There is a growing concern among womyn that there are important gender issues with the English language. As a result, it became common to use terms such as "chairperson" instead of "chairman". In this manual we will use the words person, per, pers and perself. These words are used just like the words she, her, hers, herself. For example, we will say: "person wrote a manual to feel good about perself, and to encourage per potential significant other's heart to become pers". These terms were introduced, and perhaps invented, by Marge Piercy, and have been first used in software documentation and email correspondance by Richard Stallman. By using these terms, we hope to make this manual less threatening to womyn and to encourage our womyn readers to join the free software community.
Taken from Developing software with GNU by Eleftherios Gkioulekas. This tutorial also recommends womyn to use GNU Emacs with the 'viper' vi-emulation mode to edit files.
Competitions already are judged on 'fewest bugs'. Indeed, some competitions disqualify any entry that has any bugs found in testing. But all the other criteria you suggest are subjective. I think speed is a pretty good judge of programmer ability; someone who can hack up a correct program in 10 minutes stands a good chance of writing a correct, clear and maintainable program in an hour.
I've read the book. It sucked. It would have been good at half the length, and if it hadn't been so overblown with badly adapted Arab-Muslim mumbo-jumbo and endless secret Fremen rites. The game (the direct forerunner of Command&Conquer) was much better. The film was okay, since it cut out the tedious parts of the book.
For a long time MySQL was notorious for letting you put February 30th into a datetime column. Does sqlite still happily permit "hello there" in an integer column? To me this negates the biggest reason to use an RDBMS - to get some checking of data integrity and foreign key constraints.
Be careful. If what you bought wasn't the physical media but instead a license to use some 'intellectual property', then you could be admitting a limitation of your own rights. Want to reverse engineer the game to see how it works? Nope, not allowed under the licence for the intellectual property you purchased.
I think there is a lot of merit in the old model, where you purchase a book. You don't purchase a licence or permission or 'property'; you have simply bought a book. It's now yours, and you do what you want with it. One of a few things you can't do is *make copies*, because that is forbidden by copyright law. But as with any reasonable law, anything not explicitly forbidden (including uses that copyright legislators haven't thought of yet) is allowed. Because the book is yours you can easily sell it on, but it would of course be silly to write to the publisher and demand a new copy because you spilled coffee on the old one and can't read it any more.
Of course the software company would very much like you to believe that you have bought, and require, a licence to use their 'property' in only the ways that they permit. This may well be true, depending on whether copying a computer program into memory to run it counts as 'copying' under the scope of copyright law (IANAL, but I think it depends on jurisdiction). But in practice this didn't help you get a replacement diskette. So I don't think you get any tangible reward for giving up the benefits of a more straightforward copyright-based model.
I got rid of my television about two years ago - not so much as a deliberate decision as by just not bothering to buy one when I moved house. It did indeed free up time for other things but as at the time I was maintainer of xmltv, which I created particularly to manage my own TV viewing, I ended up in the strange position of maintaining software I did not use. And then the 'other things' allowed for by not watching television started sucking up more and more of my life, and I no longer had time to work on my free software project, which had been the most important and fulfilling form of recreation for me. So I'm not sure the change is for the better.
In the 1950s British manufacturer Rover produced some experimental (and street-legal) jet engine powered cars. See this contemporary news report. For some reason the British government, which had owned the patent on the jet engine, decided to give it to Rover.
I suppose that if they thought the chance of success was less than 10% they wouldn't have flown the mission at all.
(It's not necessary to know anything about past missions in order to estimate a chance of success. A bookmaker can offer odds on a horse that has never raced before.)
You need a secure revision control system where changes you check in can be encrypted. So you could check in the fix as soon as it's discovered, but only a small number of people who know the key could check out the new version (and make further patches, etc). Then at 16:00 the key gets published to the rest of the world and everyone can then update.
This is why people sometimes say Mohammedanism when referring to the religion founded by Mohammed. Perhaps Abraham was a Muslim, but he was not a Mohammedan.
Let me see... in the past few days BusinessWeek have suggested that Apple's recent security problems mean they should hire a security czar. And now if Google have public relations 'gaffes', obviously the answer is to hire a chief public relations officer. It's pretty clear how to create new BusinessWeek editorials:
- Pick a company X; - Suggest the company has had vaguely defined 'problems' in field Y; - Therefore, X must hire a chief Y officer!
