Actually, I think that Linspire is well suited for technical reasons too. They provide a remarkably Windows-like environment which other distros go out of their way *not* to do. The result is an OS which is pretty familiar to the one in the student's household. With the added advantage of a full suite of programs and easy system management tools (which I hear are pretty good), then it's almost a drop in replacement for Windows.
Linspire also does a lot of "it-just-works" modifications. Check out Linspire's distrowatch page for some good overviews and reviews.
So yes, they are good at marketing themselves, but I believe that marketing aside they would still be a good choice for schools to deploy.
What would be really cool (and worth a couple hundred to me), is if the keys would be able to context change. Like if you press control, then you get little icons on the keys for the control+key actions for each particular program.
And add an extension on that: put little heat sensors on each key and a little two line LCD on the top of the key board. So now, not only do you get the icons for each meta key action, if you put your finger down, you can get a tool-tip like text description of it. Now *that* would be really cool.
I could probably go on for about an hour with the posibilities this thing brings up. Best not get too excited about it before it shows up though.
I'm glad I've found someone I agree with. Other reviews I've seen just exult SCTSLT as a marvel of scifi uniqueness. However, I found it to be frustrating. Though I found it compelling, you're right, I wanted more explanation.
The flashbacks interrupt the story flow, and little devices he uses are sometimes painful. Especially that device that repeats a single sentence and fills in content in parenthesis. The characters are memorable and the dialogue was good. But I felt like I wasn't getting it. Like somehow I had to look deeper to extract meaning. However, it was meaning that I never got.
The social commentary was evident and poignant. The descriptions were lively and vivid. But overall, I found it to be lacking and even frustrating to read (ie "Oh god, why another flashback, we were just getting to the good part!!", "What the hell *is* he??").
If Cory is still reading down this far, I wonder if anybody shared this kind of review. You're evidently a gifted writer and I'll dive into your other works. SCTSLT, though isn't my cup of tea.
I had the same though earlier, but came to the conclusion that it would be hard to implement. For one thing, the root DNS server would have to work even harder.
Now they have to know everything, not just where to send.co.uk stuff. It would require reworking the heirachial structure of DNS a bit.
D-day for the invasion of Normandy was originally set for June 5, 1944, but bad weather caused Gen. Dwight Eisenhower to delay until June 6, and that date has been popularly referred to ever since by the short title "D-day". (In French, it is called jour-J.) Because of this, planners of later military operations sometimes avoided the term. For example, Douglas MacArthur's invasion of Leyte began on "A-day", and the invasion of Okinawa began on "L Day". MacArthur's proposed invasions of Japan would have begun on "X-Day" (Kyushu, scheduled for November 1945) and "Y-Day" (Honshu, scheduled for March 1946).
So, yes, in many instances D-Day was the set time of invasion. But not all invasions in WWII began on D-Day. You might want to look something up before to go making a fool of yourself.
So if we really want to be honest about the count-down, we should say T-65 and then only hold when there is a real delay rather than having four or twelve hour holds which aren't counted.
Why would we want to be honest about the count-down? Is that more important than the shuttle?
All that would achieve is to raise the bar as to when a stoppage was put on. There's more pressure to get it done in 5 min 4 seconds rather than when the check is done. Which would you rather have?
Also, I'm guessing NASA put a little bit more thought into it than you. A countdown with planned stopages for critical steps, processes and checkes sounds a lot safer than a "65-hours or bust!" timer. Who cares if it's 65 real hours or 43? Nobody really cares until T-1 minute anyway.
They have not been "grown up and been socialized in isolation from mainstream society" as much as you might think. The world is all around them. I don't know if you've ever been to Amish country, but at least in Lancaster, PA, you can't really be isolated anymore.
I know I alot of people that grew up there that played regularly with amish kids. The amish and mennonites would go to the local schools and participate in things like sports and other activities that were deemed acceptable. They know more than you'd think about pop culture. I know, I gotten drunk with some who were out on their own.
