IDC analyst Al Gillen [said] "Linux is no longer a fringe player. Linux is now mainstream."
Gillen went on to chortle, "But Linux geeks are not mainstream, and while they will continue to belong to the fringe, then will never ever be players with the laaadies!
On hearing this, the assembled contingent of bearded, pasty, pot-bellied Linux geeks hung their heads in shame, silently acknowledging the truth of Gillen's words, while wishing they could, like the 7th level Magic-Users they aspired to be, quietly teleport back to their mother's basements and their collections of what they pretentiously refer to as "graphic novels".
I keed!, I keed! Truly I love you all!/Triumph the Insult Comic Dog
Serious question: does that mean they are open source?
I mean, as an end user, I don't much care if something is "linux-based" or "foot fungus-based" if I can't open it up and re-do the way that works best for me.
I had an Archos, and the guys at rockbox.org went to considerable trouble to reverse engineer it (and I contributed my own smidgen of code to that project), but Archos apparently saved a bunch of money on assembling their machines, and the damned thing broke down (and mine was far from the only one to break down -- I'll no longer buy anything from Archos).
And Archos's firmware was so ridiculously bad (the Rockbox guys sped up directory browsing alone by a factor of perhaps 50) that I no longer want to buy an mp3 player that I can't hack. Having hacked with teh Rockbox software, I know what I want in an mp3 player -- and I figure I'll have to do it myself.
I want a new mp3 player, indeed my mom wanted to buy me one for Christmas and asked what kind I wanted, but I wasn't anymore versed on what is open source and what isn't but is reversed engineered and what is totally closed, so I couldn't tell Mom what to buy.
Loss for me, loss for the electronics store, loss for the manufacturer.
So "linux-based" I don't really care about -- open source, I care about.
So reply if you know: what hard-drive based mp3 players have hackable source or open source firmware replacements?
Capture it, and then send it to Guantanamo
on
Wi-Fi Gaming
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
games like Capture the Flag
I know you Red Staters reelected the Monkey King, but could you at least spell "homosexual" right?
Besides, I thought you guys wanted to go after "Muslims" first?
This is going to mean a boom for the storage industry
Well it would be except the UK government just coincidently ordered that government agencies purge all old email -- nothing to do with this law, you see, just a desire to keep everything tidy!
I personally would rather live 50 good, full years, and die gracefully, than live 1000 years dependent on all sorts of pills and not really living life.
OH NOES!!11!1!
You had your chance for good full years, but you chose instead to spend them posting on Slashdot.
PS: where can I download Natalie Portman Furry Hentai from KaZaA? -- because unlike you, I have a life!
"Missouri's most violent criminals will no longer be permitted to play violent video games that simulate the kind of offenses that resulted in their incarceration...."
OH NOES!1!!11!
No more playing "Martha Stewart: Living" or "Martha Stewart: Baking and Basting for Bubbette" in prison anymore? That is cruel and unusual punishment!
"Scientists at UC Santa Cruz have been using computational techniques to 'reverse engineer' the DNA of extinct species."
The scientists added that the Bush Administration's environmentalpolicies will helpfully provide many more extinct species for the new techniques to be tested on.
Lends a whole new meaning to the Fundies' proselytizing question, "are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?", doesn't it?
"Yes, that lamb really did die for my sins, in this case, donating its liver to redeem the rampant alcoholism I developed trying to wrap my head around why you Fundies voted for four more years of Bush."
By chance, you don't happen to live under a bridge...do you?
The grandparent poster is making reference to a sticker that one of the southern states (Texas? Alabama?) wants to put on high-school science texts which discuss evolution.
Presumably, the grandparent poster is underscoring the absurdity of such "governemnt warning labels" for unpopular thought, by demostrating that in any context other than a high-school text, such a warning is and should be treated, as the parent did, as ridiculous.
Yes, Virginia, it's (frequently) possible to be too subtle for Slashdot commenters. But we love them anyway.
