I use Ubuntu at home, and love it. But, the installer/live CD doesn't fully boot on the DELL machines at work. By your definition, this would disqualify Ubuntu as a 'friendly' OS. Also, my old 5.25" floppy drive doesn't work on Windows anymore. This is caused by the relevant BIOS calls being absent (FreeDOS doesn't read my floppy disks either, but under Linux I can read those old floppies just fine). So much for Windows as a 'friendly' OS.
My point is, don't blame the software for lacking hardware support. No OS supports *all* hardware anymore- manufacterers come and go, and if you change your OS, you risk losing support for your current hardware. Regardless of switching to Ubuntu, to FreeBSD, or upgrading to the next flavor of Windows. That said, I think the open source community is doing a tremendous job of supporting a wide range of hardware. The source code for the drivers used by Ubuntu is readily available to the FreeBSD developers, so chances are enough information is available to support your hardware under FreeBSD as well. This in contrast to your old windows-only undocumented proprietary hardware whose manufacterer has gone bankrupt years ago.
Yes. You'd expect that at this price, the designer could've come up with a way to hold the bed in place magnetically. For example by having a lining of inverse-polarity magnets around the border of the bed.
A pizza and a bottle of coke to the first slashdotter who builds a wireless floating bed under $500.
The complexity involved in writing open source is equal to that of writing closed source - the poster confuses open source vs. closed source with single-platform vs. multi-platform. Observation: A lot of closed-source software runs only on windows. A lot of open-source software *also* runs on windows. In this context, it is true that open source is more complex than closed source, because it is more flexible.
There aren't a lot of differences to expect in compiling a package under Redhat, or Suse, or Debian. The real trouble lays in hardware- and platform differences. I've written a cross-platform application that compiles and runs on Linux, Windows and MacOS. I'm quite confident that it will compile without changes on different Linux distros, but there was some trouble involved in getting it to work on Windows and MacOS. The added complexity is a small price to pay for having the flexibility of running your software *everywhere*.
To me, the benefit is that I've gotten used to common pitfalls, and I've picked up some best practices that *always* work rather than only under certain circumstances. It'd be a safe bet that on average open source programmers are more standards-aware than their closed-source colleagues.
I don't think Negroponte or any other "owner" is going to be exploiting starving children or their poor governments in order to buy shiny red Ferraris.
> In either case, point out that they cannot produce any record of signing the contract.
+10, insightful. This has worked well for me in a dispute with my bank (and gosh knows banks are leeches).
My letter went something along the lines of
"I didn't ask for the service you are charging me for. Please reverse the billing immediately. If you believe I am in error, please show me a signed paper where I requested the service. Or else." Oh, and it was a good thing they didn't respond "or else what?" The "Or Else" might be anything along the lines of lawyers, national TV, etc.
A better solution is to define all input fields by means of a framework that properly escapes apostrophes and other unwanted characters. This will effectively make SQL injection impossible with a minimum of fuss.
If the President and Congress made decisions over 4 years that dropped the GNP to $4 trillion, that would be a disaster for the American public. Exactly. While people are going homeless, the President and Congress will keep driving their fancy bullet-proof cars and flying private jets.
So, their personal income drops a few millions. That reduces their risk from, say, never having to work again to, well - still never having to work again. Say again what risk they are taking?
Thanks, I had forgotten that. Not easy to remember these things when you use the much more sensible metric system. Now let me get back to counting the number of pints that make a gallon;)
I see a lot of discussion going on here about whether gaim should support voice/video chat or not. I think it's the wrong discussion. If it has voice chat, at your option you can decide not to use it. The real question is if it *can* have a compatible voice/video chat. Since MS released the initial MSN messenger RFC, they've gone back to their old habits of not releasing specs to the public. I'm pretty sure the Gaim people have better things to do than reverse engineering some undocumented proprietary audio/video codec - such as making sure that other IM networks and documented protocols are fully supported.
By now, the web has matured to such an extent that there really aren't many reasons anymore to keep using fat (Notes) clients, and currently I see more projects migrating away from Notes than towards it.
Also, over six years ago a Linux version was mentioned, and when it came out it was only the Domino server. And this time? Will IBM release both user-client and development-client, or will developers be left in the cold again?
That said, some of the aspects of Notes development are sheer genius (it is really easy to whip up a quick form-driven database). Other aspects plain suck (manually guarantee relational integrity/too slow).
Re:What would be cool...
on
Talking iPods
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, it consistently comes up with "Whoops, I did it again."
