Like.... be a programmer who happens to be a genius in Physics! You think that wouldn't be in demand?
Yup, that isn't in demand. Whatever made you think it might be? Just about every physics major has to be able to program. Ever see any job ads for such people? Me neither.
What do you do when it isn't fun any more, but you'd like it to be?
Do something else. Something that has the potential to pay well. Trouble with CS is that it pays relatively well for the first few years of your career, but it doesn't go anywhere. By the time you are 40, most of the people you went to college with who picked other majors will have overtaken you salary-wise.
You'd have been a lot more persuasive if you'd stuck to the main point and not started ranting about Bush. The 98-1 vote in the Senate has very little to do with Bush.
There really isn't a conspiracy. Politicians just like to have more power - that's why they're politicians. It's bad and we should fight it, but it's not new, it's not surprising, and Bush is no worse in this regard than Gore would have been.
X may be poorly designed and implemented, but the people who rant about it just don't seem to understand its usefulness. We have 6 computers at home. Do we want 6 monitors? No way! The X server on the Linux box my monitor is connected to lets me use programs on all the Unix boxes on our LAN. I have the impression that X implementations are improving. Crashes are extremely rare in my environment. OK, it used to take 50% of a machine's resources when workstations ran at 40MHz and had 8MB of memory, but those days are long gone. It takes a negligible fraction of the resources of a modern workstation.
after having my bag searched on my way to my car (which was also thoroughly inspected) after work, I decided I'm not comfortable subjecting myself to searches of my personal belongings at every turn. I want to know if I have a right to refuse searches?
Of course you have; you shouldn't need a lawyer to tell you that. The owner of a building can refuse to admit you if you refuse to be searched before entering it. But by allowing yourself to be searched on the way to your car, you're giving up your own rights and helping to diminish everyone else's.
Rights are not something that are handed out for free. If you want them, you have to defend them. This will cause you trouble and inconvenience. Read about how the signatories of the Declaration of Independence fared.
Subscriptions: what's realistic
on
Slashdot Updates
·
· Score: 1
I'd pay $20/year for access to/. , if:
1. I got totally ad-free pages,
2. Everybody had to pay for access.
Is is enough? Are there enough people who agree?/. needs to know.
The English grammarian Fowler defended some of these American spellings. I don't have a copy of his "Modern English Usage" (first published in about 1920 I think) in front of me, but quoting from memory, he points out that retaining the ending -our for words like "honour" derived from French words ending in -eur is inconsistent, because spellings like "motor" are standard.
Not that this has anything to do with "aluminum", which I believe originated in a spelling mistake. The American Chemical Society's approved spelling of the word was "aluminium" until well into the 20th century.
Did Microsoft set any standards?
on
Microsoft's Future
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Has Microsoft ever actually set any computing standards? IBM did: the punched card, half-inch magnetic tape, and the entire PC architecture, among others. It was a self-confident company that wasn't afraid of competitors building products that implemented standards it had set. (I'm not suggesting it competed fairly, ethically or even legally, BTW.)
But Microsoft? It's contributed to standards initiated by others. It's tried to detract from standards initiated by others (Java). It's currently trying to make C# and.net into standards. But I can't think of any accepted standard of which you can say, "Microsoft created that standard and gave it to the community".
The article referred to does not say what Slashdot "quotes". Specifically, the Slashdot item substitutes the words "in the next decade" where the original has "in a few decades".
MS wants software to be prostitution. They want you to pay each time you use it, and they want the US legal system to be their pimp.
This is a very poor analogy, because the service which a prostitute provides (in those countries where it's legal, i.e. not the USA) is normally exactly what the customer wanted. Also the market for provision of those services is quite competitive, there are a lot of providers. Prostitutes are more like hairdressers or dentists than software vendors.
The negative connotations of words like "prostitute" in the USA (and UK to some extent) are just a result of the puritannical traditions of those countries. Lighten up, folks. Girls here get jobs in brothels because they like the work and it pays well. More or less the same reasons programmers become programmers.
