$_='A doctor, a lawyer, and a mathematician were having a conversation about the relative benefits of wives and mistresses.
The doctor insisted that, from a health perspective, it was far better to have a wife. He talked about stress, relaxation, routine, and other factors.
The lawyer contended that it was better to have a mistress, because that way you retain more of your legal rights, she doesn't own half your property, and so forth.
The mathematician said that he could see both sides of that argument, but really he thought it was best to have both.
"Both?", the doctor and the lawyer exclaimed. "Why?"
"Sure, both. That way, when the wife thinks you're with the mistress, and the mistress thinks you're with the wife, you can sneak off by yourself and do mathematics." '; print; s/mathematician/computer geek/; s/mathematics/programming/; print;
You dial the wrong number on your phone and look for "undo". When you don't find it, you grumble about how primitive the phones are.
You complain that your alarm clock is "inflexible" and "worthless" because it can't sync with your calendar and automatically know when to wake you up.
You're looking through the videos at the public library, and you do a sudden doubletake. "Yeh, cool, I didn't know there was a video about the CPAN." Then you realize it's CSPAN archives." (This actually happened to me.)
You know more IP addresses off the top of your head than phone numbers. You know the ISO country codes for nations you can't locate on the map. You've never met most of your friends in person.
You catch yourself using computer commands as words in nontechnical conversation, such as, "Is that still under warranty? I'll have to grep the filing cabinet and see if I can find the purchase order." You arrange the contents of your (physical) desk drawers hierarchically, like a filesystem.
You've had dreams in a programming language.
You want to develop a standard for where Post-It sticky notes should be attached relative to the contents of a document, so that the results can be wellformed and easy to parse.
> I'll end up plopping down cash on a multi laser product to play either, > and one will wither and die a year or two later.
Both will wither and die, because neither of them holds *enough* more than a regular DVD. Even DVD would never have "made it" if it weren't for Hollywood pusing it so hard, because it's not *that* much better than CDs (or VHS, if you're more interested in the video side).
Remember how long the 1.44MB floppy held on, and on, and on, until *finally* the CD burners got cheap enough to really catch on? A CD holds, what, 500 times as much as a DSHD 3.5" floppy? Comparing them is almost ludicrous. And the blank ones cost much less than blank floppies ever did, too. Sure, there'll be intermediate products that people will use who really need that extra capacity, like there were between floppies and CDs (LS120 SuperDisks, for instance, or Zip and Jaz disks) -- but most folks will stick with the CD or the DVD, just like most folks stuck with the floppy, until the storage ratio is ludicrous, like 500:1 or so. I predict the next format to really make it (i.e., to replace the CD and the DVD) will need to hold at least 500 times what a CD-R holds (say about 350GB) probably more, which means it's several years out. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are the LS120 and Zip and Jaz of our time: formats that will be picked up and used by people who need to push the boundaries, but they will not catch on enough to replace the more mainstream formats.
> Wow, well I don't know much about phonetics but I do know that in Australia > we're taught, and pronounce it, as 'ridiculous'. Ie. with the 'rid' bit > pronounced like you'd say 'rid' in "get rid of it", not "get red of it".
More like "get reed of it", as if it were spelled "rediculous", with the e long (since only one consonant separates it from the next vowel). It usually comes out a little less distinct than "reed", though, due to the emphasis' generally being placed on the second syllable, so that it has more in common, pronunciation-wise, with "redecorate", "reduplicate", or "redundant".
If the i were pronounced like the e in red, that would be really bizarre (although there are stranger things in the English language). I've heard a number of different accents, most of them American (but a couple of others), and as far as I am aware the first i in ridiculous, as far as I'm aware, is always pronounced with the Latin long i sound, like the e in regard or the i in pita (which follows the Latin phonetics because it's a quite recent import from a foreign language). I suspect this may be because pronouncing it like the i in "ride" (which is really a dipthong) would be too difficult, but, with only one consonant following, it wants a long sound. If it were pronounced with the short i sound as in rid, you'd expect it to be spelled riddiculous. (Not that all spelling and pronunciation in English are fully regular, or anything...)
