But in answer to your question: if a researcher has problems with a fundamental tenet of his field then he can expect to find it extremely difficult to get support. That's exactly how it should be. No hypocrisy involved.
Nice to see you didn't have the guts to make your stupid remark without posting AC. He made a perfectly valid and point, relevant to the discussion: what the heck does 'challenge over perception' mean?
Linus wants to make a kernel that the maximum number of people can use for whatever they want.
In that case he should have just put his code in the public domain, or used a BSD-style license. But you know what? If he had done that, I doubt he'd have found so many people willing to contribute to his project. A lot of people think freedom is important, and needs to be protected.
The GPL has been hugely beneficial to the growth of Linux. We need to keep it up to date with technologies like DRM, and Linux, if it wants to still be around in another fifteen years' time, needs to keep up as well.
I was really annoyed at the way the movie progressed from being a western in space, which was great, into 'buffy the space vampire slayer', which was frankly unimaginative and wasn't even well done.
If there were another series or movie, I'd like them to ditch the superhero karate girl, and downplay the comical zombie creatures. The characters are and the setting as originally conceived were interesting, and should have merited a more grown-up movie.
People use excel because it's the only thing they know, and it's supplied by default on corporate/institutional desktops. Engineers in particular use it a lot. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be using something more appropriate. I've even seen them used for numerical integration!
Just because you can solve your problem in a spreadsheet doesn't mean you should. At best they are a convenient way of doing simple non-recursive calculations on a dataset. At worst they are a really non-portable way of making your algorithm incomprehensible to anyone else.
I understand where you (and other python advocates) are coming from on this. I also hate messy code, and I've also seen plenty, including people who don't indent at all. Such people should probably be forced to use python.
But I think you're wrong when you say the white space convention 'makes it easier to write maintainable code'. What it does is make it harder to write unmaintainable code. I happen to think it also makes it harder for me to write maintainable code, in the sense that the actual writing process is straightjacketed in a way I dislike.
I should add that I actually like almost everything in python apart from the whitespace thing - and I use it a lot!
sometimes I just want to move lines around and then quickly see what effect it has on the output. I find it frustrating having to edit their indentation as well as their location.
You mean your editor doesn't allow you to highlight multiple lines, and change the indentation (indent more or indent less) with a simple keystroke?
Yes it does - I use vi - but I find that having to highlight multiple lines gets to be a real pain when the clause extends over many (e.g. > 20) lines, or involves a degree of hierarchy.
for the colon.... I think it's just a delimiter - like "I'm done with the if condition". Like "Then" in Basic, or { in Java (with no } required).
I know it looks like a delimter, but as far as I can see, unlike the {} in C it serves no syntactic purpose - the newline tells the intepreter that the body of the clause is next. All it is is an opportunity for syntax errors.
A lot of people have religious problems with the whitespace significance in python, but I object to it on practical grounds. It bugs me every time I'm constucting conditional clauses - i.e. all the time. Coupled with the lack of a block quote (like/* */ in C), it means that if I want to move lines of code in or out of a condition, I have to cut and paste several lines, and edit their indentation. For large condition clauses this can be a real pain. In most other scripting languages, e.g. ruby, I just have to move an 'end' statement, or perhaps just comment out the if and end lines.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for having consistent and rigorous indenting once the code is finalised. I'm just irritated by the fact that the indentation has to be correct at every stage of the code development, even when I'm just experimenting with ideas. I like to be able to leave things a little messy while working on it, and then clean it up before moving to the next block of code. Using python is like having to always have a tidy desk even while you work at it.
Also I hate the stupid colons. What are they there for?
The same can be said for just about any new app or service. The web itself was only used by people in your third category at first, then it went mainstream. Ditto mp3 players.
In any case I'm not so sure your division into three groups is all that valid; there's a whole spectrum of users from geek (you) to semi-geek (your dad perhaps, or friends who rip cds and use email) to non-geek (your mom). Geek trends often filter their way along the chain, and in doing so, become big business.
It has an algorithm for moving around and responding to sensor events; this is presumably what can be reprogrammed via the serial interface. So yes it obviously has some rewritable memory; however the GP was correct in saying that it has no mapping capability, and does not keep track of where it is or where it has been relative to a map or waypoint. At least that was the case last time I looked at the roomba.
Actually, AFIK none of the commercial robot cleaners have any map-making capability. Anyone know otherwise?
I'm just doing a similar experiment at the moment; I have two machines, one running Ubuntu 5.10 and one SuSE 10, running Gnome on both. Both have been pretty straightforward to integrate with our work system so far; samba & ssh for file exchange either way, connection to printers is no problem. One is on a fixed ip address, the other uses dhcp. The only hassle might come when we switch to an Exchange mail server, which is due to happen soon. But again, that will be a problem for both.
