I am the one who DEFINES what spam is for me, hence everything I say is spam is, and everything I say isn' isn't.
Exactly. You see spam, you hand it to DSPAM and say, "spam". You see good email, you can hand it to DSPAM and say, "ignore this". DSPAM adapts and becomes excellent at doing its job. You, on the other hand...
how a program (even if it's right 99.something% of the time) is more accurate than me (100%)?
...are not 100% accurate. Once every several hundred emails, the From and Subject lines are forged well enough that you look at the mail. You realize instantly that it's spam and trash it, but you still looked where DSPAM would not.
Of course, anybody asked on/. will always claim that they are 100% accurate all the time.
They didn't when they first derived the name, but they learned quickly. And trust me, they think it's hilarious. They're not a fly-by-night shop, either; they've earned the respect of their peers and their customers.
is almost universally acknowledged as Vernor Vinge's novella True Names. No cutesy terms like "matrix" or "cyber-" anything, but all the ideas are there. Not as overtly gritty as Neuromancer, either, but I found it equally depressing.
You can find it in a number of anthologies. The most recent is called something like True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, which has the novella and a bunch of nonfiction essays by interesting people.
>...after the early scene in Neuromancer where Case is on the run for his life because of three megs of stolen RAM.
Insert RAMBUS-litigators joke here.
About those authors...
on
Practical C++
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The authors obviously know their stuff
Most definitely... since they were part of the group that helped develop the language from the beginning. They work down the hall from Stroustrup, and they are brilliant, brilliant people.
Koenig has done all kinds of work in almost every aspect of the language and the library (if you've ever wondered why your compiler isn't finding names correctly, that's because it isn't doing Koenig lookup properly), and Moo wrote one of the first "native code" C++ compilers ever, meaning that it doesn't translate to C before going to machine code.
Shouldn't GCC, like other OSS projects, ultimately be in the hands of its developers?
You'd think that. So would I. But GCC is not like most other OSS projects. Proprietary compiler writers would love to be able to take bits and pieces of GCC and get away with it. A huge step in preventing that is the fact that copyright is held by the FSF, not by the developers. (So if you steal the code that I've added to GCC, it's not me having to pursue a GPL violation, it's the FSF. Makes an even bigger difference when the parties involved are oversees.)
So RMS still has copyright (well, the FSF does, but no difference there) and therefore, essentially, the final say over major changes to GCC. (It is, after all, the FSF's flagship "product" these days, so he won't give that up.) Veto power, basically. He can be reasoned with... eventually... slowly... and the GCC Steering Committee is good at doing so.
Shoot, for a long time he wasn't going to allow the gcj people to bring their code into the master GCC tree, because he thought the portability of Java bytecode could lead to GPL violations. He's a bit out of touch, technically speaking, but he still holds the big stick.
The answer, in my (correct) opinion *grin*, is another EGCS-style fork. But as long as he is willing to make changes, even small and slow ones, the majority of the developers are loathe to take that step, and understandably so.
This is the sort of irresponsible "extend the language by default" approach that the GCC compilers are full of.
So, you'll be submitting a patch, then. What's that? You say you haven't tried it? Ah.
We've tried getting rid of some of the extensions that were not well thought out. He's just dead-set on keeping them.
Also -- unfortunately -- many of them are actually being used. Pulling the rug out from under your users is not a keen move.
It's a slow battle. Many were removed for 3.4. More are being removed for 3.5.
But free software should set an example by encouraging portable code.
Heh. The FSF view on this is that GCC is far more portable than any of your code is likely to be, so just install GCC instead and make use of its features. Not a position that I agree with necessarily, but it is the same argument that I make when installing bash on all the non-GNU systems I use.:-)
Forget bullets -- physics of superhero sex
on
Comic Book Physics
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· Score: 4, Funny
In one of the most hilarious short science essays ever written, Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex, Larry Niven tackles the problem of how Superman is going to reproduce.
For example, during orgasm, one loses control of one's muscles. Superman has been known to leave fingerprints in steel and concrete accidentally. What happens to Lois while she's in his arms?