None of them thought the outside world was "ultimately... both frightening and hollow", but rather unfriendly and shallow. AFIAK, they all went back. Not because they weren't prepared for it, but because they *really* wanted to. The Amish don't pull any punches there. They want you to make a fully informed decision. They are not stupid and don't want you to come back because you were frightened. They'll ask you when you come back. They want to make sure that you're really coming back on your own accord. There's no pressure, subversion, or brainwashing. To compare them to cultish communities shows you really don't know anything about the amish.
Thank you. I agree completely. When I started reading this thread I waded through the OMG WTF! MSCE is teh SUXOR!!. However, in the real world, it may get you in the door. And anything that helps you do that is pretty much worth the effort.
I'm looking for a job right now and have my resume submitted to several different tech staffing places. Even though I'm not looking for any MS position, they *all* suggested getting an MSCE and RHCE or LPI. Right now I don't have the money to do RHCE, so I'm getting an LPI and MSCE to pad the resume.
Yes most certs are effectively useless and judged that way by the people who know. Rarely, however, do the people that know tech, bring you in for the first interview. 90% are HR people who only care about keywords and certs. "Oh we need somebody to do JNI, if this Java guy doesn't have it on his resume, then it's out-pile for him", even though, to me listing every obscure java related tech looks pretty rediculous.
At the suggestion of several people I wrote two different resumes according to who would be reading it. The dumbed-down "at-a-glace" resume for the HR people to get me in the door and the "real" version that doesn't make me look like a tool to the technical people.
In conclusion, don't knock trying to get an MSCE. Even though it sucks, it will help you. Even though its fairly worthless, it gets you in the door with people that don't know that. Furthermore, if you've gotten it without your employer paying for it it makes you look like you're doing everything you can to stay abreast of things in the indstry.
I believe the best solution would have fallen between the "duct-tape" mod and the real release. I can see, with the leagons of doom coming toward you, you might forget to look for duct tape. However, if you could pull out the flash light for use with the one handed weapons, and maybe a couple of the two handed weapons but make the accuracy suck would have been a great comprimise.
Yeah, because saline has the same diffusive properties as blood. Dipshit. Even if you can use a fluid with the same properties as blood, or use even blood itself, does the trauma the hand goes through during separation invalidate it?
Furthermore, showing up at the scaner with an apparatus to make the hand seem alive would be promiscuous at least. Oh, I forgot as an AC you can shout out solutions to problems you don't really know about or have really thought out and call people names while doing it. Dipshit.
Ok, so what floating point number represents PI? The IEEE floating point standard, like all other binary numberical representations, can only represent a finate number of states. Use however many bits you want, it'll never be continuous.
Furthermore, actually using different values and using digital values to represent them are two totally different things.
And what are the subatomic particles made out of? No one knows. No one knows if matter is finitely divisible. Therefore you can't make the analogy that neurons could be fully described using digital technology. Sure electrons may have a number of finite states, but what about velocity? Is there a quantum distance and time?
Furthermore, the amount of complexity between subatomic particles and neurons bears no resemblence to that of a floating point datum and it's binary representation.
Thus the GP statement is right. Computers can't *really* do shades of grey. They can only approximate to a fine degree. For example, for every floating point number you give me, I can give you an infinate number of numbers that the floating point can't describe.
Not couldn't. Wouldn't. Powerful difference there is.
Re:Is it just me, or why not explain it better?
on
Eclipse 3.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
I have nothing but respect for people who code in xemacs or vi or whatever non-IDE they want to use. Hell, I did it for a year in vi because I had to develop on remote unix platforms where taking even 50% cpu and ram was out of the question. And I liked it.
However, as an IDE guy I do know and have tried most of the non-IDE methods out there, as well as most of the freely available IDEs. I like to try to know what is popular to use agmounst my fellow developers. That way I can evalute products, take best practices, understand new developement paradyms and processes, etc.
In a profession that changes so quickly, how can you afford not to be constantly looking for the best way to do your job? Like I said, you may be fine with vi. You may not want to try Eclipse for any number of perfectly valid reasons. But to not even have *heard* of it?
For instance, I've never used emacs (and personally don't really like it) for any length of time, but I've *heard* of it, and know what it's good for. Therefore when a situation arrives in the future, I'll be better able to choose the right tool for the job.