I have had significant exposure to several Commonwealth accents, notably the mumbly one used by BBC commentators, but it is possible that I have missed hearing the word "ridiculous" pronounced in them.
On a side note, a word that caught be utterly by surprise recently, in terms of the spelling, is paraphernalia. I checked three dictionaries before I had myself convinced that was right. I am quite certain I have never *EVER* heard anyone pronounce it with two r sounds.
No, really. The college I went to had cable in the dorms. The television in the lounge was always on. Occasionally when I had nothing pressing to do, or somewhat more often when I was trying to *avoid* the pressing things I *should* have been doing, I sat down there and tried to find something worth watching. It's been a little while now (I graduated in '97), but I somehow doubt the overall level of quality has improved several thousand percent.
> Humans & dinosaurs never coexisted on the planet.
Mainstream scientific dogmatism notwithstanding, we don't really know that. Claims to the contrary assume that a lack of contemporaneous fossils must necessarily mean a lack of contemporaeous existence, but that only works if the fossil record is reliably complete, and it's certainly not: there are known to be *huge* gaps in it. (This point is not in dispute. Paleontoligists are agreed that there are huge gaps in the record.) Basically, the fossil record can't tell you when something was extinct; it can tell you when something was *not* extinct, or it can say nothing, which is what it usually does. (Fossils don't usually form when something dies; only when there are rather special circumstances; consequently, if a given creature is even mildly rare, you can expect very few if any fossils to have formed.)
There are several examples of organisms that were believed to have been extinct for millions or tens of millions of years, due to an absense of recent fossils of them, and then they turned out not to have been extinct for so long after all. The most famous of these is the coelecanth. Additional creatures that are believed to have been extinct for countless aeons may in fact have only become extinct rather more recently. The only way to know for sure would involve time travel.
A number of the oldest surviving accounts of dragons (and similar beasts -- lindorms, wyverns, Behemoth, Grendel,...) sound *remarkably* dinosaur-like. I don't think it's reasonable to dismiss this out of hand based on an argument from silence in a source that is silent far more than it speaks. Those accounts *could* just be fanciful imagination (people are pretty inventive sometimes), but we don't *know* that.
One other point: the only definitions of "dinosaur" I have ever seen that exclude crocodiles are ones that have the word "extinct" in them.
> I've read that Hiroshima and Nagasaki still experience cancer rates well > above normal levels, and it's been 60 years since the bombing.
It's going to be a lot more than sixty years before we can get Mars terraformed to a livable level. (With that said, though, I am not convinced nuking it would do anything particularly useful. For terraforming Mars, there are much larger problems to solve than the lack of a greenhouse effect.)
> Nuking Mars would be the most efficient way to begin creating an > environment capable of supporting life. The first step would be to > warm the planet by creating a green house effect. Nuclear devices > would be perfect for kicking enough dust and water vapor into the > atmosphere to do this.
Interesting idea, but it's not that simple. Among other things, Mars isn't massive enough to hold enough atmosphere to create a big enough greenhouse to warm it to an Earthlike level, given its distance from the Sun.
> I'm pretty sure that every square meter of Earths surface can be seen > from one spy satellite or another at all times.
I doubt it. Some areas don't warrant it. A spy satellite is an investement; you deploy them where they'll be most useful.
Any place that's on a straight east-west line with key areas (mainly: the US, the former USSR, the middle east) is probably covered much as you describe, but there probably are some areas that are not, particularly in the southern hemisphere. There are probably north-south satellites that provide some coverage of these areas, but I suspect not 24/7 everywhere.
