My experience has been different. The engineers I've worked with couldn't do software engineering - they came up with an original solution, and then layered ugly hack upon ugly hack upon it as it needed to grow. End result, the stuff eventually became more or less unmaintainable, and G-d help the next person to come upon the code who wasn't familiar with it.
I'm not referring to BSc engineers, either - these are guys with Ph.Ds who spent most of their academic careers writing software. Lots of experience doesn't necessarily make you a great software engineer or programmer - there's actually some theory involved, believe it or not. I cringe every time I hear an engineer tell me they "know C++" or "know Java", because 95% of the time, they know enough to get a barely working solution going, and nothing more. That's hardly "knowing" a language, or knowing how to do proper software engineering.
You need BOTH - the engineers to fill in the twiddly, engineering-specific bits of a program, and some CS people to make something maintainable and extensible out of it. Anyone who's hiring EEs as software engineers is almost always going to be in for a shock when the code that comes out is awful. I'm lucky that I work with at least one who can put out good stuff - but he's the exception, not the rule, from what I've seen.
This is not to disparage your own skills, which I'm sure are impressive. Just realize that CS majors don't sit around and learn nothing for four years. (They shouldn't, anyways.) There's a lot of useful CS knowledge that doesn't get covered in electrical/mechanical/civil engineering.
"3. If you're going to mention Yahweh (aka YHWH, aka Jehovah, aka God of Israel) in proper Jewish context, you need to mark out some of the letters as a sign of respect. e.g. "Y-WH" or "G-d""
He shouldn't have written that, period. Observant Jews don't EVER pronounce or phonetically write that name. G-d will do fine, thanks.
Back on topic: Orthodox Jews can't take creation literally, because it anthropomorphizes G-d. How does G-d rest? He has no body, and, if you go for non-Maimonidean thought (popular these days in the yeshiva world), the world wouldn't exist without His constant divine intervention. Ergo, a literal account of creation cannot be true. The Orthodox question is more along the lines of just how allegorically should it be taken, and how to handle the calendar issues. There have been remarkable books written on both sides of the argument.
"is my understanding of u.s. politics so backwards? i would have expected the party breakdown to be 180degrees opoistite this..."
It is. Most Europeans (and to a certain extent, the rest of the world) seem to think of Republicans as evil, and Democrats as good (and Greens as the best, but I digress). This is a stunningly naive way of approaching the topic, and really rather misinformed.
American politics revolve on a few different axes (m-w confirms this is the plural of axis!). I think the most usual examples are: 1. States rights vs federal rights 2. Individual responsibility vs social responsibility 3. Loose constructionism vs strict constructionism
So, assuming the Democrats actually voted down the bill because they didn't want bloggers doing their thing, the reasoning would be: It's not "socially responsible" to allow people to blog outside of campaign finance rules. Campaign finance rules don't work Constitutionally unless you take a very loose-constructionist view of free speech. I mean, when you think about it, giving money is a form of speech, especially if you do it publicly, right?
Both parties believe in free speech, and all those lovely freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution. It is honestly disturbing how often you see people get gamed by the political parties into thinking the "other" is trying to steal away all of their precious freedoms.
So, yes, if you were under the misimpression that "Republicans are free speech hating monsters", and "Democrats are angelic defenders of all that is good and true", you were mistaken. There is nothing inherently wrong with the concepts of individual responsibility, states rights, and strict constructionism, at least no more than there's anything wrong with social responsibility, federalism, and loose constructionism. The situation is complex, and there are good, even great, people on both sides of the aisle, so to speak.
No, the sane part of you should be saying "Red Hat is nothing like Microsoft." So far, their own goals have been anything but sinister, and every other distro on the market has benefitted from the time and money they've invested in gcc, the kernel, and any other number of projects.
They've done nothing anti-community since dropping free Red Hat 9 support years ago. Get over it.
