Fortran in 1969 actually. Engineering students at Queens had an IBM 1800 to play with.
FORTRAN? Surely a typo - you meant to write 'a mixture of Lisp, Algol, and assembler depending on what I'd been thinking about with John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky that week'?
who is masochistic enough to even attempt writing a complex app in Excel?
The mechanical engineers where I work for starters. Drives me nuts the ridiculous things they do with Excel when they should be using a programming language or something like Matlab..
You see, because they don't know any better, they assume that there aren't any better ways of doing ANY calculation or programming task other than writing an excel macro. And so they create all kinds of mind-numbingly complicated spreadsheets doing things like Simpson's rule integration and finite-element modelling, and are proud of them.
These guys are not stupid; they just have a massively greater tolerance for tedious & repetitive tasks than your average geek. In fact it's one of the main things that differentiaites geeks from non geeks, almost a sort of laziness, that means we would rather spend a day learning how to automate something with the proper tools, in a reusable fashion, than one hour doing it by hand each time.
I work at an engineering consultancy, and you would not believe the things I have seen done, or attempted, with Miscrosoft Excel. Engineers (real, not software engineers) seem to want to use it for everything: numerical integration, finite element modelling, document layout, data storage.. I even saw one guy spend ages trying to write a multiuser client contact management system using excel.
Must be something deep in the mindset of an engineer because it seems to be their default format for all interaction with a computer. And it drives me fscking nuts.
'IT people' are often a bunch of underqualified Windows weenies who can just about handle their jobs clicking dialog boxes in Windows 2003 server, and have no clue whatsoever about programming. Hence it's in their interest to keep their jobs as simple as possible.
Blurghh. Like all the other people who think its some kind of aesthetic disagreement, you continue to ignore my point: your display preferences for indentation should not affect mine.
When you're writing code you should be thinking about syntax, and using an editor which will take care of the formatting for you. '1.5 indents' has no syntactical meaning - you're talking about 1 indent + some spaces. I can live with the meaningless spaces (which you think makes it look prettier in your editor) if they only occur every now and then and don't screw up my indenting..
I'd like that! But I suspect the reason has something to do with the fact that Guido van Rossum seems to be confused on the matter - he seems to think that tabs correspond to a certain number of spaces, which is different for different people.
See for example the
python style guide co-authored by him, which actually recommends spaces! I've even seen this used as support for the idea that spaces are better than tabs.
The fact that the originator of the language doesn't understand this does put me off python just a little.
Emacs v. vi is a religious war. So is Python v Perl v Ruby, or BSD v Linux. In a religious war there is no overarching way to decide who is wrong or right.
Tabs v spaces is different. If we share code that you have written then I am *forced* to accept your system of indentation and your idea about how many spaces constitutes an indent. Why would you want to force me to do that? If we share code that I have written, you can set your editor to display tabs to whatever width you like and we can both be happy!
It's really that simple. Your preferences for displaying code should not matter to me, and vice versa. There are no good arguments for using spaces for indentation.
This is what bugs me about python: too many people will use spaces and I will have to start caring about their opinions. Yes indentation significance is a good thing but ONLY if you use tabs. Repeat the following several times:
Spaces are for spacing, tabs are for indenting: 1 tab per level of indentation
Sorry for shouting, but the number of spaces *you* use to represent an indent in *your* editor SHOULD BE IRRELEVANT TO ME! The only reason it ever becomes an issue is when people who don't understand this decide to use spaces to indent their code. And if ever there was a language where this mattered, it's python.
still wouldn't work because the viewpoint would be different. e.g. But I guess you could assume a typical user viewpoint and just try and get it right for that.
Lots of the 'immature' posts here don't come from ACs or 'trolls' as such. There are a lot of students and schoolkids posting here which gives it a significant USENET flavour. And then there are all the grown-ups who never really got past Freshman level in their view of the world..
But Slashdot's problem - to the extent that it has one - is its success. If technocrat.net gets as popular, my guess is that you'll get the same S/N ratio there aswell.
