If, as seems to be the case, successive administrations from both major parties favor increasingly-expanding police powers, what is the point of the protest? It only makes sense if there is evidence John Kerry will oppose new police powers or support rolling back existing ones. Thus far, the only evidence available shows that Mr. Kerry supports increased police powers at the expense of civil liberties; for example, with his vote in favor of the Patriot Act.
If you integrate it with your mailer, you can reject the mail during the SMTP session rather than generating a separate bounce email, which would have the problems you mentioned (going to a forged from: address). As an added bonus, when you reject it during the SMTP session, you'll get taken off a lot of spam lists, since your address will look like it had delivery problems. And you still get the advantage of bounces, that legitimate mail that got rejected will end up with a bounce back to the sender informing them of it.
Considering that some huge percentage of new drugs, treatments, and surgeries are developed in the US, it's a good thing someone is still going the private enterprise route. Otherwise everyone, including the rest of the world that relies on US medical research, would be fucked, in a manner of speaking.
When was the last time someone outside the US isolated a new antibiotic, for example?
It'd be one thing if this were in the popular press, but this is on the school of engineering's press release site. Oops.
I was going to give them a friendly heads-up that they're publishing information most undergraduates in the field know to be flatly wrong, but I couldn't find a relevant contact address.
They most certainly are small-timers. By "major corporations", one typically means companies like BP, ExxonMobil, Microsoft, Dow, Boeing, McDonald's, GM, and so on.
grandparent post: As far as stability and consistancey goes, only Debian-Stable approaches BSD
parent post: The BSD's also benefit from being a complete system, not a kernel with various userland stuff slapped together into 1001 distributions. This means that users running the development versions are using the same userland as the developers, and bugs can be shaken out far quicker.
It's odd that you'd point that out as a difference from Debian-Stable, since that's exactly what the Debian project, especially the stable distribution, does.
Well, they complained about something very similar, which I think works through the same channels: very quickly published negative online reviews. In previous eras, the movie industry could expect a hyped-up blockbuster with top stars to have a huge opening weekend, even if it turns out to suck, since everyone queues up to go see it before they know it sucks. With online reviews, people are sometimes finding out it sucks within hours of the movie coming out (or with leaks, earlier), which is killing opening weekends of terrible films that otherwise might have snuck in $80m before anyone realized how terrible they were.
Small bands get a lot of exposure through piracy. If you happen to play avant-garde industrial music, or neofolk, or one of a million other genres, your stuff is never going to get played on the radio. When people have never heard of you, they don't buy your CDs, attend your concerts, or purchase other merchandise. Some word-of-mouth advertising takes care of that, but sending someone an mp3 over the internet is just about the best word-of-mouth advertising you can get, because it lets people actually get hooked on music they otherwise may not have ever known existed. I know that's how I've found most of the bands I currently listen to.
I'm not entirely sure that the lack of an online archive of 19th-century newspapers is the primary factor behind some Slashdot articles and comments not containing well-researched background information. But perhaps everyone here wishes they could do extensive historical research before posting, and finally they will be able to do so!
They seem to have basically renamed themselves to BT, and don't use British Telecom anymore. Sort of like how British Petroleum officially changed their name to bp (all-lowercase), and Silicon Graphics, Incorporated uses the name sgi as a primary name, not just an acronym.
I agree some "under-the-hood" knowledge is often helpful, but assembly is only really useful for that sort of knowledge in limited areas, primarily low-level stuff. Much more useful in most systems is knowledge of the system components at a level higher than the CPU--details about how the OS works (scheduler, memory management, etc.), how the language you're programming in is designed (is tail-recursion done without a stack? is list concatenation faster from the front or back? etc.). Knowing assembly will do much less for your LISP code, for example, than knowing how your LISP compiler is implemented will.
It's a tradeoff between maximally efficient code and simple code. Complicating matters further, in many cases what you'd think would be "maximally efficient" code isn't actually maximally efficient anymore, given that it's hard to predict what exactly is going to happen when your code is run through an optimizing compiler and then run on a pipelined CPU. In some cases silly optimization tricks C programmers who know assembly do actually slow down the code, because if they had written something simpler, the compiler could have optimized it, and the compiler knows better optimizations (or can compute better optimizations by looking at literally millions of different factors).
Optimization tricks are also notoriously brittle--they're clever hacks that solve a particular problem more efficiently than the straightforward solution. The problem is that if you want to change things, the trick may not work anymore, so you're stuck rewriting it, or often you end up with subtle bugs, because you relied on some clever hacks whose assumptions no longer hold.
And finally, "optimization" of the assembly-programmer sort often has negligible effects. If you actually profile, the biggest speed hits are invariably in a very few places. Most of your other "optimizations" are going to be making 0.001% speedups, if they even speed anything up at all (and sometimes they slow things down!). That's not only not worth it, it's detrimental to your application's development.
This is even more of a problem in higher-level languages. Lisp, Haskell, and other functional languages do all sorts of stuff under the hood to optimize things, and various scattered parts of your code can interact (if some redundancies are found that can be optimized away, even across modules) so premature optimization is generally a bad idea.