Re:what's the difference?
on
VIM 6.0 is Out
·
· Score: 1
You probably expected replies like, "Both are good editors, but with these differences...". Unfortunately, it's not like that at all. Both of them suck, and choosing one comes down to rejecting the one you dislike less.
vi: vi's main problem is that to insert text into the file you're editing, you have to enter "insert mode", and in this mode, the arrow keys (cursor movement) don't work. Worse, hitting an arrow key can put garbage into your file. This is truly brain-dead behavior.
emacs: emacs has lots of little annoyances in its user interface. For example, when you move the cursor to the last line of a window, then go down one more line, you'd expect the window to scroll one line. But it doesn't, it scrolls several lines. Emacs automatically detects when your file is C/C++, and indents it for you; but its indenting style is unlikely to be what you want. All this and a zillion other things are customizable, but to customize anything you have to learn emacs' scripting language (lisp) plus a lot of detail about its internal model, so in practice, for normal users for whom an editor is a tool not a career, it is not customizable.
On the other hand, ignore all the comments about emacs being big and slow. It's true that it's bloated, but on modern hardware, you won't notice. It mattered when workstations ran at 20 MHz and had 4 MB of RAM, but it doesn't today.
Re:because the 'announce' link doesn't work...
on
VIM 6.0 is Out
·
· Score: 1
Vertically split windows - mixed with horizontal splits
Wow! vi leaps forward into the 1980s!
Re:because the 'announce' link doesn't work...
on
VIM 6.0 is Out
·
· Score: 1
Vertically split windows mixed with horizontal splits! Wow! vi leaps forward into the 1980s!
Microsoft may be using pieces of the Linux kernel inside its own programs and we'll never know. Ever.
Not true. Microsoft as a corporation may be an unethical lawbreaker as a matter of corporate policy. But a lot of people work there, and many of them are honest. Ever heard the word "whistleblower"?
...any documentation, advertising materials, and other materials related to such distribution and use acknowledge that the software was developed by the University of California, Berkeley.
On the face of it, Microsoft is in violation of this clause of the Berkeley license, by putting the acknowledgement in a README file on the CD and not in the printed documentation. Of course, we all know that in practice, MS will get away with it because it can afford more and better lawyers than UCB.
A lot of people say they see little wrong with this. Please consider these:
1. Laws which are retroactive, like this one, are inherently unjust. The whole concept of the rule of law is based on people knowing what the legal consequences of their actions may be. Retroactive laws destroy this.
2. Lawmakers increasingly like to define something as something else. Here, they define some kinds of computer offences as "terrorism". Am I the only person who thinks this stinks? The purpose is to confuse people. You send someone to jail for 10 years for an offence which may be equivalent to scrawling graffitti on a web site. Then you tell people he's in jail for terrorism. That stinks. Yes, it's bad to scrawl graffitti, whether on tangible property on or a web site. Yes, kids who do it should be punished. But it has nothing to do with terrorism.
3. People generally seem increasingly willing to inflict terrible punishments, in this case life imprisonment, on their fellow citizens for less-than-terrible offences. A penalty as drastic as life imprisonment should be reserved for the most drastic crimes.
the justice isn't going to be so infinite if we get our asses kicked
Military operations have nothing to do with justice. American kids trying to serve their country will die to kill Afghan kids trying to defend their country. There is no evidence, so far, that Osama bin Laden is actually responsible for the attacks on NY and DC. The purpose of the war seems to be to make US politicians more popular with the US electorate. It worked for Clinton. It will probably work for GWB.
A terrorist is using email to plan to nuke Los Angeles.
May I suggest some rational thought?
To nuke LA, you need a nuke. These are large, heavy, very easy to detect, and very hard to get. There is no possible substitute for this item.
You also need to coordinate some planning. This can be done by code phrases in letters, code phrases in phone calls, person-to-person conversations, coded ads in the LA Times, and a zillion other ways that I haven't thought of. Note that a coded message does not look like an encrypted message, it just uses terms like "Aunt Millie" to mean the nuke, etc.
Now here's the tough question that will require serious brainwork: Which is the more reliable way to counter the operation: (1) detect people stealing, importing, or moving a radioactive object weighing nearly half a ton, or (2) investigate all possible communication channels which might contain encoded messages?
