Hemos is American and in American and he wrote 'insite', bzzt next please.
The best thing to do with spelling mistakes is to silently update your opinion of the writer's level of education and intelligence, and then move on to something more worthwhile
Re:mySQL.com and mySQL.org......
on
MySQL & Nusphere
·
· Score: 1
The big deal is that this fork is illegal. Part of the GPL is that you can't just take a GPL application and suddenly make it closed-source, which is what NuSphere is doing.
MySQL AB do not have that right either. They may hold copyright on the project but, being GPL, they cannot revoke its distribution conditions.
The problem with computers is not being able to generate the signal; it's i) making components that can respond to the signal fast enough, and ii) making components that don't overheat when doing (i).
Well, we can check that out: it ticks 10^18 times per second. If we assume that it is therefore accurate to one part in 10^18 (a reasonable assumption), then that's one second in 31.6 billion years (according to dc:)
So perhaps BBC were unexaggerating, or perhaps they halved my accuracy estimate.
BTW something very interesting happened here. This was my full calculation:
seconds/400 yrs = 86400 * (365 * 400 + 397) = 12648700800
==> seconds/yr = 31621752 (exactly)
10^18 secs / 31621752 = 31623810236 years
(ie. the number of seconds in a year is very close to the squareroot of ten! (316227766...)
Main point is to annoy specific users or opers of the network.
Undernet went through a large dossing phase a few months ago (now there are only half a dozen or so American servers left from the 25 or so there were before). They've since been implementing measures to protect from DOS:
- hide the server names in/whois
- disable/map and/links
- hide the server names in netsplits
- disable umode +s
It's not surprising that the chance is practically 1 that _one_ star or more will collide. What would be more interesting is the chance that our Sun will collide or not. (Dividing your answer by your 1e11 gives a rather small probability of this).
Your calculation doesn't take into account the size or star density of Andromeda, it assumes stars' cross-sections won't overlap, and it seems to be assuming the galaxies are colliding face-to-face. Also, I read some time ago that the Galaxy's radius was 110,000 light years, so area = nearly 5x10^10 ly^2, ie. 4x10^30km by my calculation.
The galaxy's star distribution needs to be considered too. The galactic centre is _huge_, and probably contains a supermassive black hole. Whichever other stars get in the way of that are gonna be {insert synonym for bad occurrences}.
There's a photo I've seen of two other galaxies colliding (although I forget what they are or which constellation it was). Their edges met at about 90 degrees, and the was a large empty black strip along where they were colliding. Hopefully someone reading this will be able to give an URL or upload their slide:)
And finally, large gas clouds are no worries to those of us who have had to live with a compulsive farter
Is this the same PSION that was responsible for PSION Flight Simulator?
Cyan featureless sky, blue ground featureless except for three geometric lakes. Hills aren't drawn (you have to rely on the map to avoid crashing), and it's impossible to land. Also, the compass had 361 degrees.
Or PSION Chequered Flag?
While there were several race tracks, each had a featureless black track, green grass, and blue sky. There were no other cars. You could choose among 3 cars for yourself, but only one was good and the others sucked.
If they still have the same programmers today that they did then, no wonder their products aren't going anywhere.
USR tried to corner the market. Unfortunately, modem markets aren't easy to corner, because 1) people don't upgrade modems much, and 2) it's easy for competitors to fully duplicate the technology.
On the other hand, Microsoft will leverage its desktop monopoly </CLICHE> to lock people into its commodity formats. People upgrade Windows or Office or IE fairly regularly, and it's easy for MS to invent protocols that are difficult to duplicate, and easy to break support for competitors' products if they start getting dangerous.
Looking at the USR example, it would seem that the only way MS can be brought down is by other operating systems fully duplicating Windows, and then providing added benifits. But with billions of dollars a year going into obfuscating every protocol they can get their hands on, this goal still seems a long way off.
A quote from the Samba 2.2 (recently released) docs has stuck in my mind: they're proud to have finally got DOS wildcard matching working the same as DOS does! (after how many years?)
You or I may find Windows-matching futile, and prefer the strategy of enhancing Linux's strengths to grab new customers, but we shouldn't begrudge anybody else the change to try and beat Windows on their own turf.