Just to add to the confusion, it's never even been consistent in computing to make a kilo be 1,024 or a mega be 1,048,576. For example, your 100 megabit ethernet card can handle 100,000,000 bits per second (not 104,857,600), and this has been the case when discussing data rate for decades.
Well, in some sense yes, but in another sense no. The problem is it's not entirely like inventing a "metric pint", because that would be redefining the pint after the fact. In this case, computing took already-defined metric prefixes: k, M, G, T, etc. But these are already defined as a thousand, million, billion, and trillion! The M prefix has meant 1,000,000 for quite a while now; the same with k (1,000); and so on. A km has been 1,000 m since quite a bit before the invention of computers.
The use of kilobyte for 1,024 was just sort of sloppy notation: it was close enough to 1,000 that it was convenient to reuse the k that they already knew from the metric system. Then apparently they decided to stick with metric prefixes when the megabyte came along, only with new definitions for each of them. And now they're getting increasingly far from the actual values, so it's turning out to have been a bad idea.
To rectify the situation, someone-or-other came up with mebibyte as the binary form, with megabyte retaining its standard definition in keeping with a megaton or a megawatt. But these haven't really caught on, although I do occasionally see them in some Linux programs (kiB, MiB, etc.).
Allowing me control over my own creative work precisely does "promote useful arts and sciences". Turning creative work into a commodity with a fixed rate results in it becoming an industry, and likely a low-quality one.
It's harder to say these days things like "the EU doesn't much like us at the moment". Many of the new EU countries, especially Poland, are pretty strongly pro-US.
Silly continental Europeans who don't know about the outside world.
It's true that in continental Europe, the period is used as a 10^3 separator, and the comma is used as a decimal separator, but this is hardly universal usage, and certainly the opposite is not a provincial Americanism. Using the comma fora 10^3 separator and the period for a decimal separator is in fact standard English usage, and is what is followed in the UK, Australia, Singapore, India, and South Africa, among other countries, in addition to the US.
Hell, even some other languages use it, like Japanese.
I suppose just because you got lucky with the metric system and "football", you assume whenever continental Europe and the US differ, it's continental Europe on the "international" side. =P
I don't think it's the government's business to tell me how much to charge for my music. If there are monopolies and price-fixing, by all means break them up and institute sanctions, but more price-fixing isn't the way to go. As an individual artist I should have control over my own work, and it's not the government's role to say otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
If, as seems to be the case, successive administrations from both major parties favor increasingly-expanding police powers, what is the point of the protest? It only makes sense if there is evidence John Kerry will oppose new police powers or support rolling back existing ones. Thus far, the only evidence available shows that Mr. Kerry supports increased police powers at the expense of civil liberties; for example, with his vote in favor of the Patriot Act.
If you integrate it with your mailer, you can reject the mail during the SMTP session rather than generating a separate bounce email, which would have the problems you mentioned (going to a forged from: address). As an added bonus, when you reject it during the SMTP session, you'll get taken off a lot of spam lists, since your address will look like it had delivery problems. And you still get the advantage of bounces, that legitimate mail that got rejected will end up with a bounce back to the sender informing them of it.
Considering that some huge percentage of new drugs, treatments, and surgeries are developed in the US, it's a good thing someone is still going the private enterprise route. Otherwise everyone, including the rest of the world that relies on US medical research, would be fucked, in a manner of speaking.
When was the last time someone outside the US isolated a new antibiotic, for example?
It's been all downhill since they got rid of that guy hand-cranking the engine to start it. Fucking ignition motors.
I can't believe I've been using xterm for years and never knew it had menus...
Apparently the release notes do mention that. Oops.
It's still kind of irritating. How hard is it to have the installer delete the files itself?
Well, it is...
The release notes indicate that's not necessary.
So either the release notes are wrong, or the installer is broken, or both.
It'd be one thing if this were in the popular press, but this is on the school of engineering's press release site. Oops.
I was going to give them a friendly heads-up that they're publishing information most undergraduates in the field know to be flatly wrong, but I couldn't find a relevant contact address.
So devices to copy ROMs from NES games are officially legal.
They most certainly are small-timers. By "major corporations", one typically means companies like BP, ExxonMobil, Microsoft, Dow, Boeing, McDonald's, GM, and so on.
Oops! :)
grandparent post:
As far as stability and consistancey goes, only Debian-Stable approaches BSD
parent post:
The BSD's also benefit from being a complete system, not a kernel with various userland stuff slapped together into 1001 distributions. This means that users running the development versions are using the same userland as the developers, and bugs can be shaken out far quicker.
It's odd that you'd point that out as a difference from Debian-Stable, since that's exactly what the Debian project, especially the stable distribution, does.
Well, they complained about something very similar, which I think works through the same channels: very quickly published negative online reviews. In previous eras, the movie industry could expect a hyped-up blockbuster with top stars to have a huge opening weekend, even if it turns out to suck, since everyone queues up to go see it before they know it sucks. With online reviews, people are sometimes finding out it sucks within hours of the movie coming out (or with leaks, earlier), which is killing opening weekends of terrible films that otherwise might have snuck in $80m before anyone realized how terrible they were.