But a java developer who as never even heard of a very popular developement evironment? I'm not so sure I'd take them as very experienced or have stellar coding skills. It's an indicator. ie If they haven't heard of eclipse, what else don't they know? I've seen these kind of people back in college and they wind up doing things like reimplementing basic API.
Re:Is it just me, or why not explain it better?
on
Eclipse 3.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
I am surprised. Am I being unreasonable in that everybody java should know of Eclipse?
I used Ultraedit during my first year of college when I found that using notepad wasn't nearly good enough. I basically started to use it for line numbering hehe. Shows you how anyhting is better than notepad. Anyway, yeah, it's a really good product.
However, since then I've moved to JEdit. It's free (libre), the base install is simple, and it's integrated plugin manager allows almost IDE functionality. I figured I'd recommend it since you've never heard of eclipse. And not to start a flame war, but IMHO it's the best pure-GUI programmer's text editor out there.
Re:Is it just me, or why not explain it better?
on
Eclipse 3.1 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"Think. Consider your audience. Then post."
While I agree with your main point somewhat, that you should include a short intro "what-is-it" blurb on non-trivial stuff, I'll have to disagree from there.
I don't believe you
1. Are a serious/competant Java developer
2. Have more than a year's Java development (non-classroom) experience
3. that you really work in java and are maybe a college student
How can you have never have heard of Eclipse? As any developer you should always be evaluating the best tools. Guess what a 'java ide' google search returns as it's number 1 result? In your experience researching solutions or problems in newgroups, mailing lists, IRC (ie #java @ freeenode) etc. etc. you've **never** heard of eclipse? That's like knowing and running linux and never ever hearing about debian.
But seriously man, you need to get yourself out there and looking for the best solution, wether that be Apache Commons libs for your software, jUnit for unit testing, or ant for build configuration. You should **always** know what your peers are using even though you may not like the product.
I know many developers that don't like Eclipse because of a variety of reasons, but I've never, ever, even heard of somebody who didn't hear of eclipse for years. I'm not trying to insult you or anything, but seriously man get your head out there.
or in team matches, you can tell your buddies where he was
In CoD dead teammates can't talk to live teammates. Sure you could use team speak or something else outside the game, but then you're already cheating.
Anyway, the killcam *does* give away sniping spots (or what you were doing a little bit before you killed somebody) so you'll know where to look next round. But I think that's still an advantage because you can't sit in the same spot every time. You have to adapt, and having everybody constantly doing that makes the game more fun.
IMHO CoD is light years away from Counter strike. Why do people still play that?
We already had people writing diaries and making lots of pictures in WWII. The improvement isn't that great.
Huh? We already know the second Iraqi war as well as WWII. It tooks *decades* for some of the stuff to come out of WWII. If you talk about biased-journalism, propaganda and government interference, it was about, oh, a million times greater back then.
With the advent of satelite communications and 24-hour news services the general public knows about major events and combat movements hours or days after they happen. Not months or years. Yes, it's not perfect, and no it's not unbaised. However, it *is* leaps and bounds better journalism than what was allowed back during WWII.
The improvement isn't that great? What the hell are you talking about. In which reguard *isn't* reporting better? No detail? Have you even watched the news or gone to independant websites? Like, I don't know, say read Egyptian and Saudi editorials, watch a little Al Jazeera.
It's not that there is a dearth of information, it's that there's too much information. Is the 'real' truth hard to assemble from the disparate sources? Oh yes. But is there an improvement from WWII?
I know a lot of people like you. 10000 songs for a person in their mid 20's isn't nearly impossible. Assuming 13 tracks per CD, 10000 songs is only buying one CD per week for 15 years.
If you physically share CD's with four friends, which you can leagally do with itunes (well technically, four computers), it's only 1 cd per month for 15 years, or 1 per week for 4 and 1/4 years. There are countless scenarios in which younger people might obtain 10000 songs without using P2P services.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I think that Linspire is well suited for technical reasons too. They provide a remarkably Windows-like environment which other distros go out of their way *not* to do. The result is an OS which is pretty familiar to the one in the student's household. With the added advantage of a full suite of programs and easy system management tools (which I hear are pretty good), then it's almost a drop in replacement for Windows.