Um, that's the link in the story, and it's Slashdotted. Looks like kde.org can't handle a bit of load? Maybe if they didn't run a gui on their webservers;)
I never quite understood Slashdotting: you ought to get through at least some of the time to the URLs, even if slow; unless the actual server in question has crashed under load (which is quite unacceptable)
Re:This has been mentioned before, but...
on
Why not Ruby?
·
· Score: 1
We can learn to speak it because it has rules.
The best way to get over this mindset is to observe children learning their native language.
They sure don't care whether a word is a noun or a verb, or what the past tense was.
Even if the language had no rules, children would still learn it (and, I daresay, people would come up with some rules anyway).
An interesting example of this was something I saw on/. yesterday, where the writer wrote "drug" instead of "dragged". The process involved here is known as imitation (the writer, perhaps unconsciously, tried to extend the 'rule' seen in "drink, drank, drunk" and other such verbs). This is the same way that children learn, and their parents correct them when they are "wrong" (I use quotes because what they did was perfectly logical, following rules, but it just happens that this word is different, and there was absolutely no way to know beforehand).
Think about how these rules might have come into existence in the first place... I'm quite sure that nobody invented them:)
Also, programming languages which have tried to make the syntax look like English have failed abysmally for the same reason. Sure, languages contain English words, but the phrase construction is very much unlike English (or any natural language), so in the end you have to learn the language just like any other and try to forget that it had anything to do with English.
(Try writing a set of #defines to make Romeo and Juliet into a C program:)
The other rules I mentioned were not examples of grammatical rules, but examples of rules with exceptions (which includes grammar and spelling rules, among others).
Re:This has been mentioned before, but...
on
Why not Ruby?
·
· Score: 1
English doesn't exist based on rules. The way it works is that we all know how to speak it, and we can _try_ to come up with some rules that explain what we already do. You may have noticed that every grammatical rule in the book has exceptions. Yes, even by the best theories on phrase organization, there are simple English sentences which defy them. Another example of this is the apostrophe "rule", or the i-before-e-except-after-c "rule", and so on.
The study of classical Latin has done one major evil: it's given a lot of people the idea that languages are structured, logical and organized, and any exception to this logic is a kind of mistake. However nothing could be further from the truth.
Classical Latin is a constructed language (like Esperanto etc.); nobody ever spoke it. The people of Rome spoke what we call "Vulgar Latin", a much more human language, full of "exceptions", but Classical Latin was used for any official announcements or artworks. It's been suggested that some of the writers of the classical works (Virgil etc.) may not even have spoken any form of Latin.
You say you write "better English" now. This means you've learnt more of "the rules", and probably increased your vocabulary too. In the end though, "correct language" is what the people speak and understand. We aren't going to hold back the evolution of language, no matter how hard we try (1984 notwithstanding!)
To some people, "Zup in da hood" is better language than "How are things in your area?"
Re:This has been mentioned before, but...
on
Why not Ruby?
·
· Score: 2
Knowing Latin certainly doesn't help you understand why you form sentences. In fact, if you did understand that, you could write a computer program to do it and become rich and famous overnight.
You may learn various grammatical properties (few of which Latin shares with English, but it's hard to learn another language without learning more about your own), and learn a lot of vocabulary which passed into English during the Renaissance, but that's about it.
Being a fluent native speaker, I feel quite certain that I understood English before I attempted to learn another language.
The ASM - C analogy does not compare to Latin-English, because C code (along with many languages) was designed to produce ASM, and C is at quite a low level above that, whereas English and Latin are more like distant cousins. Ebonics - English is closer to C - ASM (altho still not a particularly good analogy).
It's pretty hard to write such a complex project in 72 hours without having very well-organised, readable, and manageable-amongst-a-team code.
Many Open Source projects get by on awful code because the developers can sit there for months trying to figure out how so-and-so works before being able to write their patch and submit it.
Slashdot Mirror
Hemos is American and in American and he wrote 'insite', bzzt next please.
The best thing to do with spelling mistakes is to silently update your opinion of the writer's level of education and intelligence, and then move on to something more worthwhile
The big deal is that this fork is illegal. Part of the GPL is that you can't just take a GPL application and suddenly make it closed-source, which is what NuSphere is doing.