On the other hand, its hard to code when you don't have electricity and are starving to death.
Prove to me that the author of Mesa has no money and no income, and I will promise to pay him $2 per day for the next year. That's enough to live on (it's more than the median income per person for this planet). Some other philanthropist can chip in for electricity.
Anyway, the requested sentence is amazingly light -- 240 hours of civil service.
How often people say that a sentence is "amazingly light". I think that should be a crime punishable by whatever sentence the speaker/writer says is "amazingly light".
Just to remind people: at the trial, no evidence that this guy's activity had harmed anyone in any way was presented. Yes, viruses are bad; yes, he should be punished; but for a first offence, wouldn't probation and a fine be more appropriate? If he doesn't learn his lesson and offends again, OK, then throw the book at him.
This post demonstrates the Big Lie technique in action. Just one example:
Why are there now areas within Israel where Palestinian Arabs are self-administered?
Of course, there are no such areas. All areas administered by Palestinians are outside Israel. Of course, Israel has occupied this territory since the 1967 war, but almost all countries (including all European countries) regard this occupation as illegal. Invading it and occupying it does *not* make it part of Israel.
Terrorists change too, and for all the high-tech equipment pouring into Manhattan, sometimes there isn't a thing we can do to stop them.
This is true but incomplete. There will always be bad people who will plant bombs, etc. But to cause destruction on such a scale requires many competent, dedicated people. These come from an even larger pool of people who are very angry about the injustices they or their relatives have suffered. We don't know yet whether this particular group was angry about the million+ civilian deaths caused by the US in Iraq, or about the horrifying suffering of the Palestinians, or about American attacks on civilian targets in Yugoslavia, or something else. But America has certainly enough blood on its hands to have provoked a very large number of people. Violence leads to more violence, which leads to yet more violence. I was saddened to see that the response from US leaders seemed to be to seek to escalate the cycle of violence even further, rather than to think about its possible causes.
How does this book compare with Elizabeth Castro's book on XML?
There are many good books on most computer topics. A review that says "this book is good" is useless. What we need is a comparison of the book being reviewed, with other books which cover the same material.
Slashdot Mirror
Like.... be a programmer who happens to be a genius in Physics! You think that wouldn't be in demand?
Yup, that isn't in demand. Whatever made you think it might be? Just about every physics major has to be able to program. Ever see any job ads for such people? Me neither.
What do you do when it isn't fun any more, but you'd like it to be?
Do something else. Something that has the potential to pay well. Trouble with CS is that it pays relatively well for the first few years of your career, but it doesn't go anywhere. By the time you are 40, most of the people you went to college with who picked other majors will have overtaken you salary-wise.
You'd have been a lot more persuasive if you'd stuck to the main point and not started ranting about Bush. The 98-1 vote in the Senate has very little to do with Bush.
There really isn't a conspiracy. Politicians just like to have more power - that's why they're politicians. It's bad and we should fight it, but it's not new, it's not surprising, and Bush is no worse in this regard than Gore would have been.
X may be poorly designed and implemented, but the people who rant about it just don't seem to understand its usefulness. We have 6 computers at home. Do we want 6 monitors? No way! The X server on the Linux box my monitor is connected to lets me use programs on all the Unix boxes on our LAN.
I have the impression that X implementations are improving. Crashes are extremely rare in my environment. OK, it used to take 50% of a machine's resources when workstations ran at 40MHz and had 8MB of memory, but those days are long gone. It takes a negligible fraction of the resources of a modern workstation.
after having my bag searched on my way to my car (which was also thoroughly inspected) after work, I decided I'm not comfortable subjecting myself to searches of my personal belongings at every turn. I want to know if I have a right to refuse searches?
Of course you have; you shouldn't need a lawyer to tell you that. The owner of a building can refuse to admit you if you refuse to be searched before entering it. But by allowing yourself to be searched on the way to your car, you're giving up your own rights and helping to diminish everyone else's.
Rights are not something that are handed out for free. If you want them, you have to defend them. This will cause you trouble and inconvenience. Read about how the signatories of the Declaration of Independence fared.
I'd pay $20/year for access to /. , if:
/. needs to know.