Records refer to an individual named James, brother of 'Jesus called Christ'
The brief sentence in Josephus' Antiquities to which you refer falls some way short of confirming the historicity of Jesus as described in the gospels and subsequent Christian tradition.
My own feeling is that there probably was an individual named Jesus around that time, perhaps the leader or a significant figure in a smallish Gnostic/Jewish sect. However I suspect that later Christian writers were responsible for the attribution to him of stories and parables drawn from a stock of mythical sources and sacred texts (i.e. pretty much all the stories found in the New Testament).
Contradictions in the synoptic gospels? Rubbish.
There are plenty of contradictions in the synoptic gospels, as you would expect in a set of texts written by different authors at different times, concerning a nascent tradition whose central articles of faith were still being defined. But I suspect that you are reluctant to learn about the gospels as historical sources, and prefer to view them from a religious perspective. That's your choice.
No legitimate historian will deny that Jesus Christ was a real person that was crucified by the Roman empire.
Very few 'legitimate' historians have an opinion on this because the historicity of Jesus is not terribly relevant, other than as an article of faith for certain religions. What does matter historically is the development of the myth/cult/story/religion as a social and political phenomenon.
If you're interested, there isn't very much evidence for Jesus as a historical figure. No genuine early (1st cent. AD) sources other than the synoptic gospels refer to events of his life - and even they are surprisingly contradictory. So for historians, the evidence would equally support the view that the figure of Jesus (and the events of his life supposedly narrated in the New Testament) actually emerged from a semi-coherent set of parables and stories about a mythical religious figure. There are parallels with the legends of King Arthur or Robin Hood, for example.
While the Slashdot trolling entry is clearly one of Wikipedia's less serious entries, that particular section crosses the line in my opinion. Bitching and flaming are against the spirit of the thing.
It's clean, simple, easy to work with, and doesn't try to be Microsoft Windows
Except that it does; the look was (unbelievably) based on Windows v. 3. It is of coures a hell of a lot more configurable than Windows however so you don't need to stick to the default.
That's the main feature missing in my opinion. Yes I know there's something available from the File menu, but that doesn't do the job. Needs to be able to count the number of words in selected text, & ideally to exclude certain styles/sections (e.g. references).
My other big gripe with oo.org is the number of 'smart' features such as auto-correct turned on by default. Like auto capitalisation. Took me ages to work out how to switch it off. And in fact now I've forgotten again come to think of it..
I agree, perhaps rather than saying 'orbits a fusor', he should say 'orbits a fusor or isolated non-fusor' where 'isolated' is defined in terms of some distance, e.g. no fusor within 1000 AU or something.
Note also that you should probably add 'more massive', i.e. 'orbits a fusor or more massive isolated non fusor'.
Also I'd replace 'fusor' with 'star' because that's clear enough.
On the contrary, Canada should instigate/ramp up its nuclear & chemical weapons programmes right now. For while the possession of WMD has been shown to be a sure safeguard against invasion by the US (e.g. N. Korea, Kuwait), the lack of any (Iraq) clearly puts you at risk.
Damn right. And they know this, which is why this is all just bluster. Even with a Windows monopoly on business deployments (which are probably almost all legit in the western world at least), free software would have been given a huge boost if it really was that expensive to maintain & upgrade Windows on home PCs.
Exactly. Anyone notice how the real Windows weenies often have shedloads of warez on their machines at home? And the joke is that free software gets criticised (by idiots, admittedly) for offending the laws of copyright and proprietary licenses, when in truth the only 100% legit systems around are probably those running linux or BSD.
I wonder how many MS employees have non-legit (sorry, 'stolen') copies of Photoshop at home to use with their digital cameras?
I'd like to see a serious crackdown on software `piracy'. Wouldn't affect me in the slightest and it would put a big dent in the use of proprietary software worldwide.
This kind of thing happens constantly on development projects that I am involved in. It's very easy for me to pull a number out of my ass, but it probably isn't very representative of how long it would take to get what is actually wanted done.
That's a fair point and I guess then it's down to the boss to clarify his/her expectations and for everyone to thrash out what they mean and what can or can't be done.
