Getting sidetracked a bit: nobody fully understands the factors affecting which greyhound will win a race, but bookmakers still offer odds on it. An ideas-futures market might be one way to get a public consensus on the chance of a particular bad thing happening.
However, if a group of scientists who have researched a particular area say 'in our estimation, there is a 20% chance that X', then that is probably good enough to work on.
I think it comes down to control over your own life and your own computer. The program code itself tells your computer what to do; if it isn't free then your computer may be programmed to do nasty things and you have no legal way to fix it and probably no way to find out for sure what's happening behind your back.
Art and music isn't like that. It's quite possible to argue that scientific knowledge should be unrestricted for the good of society, while restrictions on purely artistic works are allowed. Whether an artist would be insulted by such a view, I am not sure (I expect many prefer to have restrictions so they can earn money from their work). I think this is the view that RMS has expressed. Program code, even for a computer game, is like scientific knowledge and should be shared. Music and artwork, it would be good to share, but it doesn't cause too much social harm if there are restrictions.
These are not necessarily my views BTW, but from gut feeling, I would be pleased to use a game engine that was free and then pay to license certain levels or graphics sets.
It doesn't really matter what 'some hiring managers' might or might not think in a few years' time. Go to the school with the better teaching! Choose more challenging and enjoyable course!
If you can't afford the more expensive college, justifying it with the hope that you will be able to earn higher wages doesn't make it any more affordable _now_. If you are able to afford either of the schools, just choose whichever is better, you will only get one chance.
ARM was pretty high-performance back when it first came out in 1986 or so: easily spanking the 80286, 68000 or MicroVAX boxes that were popular. But it didn't have any floating point. I don't know how it compared to early SPARC or PA-RISC chips, if they existed back then.
I'm surprised that Joel recommends choosing the courses that are based on programming, rather than mathematics. He goes to great lengths to mock some logic course he took and on that basis dismisses the whole of academic computer science. If you love computers, you probably spend too much of your free time hacking already, so why waste your years at university doing the same thing? Take the opportunity to learn some of the interesting stuff: especially you need to know about computability and complexity. The mathematician lecturers will expect you to work hard and pay attention, but much better that than being harangued about Java class hierarchies.
That said, if there are courses which involve interesting work on operating systems, writing a toy compiler or whatever, by all means take them. Just stay away from anything too trendy or too 'relevant'; you can learn that stuff by yourself.
That's nothing compared to what they do in Iceland. First everyone pisses on a dead shark then it is buried underground for several months. Then it's dug up, cut into cubes and served as a delicacy. Sources: 1, 2. Sadly I haven't been to Iceland to experience this, though members of my family have.
Yes, wine has an implementation of Direct3D, or at least Transgaming were going to add it to their WineX. I don't know if the API by itself, without the rest of Win32, would be useful for native apps (rather than Windows or winelib programs).
Is it possible to connect them the other way round and use the Selectric as the keyboard for your computer? I haven't used IBM's electric typewriters (only seen them) but I imagine the feel of the keys is a lot better than most spongy modern-day keyboards. The lack of Ctrl and Alt could bite though.
Really? A lot of C code easily has one bug every fifty lines. For example,
printf("hello world\n");
printf("goodbye\n";
If writing the first string fails, the program doesn't warn about it or abort or do anything; it just carries on and tries to print the next string. This is because the return value of printf() is not being checked. This may or may not be a bug depending on what the program is meant to do.
But IMHO, for most programs, not gracefully handling I/O failures is usually a bug. For example if you run 'my_program >out' and the disk fills up, it's probably a bug for the program to silently throw away output and exit with a code indicating success.
Similarly, do you check every integer operation for overflow? You can easily implement the Unix 'wc' command in C but unless you are careful it will have an overflow bug if you fed it, say, a 3Gbyte file of newline characters. On a 64-bit machine the limit is bigger but in principle the bug is still there.
The kind of bugs I'm mentioning are not ones that matter for many applications. Often it's acceptable to let your program misbehave when the disk fills or malloc() fails, and hope these events don't happen often. For kernel code, though, you need to be more paranoid. Even the most obscure and pedantic bug, such as an integer overflow, could one day become a security hole.
Yes, left-handedness is much less common among 80-year olds, but it has been suggested this is because schoolchildren were forced to use their right hand.
