XBoxes? To tackle obesity? What else? A new TV set? Why not offer bikes and musical instruments instead of XBoxes and iPods? This is the most stupid idea I have ever heard.
Well, iPods can certainly make jogging more enjoyable. Running can be incredibly boring without the diversion of listening to music on my iPod. In fact, I mostly use my music player in the gym rather than at work, which usually involves a computer that has a sound card. So I don't need a dedicated device except when exercising/doing paperwork.
the Gimp. If I hear one more zealot even try to compare it to Photoshop.... No doubt, the code to the Gimp is probably cleaner,better written, and less prone to memory leaks.... but it doesn't change the fact that Photoshop is light years more advanced (4 letters: CMYK) and a lot more elegant to use.
Could you expand on that for non-power-users? I'm not a graphic designer and I admit that Photoshop is a little easier to use, but I don't think the Gimp is as bad as you say. It is certainly different to use, but after a few weeks I got familiar with its interface. In fact, I prefer it to many other graphics applications that I used on my PC. That's my experience with most well-designed-but-different user interfaces - open source or not. I quickly got comfortable with Microsoft Office's task pane and Windows XP's new start menu, for instance. Perhaps I'm an aberration, but the limiting factor in the learning curves of most "infamous" applications seem more of fear than actual hardship.
My take on it is just to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Why not spend less time on these studies about obesity, and more on promoting healthy eating and exercise?
I can't stress how much truth there is in this statement. I was starting to get really fat, and my grades, productivity, and personal opinion dropped like crazy. Since then, I started eating healthy, lifting weights, and running as often as I can (ideally daily). In about a month I lost five pounds!:-)
I took a scientific approach. I attempted to running (~2.5-3mi) as often as I could - forcing myself to do the exercises rather than do something else (e.g. gotta do this homework assignment or research paper). Furthermore, I made sure my heart rate was within my target range so as not to tire myself out. I also lifted weights and joined the wrestling club. (Even though I wrestled in high school, I was horribly out of practice and shape by now.)
Each time I ran I would record estimates of my time, distance, calories burned, and average heart rate. However, I made it a point not to measure my weight since that depressed me in the past. The numbers recorded would probably not be accurate or precise; however, the trend would be after enough data was collected. (For the geeky, the error of an average of measurements is proportional to the rms of each individual measurement's error.)
With the exception of a small breakfast, I never ate until after running. I also attempted to balance my energy burned from running with the calories consumed during lunch after the exercise (I went to Subway). With the addition of wrestling (two times/week) and weight lifting (three times/week), I lost lots of weight without thinking about it. Furthermore, I believe that I didn't lose muscle mass since I kept lifting weights (at 80% max).
More importantly, my self confidence rose and I found I was ten times more productive than before. I programmed much more in the last month than the previous quarter year. My grades improved as well. I can hardly believe how good this exercise makes me feel too. It is so much better than alcohol (which really doesn't do much to me), food, or wasting time playing computer games to releave stress. It is great!
I live in Santorum's home town, and here's my letter:
I am an engineering-physics major attending the University of Pittsburgh. I do not support S.786, the National Weather Service Duties Act of 2005. In particular, I disagree that weather data provided by NOAA should be limited from public consumption so the market value of private interests is preserved.
The data provided by the National Weather Service does not harm the private weather services - in fact it allows independent verification of their claims. This increases their market value, since the risk of inaccurate statistics is less.
It also allows amateur programmers like me to write applications that analyze the data for trends and other uses. This is an engaging hobby that helps students practice their technical skills with data analysis, networking and Internet inter operation, amateur weather forcasting, among others. It would be a shame to discontinue this service for the reasons stated in the Bill.
Finally, in practice it is very hard to determine the market value of goods and services and how government services increase or decrease it. There is no reliable system of checks-and-balances to challenge decisions on how data affects the market.
The service to the public by NOAA is cheap and increases the value of private weather services by decreasing the risk. It does not affect the value of their data significantly when they present it to the general public, since most don't directly use NOAA data. For the small minority that directly use that data, the service is a valuable asset for amateur and professional software developers that would not be provided by the other private weather services.
