That was a good read, thank you (and UniverseIsADoughnut and Tackhead who also replied).
The amalgam guys lost me when they began to write about the vast dental conspiracy against them and about the number of mercury atoms (?) fillings will release. They even have the infamous Schopenhauer citation...
Personally, I like my metallic teeth more than ceramic:)
Another guy posted a website about this, but it's score in the baloney detector seems pretty bad. As a chemist, could you please detail objectively why I shouldn't worry about that? I have a lot of mercury fillings and I wouldn't like they to reach my brain.
Maybe not seminal or classic like many of the already cited papers, but I'm surprised nobody mentioned it yet. I'm learning Lisp and I was curious about what exactly is "functional programming" in practice. The 1984 paper was a great introduction, along with Graham's book On Lisp.
I think I'll link to How To Design Programs. It's a book from MIT aiming to teach computing as a liberal art. The preface has a nice discussion about why everyone should learn how to program - much nicer, IMHO, than the Guardian's article.
If you are either promoting somebody's product for money,
WTF? So people who work on proprietary software can't be hackers? I don't think the hacker community is as fanatic as Eric. Tech jobs are low everywhere, and many of us couldn't find someone to give money for free software. It's not my case, but I know people like this who contributed much more than me to the community.
Why from you?
Because I maintain the How To Become A Hacker document, A Brief History of Hackerdom, the Jargon File, and am more or less the hackers' resident historian. It's my job to think of these things.
Not very "bazaar" style, huh? This guy really needs a dose of reality. His warblogification of the Jargon File was the most egotic thing I saw in a long time. The Jargon File should be in a Wiki, and a hacker's logo should be voted by the community in an open proccess.
In my experience, most Windows users don't use Mozilla because they never heard of it (at least, the ones I teached Mozilla never went back to IE). Some users are actually willing to pay for spam filters, popup blockers, download managers and tabbed browsing.
I want to put a box in my homepage that looks for MSIE user-agents and displays something like "Are you using Internet Explorer? Did you know that there's a better browser with popup blocking and download management included? Try Mozilla! (link to end-user website)".
The Mozilla folks seems to agree with me on this, but there's still a barrier: English. Windows users worldwide are used to their fully localized environment, and afraid of anything in foreign languages. The language packs are too buried in the site. Mozilla's new user-oriented website is a great idea, but there should be localized versions of it, with easily accessible downloads of localized software.
...but we were trying to launch our own satellites rather than paying other countries to do so
And you believe that would advance our science exactly how? What do you think that are the goals of a space program?
This self-depreciative apathy is probably the biggest obstacle on the improvement of Brazilian education. Our loss with the Alcantara base wasn't monetary, it was human. That team of high skilled scientists will be really missed. You do not honour their effort with that attitude.
Yes, that's quite a zealotic statement. I believe it was just a bad choice of words by the submitter. I think he meant something like ``the article is pure FUD and has no valid or interesting arguments, so you might want to skip reading this''.
Many people (including me) use a tool like the webalizer, wich generates a page of server statistics. This page links back to the referrers. So yes, Google has access to the server logs.
The "referrer spam" phenomenon began in the weblogging community, wich use things like the webalizer extensively.
I reccomend asking Google to not cache the webalizer stats page (via robots.txt).
My home webserver has problems with "referrer spammers" (guys who keeps wasting your bandwidth with false referrer info to get higher scores at Google). Currently I just keep a list of spammers IPs and block them away.
Some of the "referrers" are spammed from many different IPs, usually from some DSL provider. I wonder if they're cracked machines doing the spammer's job.
I'd rather lose the Insert key. The tilde and grave not only are useful in Unix shell, python, LISP and URLs, but they're also used in many natural languages. Like mine. I find it amusing that the article and the posters seems to ignore the use of diacritic marks as... diacritic marks.
They worked with X 4.3 (that means I had to install LTSP 4). If yours don't, try reading this random thread, then getting these drivers (who needs God, Google is much better)
I used to run ratpoison. As others have already pointed, X is actually very fast, the problem are the toolkits. It's nice to have alternatives, but IMHO toolkit optimization is much more urgent.
Today I'm using Gnome. It's beautiful and useful, but the feature that hooked me was the superb i18n support (now I can finally do with X11 apps what I always did with Emacs: switch the input method! No more restarting apps to write multilingual Japanese/Portuguese texts!). But it is not fast, and that's in a Duron 800, 128Mb RAM. Gnome can be great for the third world, where we still have lots of Pentium 100s hanging around. Gnome and KDE are both excellent desktops, but they need speedups.