Why must I be forced to send my children to schools where the teachers insist that we are descended from apes?.... Everyone with any education at all knows that man actually comes from australopithecus.
before invading Iraq, the U.S. government used the Internet to communicate directly with Iraqi soldiers by sending them personalised messages saying, "We're about to invade. We're going to overwhelm you and if you resist us we're going to kill you...."
Before we invade Iran and Syria, maybe they should send this instead.
Can someone explain why accessor and mutator methods (I assume this is what he means by "getters/setters") are bad?
It's a bad design that promotes bad usage.
Consider the extreme case, where all attributes (sub-objects) of the main object are accessable and mutable: in this case, there's little real difference between the object in question and a C struct.
You've gained nothing over a C struct other than the ability to call it an object.
Except to essentially log any calls to getter/setters -- but you can't actually use code to set contrainsts or policy or to maintain object consistency, as to do so would be to confuse the programmer using the object. If object Square has a setWidth and a setHeight, either the using programmer can set the height and width to different values -- thus making a non-square Square -- or you have code in each setter that makes the both height and width the same, preserving the squareness but fundamentally confusing the programmer who takes the setter names at face value.
Since one point of object orientated design is to create working abstractions that know how to do thier own job, accessors and mutators undermine this, suggesting that the programmer using the object is able to, and perhaps even required to set and get the minutiae that controls that object's operation.
The object's internals, how it does its job, should belong to the object so long as the object fulfills its contract, and as much as possible, this should be done via comand-like method calls (doThis(), doThat(), checkIfDone()) and not by the setting of (or checking of) values internal to the object. The using programmer gains little if he has to micro-mange an object. The using programmer gains much if he can just use the object without having to know how its internals work.
Real object oriented design involves designing objects that do what they are supposed to do and which are expected to manage their own internal state and keep it internally consistent.
Take for example the C++ std::string; it manages its own memory, and makes sure any allocated memory is ultimately deallocated, so that the using programmer doesn't have to -- letting the using programer have have a setter to directly manange that memory would undermine the major reason for having a string class in the first place. For extraordinary situations (mostly interfacing with pre-Standard or C libraries) there are ways to directly access that memory, but rather than use a getter, a puposely more obscure and ugly syntax is required, precisly in order to underscore the dangerousness of so doing.
Another reason to prefer not to use setters and getters is to use objects as immutable or "value" objects -- Java takes this to a (in my opinion bad) extreme in order to avoid the number one Java pitfall, pointer aliasing; C++ avoids the pointer aliasing but likes "value objects" because they behave more "like" automatic (local/stack) variables, even if their implementation is on the free store, and because they make it easier to use C++'s "resource initialization is acquisition" (RIIA) idiom.
In using value objects most (and for immutable objects, necessarily all*) attributes are set when the object is constructed, via ctor arguments, and rather than enage in messy fiddling, if new values are needed, a new object is constructed.
*Unless of course the immutable object has a uses-a relationship to a mutable object, which can be a source of much merry foolishness in Java, again of the pointer aliasing variety.
and, to continue the line of reasoning, another question follows (spurred from the yellow ribbon "support our troops stickers"): What can we, as civilians, actually do to "support our troops"?
Vote Kerry.
Unlike the chicken hawks whose knowledge of war comes from Tom Clancy novels, Kerry's seen the real thing -- and doesn't have a hankering to prove himself to his daddy by sacrificing American soldiers in unwinnable, unnecessary wars.
A decent use of off the shelf components, but the actual unit quality was abysmal -- I and many others found that the unit broke down quickly with merely normal use.
And the software -- the device's OS sucked. For the recorder, a much better alternative existed in the Rockbox replacement software, but not only did Archos never support this volunteer effort that probably saved their product line, their new revenue model includes selling "keys" to activate various closed-source extentions of their software. In other words, proprietary lock-in where you get to pay again and again, to use features that should have been included when you bought the device. And so no open source replacemnt.