Linspire also does a lot of "it-just-works" modifications. Check out Linspire's distrowatch page for some good overviews and reviews. So yes, they are good at marketing themselves, but I believe that marketing aside they would still be a good choice for schools to deploy.
It does when retailers such as Walmart don't carry AO games.
-extra keys ...,
What would be really cool (and worth a couple hundred to me), is if the keys would be able to context change. Like if you press control, then you get little icons on the keys for the control+key actions for each particular program.
And add an extension on that: put little heat sensors on each key and a little two line LCD on the top of the key board. So now, not only do you get the icons for each meta key action, if you put your finger down, you can get a tool-tip like text description of it. Now *that* would be really cool.
I could probably go on for about an hour with the posibilities this thing brings up. Best not get too excited about it before it shows up though.
I'm glad I've found someone I agree with. Other reviews I've seen just exult SCTSLT as a marvel of scifi uniqueness. However, I found it to be frustrating. Though I found it compelling, you're right, I wanted more explanation.
The flashbacks interrupt the story flow, and little devices he uses are sometimes painful. Especially that device that repeats a single sentence and fills in content in parenthesis. The characters are memorable and the dialogue was good. But I felt like I wasn't getting it. Like somehow I had to look deeper to extract meaning. However, it was meaning that I never got.
The social commentary was evident and poignant. The descriptions were lively and vivid. But overall, I found it to be lacking and even frustrating to read (ie "Oh god, why another flashback, we were just getting to the good part!!", "What the hell *is* he??").
If Cory is still reading down this far, I wonder if anybody shared this kind of review. You're evidently a gifted writer and I'll dive into your other works. SCTSLT, though isn't my cup of tea.
I had the same though earlier, but came to the conclusion that it would be hard to implement. For one thing, the root DNS server would have to work even harder.
.co.uk stuff. It would require reworking the heirachial structure of DNS a bit.
Now they have to know everything, not just where to send
From wikipedia.org on D-Day:
D-day for the invasion of Normandy was originally set for June 5, 1944, but bad weather caused Gen. Dwight Eisenhower to delay until June 6, and that date has been popularly referred to ever since by the short title "D-day". (In French, it is called jour-J.) Because of this, planners of later military operations sometimes avoided the term. For example, Douglas MacArthur's invasion of Leyte began on "A-day", and the invasion of Okinawa began on "L Day". MacArthur's proposed invasions of Japan would have begun on "X-Day" (Kyushu, scheduled for November 1945) and "Y-Day" (Honshu, scheduled for March 1946).
So, yes, in many instances D-Day was the set time of invasion. But not all invasions in WWII began on D-Day. You might want to look something up before to go making a fool of yourself.
So if we really want to be honest about the count-down, we should say T-65 and then only hold when there is a real delay rather than having four or twelve hour holds which aren't counted.
Why would we want to be honest about the count-down? Is that more important than the shuttle?
All that would achieve is to raise the bar as to when a stoppage was put on. There's more pressure to get it done in 5 min 4 seconds rather than when the check is done. Which would you rather have?
Also, I'm guessing NASA put a little bit more thought into it than you. A countdown with planned stopages for critical steps, processes and checkes sounds a lot safer than a "65-hours or bust!" timer. Who cares if it's 65 real hours or 43? Nobody really cares until T-1 minute anyway.
They have not been "grown up and been socialized in isolation from mainstream society" as much as you might think. The world is all around them. I don't know if you've ever been to Amish country, but at least in Lancaster, PA, you can't really be isolated anymore.
... both frightening and hollow", but rather unfriendly and shallow. AFIAK, they all went back. Not because they weren't prepared for it, but because they *really* wanted to. The Amish don't pull any punches there. They want you to make a fully informed decision. They are not stupid and don't want you to come back because you were frightened. They'll ask you when you come back. They want to make sure that you're really coming back on your own accord. There's no pressure, subversion, or brainwashing. To compare them to cultish communities shows you really don't know anything about the amish.
I know I alot of people that grew up there that played regularly with amish kids. The amish and mennonites would go to the local schools and participate in things like sports and other activities that were deemed acceptable. They know more than you'd think about pop culture. I know, I gotten drunk with some who were out on their own.
