And, to get philosophical -- is it really possible to meet people online?
Sure. I've met people though mailing lists, then later met them in person. One karate mailing list I was on had a few get-togethers where we met and trained; someone I knew from another list, a fellow from South Africa who was touring the States, stayed at my house for a few days and visited our dojo and threw me around.
Now, I don't at all see how this ties into "friend networks"...but if twenty years ago you told me that someone from another continent who I only knew through computers would sleep on my couch for a few days, I'm sure I would have given you a quizical look.
No one has proved (yet) these plants are unsafe, but our governement wants studies showing they're safe (!unsafe != safe).
Um, yes. Before you go making irreversible changes to the biosystem by introducting new plants, you'd better prove it's safe. Don't fsck with our spaceship's life support system. That's common sense.
If, for some reason I can't fathom, you want to eat GM crops, hey, be my guest. Just grow them in greenhouses with biohazard protections to keep themfromspreading.
If we were afraid of using new technology we would still not using the wheel.
Non sequitor. Adopting a technology like the wheel (or room-temperature supercondictors) is a reversable change. Putting poorly-understood transgenic plants into the ecosystem is not.
The highest hourly rate I've had for a steady job was $55/hour. I've made much more for a short-term consulting gig, and I'm making much less now, but trading for flexibility, telecommuting, and lower stress.
That was for a W2 contract position (that means I'm an hourly employee of Company X, but as a practical matter I work for Company Y, which sends a lot of money to Company X, which sends a much smaller amount of money to me), for a pretty good C/C++/Unix geek with a Master's degree and over a decade's experience, in the relatively well-paying Baltimore/DC area. During the boom I could probably have gotten $60/hour or more if I wanted to spend a lot of time commuting from Baltimore to Northern Virginia.
As an average, though? Not unless they're talking about the cost to the employer rather than the actual salary of the programmer.
Anyone who hires a programmer without looking at code samples...
And what code samples am I supposed to show you? I can't show you stuff from previous employers it's all NDAed and I destroyed any copies I had upon leaving. The things I've hacked up for my own amusement are either too simple to be meaningfil or aren't entirely my code (derivatives of free/open source projects).
No job I've gotten has ever come from following up on an advertisment, anyway. They all came from networking.
For a contrary view: I've never gotten a job through "networking". Mostly I've followed up on ads, a few times I've been hired by people who found my resume on the net or on a job site.
It's worked well for me. My social circle and my work circle don't intersect much, and I like it that way. I don't intend to start going our for beers with management types.
only submit resumes and carefully crafted cover letters
Brief, simple cover letters have worked well for me. "Dear So-and-So, I'm contacting you regarding such-and-such position you advertized in the Weekly World News. I have complete and total mastery of Technology X, and I believe my skills and experience might be suited to this position. I look forward to speaking with you about it, yada yada yada. Thank you for your consideration. Very truly yours, Tom Swiss"
Don't think I've ever spent more than four short paragraphs and ten minutes on one; the longer you make it, the greater the opportunity to say something stupid. (That includes resumes; everyone, if you have a section in your resume about "Career Objectives" or somesuch, please go elide it now. It is never informative and always bullshit.)
Yes, an undeclared variable that is not the same variable as thisIsImportant. Thus... DIFFERENT!!!
No. When the compiler chokes and dies, you don't have a program. Thus you don't have any variables. "Undeclared variable" is not a type of variable, it is a type of compile time error.
If you could find a few dozen people willing to spend months understanding a near-unique and tightly integrated hardware/software combination.
While the probes themselves are pretty unique, the
ground systems use a lot of commodity hardware and operating systems. When I worked on CBERS we were hacking C++ on SGI Octane boxes, while EDOS, the EOS Data and Operations System was C on RS/6000s with AIX. I interviewed for a job at STScI where, IIRC, they Solaris, and they actually use Lisp in their software for scheduling observations.
You try adding a third button to a laptop trackpad.
What, your trackpad doesn't have buttons next to it? My Sony Vaio SRX77 has two regular buttons, plus the "jog dial" is clickable as a third, and it even has a "back" button next to that that could be a fourth button.
On inferior hardware:-) with only two buttons, clicking both usually emulates the middle button.
(Touchscreens are trickier. Even there, some have played with gestures to replace the missing buttons in Familiar.)