Bear in mind that a satellite can change it's orientation (which direction it's pointing) a limited number of times (before it has to be provided with fresh reaction mass or else becomes space junk), so they would tend to be pointed in a useful direction and left pointed that way, barring any really good reason to re-aim them. Consequently, when a new satellite is being deployed, it may be beneficial to deploy it in an area that already has pretty good satellite coverage, for the purpose of preventing or reducing the need to re-aim the extant satellites for that area. So new satellites would tend to continue to go to the strategically important areas, even when those areas already have enough satellites to get by, rather than to less important areas. Which would the CIA, for instance, have valued more in the 1980s: coverage of the Falkland Islands twice as often, or the ability to look at Vladivostok from two different angles at once without turning a satellite around? I am almost sure that most of the east-west spy satellites cover the northern hemisphere.
It is conceivable that some may have, after a fashion, using a binary inflammable (i.e., two chemicals excreted by separate glands that ignite when mixed). There are several types of organisms living today that use binary reactions of this sort to do various things. None produce fire per se in the fairy-tale dragon fashion, but there are beetles that create what could pass for an explosion...
There is no direct evidence, apart from the various dragon legends, that any particular type of dinosaur did anything like this, so the legends could just be fanciful imagination. But it's hard to be sure, when you're talking about something that's been extinct for a really long time; most of the information we've got to go on comes from skeletons. You can tell a lot from bones, but there are limits. The fire-breathing dragon mythos *was* pretty widespread in the ancient world, and it had to come from somewhere. It could have come from a single imaginative story that was really good and so was passed on and retold many times (and of course altered in the telling) until it became legend. Or it could have come from a real creature. It's very hard to be certain, without (you knew this had to come back to topic eventually) time travel.
> Do you have cable? Or Dish Network/DirecTV/whatever?
No. There's nothing on there I want to watch. It's the same junk as on broadcast TV, which I also don't watch. There's more of it and it's on more different times per day and on more different channels at once, but it's the same junk.
> Linux power users probably won't be interested unless they only want the hardware.
I recently ordered seven of the things for at work, specifically because I know the hardware components will all be ones that are known to work with Linux. They're going to be kiosks, basically, and they may very well end up running a different distro than Linspire, but I can expect none of the hardware to give me any driver trouble, hopefully. And they're priced very reasonably, for the low-end desktop-grade systems that they are. You wouldn't want them for high-demand applications, but the ones I bought basically have to be capable of running a web browser...
> What's different is that Windows has a "delete" function while Unix > has an "unlink" function
That depends on the filesystem. Linux will happily let you run a program that's on a FAT32 filesystem (possibly local or possibly on a disk in another computer, which may be running Windows, mounted via Samba's smbmount utility), and it will still happily let you delete it while it's still running.
Okay, so now we've got black hat crackers, white hat and grey hat security people, a Blue Hat security conference, a Red Hat distro, and of course the Man in the Yellow Hat. What next?
Oh, and I thought IBM was Big Blue. Microsoft's logos have the four colors (red, green, yellow, and blue), last I checked. Does that mean we're going to have Green Hats next?
> > ridiculous > Why is it that no one on slashdot can spell this word?
Because it "feels" intuitively like too common and/or lowbrow a word to have Latin phonetics. You expect a word like "actuarial" to be spelled with an i, but "ridiculous", despite having four syllables, is a word most of us learned before we were in school, so we expect it to have Anglo-Saxon phonetics.
Additionally, words with i in the first syllable almost all have Anglo-Saxon phonetics. Some time when you're bored, grep -e "^[b-df-hj-np-tv-z]*i"/usr/share/dict/words | less and look for words where the i is pronounced with a Latin long i sound like "ridiculous". Discounting ones where the i is followed by a nasal ng or nk sound (which pulls the i into the very common ing phonemic combination), it's quite rare. Most such words are either pronounced with short i (as in "bitter") or the Anglo-Saxon long i (as in "bite").
> there is no target="" attribute allowed on anchor tags
Because it is frankly none of the website's business what window or tab I do or do not choose to open a link in. If cretinous idiot loser webmasters wouldn't keep pulling exactly that kind of braindead schenanighans, Javascript maybe wouldn't have such a bad name with users.
> Or does obsfucating code and open source sound like they don't belong > in the same sentence? (Yes, I did RTFA. Just curious as to the response.)
Not all websites are licensed in an open-source fashion.
