I've been using lufs across several machines (mostly for the sshfs filesystem) for a bit now with good results - a couple problems (keeping dates in sync for make has been a problem), but nothing insurmountable.
I find gnuplot a very handy tool. It is excellent for just grabbing a bunch of data and putting up quick plots - not always the fanciest looking plots, but its fast, copes with largish (say a million points) nicely and produces acceptable (if not fancy) output that can be included elsewhere.
For fancier stuff there are fancier tools (including opendx ), but for simple stuff gnuplot works well, is reasonably priced and is hard to beat.
For those interested in such things, there is also "Shuteye Town" by R. F. Laird, author of the puzzlingly odd and brilliant "Boomer Bible". Unhappily it is all MS Word files so I've never been able to explore it correctly and can only report this at second hand.
On a lighter note, it may be worth noting that this provides law enforcement with a wonderful opportunity to get a search warrant for any building with a wireless lan running (or even nearby) - just go listen - if they get a signal and the target building has not paid their lan tax, it should be probable cause.
I doubt the thought has crossed their minds yet, but it will eventually (even sooner if they read/. carefully).
If a change is really a good thing, why not Sather? It is roughly based on Eiffel and has many of the same good features (and rather a few more as well).
available.
It is one of the finest languages I've ever used and I'd love to see it more widely available and used.
I'd bet that my development time in Sather is an order of magnitude less than in Java, C, C++. And while I'm very fond of Python I'd bet that development time in Sather is still less than half of what it is in Python. Sadly, the biggest part of that is compile time. But the support for programming by contract cuts debugging time almost to nothing. Thats a tradeoff I'll take any day.
I've been doing software for mumblety-mumblety years and have programmed in (or evaluated - which usually has meant programming enough to get a good feel for things) almost every language that has achieved any kind of widespread use (and a few that have not) and by far most of my programming now is being done in Python (with other bits being done in C, Java and Haskell as appropriate).
I find Python very elegant though in a rough hewn sort of way (for more refined elegance try Haskell). PHP in contrast feels just rough hewn (and not in any particularly elegant sort of way).
Python has libraries to talk to pretty much any database I've encountered and extensions that allow me to do anything I've wanted (so far).
Not to say that Python doesn't have a few warts - but over time these are being incrementally fixed - and usually in very nice ways.
I'm actually a bit glad I didn't learn Python as a first language - it would have made learning other languages so much more frustrating - why learn another language that doesn't do what Python does or that does the same thing so much more awkwardly.
I think most serious musicians feel that all the tracks are desirable. Most record companies like to pick out one or two tracks per record for possible elevation to "hit".
But, it is sometimes those "less desirable" tracks that are the interesting ones in the long term. They may not be as catchy as the ones picked for hits, but they can be more complex or innovative or otherwise worth listening to. In fact, it has been my experience that if there is only one track on an album worth listening to, that track usually isn't worth much (evaluated over the long term) and the album won't bear up over time. On the other hand, sometimes the catchy songs end up sounding like crap in the long term and those others that you only hear because they're included on the album are the most worthwhile.
This consideration makes me wonder a bit about the long term sensibility of single-track purchases. Not just "is it good for the artist?", but "is it good for the art?"
"Consider that W gave the taliban 10 Millions dollars in april 2001. Where do you think that it went."
Why, to blow up 2000 year old statues of Buddha, of course. Google Search for info... I think it comes under the notion of FBDOAOAOROTTOCOWIM (Faith Based Destruction of Art Or Artifacts Of Religions Other Than The One Correct One Which Is Mine).
Radios could benefit by being set to turn off if they are receiving (perhaps from overseas or off-planet) propaganda that is inimical to the government.
TV's could explode (or the penguin on top of it could - achieving more or less the same effect) at the barest hint of a nipple (female, naturally).
Refrigerators could collapse or turn into ovens when illicit substances are placed in them (but they'd have to be set to check (RFID?) for the presence of a valid prescription).
One thing I've noticed about how people are taught spreadsheets is that they are never taught about validation and debugging and the like. They are taught how to change fonts, how to make graphs from data, but never, never about how to check to make sure the spreadsheet is correct.
I'll admit, I've been caught by that a couple times - I've built (simple!) spreadsheets that turned out to be wrong - but I've also learned how important it is to check to be sure that my spreadsheets are correct. Many spreadsheet users are not and I always wonder about their results.
Of course, I understand what is going on. Most people don't want to dirty their fingers (or minds) with any notion that a spreadsheet might be a "program" so they don't want to hear about having to debug it. And that makes teaching that process many times harder than it should be.