How do you expect to make a copy of something if you don't point out what it is you want to make a copy of?
Pointing it out is a necessary step in making a copy. That doesn't mean that pointing it out means I want to make a copy. Maybe I want to delete it. Maybe I just want it highlighted on the screen. (In fact I often highlight text with the mouse when discussing code with someone looking at my screen.)
Many times have I selected to 'copy' a text area, closed the window to reveal the window I want to paste into, then found that paste didn't work and I've lost my work.
Selecting is not copying. When you close, that highlighted selected text isn't there any more. And why in the world would you close rather than iconify?
If I 'copy' something then I expect to be able to access it upon the next paste.
Yes, but selecting is not copying.
You've got an inaccurate mental model. Dragging with Mouse 1, or double or tripple clicking, selects text. Think of it as using a highlighter. Mouse 2 copies-and-pastes, taking the highlighted text and doing something with it. Highlighting doesn't make copy.
Most modern applications (GNOME) also support an explict copy, which is held in a different place. (CLIPBOARD versus PRIMARY.) I can select text in one ap, do a Control-C copy, select other text, go to another window, middle-click to get the currently selected text, and Control-V paste to get the first text. If you want to copy your selected text then close your window, this is the means to use.
What data loss? X operates on highlighted text. Close the window with that text and there is no more highlighted text to operate on. This is consistent.
If you really think such beauties as applications auto-selecting some text when you give them focus making you lose your previous selection...
What applications do this? Auto-selecting that way sound braindead to me, but that's an application problem, not an X problem.
All window systems which were designed with a human user in mind would have found it a no-brainer -- copy the text to an internal buffer, since that's what the user intuitively expects.
This is obviously a strange new use of the word "intuitively" which I've never encountered before. Highlighting text intuitively implies making a copy of it? Absolutely no way.
It's not a question of intuitiveness. It's a matter of people having gotten used to the (braindead and ugly) Windows way of doing things.
Cut-and-paste works fine for me between the applications I use: GNU Emacs, Galeon, Sylpheed, OpenOffice, and gnome-terminal.
properties -> change desktop resolution. Why can't it be that simple?
Control-Alt-Plus and -Minus cycle through the resolutions in your XConfig file.
GNOME and KDE don't put a wrapper around this because almost no one feels the need to alter their resolution. For example, you don't seem to care enough about it to have Googled for it, since it's right there at the top.
Why don't they use a master window to contain all the other child Gimp windows?
Because that's an ugly and unfriendly thing to do. Let my window manager manage windows the way I want it to, please.
(If I'm doing a lot of GIMPing I'll put it on its own virtual desktop. But I might to float those GIMP windows around a web browser window to see how that image looks in the web page I'm working on.)
Personally, I like Basic because of it's ease of use. Recently, I have been getting quite attracted to PHP for similar reasons.
Please don't use "Basic" when you mean "Visual Basic". You'll pollute my memories of the good old days on my CoCo...
10 PRINT "TMS RULES!"
20 GOTO 10
Anyway, I like PHP fine, it's what I'm paid to hack with these days. (And I'm the one who argued for it over our existing CGI C/C++.) But, PHP variable names are case-sensitive.
(Which, in a language where variables aren't pre-declared, so such things can't be caught the compiler, may be dangerous:
$someVar = do_it();
echo "do_it() returns $somevar";// bang head against wall wondering why do_it() always returns 0...
Names of functions, which do need pre-declaration, are case-insensitive. That is ass-backwards.)
In a case insensitive language, such example would not compile since TRUE would clash with the keyword "true" which you are not allowed to redefine.
Redefining a keyword has nothing to do with case sensitivity. The abilities are orthogonal: one can have a language that allows redefinition that is either case sensitive or insensitive.
Neither "true" nor "TRUE" is a keyword in C. ISO C calls for a stdbool.h header to #define "true"; while no such.h file is to be found on my RedHat box, there are other headers that do #define it. "TRUE" is #defined in several headers to be 1.
The abliity to redefine a macro like this makes both stupid and brilliant things possible.
The corporation is not just a business structure, it is a legal entity created by the state. By limiting liability and providing for absentee ownership - not to mention creating immoral "artficial persons" capable only of greed-driven behavior - it allows power and profit without responsibility.
A case sensitive compiler lets you do horrible things like having two properties of an object with the same name except for the case. Example: myObject.list and myObject.List.