Someone (here?) recently made a very convincing argument that journalists consistently give light-and-thin laptops much better ratings (on average) than heavier notebooks, even though the two are really for two different things. Why? Because all journalists seem to have roughly the same usage pattern - cart laptop around on plane, use it to take notes at the conference, post stories from hotel room using WiFi, and so forth. Thus, journalists need a smaller laptop, and thus give them better reviews, but unfairly bash larger ones as being inadequate. They are - but only if you're a journalist who's running around all the time. A college student who just wants something he can leave on his dorm room desk, but easily take home on break, is probably going to prefer a larger, more powerful notebook or DTR.
I'm not sure if this is as true for Macs, but it probably enters the equation somehow. If the writer says "I would never give up my Mac for anything, and I hate Microsoft and Linux even if they were better, yada yada", there's certainly some emotional bias involved, and they should probably think twice about their journalistic integrity before submitting the review for publication. Certainly the _editors_ should be concerned about the reputation of their publication.
Ideally, a computer review shouldn't be just one person's thoughts on it - they would have a team of three or four people (the gamer, the journalist, the businessman, the IT guy) that each post their own thoughts on how the computer performs for them, and how well it meets their expectations given cost. They should be reasonably open-minded about different operating systems, and also be skilled with all of them (not as hard as it sounds, really).
"Having recently travelled to several US states, I don't think that enough of the population would be willing to make such a necessary change. While there are many very intelligent and very astute Americans, they are unfortunately in the minority. The majority seem to be Bible-toting, science-hating individuals."
Making generalizations based on anecdotal evidence is pretty unscientific. In fact, it's a statistically invalid way of doing things. Statistics is a science. You, sir, have just made a claim no more scientific than intelligent design.
I'm one of these religious fanatics you speak of, yet, oddly enough, I have a degree in CS and Economics from a prestigious institution here in the US. Religion hardly affects how I perform in these fields, or how I conduct my research (I work for a contractor at a very prestigious research agency, in fact). There's nothing contradictory between "science" and "religion". In fact, science is often quite helpful for explaining unclear things about religion. But, then again, I never have religion enter into my work anyways, because believing in G-d or not has nothing to do with designing a system architecture, or running a statistical regression. In fact, it has nothing to do with any vast number of scientific endeavors, to which the Bible/Koran/WhateverBookYouLike makes no mention of. There is nothing irreligious about e=mc^2.
I will be as honest as I can when I say this: I hate assholes like you who use their pro-science rhetoric as a thin mask to their anti-religion beliefs. I even more hate it when you characterize all religion as evangelical Christianity.
"Those religious people are out to get us! STOP THEM!" "Religion is the bane of science! Destroy religion!" Most people playing this line of thought have generally disdainful attitudes towards religion to begin with, from what I've seen. They claim they're "tolerant", yet their very words make a lie of such statements. What is tolerance without respect? That you don't shoot me for practicing my religion? How very kind of you!
Maybe Christianity is anti-science. I don't think so, but then again, I'm not a Christian. But generalizing that all religion is anti-science is wrong, unfair, and untrue.
If the community keeps breaking DRM, DRM is only going to get better. I'd rather come to some sort of sane compromise solution than keep on the present course. What that compromise is, I don't know - I hate compulsory licensing, yet it appears to work reasonably well for radio.
I've seen people claim that there's no such thing as unbreakable DRM. This would seem to be flatly untrue - DRM is really just a use of cryptography, and, fascinatingly enough, the code-makers have so far kept pretty far ahead of the code-breakers. With proper cryptography, your data is safe from the DVD-Jons of the Internet, and probably gives even NSA a good bit of work to go through. The "hacks" on quite a few protections are generally exploiting the analogue loophole, which is steadily being closed by stuff like HDCP and digital watermarking. Once these are closed (and they will be!), the game is over, and everyone's suffered as a result.
I cringe when I see people advocating the death of copyright. Don't they understand that, without any legal protection, the content producers will simply start funding DRM that actually works? Now, they at least have some sort of legal means to try to protect their content - remove that, and they'll start really turning the screws. Your fair use rights? There's no such thing without copyright. I won't even get into what a reduction it will cause in content creation - many of the great works of art of the past few hundred years were created for pay, and at the very least, copyright helps protect the opportunity cost of creating works.
At least under the US, the citizens of one country have some oversight. Give them their own little organization independent of everyone, and they'll have absolutely none.
