in the mobile devices space.
its called job security make it as nonobvious and convoluted as possible so that your the only person that can comprehend it, that way your unfireable because it will fall apart when you leave.
I always fire people I suspect of doing that. You cannot afford to have them on the team.
I can't see what possible benefit it is to Intel to deliberately limit the market for their processors. Unless they are doing this for Microsoft's benefit, in which case, surely, there are anti-trust implications?
There is a whole lot of point missing going on here. Yes, you could build a faster computer cheaper using other hardware. But it wouldn't explain the concepts to children (and to first year CS students, which is pretty much the same thing) nearly so well. Throw together a heap of little itty-bitty boards each of which, individually is, as everyone knows, relatively low power, and knit them together with ordinary cat5 cable, and get out of the collection high compute performance, and you have something which will intrigue children|students and get them thinking about how it works. Show them an anonymous 1U box doing exactly the same job, and you won't get them thinking, because they can't immediately see and understand what it comprises and how it's put together. This is a teaching machine, not a practical machine. It's job is to teach students. It teaches students by being perspicuous.
It's not (yet) a requirement for getting a Slashdot account to demonstrate that you have an IQ slightly south of that of a stick of used chewing gum, but some of you clearly haven't yet got that message.
Besides science discoveries, what of any importance is reported by the news?
War. Pestilence. Famine. Death.
The four horsemen of the apocalypse are already abroad in the world. And it matters that you know it. The electoral choices made by American people cast a long shadow - over the Middle East in particular, but over the world as a whole. And yet the US electorate is quite frighteningly ignorant of what happens beyond their borders. OK, I appreciate that part of the reason you don't read the news is that the principal news media available to you are on the whole dishonest, corrupt and trivial. But there are other news media (and news aggregators). The BBC, and many of the UK 'broadsheet' sites (e.g. Guardian, Telegraph) are English language, well informed and honest (note: I did not say 'unbiased' - nothing human is unbiased). Al Jazeera seems to be well informed and honest, too, and provides a usefully different perspective.
If we carry on as we're going, global warming and with provoking conflict, war, famine and pestilence will arrive in the United States in your lifetime. You have a duty to be informed - a duty to yourself, as much as to anyone else.
This is not Apache's territory. they should not be doing anything to affect my browsing session. Nothing at all. Period.
Apache isn't doing this. One person has posted a patch. It has not, as I understand it, yet been accepted by the Apache Foundation. Even if it were, Apache HTTPD is by design a highly configurable web server which has modules to do all sorts of things, but on any typical web server only a few of those modules will be enabled. This particular patch - even if it were accepted as part of the distribution - only works if both the 'setenvif' and 'headers' modules are enabled, which, on my servers, is not the case. Furthermore, the 'patch' is five lines in a configuration file; if you don't like 'em, comment them out.
Slow news day, storm in a teacup, nothing to see here, move along.
if you can't fit the documentation into your method (and variable names), that method is likely too long and complicated.
This is foolish arrogance. In my thirty years in this profession I have worked with many people who thought their code was 'self documenting'; all of them were wrong, and faced with their own code two years later I doubt any of them could immediately follow it. I've only ever worked with one software engineer who, in my opinion, documented enough; I strive to match his standards in my own code but I know I don't always succeed.
There are, in effect, three reasons for not documenting:
Arrogance
'My code is so clear and elegant it needs no documentation'
Procrastination
'I'm too busy just now, I'll do it later'
Obscurantism
'If I don't document my code, no-one else will be able to understand it so they can't sack me'
These days I see poor documentation practice as a reason to negatively appraise an engineer; if it doesn't improve I'd seek to move them off my team. There's no excuse. Documentation - like source code - isn't, fundamentally, for you: it's to communicate with your colleagues and to the poor grunt who has to try to maintain your code, long after you've moved on to more interesting projects. And that poor grunt may not be as intellectually gifted as you are.
Please re-read my post. I said that I support the use of LOGO up to 6th grade. I think that the mental process required to step through a specific procedure is met well by the application. I think it sucks because personally I would have preferred pascal quite a bit earlier. LOGO forces a step by step approach to everything without a consideration for code reuse. I do think that there needs to be an early exposure to thinking that way.