Personally I prefer ubuntu because I'm not a great fan of YaST. Also I can't seem to de-blur SuSE's fonts in gnome-terminal. Does that make me a troll as well?
Because what gives a lot of phishing attempts away - certainly the better ones - is information in the mail header or URLs linked in the text. But we're not shown any of that, so unless they have loads of grammatical errors etc, it's impossible to tell if they are genuine or not.
Slashdot Mirror
But in answer to your question: if a researcher has problems with a fundamental tenet of his field then he can expect to find it extremely difficult to get support. That's exactly how it should be. No hypocrisy involved.
if so it was a pretty funny parody.. nice one.
not
s/websites/women/
No the e should definitely be short, so I tend to say something like 'soozeh'. Germans say something like 'sooseh'.
Would those be the same "older" IT decision makers who have abandoned Novell in droves for Windows networking?
this is slashdot after all.
Congratulations: you've identified one of the reasons why 'open source' is not necessarily the same as 'free' - which is what RMS advocates.
Nice to see you didn't have the guts to make your stupid remark without posting AC. He made a perfectly valid and point, relevant to the discussion: what the heck does 'challenge over perception' mean?
In that case he should have just put his code in the public domain, or used a BSD-style license. But you know what? If he had done that, I doubt he'd have found so many people willing to contribute to his project. A lot of people think freedom is important, and needs to be protected.
The GPL has been hugely beneficial to the growth of Linux. We need to keep it up to date with technologies like DRM, and Linux, if it wants to still be around in another fifteen years' time, needs to keep up as well.
If there were another series or movie, I'd like them to ditch the superhero karate girl, and downplay the comical zombie creatures. The characters are and the setting as originally conceived were interesting, and should have merited a more grown-up movie.
Forget Excel, and definitely forget C++; check out Octave, SciPy, or Perl if you want tools for data analysis. Matlab if you have some funds.
Just because you can solve your problem in a spreadsheet doesn't mean you should. At best they are a convenient way of doing simple non-recursive calculations on a dataset. At worst they are a really non-portable way of making your algorithm incomprehensible to anyone else.
But I think you're wrong when you say the white space convention 'makes it easier to write maintainable code'. What it does is make it harder to write unmaintainable code. I happen to think it also makes it harder for me to write maintainable code, in the sense that the actual writing process is straightjacketed in a way I dislike.
I should add that I actually like almost everything in python apart from the whitespace thing - and I use it a lot!
Yes it does - I use vi - but I find that having to highlight multiple lines gets to be a real pain when the clause extends over many (e.g. > 20) lines, or involves a degree of hierarchy.
for the colon.... I think it's just a delimiter - like "I'm done with the if condition". Like "Then" in Basic, or { in Java (with no } required).
I know it looks like a delimter, but as far as I can see, unlike the {} in C it serves no syntactic purpose - the newline tells the intepreter that the body of the clause is next. All it is is an opportunity for syntax errors.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for having consistent and rigorous indenting once the code is finalised. I'm just irritated by the fact that the indentation has to be correct at every stage of the code development, even when I'm just experimenting with ideas. I like to be able to leave things a little messy while working on it, and then clean it up before moving to the next block of code. Using python is like having to always have a tidy desk even while you work at it.
Also I hate the stupid colons. What are they there for?
I expect he's busy meeting other members of the elite cadre of individuals responsible for keeping the internet functioning. It's a full-time job.
(Apart from that I agree with the parent post. The anti-France stuff is just another reminder that a lot of high-school kids post to Slashdot.)
In any case I'm not so sure your division into three groups is all that valid; there's a whole spectrum of users from geek (you) to semi-geek (your dad perhaps, or friends who rip cds and use email) to non-geek (your mom). Geek trends often filter their way along the chain, and in doing so, become big business.
Actually, AFIK none of the commercial robot cleaners have any map-making capability. Anyone know otherwise?
Had to read that one twice - missed the 'from' first time.
Yeah because attacking religion should be banned, right?
The second statement seems perfectly reasonable to me. And the first is inflammatory, but not inaccurate. How about adding:
"Judaism and other patriarchal tribal mumbo-jumbo from prehistory"
"Buddhism and vague non-thinking for the weak-minded"
"$cientology, pyramid schemes and other large-scale confidence tricks in modern society"
Personally I prefer ubuntu because I'm not a great fan of YaST. Also I can't seem to de-blur SuSE's fonts in gnome-terminal. Does that make me a troll as well?
Because what gives a lot of phishing attempts away - certainly the better ones - is information in the mail header or URLs linked in the text. But we're not shown any of that, so unless they have loads of grammatical errors etc, it's impossible to tell if they are genuine or not.