The biggest problem with the open office spreadsheet (as far as I'm concerned) is that it mimics excel rather than Improv. Improv was a far more powerful (and rather easier to use) tool than most spreadsheets, but because the model it used was different, it could not compete (that and Lotus just didn't push it hard enough).
Linux needs Improv!
In many areas if you want TV at all you have the choice of cable, satellite or fuzz so you have to buy from the monopoly.
And in most areas there is no market. There is one cable company and that is it.
Usually this cable company got there by making arrangements with the local town/city and local utilities to install its cable on utility poles (or whatever) and agreed to a contract with the city that effectively granted it a monopoly (in return for their investment in the cable). Then a few years go by and they decide they're being repressed ("help, help, I'm being repressed") and seek deregulation.
But with or without deregulation they're still a monopoly as they have the cable installation, and installing all that anew is a very tough barrier to entry to new companies.
But again, in most places, there is no "market" to "decide". The decisions have (effectively) been made but the companies, having benefited nicely from government intervention in their favor now want government intervention against them to go away.
I saw many more references to this site the last time around than just on slashdot. At one point it was in top three of indexed blog sites.
Given all that I'm surprised her hit counter is only in the 60K or so range.
And, given the attention it was getting, I'd hope that angelfire was smart enough to recognize that making the pages available would be to their own benefit as well as to ours (and Elena's).
After all it is going to be farmed out to some corporation somewhere and they're not going to be required to maintain any particular kind of accuracy. (I think there was a slashdot story to that effect recently but I can't find it.)
Our best hope is that it will be possible for everyone to add information to it so we can overwhelm it with nonsense.
While I agree that this is a, well, close-to-bonkers design decision, the comment that it is "classic bondage-and-discipline" is amusing. Python is about as far from a b-and-d language as any I've encountered. Perhaps it is time to dust off that Pascal manual and remember what b-and-d is really all about.
Lacking that, I'm sure that there are enough slashdot readers with ropes and whips and chains around...
My campus is addicted to MS word. Everything (including the most basic email that could be sent in text) is sent around in word format. I've had a couple minor problems with such things in ooffice,
(is that pronounced to rhyme with doofus?) but nothing horrendous.
There are a couple things I'd like in oofice though. One would be a way to manipulate docbook documents easily - especially import and export to doc format. The other would be a speech to text facily to enable dictation input.
Always remember the Wisdom of Von Neumann:
"Anyone who uses determininstic methods to generate random numbers is living in a state of sin."
But if the equation is longer(in bits) than the random number, it is random in a very nice way.
For equation, read "Turing Machine" to be a bit more careful. To be even more careful, read the papers on the process. Google for Chaitin and "Kolmogorov complexity".
Note that I'm carefully not saying to use such things in cryptography.
At those prices I'm sure as hell not going to read any of their articles. What kind of egomaniacal crowd are they to think a single article is worth that kind of money?
Who gets to define that "Minimum standard of decency" ? If someone determines that "fucking" is beyond the pale of that, I certainly feel that I have the right to say that each of the following offends my "minimum standard of decency" and should thus be banned.
So, I'm sure you'll all agree that I am at least as capable as anyone in the FCC to establish a reasonable "Minimum Standard of Decency", here goes.
Here, then, in no particular order is a partial list of things that should result in half million dollar fines :
Anyone using the word Christ (blasphemy)
"Wheel of Fortune" (after all, some of the time those empty letters could be filled in to say something obscene)
Anyone using an american flag to sell something (just like flag banning)
"According to Jim" (please, if nothing else on this list gets through, let that be ruled obscene)
Anyone getting shot or shooting someone
Anyone stealing anything.
anyone using any kind of drug (and that includes alcohol)
Anyone smoking a cigarette
"Murder She Wrote" reruns.
American football (I find it an indecent and obscene waste of money that does little but produce athletes with lots of injuries and stupidity in the fans)
Reality shows
Any war scenes not covered by the shooting part
"Will and Grace" (not anti-gay, just anti "Will and Grace")
I don't know just what kind of state Creatures is in, but it is a great simulation of, well, "creatures" that hatch from eggs, grow up, mate, make more eggs and so on. You get to teach them to talk, to eat and whatever.
OK, they do "mate" but its about as asexual a mating as you can get (ok, they don't get "married" so I guess it will offend those who are easily offended). And the creatures aren't human and I'm not entirely clear on the specific doctrine of offense involved. Do these people require that chickens marry before they mate?
