The last time I checked, firefox didn't require OS rights to install, as evidenced by my firefox installation on my locked down box at work. Of course, there is a difference between operating system permission and IT department permission. I have zero windows programming experience, so I have a hard time seeing why any applications should require administrator rights to install and use, as long as you have write access to a directory you can execute from.
the novelty/originality of a piece of work has an intrinsic value, which is not the case for software.
On the contrary, the first copy of software usually has tremendous intrinsic value, even if the second copy doesn't have any value, or if the first copy only has value to one person. That's why the best programming jobs (in my opinion) are for companies that pay you for the first copy and don't care if they make money on the second.
When companies figure out that, for example, they can pay someone to implement the exact features they want in OpenOffice.org for a comparable price to what they are paying for Microsoft Office licenses, then they'll reap the benefits of being a software investor instead of a software consumer.
What you're asking amounts to how close you can get to the line of a bad credit rating without crossing it, which is a risky way to manage your finances. Keeping a good credit rating is as simple as living within your means and keeping your commitments:
Keep only one credit card, one that has no annual fee and as low interest rate as possible.
Never use it, unless everything below fails and what you are buying is an absolute necessity like food. Except if you are 18 and need to establish some credit, then you can allow yourself to charge whatever you know you can pay on the next bill.
Buy everything except cars, homes, and educations with cash.
Pay all your bills on time. If you can't, then move into a cheaper place, get rid of cable and cell phone, get a better job, or take the bus if you have to until your income exceeds your expenses.
Put a little bit of money every paycheck into a rainy day savings account until you have enough for at least 3 months of expenses.
Figure out how much you spend every year on "unexpected" expenses like clothing, home and car repairs, vacations, gifts, insurance, computers, etc. Put money in a savings account every paycheck to cover those expenses, so you earn interest on those expenses instead of paying interest on an "emergency" credit card charge. You know those expenses will come up eventually, so you're only fooling yourself if you treat them like an emergency. Not to mention that you tend to take more vacations when you don't have the guilt of going into debt to pay for them.
Never believe what your loan officer claims you can afford. Figure out a monthly payment with some breathing room in case overtime gets cut, tell the loan officer what you can afford, and stick to it. Don't get a bigger house just because the mortgage company qualifies you for that amount.
When your car is paid off, continue paying your car payment to your savings account. Chances are, you'll need to buy another car one day, and it will be difficult if you became accustomed to the "extra" money. Plus, a large down payment will dramatically lower your monthly payments. I currently pay about a third of what relatives pay for the same kind of car, and am working toward being able to buy a future car without any loan at all.
Plan ahead for major expenses. There are better times of the year than others for purchasing a car or going on vacations, that can save a lot of money. For example, we saved a lot by visiting Washington D.C. in January, but felt a little foolish about our timing until we heard that friends were unable to get into places in the summer that had no lines at all when we went.
Don't expect to have everything your parents have right away. Remember, they have at least 20 more years invested in their posessions than you do.
I know it sounds crazy to put money in savings when you are barely making ends meet, but when you add everything up over the long term, you are actually spending a lot less than you would if you were paying credit card interest, which means you can have more fun with your money. I was taking nice vacations twice a year, with no credit card debt, when people I knew with higher incomes than my intern's salary were having their houses foreclosed.
Polls are useful to a "real" voter in selecting a candidate, because of intrinsic weaknesses in first past the post electoral systems.
Say you have two challengers, "A" and "B". You vastly prefer both candidates to the incumbent, and slightly prefer candidate A over candidate B. However, polls indicate that candidate B has a good chance of beating the incumbent, but candidate A does not. The voter who consults the polls ends up with their close second choice, whereas the voter who doesn't follow the polls ends up with their dead last choice.
However, history is full of counterexamples, just look at the Lieberman-Lamont situation.
65% is also a pretty decent score in my graduate courses here in the U.S. (at a top ten engineering school). The tests are different than my undergrad classes were. Most of the points that get deducted are for things I know, but just didn't have time to answer, or picky details or optimizations the professor thought of that I didn't, but probably would think of given enough time. In other words, answers that are (usually) correct but not thorough. In my undergrad classes, there was almost always a single clear, concise, and obvious answer.