Another example, which I'll quote directly:
Ejaculation of semen is entirely involuntary in the human male, and in all other forms of terrestrial life. It would be unreasonable to assume otherwise for a Kryptonian. But with Kryptonian muscles behind it, Kal-El's semen would emerge with the muzzle velocity of a machine gun bullet.
Followup scenarios (for artificial insemination) assume that he's on an airless moon, to prevent the semen from exploding into vapor due to air friction at supersonic speeds. It eventually turns out artificial insemination doesn't work either.
There is no way in hell that any HMO or insurance company should ever be allowed to tell a patient "we're gonna fly you half way around the world for this surgery".
Why not?
You've ranted for two paragraphs, but you haven't given me any objective reasons.
The salt water of the Dead Sea, combined with the thicker atmosphere (prevents ultraviolet rays from actually reaching the earth's surface), is so effective against psoriasis that some European countries' health plans pay patients to fly to Israel, rather than use medications at home.[*] In this case it's a natural geographic feature of the world doing the healing instead of trained doctors, but the idea -- and the economics -- of moving patients to a more effective, more economical location are well set in the world of Western medicine.
[*] Bruce Feiler, ISBN 0-380-80731-9, odd travel writer. This fact struck me as so interesting that I hunted through the bookcases to find the reference.
How, exactly, would one "work around" breakage that can't be programmatically detected? It's not like in Hollywood movies, where the packets come back tainted and twirling little mustaches and giving shifty glances.
Query: "Is foo.bar.com a valid address?"
DNS answer: "Yes. It resolves to a.b.c.d."
Now tell me how to decide whether it really is valid, or whether it's an advertisement. Without actually contacting a.b.c.d on port 80 to see what comes back.
So, your silly little analogy presupposes that clearing the pond takes more than one day. This might not be the case.
You're missing the point. We know the pond in question takes a long time to clean. Or, for a given climatic/environmental issue, we know it's not an easily solvable problem. There's no "might not be the case" weaseling out of it.
(P.S.- Attacking the analogy instead of the reasoning is a common failure of critical thought. Take a look at, say, http://www.fallacyfiles.org/ for some tips.)
To state that there is an emergency and that we're all going to die is... well, premature.
Well, no shit. I never stated that, and I don't believe anybody else has either. So I think we're in violent agreement.
Of course not all changes are emergencies. Duh. They're not even all "bad" for that matter. My point is that, as far as climate changes go, we've never started responding early enough to negative changes that we could do something about. We always put off environmental solutions, because we are a short-sighted spieces and there's no immediate benefit.
Not to be rude, but: so what? Anything that can be solved that quickly isn't worth worrying about, and isn't an interesting problem.
More to the point, there will be problems that cannot be solved that quickly. There will be ponds that we cannot clear in a day. There will be crises that we out off too long. Saying that some problems can be taken care of in a short time is great, yeah, fine, but it doesn't help the other problems, and doesn't really mean anything.
is absolutely incredible. Sci-fi, comedy, mystery, even a touch of romance thrown in there just to round things out. Mostly comedy, though. Very well written.
An opposing point of view would say
on
Dream Jobs of 2004
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
that if you find a job that you like, you'll never have to work a day in your life.
Friend, if the best thing about your job is the time you spend away from it, you're in the wrong job.
I'm not saying it should be the centerpiece of your life. (Indeed, my mother tells me that we are a nation that worships our work, works at our play, and plays at our worship. *grin*) I think I have my dream job, but I'm not going to pass up spending time with good friends to get in a few more hours just for fun. But if you dread your job to the point where the only enjoyment is looking to leave, you need to find new employment.
When the web was all new and shiny, even to us geeks, we would pronounce the leading part of the URL as "huh-tuppa-wuh-wuh", referring to "http://www."
EE has an attack-move command. It has find-idle-worker and find-idle-fighter commands. The only command it lacks which I find myself missing occasionally is a "unit B, escort this other unit A" command. As it is, I can tell unit A to unconditionally move to point X, and unit B to attack-move to point X, but B will not match A's pace, and if they get separated, A becomes open to ambush.
In practice, it just means I need to split A in half and send a vanguard and a rear guard, with B between them.
