I had a mate who wasn't drinking test positive on a couple of breathalizers, but a blood test came up negative. He was arrested and it shook him quite badly. This is a whole new way of ruining lives. I wonder how many heart attacks you can induce telling a person they're about to die?
"The magic 8 ball says....." "you will live. Have a nice day!" "The magic 8 ball says....." "you will die. Sorry better luck next time. Please be sure to pay your bill immediately"
Proving not all science requires big, expensive apparatus, Professor Gaensler and colleagues...downloaded data from the internet
No, this actually proves that you can reuse data gathered with large expensive apparatus. There's a difference. They couldn't have done this without expensive infrastructure that just happened to cost them nothing (or close to nothing) - ie. The original instruments and the Internet.
The University of Sydney team's analysis differs from previous calculations because they were more discerning with their data selection. "We used data from pulsars: stars that flash with a regular pulse," Professor Gaensler explains. "As light from these pulsars travels to us, it interacts with electrons scattered between the stars (the Warm Ionised Medium, or WIM), which slows the light down.
Well now wouldn't you want to explore why the data differs so much, before declaring your answer to be the correct one just because you verified your calculations are correct?
My first thought is: Did they use some standard or average value for the density of the WIM? Could the discrepancy be because the WIM itself is not uniform through the thickness of the galaxy/
This is definitely an interesting result and worth following up but rather than declare victory the real question is why is there such a large discrepancy with other data?
For goodness sake man. That might be what it says on their tax return, but if you acknowledge that you only encourage them to continue to "act" very very poorly.
If you're out to meet a geek quit with the dating sites and find a couple of male dominated interests (e.g. chess, remote control aircraft, electronics, a sporting club). Don't go out there advertising that you're there just to pick up. Find an actual hobby you'd be interested in. If you meet someone, great. If you don't you'll probably still make friends, pick up a hobby, and grow as a person.
1) Good chance she'd recognise her son from his mannerisms 2) Who wants to chat up or have an intimiate conversation with their mother??? 3) If deceived she'd only turn around and be resentful towards her son - probably even cut him off - while getting closer to the lover who she'd argue would never do such a thing to her.
People only wake up to these things when they choose to.
The only good solution is to be honest and tell her exactly what you think, then let her live her own life. Be there to pick up the pieces emotionally but never give her any money unless and until you're sure she won't just squander it.
It's a good trot... But, still a strawman (since I am referring to PERSONAL USE SOFTWARE).
There is some additional protection for you if you're using software in a large company, however ultimately an end user can be held accountable for breaking the conditions of the license. So even if you're talking about personal use, I certainly am not. Most of my software use happens in the workplace. So it's no strawman.
I would hope that you can't enter EULA personally for your company.
Now who's coming up with straw men? Who do you think is held accountable if you break the EULA? For example, if you make a copy of a piece of software when you aren't authorized to, do you think it's just your company that's held liable?
So, you don't have to read it. Unless, of course, you were hired to provide legal advice for your company.
In practice almost no one reads them. However you are legally obligated to comply with the license agreement. Sure you can choose not to read it, but you're no less bound by it just because you're working for someone else. That's true of any law. Take an extreme example to make the point: If you're asked to commit murder by your boss it doesn't absolve you of the crime.
Personally, this doesn't apply. My lawyer charges a very hefty amount to read and digest documents and provide opinions. But, any employment contract I enter is CERTAINLY passed on to my lawyer. (whether I am free-lancing, or, as I am now, in a staff role).
Again if you enter into an agreement it doesn't matter who you asked to read it. If YOU sign it YOU are bound by it. You pay the lawyer to read it so that if there is a problem he will pick it up (since he has more experience). However if he doesn't pick up a problem you're still bound by the contract.
If my employment contract ever contained a clause that *I WAS LIABLE FOR EULAS* I would strike the clause -- I certainly wouldn't entertain that liability.
It doesn't need to explicitly state anything. If you knowingly or negligently break the law, you're the one who can be tried for the crime. As for civil damages, it's true you're protected to some degree. However your employer could (at least in theory) allege the fault was yours - negligence for failing to read the EULA.
Most large companies have clauses in their contracts that say you agree to abide by their code of conduct. Most codes of conduct have something to say about illegal use of software and almost all have something regarding violation of copyright. At the very least you'd likely be fired if you misused software and your employer took the financial hit.