I've been wanting to do a similar database for a while, but just don't have the time. Trusting Congress to make a porkbuster database is like trusting oil companies with alternative energy research: they're the worst people for the job, but everyone inexplicably is sitting around waiting for them to do it.
Every member of Congress is against pork on camera, but you might be surprised at how much support there is for pork on the house and senate floors. The congressman from my district, Jeff Flake, has been waging a futile war on pork the last couple of years. (So have a few others, but Flake is who I am familiar with.) That makes it a little easier to find votes on pork spending.
On thomas.loc.gov, look up any appropriations bill this year (try H.R. 5384), click on the amendments link, and search for "Flake." Sorry, thomas.loc.gov has a weird cache system that doesn't allow direct links.
What you'll find is that nearly all of the dozens of Flake amendments on appropriations bills this year have been anti-pork. However, I am not aware of a single one that has passed. What may be even more surprising is the margins by which his amendments fail. At best, he gets about 20% of the vote.
So, stop complaining about an obscure senator from Alaska. Find out what pork your own representative voted for, whether benefitting your state or not, and let him or her know that you don't appreciate it.
as if a flushed ipod by a kid can EVER be [a disaster]
Yes, but this "kid" has a degree in physics. According to Will Smith's character on Men in Black, that makes him the most dangerous creature on the plane.
if the kid have been a terrorist, s/he wouldnt inform them of the action.
Ah, but wouldn't a real terrorist want to lull the crew into a false sense of security?
It's mostly about how close to "the line" you are willing to get. Nearly everyone agrees that the line is somewhere between unfertilized eggs and full-term infants, but the exact point at which experimentation becomes morally wrong is a lot harder to pin down. People who make moral and ethical decisions from a purely secular point of view tend to get as close to the line as possible. People who make those decisions from a purely religious point of view tend to stay as far away from the line as possible. The President is closer to the latter group.
A more practical side of the argument is that the bill would have made it harder to guard against intentionally creating extra embryos for research, which a lot of people think is unethical even if they don't have a problem using unintentional extra embryos.
Creating TATP requires access to a cooler or ice water bath, it is not something you can whip up in a bathroom.
He's right. I tried keeping ice water in the bathroom one time, but after a couple of hours it melted into completely useless tepid water. My chemist friend told me I must have misheard laboratory as lavatory, but not to feel bad because it is a common mistake.
We have some human-machine interaction specialists where I work. I know their educational backgrounds are varied, but I'm not sure what the basic requirements are.
We make military aircraft, so they are concerned not only with the computer interaction in the cockpit, but also with the positions, labels, and feel of switches, knobs, controls, instruments, ejection buttons, etc. For some reason quick and reliable person-machine interaction is considered important when people are shooting at you. (Haven't we all been tempted to motivate certain Microsoft engineers the same way at one time or another?)
It's a lot of fun to go down to the simulator and watch these guys work, but I know there is a lot of tedious work in between the simulator "play" time. Just don't limit yourself to desktop computers when you think about possible careers in the field.
This example deals with a physical product in a physical store. How would this translate to e-mail sent and received electronically?
Did you intentionally block out the insurance license example?
You'd have to check against every single list in existence whose restrictions you might be subject to.
That's why I favor simpler options like a family friendly tld, or an "adult spam only allowed here" tld. However, those have had a difficult time getting off the ground.
If every rinky dink municipality decides to do this it would get
prohibitively expensive to send an e-mail.
No, it would get prohibitively expensive to send an unsolicited, obscene email. The porn industry did just fine before the email era without being able to send unsolicited, obscene snail mail. I don't think it's that much of a problem for obscene spammers to limit themselves to people who have entered their email addresses at some other porn site. I get a lot of spam, but I only get spam I consider obscene maybe twice a year. That's still too much for my children's inboxes. I don't want to be forced to invade their privacy by censoring every email they receive.
Most "rinky dink municipalities" realize that the state is the most appropriate level to handle the problem. Besides, the federal government would intervene before it got to that point. Of course, if that happens, all the childless slashdotters will inexplicably become spammer's rights activists again.
That's not entirely accurate. You can't send unsolicited obscene material in snail mail. Obscene material also cannot be visible on the outside of the envelope or package. If you apply those same standards (which were found constitutional a long time ago) to the new technology of email, complying with an obscene spam blacklist seems a mild restriction.