I have the ultimate solution to web sites that try to get around my web browser's popup blocker (either Firefox, Opera, or Internet Explorer depending on my mood and OS). I simply click the back button and never visit that site again.
Popups are annoying and give me the impression that the sponsors using popups are annoying as well. Webmaster that use popups are either greedy or can't pay the bills with regular advertisments. If it is an informative site, then why should I trust them when they decieve me into viewing advertisements or visiting sites that I wasn't expecting? If the site is a merchant site, then they probably aren't reputable enough to do business with.
In any case, popups disrepect me, who as a visitor has all the power. Why should I care what the web site owner says or can offer me when the site opens windows I don't ask for or uses deception to get attention? These feelings induce me to hit the back button and mentally blacklist the companies involved in such behavior.
So my popup blocker - after built-in filters in my browser - is the back button. If the web site owners wants my attention they can earn it with on-topic advertisements that respect me the visitor.
Snakebots are very fragile. Many times a section would break after a few hours demostration. Jer was working on making each section more modular and easier to build. Apparently the main goal of snakebots for many research labs are for providing demostrations (read: grantbots) and giving new grad students something to do.;-)
Actually, null characters are used to terminate strings, so if there's one byte left to be read and it's a null character, the read routine would just return a string with length of zero. If it's the EOF character, it would return -1.
That's true in C, but not in Java. Try this code fragment:
The first println will output "3" and not "0", even though it is a string of just null characters. You can verify this by the second println, which prints the bytes (as an integer) of the second character. It will ouptut "'0'" too.
That wouldn't work, since the null character is still a legit byte. Did you mean:
while ((buffer = in.read()) >= 0)
That's why I usually deal with buffer classes and streams for both reading and writing rather than looking at the bytes by hand.:) However, in this case they were overkill for my method.
In my experience, code like that often comes about as a programmer is experimenting with a different algorithms (sometimes to fix bugs) and simply forgot to finish refactoring that slice.
For instance, I once used a byte array of one 1 element as a buffer! The reason was that my previous design overused Java IO streams. The next version (which is much simpler) just modified the bytes directly from a single stream. However, with my brain in "byte" mode I tried to use bytes where I should have used an int. Here's what it looked like (from memory):
int buffer; while((buffer = in.read()) != -1) { //...
But that form seems to obfusticate the meaning and is harder to read. As you can see, code is often drastically refactored as algorithms are changed. Some things slip through.
You don't even need to use ActiveX objects in IE. You can use document.createElement("xml") and use Internet Explorer's built-in XML islands extention to load content, which seems to work even if ActiveX is disabled (at least for me) in IE6-SP2. Pimping my own stuff: I wrote a few journal entries on this topic a while ago. Check out the original article and its update.
WARNING WARNING WARNING! I AM NOT A LAWYER, AND THE FOLLOWING IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE. IN FACT, I KNOW VERY LITTLE OF THE REQUIRED KNOWLEDGE, AND THE FOLLOWING IS INTENDED TO REFLECT MY CURRENT THINKING ONLY. WARNING WARNING WARNING!
LGPL is what lets me use things like libPNG or ZLib in my commercial application without giving away the unrelated source code to my entire program. LGPL is a good thing if you value PNG support in other programs that aren't going to be using GPL themselves.
(The following assumes you are not the copyright holder to the MPL sources.)
Doesn't the MPL allow this as well? In fact, the only time you need to relicense your code under the MPL is if you directly use MPL text. If you don't modify the files or copy-and-paste from the MPL sources, then your contribution can be under any license you wish. IANAL, but that's what the MPL seems to indicate to me.
Now, you can't relicense works based on MPL source under the GPL; although, you can with the LGPL. I think that the main reason is the "patent peace" cause in the MPL. Still, that's a good idea that many licenses are starting to include. There are even rumors that the next generation of the GPL will include something simular. However in the meantime that's why there are MPL/LGPL/GPL tri-licenses is out there.
Now the MPL has its flaws. Some of the requirements don't seem very general purpose. I generally agree with the CDDL's modifications, except for its noted patent peace problems among other minor things. Personally, I want something like the MPL that is easy to apply to a project, yet allows other parties to use any license for other works that associate to/from/with the project or works that that don't contain any of the project's copyrighted stuff. Does anyone have any ideas?