MySQL AB do not have that right either. They may hold copyright on the project but, being GPL, they cannot revoke its distribution conditions.
So, what are you doing about these things?
taliban.is.n.af
*checks calendar* 1984 anyone?
...a Beowulf cluster of hidden cameras?
6AM pictures of Natalie Portman
7AM hot grits for breakfast.
The problem with computers is not being able to generate the signal; it's i) making components that can respond to the signal fast enough, and ii) making components that don't overheat when doing (i).
Well, we can check that out: it ticks 10^18 times per second. If we assume that it is therefore accurate to one part in 10^18 (a reasonable assumption), then that's one second in 31.6 billion years (according to dc :)
So perhaps BBC were unexaggerating, or perhaps they halved my accuracy estimate.
BTW something very interesting happened here. This was my full calculation:
seconds/400 yrs = 86400 * (365 * 400 + 397) = 12648700800
==> seconds/yr = 31621752 (exactly)
10^18 secs / 31621752 = 31623810236 years
(ie. the number of seconds in a year is very close to the squareroot of ten! (316227766...)
Main point is to annoy specific users or opers of the network.
/whois
/map and /links
:)
Undernet went through a large dossing phase a few months ago (now there are only half a dozen or so American servers left from the 25 or so there were before). They've since been implementing measures to protect from DOS:
- hide the server names in
- disable
- hide the server names in netsplits
- disable umode +s
Perhaps EFnet could learn from history
It's not surprising that the chance is practically 1 that _one_ star or more will collide. What would be more interesting is the chance that our Sun will collide or not. (Dividing your answer by your 1e11 gives a rather small probability of this).
:)
Your calculation doesn't take into account the size or star density of Andromeda, it assumes stars' cross-sections won't overlap, and it seems to be assuming the galaxies are colliding face-to-face. Also, I read some time ago that the Galaxy's radius was 110,000 light years, so area = nearly 5x10^10 ly^2, ie. 4x10^30km by my calculation.
The galaxy's star distribution needs to be considered too. The galactic centre is _huge_, and probably contains a supermassive black hole. Whichever other stars get in the way of that are gonna be {insert synonym for bad occurrences}.
There's a photo I've seen of two other galaxies colliding (although I forget what they are or which constellation it was). Their edges met at about 90 degrees, and the was a large empty black strip along where they were colliding. Hopefully someone reading this will be able to give an URL or upload their slide
And finally, large gas clouds are no worries to those of us who have had to live with a compulsive farter
Is this the same PSION that was responsible for PSION Flight Simulator?
Cyan featureless sky, blue ground featureless except for three geometric lakes. Hills aren't drawn (you have to rely on the map to avoid crashing), and it's impossible to land. Also, the compass had 361 degrees.
Or PSION Chequered Flag?
While there were several race tracks, each had a featureless black track, green grass, and blue sky. There were no other cars. You could choose among 3 cars for yourself, but only one was good and the others sucked.
If they still have the same programmers today that they did then, no wonder their products aren't going anywhere.
USR tried to corner the market. Unfortunately, modem markets aren't easy to corner, because 1) people don't upgrade modems much, and 2) it's easy for competitors to fully duplicate the technology.
On the other hand, Microsoft will leverage its desktop monopoly </CLICHE> to lock people into its commodity formats. People upgrade Windows or Office or IE fairly regularly, and it's easy for MS to invent protocols that are difficult to duplicate, and easy to break support for competitors' products if they start getting dangerous.
Looking at the USR example, it would seem that the only way MS can be brought down is by other operating systems fully duplicating Windows, and then providing added benifits. But with billions of dollars a year going into obfuscating every protocol they can get their hands on, this goal still seems a long way off. A quote from the Samba 2.2 (recently released) docs has stuck in my mind: they're proud to have finally got DOS wildcard matching working the same as DOS does! (after how many years?)
You or I may find Windows-matching futile, and prefer the strategy of enhancing Linux's strengths to grab new customers, but we shouldn't begrudge anybody else the change to try and beat Windows on their own turf.