Would you be so kind as to cite the portion of the Constitution that excludes "adult oriented" from the first amendment?
Certainly. Please see Roth v. United States and Miller v. California.
...the mere fact that material is of interest to Adults does not exempt it from First Amendment protection.
The mere fact that the material is being distributed to minors and/or unwilling third parties does.
In this case, the issue is that Interstate Commerce is involved.... That's exactly the kind of thing that is supposed to be within the purview of Federal Regulation, not State powers.
You are oversimplifying the commerce clause. The fact that a business operates across state lines does not preclude individual states from applying their own restrictions, as long as they do not contradict federal regulations.
For example, you still pay state and local sales tax on things you buy in a local store, even if none of the products sold were actually produced in the state. For another example, in order for an insurance salesperson in a national call center to conduct business with a customer in another state, he or she must hold a license issued by that state.
Every business must comply with all federal and state laws, unless the state law is struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Thousands of businesses do just fine with this restriction; obscene spammers should be no different. In fact, supreme court decisions have specifically said that community standards must be applied in deciding what is obscene. There is an undue burden standard, but I find it hard to believe a court will rule that checking 50 blacklist databases is an undue burden for a business that handles databases of millions of email addresses.
It may surprise you to hear that people were learning stuff from books -- even how to fix computers -- long before google was a gleam in Larry Page's eye. I don't know a single engineer who doesn't have 5 books or so at his or her desk.
Even with google available, books are helpful to cover the basics so that people know how to ask the right questions, which is much more difficult in the internet age than getting the right answers [insert lame hitchhiker's guide joke here].
Don't confuse ignorance with a lack of intelligence or aptitude, either. Your geek squad comment implies that the only people capable of learning how to fix a computer already know a certain amount about how to do it. Certainly, some people have more aptitude for it than others, but remember that at some point, every computer genius you know was more ignorant about computers than the reviewer.
I worked at Taco Bell in high school. Most of my managers were pretty decent, but I had a new one once who was exactly the manual-relying type you described:
Manager walks by as I'm reconstituting some beans.
"You're not putting enough water in those beans."
"I've been doing this a long time. Trust me, this is the right amount."
"The manual says you need a full two quarts of water per bag of beans."
"I know what the manual says; I certified over a year ago. The manual is wrong. The amount of water needed is approximately two quarts, but it varies from bag to bag."
"You obviously need to refresh your training. I just passed the manual certification, so it is more fresh in my mind than in yours. Let me show you the right way to make beans."
Manager making food 20 minutes later: "Why are these beans so runny? I told you that you weren't making them right. The batch I've been using for the last 15 minutes was perfect, but your batch is all runny."
"Actually, this is the batch you made. I just switched it in. The perfect batch you were using before didn't have as much water in it."
"But I followed the manual exactly, so they must be too runny because of something you did after I left."
It wasn't just the managers that couldn't think for themselves, either. Your fire story reminded me of the time I left a stack of nacho trays on a counter, then walked into the refrigerator in the back to get something. While I was away, the stack accidentally tipped over and caught fire on a burner that was boiling a huge pot of water.
When I got out of the refrigerator, I heard someone calling my name. There were no fewer than three people standing around the small fire, waiting for me to get back so I could do something about it. It took me about one second to push my way through the group, pick up the trays by the ends that weren't burning, and extinguish them in the pot of water. No harm done other than having to change the water and throw out a dozen or so trays.
I admit it wasn't the brightest idea to leave the stack there in the first place, but how dense do you have to be to see a tiny fire next to an enormous pot of water and not make the connection?
I would suggest ftp or http, but CD-ROMs are also popular.
I'm just guessing, but I think the right way to distribute a binary would be to compile it before you put it on the server or CD. Sorry, I use gentoo, the only major distro to distribute everything as source, so the compile-first strategy sometimes confuses me. Maybe someone who uses one of the distros that makes thousands of binary packages per release could help point you in the right direction.
Perhaps you've heard of Maya, Massive, or Shake -- all successful commercial Linux software, all distributed in binary. Their software engineers probably had to bother actually trying it, though. It's better just to stick to learning stuff you already know, that way you won't accidentally find out what you've been missing all these years.