The main problem with X is (still) video card support and configuration (ever played with Trident TGUIs 9680? I have an LTSP net full of them). There's a lot of work to do, but we have come very far in this aspect. I doubt a "modern window system" wannabe could easily offer similar support.
Althought I never tried "extreme programming" or other buzzwords, I always programmed in pair with friends and coworkers. When both of we are "in zone" I can't really feel any difference between my ideas and their ideas; it's just "ideas" with are implemented in code.
I can't verbalize why I'm writing a code fragment the way I am writing it... I can and, in fact, I do it to myself all the time. So when I'm pair programming I just speak aloud my personal monologue. The "why" is usually short and interesting, and the "how" can be communicated throught code.
While maybe our team code produce more amount of code working separately, I definitly see a good amount of improvement in code quality when we work together on the same code.
While I wholeheartedly agree with having lots of meetings and discussions during the design phase (requirements, functional spec, detailed design) and during the review phase (post mortem, code reviews) And this is where we see my style is exactly the opposite of you. I think detailed design, specs, code reviews are worth nothing. In my experience all this bureaucracy never really was useful to anything. Detailed design, for example, implies that you know in advance what you will do and what are the requeriments, and this has never been the case.
Instead of wasting my time with corporate cruft, I'm much more productive using some language wich allows fast prototyping, quick redesign, quick fixing of errors and incremental development.
I guess this goes to show how people code differently:)
Somewhat OT, but lately I've been interested in learning a bit of carpentry. Any slashdotter's recommendations of online tutorials about working with wood?
Give a RIAA CD to your girlfriend...
on
Diamonds & the RIAA
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Indeed. My bank's ATMs have a cool touchscreen interface. Sometime ago, I was greeted by the usual window about "illegal operation", etc. The thing then rebooted, displaying what looked like a common PC BIOS, and booted Windows 2000.
This is a case where I think Windows is not too little, it is too much. One wonders how much this (Brazilian, once-public) bank spent with Microsoft licences and hardware when any small, light, specialized OS would do better.
Fortunately, this is changing. At least one bank is already using Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
That was a good read, thank you (and UniverseIsADoughnut and Tackhead who also replied).
:)
The amalgam guys lost me when they began to write about the vast dental conspiracy against them and about the number of mercury atoms (?) fillings will release. They even have the infamous Schopenhauer citation...
Personally, I like my metallic teeth more than ceramic
Another guy posted a website about this, but it's score in the baloney detector seems pretty bad. As a chemist, could you please detail objectively why I shouldn't worry about that? I have a lot of mercury fillings and I wouldn't like they to reach my brain.
Maybe not seminal or classic like many of the already cited papers, but I'm surprised nobody mentioned it yet. I'm learning Lisp and I was curious about what exactly is "functional programming" in practice. The 1984 paper was a great introduction, along with Graham's book On Lisp.
Great post.
I think I'll link to How To Design Programs. It's a book from MIT aiming to teach computing as a liberal art. The preface has a nice discussion about why everyone should learn how to program - much nicer, IMHO, than the Guardian's article.
If he sends you a response, please post it here :)
WTF? So people who work on proprietary software can't be hackers? I don't think the hacker community is as fanatic as Eric. Tech jobs are low everywhere, and many of us couldn't find someone to give money for free software. It's not my case, but I know people like this who contributed much more than me to the community.
Not very "bazaar" style, huh? This guy really needs a dose of reality. His warblogification of the Jargon File was the most egotic thing I saw in a long time. The Jargon File should be in a Wiki, and a hacker's logo should be voted by the community in an open proccess.
...slashdot God!
In my experience, most Windows users don't use Mozilla because they never heard of it (at least, the ones I teached Mozilla never went back to IE). Some users are actually willing to pay for spam filters, popup blockers, download managers and tabbed browsing.
I want to put a box in my homepage that looks for MSIE user-agents and displays something like "Are you using Internet Explorer? Did you know that there's a better browser with popup blocking and download management included? Try Mozilla! (link to end-user website)".
The Mozilla folks seems to agree with me on this, but there's still a barrier: English. Windows users worldwide are used to their fully localized environment, and afraid of anything in foreign languages. The language packs are too buried in the site. Mozilla's new user-oriented website is a great idea, but there should be localized versions of it, with easily accessible downloads of localized software.
Hint: See that cute cartoonish girl with big eyes? It's the icon for "Anime".
And you believe that would advance our science exactly how? What do you think that are the goals of a space program?
This self-depreciative apathy is probably the biggest obstacle on the improvement of Brazilian education. Our loss with the Alcantara base wasn't monetary, it was human. That team of high skilled scientists will be really missed. You do not honour their effort with that attitude.