No, the compiler wouldn't object. Compilers will let you do many deliberately stupid things. #define TRUE 0 for example, is perfectly valid C. But try putting it into your program and see what happens when the next coder comes across it, remembering John F. Woods advice: "Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."
Compilers are supposed to help prevent accidental stupidity. What protects against deliberately stupid things is your fellow coders beating you to death with your own keyboard.
You can still capitalize your static variables if you like...If you spell a variable "thisIsImportant" in hundreds of places throughout your source code, but in one place spell it "ThisIsImportant" a case sensitive language like Java will consider those two DIFFERENT variables.
It won't be considered a different variable, it will be considered an undeclared variable. The compliler will choke on it.
As it should. If people use case convertions to convey information - static variables are capitalized - then the compiler enforcing consistent casing is good. Else in file1.c it's "ThisIsStatic", in file2.c it's "thisisstatic"; Alice, looking a file1.c, knows it's static, while Bob, looking at file2.c, doesn't get that same information. The compiler is merely making you pick a way and stick to it, for the benefit of your fellow humans.
Should the compilier also ignore misspellings? If "Variable1" appears all over the place and in one place "Variabl1" appears, should the complier auto-correct it to "Variable1"?
He-3 being part of the energy that is taken in, of course.
Most folks would say that the He3 being put it was mass. Thus by converting part of that mass to energy you get out more energy than you put in.
You're getting hung up on fine distinctions about usage of the word "energy". Outside of a physics class, where by modern convetion "mass" is seen as a form of "energy", the article's usage was quite correct. Relax. Have a beer.
Well SCO OpenDesktop 2, OpenDesktop 3 and OpenServer 5 were C2 certified.
SCO also had a B3 certified product (called "SCO CMW+", IIRC). It sucked rocks, rather unstable, but at the lime I beleive it was the only B-level system available on x86 hardware.
I don't know. Could be the question is meaningless, like "What positive integer is less that 1?" or "What is further North than the North Pole?" Could be an oscillating universe, or an endless stream of universes being created. (Though this might require slippery considerations of wat "before" means.) Could be the whole thing was sneezed out of the nose the Great Green Arkleseizure.
I do know that positing a pre-existing creator explains nothing, because one then is left with the puzzle of the creator's origin. Shifting mysteries is no solution.
I would fear for us all if we ever attempted "world government". As a race, we're not even qualified to run a government, never mind a national one, never mind a global one.
Like all other levels of government, world government is unavoidable. Either one is organized, or a de facto arrangement of rule by the strongest prevails.
Imagine what would happen if your city or town was suddenly and magically cut off from the rest of the world, and all traces of existing government vanished. Would you remain without government? Heck no. Anarchy is unstable. Either you'd all get together and vote some person or group into authority, or the strongest, toughest, meanest SOB around would take charge, or some combination thereof (SOB in charge with an selected/elected body providing some moderation.)
Same applies to world government. The strongest, toughest, meanest SOB around has taken charge. The world government exists, and it is the United States. The U.N. just provides a little moderation.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure. I've met people though mailing lists, then later met them in person. One karate mailing list I was on had a few get-togethers where we met and trained; someone I knew from another list, a fellow from South Africa who was touring the States, stayed at my house for a few days and visited our dojo and threw me around.
Now, I don't at all see how this ties into "friend networks"...but if twenty years ago you told me that someone from another continent who I only knew through computers would sleep on my couch for a few days, I'm sure I would have given you a quizical look.
Um, yes. Before you go making irreversible changes to the biosystem by introducting new plants, you'd better prove it's safe. Don't fsck with our spaceship's life support system. That's common sense.
If, for some reason I can't fathom, you want to eat GM crops, hey, be my guest. Just grow them in greenhouses with biohazard protections to keep them from spreading.
Non sequitor. Adopting a technology like the wheel (or room-temperature supercondictors) is a reversable change. Putting poorly-understood transgenic plants into the ecosystem is not.
The highest hourly rate I've had for a steady job was $55/hour. I've made much more for a short-term consulting gig, and I'm making much less now, but trading for flexibility, telecommuting, and lower stress.