Oh. I didn't know that. Clearly there was some cross-pollination of ideas, then, since some of the expansion pack ideas made their way into EE. (Or vice versa? Dunno.)
Slashdot Mirror
Just be sure to check what you're about to spray water on before squeezing the spray trigger. If it's part of your computer, stop.
Exactly. You see spam, you hand it to DSPAM and say, "spam". You see good email, you can hand it to DSPAM and say, "ignore this". DSPAM adapts and becomes excellent at doing its job. You, on the other hand...
...are not 100% accurate. Once every several hundred emails, the From and Subject lines are forged well enough that you look at the mail. You realize instantly that it's spam and trash it, but you still looked where DSPAM would not.
Of course, anybody asked on /. will always claim that they are 100% accurate all the time.
They didn't when they first derived the name, but they learned quickly. And trust me, they think it's hilarious. They're not a fly-by-night shop, either; they've earned the respect of their peers and their customers.
is almost universally acknowledged as Vernor Vinge's novella True Names. No cutesy terms like "matrix" or "cyber-" anything, but all the ideas are there. Not as overtly gritty as Neuromancer, either, but I found it equally depressing.
You can find it in a number of anthologies. The most recent is called something like True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, which has the novella and a bunch of nonfiction essays by interesting people.
>...after the early scene in Neuromancer where Case is on the run for his life because of three megs of stolen RAM.
Insert RAMBUS-litigators joke here.
Most definitely... since they were part of the group that helped develop the language from the beginning. They work down the hall from Stroustrup, and they are brilliant, brilliant people.
Koenig has done all kinds of work in almost every aspect of the language and the library (if you've ever wondered why your compiler isn't finding names correctly, that's because it isn't doing Koenig lookup properly), and Moo wrote one of the first "native code" C++ compilers ever, meaning that it doesn't translate to C before going to machine code.
...instead of Brazil, train your Java monkeys on the actual island of Java.
After version 1.something, none.
You'd think that. So would I. But GCC is not like most other OSS projects. Proprietary compiler writers would love to be able to take bits and pieces of GCC and get away with it. A huge step in preventing that is the fact that copyright is held by the FSF, not by the developers. (So if you steal the code that I've added to GCC, it's not me having to pursue a GPL violation, it's the FSF. Makes an even bigger difference when the parties involved are oversees.)
So RMS still has copyright (well, the FSF does, but no difference there) and therefore, essentially, the final say over major changes to GCC. (It is, after all, the FSF's flagship "product" these days, so he won't give that up.) Veto power, basically. He can be reasoned with... eventually... slowly... and the GCC Steering Committee is good at doing so.
Shoot, for a long time he wasn't going to allow the gcj people to bring their code into the master GCC tree, because he thought the portability of Java bytecode could lead to GPL violations. He's a bit out of touch, technically speaking, but he still holds the big stick.
The answer, in my (correct) opinion *grin*, is another EGCS-style fork. But as long as he is willing to make changes, even small and slow ones, the majority of the developers are loathe to take that step, and understandably so.
Think again. It's been done.
And they are: R. M. S.
So, you'll be submitting a patch, then. What's that? You say you haven't tried it? Ah.
We've tried getting rid of some of the extensions that were not well thought out. He's just dead-set on keeping them.
Also -- unfortunately -- many of them are actually being used. Pulling the rug out from under your users is not a keen move.
It's a slow battle. Many were removed for 3.4. More are being removed for 3.5.
Heh. The FSF view on this is that GCC is far more portable than any of your code is likely to be, so just install GCC instead and make use of its features. Not a position that I agree with necessarily, but it is the same argument that I make when installing bash on all the non-GNU systems I use. :-)
In one of the most hilarious short science essays ever written, Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex, Larry Niven tackles the problem of how Superman is going to reproduce.
For example, during orgasm, one loses control of one's muscles. Superman has been known to leave fingerprints in steel and concrete accidentally. What happens to Lois while she's in his arms?
Another example, which I'll quote directly:
Followup scenarios (for artificial insemination) assume that he's on an airless moon, to prevent the semen from exploding into vapor due to air friction at supersonic speeds. It eventually turns out artificial insemination doesn't work either.
Why not?
You've ranted for two paragraphs, but you haven't given me any objective reasons.