1. I got totally ad-free pages,
2. Everybody had to pay for access.
Is is enough? Are there enough people who agree?
The English grammarian Fowler defended some of these American spellings. I don't have a copy of his "Modern English Usage" (first published in about 1920 I think) in front of me, but quoting from memory, he points out that retaining the ending -our for words like "honour" derived from French words ending in -eur is inconsistent, because spellings like "motor" are standard.
Not that this has anything to do with "aluminum", which I believe originated in a spelling mistake. The American Chemical Society's approved spelling of the word was "aluminium" until well into the 20th century.
Has Microsoft ever actually set any computing standards? IBM did: the punched card, half-inch magnetic tape, and the entire PC architecture, among others. It was a self-confident company that wasn't afraid of competitors building products that implemented standards it had set. (I'm not suggesting it competed fairly, ethically or even legally, BTW.)
.net into standards. But I can't think of any accepted standard of which you can say, "Microsoft created that standard and gave it to the community".
But Microsoft? It's contributed to standards initiated by others. It's tried to detract from standards initiated by others (Java). It's currently trying to make C# and
The article referred to does not say what Slashdot "quotes". Specifically, the Slashdot item substitutes the words "in the next decade" where the original has "in a few decades".
MS wants software to be prostitution. They want you to pay each time you use it, and they want the US legal system to be their pimp.
This is a very poor analogy, because the service which a prostitute provides (in those countries where it's legal, i.e. not the USA) is normally exactly what the customer wanted. Also the market for provision of those services is quite competitive, there are a lot of providers. Prostitutes are more like hairdressers or dentists than software vendors.
The negative connotations of words like "prostitute" in the USA (and UK to some extent) are just a result of the puritannical traditions of those countries. Lighten up, folks. Girls here get jobs in brothels because they like the work and it pays well. More or less the same reasons programmers become programmers.
You probably expected replies like, "Both are good editors, but with these differences ...". Unfortunately, it's not like that at all. Both of them suck, and choosing one comes down to rejecting the one you dislike less.
vi: vi's main problem is that to insert text into the file you're editing, you have to enter "insert mode", and in this mode, the arrow keys (cursor movement) don't work. Worse, hitting an arrow key can put garbage into your file. This is truly brain-dead behavior.
emacs: emacs has lots of little annoyances in its user interface. For example, when you move the cursor to the last line of a window, then go down one more line, you'd expect the window to scroll one line. But it doesn't, it scrolls several lines. Emacs automatically detects when your file is C/C++, and indents it for you; but its indenting style is unlikely to be what you want. All this and a zillion other things are customizable, but to customize anything you have to learn emacs' scripting language (lisp) plus a lot of detail about its internal model, so in practice, for normal users for whom an editor is a tool not a career, it is not customizable.
On the other hand, ignore all the comments about emacs being big and slow. It's true that it's bloated, but on modern hardware, you won't notice. It mattered when workstations ran at 20 MHz and had 4 MB of RAM, but it doesn't today.
Vertically split windows - mixed with horizontal splits
Wow! vi leaps forward into the 1980s!
Vertically split windows mixed with horizontal splits! Wow! vi leaps forward into the 1980s!
Microsoft may be using pieces of the Linux kernel inside its own programs and we'll never know. Ever.
Not true. Microsoft as a corporation may be an unethical lawbreaker as a matter of corporate policy. But a lot of people work there, and many of them are honest. Ever heard the word "whistleblower"?
...any documentation, advertising materials, and other materials related to such distribution and use acknowledge that the software was developed by the University of California, Berkeley.
On the face of it, Microsoft is in violation of this clause of the Berkeley license, by putting the acknowledgement in a README file on the CD and not in the printed documentation.
Of course, we all know that in practice, MS will get away with it because it can afford more and better lawyers than UCB.
I wish people would stop saying the word recession
... the most visible occurrence of the R-word on Slashdot is your posting and the replies to it.
Guess what
A lot of people say they see little wrong with this. Please consider these:
1. Laws which are retroactive, like this one, are inherently unjust. The whole concept of the rule of law is based on people knowing what the legal consequences of their actions may be. Retroactive laws destroy this.