The players do get to raise the kids - and those kids are not always the best behaved of creatures so it can be an interesting process. Rather more demanding than the "carry an egg around for a week" type thing that has been popular.
Who knows - it is possible that if there are enough people who demand that everyone adhere to their particular mating rituals that maybe the makers would add in a "you must be married to have eggs" option to make using the game possible. Naturally (and I mean that word quite literally) that also raises the questions of the death of a partner, adultery, divorce and what not. Not to mention heaven and hell (and purgatory and beatrice and...).
Check out the
doctors national plantiff database where doctors can check to see if you're likely to cause them trouble if they treat you. They say "Tell your colleagues the playing field has been leveled."
The article says that he set up and ran the website as a volunteer. Then that the sheriff refused to negotiate any way to take it over and legitimately handle the ongoing expenses.
I think then that the sheriff lost any real legal claim to anything on the site at that point.
So he did not "take something away from someone else and threaten not to return it", he refused to continue providing a service to someone for free that was costing him money ($300,000 or $300, the amount doesn't matter that much).
I'd say that the real lesson here is much simpler. If you do something nice for someone, be prepared to be screwed unless you've worked out a contract in advance (and if the someone is SCO, don't count on the contract). And I'll admit that I'm still idealist enough to be saddened by it (though I'm cynic enough to be unsurprised).
Slashdot Mirror
Easy install, easy to use. Good stuff.
For fancier stuff there are fancier tools (including opendx ), but for simple stuff gnuplot works well, is reasonably priced and is hard to beat.
For those interested in such things, there is also "Shuteye Town" by R. F. Laird, author of the puzzlingly odd and brilliant "Boomer Bible". Unhappily it is all MS Word files so I've never been able to explore it correctly and can only report this at second hand.
On a lighter note, it may be worth noting that this provides law enforcement with a wonderful opportunity to get a search warrant for any building with a wireless lan running (or even nearby) - just go listen - if they get a signal and the target building has not paid their lan tax, it should be probable cause.
I doubt the thought has crossed their minds yet, but it will eventually (even sooner if they read /. carefully).
Think of the fun the DEA, FBI, RIAA could have.
It is one of the finest languages I've ever used and I'd love to see it more widely available and used. I'd bet that my development time in Sather is an order of magnitude less than in Java, C, C++. And while I'm very fond of Python I'd bet that development time in Sather is still less than half of what it is in Python. Sadly, the biggest part of that is compile time. But the support for programming by contract cuts debugging time almost to nothing. Thats a tradeoff I'll take any day.
I find Python very elegant though in a rough hewn sort of way (for more refined elegance try Haskell). PHP in contrast feels just rough hewn (and not in any particularly elegant sort of way).
Python has libraries to talk to pretty much any database I've encountered and extensions that allow me to do anything I've wanted (so far).
Not to say that Python doesn't have a few warts - but over time these are being incrementally fixed - and usually in very nice ways.
I'm actually a bit glad I didn't learn Python as a first language - it would have made learning other languages so much more frustrating - why learn another language that doesn't do what Python does or that does the same thing so much more awkwardly.
But, it is sometimes those "less desirable" tracks that are the interesting ones in the long term. They may not be as catchy as the ones picked for hits, but they can be more complex or innovative or otherwise worth listening to. In fact, it has been my experience that if there is only one track on an album worth listening to, that track usually isn't worth much (evaluated over the long term) and the album won't bear up over time. On the other hand, sometimes the catchy songs end up sounding like crap in the long term and those others that you only hear because they're included on the album are the most worthwhile.
This consideration makes me wonder a bit about the long term sensibility of single-track purchases. Not just "is it good for the artist?", but "is it good for the art?"
Or the not-so-hidden messages - like Tom Clancy's plot in which a hijacked (though by the pilot) airliner flies into a building...
Why, to blow up 2000 year old statues of Buddha, of course. Google Search for info... I think it comes under the notion of FBDOAOAOROTTOCOWIM (Faith Based Destruction of Art Or Artifacts Of Religions Other Than The One Correct One Which Is Mine).
Radios could benefit by being set to turn off if they are receiving (perhaps from overseas or off-planet) propaganda that is inimical to the government.
TV's could explode (or the penguin on top of it could - achieving more or less the same effect) at the barest hint of a nipple (female, naturally).
Refrigerators could collapse or turn into ovens when illicit substances are placed in them (but they'd have to be set to check (RFID?) for the presence of a valid prescription).
Yes, this is just what is needed.
I'll admit, I've been caught by that a couple times - I've built (simple!) spreadsheets that turned out to be wrong - but I've also learned how important it is to check to be sure that my spreadsheets are correct. Many spreadsheet users are not and I always wonder about their results.