Not only that, but the open content license also allows Google to profit from providing premium access (read: low-latency) to their own instance of the content.
Not only that, but from Google's point-of-view Wikipedia provides the benifits of Yahoo's original function and the Open Directory Project. That is, the community's openness actually seems to provide insentive to edit and add to the the content, while the collective wiki gardening also removes wrong, out-of-date, or very low quality articles and spam from the system. Thus Wikis - and Wikipedia in particular - generally provide high quality links that search engines can use to target and/or refine their search bots. This helps them with searching, targeting adwords, anti-spam filtering in Gmail, among others. That's why spammers try vandalizing them so much. Given Google's lead among their peers with document analysis algorithms, they have a high incentive to support wikis like Wikipedia.
There seem to be a few errors with both charts. For instance, the pdf diagram shows JavaScript to be directly influenced by only Java, while the Éric Lévénez's history shows links from both C++ and C. However, JavaScript was actually designed to be Self in C's clothing. Some features of LISP and other object-functional languages also influenced it's design. I wonder how the links in these charts were determined.
Enterprise is starting to look really good. I previously submitted a story - that was rejected:-( - about the next half of Star Trek: Enterprise. Trektoday reported that it will feature some exciting plots involving "Andoria, a Klingon moon, Romulan outposts, Romulan Marauders, Orion Privateers, Earth's Moon, Mars, a Constitution-class Federation starship and more. You'll see a live Tholian... and a Gorn." according to the show runner Manny Coto. Leaked mild spoilers also indicate that the Constitution-class ship is the U.S.S. Defiant, which re-appears in the two-parter episode titled, In a Mirror, Darkly. There have been beautiful pictures of the reconstructed set just recently posted too. As a hardcore Trekkie, I find it fascinating.
I remember that, but I can't find a link to the story. It really shows the advantages of an open development process. Do you know of any resources documenting what happended with the kernel?
I already run Cygwin on a flash drive. Granted, I only run some BASH, CVS, Lynx, clisp, and some other text utilities. But it only takes up 69,884,685 bytes plus slack. Here's what I did:
I'm installing on a computer with limited permissions (no install allowed). So I downloaded setup.exe from Cygwin.com.
Ran setup.exe. I told it to:
Install only for me (although I didn't install untill later).
Download only from the Internet to c:\temp\cygwin-setup\.
Use a local mirror. Don't bother with any of the suggested default ones - they are slow. I used a little-known mirror from a local university.
I selected the minimum install and a few extra packages. Don't go overboard. If you want more, you can install them later. Note that I selected Nano instead of Emacs. I'm just weird, OK!
Took a break while setup.exe worked hard downloading. I think Cygwin still has a grudge against me for that!:-p
After downloading was completed, I finished the process to close setup.exe.
I made a zip copy of c:\temp\cygwin-setup\ in case I fubar my installation. That way I can go back to a minimum build. You didn't go overboard a few steps ago, right?
Now I reran setup.exe to download any other crap like clisp (I kid, I kid!) that I wanted. Use the same settings as above except for the package selections. Use common sense.
I ran setup.exe a third time. I told it to use the files downloaded and install them to c:\temp\cygwin\. I opted NOT to add all the shortcuts that Realplayer likes to force on me. Now I checked to make sure it worked by running the batch file in the directory.
After verifying that it works, copy the entire cygwin directory to your flash drive. I put mine under \programs\windows\.
That batch file won't work with other computers because it fubars the mount points. After a little bit of experimenting, I figured out a better batch file for portable drives. I use:
@echo off
rem - required for `man` to work set TERM=cygwin
rem - sets home path rem - replace LOGONNAME with your log-on name (you can choose anything) rem - create this folder by hand set HOME=%cd%\home\LOGONNAME
rem - set mount points rem - these make the directories and drives, which rem - are required to start cygwin, readable bin\mount -f -u -b "%cd%\\bin" "/usr/bin" bin\mount -f -u -b "%cd%\\lib" "/usr/lib" bin\mount -f -u -b "%cd%" "/" bin\mount -u -b --change-cygdrive-prefix "/cygdrive"
rem - start shell bin\bash --login -i
I run this batch file from a simple wsh vbscript (the horror):
set shellProxy = WScript.createObject("WScript.Shell")
Now run that. Does it work? If so, close everything, unmount the USB drive in Windows, and put try it with a clean computer. It should work in that one two. Now you have a portable Cygwin-based BASH shell on a Flash Drive.