I look forward to many more of these editorials linked from Slashdot in the future!
Agreed. The whole idea of rootkit detection is silly. By definition if something gets root access it has complete control over your machine and you can't trust anything further that the computer tells you. If rootkits and viruses have been detectable so far, that is only because they are buggy or incomplete. (At least, detectable by an automated process - I'm sure a human expert, given enough time, could at least have a good guess on whether a rootkit was present.) The only way round the problem is to make sure that there is no true 'root' level of total control that's accessible by software. For example, to make BIOS that is not rewritable under software control, or to provide a hard reset switch to restore the BIOS to its original state and boot from floppy. (But if you provide such a mechanism, you can't set a boot password on the machine!)
All this seems to be missing the point, which is that we need a source of free map data. (Free as in speech.) Presumably any satellite photos published by the US government are in the public domain - what else is there?
TFA: Putting together a blog should be as easy as sending an e-mail.
It is: just send mail to a mailing list indexed by Gmane and then view the list with Gmane's blog interface. 'Course, you do have to create your own mailing list first...
Surely your professor based his class on the old joke:
A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was. So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was. The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up the remaining space. He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with an unanimous 'yes'.
The professor then produced two cans of beer from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the space between the sand particles. The students laughed.
Now, said the professor, as the laughter subsided, "I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. " "The golf balls are the important things - your family, your children, your health, your friends, your favourite passions - things that if everything else were lost, and only they remained, your life would still be full. The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house, your car. The sand is everything else - the small stuff.
"If you put the sand into the jar first," he continued, "there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you. Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take your partner out to dinner. Go out with friends. There will always be time to clean the house and fix the washing. Take care of the golf balls first, the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand."
One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the beer represented.The professor smiled. "I'm glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there's always room for a couple of beers."
Slashdot Mirror
Also note that another reason womyn are not attracted to free software is because referring to it as 'open source' puts them off.
Competitions already are judged on 'fewest bugs'. Indeed, some competitions disqualify any entry that has any bugs found in testing. But all the other criteria you suggest are subjective. I think speed is a pretty good judge of programmer ability; someone who can hack up a correct program in 10 minutes stands a good chance of writing a correct, clear and maintainable program in an hour.
I've read the book. It sucked. It would have been good at half the length, and if it hadn't been so overblown with badly adapted Arab-Muslim mumbo-jumbo and endless secret Fremen rites. The game (the direct forerunner of Command&Conquer) was much better. The film was okay, since it cut out the tedious parts of the book.
I think you could ask them about Dune 2.
'The noble Atreides' => Fedora
'The evil Harkonnen' => Debian
'The insidious Ordos' => SuSE
Fremen => Ubuntu
Sardaukar => Gentoo
There is the conspiracy theory that the dark ages never existed and Charlemagne (among other rulers of the period) is fictional.
I'm interested in how all this relates to Ruby On Rails.
For a long time MySQL was notorious for letting you put February 30th into a datetime column. Does sqlite still happily permit "hello there" in an integer column? To me this negates the biggest reason to use an RDBMS - to get some checking of data integrity and foreign key constraints.
Be careful. If what you bought wasn't the physical media but instead a license to use some 'intellectual property', then you could be admitting a limitation of your own rights. Want to reverse engineer the game to see how it works? Nope, not allowed under the licence for the intellectual property you purchased.
I think there is a lot of merit in the old model, where you purchase a book. You don't purchase a licence or permission or 'property'; you have simply bought a book. It's now yours, and you do what you want with it. One of a few things you can't do is *make copies*, because that is forbidden by copyright law. But as with any reasonable law, anything not explicitly forbidden (including uses that copyright legislators haven't thought of yet) is allowed. Because the book is yours you can easily sell it on, but it would of course be silly to write to the publisher and demand a new copy because you spilled coffee on the old one and can't read it any more.
Of course the software company would very much like you to believe that you have bought, and require, a licence to use their 'property' in only the ways that they permit. This may well be true, depending on whether copying a computer program into memory to run it counts as 'copying' under the scope of copyright law (IANAL, but I think it depends on jurisdiction). But in practice this didn't help you get a replacement diskette. So I don't think you get any tangible reward for giving up the benefits of a more straightforward copyright-based model.
