Hemp based biodiesel is very productive per acre, and has the added advantage of growing in some pretty harsh conditions compared to corn.
Howevver, hemp is related to cannabis, and as the US has shown, nothing like logic shall come between the government and their ill-advised prohibitionist policies.
It also doesn't help that Windows is so much easier to deploy and administer company-wide than Linux is.
I really have to disagree with that statement. An experienced Linux admin can deploy and maintain a much greater number of Linux desktops than Windows desktops. Management of those workstations is not what's holding Linux back -- it's the constant churn of "new" UI themes and interfaces from Gnome and KDE that baffle the Windows users when they first try to use Linux.
My own experience with Linux on the desktop has been frustrating. For example, I cannot find a single DVD burning program that will support my Toshiba drive at 16x burning. The music players I've tried suck horribly. The Mono developer/debugger absolutely sucks -- it won't even break at breakpoints in the code when running in debug mode, much less allow you to do live edits/patches while on a break point. Other than that it's been very usable, but it does take getting used to.
I rely heavily on scripting for one reason: scripts can be captured in version management repositories. GUI interactions can't.
Aside from that, my database creation scripts are huge. I'd hate to have to open each script in a GUI tool to run it instead of being able to run them all as a batch (as intended) through a bash script (which in turn invokes the compent bash scripts that actually invoke the database CLI.)
By all means ban smartphones from the court. The cameras most of them have are already illegal in many jurisdictions, and there is nothing you can do with a smartphone that you should be doing in court.
For that matter, I'd say ban cellphones period. The court is not a place to be text messaging, and you sure as hell aren't going to be taking calls anyhow.
However, there isn't really that much material at the foundation of Calculus, Geometry, and Trigonometry. They may spend entire semesters going through the material, but the "cheat sheet" notes boil down to a page each.
If this kid has an intuitive grasp of mathematics, he probably started reading about different concepts, basically went "Oh, that's what they call that!", and was on to the next topic without hesitation. Unlike the rest of us, he probably grasped most of the key concepts by skimming the textbooks, without having to read the long-winded detailed explanations and examples of concepts.
I fully believe he could "learn" all that material in a week because he wasn't learning the material in the usual sense -- he was just learning the standard labels and terminology for things he already understood.
Questioning the use of the.Net framework when doing Windows development is like questioning the use of the J2EE framework for web interface development. Why in the world would you want someone who doesn't know the fundamental frameworks of the environment they're deploying to?
The days of simple APIs is long gone. Every major product or project I've worked on for the past 10-15 years has started with the choice of a framework, followed by the choice of reusable add-ons for that framework. Only the "leftover" custom functionality actually gets programmed by hand.
Doing otherwise is not only foolish, it's a sign of criminal negligence and incompetence.
Actually I'm looking forward to re-learning C++ after GCC et. al. are updated and the spec is finalized. They've added a great deal to the standard libraries, the syntax, and the collections/containers since I last worked with C++. I've no need for C++ -- it's just something I want to do for fun.
Apparently the meaning of "Modular" has changed since I was in University back in '82. OO used to be the epitome of modularity.
But I do agree that making it an introductory first-level course does warp the mind of the young programmer. There are a lot of languages that don't enable OO programming at all (e.g. Erlang), which become much more difficult for them to grasp because OO is so engrained in their thinking.
I can't think of anything specific about OO that makes it poorly suited to parallel programming. There are languages whose nature is parallelism (again, Erlang), but that's usually accomplished by adding parallelism operators and messaging operators to a relatively "traditional" language. I don't see why you couldn't add and implement those constructs in a non-parallel language.
I also shudder to think how a CS student is going to deal with parallelism using languages that don't make it a natural extension if they're learning to rely on those extensions in their first year.
I gotta tell you, though, I really object to the use of Java as an introduction language for programming. Java is far from a shining example of any particular style of programming. It's not real OO because it's only single inheritance. It's not designed for parallelism. It doesn't have messaging built in. In short, Java is actually a pretty archaic and restricted language.