So my advice is to stay away from this, and get yourself a mini-laptop.
While there's damned little software for them, I'd recommend Sharp's products: my Zaurus I've dropped on bare wooden floors dozens of times, and the worst that's happened is the keyboard shield came off -- and it took me two minutes to hook that back on. When I've dropped it, the running software kept running without a hitch -- even when I was using xmms to play mp3s.
...randomly mentioning Different Things You've Heard Of contributes nothing but pretentiousness.
Don't they teach American history anymore? Omaha Beach and Tarawa were major WWII battles American soldiers fought and died in, in Normandy and in the Pacific, respectively.
Lexington and Concord were of course two of the earliest battles of the American Revolution.
All are examples of Americans paying the butcher's bill, either to establish our democracy or to defend our liberties.
Second, I wasn't addressing your (uncontroversial, if banal) point, but rather the caricature and ridicule with which it was expressed.
Then you really did miss the point, friend, when you lambasted me for "racism"; the caricature and ridicule weren't directed at the stereotypical Indian -- who does vote, Indian independence being within living memory --, but at the sort of American who is too lazy to care about exercising the political rights our forefathers bought with their blood and sweat.
I'll just mention that the "design" of the mammalian eye, with a blind spot where the optic nerve meets the retina from the front, is an excellent argument against a designer, or at least a competent designer. Compare to the eyes of squid and other mollusks, which have no blind spot.
If I were a theologian, I'd say that means tat man evolved, but God created squid and mollusks in His own eight-armed image.
(Yes, I know, it's actually octopuses that have eight arms, but it's funnier to phrase it that way.)
Increasing numbers of scientists are rejecting Darwinian macroevolution due to lack of evidence.
And two of them are biologists.
Real biologists other than the fabulously foolish punctuationalist (and Marxist character assassin of E.O. Wilson) Stephen Jay Gould don't distinguish "macroevolution" from "microevolution". The "Cambrian explosion" is a mere artifact caused because organisms existing before the Cambrian didn't have shells that readily fossilize.
The explanatory power of neo-Darwinism has the potential to finally give us power over our own lives, and predictably, Michael Behe and his ilk are still making the "Argument from Personal Incredulity": "I can't conceive how an eye ^W^W a partial rotor could be favored by natural selection, so, since I can't figure it out, there must be a God ^W^W an Intelligent Designer."
Two hundred years ago William Paley couldn't conceive of how such an instrument of perfection as an eye could be formed by the blind processes of natural selection -- and he had a decent excuse, he lived before Darwin; but today we have the Darwinian model and today we have credible computer model of precisely how an eye could evolve, and how even rudimentary and partial eyes can be advantageous to an organism. There's no longer a credible excuse to prefer superstition.
So the "Intelligent Design" crowd waves their hands and says, well, ignore those eyes, but what about free-spinning rotors powering bacterial flagella? What about them? A partial rotor able to rotate through only, say, 180 degrees is still advantageous to any bacterium that needs to move.
Three billion years of evolution gives plenty of time -- and plenty of trials that didn't work out so well, to explain the variety of life of earth.
If you need the security blanket of a God, well, enjoy it. But don't pretend your emotional needs are science.
Slashdot Mirror
IDC analyst Al Gillen [said] "Linux is no longer a fringe player. Linux is now mainstream."
/Triumph the Insult Comic Dog
Gillen went on to chortle, "But Linux geeks are not mainstream, and while they will continue to belong to the fringe, then will never ever be players with the laaadies!
On hearing this, the assembled contingent of bearded, pasty, pot-bellied Linux geeks hung their heads in shame, silently acknowledging the truth of Gillen's words, while wishing they could, like the 7th level Magic-Users they aspired to be, quietly teleport back to their mother's basements and their collections of what they pretentiously refer to as "graphic novels".
I keed!, I keed! Truly I love you all!
Serious question: does that mean they are open source?