"it's one of the smoothest and securest server operating systems out there"
I really doubt you can actually quantify this in any sort of believable fashion.
And, in any event, they don't have nearly the breadth of support offerings Red Hat does. 24/5 email support - what a treat! Better hope nothing goes wrong on the weekend!
Welcome to the real world, where you actually have to spend money on cutting edge technology. $3000 sounds cheap for a company that's actually going to make a product. Certainly, if we had a product that needed eInk, we'd pay the expense without hesitation.
What's that? You're _not_ making a product, and you just want to screw around with it? Well, guess what? They're looking to stay in business, and you don't do that by selling way under cost to a bunch of guys who are never going to deliver those huge-quantity orders that eInk needs to stay in business. You do it by selling to people who are actually going to make a product out of it.
As for a "more reasonable dev board", they're using a Gumstix, which is an off-the-shelf component. It should be pretty obvious to anyone with half a brain that the majority of the costs here are either in the display or the R&D.
The meaning there was not to exclude civilians. Obviously, civilians are protected. Rather, I was excluding _ununiformed_ combatants. Mea culpa, for what it's worth.
I also think people need to understand the two amendments to the Geneva Conventions a little better, but that's a discussion for another time.
"Which is a ficticious pile of crap with no legal definition or basis that was made up on the spot to justify terrorism against captives."
I recommend you actually read the Geneva Conventions sometime. Like it or not, it is very clearly intended only for protecting _uniformed soldiers_. If you want it to be more broadly applicable, write a new treaty and submit it to the UN.
"Don't criticise Slashdot readers for criticising Bush - they are quite right to."
This statement makes no sense. Are you saying people shouldn't be allowed to criticize others if there's a perceived falsehood in the original criticism? Or, is this just a thinly-veiled way of saying "I think they're right, and people shouldn't criticize my beliefs!"
"Think about it - could there possibly be a reason why so many Slashdotters are criticising Bush? I'll leave you to ponder it."
Many of them hate him entirely for past issues, and are eager to seize upon any excuse to bash him more? I mean, be realistic - for every informed criticism of his policy, there's nine other people just tossing out crude insults because he's not a Democratic-style leftist. This isn't meant as an apology or a defense of him - just that I generally find the level of political discourse to be pretty childish and crude, not well-thought-out at all. It's essentially sand-box name-taunting by three year olds.
I also think that Europeans don't really "get" the dual federal/state government system that the US has. Calling out national guard is typically a state, not federal function, for instance. If the federal government has to call out the National Guard, it means the _state_ has screwed up. Many of the things Europeans are blaming the federal government for are typically _state_ functions. Evacuating the citizens is also a state function (or a city function). This is not to say that the federal government shouldn't assist - but we have separation of powers between state and federal governments over here, apparently to a much larger extent than in, say, Europe.
I really, really wish more people would get to understand how the government system over here works. It disturbs me when I see all these complaints about how ignorant Americans are about the rest of the world, yet others are just as ignorant about them.
"The only way that I can think around this is that you considered it a parve (like plants and eggs) after you grow it, but why could we do that?"
My assumption was _not_ that there was an original pig involved, but rather it was some separate thing entirely. Indeed, if there was an original pig involved, it wouldn't be kosher, period. I wouldn't really be consider such a meat artificial, either. I should probably RTFA a bit more carefully, eh?
A Muslim co-worker and I (I'm an Orthodox Jew, for reference) had a brief discussion of whether you could actually eat artificial pork. I'm _reasonably sure_ that under halakha, you could - meat is really defined as something that comes off an animal, and whatever this stuff is, if it doesn't come off an animal, it wouldn't have the halakhic status of meat. He also agreed that Shaaria would _probably_ not have an issue with it, either.
I think the ideological implications are more interesting (fake bacon is one thing, but this...), but those aren't really of any concern on/., methinks.
"Our patent system (flawed as it may be) works on rewarding patent to the first to invent, not the first to register for patent."
First to _invent_, not to implement. If Microsoft can produce documentation that they thought of this idea well in advance of Apple's iPod release, they can still retain the patent.