Any time you have an interpreted language (or a run-time-compiled language, for that matter), people will want a code obfuscator for use with it. It's a topic that comes up with annoying frequency on Perlmonks. (I like to point them at Acme::Eyedrops...)
This is true, as far as it goes, but I do think a less verbose name than getElementById might have been preferable; that *is* a lot of typing, for something that gets used stupendously often. The Perl-culture side of me says it's "bad Huffman coding" (a Wallism, IIRC). Perhaps something along the lines of document.elt("someelementid") would be reasonable.
> Yes, you *want* other code to be able to change your variables. Really. It > saves other people from needing to modify your code for no very good reason > (which would otherwise happen a *lot*), and, perhaps more importantly, it > saves you from having to accept a hillion jillion arguments to every > function, most of which would only get used occasionally.
Come to think of it, it's actually even more important than that. What it really saves you from is having the end user need to modify somebody *else's* code in order to get *your* code to work differently. Because the calling code doesn't necessarily know how the code it's calling needs to behave; that might need to be determined by the caller's caller's caller, or of course by the user. So the variables absolutely must be scoped globally and/or dynamically, as opposed to lexically. But they sure could use package namespaces.
> JS is the only language I've ever worked in where all the namespace > pitfalls I learned about in my CS Theory courses have ever come into play.
Emacs lisp has serious namespace issues, for several reasons. First, and most obviously, there is no concept of package or namespace. Second, and more importantly, all your code has to play nice with all the other code ever written in the language, even code you've never seen, even code that hasn't been written yet, or it's a bug.
Consequently, everyone just builds the namespace right into the variable names, by prefixing the package name to the variable name, so that you end up with variable names like cperl-break-one-line-blocks-when-indent and mail-extr-address-text-comment-syntax-table. (Yes, really.) This works, but it's a bit ugly.
It should be noted that lexical scoping would *not* solve the problem, since most or all of these variables *need* to be globally scoped, so that they can be changed easily by other code. (Yes, you *want* other code to be able to change your variables. Really. It saves other people from needing to modify your code for no very good reason (which would otherwise happen a *lot*), and, perhaps more importantly, it saves you from having to accept a hillion jillion arguments to every function, most of which would only get used occasionally. Very frequently you incorporate variables for the express purpose of allowing other code to modify your behavior.) Dynamic scoping is very handy, but it solves a different class of problem and doesn't do anything for the namespace issue. What is needed really is a package scope mechanism like Perl has. In Perl, you can have a variable that's fully global, but code within the package (namespace) can just call it by it's simple name; whereas, code outside the namespace must use the fully qualified name with the namespace built in, e.g., in a package Foo::Bar::Baz, you can have a variable that goes locally by the name of $quux, but code outside the module must call it $Foo::Bar::Baz::quux instead. This avoids most namespace collision issues, and elisp would benefit hugely from a similar system (though I don't think double-colon would be the right syntax in elisp; I suspect common lisp probably has some more lispish syntax that could be appropriated).
I can't be certain, because I get a 404 at his URI, but the other poster was *probably* using the word "functional" in the CS jargon sense, referring to the fact that Javascript has lexical closures.
They used to do that, but too many whiney corporate PHBs (who on average understand security just about well enough to think using their mothers' maiden names as passwords is clever and secure) complained about how inconvenient it was to have those updates coming out whenever they were ready and how much their corporations needed a predictable schedule for software security updates, in order to allow patch integration to be scheduled in advance around meetings and vacations and thereby promote holistic synergy in their workflow-equilibrium organizational strata and integration team dynamics.
> Tearing Windows present design platform down to the smallest parts and > scrubbing and rebuilding would probably put back the release of XP's > successor to 2016.
And this is different from the current situation *how*, exactly?;-)
Slashdot Mirror
$_='A doctor, a lawyer, and a mathematician were having a conversation about the relative benefits of wives and mistresses.
The doctor insisted that, from a health perspective, it was far better to have a wife. He talked about stress, relaxation, routine, and other factors.