I'm just saying that a lot of proto-engineers think that it's going to be really easy to deal with managers: all they have to do is act like an android and the 'PHB' will go away. I used to think something similar.
When you grow up you'll find out that a) yes, people really do have to manage projects and take responsibility for estimates, and b) the PHB is actually a comic strip character.
The reason they are asking you is because they think you are old enough and experienced enough to be able to give an estimate. That's what real project management is about. Everyone can give a Mr Spock-style answer: "insufficient data to compute that captain". If someone on one of my project teams kept giving me that, I'd look for someone else to fill their role.
Would you accept it if when you asked what your salary was going to be they said "I don't have enough information to answer that". Didn't think so. They make a commitment based on their projected estimates of how the business will perform. You need to be able to do the same.
Re:It's not the business model...
on
Linux, Inc.
·
· Score: 1
I'm a hacker; incidentally, so are most other IT folks.
If only that were true. Sadly it's not; most IT folks are weenies whose only experience has been with MS products and who a) feel defensive about their lack of knowledge and are therefore hostile to the idea that another system might be enormously better, and b) are fundamentally not interested in computers and wouldn't be prepared to put in the initial effort required to admin unix.
Hence they fiddle with buttons on Windows server 2003 and blame their fuckups on 'external DNS errors' or whatever, because they are hired by managers with even less clue.
Like I said, sad but it's true. Try wondering into the IT dept in your average corp and asking how many run unix on their boxes at home.
Slashdot Mirror
FORTRAN? Surely a typo - you meant to write 'a mixture of Lisp, Algol, and assembler depending on what I'd been thinking about with John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky that week'?
The mechanical engineers where I work for starters. Drives me nuts the ridiculous things they do with Excel when they should be using a programming language or something like Matlab..
You see, because they don't know any better, they assume that there aren't any better ways of doing ANY calculation or programming task other than writing an excel macro. And so they create all kinds of mind-numbingly complicated spreadsheets doing things like Simpson's rule integration and finite-element modelling, and are proud of them.
These guys are not stupid; they just have a massively greater tolerance for tedious & repetitive tasks than your average geek. In fact it's one of the main things that differentiaites geeks from non geeks, almost a sort of laziness, that means we would rather spend a day learning how to automate something with the proper tools, in a reusable fashion, than one hour doing it by hand each time.
Must be something deep in the mindset of an engineer because it seems to be their default format for all interaction with a computer. And it drives me fscking nuts.
'IT people' are often a bunch of underqualified Windows weenies who can just about handle their jobs clicking dialog boxes in Windows 2003 server, and have no clue whatsoever about programming. Hence it's in their interest to keep their jobs as simple as possible.
When you're writing code you should be thinking about syntax, and using an editor which will take care of the formatting for you. '1.5 indents' has no syntactical meaning - you're talking about 1 indent + some spaces. I can live with the meaningless spaces (which you think makes it look prettier in your editor) if they only occur every now and then and don't screw up my indenting..
See for example the python style guide co-authored by him, which actually recommends spaces! I've even seen this used as support for the idea that spaces are better than tabs.
The fact that the originator of the language doesn't understand this does put me off python just a little.
Tabs v spaces is different. If we share code that you have written then I am *forced* to accept your system of indentation and your idea about how many spaces constitutes an indent. Why would you want to force me to do that? If we share code that I have written, you can set your editor to display tabs to whatever width you like and we can both be happy!
It's really that simple. Your preferences for displaying code should not matter to me, and vice versa. There are no good arguments for using spaces for indentation.
Spaces are for spacing, tabs are for indenting: 1 tab per level of indentation
Sorry for shouting, but the number of spaces *you* use to represent an indent in *your* editor SHOULD BE IRRELEVANT TO ME! The only reason it ever becomes an issue is when people who don't understand this decide to use spaces to indent their code. And if ever there was a language where this mattered, it's python.
This story is too dull to be a joke.
still wouldn't work because the viewpoint would be different. e.g. But I guess you could assume a typical user viewpoint and just try and get it right for that.