My main complaint about java regexps is that all the backslashes have to be quoted with a backslash, making them completely unreadable compared to a language that supports regular expressions natively, like perl (no, a standard library is not technically native support). "\d" becomes "\\d" and so forth. Does anyone know a simple way around this? We just started using java regexp's at work, so the extra backslashes don't bother most people, but they are extremely annoying to those of us with a lot of perl experience.
P.S. How many slashdotters thought they'd be rolling in their graves by the time they heard an example of where perl is more readable than java?
You'll probably be undermodded, but you bring up a good point. The games that are included in most Linux distributions are way better than most of the free games for Windows. People like my wife and myself, who enjoy the simple gameplay of games like tuxracer, frozen bubble, clowns, pioneers, and the like will find Linux a superior platform.
There are over 700 games included in my Linux distribution (gentoo). Of course, a lot of them are not worth a second look, at least by adults, but I still discover a gem every once in a while that I didn't even know existed.
I look forward to seeing what my daughter will like when she gets old enough. I didn't have any video games at all until I was 12, and then it was only one TRS-80 game until college. I would have done almost anything to have the selection of games that she will have.
As for the more modern games, that's why I have a TV dedicated to video editing and an Xbox.
As a member of perhaps the last generation to make it through high school without ever being required to use a computer for typing papers, I think the advent of computers has increased grammar and clarity in writing overall, because it has dramatically increased the speed and ease of editing.
If you are old enough, then think for a minute about writing in school. How often did you actually write second and third drafts? I bet it was only when the teacher required it. Now, I rewrite parts all the time, even on something as trivial as a slashdot post.
Also think about how often you read the work of other amateur writers before computers became popular. You were probably limited to family members and occasionally those who sat next to you at school. Now, everyone has a world-wide audience, whether their writing merits it or not.
First-world countries also have educational systems that encourage everyone to read and write, even those with no aptitude at all for it. I know several people who rarely read and write any more than is necessary for daily life, and who would probably never have learned at all if they had been born a century earlier.
In short, I think literacy and grammar is improving overall, despite the perception to the contrary.
If you think the population of mine workers is large, I set off the alarm once after shooting off a bunch of fireworks on new year's eve. All I had to do was sign a paper. They inspected my bags more closely, and made me check the bag that set off the alarm even though I was going to carry it on.
Does anyone know when the last time explosives were actually set off on a plane?
I agree that automated checking would be pointless in the case where there is more than one correct answer, unless the grader checks for all possible correct answers. I had an artificial intelligence class with automated grading that worked that way.
Ironically, both my undergrad and graduate compiler courses had very little programming. Doing compiler optimizations by hand for a whole semester can really make you appreciate compilers.
It's not madness. I actually preferred my classes with automated output checking, for the following reasons:
It forces the teacher to make very clear program specifications.
It forces the teacher to make a reference implementation of their own assignment, so they will see for themselves where potential problems are.
Teachers provide some sample test cases and solutions, so that students can get instant feedback on the correctness of the program, even in the middle of the night. The final grading used those test cases, and some surprise ones to make sure the students thought about the entire algorithm and didn't just write to the test cases.
The automated grading only ever counted for maybe 70% of the grade. I never had a class with automated grading where a human didn't check for style, implementation, simple mistakes, etc.
The grader can still look at the output of failed test cases to provide constructive feedback, but they don't have to waste their time looking at it when the student got it right.
I always knew exactly what a certain percentage of my grade would be, before I turned in the assignment.
As for implementation, all you need is a script that compiles the student's program, runs it against the test cases, then does a diff against the output from the reference implementation, and records how many test cases passed.
Have you tried using the -dSubsetFonts=false option to ps2pdf? Any other options that might help? Have you had any problems uploading a postscript file instead? Just wondering because I'm in the middle of a small handbook for a local niche market, which I plan to have lulu print, but I haven't used them before.
Slashdot Mirror
The last time I checked, firefox didn't require OS rights to install, as evidenced by my firefox installation on my locked down box at work. Of course, there is a difference between operating system permission and IT department permission. I have zero windows programming experience, so I have a hard time seeing why any applications should require administrator rights to install and use, as long as you have write access to a directory you can execute from.
On the contrary, the first copy of software usually has tremendous intrinsic value, even if the second copy doesn't have any value, or if the first copy only has value to one person. That's why the best programming jobs (in my opinion) are for companies that pay you for the first copy and don't care if they make money on the second.
