I'm not at all sure that OSS does interoperate poorly. I would rather ask:
Why, when there's a need to interoperate, does OSS invariably fall back on the 'chain of programs communicating via a pipe of characters' model from the 1970s, even though mechanisms for defining rich, concurrent interfaces have been in common use for ages everywhere else?
I know there are many good reasons why pipe'o'ASCII software projects do what they do. I also know that projects like KDE have made considerable steps in what I think of as the right direction. But the lack of componentization and well-defined interfaces in Linux-style software is one good reason why I'm glad Microsoft (and even -- yechh -- Sun) still have a strong role in keeping things moving.
(loud crashing sound as post is modded down for not being unix-centric enough)
Actually, some of us use real units not because we are from the US, but because they are more comfortable and intuitive, having evolved through use rather than being arbitrarily dictated by pompous French people.
I would do, but I'm out of points.
The parent post captures the interesting aspect of the case -- i.e. that a crime that could be only weakly punished by civil law (because only marginal damage was done) was simply reinterpreted as a national security issue, and hey presto! a strong punishment.
The 'clean needle' approach basically involves making life easier for the criminal group (drug addicts) so that they don't need to commit so many troublesome crimes -- thus making life easier for everyone.
The approach advocated in the Register involves making life harder for the criminal group (hackers) so that they aren't able to commit troublesome crimes.
There is no similarity, and furthermore, while the 'clean needle' thing is hightly controversial and frequently shades into a program of government-subsidised drug abuse, writing software more securely is obviously beneficial and should be a no-brainer.
I therefore conclude, your honor, that the phrase 'clean needle' was only introduced because it's eyecatching -- perhaps because the original submitter was caught in a fringe eddy of the Really Rather Silly Field (RRSF) that usually surrounds The Register.
It's a parody of American McGee (or maybe of the flood of crap pseudo-gothic grotesquerie of which he forms but a small part). It just happens to refer to Strawberry Thingy.
Sorry, I'm so pedantic I just had to point that out, because some people seem to have the impression that it's a really childish parody of Strawberry Doodad. Whereas in fact it's an okay (but not hilarious) parody of American 'Alice' McGee and his belief that giving anything at all a big fanged grin and some pseudo-bondage chic will make it entertaining.
This is of course a false belief, similar to the belief (popular in Asia and, I'm told, elsewhere) that giving something cat ears, a cat tail, and enormous big eyes makes it automatically entertaining.
I'm typing this on a Kinesis Contour keyboard and it's a wonderful thing. It abandons the traditional 'staggered grid' layout (which is fine, because none of my keyboards relies on swinging a thin metal arm that has to be kept clear of all the other thin metal arms) and puts the keys in a bowl shape around the fingers. It feels so much more comfortable and natural to type on -- and it also fixed the tendons in my right hand, which were freaking out from having to reach over to the backspace and 'programming' keys so much.
It also has total programmability -- which means that finally I can do something with the scroll lock key (I use it to toggle Japanese/English input).
Mine is from the mid 90's and is still working perfectly.
N.B. I do not work for Kinesis. I merely plug their keyboard all the damn time because I like it.
Re:are you making this up?
on
Robots!
·
· Score: 1
I know others have corrected your errors already in this thread but I just like correcting twits.
"the faster the better" -> hayai hodo ii "I bumped my head..." -> ofuro ni hairu tokoro atama wo buttobashita
'yoroshiku' and 'sumimasen' have many possible shades of meaning, just like 'excuse me' and 'please' in English and like similar interjections in other languages.
By '"sound the exact same" words' I assume you mean homophones. English and Spanish are extremely rich in homophones.
Kanji are not relevant because this is *voice* communication.
As someone who does natural language processing, I find Japanese comparatively easy -- certainly easier than English, which is generally a hard one.
Because you're a crushed, crumpled, used-up-tissue of a creature whose horizons are so low that he cannot concieve of someone learning another language out of interest or because their life is just more varied than yours. Easy.
What I can't figure out is whether you're the real Reagan or not.
I both buy shareware (Pontifex, Snood, silly games like that) and sell shareware (http://www.jbrowse.com/products/axe) and I'd say the system is still working just as well as it was in the Epic/Apogee era -- better, even, because credit card payments are quite easy to process now and shareware is well suited to Web business.
What's more, the level of organization in the shareware world is increasing -- the PAD XML format (PAD files describe shareware/freeware products) makes finding shareware (for the customer) and keeping it up to date (for the seller) easier than ever.
Even big-name games are sometimes still released as shareware (without using the word per se) -- Unreal Tournament 3 springs to mind.
...and for doing generic markup in a relatively simple way, it's good.