2. Lawmakers increasingly like to define something as something else. Here, they define some kinds of computer offences as "terrorism". Am I the only person who thinks this stinks? The purpose is to confuse people. You send someone to jail for 10 years for an offence which may be equivalent to scrawling graffitti on a web site. Then you tell people he's in jail for terrorism. That stinks. Yes, it's bad to scrawl graffitti, whether on tangible property on or a web site. Yes, kids who do it should be punished. But it has nothing to do with terrorism.
3. People generally seem increasingly willing to inflict terrible punishments, in this case life imprisonment, on their fellow citizens for less-than-terrible offences. A penalty as drastic as life imprisonment should be reserved for the most drastic crimes.
the justice isn't going to be so infinite if we get our asses kicked
Military operations have nothing to do with justice. American kids trying to serve their country will die to kill Afghan kids trying to defend their country. There is no evidence, so far, that Osama bin Laden is actually responsible for the attacks on NY and DC. The purpose of the war seems to be to make US politicians more popular with the US electorate. It worked for Clinton. It will probably work for GWB.
A terrorist is using email to plan to nuke Los Angeles.
May I suggest some rational thought?
To nuke LA, you need a nuke. These are large, heavy, very easy to detect, and very hard to get. There is no possible substitute for this item.
You also need to coordinate some planning. This can be done by code phrases in letters, code phrases in phone calls, person-to-person conversations, coded ads in the LA Times, and a zillion other ways that I haven't thought of. Note that a coded message does not look like an encrypted message, it just uses terms like "Aunt Millie" to mean the nuke, etc.
Now here's the tough question that will require serious brainwork: Which is the more reliable way to counter the operation: (1) detect people stealing, importing, or moving a radioactive object weighing nearly half a ton, or (2) investigate all possible communication channels which might contain encoded messages?
Essentials like spell checking are missing as well
Spell checkers are useless; if you don't want spelling mistakes in your documents, learn to spell. It's not difficult.
People who rely on spell checkers eventually give themselves away by mistakes like "compliment" for "complement", "it's" for "its", and vice versa.
On the other hand, its hard to code when you don't have electricity and are starving to death.
Prove to me that the author of Mesa has no money and no income, and I will promise to pay him $2 per day for the next year. That's enough to live on (it's more than the median income per person for this planet). Some other philanthropist can chip in for electricity.
Anyway, the requested sentence is amazingly light -- 240 hours of civil service.
How often people say that a sentence is "amazingly light". I think that should be a crime punishable by whatever sentence the speaker/writer says is "amazingly light".
Just to remind people: at the trial, no evidence that this guy's activity had harmed anyone in any way was presented. Yes, viruses are bad; yes, he should be punished; but for a first offence, wouldn't probation and a fine be more appropriate? If he doesn't learn his lesson and offends again, OK, then throw the book at him.
This post demonstrates the Big Lie technique in action. Just one example:
Why are there now areas within Israel where Palestinian Arabs are self-administered?
Of course, there are no such areas. All areas administered by Palestinians are outside Israel. Of course, Israel has occupied this territory since the 1967 war, but almost all countries (including all European countries) regard this occupation as illegal. Invading it and occupying it does *not* make it part of Israel.
Terrorists change too, and for all the high-tech equipment pouring into Manhattan, sometimes there isn't a thing we can do to stop them.
This is true but incomplete. There will always be bad people who will plant bombs, etc. But to cause destruction on such a scale requires many competent, dedicated people. These come from an even larger pool of people who are very angry about the injustices they or their relatives have suffered. We don't know yet whether this particular group was angry about the million+ civilian deaths caused by the US in Iraq, or about the horrifying suffering of the Palestinians, or about American attacks on civilian targets in Yugoslavia, or something else. But America has certainly enough blood on its hands to have provoked a very large number of people. Violence leads to more violence, which leads to yet more violence. I was saddened to see that the response from US leaders seemed to be to seek to escalate the cycle of violence even further, rather than to think about its possible causes.
How does this book compare with Elizabeth Castro's book on XML?
There are many good books on most computer topics. A review that says "this book is good" is useless. What we need is a comparison of the book being reviewed, with other books which cover the same material.