Learn to use copy and paste... learn to type quickly This is the absolute worst advice I've ever read about programming. Need to add a parameter to a piece of code that has been copy/pasted 10 times? You'll multiply your work by 10.
Ever copy/pasted a piece of code into *another* piece of copy/pasted code and need to make a change afterwards? Prepare to increase your workload by a factor 100. Do it again and it's a factor 1000. And you just might have duplicated a bug. Before you know it, you'll be drowning yourself in repetitive, boring work and bugs that keep popping up after you thought for the Nth time that you fixed them *for real* this time. Even if you're the fastest typist in the world, no amount of words per minute will be a match for spending five minutes of your time to abstract your repeated code into a function.
This is also shows why lines of code per day is a bad measure of productivity: the better a programmer is, the less lines of code (s)he needs to implement the same features.
Finally, another indication that repetition is bad: I was going to give this a subject with a lot more O's in there but the lameness filter stopped it. Reason: Too much repetition. How appropriate.
The US government might actually be entitled to many internet patents, as all or most of the technology behind the (early) internet was financed with U.S. tax payer money. Which, in a democratic country, should (but not necessarily does) mean that those patents are in the public domain.
There's been spelling reform after spelling reform to 'simplify' things. With each reform, new exceptions to the rules were introduced to prevent words from 'looking weird' (or whatever reasons they came up with).
Result: Due to all the exceptions to the rules, nowadays it is a lot more complicated to get your Dutch spelling right than before. In fact, right now I have less trouble spelling English right, than doing so in my own mother language.
So, bad idea. Don't change the spelling rules; the language is already messed up enough as it is.
So I spent 15 minutes on the phone downstairs to walk through his network settings. Everything was configured absolutely perfectly. When finally I decided to go upstairs and see what was going on, I found out: He had inserted the plug of the cable of his laptop modem in the UTP network socket in the wall.
Slashdot Mirror
I use Ubuntu at home, and love it. But, the installer/live CD doesn't fully boot on the DELL machines at work. By your definition, this would disqualify Ubuntu as a 'friendly' OS. Also, my old 5.25" floppy drive doesn't work on Windows anymore. This is caused by the relevant BIOS calls being absent (FreeDOS doesn't read my floppy disks either, but under Linux I can read those old floppies just fine). So much for Windows as a 'friendly' OS.
My point is, don't blame the software for lacking hardware support. No OS supports *all* hardware anymore- manufacterers come and go, and if you change your OS, you risk losing support for your current hardware. Regardless of switching to Ubuntu, to FreeBSD, or upgrading to the next flavor of Windows. That said, I think the open source community is doing a tremendous job of supporting a wide range of hardware. The source code for the drivers used by Ubuntu is readily available to the FreeBSD developers, so chances are enough information is available to support your hardware under FreeBSD as well. This in contrast to your old windows-only undocumented proprietary hardware whose manufacterer has gone bankrupt years ago.
Yes. You'd expect that at this price, the designer could've come up with a way to hold the bed in place magnetically. For example by having a lining of inverse-polarity magnets around the border of the bed.
A pizza and a bottle of coke to the first slashdotter who builds a wireless floating bed under $500.
The complexity involved in writing open source is equal to that of writing closed source - the poster confuses open source vs. closed source with single-platform vs. multi-platform. Observation: A lot of closed-source software runs only on windows. A lot of open-source software *also* runs on windows. In this context, it is true that open source is more complex than closed source, because it is more flexible.
There aren't a lot of differences to expect in compiling a package under Redhat, or Suse, or Debian. The real trouble lays in hardware- and platform differences. I've written a cross-platform application that compiles and runs on Linux, Windows and MacOS. I'm quite confident that it will compile without changes on different Linux distros, but there was some trouble involved in getting it to work on Windows and MacOS. The added complexity is a small price to pay for having the flexibility of running your software *everywhere*.
To me, the benefit is that I've gotten used to common pitfalls, and I've picked up some best practices that *always* work rather than only under certain circumstances. It'd be a safe bet that on average open source programmers are more standards-aware than their closed-source colleagues.
If you currently cover your ears around the device, keep doing that. He'll never know the difference.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
What you are describing works wonderfully with tapioca flour too.
I don't think Negroponte or any other "owner" is going to be exploiting starving children or their poor governments in order to buy shiny red Ferraris.
Me neither. I think he'll go for yellow.
And then cast your boss as monster. Of course, you'd still have to convince him to wear phosphorecent makeup first.
#!/bin/sh
mplayer ~/samples/ouch..._that_HURT.wav
> In either case, point out that they cannot produce any record of signing the contract.