This is assuming that all this is good for is games. I disagree. This gives an excellent venue for such things as LCDProc, which could use it as a convienient spot for system temperature, fan speed, etc. Maybe it could be used for RSS feeds while you're playing, or incoming IM. Be creative!
However, I do think it will provide a reasonable place for auxillary information for games, too. Not everything is an FPS - think RTS or turn-based strategy. Getting instant information on how much range, firepower, armor, etc. your selected units have (averaged?) could be stunningly useful, yet be a little too much for the main game screen. A keyboard LCD fills this void in an efficient way.
It could very well be. The presentation we had was for a very large public academic institution. It was also rather soon after the acquisitions of Ximian and SuSE - perhaps they didn't have time to get together a better presentation? But, still, these were guys from Ximian. They should have known better.
Anyways, I would encourage you to get Red Hat over there. Everyone I've ever talked to from them (a couple large pimping/sales-oriented meetings, and a training pitch session) has been stunningly knowledgable about Red Hat's plans, and they've never given off the "WE WILL OWN YOU" vibe that everyone always accuses them of. Really professional folks, in other words, and a credit to the community.
At the end of the day, I'll choose Red Hat's free as in freedom distro over Novell's "well, it's free, except for when we think it's in our best interests" every time. Maybe that makes me irrational, but if I can spread the free software ideal without compromising the business' objectives, I'll do it.
I like Fedora Core 4 a lot more than I liked Red Hat 9. I'd give it a try. We exclusively use FC on new machines at work, and it's given us no problems. It's always a happy day when we upgrade some of the old RH boxes to FC, too...
Slashdot Mirror
My experience has been different. The engineers I've worked with couldn't do software engineering - they came up with an original solution, and then layered ugly hack upon ugly hack upon it as it needed to grow. End result, the stuff eventually became more or less unmaintainable, and G-d help the next person to come upon the code who wasn't familiar with it.
I'm not referring to BSc engineers, either - these are guys with Ph.Ds who spent most of their academic careers writing software. Lots of experience doesn't necessarily make you a great software engineer or programmer - there's actually some theory involved, believe it or not. I cringe every time I hear an engineer tell me they "know C++" or "know Java", because 95% of the time, they know enough to get a barely working solution going, and nothing more. That's hardly "knowing" a language, or knowing how to do proper software engineering.
You need BOTH - the engineers to fill in the twiddly, engineering-specific bits of a program, and some CS people to make something maintainable and extensible out of it. Anyone who's hiring EEs as software engineers is almost always going to be in for a shock when the code that comes out is awful. I'm lucky that I work with at least one who can put out good stuff - but he's the exception, not the rule, from what I've seen.
This is not to disparage your own skills, which I'm sure are impressive. Just realize that CS majors don't sit around and learn nothing for four years. (They shouldn't, anyways.) There's a lot of useful CS knowledge that doesn't get covered in electrical/mechanical/civil engineering.
-Erwos
up2date is being retired in favor of the yum front-end "pup".
-Erwos
"But people should boycott the XBOX 360 until it supports all the XBOX games in their collection."
So you'd advocate doing the same to the PS2, because it most certainly _does not_ support all PS1 games?
Or am I misinterpreting "their" to be Microsoft, when you really mean "the user's"?
-Erwos
"3. If you're going to mention Yahweh (aka YHWH, aka Jehovah, aka God of Israel) in proper Jewish context, you need to mark out some of the letters as a sign of respect. e.g. "Y-WH" or "G-d""
He shouldn't have written that, period. Observant Jews don't EVER pronounce or phonetically write that name. G-d will do fine, thanks.
Back on topic: Orthodox Jews can't take creation literally, because it anthropomorphizes G-d. How does G-d rest? He has no body, and, if you go for non-Maimonidean thought (popular these days in the yeshiva world), the world wouldn't exist without His constant divine intervention. Ergo, a literal account of creation cannot be true. The Orthodox question is more along the lines of just how allegorically should it be taken, and how to handle the calendar issues. There have been remarkable books written on both sides of the argument.
-Erwos
"is my understanding of u.s. politics so backwards? i would have expected the party breakdown to be 180degrees opoistite this..."