You've actually never used Logo, have you? Logo is Lisp with syntactic sugar. It is a full-featured functional programming language, and to say it doesn't encourage code reuse is just mistaken. When I wrote adventure games in Logo - decades ago - the same Eliza-like natural language parser was used by non-player characters to interpret one anothers' speech actions as was used to interpret command-line input from the user.
A lot of what is wrong with software today is that too many people think that "RIGHT 90, FORWARD 100, LEFT 80" is programming.
That's true. But the good old Logo program to draw a fractal tree or fern is easy enough for a child of six to understand - because you can actually pace it out in the playground as well as run it on the computer - and teaches fundamental concepts of recursion and decision which really are programming.
If there are any essential elements to programming they'd be:
0) Recursion 1) Direct sequencing 2) Iteration (a. Bounded, b. Conditional) 3) Branching (a. Conditional, b. Unconditional) 4) Data Types and Structures (Scalars, Aggregates, etc.)
Why would a sane "grown up" expect a kid to be a perfect programmer?
Oh, a lot of grown ups want their kid to be perfect in each and every way
I think that is primarily an American (and perhaps also a Chinese and Japanese) disease. Europe is much more relaxed about letting children learn and discover - which is, after all, what children inherently want to do.
Whatever happened to them? Didn't they at one time have a Java implementation?
IBM's Java work is now part ofOpenJDK. How close OpenJDK is to Oracle Java and whether it shares this exploit I don't know (although the OpenJDK home page says they are '...based largely on the same code'), but if it does it should be patchable.
I'm not ready to give up on Java. It is not because I think it's the best, I still think C# beats it as a language, but at times when a client requires non-microsoft, it is my only choice for a modern language. Yeah, I know C++11, I've looked at it quite a bit, and it is better than it was, but as long as it needs header files, I don't put it into a modern language category.
The company I currently work for turns over roughly half a billion US dollars a year, and is currently the most profitable company in our group. We've grown from a small regional business to the largest in our market segment in fifteen years. We ship goods to four thousand customers every business day in our own fleet of vans. On average we receive one electronic order every four seconds, day and night. All our business-critical systems run on Debian. In the real world, many companies are like this.
When you hit the $100k a year mark - I'm slightly above that now - you may find you're working for one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
The sad thing is that by digging it up he's destroyed the archaeological context which might have shown why it was buried, when, and, to some extent, who by. The end of the Roman period in Britain is a very interesting period of history, but one about which we have far too little information. Yes, it's great that these things get found, but when you've found something, for heaven's sake leave it in the ground and alert the county archaeologists (or, technically, the coroner who will in turn alert the archaeologists, but...). You'll still get the 'treasure trove' value as the finder, and the context will get recorded.
Given the timing I can't help but feel we gave them Abu Hamza and the other 4 'terror' suspects in return for them letting this go without a major fuss. That both your premise and mine both are based on the assumption that actual human rights and morality were largely irrelevant says something about our countries politics.
I have to confess that, while I don't think Gary McKinnon should be extradited to the US to face trial for an alleged offence committed in England, I can't help suspecting that the 'medical condition' which he has which gave rise to this decision was 'white skin syndrome'.
It is simply not right that one must know the laws of an artibray number of other countries even if you've never visited them.
Hacking into systems you don't have official access to is illegal in the UK just as much as it is in the US.
So he didn't need to know the laws of another country to know that what he did was illegal.
Right. So, as a Scot, when in England, he allegedly committed a crime in England which was against English law. So he should be tried in England, and, if found guilty, imprisoned in Scotland (because he's one of our citizens, and in Europe there's a general presumption that people should be imprisoned in their own country). The USA has no role in this, other than to sit quiet and await the outcome of the trial.
I've always thought that someone should be prosecuted in England for alleged crimes allegedly committed in England. The US may be the alleged victim in this case but I don't see that it has any other role.
Wake up and smell the coffee, guys.
Fifteen years from now food shortages, triggered by the combination of climate change and population explosion, will impact significantly on even advanced western societies. Crops will fail widely, on a regular basis. The cost of food will be relatively a lot more than it is now, and the availability of it a lot less dependable. Cereals in the morning? Don't depend on it. We could, of course, limit climate change if we drastically limited our consumption of energy, but our politicians don't have the bottle to do that, so we probably won't. Which means your shower probably will come on automatically at the comfortable temperature you prefer.