Now, if YOU have been stuck with this liability; um.. too bad for you (I would offer you my shoulder to cry on).
Typical inflammatory slashdot comment stating the person you're having a disagreement with is a moron who deserves no sympathy. It borders on trolling. Before you accuse me of using straw men arguments, you might want to take a look at the flaws in your own argument style. Personal attacks (or if you prefer latin snobbery ad hominem) and exaggerating your opponent's point of view (aka reductio ad absurdum) aren't constructive techniques for arguing. Either stick to the point, or don't waste my time with childish attacks and arguing about things that have nothing to do with what I said. (*I most certainly haven't exposed myself to an excessive amount of liability in my current job thanks very much).
Now you have two problems. Namely a second repository with drastically limited support for viewing history and getting particular revisions into the other.
Not really a problem when it's temporary. Typically changes take no more than a day or 2. If they do take longer they get broken up into smaller changes and each change is checked in when complete. Seems to work well.
The solution is to make your own sandbox in the real version control system, named something like misc/users/$USER.
We use both CVS and subversion, however as a general rule broken or half finished code is not to be checked in. Instead we do what I did and what saved my bacon - backup to a network regularly.
What would be nice is a revision control system that allowed for work to be checked in but only visible to other users when the developer "releases" it. You would still have to deal with more complex merges, but it would be nice if the repository allowed this. Failing that it would be nice if tools allowed code to be committed to 2 repositories simultaneously. (A "scratch" repository, and a "release" repository).
All well and good if your job doesn't require you to use specific software, and if GNU licensed software is available for the task you wish to perform. Many if not most of us don't have that luxury. At work for instance I use a diverse range of software covered by a multitude of licenses and my boss would not appreciate me refusing to do my job or comply with team development standards because I wish to simplify my life and not read EULAs.
I use Eclipse every day. It's still buggy. So buggy it's taken out about half a day's worth of file changes I did one day last year (wiping local history as well as actual file content). Luckily I did make a backup mid way through of some of the files so it only took about an hour to recover. I've learnt to close down the IDE nightly to avoid such things. The other thing about eclipse is that each new version seems to break old plugins like HibernateIDE for example. At work our team has stopped upgrading versions somewhere around 3.2 and are not moving to europa yet because of this. (We've also had issues moving between workspaces for minor revisions of the IDE).
Eclipse is wonderful but it could be SO much better! This sort of crap just turns developers off it, and rightly so. We can't afford to sit on our hands and say how wonderful a product is when it has so many flaws unless we wish to perpetuate the "open source = buggy" meme.
...which one reason why lots of people have, rightly or wrongly, replaced their EULA with the pirate bay version. Download it illegally, ignore the license, install and play with it. If they need it or are using it and feel guilty buy it. Even when they do buy it a lot of users continue to ignore the EULA. I'm not condoning this behavior but I am saying that onerous conditions in the EULAs directly contribute to piracy.
The other thing is that no one reads all their EULAs thoroughly. If they did heavy computer users would be complaining about spending weeks installing software (or not understanding something about the EULA), when in reality software installation is something people often are doing in their "spare" time after all their other obligations are met. I've found that those people who suggest they do read all their EULAs are either doing it for a job or socially impaired or just plain liars.
Most people just understand that unless it's free software it's not legal to copy. Beyond that they use their software however they choose paying no mind to the EULA. In fact I've come across many a game forum where people openly are flouting the terms of the EULA and the company who creates the game turn a blind eye and don't wish to even discuss licensing issues beyond regurgitating the "copying is stealing" mantra. This is enough enforcement for the company to benefit from the inclusion of the EULA for individual users. Only when the software is used on a grander scale contrary to the EULA does the company act to put a stop to that use, and even then only when it hurts their commercial interests.
My understanding was the space shrunk. Thus, for a photon, the universe has effectively zero size.
If that were true, light would be able to move instantaneously instead of having a finite speed. ie. If the universe were of size zero, moving from one end to the other would take no time at all instead of several billion years. Your understanding isn't correct.
Will quantum computers let us transcend the human condition and become as powerful as gods, or are they a physical absurdity destined to be exposed as the twenty-first century's perpetual-motion machine?
No, they won't let us defy physical laws and become omnipotent. No, quantum mechanics, being a whole class of physical laws, isn't going to have absolutely no practical use. How about something in between that doesn't come from the over-used plot of a bad sci-fi show?