I mean, as an end user, I don't much care if something is "linux-based" or "foot fungus-based" if I can't open it up and re-do the way that works best for me.
I had an Archos, and the guys at rockbox.org went to considerable trouble to reverse engineer it (and I contributed my own smidgen of code to that project), but Archos apparently saved a bunch of money on assembling their machines, and the damned thing broke down (and mine was far from the only one to break down -- I'll no longer buy anything from Archos).
And Archos's firmware was so ridiculously bad (the Rockbox guys sped up directory browsing alone by a factor of perhaps 50) that I no longer want to buy an mp3 player that I can't hack. Having hacked with teh Rockbox software, I know what I want in an mp3 player -- and I figure I'll have to do it myself.
I want a new mp3 player, indeed my mom wanted to buy me one for Christmas and asked what kind I wanted, but I wasn't anymore versed on what is open source and what isn't but is reversed engineered and what is totally closed, so I couldn't tell Mom what to buy.
Loss for me, loss for the electronics store, loss for the manufacturer.
So "linux-based" I don't really care about -- open source, I care about.
So reply if you know: what hard-drive based mp3 players have hackable source or open source firmware replacements?
games like Capture the Flag
I know you Red Staters reelected the Monkey King, but could you at least spell "homosexual" right?
Besides, I thought you guys wanted to go after "Muslims" first?
Would you spend your vacation in there? The Germans don't seem to be very eager.
Everybody knows that a real German's idea of a vacation is invading Poland.
This is going to mean a boom for the storage industry
Well it would be except the UK government just coincidently ordered that government agencies purge all old email -- nothing to do with this law, you see, just a desire to keep everything tidy!
Whilst "deleted emails will be stored on back-up systems, these have been declared off limits to freedom of information requests because of the cost of accessing them".
Tony Blair and David Blunkett: Labour's way of emulating Dubya Bush and John Ashcroft.
You'll see that some people are so convinced that [these] kind of human enhancements will happen...
;)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I keep getting email about "human enhancements".
But no nanobot is going to make this geek cool.
Not that there's anything wrong with that....
I don't plan on working there for long though, they just don't pay and could care less about your opinion unless your an editor. Screw the newspapers!
Your b-ing descremineted aginst. Ud make a grate edatur 4 Slashdot !
The only way for it to be feasible is for one half the population to monitor the other....
Seee!!1!11!!
And u stoopid libruls say PREDISENT DUBYA BUSH don't have no full employment plan!
Wait, what do u maen Halliburton's gonna outsource it to Indiana??//?/??
Ok, but that one'll cost you $101 dollars.
First, look in the phone book under "Escorts, blind and unable to smell Dorito dust...."
I personally would rather live 50 good, full years, and die gracefully, than live 1000 years dependent on all sorts of pills and not really living life.
OH NOES!!11!1!
You had your chance for good full years, but you chose instead to spend them posting on Slashdot.
PS: where can I download Natalie Portman Furry Hentai from KaZaA? -- because unlike you, I have a life!
"Missouri's most violent criminals will no longer be permitted to play violent video games that simulate the kind of offenses that resulted in their incarceration...."
OH NOES!1!!11!
No more playing "Martha Stewart: Living" or "Martha Stewart: Baking and Basting for Bubbette" in prison anymore? That is cruel and unusual punishment!
"Scientists at UC Santa Cruz have been using computational techniques to 'reverse engineer' the DNA of extinct species."
The scientists added that the Bush Administration's environmental policies will helpfully provide many more extinct species for the new techniques to be tested on.
stress can cause accelerated aging of cells.
Aha!
When I said doing those dumbass Java Server Pages and pretending that was real OOP was killing me, I had no idea how literal I was being.
I wonder if these lies were cooked up ahead of time, and if so, how well learned they were when they were recited?
It's called a catechism or a creed.
Lends a whole new meaning to the Fundies' proselytizing question, "are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?", doesn't it?