None of them thought the outside world was "ultimately
Thank you. I agree completely. When I started reading this thread I waded through the OMG WTF! MSCE is teh SUXOR!!. However, in the real world, it may get you in the door. And anything that helps you do that is pretty much worth the effort.
I'm looking for a job right now and have my resume submitted to several different tech staffing places. Even though I'm not looking for any MS position, they *all* suggested getting an MSCE and RHCE or LPI. Right now I don't have the money to do RHCE, so I'm getting an LPI and MSCE to pad the resume.
Yes most certs are effectively useless and judged that way by the people who know. Rarely, however, do the people that know tech, bring you in for the first interview. 90% are HR people who only care about keywords and certs. "Oh we need somebody to do JNI, if this Java guy doesn't have it on his resume, then it's out-pile for him", even though, to me listing every obscure java related tech looks pretty rediculous.
At the suggestion of several people I wrote two different resumes according to who would be reading it. The dumbed-down "at-a-glace" resume for the HR people to get me in the door and the "real" version that doesn't make me look like a tool to the technical people.
In conclusion, don't knock trying to get an MSCE. Even though it sucks, it will help you. Even though its fairly worthless, it gets you in the door with people that don't know that. Furthermore, if you've gotten it without your employer paying for it it makes you look like you're doing everything you can to stay abreast of things in the indstry.
Yeah, well a little of both.
I believe the best solution would have fallen between the "duct-tape" mod and the real release. I can see, with the leagons of doom coming toward you, you might forget to look for duct tape. However, if you could pull out the flash light for use with the one handed weapons, and maybe a couple of the two handed weapons but make the accuracy suck would have been a great comprimise.
I'm reminded of the adage:
"Perfection is not when there is nothing left to add, but rather when there is nothing left to take away."
Upon hearing this the c-book writer was enlightened.
Yeah, because saline has the same diffusive properties as blood. Dipshit. Even if you can use a fluid with the same properties as blood, or use even blood itself, does the trauma the hand goes through during separation invalidate it?
Furthermore, showing up at the scaner with an apparatus to make the hand seem alive would be promiscuous at least. Oh, I forgot as an AC you can shout out solutions to problems you don't really know about or have really thought out and call people names while doing it. Dipshit.
Ok, so what floating point number represents PI? The IEEE floating point standard, like all other binary numberical representations, can only represent a finate number of states. Use however many bits you want, it'll never be continuous.
Furthermore, actually using different values and using digital values to represent them are two totally different things.
And what are the subatomic particles made out of? No one knows. No one knows if matter is finitely divisible. Therefore you can't make the analogy that neurons could be fully described using digital technology. Sure electrons may have a number of finite states, but what about velocity? Is there a quantum distance and time?
Furthermore, the amount of complexity between subatomic particles and neurons bears no resemblence to that of a floating point datum and it's binary representation.
Thus the GP statement is right. Computers can't *really* do shades of grey. They can only approximate to a fine degree. For example, for every floating point number you give me, I can give you an infinate number of numbers that the floating point can't describe.
Yoda says:
Not couldn't. Wouldn't. Powerful difference there is.
I have nothing but respect for people who code in xemacs or vi or whatever non-IDE they want to use. Hell, I did it for a year in vi because I had to develop on remote unix platforms where taking even 50% cpu and ram was out of the question. And I liked it.
However, as an IDE guy I do know and have tried most of the non-IDE methods out there, as well as most of the freely available IDEs. I like to try to know what is popular to use agmounst my fellow developers. That way I can evalute products, take best practices, understand new developement paradyms and processes, etc.
In a profession that changes so quickly, how can you afford not to be constantly looking for the best way to do your job? Like I said, you may be fine with vi. You may not want to try Eclipse for any number of perfectly valid reasons. But to not even have *heard* of it?
For instance, I've never used emacs (and personally don't really like it) for any length of time, but I've *heard* of it, and know what it's good for. Therefore when a situation arrives in the future, I'll be better able to choose the right tool for the job.
But a java developer who as never even heard of a very popular developement evironment? I'm not so sure I'd take them as very experienced or have stellar coding skills. It's an indicator. ie If they haven't heard of eclipse, what else don't they know? I've seen these kind of people back in college and they wind up doing things like reimplementing basic API.