I think the real problem that's freaking politicians out is that electric vehicles will be raising no fuel tax at all. And with the high price of gasoline and the inevitable reduction in EV pricing, most commuters will probably be going EV within 5-10 years.
Better to deal with that budget shock now than when the revenue crash comes.
Microsoft seems to be taking a reversed approach to the RIAA and MPAA. The AAs are busy suing people and companies overseas who aren't under US jurisdiction. Microsoft, on the other hand, wants to sue Americans who do business with those overseas law breakers.
Microsoft made all kinds of promises about what DRM could and would do. Why haven't they been able to implement software licensing and security that actually achieves what they promised? Microsoft seems to have turned a blind eye to the overseas piracy, preferring to lick their wounds and console themselves that at least they have users.
Now that they've ingrained a lifestyle of piracy in those nations, they have an issue with it. Too bad. Come up with an actual solution instead of trying to sue everyone else for their own fuckups.
Red Hat submits their patches upstream for inclusion in the main Linux kernel.
According to earlier posts, they even submit them upstream before they include them in the RHEL kernel.
Those upstream submissions are not monolithic/merged, so distros which build from the Linux source instead of a distro's source should not have a problem. That includes Debian.
If you want scummy, look to companies like Oracle which just take, repackage, and rarely give back. They're the real problem, not RedHat.
RedHat's patches still get submitted upstream for inclusion in the main kernel, which very often does happen.
I have no sympathy whatsoever for leeches that were taking RedHat patches and rolling their own distributions without contributing enough back on their own.
I fail to see how this affects seperate distros like Debian, which aren't based on RedHat-patched source in the first place.
I consider that a benefit, because there are many pages at ibm.com (for example) that I reference. If Firefox only tracked the main address for the site, the so-called Awesome bar would be truly useless.
I only know one person who buys music from iTunes. Everyone else uses other services, rips their own DVDs, or downloads torrents.
Apple is far from having a music monopoly.
But I have always been curious why Apple didn't get sued for getting into the entertainment business. I seem to recall Apple Records of Beatles fame having Apple Computer agree not to get involved in music so that there would be no confusion between the two Apples.
There's a lot of heavy equipment, shipping of yellowcake, and processing of yellow cake before it gets to a nuke plant. I don't think they're as "green" as a lot of other people seem to think.
University is a long time ago for me, but I learned by writing my notes, rewriting them, condensing them, further condensing them, until eventually I got down to 3-4 sheets of paper for a semester's worth of info. It was the very act of thinking about the notes and rewriting them that taught me the material.
I've no doubt my grades would have suffered if I had been able to get copies of the lecture notes at the push of a button.
Isn't it the parent's responsibility to "coach" their child? Maybe if more parents did their job properly there wouldn't be a perceived need for IBM's technology.
$10/month is obscene. That's 2/3 of a CD per month guaranteed income, no matter how crappy the product. I already have to pay a CD tax even when burning data CDs, pretty much forcing me to switch entirely to DVDs for burning because they're not subject to that damn tax. (A spindle of 75 DVD-R is $15, a spindle of 50 CD-R is $45!)
If you want to be fair, you should start with a 5-10MB disk, which is what was available around the time of Windows 1.0/DOS 5.
It would have been physically impossible to keep upgrading a machine this way in reality, as you'd have run into hardware driver issues when upgrading motherboards and hard drives to get the capacity needed for the newer releases of Windows. An interesting experiment to see if the software itself could deal with the upgrades, but hardly noteworthy. I'm more impressed with software like OS/2 that didn't need to be upgraded to serve it's purpose.
As Apple did not invent the idea of Pad computing, I'm quite certain there would have been others to market. The only questions are whether they would have been as successful or achieved the brand recognition that Apple has.
I reboot all my systems once a week (Sunday). Better to find out about messed up init scripts and such in a timely fashion that while everyone is screaming about unplanned downtime. And I have found and fixed such errors from time to time, so it's not a bad idea to get the issues resolved before they become a problem.
While I agree that going through a search engine for everything is silly, I do know a couple people who already do exactly that. They never save bookmarks, because it's "easier" to make Google their home page.