When companies figure out that, for example, they can pay someone to implement the exact features they want in OpenOffice.org for a comparable price to what they are paying for Microsoft Office licenses, then they'll reap the benefits of being a software investor instead of a software consumer.
What you're asking amounts to how close you can get to the line of a bad credit rating without crossing it, which is a risky way to manage your finances. Keeping a good credit rating is as simple as living within your means and keeping your commitments:
I know it sounds crazy to put money in savings when you are barely making ends meet, but when you add everything up over the long term, you are actually spending a lot less than you would if you were paying credit card interest, which means you can have more fun with your money. I was taking nice vacations twice a year, with no credit card debt, when people I knew with higher incomes than my intern's salary were having their houses foreclosed.
Polls are useful to a "real" voter in selecting a candidate, because of intrinsic weaknesses in first past the post electoral systems.
Say you have two challengers, "A" and "B". You vastly prefer both candidates to the incumbent, and slightly prefer candidate A over candidate B. However, polls indicate that candidate B has a good chance of beating the incumbent, but candidate A does not. The voter who consults the polls ends up with their close second choice, whereas the voter who doesn't follow the polls ends up with their dead last choice.
However, history is full of counterexamples, just look at the Lieberman-Lamont situation.
65% is also a pretty decent score in my graduate courses here in the U.S. (at a top ten engineering school). The tests are different than my undergrad classes were. Most of the points that get deducted are for things I know, but just didn't have time to answer, or picky details or optimizations the professor thought of that I didn't, but probably would think of given enough time. In other words, answers that are (usually) correct but not thorough. In my undergrad classes, there was almost always a single clear, concise, and obvious answer.
Thanks. I've been using Thomas for years and am now thoroughly embarrased that I never tried to figure that out.
I still can't figure out how to get to the amendments, but here is a link to the appropriations bill I was using as an example.
I've been wanting to do a similar database for a while, but just don't have the time. Trusting Congress to make a porkbuster database is like trusting oil companies with alternative energy research: they're the worst people for the job, but everyone inexplicably is sitting around waiting for them to do it.
Every member of Congress is against pork on camera, but you might be surprised at how much support there is for pork on the house and senate floors. The congressman from my district, Jeff Flake, has been waging a futile war on pork the last couple of years. (So have a few others, but Flake is who I am familiar with.) That makes it a little easier to find votes on pork spending.
On thomas.loc.gov, look up any appropriations bill this year (try H.R. 5384), click on the amendments link, and search for "Flake." Sorry, thomas.loc.gov has a weird cache system that doesn't allow direct links.
What you'll find is that nearly all of the dozens of Flake amendments on appropriations bills this year have been anti-pork. However, I am not aware of a single one that has passed. What may be even more surprising is the margins by which his amendments fail. At best, he gets about 20% of the vote.
So, stop complaining about an obscure senator from Alaska. Find out what pork your own representative voted for, whether benefitting your state or not, and let him or her know that you don't appreciate it.
Yes, but this "kid" has a degree in physics. According to Will Smith's character on Men in Black, that makes him the most dangerous creature on the plane.
Ah, but wouldn't a real terrorist want to lull the crew into a false sense of security?
It's mostly about how close to "the line" you are willing to get. Nearly everyone agrees that the line is somewhere between unfertilized eggs and full-term infants, but the exact point at which experimentation becomes morally wrong is a lot harder to pin down. People who make moral and ethical decisions from a purely secular point of view tend to get as close to the line as possible. People who make those decisions from a purely religious point of view tend to stay as far away from the line as possible. The President is closer to the latter group.
A more practical side of the argument is that the bill would have made it harder to guard against intentionally creating extra embryos for research, which a lot of people think is unethical even if they don't have a problem using unintentional extra embryos.
He's right. I tried keeping ice water in the bathroom one time, but after a couple of hours it melted into completely useless tepid water. My chemist friend told me I must have misheard laboratory as lavatory, but not to feel bad because it is a common mistake.
We have some human-machine interaction specialists where I work. I know their educational backgrounds are varied, but I'm not sure what the basic requirements are.
We make military aircraft, so they are concerned not only with the computer interaction in the cockpit, but also with the positions, labels, and feel of switches, knobs, controls, instruments, ejection buttons, etc. For some reason quick and reliable person-machine interaction is considered important when people are shooting at you. (Haven't we all been tempted to motivate certain Microsoft engineers the same way at one time or another?)