The lawyer contended that it was better to have a mistress, because that way you retain more of your legal rights, she doesn't own half your property, and so forth.
The mathematician said that he could see both sides of that argument, but really he thought it was best to have both.
"Both?", the doctor and the lawyer exclaimed. "Why?"
"Sure, both. That way, when the wife thinks you're with the mistress, and the mistress thinks you're with the wife, you can sneak off by yourself and do mathematics."
'; print; s/mathematician/computer geek/; s/mathematics/programming/; print;
You Know You've Been Hacking Too Long When...
You dial the wrong number on your phone and look for "undo". When you don't find it, you grumble about how primitive the phones are.
You complain that your alarm clock is "inflexible" and "worthless" because it can't sync with your calendar and automatically know when to wake you up.
You're looking through the videos at the public library, and you do a sudden doubletake. "Yeh, cool, I didn't know there was a video about the CPAN." Then you realize it's CSPAN archives." (This actually happened to me.)
You know more IP addresses off the top of your head than phone numbers. You know the ISO country codes for nations you can't locate on the map. You've never met most of your friends in person.
You catch yourself using computer commands as words in nontechnical conversation, such as, "Is that still under warranty? I'll have to grep the filing cabinet and see if I can find the purchase order." You arrange the contents of your (physical) desk drawers hierarchically, like a filesystem.
You've had dreams in a programming language.
You want to develop a standard for where Post-It sticky notes should be attached relative to the contents of a document, so that the results can be wellformed and easy to parse.
> GPS units don't work so well inside buildings.
Not well enough to determine whether you're in North America, Europe, or Asia?
*Shrug*. It's not like they're actually going to do it. Somebody suggested it, that's all. People will suggest all sorts of crazy things.
> I'll end up plopping down cash on a multi laser product to play either,
> and one will wither and die a year or two later.
Both will wither and die, because neither of them holds *enough* more than a regular DVD. Even DVD would never have "made it" if it weren't for Hollywood pusing it so hard, because it's not *that* much better than CDs (or VHS, if you're more interested in the video side).
Remember how long the 1.44MB floppy held on, and on, and on, until *finally* the CD burners got cheap enough to really catch on? A CD holds, what, 500 times as much as a DSHD 3.5" floppy? Comparing them is almost ludicrous. And the blank ones cost much less than blank floppies ever did, too. Sure, there'll be intermediate products that people will use who really need that extra capacity, like there were between floppies and CDs (LS120 SuperDisks, for instance, or Zip and Jaz disks) -- but most folks will stick with the CD or the DVD, just like most folks stuck with the floppy, until the storage ratio is ludicrous, like 500:1 or so. I predict the next format to really make it (i.e., to replace the CD and the DVD) will need to hold at least 500 times what a CD-R holds (say about 350GB) probably more, which means it's several years out. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are the LS120 and Zip and Jaz of our time: formats that will be picked up and used by people who need to push the boundaries, but they will not catch on enough to replace the more mainstream formats.
> Wow, well I don't know much about phonetics but I do know that in Australia
> we're taught, and pronounce it, as 'ridiculous'. Ie. with the 'rid' bit
> pronounced like you'd say 'rid' in "get rid of it", not "get red of it".
More like "get reed of it", as if it were spelled "rediculous", with the e long (since only one consonant separates it from the next vowel). It usually comes out a little less distinct than "reed", though, due to the emphasis' generally being placed on the second syllable, so that it has more in common, pronunciation-wise, with "redecorate", "reduplicate", or "redundant".
If the i were pronounced like the e in red, that would be really bizarre (although there are stranger things in the English language). I've heard a number of different accents, most of them American (but a couple of others), and as far as I am aware the first i in ridiculous, as far as I'm aware, is always pronounced with the Latin long i sound, like the e in regard or the i in pita (which follows the Latin phonetics because it's a quite recent import from a foreign language). I suspect this may be because pronouncing it like the i in "ride" (which is really a dipthong) would be too difficult, but, with only one consonant following, it wants a long sound. If it were pronounced with the short i sound as in rid, you'd expect it to be spelled riddiculous. (Not that all spelling and pronunciation in English are fully regular, or anything...)