It is. Most Europeans (and to a certain extent, the rest of the world) seem to think of Republicans as evil, and Democrats as good (and Greens as the best, but I digress). This is a stunningly naive way of approaching the topic, and really rather misinformed.
American politics revolve on a few different axes (m-w confirms this is the plural of axis!). I think the most usual examples are:
1. States rights vs federal rights
2. Individual responsibility vs social responsibility
3. Loose constructionism vs strict constructionism
So, assuming the Democrats actually voted down the bill because they didn't want bloggers doing their thing, the reasoning would be: It's not "socially responsible" to allow people to blog outside of campaign finance rules. Campaign finance rules don't work Constitutionally unless you take a very loose-constructionist view of free speech. I mean, when you think about it, giving money is a form of speech, especially if you do it publicly, right?
Both parties believe in free speech, and all those lovely freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution. It is honestly disturbing how often you see people get gamed by the political parties into thinking the "other" is trying to steal away all of their precious freedoms.
So, yes, if you were under the misimpression that "Republicans are free speech hating monsters", and "Democrats are angelic defenders of all that is good and true", you were mistaken. There is nothing inherently wrong with the concepts of individual responsibility, states rights, and strict constructionism, at least no more than there's anything wrong with social responsibility, federalism, and loose constructionism. The situation is complex, and there are good, even great, people on both sides of the aisle, so to speak.
-Erwos
No, the sane part of you should be saying "Red Hat is nothing like Microsoft." So far, their own goals have been anything but sinister, and every other distro on the market has benefitted from the time and money they've invested in gcc, the kernel, and any other number of projects.
They've done nothing anti-community since dropping free Red Hat 9 support years ago. Get over it.
-Erwos
Someone (here?) recently made a very convincing argument that journalists consistently give light-and-thin laptops much better ratings (on average) than heavier notebooks, even though the two are really for two different things. Why? Because all journalists seem to have roughly the same usage pattern - cart laptop around on plane, use it to take notes at the conference, post stories from hotel room using WiFi, and so forth. Thus, journalists need a smaller laptop, and thus give them better reviews, but unfairly bash larger ones as being inadequate. They are - but only if you're a journalist who's running around all the time. A college student who just wants something he can leave on his dorm room desk, but easily take home on break, is probably going to prefer a larger, more powerful notebook or DTR.
I'm not sure if this is as true for Macs, but it probably enters the equation somehow. If the writer says "I would never give up my Mac for anything, and I hate Microsoft and Linux even if they were better, yada yada", there's certainly some emotional bias involved, and they should probably think twice about their journalistic integrity before submitting the review for publication. Certainly the _editors_ should be concerned about the reputation of their publication.
Ideally, a computer review shouldn't be just one person's thoughts on it - they would have a team of three or four people (the gamer, the journalist, the businessman, the IT guy) that each post their own thoughts on how the computer performs for them, and how well it meets their expectations given cost. They should be reasonably open-minded about different operating systems, and also be skilled with all of them (not as hard as it sounds, really).
-Erwos
"Having recently travelled to several US states, I don't think that enough of the population would be willing to make such a necessary change. While there are many very intelligent and very astute Americans, they are unfortunately in the minority. The majority seem to be Bible-toting, science-hating individuals."
Making generalizations based on anecdotal evidence is pretty unscientific. In fact, it's a statistically invalid way of doing things. Statistics is a science. You, sir, have just made a claim no more scientific than intelligent design.
I'm one of these religious fanatics you speak of, yet, oddly enough, I have a degree in CS and Economics from a prestigious institution here in the US. Religion hardly affects how I perform in these fields, or how I conduct my research (I work for a contractor at a very prestigious research agency, in fact). There's nothing contradictory between "science" and "religion". In fact, science is often quite helpful for explaining unclear things about religion. But, then again, I never have religion enter into my work anyways, because believing in G-d or not has nothing to do with designing a system architecture, or running a statistical regression. In fact, it has nothing to do with any vast number of scientific endeavors, to which the Bible/Koran/WhateverBookYouLike makes no mention of. There is nothing irreligious about e=mc^2.
I will be as honest as I can when I say this: I hate assholes like you who use their pro-science rhetoric as a thin mask to their anti-religion beliefs. I even more hate it when you characterize all religion as evangelical Christianity.