That was for a W2 contract position (that means I'm an hourly employee of Company X, but as a practical matter I work for Company Y, which sends a lot of money to Company X, which sends a much smaller amount of money to me), for a pretty good C/C++/Unix geek with a Master's degree and over a decade's experience, in the relatively well-paying Baltimore/DC area. During the boom I could probably have gotten $60/hour or more if I wanted to spend a lot of time commuting from Baltimore to Northern Virginia.
As an average, though? Not unless they're talking about the cost to the employer rather than the actual salary of the programmer.
And what code samples am I supposed to show you? I can't show you stuff from previous employers it's all NDAed and I destroyed any copies I had upon leaving. The things I've hacked up for my own amusement are either too simple to be meaningfil or aren't entirely my code (derivatives of free/open source projects).
For a contrary view: I've never gotten a job through "networking". Mostly I've followed up on ads, a few times I've been hired by people who found my resume on the net or on a job site.
It's worked well for me. My social circle and my work circle don't intersect much, and I like it that way. I don't intend to start going our for beers with management types.
Brief, simple cover letters have worked well for me. "Dear So-and-So, I'm contacting you regarding such-and-such position you advertized in the Weekly World News. I have complete and total mastery of Technology X, and I believe my skills and experience might be suited to this position. I look forward to speaking with you about it, yada yada yada. Thank you for your consideration. Very truly yours, Tom Swiss"
Don't think I've ever spent more than four short paragraphs and ten minutes on one; the longer you make it, the greater the opportunity to say something stupid. (That includes resumes; everyone, if you have a section in your resume about "Career Objectives" or somesuch, please go elide it now. It is never informative and always bullshit.)
No. When the compiler chokes and dies, you don't have a program. Thus you don't have any variables. "Undeclared variable" is not a type of variable, it is a type of compile time error.
As opposed to Lucid Emacs, XEmacs, Gosling Emacs, MicroEmacs...
Hope that foot in your mouth tastes good.
They do. But the usage is incorrect. On the GNU/Linux thing, Stallman's a pain in the ass (as usual), but he's right (as usual).What, your trackpad doesn't have buttons next to it? My Sony Vaio SRX77 has two regular buttons, plus the "jog dial" is clickable as a third, and it even has a "back" button next to that that could be a fourth button.
On inferior hardware :-) with only two buttons, clicking both usually emulates the middle button.
(Touchscreens are trickier. Even there, some have played with gestures to replace the missing buttons in Familiar.)
Pointing it out is a necessary step in making a copy. That doesn't mean that pointing it out means I want to make a copy. Maybe I want to delete it. Maybe I just want it highlighted on the screen. (In fact I often highlight text with the mouse when discussing code with someone looking at my screen.)
Selecting is not copying. When you close, that highlighted selected text isn't there any more. And why in the world would you close rather than iconify?
Yes, but selecting is not copying.
You've got an inaccurate mental model. Dragging with Mouse 1, or double or tripple clicking, selects text. Think of it as using a highlighter. Mouse 2 copies-and-pastes, taking the highlighted text and doing something with it. Highlighting doesn't make copy.
Most modern applications (GNOME) also support an explict copy, which is held in a different place. (CLIPBOARD versus PRIMARY.) I can select text in one ap, do a Control-C copy, select other text, go to another window, middle-click to get the currently selected text, and Control-V paste to get the first text. If you want to copy your selected text then close your window, this is the means to use.
Of course not all aps support this. GNU Emacs does things a little different, for example. That's an application issue, not an X issue.
It's discussed elsewhere in this thread that there's a serious Mozilla bug related to cut and paste, perhaps it applies to Firebird as well.What data loss? X operates on highlighted text. Close the window with that text and there is no more highlighted text to operate on. This is consistent.
What applications do this? Auto-selecting that way sound braindead to me, but that's an application problem, not an X problem.This is obviously a strange new use of the word "intuitively" which I've never encountered before. Highlighting text intuitively implies making a copy of it? Absolutely no way.
It's not a question of intuitiveness. It's a matter of people having gotten used to the (braindead and ugly) Windows way of doing things.
Cut-and-paste works fine for me between the applications I use: GNU Emacs, Galeon, Sylpheed, OpenOffice, and gnome-terminal.
Control-Alt-Plus and -Minus cycle through the resolutions in your XConfig file.
GNOME and KDE don't put a wrapper around this because almost no one feels the need to alter their resolution. For example, you don't seem to care enough about it to have Googled for it, since it's right there at the top.