Slashdot Mirror
Hemp based biodiesel is very productive per acre, and has the added advantage of growing in some pretty harsh conditions compared to corn.
Howevver, hemp is related to cannabis, and as the US has shown, nothing like logic shall come between the government and their ill-advised prohibitionist policies.
Yet another excuse for cubemates to mutter incoherently at their computers...
I really have to disagree with that statement. An experienced Linux admin can deploy and maintain a much greater number of Linux desktops than Windows desktops. Management of those workstations is not what's holding Linux back -- it's the constant churn of "new" UI themes and interfaces from Gnome and KDE that baffle the Windows users when they first try to use Linux.
My own experience with Linux on the desktop has been frustrating. For example, I cannot find a single DVD burning program that will support my Toshiba drive at 16x burning. The music players I've tried suck horribly. The Mono developer/debugger absolutely sucks -- it won't even break at breakpoints in the code when running in debug mode, much less allow you to do live edits/patches while on a break point. Other than that it's been very usable, but it does take getting used to.
I rely heavily on scripting for one reason: scripts can be captured in version management repositories. GUI interactions can't.
Aside from that, my database creation scripts are huge. I'd hate to have to open each script in a GUI tool to run it instead of being able to run them all as a batch (as intended) through a bash script (which in turn invokes the compent bash scripts that actually invoke the database CLI.)
By all means ban smartphones from the court. The cameras most of them have are already illegal in many jurisdictions, and there is nothing you can do with a smartphone that you should be doing in court.
For that matter, I'd say ban cellphones period. The court is not a place to be text messaging, and you sure as hell aren't going to be taking calls anyhow.
However, there isn't really that much material at the foundation of Calculus, Geometry, and Trigonometry. They may spend entire semesters going through the material, but the "cheat sheet" notes boil down to a page each.
If this kid has an intuitive grasp of mathematics, he probably started reading about different concepts, basically went "Oh, that's what they call that!", and was on to the next topic without hesitation. Unlike the rest of us, he probably grasped most of the key concepts by skimming the textbooks, without having to read the long-winded detailed explanations and examples of concepts.
I fully believe he could "learn" all that material in a week because he wasn't learning the material in the usual sense -- he was just learning the standard labels and terminology for things he already understood.
Questioning the use of the .Net framework when doing Windows development is like questioning the use of the J2EE framework for web interface development. Why in the world would you want someone who doesn't know the fundamental frameworks of the environment they're deploying to?
The days of simple APIs is long gone. Every major product or project I've worked on for the past 10-15 years has started with the choice of a framework, followed by the choice of reusable add-ons for that framework. Only the "leftover" custom functionality actually gets programmed by hand.
Doing otherwise is not only foolish, it's a sign of criminal negligence and incompetence.
Actually I'm looking forward to re-learning C++ after GCC et. al. are updated and the spec is finalized. They've added a great deal to the standard libraries, the syntax, and the collections/containers since I last worked with C++. I've no need for C++ -- it's just something I want to do for fun.
Apparently the meaning of "Modular" has changed since I was in University back in '82. OO used to be the epitome of modularity.
But I do agree that making it an introductory first-level course does warp the mind of the young programmer. There are a lot of languages that don't enable OO programming at all (e.g. Erlang), which become much more difficult for them to grasp because OO is so engrained in their thinking.
I can't think of anything specific about OO that makes it poorly suited to parallel programming. There are languages whose nature is parallelism (again, Erlang), but that's usually accomplished by adding parallelism operators and messaging operators to a relatively "traditional" language. I don't see why you couldn't add and implement those constructs in a non-parallel language.
I also shudder to think how a CS student is going to deal with parallelism using languages that don't make it a natural extension if they're learning to rely on those extensions in their first year.
I gotta tell you, though, I really object to the use of Java as an introduction language for programming. Java is far from a shining example of any particular style of programming. It's not real OO because it's only single inheritance. It's not designed for parallelism. It doesn't have messaging built in. In short, Java is actually a pretty archaic and restricted language.
I think the real problem that's freaking politicians out is that electric vehicles will be raising no fuel tax at all. And with the high price of gasoline and the inevitable reduction in EV pricing, most commuters will probably be going EV within 5-10 years.