The speed of light is not a deal-breaker. It means that, from *our* perspective, we'll send people to distant planets and never hear from them again. But from their perspective, it may be a few years. If interstellar travel actually happens, then the speed of light issue is just a managable logistical issue. It means that space-farers must be able to think for themselves. They already must be self-sufficient in other respects.
Wow. How does such a profound mis-understanding of the speed of light, the vastness of space, and relativity get modded insightful? Your head's been filled with too much sci fi and too little science fact.4
Yes, if you climb aboard a spaceship and accelerate to near the speed of light, someone on earth observing you would note that time slowed down. That's because they're in a different frame of reference. For you however in your own frame of reference, time doesn't slow down within the spaceship. In fact, paradoxically you look back at Earth and see it slow down instead. There is no absolute time. It all depends on your own frame of reference.
Let's say you manage to accelerate to 99% of the speed of light instantly. (Ignoring of course the fact that the closer you get to c, the more you weigh and the exponentially more force it takes to accelerate you). If a star is 90 light years away, you'd still take over 90 years to reach it. It won't just be a few years.
I recommend you look up the Lorentz transformations and plug in some numbers to get an understanding. Look for algebraic versions for simplicity not the matrix versions. They're even quite easy to derive with a little bit of trig and algebra.
Then take a look at the twin paradox and answer the fundamental question: Why do the 2 brothers agree which brother got older quicker? (Hint only one of them accerlates - changes their frame of reference).
I live in Australia and recently bought a 68cm CRT TV for $127, a DVD player for $50 and a digital an SD-STB for $50. Total price $227 (All prices in Aussie Dollars, about USD0.90). None are top of the line but none are crap either.
Let's say you want to put one of these in each bedroom, one in the living room, one in the kitchen/dining area, and one in the family rumpus area. Let's say it's a 4 bedroom house. That's a total of 7 rooms. 7 x 227 = $1589.
Now the above scenario is extreme and perhaps a little insane. You don't need a 68cm TV in every room. Most people can't fit one in even if they want it. Yet I'd be pushing it getting even one decent blu-ray setup for that amount of money. Rough pricing is $500 on a PS3, $200 on the HD set-top box, and ??? for the screen. Yeah the $900 left over might get you an okay screen, maybe if you're lucky, and maybe even a bit larger than 68cm. But hell if I wanted to enjoy that HD in all it's glory I'd be after a big screen and that 1 big screen would eat up more than the entire $1600 budget.
F*^& that!!! I'll put up with a bit of blurriness and a big screen instead of a monsterous one, and keep my money. Having 2 or even 3 TVs is much more valuable to me than one wiz bang one (which is also a single point of failure). Truly unless you're rolling in cash and have so much free time you're glued to the tele, this is madness.
There is nothing simple about XSLT. It is a nutty and extreme idea. Unless your HTML and XML are so incredibly simple as to render the format duality useless the style sheets start reading like gibberish.
It amazes me how something that looks so simple can have so many corner cases, and how they can be solved so differently by different implementations.
CSV is fine if you want to store data that has no quote marks, commas, carriage returns or linefeeds. For everything else, please use a better specified format, preferably one that has a formal definition. Like XML, for example.
Or perhaps just agree on a standard for quote marks, commas, carriage returns, line feeds and any other common corner cases? If you don't have the discipline to do this in CSV, any custom XML schema will turn into horse doo doo very quickly.
Thank you. It's good to occasionally run into a Java programmer that realizes just how bad it's gotten. It's all being driven by consultancies selling their own brand of programming religion....and like a cult it makes me sick how many intelligent people fall for these methodologies and frameworks hook, line, and sinker.
Yay! Nothing like the combination of XML and Java to bring out the haters
The word is critics not 'haters'. I'm guessing you're in your late teens or early 20's by your use of such pathetic slang.
I can show you plenty of crappy C/C++ code freely browsable in some open source libraries. Does that mean C++ sucks?
It sure does when it becomes the standard.
Some good uses for XML:
* Ephemeral representations of atomic, structured data; usually for transport.
* Config files. More verbose and the syntax is far better at keeping you from fat fingering a setting and blowing up your app. If you can't clearly read XML, you need glasses.