But I'm very sceptical about whether most knowledge workers will get in a car and drive to work. With ubiquitous networks, why drive anywhere? You can work equally effectively wherever you happen to be. You probably work in your own home, or go round the corner to a local cafe/shared workspace. And I doubt anyone will have a screen on their desk. We'll all wear information displays discreetly integrated with glasses or even contact lenses, which will simulate an effectively infinite 3d display when needed, and will simply fade out to give us a clear view of the world when the data display is not needed. Some form of wearable device, probably built into your clothing, will provide local compute power, but will function most of the time as a thin client onto servers elsewhere. You won't own any special purpose information devices - no phone, no MP3 player, no television, no playstation, no ebook reader, no wristwatch, no GPS, certainly no laptop or desktop computer. Your local device will provide you with all the functionality of all those things and more. Younger people won't use a physical keyboard, mouse or pen to input data. Muttering in a shared workspace will probably be considered uncool (although your device will of course respond intelligently to voice input), but if you simulate the motions of writing with a pen or typing on a keyboard, your device will interpret your gestures as though you had written or typed or spoken. Older people may still prefer to use legacy input devices. And it's possible that increasingly we will have direct interface between our brains and our devices, although I think that's probably beyond the fifteen year horizon.
As for having a hardware token as proxy for your identity, I really don't see that surviving in the medium term. Some form of biometric identity will be more convenient and much more secure. If your interface with the network is built into your glasses, then it seems reasonable to use an iris scan.
... might be owned or unowned, but is still owned if meanwhile no appeal is upheld.
Nah. It's been r possessed.
I think it's more nearly the truth that Tolkien (like many men of his class and generation) was quite alienated from women. I don't think you'd exactly call him a misoynist - although many of his attitudes look very misoynistic to modern eyes - but he had no sympathetic ability to understand what it was to be a woman, not to write from a woman's view point. His understanding of women is pretty much as sexless and passive creatures. The outstanding exceptions to passivity are Eowyn and perhaps Luthien, but Eowyn at least is clearly unable to express the sexuality of her feeling for Aragorn[1], and is apparently virgin until her marriage to Faramir. I don't remember the Luthien narrative in detail, but my memory of it is that he pursues her, not the other way around; so again there's little evidence of any erotic feeling on her part. The only couple in the whole damned epic (I include the Silmarillion and the Hobbit) to appear to have anything approaching what we'd describe as a normal healthy sex-life are Sam and Rosie Gamgee, and that happens in a few pages at the very end of the text.
I have very conflicted feelings about Tolkien, and this is one of the issues. In the end he's telling a very reactionary story, a story of primogeniture, divine right, and male supremacy. A story, undoubtedly, influenced both by his Catholicism and his experience of the Great War. But seriously, do you see Arwen as good in the sack? Do images of Galadriel have you writhing in the night? No, didn't think so. Me neither. And, actually, I think the story would be stronger if they did.
Perhaps the reason that the population of Middle Earth is so small and doesn't grow in anything like a natural way is that Middle Earth women just don't like sex very much? Or perhaps Middle Earth men just aren't very good at it?
[1] I'm not suggesting that Eowyn 'ought' to have made an unsubtle pass at Aragorn; there are plenty of societies in which young women are very inhibited from doing that, although it's a little surprising in the robust horse-nomad society of the Rohirrim: but there are plenty of subtle ways in which Eowyn could have made a pass at him, and she just doesn't. She mopes about waiting for him to make a pass, and then when he doesn't goes all fey and suicidal.
If you have around $3-6M (USD) to spare, I could have a 25mm x 25mm chip fabricated, using 28nm CMOS technology at either TSMC or GlobalFoundaries, with a 2-core ARM Cortex-A9 and a custom 384-core MIMT architecture, the latter of which would hit above 500 GFLOPS in single-precision peak performance.
MIMT? Do you mean MIMD, or is this some new acronym I don't know about (and probably should)?
seriously, though, what does it run? the article doesn't say except to use the nebulous term "open source". or are they planning on schlepping off the initial software development to the open source community too? (good luck with that)
Seriously, though, UN*X-like operating systems for massively parallel architectures have been written in the past - one I'm familiar with is Helios. The Linux kernel is not optimised for massively parallel architectures, so that I doubt it would be easy to port Linux in such a way that it made efficient use of the parallelism of the Epiphany architecture. But the kernel is a relatively small part of a distribution. However, writing a new kernel is not an unfeasible task: Linus, after all, wrote the original Linux kernel (up to 0.99) largely by himself in less than two years, and it worked - I know, I used it. So something like an OpenHelios project, given that the documentation exists, would not be an over-ambitious open source project.