Perhaps the next stage is to give up videogames.
I got rid of my television about two years ago - not so much as a deliberate decision as by just not bothering to buy one when I moved house. It did indeed free up time for other things but as at the time I was maintainer of xmltv, which I created particularly to manage my own TV viewing, I ended up in the strange position of maintaining software I did not use. And then the 'other things' allowed for by not watching television started sucking up more and more of my life, and I no longer had time to work on my free software project, which had been the most important and fulfilling form of recreation for me. So I'm not sure the change is for the better.
A cadre of petite bureaucrats would be kinda cool. Sadly Google image search doesn't find anything.
In the 1950s British manufacturer Rover produced some experimental (and street-legal) jet engine powered cars. See this contemporary news report. For some reason the British government, which had owned the patent on the jet engine, decided to give it to Rover.
You mean like an arrow to indicate direction, although most people nowadays have never seen a real arrow?
Difference between British subject and British citizen
The Queen is not allowed to send you to the mines on a whim (even in theory). This is the difference between monarchy and dictatorship.
I think the latest versions of apt do support multi-arch. Apt is much faster than yum. What the cool kids are using now, though, is smart.
Obviously, they should hire the Debian guys.
I suppose that if they thought the chance of success was less than 10% they wouldn't have flown the mission at all.
(It's not necessary to know anything about past missions in order to estimate a chance of success. A bookmaker can offer odds on a horse that has never raced before.)
You need a secure revision control system where changes you check in can be encrypted. So you could check in the fix as soon as it's discovered, but only a small number of people who know the key could check out the new version (and make further patches, etc). Then at 16:00 the key gets published to the rest of the world and everyone can then update.
Bah. I use yasql for everything. Who needs a GUI anyway?
This is why people sometimes say Mohammedanism when referring to the religion founded by Mohammed. Perhaps Abraham was a Muslim, but he was not a Mohammedan.
Let me see... in the past few days BusinessWeek have suggested that Apple's recent security problems mean they should hire a security czar. And now if Google have public relations 'gaffes', obviously the answer is to hire a chief public relations officer. It's pretty clear how to create new BusinessWeek editorials:
- Pick a company X;
- Suggest the company has had vaguely defined 'problems' in field Y;
- Therefore, X must hire a chief Y officer!
I look forward to many more of these editorials linked from Slashdot in the future!
Agreed. The whole idea of rootkit detection is silly. By definition if something gets root access it has complete control over your machine and you can't trust anything further that the computer tells you. If rootkits and viruses have been detectable so far, that is only because they are buggy or incomplete. (At least, detectable by an automated process - I'm sure a human expert, given enough time, could at least have a good guess on whether a rootkit was present.) The only way round the problem is to make sure that there is no true 'root' level of total control that's accessible by software. For example, to make BIOS that is not rewritable under software control, or to provide a hard reset switch to restore the BIOS to its original state and boot from floppy. (But if you provide such a mechanism, you can't set a boot password on the machine!)
All this seems to be missing the point, which is that we need a source of free map data. (Free as in speech.) Presumably any satellite photos published by the US government are in the public domain - what else is there?
TFA: Putting together a blog should be as easy as sending an e-mail.
It is: just send mail to a mailing list indexed by Gmane and then view the list with Gmane's blog interface. 'Course, you do have to create your own mailing list first...
Surely your professor based his class on the old joke:
A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.
So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.
The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up the remaining space. He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with an unanimous 'yes'.
The professor then produced two cans of beer from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the space between the sand particles. The students laughed.
Now, said the professor, as the laughter subsided, "I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. "
"The golf balls are the important things - your family, your children, your health, your friends, your favourite passions - things that if everything else were lost, and only they remained, your life would still be full. The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house, your car. The sand is everything else - the small stuff.
"If you put the sand into the jar first," he continued, "there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you. Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take your partner out to dinner. Go out with friends. There will always be time to clean the house and fix the washing. Take care of the golf balls first, the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand."
One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the beer represented.The professor smiled. "I'm glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there's always room for a couple of beers."