Using XML for transport is laughable and is a bad use for XML. Binary transport is much more efficient, and doesn't require the time or complexity of a modern parser. If the content is human readable, the binary will also be human readable. If not, you don't waste cycles converting back and forth just so a lazy incompetent programmer has an easier time debugging. Any good programmer doesn't have a hard time printing a binary value from any decent debugger.
Now config files. A good portion of the code I have to deal with every day (probably 20%) is in goddamn XML config and with the brilliance of Aspect Oriented programming Java style even infrastructure level code intercepts are now XML resulting in a fine mess to try to trace anything. Unlike printing a binary value, tracing through layers of XML is not easy. What's worse it ruins your type checking and config errors come up at runtime instead of compile time.
The guy who got modded up telling you that you fail Comp Sci was rude, but then that seems to be what is rewarded on slashdot these days. He's right in as much as you are displaying your ignorance, but it's possible to be more helpful.
Regular expressions certainly aren't enough to parse XML.
I could give you a bunch of rules to google, but frankly I'm rusty on this stuff, and didn't get as deep an understanding as I wanted in the time I had when I studied this. In fact I'd love to go back and re-take my compiler course. It isn't simple stuff, but it is the very heart and soul of the computer science you use every day. You certainly don't need to understand it to write most business software, but it helps.
Seriously, two articles in the same day scaremongering about China. Slashdot is turning into The New York Times in the lead-up to the Iraq War.
Take a pill, will ya. Slashdot just links to the stories. The news has a lot of scaremongering at the moment. If slashdot editors started banning stories that cited China, I can imagine there would be an uproar about censorship. If you really have a problem, take it up with the satellite spotters that were quoted mentioning the Chinese, not slashdot or IHT.
"Natural" is a word of many meanings, but in the context of the scientific theory of evolution, it implies merely the absence of supernatural influence.
No it doesn't. It means there was no design...supernatural or otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
The blog entry is dated today.
The link to Feynman's appendix to the Rogers Commission is a link dated 1996.
Feynman died Feb 18 1998.
So we're talking about something over 10 years old that a blogger has added a few personal observations to, and it's linked in as slashdot news.
I had a mate who wasn't drinking test positive on a couple of breathalizers, but a blood test came up negative. He was arrested and it shook him quite badly. This is a whole new way of ruining lives. I wonder how many heart attacks you can induce telling a person they're about to die?
"The magic 8 ball says....." "you will live. Have a nice day!"
"The magic 8 ball says....." "you will die. Sorry better luck next time. Please be sure to pay your bill immediately"
I'll have to retract this. I was the one that was wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation
Thanks for making me go find this.
From TFA with commentary:
Proving not all science requires big, expensive apparatus, Professor Gaensler and colleagues...downloaded data from the internet
No, this actually proves that you can reuse data gathered with large expensive apparatus. There's a difference. They couldn't have done this without expensive infrastructure that just happened to cost them nothing (or close to nothing) - ie. The original instruments and the Internet.
The University of Sydney team's analysis differs from previous calculations because they were more discerning with their data selection. "We used data from pulsars: stars that flash with a regular pulse," Professor Gaensler explains. "As light from these pulsars travels to us, it interacts with electrons scattered between the stars (the Warm Ionised Medium, or WIM), which slows the light down.
Well now wouldn't you want to explore why the data differs so much, before declaring your answer to be the correct one just because you verified your calculations are correct?
My first thought is: Did they use some standard or average value for the density of the WIM? Could the discrepancy be because the WIM itself is not uniform through the thickness of the galaxy/
This is definitely an interesting result and worth following up but rather than declare victory the real question is why is there such a large discrepancy with other data?
They're just actors.
For goodness sake man. That might be what it says on their tax return, but if you acknowledge that you only encourage them to continue to "act" very very poorly.
If you're out to meet a geek quit with the dating sites and find a couple of male dominated interests (e.g. chess, remote control aircraft, electronics, a sporting club). Don't go out there advertising that you're there just to pick up. Find an actual hobby you'd be interested in. If you meet someone, great. If you don't you'll probably still make friends, pick up a hobby, and grow as a person.
Wouldn't work.
1) Good chance she'd recognise her son from his mannerisms
2) Who wants to chat up or have an intimiate conversation with their mother???
3) If deceived she'd only turn around and be resentful towards her son - probably even cut him off - while getting closer to the lover who she'd argue would never do such a thing to her.
People only wake up to these things when they choose to.