"Those religious people are out to get us! STOP THEM!" "Religion is the bane of science! Destroy religion!" Most people playing this line of thought have generally disdainful attitudes towards religion to begin with, from what I've seen. They claim they're "tolerant", yet their very words make a lie of such statements. What is tolerance without respect? That you don't shoot me for practicing my religion? How very kind of you!
Maybe Christianity is anti-science. I don't think so, but then again, I'm not a Christian. But generalizing that all religion is anti-science is wrong, unfair, and untrue.
-Erwos
If the community keeps breaking DRM, DRM is only going to get better. I'd rather come to some sort of sane compromise solution than keep on the present course. What that compromise is, I don't know - I hate compulsory licensing, yet it appears to work reasonably well for radio.
I've seen people claim that there's no such thing as unbreakable DRM. This would seem to be flatly untrue - DRM is really just a use of cryptography, and, fascinatingly enough, the code-makers have so far kept pretty far ahead of the code-breakers. With proper cryptography, your data is safe from the DVD-Jons of the Internet, and probably gives even NSA a good bit of work to go through. The "hacks" on quite a few protections are generally exploiting the analogue loophole, which is steadily being closed by stuff like HDCP and digital watermarking. Once these are closed (and they will be!), the game is over, and everyone's suffered as a result.
I cringe when I see people advocating the death of copyright. Don't they understand that, without any legal protection, the content producers will simply start funding DRM that actually works? Now, they at least have some sort of legal means to try to protect their content - remove that, and they'll start really turning the screws. Your fair use rights? There's no such thing without copyright. I won't even get into what a reduction it will cause in content creation - many of the great works of art of the past few hundred years were created for pay, and at the very least, copyright helps protect the opportunity cost of creating works.
-Erwos
At least under the US, the citizens of one country have some oversight. Give them their own little organization independent of everyone, and they'll have absolutely none.
-Erwos
"it's one of the smoothest and securest server operating systems out there"
I really doubt you can actually quantify this in any sort of believable fashion.
And, in any event, they don't have nearly the breadth of support offerings Red Hat does. 24/5 email support - what a treat! Better hope nothing goes wrong on the weekend!
-Erwos
Welcome to the real world, where you actually have to spend money on cutting edge technology. $3000 sounds cheap for a company that's actually going to make a product. Certainly, if we had a product that needed eInk, we'd pay the expense without hesitation.
What's that? You're _not_ making a product, and you just want to screw around with it? Well, guess what? They're looking to stay in business, and you don't do that by selling way under cost to a bunch of guys who are never going to deliver those huge-quantity orders that eInk needs to stay in business. You do it by selling to people who are actually going to make a product out of it.
As for a "more reasonable dev board", they're using a Gumstix, which is an off-the-shelf component. It should be pretty obvious to anyone with half a brain that the majority of the costs here are either in the display or the R&D.
-Erwos
The meaning there was not to exclude civilians. Obviously, civilians are protected. Rather, I was excluding _ununiformed_ combatants. Mea culpa, for what it's worth.
I also think people need to understand the two amendments to the Geneva Conventions a little better, but that's a discussion for another time.
-Erwos
"Which is a ficticious pile of crap with no legal definition or basis that was made up on the spot to justify terrorism against captives."
I recommend you actually read the Geneva Conventions sometime. Like it or not, it is very clearly intended only for protecting _uniformed soldiers_. If you want it to be more broadly applicable, write a new treaty and submit it to the UN.
-Erwos
"Don't criticise Slashdot readers for criticising Bush - they are quite right to."
This statement makes no sense. Are you saying people shouldn't be allowed to criticize others if there's a perceived falsehood in the original criticism? Or, is this just a thinly-veiled way of saying "I think they're right, and people shouldn't criticize my beliefs!"
"Think about it - could there possibly be a reason why so many Slashdotters are criticising Bush? I'll leave you to ponder it."