OK, I'm giving up my power to moderate on this story to ask a few questions. Let's hope the answers are worth it...
My understanding, so far, for what it's worth, is that the key features of the Epiphany architecture are:
From the article:
Right. Around 35% of Microsoft fanbois on a Microsoft fanboi site would prefer Surface to Android of I pad, and that's good news for Microsoft? If they can't get more than 35% of their own fanbois on board, it's dead.
Started with SLS. Then Slackware. Stayed with Slackware for a considerable while, then early RedHat, then Caldera (remember them? - the distribution included licensed OSF/Motif), then Mandrake (again for a good while) then by 1997 I was onto Debian and I've kept my servers on Debian ever since. My desktops run Ubuntu these days after a brief flirtation with Mint, but it's a heavily customised Ubuntu - Unity really does not do it for me. Before Linux I used BSD4.2 on 68000, SPARC, MIPS and Acorn RISC hardware, and System V.4 (and later UnixWare) on PowerPC and Intel hardware.
One of the really nice applications on Linux back in the 1990s was an office productivity suite called Applixware. It was commercial, for pay, and I don't think it sold well, which is a shame because it was really good - particularly for the time. LibreOffice is pretty good these days, but I might just download an evaluation of Applixware tonight to see if it's still as good as I remember.
Back in those days there was a sort of toy operating system called Microsoft Windows, but it was shockingly bad - fragile as hell and full of security holes. I've kept looking it over the years and thinking 'the next release of this might actually be good enough for commercial use'. I still think that, but now it's really too late - the PC is more or less dead, and various flavours of UN*X have, for the time being anyway, won in the server and in the mobile devices space.
its called job security make it as nonobvious and convoluted as possible so that your the only person that can comprehend it, that way your unfireable because it will fall apart when you leave.
I always fire people I suspect of doing that. You cannot afford to have them on the team.
I can't see what possible benefit it is to Intel to deliberately limit the market for their processors. Unless they are doing this for Microsoft's benefit, in which case, surely, there are anti-trust implications?
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!
There is a whole lot of point missing going on here. Yes, you could build a faster computer cheaper using other hardware. But it wouldn't explain the concepts to children (and to first year CS students, which is pretty much the same thing) nearly so well. Throw together a heap of little itty-bitty boards each of which, individually is, as everyone knows, relatively low power, and knit them together with ordinary cat5 cable, and get out of the collection high compute performance, and you have something which will intrigue children|students and get them thinking about how it works. Show them an anonymous 1U box doing exactly the same job, and you won't get them thinking, because they can't immediately see and understand what it comprises and how it's put together. This is a teaching machine, not a practical machine. It's job is to teach students. It teaches students by being perspicuous.
It's not (yet) a requirement for getting a Slashdot account to demonstrate that you have an IQ slightly south of that of a stick of used chewing gum, but some of you clearly haven't yet got that message.
Besides science discoveries, what of any importance is reported by the news?
War. Pestilence. Famine. Death.
The four horsemen of the apocalypse are already abroad in the world. And it matters that you know it. The electoral choices made by American people cast a long shadow - over the Middle East in particular, but over the world as a whole. And yet the US electorate is quite frighteningly ignorant of what happens beyond their borders. OK, I appreciate that part of the reason you don't read the news is that the principal news media available to you are on the whole dishonest, corrupt and trivial. But there are other news media (and news aggregators). The BBC, and many of the UK 'broadsheet' sites (e.g. Guardian, Telegraph) are English language, well informed and honest (note: I did not say 'unbiased' - nothing human is unbiased). Al Jazeera seems to be well informed and honest, too, and provides a usefully different perspective.
If we carry on as we're going, global warming and with provoking conflict, war, famine and pestilence will arrive in the United States in your lifetime. You have a duty to be informed - a duty to yourself, as much as to anyone else.
This is not Apache's territory. they should not be doing anything to affect my browsing session. Nothing at all. Period.