Hope someone finds that useful! Some resources that really helped me out include:
I store firefox on a hi-speed usb 2.0 drive. With a custom script (on Windows: yes, a.vbs file - I could have used a batch script but I didn't want a dos window), you can store your profile on the drive. This way I can carry everything with me - my bookmarks, history, and other nice things.
USB drives are useful for more than just firefox. I store some useful Java programs like jEdit and Saxon. I even have a copy of Cygwin for GNU hacking in Windows. Just learn how to use the windows scripting host. Even though it sometimes has lots of bugs (or, more precisely, too many Microsoft programs automatically run wsh scripts without safety measures); it'll simplify your life.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, at least I still have my books. And the best thing is, there's time now... all the time I need.
<<Picks up a book, but glasses fall off and break.>>
That's not fair! That's not fair at all! (source)
Well, iPods can certainly make jogging more enjoyable. Running can be incredibly boring without the diversion of listening to music on my iPod. In fact, I mostly use my music player in the gym rather than at work, which usually involves a computer that has a sound card. So I don't need a dedicated device except when exercising/doing paperwork.
I agree with you about the XBoxes though.
Could you expand on that for non-power-users? I'm not a graphic designer and I admit that Photoshop is a little easier to use, but I don't think the Gimp is as bad as you say. It is certainly different to use, but after a few weeks I got familiar with its interface. In fact, I prefer it to many other graphics applications that I used on my PC. That's my experience with most well-designed-but-different user interfaces - open source or not. I quickly got comfortable with Microsoft Office's task pane and Windows XP's new start menu, for instance. Perhaps I'm an aberration, but the limiting factor in the learning curves of most "infamous" applications seem more of fear than actual hardship.
I'm not Jarrod, nor have I ever been in a commercial. Being a college student, I wish I had his income to pay my tution! ;-)
I can't stress how much truth there is in this statement. I was starting to get really fat, and my grades, productivity, and personal opinion dropped like crazy. Since then, I started eating healthy, lifting weights, and running as often as I can (ideally daily). In about a month I lost five pounds! :-)
I took a scientific approach. I attempted to running (~2.5-3mi) as often as I could - forcing myself to do the exercises rather than do something else (e.g. gotta do this homework assignment or research paper). Furthermore, I made sure my heart rate was within my target range so as not to tire myself out. I also lifted weights and joined the wrestling club. (Even though I wrestled in high school, I was horribly out of practice and shape by now.)
Each time I ran I would record estimates of my time, distance, calories burned, and average heart rate. However, I made it a point not to measure my weight since that depressed me in the past. The numbers recorded would probably not be accurate or precise; however, the trend would be after enough data was collected. (For the geeky, the error of an average of measurements is proportional to the rms of each individual measurement's error.)
With the exception of a small breakfast, I never ate until after running. I also attempted to balance my energy burned from running with the calories consumed during lunch after the exercise (I went to Subway). With the addition of wrestling (two times/week) and weight lifting (three times/week), I lost lots of weight without thinking about it. Furthermore, I believe that I didn't lose muscle mass since I kept lifting weights (at 80% max).
More importantly, my self confidence rose and I found I was ten times more productive than before. I programmed much more in the last month than the previous quarter year. My grades improved as well. I can hardly believe how good this exercise makes me feel too. It is so much better than alcohol (which really doesn't do much to me), food, or wasting time playing computer games to releave stress. It is great!
I live in Santorum's home town, and here's my letter:
I am an engineering-physics major attending the University of Pittsburgh. I do not support S.786, the National Weather Service Duties Act of 2005. In particular, I disagree that weather data provided by NOAA should be limited from public consumption so the market value of private interests is preserved.