It wouldn't be so bad to let individual drivers flip the switch to green - if they pay for it. You could tell a computer in your car how much your time is worth to you (say $10.80 per hour, which is 3 cents per second) and at a junction the cars queuing would bid in an auction for the right to go first. This sounds a rather extreme free-market solution but it's not really any different from congestion charging, which already exists in some cities.
So does this mean that IBM is selling off the crappy clonebuilder business - you know, the people who refused to sell any machine with OS/2? (variously marketed as Aptiva, PS/1 and other names) If so, good riddance. They'll be keeping the true-blue PC business, the group that used to make PS/2s and before that the original PC, PC-XT and PC-AT. At least that is my understanding.
I'm not that knowledgeable on IBM history so maybe someone can correct me. But I thought there were two PC businesses within IBM. One of them is descended from the 'business systems' part and used to make PS/2s and before that the original PC, PC-XT and PC-AT. It now sells reasonably well-built workstations and servers.
The other PC business is descended from the PC clone business (marketed at various times as PS/1, PS/ValuePoint and Aptiva). These are the people who, even when IBM was heavily pushing OS/2, refused to sell a machine with anything except Windows.
So which group is being sold here? The big-blue-blooded servers and workstations business, or the evil cheap and nasty clonebuilders?
They released the screensaver with a fixed list of sites? I thought it would look through your Spam folder in your mail client and visit each web site mentioned there; a much fairer way to do things and perhaps legally safer too.
I know someone has previously suggested making mail clients download every link in a message; the idea is that if everyone did this then spammers would even have an incentive to get 'unsubscribe' working. Yes, it does confirm that your address is live; so what, it was on the spam list anyway.
Since POV-Ray is not free software there isn't that much point including a front end for it in GNOME. If you're asking 'why has nobody written a POV-Ray front end using the GNOME libraries and the GNOME look and feel' that is a slightly different question.
It's Intel's fault for not naming their chips ending in '86' any more. You can say 8086 assember or 80386 assembler and people will know what you mean... the 64-bit version ought to be called an 'i786' or something, but Intel marketing decided to drop the numbers after the 486.
I noticed one big difference between 'smart' and existing tools is that it will sometimes choose an older version of a package if that's necessary to get a smooth upgrade. As they say in the web page,
In this case, there's a package A version 1.0 installed in the system, and there are two versions available for upgrading: 1.5 and 2.0. Version 1.5 may be installed without problems, but version 2.0 has a dependency on B, which is not available anywhere.
In this case, the best possibility is upgrading to 1.5, since upgrading to 2.0 is not an option.
But doesn't it often happen that older versions of a package have known security holes? Until now it has been sufficient to package the newer, fixed release and let the systems like apt and yum pick it up. If we have package managers that may deliberately choose an older version, there needs to be good metadata on which older versions of a package are still usable (ie, don't have known or likely exploits).
Indeed this is true of bugs in general, but security is the most worrying example.
Of course a shift to vegetarian diets would free resources for other things. So would a shift to riding bicycles instead of driving cars, or a shift to living in small one-room apartments instead of houses. Indeed, if you live in a large house, you are taking more than your fair share of land. But you must pay for it.
Of course the world can't sustain everyone eating a US-style diet, nor could it sustain everyone driving the kind of automobile common in the US or using the same amount of fresh water every day as the average American. The more important question is whether the US can sustain it. Americans are lucky to have large areas of land for growing grain and rearing cattle; why shouldn't they enjoy what they have?
You make a good point about environmental damage though, I accept that most of the pollution caused by beef production is not reflected in the price.
Now to get 1lb of steak, I think a cow eats close to 100lb of grain. That's hugely inefficient.
Yes, and that inefficiency is reflected in the high price you pay for steak. If you ate foods that required fewer resources, they would be cheaper and you would have more money to spend on other things. The cost of producing whatever you choose to buy instead will be rougly equal to the cost of growing 100lb of grain and feeding it to cattle. The cost may not come from land usage but from other resources which are equally scarce - for example, people's time. A hand-knitted jumper is 'inefficient' by some measure compared to mass-producted clothing, but many people still prefer to pay the high price needed (forgoing other things) to get something they'll enjoy more.