Um, that's the link in the story, and it's Slashdotted. Looks like kde.org can't handle a bit of load? Maybe if they didn't run a gui on their webservers ;)
I never quite understood Slashdotting: you ought to get through at least some of the time to the URLs, even if slow; unless the actual server in question has crashed under load (which is quite unacceptable)
The best way to get over this mindset is to observe children learning their native language.
They sure don't care whether a word is a noun or a verb, or what the past tense was. Even if the language had no rules, children would still learn it (and, I daresay, people would come up with some rules anyway).
An interesting example of this was something I saw on /. yesterday, where the writer wrote "drug" instead of "dragged". The process involved here is known as imitation (the writer, perhaps unconsciously, tried to extend the 'rule' seen in "drink, drank, drunk" and other such verbs). This is the same way that children learn, and their parents correct them when they are "wrong" (I use quotes because what they did was perfectly logical, following rules, but it just happens that this word is different, and there was absolutely no way to know beforehand).
Think about how these rules might have come into existence in the first place... I'm quite sure that nobody invented them :)
Also, programming languages which have tried to make the syntax look like English have failed abysmally for the same reason. Sure, languages contain English words, but the phrase construction is very much unlike English (or any natural language), so in the end you have to learn the language just like any other and try to forget that it had anything to do with English. (Try writing a set of #defines to make Romeo and Juliet into a C program :)
The other rules I mentioned were not examples of grammatical rules, but examples of rules with exceptions (which includes grammar and spelling rules, among others).
Who registered COMMAND.COM ;)
English doesn't exist based on rules. The way it works is that we all know how to speak it, and we can _try_ to come up with some rules that explain what we already do. You may have noticed that every grammatical rule in the book has exceptions. Yes, even by the best theories on phrase organization, there are simple English sentences which defy them. Another example of this is the apostrophe "rule", or the i-before-e-except-after-c "rule", and so on.
The study of classical Latin has done one major evil: it's given a lot of people the idea that languages are structured, logical and organized, and any exception to this logic is a kind of mistake. However nothing could be further from the truth.
Classical Latin is a constructed language (like Esperanto etc.); nobody ever spoke it. The people of Rome spoke what we call "Vulgar Latin", a much more human language, full of "exceptions", but Classical Latin was used for any official announcements or artworks. It's been suggested that some of the writers of the classical works (Virgil etc.) may not even have spoken any form of Latin.
You say you write "better English" now. This means you've learnt more of "the rules", and probably increased your vocabulary too. In the end though, "correct language" is what the people speak and understand. We aren't going to hold back the evolution of language, no matter how hard we try (1984 notwithstanding!)
To some people, "Zup in da hood" is better language than "How are things in your area?"
Knowing Latin certainly doesn't help you understand why you form sentences. In fact, if you did understand that, you could write a computer program to do it and become rich and famous overnight.
You may learn various grammatical properties (few of which Latin shares with English, but it's hard to learn another language without learning more about your own), and learn a lot of vocabulary which passed into English during the Renaissance, but that's about it.
Being a fluent native speaker, I feel quite certain that I understood English before I attempted to learn another language.
The ASM - C analogy does not compare to Latin-English, because C code (along with many languages) was designed to produce ASM, and C is at quite a low level above that, whereas English and Latin are more like distant cousins. Ebonics - English is closer to C - ASM (altho still not a particularly good analogy).
I was a perl man too, but I have recently switched to cross-stitch.
It's now cool to be a geek?
Are "American's" today really so uneducated that they can't use an apostrophe correctly?
Quick .. somebody drop this off with a large bribe to Tom's Hardware and get them to list it as better than AMD when it isn't!
Well, this is an international competition; you americans may not be so hot on it, but we Kiwis are :)
As a high school coder, I made $4/hr (when translated into US dollars). A salary of US$25,000 puts you in the "rich" sector of the population.
Hang on, isn't Napster legal under this? I sure didn't leave my home to download from it.
Unfortunately Napster is trying to make a commercial profit from its songs now, but it wasn't when it started.
It's pretty hard to write such a complex project in 72 hours without having very well-organised, readable, and manageable-amongst-a-team code.
Many Open Source projects get by on awful code because the developers can sit there for months trying to figure out how so-and-so works before being able to write their patch and submit it.