I have had significant exposure to several Commonwealth accents, notably the mumbly one used by BBC commentators, but it is possible that I have missed hearing the word "ridiculous" pronounced in them.
On a side note, a word that caught be utterly by surprise recently, in terms of the spelling, is paraphernalia. I checked three dictionaries before I had myself convinced that was right. I am quite certain I have never *EVER* heard anyone pronounce it with two r sounds.
> If you don't watch TV how do you know it's bad?
I learned it in school.
No, really. The college I went to had cable in the dorms. The television in the lounge was always on. Occasionally when I had nothing pressing to do, or somewhat more often when I was trying to *avoid* the pressing things I *should* have been doing, I sat down there and tried to find something worth watching. It's been a little while now (I graduated in '97), but I somehow doubt the overall level of quality has improved several thousand percent.
> Humans & dinosaurs never coexisted on the planet.
...) sound *remarkably* dinosaur-like. I don't think it's reasonable to dismiss this out of hand based on an argument from silence in a source that is silent far more than it speaks. Those accounts *could* just be fanciful imagination (people are pretty inventive sometimes), but we don't *know* that.
Mainstream scientific dogmatism notwithstanding, we don't really know that. Claims to the contrary assume that a lack of contemporaneous fossils must necessarily mean a lack of contemporaeous existence, but that only works if the fossil record is reliably complete, and it's certainly not: there are known to be *huge* gaps in it. (This point is not in dispute. Paleontoligists are agreed that there are huge gaps in the record.) Basically, the fossil record can't tell you when something was extinct; it can tell you when something was *not* extinct, or it can say nothing, which is what it usually does. (Fossils don't usually form when something dies; only when there are rather special circumstances; consequently, if a given creature is even mildly rare, you can expect very few if any fossils to have formed.)
There are several examples of organisms that were believed to have been extinct for millions or tens of millions of years, due to an absense of recent fossils of them, and then they turned out not to have been extinct for so long after all. The most famous of these is the coelecanth. Additional creatures that are believed to have been extinct for countless aeons may in fact have only become extinct rather more recently. The only way to know for sure would involve time travel.
A number of the oldest surviving accounts of dragons (and similar beasts -- lindorms, wyverns, Behemoth, Grendel,
One other point: the only definitions of "dinosaur" I have ever seen that exclude crocodiles are ones that have the word "extinct" in them.
almost as if somebody slapped a CLI onto WWW::Mechanize.
> I've read that Hiroshima and Nagasaki still experience cancer rates well
> above normal levels, and it's been 60 years since the bombing.
It's going to be a lot more than sixty years before we can get Mars terraformed to a livable level. (With that said, though, I am not convinced nuking it would do anything particularly useful. For terraforming Mars, there are much larger problems to solve than the lack of a greenhouse effect.)
> Nuking Mars would be the most efficient way to begin creating an
> environment capable of supporting life. The first step would be to
> warm the planet by creating a green house effect. Nuclear devices
> would be perfect for kicking enough dust and water vapor into the
> atmosphere to do this.
Interesting idea, but it's not that simple. Among other things, Mars isn't massive enough to hold enough atmosphere to create a big enough greenhouse to warm it to an Earthlike level, given its distance from the Sun.
> I'm pretty sure that every square meter of Earths surface can be seen
> from one spy satellite or another at all times.
I doubt it. Some areas don't warrant it. A spy satellite is an investement; you deploy them where they'll be most useful.
Any place that's on a straight east-west line with key areas (mainly: the US, the former USSR, the middle east) is probably covered much as you describe, but there probably are some areas that are not, particularly in the southern hemisphere. There are probably north-south satellites that provide some coverage of these areas, but I suspect not 24/7 everywhere.