The salt water of the Dead Sea, combined with the thicker atmosphere (prevents ultraviolet rays from actually reaching the earth's surface), is so effective against psoriasis that some European countries' health plans pay patients to fly to Israel, rather than use medications at home.[*] In this case it's a natural geographic feature of the world doing the healing instead of trained doctors, but the idea -- and the economics -- of moving patients to a more effective, more economical location are well set in the world of Western medicine.
[*] Bruce Feiler, ISBN 0-380-80731-9, odd travel writer. This fact struck me as so interesting that I hunted through the bookcases to find the reference.
If I only knew what mad props were, I'd give you some.
Aha! Good point, thanks.
Yeah, we'd have to do this in the resolver libraries themselves, rather than in the source of the utilities... *head off to find source code*
How, exactly, would one "work around" breakage that can't be programmatically detected? It's not like in Hollywood movies, where the packets come back tainted and twirling little mustaches and giving shifty glances.
Query: "Is foo.bar.com a valid address?"
DNS answer: "Yes. It resolves to a.b.c.d."
Now tell me how to decide whether it really is valid, or whether it's an advertisement. Without actually contacting a.b.c.d on port 80 to see what comes back.
No, I'm not... but as you seem unwilling to accept that I'm not a dumbass, I guess there's no point to continuing the thread. Have a nice day.
You're missing the point. We know the pond in question takes a long time to clean. Or, for a given climatic/environmental issue, we know it's not an easily solvable problem. There's no "might not be the case" weaseling out of it.
(P.S.- Attacking the analogy instead of the reasoning is a common failure of critical thought. Take a look at, say, http://www.fallacyfiles.org/ for some tips.)
Well, no shit. I never stated that, and I don't believe anybody else has either. So I think we're in violent agreement.
Of course not all changes are emergencies. Duh. They're not even all "bad" for that matter. My point is that, as far as climate changes go, we've never started responding early enough to negative changes that we could do something about. We always put off environmental solutions, because we are a short-sighted spieces and there's no immediate benefit.
Take a look at the dedication page. Or just read more closely when Ned first arrives in old Oxford, and describes the book himself.
Not to be rude, but: so what? Anything that can be solved that quickly isn't worth worrying about, and isn't an interesting problem.
More to the point, there will be problems that cannot be solved that quickly. There will be ponds that we cannot clear in a day. There will be crises that we out off too long. Saying that some problems can be taken care of in a short time is great, yeah, fine, but it doesn't help the other problems, and doesn't really mean anything.
is absolutely incredible. Sci-fi, comedy, mystery, even a touch of romance thrown in there just to round things out. Mostly comedy, though. Very well written.
that if you find a job that you like, you'll never have to work a day in your life.
Friend, if the best thing about your job is the time you spend away from it, you're in the wrong job.
I'm not saying it should be the centerpiece of your life. (Indeed, my mother tells me that we are a nation that worships our work, works at our play, and plays at our worship. *grin*) I think I have my dream job, but I'm not going to pass up spending time with good friends to get in a few more hours just for fun. But if you dread your job to the point where the only enjoyment is looking to leave, you need to find new employment.
When the web was all new and shiny, even to us geeks, we would pronounce the leading part of the URL as "huh-tuppa-wuh-wuh", referring to "http://www."
From the most excellent Manifold trilogy by Steven Baxter:
Say you have some algae growing on the surface of your pond. It doubles in size every day. It will take 30 days to cover the pond.
When the pond is half covered, you decide to start to do something about it...
...but, when the pond is half covered, it's the 29th day, and you're out of time.
EE has an attack-move command. It has find-idle-worker and find-idle-fighter commands. The only command it lacks which I find myself missing occasionally is a "unit B, escort this other unit A" command. As it is, I can tell unit A to unconditionally move to point X, and unit B to attack-move to point X, but B will not match A's pace, and if they get separated, A becomes open to ambush.
In practice, it just means I need to split A in half and send a vanguard and a rear guard, with B between them.
Oh. I didn't know that. Clearly there was some cross-pollination of ideas, then, since some of the expansion pack ideas made their way into EE. (Or vice versa? Dunno.)