Better to deal with that budget shock now than when the revenue crash comes.
Microsoft seems to be taking a reversed approach to the RIAA and MPAA. The AAs are busy suing people and companies overseas who aren't under US jurisdiction. Microsoft, on the other hand, wants to sue Americans who do business with those overseas law breakers.
Microsoft made all kinds of promises about what DRM could and would do. Why haven't they been able to implement software licensing and security that actually achieves what they promised? Microsoft seems to have turned a blind eye to the overseas piracy, preferring to lick their wounds and console themselves that at least they have users.
Now that they've ingrained a lifestyle of piracy in those nations, they have an issue with it. Too bad. Come up with an actual solution instead of trying to sue everyone else for their own fuckups.
Red Hat submits their patches upstream for inclusion in the main Linux kernel.
According to earlier posts, they even submit them upstream before they include them in the RHEL kernel.
Those upstream submissions are not monolithic/merged, so distros which build from the Linux source instead of a distro's source should not have a problem. That includes Debian.
If you want scummy, look to companies like Oracle which just take, repackage, and rarely give back. They're the real problem, not RedHat.
RedHat's patches still get submitted upstream for inclusion in the main kernel, which very often does happen.
I have no sympathy whatsoever for leeches that were taking RedHat patches and rolling their own distributions without contributing enough back on their own.
I fail to see how this affects seperate distros like Debian, which aren't based on RedHat-patched source in the first place.
mGive Foundation is a non-profit; mGive.com is for profit.
I consider that a benefit, because there are many pages at ibm.com (for example) that I reference. If Firefox only tracked the main address for the site, the so-called Awesome bar would be truly useless.
I only know one person who buys music from iTunes. Everyone else uses other services, rips their own DVDs, or downloads torrents.
Apple is far from having a music monopoly.
But I have always been curious why Apple didn't get sued for getting into the entertainment business. I seem to recall Apple Records of Beatles fame having Apple Computer agree not to get involved in music so that there would be no confusion between the two Apples.
There's a lot of heavy equipment, shipping of yellowcake, and processing of yellow cake before it gets to a nuke plant. I don't think they're as "green" as a lot of other people seem to think.
University is a long time ago for me, but I learned by writing my notes, rewriting them, condensing them, further condensing them, until eventually I got down to 3-4 sheets of paper for a semester's worth of info. It was the very act of thinking about the notes and rewriting them that taught me the material.
I've no doubt my grades would have suffered if I had been able to get copies of the lecture notes at the push of a button.
Don't you mean "Adding to tuition costs"?
Isn't it the parent's responsibility to "coach" their child? Maybe if more parents did their job properly there wouldn't be a perceived need for IBM's technology.
$10/month is obscene. That's 2/3 of a CD per month guaranteed income, no matter how crappy the product. I already have to pay a CD tax even when burning data CDs, pretty much forcing me to switch entirely to DVDs for burning because they're not subject to that damn tax. (A spindle of 75 DVD-R is $15, a spindle of 50 CD-R is $45!)
If you want to be fair, you should start with a 5-10MB disk, which is what was available around the time of Windows 1.0/DOS 5.
It would have been physically impossible to keep upgrading a machine this way in reality, as you'd have run into hardware driver issues when upgrading motherboards and hard drives to get the capacity needed for the newer releases of Windows. An interesting experiment to see if the software itself could deal with the upgrades, but hardly noteworthy. I'm more impressed with software like OS/2 that didn't need to be upgraded to serve it's purpose.
As Apple did not invent the idea of Pad computing, I'm quite certain there would have been others to market. The only questions are whether they would have been as successful or achieved the brand recognition that Apple has.
I reboot all my systems once a week (Sunday). Better to find out about messed up init scripts and such in a timely fashion that while everyone is screaming about unplanned downtime. And I have found and fixed such errors from time to time, so it's not a bad idea to get the issues resolved before they become a problem.
While I agree that going through a search engine for everything is silly, I do know a couple people who already do exactly that. They never save bookmarks, because it's "easier" to make Google their home page.