Small bands get a lot of exposure through piracy. If you happen to play avant-garde industrial music, or neofolk, or one of a million other genres, your stuff is never going to get played on the radio. When people have never heard of you, they don't buy your CDs, attend your concerts, or purchase other merchandise. Some word-of-mouth advertising takes care of that, but sending someone an mp3 over the internet is just about the best word-of-mouth advertising you can get, because it lets people actually get hooked on music they otherwise may not have ever known existed. I know that's how I've found most of the bands I currently listen to.
I'm not entirely sure that the lack of an online archive of 19th-century newspapers is the primary factor behind some Slashdot articles and comments not containing well-researched background information. But perhaps everyone here wishes they could do extensive historical research before posting, and finally they will be able to do so!
They seem to have basically renamed themselves to BT, and don't use British Telecom anymore. Sort of like how British Petroleum officially changed their name to bp (all-lowercase), and Silicon Graphics, Incorporated uses the name sgi as a primary name, not just an acronym.
I agree some "under-the-hood" knowledge is often helpful, but assembly is only really useful for that sort of knowledge in limited areas, primarily low-level stuff. Much more useful in most systems is knowledge of the system components at a level higher than the CPU--details about how the OS works (scheduler, memory management, etc.), how the language you're programming in is designed (is tail-recursion done without a stack? is list concatenation faster from the front or back? etc.). Knowing assembly will do much less for your LISP code, for example, than knowing how your LISP compiler is implemented will.
It's a tradeoff between maximally efficient code and simple code. Complicating matters further, in many cases what you'd think would be "maximally efficient" code isn't actually maximally efficient anymore, given that it's hard to predict what exactly is going to happen when your code is run through an optimizing compiler and then run on a pipelined CPU. In some cases silly optimization tricks C programmers who know assembly do actually slow down the code, because if they had written something simpler, the compiler could have optimized it, and the compiler knows better optimizations (or can compute better optimizations by looking at literally millions of different factors).
Optimization tricks are also notoriously brittle--they're clever hacks that solve a particular problem more efficiently than the straightforward solution. The problem is that if you want to change things, the trick may not work anymore, so you're stuck rewriting it, or often you end up with subtle bugs, because you relied on some clever hacks whose assumptions no longer hold.
And finally, "optimization" of the assembly-programmer sort often has negligible effects. If you actually profile, the biggest speed hits are invariably in a very few places. Most of your other "optimizations" are going to be making 0.001% speedups, if they even speed anything up at all (and sometimes they slow things down!). That's not only not worth it, it's detrimental to your application's development.
This is even more of a problem in higher-level languages. Lisp, Haskell, and other functional languages do all sorts of stuff under the hood to optimize things, and various scattered parts of your code can interact (if some redundancies are found that can be optimized away, even across modules) so premature optimization is generally a bad idea.
Just to add to the confusion, it's never even been consistent in computing to make a kilo be 1,024 or a mega be 1,048,576. For example, your 100 megabit ethernet card can handle 100,000,000 bits per second (not 104,857,600), and this has been the case when discussing data rate for decades.
Well, in some sense yes, but in another sense no. The problem is it's not entirely like inventing a "metric pint", because that would be redefining the pint after the fact. In this case, computing took already-defined metric prefixes: k, M, G, T, etc. But these are already defined as a thousand, million, billion, and trillion! The M prefix has meant 1,000,000 for quite a while now; the same with k (1,000); and so on. A km has been 1,000 m since quite a bit before the invention of computers.
The use of kilobyte for 1,024 was just sort of sloppy notation: it was close enough to 1,000 that it was convenient to reuse the k that they already knew from the metric system. Then apparently they decided to stick with metric prefixes when the megabyte came along, only with new definitions for each of them. And now they're getting increasingly far from the actual values, so it's turning out to have been a bad idea.
To rectify the situation, someone-or-other came up with mebibyte as the binary form, with megabyte retaining its standard definition in keeping with a megaton or a megawatt. But these haven't really caught on, although I do occasionally see them in some Linux programs (kiB, MiB, etc.).
Allowing me control over my own creative work precisely does "promote useful arts and sciences". Turning creative work into a commodity with a fixed rate results in it becoming an industry, and likely a low-quality one.
It's harder to say these days things like "the EU doesn't much like us at the moment". Many of the new EU countries, especially Poland, are pretty strongly pro-US.
Silly continental Europeans who don't know about the outside world.
It's true that in continental Europe, the period is used as a 10^3 separator, and the comma is used as a decimal separator, but this is hardly universal usage, and certainly the opposite is not a provincial Americanism. Using the comma fora 10^3 separator and the period for a decimal separator is in fact standard English usage, and is what is followed in the UK, Australia, Singapore, India, and South Africa, among other countries, in addition to the US.
Hell, even some other languages use it, like Japanese.
I suppose just because you got lucky with the metric system and "football", you assume whenever continental Europe and the US differ, it's continental Europe on the "international" side. =P
I don't think it's the government's business to tell me how much to charge for my music. If there are monopolies and price-fixing, by all means break them up and institute sanctions, but more price-fixing isn't the way to go. As an individual artist I should have control over my own work, and it's not the government's role to say otherwise.