The only good solution is to be honest and tell her exactly what you think, then let her live her own life. Be there to pick up the pieces emotionally but never give her any money unless and until you're sure she won't just squander it.
It's a good trot... But, still a strawman (since I am referring to PERSONAL USE SOFTWARE).
There is some additional protection for you if you're using software in a large company, however ultimately an end user can be held accountable for breaking the conditions of the license. So even if you're talking about personal use, I certainly am not. Most of my software use happens in the workplace. So it's no strawman.
I would hope that you can't enter EULA personally for your company.
Now who's coming up with straw men? Who do you think is held accountable if you break the EULA? For example, if you make a copy of a piece of software when you aren't authorized to, do you think it's just your company that's held liable?
So, you don't have to read it. Unless, of course, you were hired to provide legal advice for your company.
In practice almost no one reads them. However you are legally obligated to comply with the license agreement. Sure you can choose not to read it, but you're no less bound by it just because you're working for someone else. That's true of any law. Take an extreme example to make the point: If you're asked to commit murder by your boss it doesn't absolve you of the crime.
Personally, this doesn't apply. My lawyer charges a very hefty amount to read and digest documents and provide opinions. But, any employment contract I enter is CERTAINLY passed on to my lawyer. (whether I am free-lancing, or, as I am now, in a staff role).
Again if you enter into an agreement it doesn't matter who you asked to read it. If YOU sign it YOU are bound by it. You pay the lawyer to read it so that if there is a problem he will pick it up (since he has more experience). However if he doesn't pick up a problem you're still bound by the contract.
If my employment contract ever contained a clause that *I WAS LIABLE FOR EULAS* I would strike the clause -- I certainly wouldn't entertain that liability.
It doesn't need to explicitly state anything. If you knowingly or negligently break the law, you're the one who can be tried for the crime. As for civil damages, it's true you're protected to some degree. However your employer could (at least in theory) allege the fault was yours - negligence for failing to read the EULA.
Most large companies have clauses in their contracts that say you agree to abide by their code of conduct. Most codes of conduct have something to say about illegal use of software and almost all have something regarding violation of copyright. At the very least you'd likely be fired if you misused software and your employer took the financial hit.
Now, if YOU have been stuck with this liability; um.. too bad for you (I would offer you my shoulder to cry on).
Typical inflammatory slashdot comment stating the person you're having a disagreement with is a moron who deserves no sympathy. It borders on trolling. Before you accuse me of using straw men arguments, you might want to take a look at the flaws in your own argument style. Personal attacks (or if you prefer latin snobbery ad hominem) and exaggerating your opponent's point of view (aka reductio ad absurdum) aren't constructive techniques for arguing. Either stick to the point, or don't waste my time with childish attacks and arguing about things that have nothing to do with what I said. (*I most certainly haven't exposed myself to an excessive amount of liability in my current job thanks very much).
Now you have two problems. Namely a second repository with drastically limited support for viewing history and getting particular revisions into the other.
Not really a problem when it's temporary. Typically changes take no more than a day or 2. If they do take longer they get broken up into smaller changes and each change is checked in when complete. Seems to work well.
The solution is to make your own sandbox in the real version control system, named something like misc/users/$USER.
Nice idea if the repository and tools support it.
This is why you use a version control system.
We use both CVS and subversion, however as a general rule broken or half finished code is not to be checked in. Instead we do what I did and what saved my bacon - backup to a network regularly.
What would be nice is a revision control system that allowed for work to be checked in but only visible to other users when the developer "releases" it. You would still have to deal with more complex merges, but it would be nice if the repository allowed this. Failing that it would be nice if tools allowed code to be committed to 2 repositories simultaneously. (A "scratch" repository, and a "release" repository).
All well and good if your job doesn't require you to use specific software, and if GNU licensed software is available for the task you wish to perform. Many if not most of us don't have that luxury. At work for instance I use a diverse range of software covered by a multitude of licenses and my boss would not appreciate me refusing to do my job or comply with team development standards because I wish to simplify my life and not read EULAs.
I use Eclipse every day. It's still buggy. So buggy it's taken out about half a day's worth of file changes I did one day last year (wiping local history as well as actual file content). Luckily I did make a backup mid way through of some of the files so it only took about an hour to recover. I've learnt to close down the IDE nightly to avoid such things. The other thing about eclipse is that each new version seems to break old plugins like HibernateIDE for example. At work our team has stopped upgrading versions somewhere around 3.2 and are not moving to europa yet because of this. (We've also had issues moving between workspaces for minor revisions of the IDE).