Bear in mind that a satellite can change it's orientation (which direction it's pointing) a limited number of times (before it has to be provided with fresh reaction mass or else becomes space junk), so they would tend to be pointed in a useful direction and left pointed that way, barring any really good reason to re-aim them. Consequently, when a new satellite is being deployed, it may be beneficial to deploy it in an area that already has pretty good satellite coverage, for the purpose of preventing or reducing the need to re-aim the extant satellites for that area. So new satellites would tend to continue to go to the strategically important areas, even when those areas already have enough satellites to get by, rather than to less important areas. Which would the CIA, for instance, have valued more in the 1980s: coverage of the Falkland Islands twice as often, or the ability to look at Vladivostok from two different angles at once without turning a satellite around? I am almost sure that most of the east-west spy satellites cover the northern hemisphere.
> Dragons breathed fire. Dinosaurs did not.
It is conceivable that some may have, after a fashion, using a binary inflammable (i.e., two chemicals excreted by separate glands that ignite when mixed). There are several types of organisms living today that use binary reactions of this sort to do various things. None produce fire per se in the fairy-tale dragon fashion, but there are beetles that create what could pass for an explosion...
There is no direct evidence, apart from the various dragon legends, that any particular type of dinosaur did anything like this, so the legends could just be fanciful imagination. But it's hard to be sure, when you're talking about something that's been extinct for a really long time; most of the information we've got to go on comes from skeletons. You can tell a lot from bones, but there are limits. The fire-breathing dragon mythos *was* pretty widespread in the ancient world, and it had to come from somewhere. It could have come from a single imaginative story that was really good and so was passed on and retold many times (and of course altered in the telling) until it became legend. Or it could have come from a real creature. It's very hard to be certain, without (you knew this had to come back to topic eventually) time travel.
> Do you have cable? Or Dish Network/DirecTV/whatever?
No. There's nothing on there I want to watch. It's the same junk as on broadcast TV, which I also don't watch. There's more of it and it's on more different times per day and on more different channels at once, but it's the same junk.
> Linux power users probably won't be interested unless they only want the hardware.
I recently ordered seven of the things for at work, specifically because I know the hardware components will all be ones that are known to work with Linux. They're going to be kiosks, basically, and they may very well end up running a different distro than Linspire, but I can expect none of the hardware to give me any driver trouble, hopefully. And they're priced very reasonably, for the low-end desktop-grade systems that they are. You wouldn't want them for high-demand applications, but the ones I bought basically have to be capable of running a web browser...
> What's different is that Windows has a "delete" function while Unix
> has an "unlink" function
That depends on the filesystem. Linux will happily let you run a program that's on a FAT32 filesystem (possibly local or possibly on a disk in another computer, which may be running Windows, mounted via Samba's smbmount utility), and it will still happily let you delete it while it's still running.
Okay, so now we've got black hat crackers, white hat and grey hat security people, a Blue Hat security conference, a Red Hat distro, and of course the Man in the Yellow Hat. What next?
Oh, and I thought IBM was Big Blue. Microsoft's logos have the four colors (red, green, yellow, and blue), last I checked. Does that mean we're going to have Green Hats next?
> > ridiculous
/usr/share/dict/words | less and look for words where the i is pronounced with a Latin long i sound like "ridiculous". Discounting ones where the i is followed by a nasal ng or nk sound (which pulls the i into the very common ing phonemic combination), it's quite rare. Most such words are either pronounced with short i (as in "bitter") or the Anglo-Saxon long i (as in "bite").
> Why is it that no one on slashdot can spell this word?
Because it "feels" intuitively like too common and/or lowbrow a word to have Latin phonetics. You expect a word like "actuarial" to be spelled with an i, but "ridiculous", despite having four syllables, is a word most of us learned before we were in school, so we expect it to have Anglo-Saxon phonetics.
Additionally, words with i in the first syllable almost all have Anglo-Saxon phonetics. Some time when you're bored, grep -e "^[b-df-hj-np-tv-z]*i"
> there is no target="" attribute allowed on anchor tags
Because it is frankly none of the website's business what window or tab I do or do not choose to open a link in. If cretinous idiot loser webmasters wouldn't keep pulling exactly that kind of braindead schenanighans, Javascript maybe wouldn't have such a bad name with users.
