Probably more relevant to techies than TFA. Interestingly, ge stopped his prepared statement about halfway into his alloted 50 minutes to take questions.
There's a review of the Samsung MM-A800 phone at the NY Times entitled "The Cellphone That Does Everything Imaginable, at Least Sort Of". He writes:
The trouble is, all of these features saddle the poor little device with a complexity that will boggle even the veteran cell fan. You have to wade your way through a staggering 583 menu commands, along with far too many pointless "Are you sure?" confirmations, to find them all. Just looking up your own phone number requires eight button presses, for goodness' sake.
Simply point out to this idiot that if they withhold your last paycheck that
you will go to a lawyer who is an expert on employment law in your state
who will love to take on your case and totally ream the company for
potentially a hundred times as much money as your last paycheck.
Unless you signed an employment agreement that requires you to
find your replacement (which you probably didn't and which wouldn't
stand up in court anyway) they don't have a leg to stand on.
Just having permissions doesn't mean they're used. UNIX has had permissions since the '70s but many programs were written to run as root. There were lots of artcles/chapters in books in the '80s and '90s warning UNIX sysadmins of the dangers of this. I think Solaris was pretty clean on this by the mid to late '90s (probably earlier), and I haven't run into any of this on OS X so I suppose the *BSDs are behaving nicely.
Sometimes the convenience of not having to mess with permissions seduces developers to the dark side.
Mr. Gates has selective memory
on
The PC Is Not Dead
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
From Mr. Gates article: Back when IBM (IBM ) launched its first personal computer in 1981, business computing was a scarce resource. If a company was large enough even to afford computers, they were mostly so-called dumb terminals hooked up to large mainframe computers.
Mr. Gates seems to forget the Apple II, which a lot of businesses owned before 1981. IBM did not create the idea of personal computers for business, they merely responded (grudgingly) to their customers.
Bill should know this - unless he's forgotten that his company existed before 1981 - he's no doubt just trying to spin it his way. In any case he doesn't actually address the issues in the original article which argues that intranet/internet based applications will make life easier for corporate computing.
People who can only spin the past are likely to be spun by the future.
large class action lawsuit against the private firm
Class action lawsuits were essentially outlawed by the Rupublican Congress and
President Bush this week. Nobody will ever get any damages from Choicepoint.
RMS complains that not everyone in the world does what he wants.
This isn't news for nerds - they all know what RMS is about.
Is it stuff that matters? Depends on whether you think that Mr, Stallman's opinion matters. Personally I think he hasn't been relevant for a long time.
I noticed that there was no Python binding listed. Then I looked at the examples and they looked a lot like Python dictionaries and lists so I fired up the python interpreter and
fed it the following from one of the example pages:
{ "glossary": { "title": "example glossary", "GlossDiv": { "title": "S", "GlossList": [{ "ID": "SGML", "SortAs": "SGML", "GlossTerm": "Standard Generalized Markup Language", "Acronym": "SGML", "Abbrev": "ISO 8879:1986", "GlossDef": "A meta-markup language, used to create markup languages such as DocBook.", "GlossSeeAlso": ["GML", "XML", "markup"]}]}}}
and Python accepted it without complaint.
I can see a couple issues - Python uses None instead of null and Python doesn't always play nicely with Unicode - but a Python *binding* will be *very* lightweight.
Not just for the Tin Foil hat crowd. Those who are criminally inclined may find a GPS Jammer handy. Though this does violate FCC regulations. But hey when you committing a crime, does breaking one more law matter?
If you see a GPS device on your car call the cops and say "Somebody put a bomb on my car!" The reaction should be entertaining.
This buddy of mine was once working about five minutes from where I was working so one morning I called him up and said "Want to meet for lunch?" and he said "No, I've got a bug, can't take time for lunch." So I called him the next morning and asked him about lunch again. He said that he still had the bug and couldn't take tiime for lunch. I asked him if he'd fixed the bug by not going to lunch the previous day. After a long period of silence I asked him when I should pick him up for lunch. He bitched about the bug in the car, and then we talked about other things at lunch.
When I talked to him the next morning he said he'd found the bug within an hour after getting back from lunch.
I will let the reader find the moral to this story.
If you used a good mail client you'd never see this stuff.
I use the Mail program that comes with Mac OS X which uses Bayesian filtering and user defined rules. In the last 26 hours it marked 304 messages as junk and no SPAM/viruses showed up in my inbox. A few weeks ago I started getting 'Rolex' SPAM - I added a rule to classify email with 'Rolex' in the subject as junk and I don't see them any more.
Surely there's some equally good client for whatever OS you use.
I can understand a desire for adding grammars that are more powerful than
regular expressions in Perl 6 but it opens up a whole new can of worms.
The grammars appear to be in a class called "context free languages"(CFGs). Some CFGs are ambiguous in the sense that a given "sentence" can be derived from more than one set of rules. Traditional tools such as yacc/bison tell you where there is ambiguity in your rules - even then it isn't always easy to remove the ambiguity (trust me on this). If the Perl 6 system doesn't help the programmer debug the grammar he/she will not be happy when the parsing doesn't work as expected.
In addition, the article ends the description of features with "And much more...". It appears that Perl 6 grammars are more powerful than CFGs. If they can simulate a Turing machine...
I'm curious as to why then it becomes much harder for adults who are native speakers of one class of language(say Romantic) to learn languages that are not related to their native tongue(for example Chinese speakers who learn English and vica-versa). The summary doesn't state if perhaps we are teaching language the wrong way.