The data provided by the National Weather Service does not harm the private weather services - in fact it allows independent verification of their claims. This increases their market value, since the risk of inaccurate statistics is less.
It also allows amateur programmers like me to write applications that analyze the data for trends and other uses. This is an engaging hobby that helps students practice their technical skills with data analysis, networking and Internet inter operation, amateur weather forcasting, among others. It would be a shame to discontinue this service for the reasons stated in the Bill.
Finally, in practice it is very hard to determine the market value of goods and services and how government services increase or decrease it. There is no reliable system of checks-and-balances to challenge decisions on how data affects the market.
The service to the public by NOAA is cheap and increases the value of private weather services by decreasing the risk. It does not affect the value of their data significantly when they present it to the general public, since most don't directly use NOAA data. For the small minority that directly use that data, the service is a valuable asset for amateur and professional software developers that would not be provided by the other private weather services.
So I suggest you withdraw the bill.
I have the ultimate solution to web sites that try to get around my web browser's popup blocker (either Firefox, Opera, or Internet Explorer depending on my mood and OS). I simply click the back button and never visit that site again.
Popups are annoying and give me the impression that the sponsors using popups are annoying as well. Webmaster that use popups are either greedy or can't pay the bills with regular advertisments. If it is an informative site, then why should I trust them when they decieve me into viewing advertisements or visiting sites that I wasn't expecting? If the site is a merchant site, then they probably aren't reputable enough to do business with.
In any case, popups disrepect me, who as a visitor has all the power. Why should I care what the web site owner says or can offer me when the site opens windows I don't ask for or uses deception to get attention? These feelings induce me to hit the back button and mentally blacklist the companies involved in such behavior.
So my popup blocker - after built-in filters in my browser - is the back button. If the web site owners wants my attention they can earn it with on-topic advertisements that respect me the visitor.
Snakebots are very fragile. Many times a section would break after a few hours demostration. Jer was working on making each section more modular and easier to build. Apparently the main goal of snakebots for many research labs are for providing demostrations (read: grantbots) and giving new grad students something to do. ;-)
That's true in C, but not in Java. Try this code fragment:
The first println will output "3" and not "0", even though it is a string of just null characters. You can verify this by the second println, which prints the bytes (as an integer) of the second character. It will ouptut "'0'" too.
Just one of the advantages of Strings as Objects. Of course, sometimes you just have to dig into the bytes as I did in this project (comments encouraged!).
Correction! Actually, the faulty line was:
That's what I get for typing from memory...
That wouldn't work, since the null character is still a legit byte. Did you mean:
That's why I usually deal with buffer classes and streams for both reading and writing rather than looking at the bytes by hand. :) However, in this case they were overkill for my method.
In my experience, code like that often comes about as a programmer is experimenting with a different algorithms (sometimes to fix bugs) and simply forgot to finish refactoring that slice.
For instance, I once used a byte array of one 1 element as a buffer! The reason was that my previous design overused Java IO streams. The next version (which is much simpler) just modified the bytes directly from a single stream. However, with my brain in "byte" mode I tried to use bytes where I should have used an int. Here's what it looked like (from memory):
and only `buffer` was used in the code block from there onward. After recognizing my mistake, I refactored to use a single integer:
I could have used:
But that form seems to obfusticate the meaning and is harder to read. As you can see, code is often drastically refactored as algorithms are changed. Some things slip through.
Great, now I've got to change my password... ;-)
You don't even need to use ActiveX objects in IE. You can use document.createElement("xml") and use Internet Explorer's built-in XML islands extention to load content, which seems to work even if ActiveX is disabled (at least for me) in IE6-SP2. Pimping my own stuff: I wrote a few journal entries on this topic a while ago. Check out the original article and its update.
WARNING WARNING WARNING! I AM NOT A LAWYER, AND THE FOLLOWING IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE. IN FACT, I KNOW VERY LITTLE OF THE REQUIRED KNOWLEDGE, AND THE FOLLOWING IS INTENDED TO REFLECT MY CURRENT THINKING ONLY. WARNING WARNING WARNING!