Apache isn't doing this. One person has posted a patch. It has not, as I understand it, yet been accepted by the Apache Foundation. Even if it were, Apache HTTPD is by design a highly configurable web server which has modules to do all sorts of things, but on any typical web server only a few of those modules will be enabled. This particular patch - even if it were accepted as part of the distribution - only works if both the 'setenvif' and 'headers' modules are enabled, which, on my servers, is not the case. Furthermore, the 'patch' is five lines in a configuration file; if you don't like 'em, comment them out.
Slow news day, storm in a teacup, nothing to see here, move along.
if you can't fit the documentation into your method (and variable names), that method is likely too long and complicated.
This is foolish arrogance. In my thirty years in this profession I have worked with many people who thought their code was 'self documenting'; all of them were wrong, and faced with their own code two years later I doubt any of them could immediately follow it. I've only ever worked with one software engineer who, in my opinion, documented enough; I strive to match his standards in my own code but I know I don't always succeed.
There are, in effect, three reasons for not documenting:
Arrogance 'My code is so clear and elegant it needs no documentation' Procrastination 'I'm too busy just now, I'll do it later' Obscurantism 'If I don't document my code, no-one else will be able to understand it so they can't sack me'These days I see poor documentation practice as a reason to negatively appraise an engineer; if it doesn't improve I'd seek to move them off my team. There's no excuse. Documentation - like source code - isn't, fundamentally, for you: it's to communicate with your colleagues and to the poor grunt who has to try to maintain your code, long after you've moved on to more interesting projects. And that poor grunt may not be as intellectually gifted as you are.
Please re-read my post. I said that I support the use of LOGO up to 6th grade. I think that the mental process required to step through a specific procedure is met well by the application. I think it sucks because personally I would have preferred pascal quite a bit earlier. LOGO forces a step by step approach to everything without a consideration for code reuse. I do think that there needs to be an early exposure to thinking that way.
You've actually never used Logo, have you? Logo is Lisp with syntactic sugar. It is a full-featured functional programming language, and to say it doesn't encourage code reuse is just mistaken. When I wrote adventure games in Logo - decades ago - the same Eliza-like natural language parser was used by non-player characters to interpret one anothers' speech actions as was used to interpret command-line input from the user.
A lot of what is wrong with software today is that too many people think that "RIGHT 90, FORWARD 100, LEFT 80" is programming.
That's true. But the good old Logo program to draw a fractal tree or fern is easy enough for a child of six to understand - because you can actually pace it out in the playground as well as run it on the computer - and teaches fundamental concepts of recursion and decision which really are programming.
If there are any essential elements to programming they'd be:
0) Recursion
1) Direct sequencing
2) Iteration (a. Bounded, b. Conditional)
3) Branching (a. Conditional, b. Unconditional)
4) Data Types and Structures (Scalars, Aggregates, etc.)
Fixed that for you.
Why would a sane "grown up" expect a kid to be a perfect programmer?
Oh, a lot of grown ups want their kid to be perfect in each and every way
I think that is primarily an American (and perhaps also a Chinese and Japanese) disease. Europe is much more relaxed about letting children learn and discover - which is, after all, what children inherently want to do.
Whatever happened to them? Didn't they at one time have a Java implementation?
IBM's Java work is now part of OpenJDK. How close OpenJDK is to Oracle Java and whether it shares this exploit I don't know (although the OpenJDK home page says they are '...based largely on the same code'), but if it does it should be patchable.
I'm not ready to give up on Java. It is not because I think it's the best, I still think C# beats it as a language, but at times when a client requires non-microsoft, it is my only choice for a modern language. Yeah, I know C++11, I've looked at it quite a bit, and it is better than it was, but as long as it needs header files, I don't put it into a modern language category.
I could happily give up Java, but I wouldn't willingly give up Clojure. There's more (and better) languages for the JVM than just Java.
Is a pretty naive view.
The company I currently work for turns over roughly half a billion US dollars a year, and is currently the most profitable company in our group. We've grown from a small regional business to the largest in our market segment in fifteen years. We ship goods to four thousand customers every business day in our own fleet of vans. On average we receive one electronic order every four seconds, day and night. All our business-critical systems run on Debian. In the real world, many companies are like this.
When you hit the $100k a year mark - I'm slightly above that now - you may find you're working for one of them.
Difference is, Apple paid Xerox for the right to use it.
Has Samsung paid Apple for all the copying they did?
Errr.... no they didn't. They very blatantly stole it. I was programming Xerox kit in those days.