The article suggests that infants create neural connections that are optimized to the phonemes of the first language(s) they hear. Later in life, when confronted with a slightly (or massively) different set of phonemes from a new language the brain struggles to classify the sounds. This is according to a lecture I heard by an expert on early language acquisition.
My bank has a system that when they send me a new debit or credit card it is not active until I call a toll-free number from the home phone number they have on file. Guess this blows that 'security' feature away.
Ever tried a fresh install of any OS, out of the box? Granted, I don't own/use Macs
On a clean Mac install you might have to tell it what kind of printer you have. Usually no seperate drivers. Two button USB mice work when you plug 'em in, even though Apple only ships one button mice.
Slashdot Mirror
http://videosrv14.cs.washington.edu/info/audio/mp3 /colloq/ESchmidt_050526.mp3
Probably more relevant to techies than TFA. Interestingly, ge stopped his prepared statement about halfway into his alloted 50 minutes to take questions.
The trouble is, all of these features saddle the poor little device with a complexity that will boggle even the veteran cell fan. You have to wade your way through a staggering 583 menu commands, along with far too many pointless "Are you sure?" confirmations, to find them all. Just looking up your own phone number requires eight button presses, for goodness' sake.
Unless you signed an employment agreement that requires you to find your replacement (which you probably didn't and which wouldn't stand up in court anyway) they don't have a leg to stand on.
Like OS X already does.
the ability to have files in more than one folder simultaneously
Like the symbolic links every flavor of UNIX has had for about 30 years.
Sometimes the convenience of not having to mess with permissions seduces developers to the dark side.
Back when IBM (IBM ) launched its first personal computer in 1981, business computing was a scarce resource. If a company was large enough even to afford computers, they were mostly so-called dumb terminals hooked up to large mainframe computers.
Mr. Gates seems to forget the Apple II, which a lot of businesses owned before 1981. IBM did not create the idea of personal computers for business, they merely responded (grudgingly) to their customers.
Bill should know this - unless he's forgotten that his company existed before 1981 - he's no doubt just trying to spin it his way. In any case he doesn't actually address the issues in the original article which argues that intranet/internet based applications will make life easier for corporate computing.
People who can only spin the past are likely to be spun by the future.
Lots of software announcements happen on April Fools Day.
What FPS games have been ported to Blue Gene? Are any of those multi-player?
Class action lawsuits were essentially outlawed by the Rupublican Congress and President Bush this week. Nobody will ever get any damages from Choicepoint.
This isn't news for nerds - they all know what RMS is about.
Is it stuff that matters? Depends on whether you think that Mr, Stallman's opinion matters. Personally I think he hasn't been relevant for a long time.
Speaking of relevance, where's GNU/HURD?
Yes, I expect to get modded down.
Firefox is cross-platform - this baby is not. Perhaps K-Meleon is a cousin.
I can see a couple issues - Python uses None instead of null and Python doesn't always play nicely with Unicode - but a Python *binding* will be *very* lightweight.
Hitachi and others will continue to push the limit and introduce a 500GB model to the market very soon.
I guess very soon means last week, since the MacMall catalog that hit my mailbox last week offers a 500GB drive.
If you see a GPS device on your car call the cops and say "Somebody put a bomb on my car!" The reaction should be entertaining.
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/06/writestuff.ht ml
When I talked to him the next morning he said he'd found the bug within an hour after getting back from lunch.
I will let the reader find the moral to this story.
How do the Israelis get from one town to another?
Israeli settlements in the West Bank have special highways back into Israel - they don't get stopped.
Lots of shows go to DVD now. The people who own "Sex and the City" want people to rent/buy season one DVDs, not download episodes.
btefnet.net
The MPAA and RIAA have little reason to go after them.
Most of the companies that make movies also make TV shows, so the MPAA probably would go after them.
"Gee, Dad, the GPS feature on my phone must not work in the car."
I use the Mail program that comes with Mac OS X which uses Bayesian filtering and user defined rules. In the last 26 hours it marked 304 messages as junk and no SPAM/viruses showed up in my inbox. A few weeks ago I started getting 'Rolex' SPAM - I added a rule to classify email with 'Rolex' in the subject as junk and I don't see them any more.
Surely there's some equally good client for whatever OS you use.
The grammars appear to be in a class called "context free languages"(CFGs). Some CFGs are ambiguous in the sense that a given "sentence" can be derived from more than one set of rules. Traditional tools such as yacc/bison tell you where there is ambiguity in your rules - even then it isn't always easy to remove the ambiguity (trust me on this). If the Perl 6 system doesn't help the programmer debug the grammar he/she will not be happy when the parsing doesn't work as expected.
In addition, the article ends the description of features with "And much more...". It appears that Perl 6 grammars are more powerful than CFGs. If they can simulate a Turing machine...
The article suggests that infants create neural connections that are optimized to the phonemes of the first language(s) they hear. Later in life, when confronted with a slightly (or massively) different set of phonemes from a new language the brain struggles to classify the sounds. This is according to a lecture I heard by an expert on early language acquisition.
My bank has a system that when they send me a new debit or credit card it is not active until I call a toll-free number from the home phone number they have on file. Guess this blows that 'security' feature away.
On a clean Mac install you might have to tell it what kind of printer you have. Usually no seperate drivers. Two button USB mice work when you plug 'em in, even though Apple only ships one button mice.