Because that's an ugly and unfriendly thing to do. Let my window manager manage windows the way I want it to, please.
(If I'm doing a lot of GIMPing I'll put it on its own virtual desktop. But I might to float those GIMP windows around a web browser window to see how that image looks in the web page I'm working on.)
Please don't use "Basic" when you mean "Visual Basic". You'll pollute my memories of the good old days on my CoCo...
10 PRINT "TMS RULES!"
20 GOTO 10
Anyway, I like PHP fine, it's what I'm paid to hack with these days. (And I'm the one who argued for it over our existing CGI C/C++.) But, PHP variable names are case-sensitive.
(Which, in a language where variables aren't pre-declared, so such things can't be caught the compiler, may be dangerous: // bang head against wall wondering why do_it() always returns 0...
$someVar = do_it();
echo "do_it() returns $somevar";
Names of functions, which do need pre-declaration, are case-insensitive. That is ass-backwards.)
Redefining a keyword has nothing to do with case sensitivity. The abilities are orthogonal: one can have a language that allows redefinition that is either case sensitive or insensitive.
Neither "true" nor "TRUE" is a keyword in C. ISO C calls for a stdbool.h header to #define "true"; while no such .h file is to be found on my RedHat box, there are other headers that do #define it. "TRUE" is #defined in several headers to be 1.
The abliity to redefine a macro like this makes both stupid and brilliant things possible.
The corporation is not just a business structure, it is a legal entity created by the state. By limiting liability and providing for absentee ownership - not to mention creating immoral "artficial persons" capable only of greed-driven behavior - it allows power and profit without responsibility.
No, the compiler wouldn't object. Compilers will let you do many deliberately stupid things.
#define TRUE 0
for example, is perfectly valid C. But try putting it into your program and see what happens when the next coder comes across it, remembering John F. Woods advice: "Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."
Compilers are supposed to help prevent accidental stupidity. What protects against deliberately stupid things is your fellow coders beating you to death with your own keyboard.
It won't be considered a different variable, it will be considered an undeclared variable. The compliler will choke on it.
As it should. If people use case convertions to convey information - static variables are capitalized - then the compiler enforcing consistent casing is good. Else in file1.c it's "ThisIsStatic", in file2.c it's "thisisstatic"; Alice, looking a file1.c, knows it's static, while Bob, looking at file2.c, doesn't get that same information. The compiler is merely making you pick a way and stick to it, for the benefit of your fellow humans.
Should the compilier also ignore misspellings? If "Variable1" appears all over the place and in one place "Variabl1" appears, should the complier auto-correct it to "Variable1"?
Most folks would say that the He3 being put it was mass. Thus by converting part of that mass to energy you get out more energy than you put in.
You're getting hung up on fine distinctions about usage of the word "energy". Outside of a physics class, where by modern convetion "mass" is seen as a form of "energy", the article's usage was quite correct. Relax. Have a beer.
SCO also had a B3 certified product (called "SCO CMW+", IIRC). It sucked rocks, rather unstable, but at the lime I beleive it was the only B-level system available on x86 hardware.
I don't know. Could be the question is meaningless, like "What positive integer is less that 1?" or "What is further North than the North Pole?" Could be an oscillating universe, or an endless stream of universes being created. (Though this might require slippery considerations of wat "before" means.) Could be the whole thing was sneezed out of the nose the Great Green Arkleseizure.
I do know that positing a pre-existing creator explains nothing, because one then is left with the puzzle of the creator's origin. Shifting mysteries is no solution.
Like all other levels of government, world government is unavoidable. Either one is organized, or a de facto arrangement of rule by the strongest prevails.
Imagine what would happen if your city or town was suddenly and magically cut off from the rest of the world, and all traces of existing government vanished. Would you remain without government? Heck no. Anarchy is unstable. Either you'd all get together and vote some person or group into authority, or the strongest, toughest, meanest SOB around would take charge, or some combination thereof (SOB in charge with an selected/elected body providing some moderation.)
Universal Enlightenment is a prerequisite to abolition of the State, after which the State will inevitably vanish. Or - that failing - nobody will give a damn. But until we're all enlightened, government is inevitable.
Same applies to world government. The strongest, toughest, meanest SOB around has taken charge. The world government exists, and it is the United States. The U.N. just provides a little moderation.