But Slashdot's problem - to the extent that it has one - is its success. If technocrat.net gets as popular, my guess is that you'll get the same S/N ratio there aswell.
The brief sentence in Josephus' Antiquities to which you refer falls some way short of confirming the historicity of Jesus as described in the gospels and subsequent Christian tradition.
My own feeling is that there probably was an individual named Jesus around that time, perhaps the leader or a significant figure in a smallish Gnostic/Jewish sect. However I suspect that later Christian writers were responsible for the attribution to him of stories and parables drawn from a stock of mythical sources and sacred texts (i.e. pretty much all the stories found in the New Testament).
Contradictions in the synoptic gospels? Rubbish.There are plenty of contradictions in the synoptic gospels, as you would expect in a set of texts written by different authors at different times, concerning a nascent tradition whose central articles of faith were still being defined. But I suspect that you are reluctant to learn about the gospels as historical sources, and prefer to view them from a religious perspective. That's your choice.
Very few 'legitimate' historians have an opinion on this because the historicity of Jesus is not terribly relevant, other than as an article of faith for certain religions. What does matter historically is the development of the myth/cult/story/religion as a social and political phenomenon.
If you're interested, there isn't very much evidence for Jesus as a historical figure. No genuine early (1st cent. AD) sources other than the synoptic gospels refer to events of his life - and even they are surprisingly contradictory. So for historians, the evidence would equally support the view that the figure of Jesus (and the events of his life supposedly narrated in the New Testament) actually emerged from a semi-coherent set of parables and stories about a mythical religious figure. There are parallels with the legends of King Arthur or Robin Hood, for example.
While the Slashdot trolling entry is clearly one of Wikipedia's less serious entries, that particular section crosses the line in my opinion. Bitching and flaming are against the spirit of the thing.
Except that it does; the look was (unbelievably) based on Windows v. 3. It is of coures a hell of a lot more configurable than Windows however so you don't need to stick to the default.
My other big gripe with oo.org is the number of 'smart' features such as auto-correct turned on by default. Like auto capitalisation. Took me ages to work out how to switch it off. And in fact now I've forgotten again come to think of it..
Note also that you should probably add 'more massive', i.e. 'orbits a fusor or more massive isolated non fusor'.
Also I'd replace 'fusor' with 'star' because that's clear enough.
must have meant Iran.
On the contrary, Canada should instigate/ramp up its nuclear & chemical weapons programmes right now. For while the possession of WMD has been shown to be a sure safeguard against invasion by the US (e.g. N. Korea, Kuwait), the lack of any (Iraq) clearly puts you at risk.
Damn right. And they know this, which is why this is all just bluster. Even with a Windows monopoly on business deployments (which are probably almost all legit in the western world at least), free software would have been given a huge boost if it really was that expensive to maintain & upgrade Windows on home PCs.
I wonder how many MS employees have non-legit (sorry, 'stolen') copies of Photoshop at home to use with their digital cameras?
I'd like to see a serious crackdown on software `piracy'. Wouldn't affect me in the slightest and it would put a big dent in the use of proprietary software worldwide.
That's a fair point and I guess then it's down to the boss to clarify his/her expectations and for everyone to thrash out what they mean and what can or can't be done.
I'm just saying that a lot of proto-engineers think that it's going to be really easy to deal with managers: all they have to do is act like an android and the 'PHB' will go away. I used to think something similar.
Would you accept it if when you asked what your salary was going to be they said "I don't have enough information to answer that". Didn't think so. They make a commitment based on their projected estimates of how the business will perform. You need to be able to do the same.
If only that were true. Sadly it's not; most IT folks are weenies whose only experience has been with MS products and who a) feel defensive about their lack of knowledge and are therefore hostile to the idea that another system might be enormously better, and b) are fundamentally not interested in computers and wouldn't be prepared to put in the initial effort required to admin unix.
Hence they fiddle with buttons on Windows server 2003 and blame their fuckups on 'external DNS errors' or whatever, because they are hired by managers with even less clue.
Like I said, sad but it's true. Try wondering into the IT dept in your average corp and asking how many run unix on their boxes at home.