It's a lot of fun to go down to the simulator and watch these guys work, but I know there is a lot of tedious work in between the simulator "play" time. Just don't limit yourself to desktop computers when you think about possible careers in the field.
Did you intentionally block out the insurance license example?
That's why I favor simpler options like a family friendly tld, or an "adult spam only allowed here" tld. However, those have had a difficult time getting off the ground.
No, it would get prohibitively expensive to send an unsolicited, obscene email. The porn industry did just fine before the email era without being able to send unsolicited, obscene snail mail. I don't think it's that much of a problem for obscene spammers to limit themselves to people who have entered their email addresses at some other porn site. I get a lot of spam, but I only get spam I consider obscene maybe twice a year. That's still too much for my children's inboxes. I don't want to be forced to invade their privacy by censoring every email they receive.
Most "rinky dink municipalities" realize that the state is the most appropriate level to handle the problem. Besides, the federal government would intervene before it got to that point. Of course, if that happens, all the childless slashdotters will inexplicably become spammer's rights activists again.
That's not entirely accurate. You can't send unsolicited obscene material in snail mail. Obscene material also cannot be visible on the outside of the envelope or package. If you apply those same standards (which were found constitutional a long time ago) to the new technology of email, complying with an obscene spam blacklist seems a mild restriction.
You are oversimplifying the commerce clause. The fact that a business operates across state lines does not preclude individual states from applying their own restrictions, as long as they do not contradict federal regulations.
For example, you still pay state and local sales tax on things you buy in a local store, even if none of the products sold were actually produced in the state. For another example, in order for an insurance salesperson in a national call center to conduct business with a customer in another state, he or she must hold a license issued by that state.
Every business must comply with all federal and state laws, unless the state law is struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Thousands of businesses do just fine with this restriction; obscene spammers should be no different. In fact, supreme court decisions have specifically said that community standards must be applied in deciding what is obscene. There is an undue burden standard, but I find it hard to believe a court will rule that checking 50 blacklist databases is an undue burden for a business that handles databases of millions of email addresses.
It may surprise you to hear that people were learning stuff from books -- even how to fix computers -- long before google was a gleam in Larry Page's eye. I don't know a single engineer who doesn't have 5 books or so at his or her desk.
Even with google available, books are helpful to cover the basics so that people know how to ask the right questions, which is much more difficult in the internet age than getting the right answers [insert lame hitchhiker's guide joke here].
Don't confuse ignorance with a lack of intelligence or aptitude, either. Your geek squad comment implies that the only people capable of learning how to fix a computer already know a certain amount about how to do it. Certainly, some people have more aptitude for it than others, but remember that at some point, every computer genius you know was more ignorant about computers than the reviewer.
I worked at Taco Bell in high school. Most of my managers were pretty decent, but I had a new one once who was exactly the manual-relying type you described:
Manager walks by as I'm reconstituting some beans.
"You're not putting enough water in those beans."
"I've been doing this a long time. Trust me, this is the right amount."
"The manual says you need a full two quarts of water per bag of beans."
"I know what the manual says; I certified over a year ago. The manual is wrong. The amount of water needed is approximately two quarts, but it varies from bag to bag."
"You obviously need to refresh your training. I just passed the manual certification, so it is more fresh in my mind than in yours. Let me show you the right way to make beans."
Manager making food 20 minutes later: "Why are these beans so runny? I told you that you weren't making them right. The batch I've been using for the last 15 minutes was perfect, but your batch is all runny."
"Actually, this is the batch you made. I just switched it in. The perfect batch you were using before didn't have as much water in it."
"But I followed the manual exactly, so they must be too runny because of something you did after I left."
It wasn't just the managers that couldn't think for themselves, either. Your fire story reminded me of the time I left a stack of nacho trays on a counter, then walked into the refrigerator in the back to get something. While I was away, the stack accidentally tipped over and caught fire on a burner that was boiling a huge pot of water.
When I got out of the refrigerator, I heard someone calling my name. There were no fewer than three people standing around the small fire, waiting for me to get back so I could do something about it. It took me about one second to push my way through the group, pick up the trays by the ends that weren't burning, and extinguish them in the pot of water. No harm done other than having to change the water and throw out a dozen or so trays.