"Yes, that lamb really did die for my sins, in this case, donating its liver to redeem the rampant alcoholism I developed trying to wrap my head around why you Fundies voted for four more years of Bush."
By chance, you don't happen to live under a bridge...do you?
The grandparent poster is making reference to a sticker that one of the southern states (Texas? Alabama?) wants to put on high-school science texts which discuss evolution.
Presumably, the grandparent poster is underscoring the absurdity of such "governemnt warning labels" for unpopular thought, by demostrating that in any context other than a high-school text, such a warning is and should be treated, as the parent did, as ridiculous.
Yes, Virginia, it's (frequently) possible to be too subtle for Slashdot commenters. But we love them anyway.
Why must I be forced to send my children to schools where the teachers insist that we are descended from apes?.... Everyone with any education at all knows that man actually comes from australopithecus.
Beee-yooo-ti-ful non-troll troll.
Mod parent up, up, up, up.
before invading Iraq, the U.S. government used the Internet to communicate directly with Iraqi soldiers by sending them personalised messages saying, "We're about to invade. We're going to overwhelm you and if you resist us we're going to kill you...."
Before we invade Iran and Syria, maybe they should send this instead.
Can someone explain why accessor and mutator methods (I assume this is what he means by "getters/setters") are bad?
It's a bad design that promotes bad usage.
Consider the extreme case, where all attributes (sub-objects) of the main object are accessable and mutable: in this case, there's little real difference between the object in question and a C struct.
You've gained nothing over a C struct other than the ability to call it an object.
Except to essentially log any calls to getter/setters -- but you can't actually use code to set contrainsts or policy or to maintain object consistency, as to do so would be to confuse the programmer using the object. If object Square has a setWidth and a setHeight, either the using programmer can set the height and width to different values -- thus making a non-square Square -- or you have code in each setter that makes the both height and width the same, preserving the squareness but fundamentally confusing the programmer who takes the setter names at face value.
Since one point of object orientated design is to create working abstractions that know how to do thier own job, accessors and mutators undermine this, suggesting that the programmer using the object is able to, and perhaps even required to set and get the minutiae that controls that object's operation.
The object's internals, how it does its job, should belong to the object so long as the object fulfills its contract, and as much as possible, this should be done via comand-like method calls (doThis(), doThat(), checkIfDone()) and not by the setting of (or checking of) values internal to the object. The using programmer gains little if he has to micro-mange an object. The using programmer gains much if he can just use the object without having to know how its internals work.
Real object oriented design involves designing objects that do what they are supposed to do and which are expected to manage their own internal state and keep it internally consistent.
Take for example the C++ std::string; it manages its own memory, and makes sure any allocated memory is ultimately deallocated, so that the using programmer doesn't have to -- letting the using programer have have a setter to directly manange that memory would undermine the major reason for having a string class in the first place. For extraordinary situations (mostly interfacing with pre-Standard or C libraries) there are ways to directly access that memory, but rather than use a getter, a puposely more obscure and ugly syntax is required, precisly in order to underscore the dangerousness of so doing.
Another reason to prefer not to use setters and getters is to use objects as immutable or "value" objects -- Java takes this to a (in my opinion bad) extreme in order to avoid the number one Java pitfall, pointer aliasing; C++ avoids the pointer aliasing but likes "value objects" because they behave more "like" automatic (local/stack) variables, even if their implementation is on the free store, and because they make it easier to use C++'s "resource initialization is acquisition" (RIIA) idiom.
In using value objects most (and for immutable objects, necessarily all*) attributes are set when the object is constructed, via ctor arguments, and rather than enage in messy fiddling, if new values are needed, a new object is constructed.
*Unless of course the immutable object has a uses-a relationship to a mutable object, which can be a source of much merry foolishness in Java, again of the pointer aliasing variety.
and, to continue the line of reasoning, another question follows (spurred from the yellow ribbon "support our troops stickers"): What can we, as civilians, actually do to "support our troops"?
Vote Kerry.