For storing arbitrary data, and use as a message format (as in SOAP), it's not so good because it has markup-like features, such as the distinction between attributes and elements and the distinction between text and element nodes. (The latter in particular is a huge pain, I wish people would agree to only use text nodes in leaf elements.)
This is why XML parsers/generators, once they get into entities and DTDs and so on, become really a lot more complicated than they would need to be if XML just stored a tree of elements.
However, it's the standard, so we might as well just shut up and use it.
My opinions have no special importance but it *is* important to remember that XML is a markup format that is being used mostly for things other than markup.
Well, in the course of slashdot history something like 20 separate people have chosen either to say that a deltic is a type of locomotive, or to ask you what a deltic is, and never once have you responded!
So, what's a deltic? I hear it's a kind of locomotive.
I think the reason there are so many 'huh? why do I want to do all this?' responses is that Java is not a language that lends itself to AOP, and that AspectJ therefore has to build this scary layer of 'pointcuts' and so on on top of it.
With a language that lets you assembly types dynamically, like Ruby or Perl, AOP is much simpler and more natural, so it's easier to get a feel for the benefits.
In particular I think Ruby is well-suited, although you do lose some type safety. There is a package called AspectR available, although you *could* do it all youself with mixins and the like.
Re:That's Washington University, moron
on
Collecting Stardust
·
· Score: 2, Funny
You sound like a moron to anyone who went there.
I'm having trouble believing that *everyone* who went there is like that. I think what you meant to say was something like:
'I have very few sources of pride in my life, so I obsess over trivia such as the name of my old school -- desperate for anything, no matter how trivial or laughable it may seem to others, that will allow me to tell myself for a precious second or two that I am in some minute way superior."
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not at all sure that OSS does interoperate poorly. I would rather ask:
Why, when there's a need to interoperate, does OSS invariably fall back on the 'chain of programs communicating via a pipe of characters' model from the 1970s, even though mechanisms for defining rich, concurrent interfaces have been in common use for ages everywhere else?
I know there are many good reasons why pipe'o'ASCII software projects do what they do. I also know that projects like KDE have made considerable steps in what I think of as the right direction. But the lack of componentization and well-defined interfaces in Linux-style software is one good reason why I'm glad Microsoft (and even -- yechh -- Sun) still have a strong role in keeping things moving.
(loud crashing sound as post is modded down for not being unix-centric enough)
Actually, some of us use real units not because we are from the US, but because they are more comfortable and intuitive, having evolved through use rather than being arbitrarily dictated by pompous French people.
I think that's probably the most easily-disproved wild assertion I've ever read, even on
There should be a special prize or something.
I would do, but I'm out of points.
The parent post captures the interesting aspect of the case -- i.e. that a crime that could be only weakly punished by civil law (because only marginal damage was done) was simply reinterpreted as a national security issue, and hey presto! a strong punishment.
Not that the kid wasn't a twit, you understand.
Something with a more sordid history? You mean... MY LITTLE PONY?
I can say no more on this matter.
The 'clean needle' approach basically involves making life easier for the criminal group (drug addicts) so that they don't need to commit so many troublesome crimes -- thus making life easier for everyone.
The approach advocated in the Register involves making life harder for the criminal group (hackers) so that they aren't able to commit troublesome crimes.
There is no similarity, and furthermore, while the 'clean needle' thing is hightly controversial and frequently shades into a program of government-subsidised drug abuse, writing software more securely is obviously beneficial and should be a no-brainer.
I therefore conclude, your honor, that the phrase 'clean needle' was only introduced because it's eyecatching -- perhaps because the original submitter was caught in a fringe eddy of the Really Rather Silly Field (RRSF) that usually surrounds The Register.
It's a parody of American McGee (or maybe of the flood of crap pseudo-gothic grotesquerie of which he forms but a small part). It just happens to refer to Strawberry Thingy.
Sorry, I'm so pedantic I just had to point that out, because some people seem to have the impression that it's a really childish parody of Strawberry Doodad. Whereas in fact it's an okay (but not hilarious) parody of American 'Alice' McGee and his belief that giving anything at all a big fanged grin and some pseudo-bondage chic will make it entertaining.
This is of course a false belief, similar to the belief (popular in Asia and, I'm told, elsewhere) that giving something cat ears, a cat tail, and enormous big eyes makes it automatically entertaining.
I'm typing this on a Kinesis Contour keyboard and it's a wonderful thing. It abandons the traditional 'staggered grid' layout (which is fine, because none of my keyboards relies on swinging a thin metal arm that has to be kept clear of all the other thin metal arms) and puts the keys in a bowl shape around the fingers. It feels so much more comfortable and natural to type on -- and it also fixed the tendons in my right hand, which were freaking out from having to reach over to the backspace and 'programming' keys so much.
It also has total programmability -- which means that finally I can do something with the scroll lock key (I use it to toggle Japanese/English input).