Anyone knows if it is possible to access GKT's "Input Method" menu on the new Firebird? Epiphany is using too much memory...
Yes, that's quite a zealotic statement. I believe it was just a bad choice of words by the submitter. I think he meant something like ``the article is pure FUD and has no valid or interesting arguments, so you might want to skip reading this''.
Some people want intuitive interfaces. Some want powerful interfaces. Power is the reason I switched to GNU/Linux in the first place.
I don't care about the mainstream, ease of use or intuitiveness. Emacs is powerful, Vim is powerful, and that's why I use both.
Many people (including me) use a tool like the webalizer, wich generates a page of server statistics. This page links back to the referrers. So yes, Google has access to the server logs.
The "referrer spam" phenomenon began in the weblogging community, wich use things like the webalizer extensively.
I reccomend asking Google to not cache the webalizer stats page (via robots.txt).
My home webserver has problems with "referrer spammers" (guys who keeps wasting your bandwidth with false referrer info to get higher scores at Google). Currently I just keep a list of spammers IPs and block them away.
Some of the "referrers" are spammed from many different IPs, usually from some DSL provider. I wonder if they're cracked machines doing the spammer's job.
I'd rather lose the Insert key. The tilde and grave not only are useful in Unix shell, python, LISP and URLs, but they're also used in many natural languages. Like mine. I find it amusing that the article and the posters seems to ignore the use of diacritic marks as... diacritic marks.
They worked with X 4.3 (that means I had to install LTSP 4). If yours don't, try reading this random thread, then getting these drivers (who needs God, Google is much better)
Exactly. It's great, isn't it?
(Note to the clueless: want to write Japanese in GTK apps? Try it.
I used to run ratpoison. As others have already pointed, X is actually very fast, the problem are the toolkits. It's nice to have alternatives, but IMHO toolkit optimization is much more urgent.
Today I'm using Gnome. It's beautiful and useful, but the feature that hooked me was the superb i18n support (now I can finally do with X11 apps what I always did with Emacs: switch the input method! No more restarting apps to write multilingual Japanese/Portuguese texts!). But it is not fast, and that's in a Duron 800, 128Mb RAM. Gnome can be great for the third world, where we still have lots of Pentium 100s hanging around. Gnome and KDE are both excellent desktops, but they need speedups.
The main problem with X is (still) video card support and configuration (ever played with Trident TGUIs 9680? I have an LTSP net full of them). There's a lot of work to do, but we have come very far in this aspect. I doubt a "modern window system" wannabe could easily offer similar support.
Althought I never tried "extreme programming" or other buzzwords, I always programmed in pair with friends and coworkers. When both of we are "in zone" I can't really feel any difference between my ideas and their ideas; it's just "ideas" with are implemented in code.
:)
I can't verbalize why I'm writing a code fragment the way I am writing it...
I can and, in fact, I do it to myself all the time. So when I'm pair programming I just speak aloud my personal monologue. The "why" is usually short and interesting, and the "how" can be communicated throught code.
While maybe our team code produce more amount of code working separately, I definitly see a good amount of improvement in code quality when we work together on the same code.
While I wholeheartedly agree with having lots of meetings and discussions during the design phase (requirements, functional spec, detailed design) and during the review phase (post mortem, code reviews)
And this is where we see my style is exactly the opposite of you. I think detailed design, specs, code reviews are worth nothing. In my experience all this bureaucracy never really was useful to anything. Detailed design, for example, implies that you know in advance what you will do and what are the requeriments, and this has never been the case.
Instead of wasting my time with corporate cruft, I'm much more productive using some language wich allows fast prototyping, quick redesign, quick fixing of errors and incremental development.
I guess this goes to show how people code differently
Somewhat OT, but lately I've been interested in learning a bit of carpentry. Any slashdotter's recommendations of online tutorials about working with wood?
...because copyrights are forever!
Unfortunately he isn't good at refusing patches (think about all the Linux code they stole) nor at being ignored (just look at slashdot).
Indeed. My bank's ATMs have a cool touchscreen interface. Sometime ago, I was greeted by the usual window about "illegal operation", etc. The thing then rebooted, displaying what looked like a common PC BIOS, and booted Windows 2000.
This is a case where I think Windows is not too little, it is too much. One wonders how much this (Brazilian, once-public) bank spent with Microsoft licences and hardware when any small, light, specialized OS would do better.
Fortunately, this is changing. At least one bank is already using Linux.
Wow! The results are impressive!
Chinese scientists announced that now they'll focus research in catgirls.