Of course, I understand what is going on. Most people don't want to dirty their fingers (or minds) with any notion that a spreadsheet might be a "program" so they don't want to hear about having to debug it. And that makes teaching that process many times harder than it should be.
The biggest problem with the open office spreadsheet (as far as I'm concerned) is that it mimics excel rather than Improv. Improv was a far more powerful (and rather easier to use) tool than most spreadsheets, but because the model it used was different, it could not compete (that and Lotus just didn't push it hard enough). Linux needs Improv!
And in most areas there is no market. There is one cable company and that is it.
Usually this cable company got there by making arrangements with the local town/city and local utilities to install its cable on utility poles (or whatever) and agreed to a contract with the city that effectively granted it a monopoly (in return for their investment in the cable). Then a few years go by and they decide they're being repressed ("help, help, I'm being repressed") and seek deregulation.
But with or without deregulation they're still a monopoly as they have the cable installation, and installing all that anew is a very tough barrier to entry to new companies.
But again, in most places, there is no "market" to "decide". The decisions have (effectively) been made but the companies, having benefited nicely from government intervention in their favor now want government intervention against them to go away.
Given all that I'm surprised her hit counter is only in the 60K or so range.
And, given the attention it was getting, I'd hope that angelfire was smart enough to recognize that making the pages available would be to their own benefit as well as to ours (and Elena's).
After all it is going to be farmed out to some corporation somewhere and they're not going to be required to maintain any particular kind of accuracy. (I think there was a slashdot story to that effect recently but I can't find it.)
Our best hope is that it will be possible for everyone to add information to it so we can overwhelm it with nonsense.
Lacking that, I'm sure that there are enough slashdot readers with ropes and whips and chains around...
There are a couple things I'd like in oofice though. One would be a way to manipulate docbook documents easily - especially import and export to doc format. The other would be a speech to text facily to enable dictation input.
Always remember the Wisdom of Von Neumann :
"Anyone who uses determininstic methods to generate random numbers is living in a state of sin."
But if the equation is longer(in bits) than the random number, it is random in a very nice way.
For equation, read "Turing Machine" to be a bit more careful. To be even more careful, read the papers on the process. Google for Chaitin and "Kolmogorov complexity".
Note that I'm carefully not saying to use such things in cryptography.
At those prices I'm sure as hell not going to read any of their articles. What kind of egomaniacal crowd are they to think a single article is worth that kind of money?
"flag banning" - should be flag "burning". Duh.
Who gets to define that "Minimum standard of decency" ? If someone determines that "fucking" is beyond the pale of that, I certainly feel that I have the right to say that each of the following offends my "minimum standard of decency" and should thus be banned.
So, I'm sure you'll all agree that I am at least as capable as anyone in the FCC to establish a reasonable "Minimum Standard of Decency", here goes.
Here, then, in no particular order is a partial list of things that should result in half million dollar fines :
Note that one of the areas where they want talent is linguists (and specifically arabic speakers).
Remember that just prior to the current conflict, all the openly gay arabic speakers in the military were tossed out. A CNN story on the matter
OK, they do "mate" but its about as asexual a mating as you can get (ok, they don't get "married" so I guess it will offend those who are easily offended). And the creatures aren't human and I'm not entirely clear on the specific doctrine of offense involved. Do these people require that chickens marry before they mate?
The players do get to raise the kids - and those kids are not always the best behaved of creatures so it can be an interesting process. Rather more demanding than the "carry an egg around for a week" type thing that has been popular.
Who knows - it is possible that if there are enough people who demand that everyone adhere to their particular mating rituals that maybe the makers would add in a "you must be married to have eggs" option to make using the game possible. Naturally (and I mean that word quite literally) that also raises the questions of the death of a partner, adultery, divorce and what not. Not to mention heaven and hell (and purgatory and beatrice and ...).
Or Does a sexual predator live in your neighborhood?
These databases are inevitable and likely to proliferate.
I think then that the sheriff lost any real legal claim to anything on the site at that point.
So he did not "take something away from someone else and threaten not to return it", he refused to continue providing a service to someone for free that was costing him money ($300,000 or $300, the amount doesn't matter that much).
I'd say that the real lesson here is much simpler. If you do something nice for someone, be prepared to be screwed unless you've worked out a contract in advance (and if the someone is SCO, don't count on the contract). And I'll admit that I'm still idealist enough to be saddened by it (though I'm cynic enough to be unsurprised).