Mine is from the mid 90's and is still working perfectly.
N.B. I do not work for Kinesis. I merely plug their keyboard all the damn time because I like it.
I know others have corrected your errors already in this thread but I just like correcting twits.
"the faster the better" -> hayai hodo ii
"I bumped my head..." -> ofuro ni hairu tokoro atama wo buttobashita
'yoroshiku' and 'sumimasen' have many possible shades of meaning, just like 'excuse me' and 'please' in English and like similar interjections in other languages.
By '"sound the exact same" words' I assume you mean homophones. English and Spanish are extremely rich in homophones.
Kanji are not relevant because this is *voice* communication.
As someone who does natural language processing, I find Japanese comparatively easy -- certainly easier than English, which is generally a hard one.
Yes, words written with kanji are far harder to hear than words written phonetically.
Whereas in English there's always a subject, an object, and a single unambiguous interpretation independent of any context information. How fortunate.
The bent knees are because they are correcting their balance constantly by moving their knees slightly to lengthen and shorten each leg.
Conspicuous by their absense from this list, huh?
Ah well.
Because you're a crushed, crumpled, used-up-tissue of a creature whose horizons are so low that he cannot concieve of someone learning another language out of interest or because their life is just more varied than yours. Easy.
What I can't figure out is whether you're the real Reagan or not.
I both buy shareware (Pontifex, Snood, silly games like that) and sell shareware (http://www.jbrowse.com/products/axe) and I'd say the system is still working just as well as it was in the Epic/Apogee era -- better, even, because credit card payments are quite easy to process now and shareware is well suited to Web business.
What's more, the level of organization in the shareware world is increasing -- the PAD XML format (PAD files describe shareware/freeware products) makes finding shareware (for the customer) and keeping it up to date (for the seller) easier than ever.
Even big-name games are sometimes still released as shareware (without using the word per se) -- Unreal Tournament 3 springs to mind.
...seeing as it's already the standard TRON for the desktop and actually has unique TRON-style features (i.e. the universal character set).
Bolting TRON and Linux together does not seem to offer any particular advantages to the world as a whole, although it might be an advantage to TRON.
Use BTRON today! Documentation probably Japanese only but still in many ways easier to read than GNU Info.
...and for doing generic markup in a relatively simple way, it's good.
For storing arbitrary data, and use as a message format (as in SOAP), it's not so good because it has markup-like features, such as the distinction between attributes and elements and the distinction between text and element nodes. (The latter in particular is a huge pain, I wish people would agree to only use text nodes in leaf elements.)
This is why XML parsers/generators, once they get into entities and DTDs and so on, become really a lot more complicated than they would need to be if XML just stored a tree of elements.
However, it's the standard, so we might as well just shut up and use it.
My opinions have no special importance but it *is* important to remember that XML is a markup format that is being used mostly for things other than markup.
Well, in the course of slashdot history something like 20 separate people have chosen either to say that a deltic is a type of locomotive, or to ask you what a deltic is, and never once have you responded!
So, what's a deltic? I hear it's a kind of locomotive.
Look, I PERSONALLY VOLUNTEER to go round to your office and tell him about plurals. And about how common nouns are not capitalized in English.
Or maybe I'll just send a memo.
It was England? And they actually *asked*? You must be in the polite part of England.
I know what dwim means.
Nevertheless, that sentence was still enough to make me give up on Perl 6. What is he *thinking* of??
Now, to start work on my '.NET CLR for Parrot' system...
So, I read through the recent Apocalypse and I come to a sentence a bit like this:
'...but Perl will dwim silently if the context is a list that starts with a pair or hash.'
Admittedly, by that point I'd already seen enough sequences of punctuation marks that I wasn't really feeling very hopeful.
So it seems I will be living with the limitations of Ruby for quite a few years yet! Banzai!
Can someone please make a Ruby that compiles to Parrot code? Pretty please? I volunteer to do the SVG library.
Well, it worked for McDonalds.
I think the reason there are so many 'huh? why do I want to do all this?' responses is that Java is not a language that lends itself to AOP, and that AspectJ therefore has to build this scary layer of 'pointcuts' and so on on top of it.
With a language that lets you assembly types dynamically, like Ruby or Perl, AOP is much simpler and more natural, so it's easier to get a feel for the benefits.
In particular I think Ruby is well-suited, although you do lose some type safety. There is a package called AspectR available, although you *could* do it all youself with mixins and the like.
I'm having trouble believing that *everyone* who went there is like that. I think what you meant to say was something like:
'I have very few sources of pride in my life, so I obsess over trivia such as the name of my old school -- desperate for anything, no matter how trivial or laughable it may seem to others, that will allow me to tell myself for a precious second or two that I am in some minute way superior."