Unlike the chicken hawks whose knowledge of war comes from Tom Clancy novels, Kerry's seen the real thing -- and doesn't have a hankering to prove himself to his daddy by sacrificing American soldiers in unwinnable, unnecessary wars.
I had -- yes had -- an Archos FM Recorder.
A decent use of off the shelf components, but the actual unit quality was abysmal -- I and many others found that the unit broke down quickly with merely normal use.
And the software -- the device's OS sucked. For the recorder, a much better alternative existed in the Rockbox replacement software, but not only did Archos never support this volunteer effort that probably saved their product line, their new revenue model includes selling "keys" to activate various closed-source extentions of their software. In other words, proprietary lock-in where you get to pay again and again, to use features that should have been included when you bought the device. And so no open source replacemnt.
So my advice is to stay away from this, and get yourself a mini-laptop.
While there's damned little software for them, I'd recommend Sharp's products: my Zaurus I've dropped on bare wooden floors dozens of times, and the worst that's happened is the keyboard shield came off -- and it took me two minutes to hook that back on. When I've dropped it, the running software kept running without a hitch -- even when I was using xmms to play mp3s.
...randomly mentioning Different Things You've Heard Of contributes nothing but pretentiousness.
Don't they teach American history anymore? Omaha Beach and Tarawa were major WWII battles American soldiers fought and died in, in Normandy and in the Pacific, respectively.
Lexington and Concord were of course two of the earliest battles of the American Revolution.
All are examples of Americans paying the butcher's bill, either to establish our democracy or to defend our liberties.
Second, I wasn't addressing your (uncontroversial, if banal) point, but rather the caricature and ridicule with which it was expressed.
Then you really did miss the point, friend, when you lambasted me for "racism"; the caricature and ridicule weren't directed at the stereotypical Indian -- who does vote, Indian independence being within living memory --, but at the sort of American who is too lazy to care about exercising the political rights our forefathers bought with their blood and sweat.
I'll just mention that the "design" of the mammalian eye, with a blind spot where the optic nerve meets the retina from the front, is an excellent argument against a designer, or at least a competent designer. Compare to the eyes of squid and other mollusks, which have no blind spot.
If I were a theologian, I'd say that means tat man evolved, but God created squid and mollusks in His own eight-armed image.
(Yes, I know, it's actually octopuses that have eight arms, but it's funnier to phrase it that way.)
Increasing numbers of scientists are rejecting Darwinian macroevolution due to lack of evidence.
And two of them are biologists.
Real biologists other than the fabulously foolish punctuationalist (and Marxist character assassin of E.O. Wilson) Stephen Jay Gould don't distinguish "macroevolution" from "microevolution". The "Cambrian explosion" is a mere artifact caused because organisms existing before the Cambrian didn't have shells that readily fossilize.
The explanatory power of neo-Darwinism has the potential to finally give us power over our own lives, and predictably, Michael Behe and his ilk are still making the "Argument from Personal Incredulity": "I can't conceive how an eye ^W^W a partial rotor could be favored by natural selection, so, since I can't figure it out, there must be a God ^W^W an Intelligent Designer."
Two hundred years ago William Paley couldn't conceive of how such an instrument of perfection as an eye could be formed by the blind processes of natural selection -- and he had a decent excuse, he lived before Darwin; but today we have the Darwinian model and today we have credible computer model of precisely how an eye could evolve, and how even rudimentary and partial eyes can be advantageous to an organism. There's no longer a credible excuse to prefer superstition.
So the "Intelligent Design" crowd waves their hands and says, well, ignore those eyes, but what about free-spinning rotors powering bacterial flagella? What about them? A partial rotor able to rotate through only, say, 180 degrees is still advantageous to any bacterium that needs to move.
Three billion years of evolution gives plenty of time -- and plenty of trials that didn't work out so well, to explain the variety of life of earth.
If you need the security blanket of a God, well, enjoy it. But don't pretend your emotional needs are science.