+10, insightful. This has worked well for me in a dispute with my bank (and gosh knows banks are leeches).
My letter went something along the lines of
"I didn't ask for the service you are charging me for. Please reverse the billing immediately. If you believe I am in error, please show me a signed paper where I requested the service. Or else." Oh, and it was a good thing they didn't respond "or else what?" The "Or Else" might be anything along the lines of lawyers, national TV, etc.
A better solution is to define all input fields by means of a framework that properly escapes apostrophes and other unwanted characters. This will effectively make SQL injection impossible with a minimum of fuss.
Score 4, Insightful my ass.
If the President and Congress made decisions over 4 years that dropped the GNP to $4 trillion, that would be a disaster for the American public. Exactly. While people are going homeless, the President and Congress will keep driving their fancy bullet-proof cars and flying private jets. So, their personal income drops a few millions. That reduces their risk from, say, never having to work again to, well - still never having to work again. Say again what risk they are taking?
Thanks, I had forgotten that. Not easy to remember these things when you use the much more sensible metric system. Now let me get back to counting the number of pints that make a gallon ;)
They're treating time as if it were something absolute.
"Many photons before you went on this quest, but none returned. But you will."
"Why?"
"Because you are The One".
I see a lot of discussion going on here about whether gaim should support voice/video chat or not. I think it's the wrong discussion. If it has voice chat, at your option you can decide not to use it. The real question is if it *can* have a compatible voice/video chat. Since MS released the initial MSN messenger RFC, they've gone back to their old habits of not releasing specs to the public. I'm pretty sure the Gaim people have better things to do than reverse engineering some undocumented proprietary audio/video codec - such as making sure that other IM networks and documented protocols are fully supported.
...I think this is more than six years late.
By now, the web has matured to such an extent that there really aren't many reasons anymore to keep using fat (Notes) clients, and currently I see more projects migrating away from Notes than towards it.
Also, over six years ago a Linux version was mentioned, and when it came out it was only the Domino server. And this time? Will IBM release both user-client and development-client, or will developers be left in the cold again?
That said, some of the aspects of Notes development are sheer genius (it is really easy to whip up a quick form-driven database). Other aspects plain suck (manually guarantee relational integrity/too slow).
Yeah, it consistently comes up with "Whoops, I did it again."
When you use cmd.exe for a command line interpreter, it makes more sense to type
cd prog*\mic*
Not only will this work, it will also work on other platforms, and it will also keep working when the silly ~1 convention is abandoned.
Segway Pogo? I want one :)
Next task: getting them to accept that version control is a good idea. Dude. You're obviously working at the wrong company.
Learn to use copy and paste ... learn to type quickly This is the absolute worst advice I've ever read about programming. Need to add a parameter to a piece of code that has been copy/pasted 10 times? You'll multiply your work by 10.
Ever copy/pasted a piece of code into *another* piece of copy/pasted code and need to make a change afterwards? Prepare to increase your workload by a factor 100. Do it again and it's a factor 1000. And you just might have duplicated a bug. Before you know it, you'll be drowning yourself in repetitive, boring work and bugs that keep popping up after you thought for the Nth time that you fixed them *for real* this time. Even if you're the fastest typist in the world, no amount of words per minute will be a match for spending five minutes of your time to abstract your repeated code into a function.
This is also shows why lines of code per day is a bad measure of productivity: the better a programmer is, the less lines of code (s)he needs to implement the same features.
Finally, another indication that repetition is bad: I was going to give this a subject with a lot more O's in there but the lameness filter stopped it. Reason: Too much repetition. How appropriate.
The US government might actually be entitled to many internet patents, as all or most of the technology behind the (early) internet was financed with U.S. tax payer money. Which, in a democratic country, should (but not necessarily does) mean that those patents are in the public domain.
There's been spelling reform after spelling reform to 'simplify' things. With each reform, new exceptions to the rules were introduced to prevent words from 'looking weird' (or whatever reasons they came up with). Result: Due to all the exceptions to the rules, nowadays it is a lot more complicated to get your Dutch spelling right than before. In fact, right now I have less trouble spelling English right, than doing so in my own mother language. So, bad idea. Don't change the spelling rules; the language is already messed up enough as it is.
So I spent 15 minutes on the phone downstairs to walk through his network settings. Everything was configured absolutely perfectly. When finally I decided to go upstairs and see what was going on, I found out: He had inserted the plug of the cable of his laptop modem in the UTP network socket in the wall.