(The following assumes you are not the copyright holder to the MPL sources.)
Doesn't the MPL allow this as well? In fact, the only time you need to relicense your code under the MPL is if you directly use MPL text. If you don't modify the files or copy-and-paste from the MPL sources, then your contribution can be under any license you wish. IANAL, but that's what the MPL seems to indicate to me.
Now, you can't relicense works based on MPL source under the GPL; although, you can with the LGPL. I think that the main reason is the "patent peace" cause in the MPL. Still, that's a good idea that many licenses are starting to include. There are even rumors that the next generation of the GPL will include something simular. However in the meantime that's why there are MPL/LGPL/GPL tri-licenses is out there.
Now the MPL has its flaws. Some of the requirements don't seem very general purpose. I generally agree with the CDDL's modifications, except for its noted patent peace problems among other minor things. Personally, I want something like the MPL that is easy to apply to a project, yet allows other parties to use any license for other works that associate to/from/with the project or works that that don't contain any of the project's copyrighted stuff. Does anyone have any ideas?
Not only that, but from Google's point-of-view Wikipedia provides the benifits of Yahoo's original function and the Open Directory Project. That is, the community's openness actually seems to provide insentive to edit and add to the the content, while the collective wiki gardening also removes wrong, out-of-date, or very low quality articles and spam from the system. Thus Wikis - and Wikipedia in particular - generally provide high quality links that search engines can use to target and/or refine their search bots. This helps them with searching, targeting adwords, anti-spam filtering in Gmail, among others. That's why spammers try vandalizing them so much. Given Google's lead among their peers with document analysis algorithms, they have a high incentive to support wikis like Wikipedia.
There seem to be a few errors with both charts. For instance, the pdf diagram shows JavaScript to be directly influenced by only Java, while the Éric Lévénez's history shows links from both C++ and C. However, JavaScript was actually designed to be Self in C's clothing. Some features of LISP and other object-functional languages also influenced it's design. I wonder how the links in these charts were determined.
The new uniforms are skin-tight. So that's what T'Pol's uniform is for! :p
Opps. That last link should go to http://saveenterprise.com/USSdefiant_exclusive.htm for the Defiant images. I'm sorry about the mixup (the old link worked for me during the preview....).
Enterprise is starting to look really good. I previously submitted a story - that was rejected :-( - about the next half of Star Trek: Enterprise. Trektoday reported that it will feature some exciting plots involving "Andoria, a Klingon moon, Romulan outposts, Romulan Marauders, Orion Privateers, Earth's Moon, Mars, a Constitution-class Federation starship and more. You'll see a live Tholian... and a Gorn." according to the show runner Manny Coto. Leaked mild spoilers also indicate that the Constitution-class ship is the U.S.S. Defiant, which re-appears in the two-parter episode titled, In a Mirror, Darkly. There have been beautiful pictures of the reconstructed set just recently posted too. As a hardcore Trekkie, I find it fascinating.
F-302. The BC-303 is the Prometheus Battle crusier. And they lost their "ecks" designations in season 7.
I remember that, but I can't find a link to the story. It really shows the advantages of an open development process. Do you know of any resources documenting what happended with the kernel?
I already run Cygwin on a flash drive. Granted, I only run some BASH, CVS, Lynx, clisp, and some other text utilities. But it only takes up 69,884,685 bytes plus slack. Here's what I did:
Hope someone finds that useful! Some resources that really helped me out include:
I store firefox on a hi-speed usb 2.0 drive. With a custom script (on Windows: yes, a .vbs file - I could have used a batch script but I didn't want a dos window), you can store your profile on the drive. This way I can carry everything with me - my bookmarks, history, and other nice things.
USB drives are useful for more than just firefox. I store some useful Java programs like jEdit and Saxon. I even have a copy of Cygwin for GNU hacking in Windows. Just learn how to use the windows scripting host. Even though it sometimes has lots of bugs (or, more precisely, too many Microsoft programs automatically run wsh scripts without safety measures); it'll simplify your life.
Yes. ;)
To elaborate... Linus intended the name to be a combonation of Free, Freak and Unix. I am really glad the name was changed!