I admit it wasn't the brightest idea to leave the stack there in the first place, but how dense do you have to be to see a tiny fire next to an enormous pot of water and not make the connection?
I would suggest ftp or http, but CD-ROMs are also popular.
I'm just guessing, but I think the right way to distribute a binary would be to compile it before you put it on the server or CD. Sorry, I use gentoo, the only major distro to distribute everything as source, so the compile-first strategy sometimes confuses me. Maybe someone who uses one of the distros that makes thousands of binary packages per release could help point you in the right direction.
Perhaps you've heard of Maya, Massive, or Shake -- all successful commercial Linux software, all distributed in binary. Their software engineers probably had to bother actually trying it, though. It's better just to stick to learning stuff you already know, that way you won't accidentally find out what you've been missing all these years.
My main complaint about java regexps is that all the backslashes have to be quoted with a backslash, making them completely unreadable compared to a language that supports regular expressions natively, like perl (no, a standard library is not technically native support). "\d" becomes "\\d" and so forth. Does anyone know a simple way around this? We just started using java regexp's at work, so the extra backslashes don't bother most people, but they are extremely annoying to those of us with a lot of perl experience.
P.S. How many slashdotters thought they'd be rolling in their graves by the time they heard an example of where perl is more readable than java?
You'll probably be undermodded, but you bring up a good point. The games that are included in most Linux distributions are way better than most of the free games for Windows. People like my wife and myself, who enjoy the simple gameplay of games like tuxracer, frozen bubble, clowns, pioneers, and the like will find Linux a superior platform.
There are over 700 games included in my Linux distribution (gentoo). Of course, a lot of them are not worth a second look, at least by adults, but I still discover a gem every once in a while that I didn't even know existed.
I look forward to seeing what my daughter will like when she gets old enough. I didn't have any video games at all until I was 12, and then it was only one TRS-80 game until college. I would have done almost anything to have the selection of games that she will have.
As for the more modern games, that's why I have a TV dedicated to video editing and an Xbox.
As a member of perhaps the last generation to make it through high school without ever being required to use a computer for typing papers, I think the advent of computers has increased grammar and clarity in writing overall, because it has dramatically increased the speed and ease of editing.
If you are old enough, then think for a minute about writing in school. How often did you actually write second and third drafts? I bet it was only when the teacher required it. Now, I rewrite parts all the time, even on something as trivial as a slashdot post.
Also think about how often you read the work of other amateur writers before computers became popular. You were probably limited to family members and occasionally those who sat next to you at school. Now, everyone has a world-wide audience, whether their writing merits it or not.
First-world countries also have educational systems that encourage everyone to read and write, even those with no aptitude at all for it. I know several people who rarely read and write any more than is necessary for daily life, and who would probably never have learned at all if they had been born a century earlier.
In short, I think literacy and grammar is improving overall, despite the perception to the contrary.
Does anyone know when the last time explosives were actually set off on a plane?
Ironically, both my undergrad and graduate compiler courses had very little programming. Doing compiler optimizations by hand for a whole semester can really make you appreciate compilers.
- It forces the teacher to make very clear program specifications.
- It forces the teacher to make a reference implementation of their own assignment, so they will see for themselves where potential problems are.
- Teachers provide some sample test cases and solutions, so that students can get instant feedback on the correctness of the program, even in the middle of the night. The final grading used those test cases, and some surprise ones to make sure the students thought about the entire algorithm and didn't just write to the test cases.
- The automated grading only ever counted for maybe 70% of the grade. I never had a class with automated grading where a human didn't check for style, implementation, simple mistakes, etc.
- The grader can still look at the output of failed test cases to provide constructive feedback, but they don't have to waste their time looking at it when the student got it right.
- I always knew exactly what a certain percentage of my grade would be, before I turned in the assignment.
As for implementation, all you need is a script that compiles the student's program, runs it against the test cases, then does a diff against the output from the reference implementation, and records how many test cases passed.Have you tried using the -dSubsetFonts=false option to ps2pdf? Any other options that might help? Have you had any problems uploading a postscript file instead? Just wondering because I'm in the middle of a small handbook for a local niche market, which I plan to have lulu print, but I haven't used them before.