Slashdot Mirror
Getting sidetracked a bit: nobody fully understands the factors affecting which greyhound will win a race, but bookmakers still offer odds on it. An ideas-futures market might be one way to get a public consensus on the chance of a particular bad thing happening.
However, if a group of scientists who have researched a particular area say 'in our estimation, there is a 20% chance that X', then that is probably good enough to work on.
If there is only a one in five chance that the sky is falling and we're all going to die, that is still pretty damn serious.
What odds would you want before taking action?
Does it run Linux?
I think it comes down to control over your own life and your own computer. The program code itself tells your computer what to do; if it isn't free then your computer may be programmed to do nasty things and you have no legal way to fix it and probably no way to find out for sure what's happening behind your back.
Art and music isn't like that. It's quite possible to argue that scientific knowledge should be unrestricted for the good of society, while restrictions on purely artistic works are allowed. Whether an artist would be insulted by such a view, I am not sure (I expect many prefer to have restrictions so they can earn money from their work). I think this is the view that RMS has expressed. Program code, even for a computer game, is like scientific knowledge and should be shared. Music and artwork, it would be good to share, but it doesn't cause too much social harm if there are restrictions.
These are not necessarily my views BTW, but from gut feeling, I would be pleased to use a game engine that was free and then pay to license certain levels or graphics sets.
It doesn't really matter what 'some hiring managers' might or might not think in a few years' time. Go to the school with the better teaching! Choose more challenging and enjoyable course!
If you can't afford the more expensive college, justifying it with the hope that you will be able to earn higher wages doesn't make it any more affordable _now_. If you are able to afford either of the schools, just choose whichever is better, you will only get one chance.
ARM was pretty high-performance back when it first came out in 1986 or so: easily spanking the 80286, 68000 or MicroVAX boxes that were popular. But it didn't have any floating point. I don't know how it compared to early SPARC or PA-RISC chips, if they existed back then.
I'm surprised that Joel recommends choosing the courses that are based on programming, rather than mathematics. He goes to great lengths to mock some logic course he took and on that basis dismisses the whole of academic computer science. If you love computers, you probably spend too much of your free time hacking already, so why waste your years at university doing the same thing? Take the opportunity to learn some of the interesting stuff: especially you need to know about computability and complexity. The mathematician lecturers will expect you to work hard and pay attention, but much better that than being harangued about Java class hierarchies.
That said, if there are courses which involve interesting work on operating systems, writing a toy compiler or whatever, by all means take them. Just stay away from anything too trendy or too 'relevant'; you can learn that stuff by yourself.
That's nothing compared to what they do in Iceland. First everyone pisses on a dead shark then it is buried underground for several months. Then it's dug up, cut into cubes and served as a delicacy. Sources: 1, 2. Sadly I haven't been to Iceland to experience this, though members of my family have.
Yes, wine has an implementation of Direct3D, or at least Transgaming were going to add it to their WineX. I don't know if the API by itself, without the rest of Win32, would be useful for native apps (rather than Windows or winelib programs).
Is it possible to connect them the other way round and use the Selectric as the keyboard for your computer? I haven't used IBM's electric typewriters (only seen them) but I imagine the feel of the keys is a lot better than most spongy modern-day keyboards. The lack of Ctrl and Alt could bite though.
Really? A lot of C code easily has one bug every fifty lines. For example,
printf("hello world\n");
printf("goodbye\n";
If writing the first string fails, the program doesn't warn about it or abort or do anything; it just carries on and tries to print the next string. This is because the return value of printf() is not being checked. This may or may not be a bug depending on what the program is meant to do.
But IMHO, for most programs, not gracefully handling I/O failures is usually a bug. For example if you run 'my_program >out' and the disk fills up, it's probably a bug for the program to silently throw away output and exit with a code indicating success.
Similarly, do you check every integer operation for overflow? You can easily implement the Unix 'wc' command in C but unless you are careful it will have an overflow bug if you fed it, say, a 3Gbyte file of newline characters. On a 64-bit machine the limit is bigger but in principle the bug is still there.
The kind of bugs I'm mentioning are not ones that matter for many applications. Often it's acceptable to let your program misbehave when the disk fills or malloc() fails, and hope these events don't happen often. For kernel code, though, you need to be more paranoid. Even the most obscure and pedantic bug, such as an integer overflow, could one day become a security hole.