I am surprised. Am I being unreasonable in that everybody java should know of Eclipse?
Or it is just a statement about developers today?
I responded at another of your posts so...
I used Ultraedit during my first year of college when I found that using notepad wasn't nearly good enough. I basically started to use it for line numbering hehe. Shows you how anyhting is better than notepad. Anyway, yeah, it's a really good product.
However, since then I've moved to JEdit. It's free (libre), the base install is simple, and it's integrated plugin manager allows almost IDE functionality. I figured I'd recommend it since you've never heard of eclipse. And not to start a flame war, but IMHO it's the best pure-GUI programmer's text editor out there.
"Think. Consider your audience. Then post."
While I agree with your main point somewhat, that you should include a short intro "what-is-it" blurb on non-trivial stuff, I'll have to disagree from there.
I don't believe you
1. Are a serious/competant Java developer
2. Have more than a year's Java development (non-classroom) experience
3. that you really work in java and are maybe a college student
How can you have never have heard of Eclipse? As any developer you should always be evaluating the best tools. Guess what a 'java ide' google search returns as it's number 1 result? In your experience researching solutions or problems in newgroups, mailing lists, IRC (ie #java @ freeenode) etc. etc. you've **never** heard of eclipse? That's like knowing and running linux and never ever hearing about debian.
But seriously man, you need to get yourself out there and looking for the best solution, wether that be Apache Commons libs for your software, jUnit for unit testing, or ant for build configuration. You should **always** know what your peers are using even though you may not like the product.
I know many developers that don't like Eclipse because of a variety of reasons, but I've never, ever, even heard of somebody who didn't hear of eclipse for years. I'm not trying to insult you or anything, but seriously man get your head out there.
(I realize that I'm responding to a troll, but just to clear it up for other people...)
Um... in some programming languages arrays *are* indexed from, but in binary, like every other number-base system 0 is 0. Don't believe me?
Suppose we have one foobar. And we get another. How many do we have?
0+0=0
or
1+1=10
Right. Repeat after me: binary 1 is decimal 1. binary 10 is decimal 2. Oh... wait... was your comment suppose to be funny?
or in team matches, you can tell your buddies where he was
In CoD dead teammates can't talk to live teammates. Sure you could use team speak or something else outside the game, but then you're already cheating.
Anyway, the killcam *does* give away sniping spots (or what you were doing a little bit before you killed somebody) so you'll know where to look next round. But I think that's still an advantage because you can't sit in the same spot every time. You have to adapt, and having everybody constantly doing that makes the game more fun.
IMHO CoD is light years away from Counter strike. Why do people still play that?
We already had people writing diaries and making lots of pictures in WWII. The improvement isn't that great.
Huh? We already know the second Iraqi war as well as WWII. It tooks *decades* for some of the stuff to come out of WWII. If you talk about biased-journalism, propaganda and government interference, it was about, oh, a million times greater back then.
With the advent of satelite communications and 24-hour news services the general public knows about major events and combat movements hours or days after they happen. Not months or years. Yes, it's not perfect, and no it's not unbaised. However, it *is* leaps and bounds better journalism than what was allowed back during WWII.
The improvement isn't that great? What the hell are you talking about. In which reguard *isn't* reporting better? No detail? Have you even watched the news or gone to independant websites? Like, I don't know, say read Egyptian and Saudi editorials, watch a little Al Jazeera.
It's not that there is a dearth of information, it's that there's too much information. Is the 'real' truth hard to assemble from the disparate sources? Oh yes. But is there an improvement from WWII?
You tell me, Mr. AC, how can there not be?
I know a lot of people like you. 10000 songs for a person in their mid 20's isn't nearly impossible. Assuming 13 tracks per CD, 10000 songs is only buying one CD per week for 15 years.
If you physically share CD's with four friends, which you can leagally do with itunes (well technically, four computers), it's only 1 cd per month for 15 years, or 1 per week for 4 and 1/4 years. There are countless scenarios in which younger people might obtain 10000 songs without using P2P services.
If you are going to kharma whore, at the very minimum please make sure there's white space.
If you can't take the time to make the post minimally readable, you don't deserve the mod-points.
Boy, that couldn't possibly be a problem with the driver and not the kernel could it?