Eclipse is wonderful but it could be SO much better! This sort of crap just turns developers off it, and rightly so. We can't afford to sit on our hands and say how wonderful a product is when it has so many flaws unless we wish to perpetuate the "open source = buggy" meme.
...which one reason why lots of people have, rightly or wrongly, replaced their EULA with the pirate bay version. Download it illegally, ignore the license, install and play with it. If they need it or are using it and feel guilty buy it. Even when they do buy it a lot of users continue to ignore the EULA. I'm not condoning this behavior but I am saying that onerous conditions in the EULAs directly contribute to piracy.
The other thing is that no one reads all their EULAs thoroughly. If they did heavy computer users would be complaining about spending weeks installing software (or not understanding something about the EULA), when in reality software installation is something people often are doing in their "spare" time after all their other obligations are met. I've found that those people who suggest they do read all their EULAs are either doing it for a job or socially impaired or just plain liars.
Most people just understand that unless it's free software it's not legal to copy. Beyond that they use their software however they choose paying no mind to the EULA. In fact I've come across many a game forum where people openly are flouting the terms of the EULA and the company who creates the game turn a blind eye and don't wish to even discuss licensing issues beyond regurgitating the "copying is stealing" mantra. This is enough enforcement for the company to benefit from the inclusion of the EULA for individual users. Only when the software is used on a grander scale contrary to the EULA does the company act to put a stop to that use, and even then only when it hurts their commercial interests.
My understanding was the space shrunk. Thus, for a photon, the universe has effectively zero size.
If that were true, light would be able to move instantaneously instead of having a finite speed. ie. If the universe were of size zero, moving from one end to the other would take no time at all instead of several billion years. Your understanding isn't correct.
Will quantum computers let us transcend the human condition and become as powerful as gods, or are they a physical absurdity destined to be exposed as the twenty-first century's perpetual-motion machine?
No, they won't let us defy physical laws and become omnipotent. No, quantum mechanics, being a whole class of physical laws, isn't going to have absolutely no practical use. How about something in between that doesn't come from the over-used plot of a bad sci-fi show?
The speed of light is not a deal-breaker. It means that, from *our* perspective, we'll send people to distant planets and never hear from them again. But from their perspective, it may be a few years. If interstellar travel actually happens, then the speed of light issue is just a managable logistical issue. It means that space-farers must be able to think for themselves. They already must be self-sufficient in other respects.
Wow. How does such a profound mis-understanding of the speed of light, the vastness of space, and relativity get modded insightful? Your head's been filled with too much sci fi and too little science fact.4
Yes, if you climb aboard a spaceship and accelerate to near the speed of light, someone on earth observing you would note that time slowed down. That's because they're in a different frame of reference. For you however in your own frame of reference, time doesn't slow down within the spaceship. In fact, paradoxically you look back at Earth and see it slow down instead. There is no absolute time. It all depends on your own frame of reference.
Let's say you manage to accelerate to 99% of the speed of light instantly. (Ignoring of course the fact that the closer you get to c, the more you weigh and the exponentially more force it takes to accelerate you). If a star is 90 light years away, you'd still take over 90 years to reach it. It won't just be a few years.
I recommend you look up the Lorentz transformations and plug in some numbers to get an understanding. Look for algebraic versions for simplicity not the matrix versions. They're even quite easy to derive with a little bit of trig and algebra.
Then take a look at the twin paradox and answer the fundamental question: Why do the 2 brothers agree which brother got older quicker? (Hint only one of them accerlates - changes their frame of reference).
I live in Australia and recently bought a 68cm CRT TV for $127, a DVD player for $50 and a digital an SD-STB for $50.
Total price $227 (All prices in Aussie Dollars, about USD0.90). None are top of the line but none are crap either.
Let's say you want to put one of these in each bedroom, one in the living room, one in the kitchen/dining area, and one in the family rumpus area. Let's say it's a 4 bedroom house. That's a total of 7 rooms. 7 x 227 = $1589.