Many of them hate him entirely for past issues, and are eager to seize upon any excuse to bash him more? I mean, be realistic - for every informed criticism of his policy, there's nine other people just tossing out crude insults because he's not a Democratic-style leftist. This isn't meant as an apology or a defense of him - just that I generally find the level of political discourse to be pretty childish and crude, not well-thought-out at all. It's essentially sand-box name-taunting by three year olds.
I also think that Europeans don't really "get" the dual federal/state government system that the US has. Calling out national guard is typically a state, not federal function, for instance. If the federal government has to call out the National Guard, it means the _state_ has screwed up. Many of the things Europeans are blaming the federal government for are typically _state_ functions. Evacuating the citizens is also a state function (or a city function). This is not to say that the federal government shouldn't assist - but we have separation of powers between state and federal governments over here, apparently to a much larger extent than in, say, Europe.
I really, really wish more people would get to understand how the government system over here works. It disturbs me when I see all these complaints about how ignorant Americans are about the rest of the world, yet others are just as ignorant about them.
-Erwos
Very nice that they support bzip2 - it seems to be gaining some traction in the community now, so it should be handy.
-Erwos
Kinda like martial arts, then - turn aside the force of the blow, rather than just trying to take it in the gut.
I'd love to use DRM to enforce the GPL.
-Erwos
"The only way that I can think around this is that you considered it a parve (like plants and eggs) after you grow it, but why could we do that?"
My assumption was _not_ that there was an original pig involved, but rather it was some separate thing entirely. Indeed, if there was an original pig involved, it wouldn't be kosher, period. I wouldn't really be consider such a meat artificial, either. I should probably RTFA a bit more carefully, eh?
-Erwos
A Muslim co-worker and I (I'm an Orthodox Jew, for reference) had a brief discussion of whether you could actually eat artificial pork. I'm _reasonably sure_ that under halakha, you could - meat is really defined as something that comes off an animal, and whatever this stuff is, if it doesn't come off an animal, it wouldn't have the halakhic status of meat. He also agreed that Shaaria would _probably_ not have an issue with it, either.
/., methinks.
I think the ideological implications are more interesting (fake bacon is one thing, but this...), but those aren't really of any concern on
-Erwos
I was under the impression that Communigate Pro had a clustering mode.
-Erwos
"Our patent system (flawed as it may be) works on rewarding patent to the first to invent, not the first to register for patent."
First to _invent_, not to implement. If Microsoft can produce documentation that they thought of this idea well in advance of Apple's iPod release, they can still retain the patent.
-Erwos
SuSE Pro 9.3 comes with a lot of non-free, patent-encumbered software (ie, MP3 playing), from what I recall. YAST is not what I was referring to.
-Erwos
This is assuming that all this is good for is games. I disagree. This gives an excellent venue for such things as LCDProc, which could use it as a convienient spot for system temperature, fan speed, etc. Maybe it could be used for RSS feeds while you're playing, or incoming IM. Be creative!
However, I do think it will provide a reasonable place for auxillary information for games, too. Not everything is an FPS - think RTS or turn-based strategy. Getting instant information on how much range, firepower, armor, etc. your selected units have (averaged?) could be stunningly useful, yet be a little too much for the main game screen. A keyboard LCD fills this void in an efficient way.
-Erwos
It could very well be. The presentation we had was for a very large public academic institution. It was also rather soon after the acquisitions of Ximian and SuSE - perhaps they didn't have time to get together a better presentation? But, still, these were guys from Ximian. They should have known better.
Anyways, I would encourage you to get Red Hat over there. Everyone I've ever talked to from them (a couple large pimping/sales-oriented meetings, and a training pitch session) has been stunningly knowledgable about Red Hat's plans, and they've never given off the "WE WILL OWN YOU" vibe that everyone always accuses them of. Really professional folks, in other words, and a credit to the community.
At the end of the day, I'll choose Red Hat's free as in freedom distro over Novell's "well, it's free, except for when we think it's in our best interests" every time. Maybe that makes me irrational, but if I can spread the free software ideal without compromising the business' objectives, I'll do it.
-Erwos
I like Fedora Core 4 a lot more than I liked Red Hat 9. I'd give it a try. We exclusively use FC on new machines at work, and it's given us no problems. It's always a happy day when we upgrade some of the old RH boxes to FC, too...
-Erwos