Yes, left-handedness is much less common among 80-year olds, but it has been suggested this is because schoolchildren were forced to use their right hand.
It wouldn't be so bad to let individual drivers flip the switch to green - if they pay for it. You could tell a computer in your car how much your time is worth to you (say $10.80 per hour, which is 3 cents per second) and at a junction the cars queuing would bid in an auction for the right to go first. This sounds a rather extreme free-market solution but it's not really any different from congestion charging, which already exists in some cities.
So does this mean that IBM is selling off the crappy clonebuilder business - you know, the people who refused to sell any machine with OS/2? (variously marketed as Aptiva, PS/1 and other names) If so, good riddance. They'll be keeping the true-blue PC business, the group that used to make PS/2s and before that the original PC, PC-XT and PC-AT. At least that is my understanding.
I'm not that knowledgeable on IBM history so maybe someone can correct me. But I thought there were two PC businesses within IBM. One of them is descended from the 'business systems' part and used to make PS/2s and before that the original PC, PC-XT and PC-AT. It now sells reasonably well-built workstations and servers.
The other PC business is descended from the PC clone business (marketed at various times as PS/1, PS/ValuePoint and Aptiva). These are the people who, even when IBM was heavily pushing OS/2, refused to sell a machine with anything except Windows.
So which group is being sold here? The big-blue-blooded servers and workstations business, or the evil cheap and nasty clonebuilders?
They released the screensaver with a fixed list of sites? I thought it would look through your Spam folder in your mail client and visit each web site mentioned there; a much fairer way to do things and perhaps legally safer too.
I know someone has previously suggested making mail clients download every link in a message; the idea is that if everyone did this then spammers would even have an incentive to get 'unsubscribe' working. Yes, it does confirm that your address is live; so what, it was on the spam list anyway.
Since POV-Ray is not free software there isn't that much point including a front end for it in GNOME. If you're asking 'why has nobody written a POV-Ray front end using the GNOME libraries and the GNOME look and feel' that is a slightly different question.
It's Intel's fault for not naming their chips ending in '86' any more. You can say 8086 assember or 80386 assembler and people will know what you mean... the 64-bit version ought to be called an 'i786' or something, but Intel marketing decided to drop the numbers after the 486.
But doesn't it often happen that older versions of a package have known security holes? Until now it has been sufficient to package the newer, fixed release and let the systems like apt and yum pick it up. If we have package managers that may deliberately choose an older version, there needs to be good metadata on which older versions of a package are still usable (ie, don't have known or likely exploits).
Indeed this is true of bugs in general, but security is the most worrying example.
Of course a shift to vegetarian diets would free resources for other things. So would a shift to riding bicycles instead of driving cars, or a shift to living in small one-room apartments instead of houses. Indeed, if you live in a large house, you are taking more than your fair share of land. But you must pay for it.
Of course the world can't sustain everyone eating a US-style diet, nor could it sustain everyone driving the kind of automobile common in the US or using the same amount of fresh water every day as the average American. The more important question is whether the US can sustain it. Americans are lucky to have large areas of land for growing grain and rearing cattle; why shouldn't they enjoy what they have?
You make a good point about environmental damage though, I accept that most of the pollution caused by beef production is not reflected in the price.
Yes, and that inefficiency is reflected in the high price you pay for steak. If you ate foods that required fewer resources, they would be cheaper and you would have more money to spend on other things. The cost of producing whatever you choose to buy instead will be rougly equal to the cost of growing 100lb of grain and feeding it to cattle. The cost may not come from land usage but from other resources which are equally scarce - for example, people's time. A hand-knitted jumper is 'inefficient' by some measure compared to mass-producted clothing, but many people still prefer to pay the high price needed (forgoing other things) to get something they'll enjoy more.
Or just enable 'light mode' in your Slashdot preferences. The site is a lot easier on the eye after that.
Triple negatives can be tricky. 'Not that CBS hasn't been without its problems'
=> 'Not to say that CBS has had problems'
Of course, most people could care less about this kind of thing.
Not 'dumped'. Better 'ejected', as in
Eject the Fedora Core! Eject the Fedora Core!