> Or does obsfucating code and open source sound like they don't belong
> in the same sentence? (Yes, I did RTFA. Just curious as to the response.)
Not all websites are licensed in an open-source fashion.
Any time you have an interpreted language (or a run-time-compiled language, for that matter), people will want a code obfuscator for use with it. It's a topic that comes up with annoying frequency on Perlmonks. (I like to point them at Acme::Eyedrops...)
This is true, as far as it goes, but I do think a less verbose name than getElementById might have been preferable; that *is* a lot of typing, for something that gets used stupendously often. The Perl-culture side of me says it's "bad Huffman coding" (a Wallism, IIRC). Perhaps something along the lines of document.elt("someelementid") would be reasonable.
> Yes, you *want* other code to be able to change your variables. Really. It
> saves other people from needing to modify your code for no very good reason
> (which would otherwise happen a *lot*), and, perhaps more importantly, it
> saves you from having to accept a hillion jillion arguments to every
> function, most of which would only get used occasionally.
Come to think of it, it's actually even more important than that. What it really saves you from is having the end user need to modify somebody *else's* code in order to get *your* code to work differently. Because the calling code doesn't necessarily know how the code it's calling needs to behave; that might need to be determined by the caller's caller's caller, or of course by the user. So the variables absolutely must be scoped globally and/or dynamically, as opposed to lexically. But they sure could use package namespaces.
> JS is the only language I've ever worked in where all the namespace
> pitfalls I learned about in my CS Theory courses have ever come into play.
Emacs lisp has serious namespace issues, for several reasons. First, and most obviously, there is no concept of package or namespace. Second, and more importantly, all your code has to play nice with all the other code ever written in the language, even code you've never seen, even code that hasn't been written yet, or it's a bug.
Consequently, everyone just builds the namespace right into the variable names, by prefixing the package name to the variable name, so that you end up with variable names like cperl-break-one-line-blocks-when-indent and mail-extr-address-text-comment-syntax-table. (Yes, really.) This works, but it's a bit ugly.
It should be noted that lexical scoping would *not* solve the problem, since most or all of these variables *need* to be globally scoped, so that they can be changed easily by other code. (Yes, you *want* other code to be able to change your variables. Really. It saves other people from needing to modify your code for no very good reason (which would otherwise happen a *lot*), and, perhaps more importantly, it saves you from having to accept a hillion jillion arguments to every function, most of which would only get used occasionally. Very frequently you incorporate variables for the express purpose of allowing other code to modify your behavior.) Dynamic scoping is very handy, but it solves a different class of problem and doesn't do anything for the namespace issue. What is needed really is a package scope mechanism like Perl has. In Perl, you can have a variable that's fully global, but code within the package (namespace) can just call it by it's simple name; whereas, code outside the namespace must use the fully qualified name with the namespace built in, e.g., in a package Foo::Bar::Baz, you can have a variable that goes locally by the name of $quux, but code outside the module must call it $Foo::Bar::Baz::quux instead. This avoids most namespace collision issues, and elisp would benefit hugely from a similar system (though I don't think double-colon would be the right syntax in elisp; I suspect common lisp probably has some more lispish syntax that could be appropriated).
I can't be certain, because I get a 404 at his URI, but the other poster was *probably* using the word "functional" in the CS jargon sense, referring to the fact that Javascript has lexical closures.
They used to do that, but too many whiney corporate PHBs (who on average understand security just about well enough to think using their mothers' maiden names as passwords is clever and secure) complained about how inconvenient it was to have those updates coming out whenever they were ready and how much their corporations needed a predictable schedule for software security updates, in order to allow patch integration to be scheduled in advance around meetings and vacations and thereby promote holistic synergy in their workflow-equilibrium organizational strata and integration team dynamics.
> Tearing Windows present design platform down to the smallest parts and
;-)
> scrubbing and rebuilding would probably put back the release of XP's
> successor to 2016.
And this is different from the current situation *how*, exactly?