Now the above scenario is extreme and perhaps a little insane. You don't need a 68cm TV in every room. Most people can't fit one in even if they want it. Yet I'd be pushing it getting even one decent blu-ray setup for that amount of money. Rough pricing is $500 on a PS3, $200 on the HD set-top box, and ??? for the screen. Yeah the $900 left over might get you an okay screen, maybe if you're lucky, and maybe even a bit larger than 68cm. But hell if I wanted to enjoy that HD in all it's glory I'd be after a big screen and that 1 big screen would eat up more than the entire $1600 budget.
F*^& that!!! I'll put up with a bit of blurriness and a big screen instead of a monsterous one, and keep my money. Having 2 or even 3 TVs is much more valuable to me than one wiz bang one (which is also a single point of failure). Truly unless you're rolling in cash and have so much free time you're glued to the tele, this is madness.
There is nothing simple about XSLT. It is a nutty and extreme idea. Unless your HTML and XML are so incredibly simple as to render the format duality useless the style sheets start reading like gibberish.
It amazes me how something that looks so simple can have so many corner cases, and how they can be solved so differently by different implementations.
CSV is fine if you want to store data that has no quote marks, commas, carriage returns or linefeeds. For everything else, please use a better specified format, preferably one that has a formal definition. Like XML, for example.
Or perhaps just agree on a standard for quote marks, commas, carriage returns, line feeds and any other common corner cases? If you don't have the discipline to do this in CSV, any custom XML schema will turn into horse doo doo very quickly.
Thank you. It's good to occasionally run into a Java programmer that realizes just how bad it's gotten. It's all being driven by consultancies selling their own brand of programming religion....and like a cult it makes me sick how many intelligent people fall for these methodologies and frameworks hook, line, and sinker.
Yay! Nothing like the combination of XML and Java to bring out the haters
The word is critics not 'haters'. I'm guessing you're in your late teens or early 20's by your use of such pathetic slang.
I can show you plenty of crappy C/C++ code freely browsable in some open source libraries. Does that mean C++ sucks?
It sure does when it becomes the standard.
Some good uses for XML:
* Ephemeral representations of atomic, structured data; usually for transport.
* Config files. More verbose and the syntax is far better at keeping you from fat fingering a setting and blowing up your app. If you can't clearly read XML, you need glasses.
Using XML for transport is laughable and is a bad use for XML. Binary transport is much more efficient, and doesn't require the time or complexity of a modern parser. If the content is human readable, the binary will also be human readable. If not, you don't waste cycles converting back and forth just so a lazy incompetent programmer has an easier time debugging. Any good programmer doesn't have a hard time printing a binary value from any decent debugger.
Now config files. A good portion of the code I have to deal with every day (probably 20%) is in goddamn XML config and with the brilliance of Aspect Oriented programming Java style even infrastructure level code intercepts are now XML resulting in a fine mess to try to trace anything. Unlike printing a binary value, tracing through layers of XML is not easy. What's worse it ruins your type checking and config errors come up at runtime instead of compile time.
Can you disprove this?
The guy who got modded up telling you that you fail Comp Sci was rude, but then that seems to be what is rewarded on slashdot these days. He's right in as much as you are displaying your ignorance, but it's possible to be more helpful.
Regular expressions certainly aren't enough to parse XML.
You need to read the following book and take a course on compilers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compilers:_Principles,_Techniques,_and_Tools
I could give you a bunch of rules to google, but frankly I'm rusty on this stuff, and didn't get as deep an understanding as I wanted in the time I had when I studied this. In fact I'd love to go back and re-take my compiler course. It isn't simple stuff, but it is the very heart and soul of the computer science you use every day. You certainly don't need to understand it to write most business software, but it helps.
Seriously, two articles in the same day scaremongering about China. Slashdot is turning into The New York Times in the lead-up to the Iraq War.
Take a pill, will ya. Slashdot just links to the stories. The news has a lot of scaremongering at the moment. If slashdot editors started banning stories that cited China, I can imagine there would be an uproar about censorship. If you really have a problem, take it up with the satellite spotters that were quoted mentioning the Chinese, not slashdot or IHT.
What we need is a war on people being assholes to each other.
"Natural" is a word of many meanings, but in the context of the scientific theory of evolution, it implies merely the absence of supernatural influence.
No it doesn't. It means there was no design...supernatural or otherwise.
This definition even limits it to reproducing organisms
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection
You're talking out of your backside and I'm sick and tired of slashdot trolling.