I'm not supporting Kerry which is a pretty bitter pill to swallow
I'd have to agree with that. Reading some of Gore's the speeches recently it has been clear to me what an excellent president he would have made. Failing Gore, Dean looks like he would probably have been pretty good.
Still, Kerry is what is left.
Also not really my problem, not living in the US and all that.
I suggest you read E H Carr's What is History. This is not a new book but is considered as one of the classics of the writing of history. History and jouralism have an enormous amount in common, so this is very appropriate to the subject matter.
Carr makes the point that a historian must hold a balance between, on one hand, applying his own views to the facts, and on the other, reporting just the facts.
I would have to re-read the relevant section to properly explain why this is the case, but to provide a rough explanation: 1. Not all facts are facts, and discerning which and which aren't is in fact applying your own views to the facts. 2. One cannot draw a conslusion unless one applies a view to the facts.
Let me give you an example. I saw a news article summary on the Drudge report the other day that said there was a pentagon report floating around that said WMD had been shifted out of Iraq by Russian Special forces in the lead up to the invasion. I discounted this fact because: 1. The article was a neo-con wet dream, in that it looked like it was tailered to tie up a whole lot of loose ends 2. The link on drudge was to an article that didn't exist (or at least didn't when I clicked on the link) 3. Election on the 2nd Nov 4. Why has there be no earlier news on this? News of this momentus type is generally preceded by other news that point towards this one (ie other articles groping towards the same conclusion, but not getting there) 5. Lastly and most critically, it does not square with other facts that I am aware of. If I have a hundred pieces of evidence that support one conclusion and in my hand I have another piece of evidence the supports another, I'm going with the hundred.
In this case I have reached a conclusion that has dismissed a fact. This view has also been shaped by the facts.
I did honestly miss this piece of news. Thanks for pointing it out. I was honestly apalled at this news and frankly I am glad to hear that it is not as bad as I initially believed it was. Thanks again.
Re:Middle East
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
And right there you proved the point.
No I have not. Let me try to explain what I mean.
Facts are nuanced by the events that surround them. The surroundings place the fact in context. Without that you can draw anything you want out of some event.
Reporters are not just reporting on a single event, they are reporting on a collection of facts to present people with a picture of the place.
Take the Sudan for instance. We have a government committing or at the least supporting genocide. Now if you hear that this government has arranged a $1000 educational grant to make ammends for the genocide. Are you going to report that the government of Sudan is benevolent and kind for offering this? I think not.
In the case of Israel, past performance makes people suspicious and less likely to trust the government. If you have read some of the followup articles on the shooting of the school girl (in one of the articles I linked), the army has said that company commander did not behave unethically.
Now, if this was the first event of this sort you had run accross, you might be inclined to take the Iaraeli army explanation at face value. However as this is not the first time (by any means) the Israeli army has failed to prosecute their soldiers for gorssly innappropriate behaviour (that is an understatement), then you are less likely to trust the Israeli army explanation.
Knowing also from previous events the kind of value that the Israeli army places on Palestinian lives, you might also be more likely to believe that this shooting was deliberate.
Point?
I really don't understand why I am arguing with a troll account created for the sole purpose of responding to this article, but anyway.
Reading your linked article, I think that the reason the reporters might be biased against Israel might be due to Israel's recentperformance, but that might be just me. There are plenty of other examples of similar behavior (shooting of UK civilian by sniper, shootings of palestinian children by snipers, the Israeli tank that fired two tank shells into a group of unarmed civilians), but I can't be bothered to dig for specific articles. You might also note the following article.
Exceptions are more controlled. When you have a catch block, it can only refer to the throw block above it, whereas with goto you open the door to jumping to that stop from anywhere on your code.
You can do similar things with exceptions and gotos, but exceptions offer less chances to shoot yourself in the foot.
It isn't just Iraq. This is the flaw in the doctrine of Pre-emptive strike. The doctrine (as propogated by the US) says if we feel threatened we will invade. This doctrine was effectively in place before 9/11.
However it is a double edged sword. Under this doctrine Nth Korea is perfectly justified in invading America, or for that matter invading South Korea.
Iraq will be a major area in which US military will be stationed
No doubt about that.
and therefore be able to quickly smack around terrorists in the middle east
I think you have made a mistake here. I think it more like fighting "terrorists" created by an illegal & heavy handed occupation. Sure the troops are going to be there a while. They'll need to be there to clean up the mess they have created. And they will be tied down and unable to do anything positive in the region. They'll be able to kill more civilians & create more "terrorists" though.
I hate that acronym. I cannot understand how perl programmers are proud of this. It is like holding up a sign saying "I write unmaintainable code".
Why is there more than one way to do it? Is this a deliberate attempt to obfuscate code written in perl? Why can't they pick one or two good ways to do things and leave it at that?
One thing that makes it easier reading someone else's code (or even your own 6 months later) is that you can recognise patterns. You can glance at an if... else block and recognise it before you actually read it. Perl makes this so much more difficult by greatly increasing the number of valid ways to write the same thing.
Programming is hard enough, why make it harder?
I do write some code in perl, for example I recently updated a series of perl scripts that I use for change management. However I will never work with someone else's perl code and I use only a small number of the available constructs. I will also never write something in perl that I think may grow to over 1000 lines of code.
Back to classes:
From the documentation I am reading, you have to work hard to do the right thing. That is just dumb. It should be *easy* to do the right thing, and hard to do the *wrong* thing. The default option is generally what people will keep using.
Yep. I have now officially sworn off Mandrake. My previous experience (it was either 6.1 or 8.1) was somwhat more painful than this one.
Yes, you have to be a bit selective about hardware, before you buy it's wise to check that it is supported
I don't have to with windows. In the case of my girlfriend's machine, I needed to get something that looked good and had a small footprint. Add in the fact that she would have killed me if I spent too much and I'm not left with a huge choice hardware.
Even the 2.6 kernel isn't too flash, or at least to my somewhat inexperienced tinkering it isn't. I installed a 2.6 desktop (debian), and tried 3 different network cards, none of which were supported (DLink 530TX, Netgear 411, old 3Com card). In the end went with the DLink card and had to add in a module as part of the bootup sequence. None of these cards was particularly new.
It is possible that these issues might be have been a combination of my experience and Debian.
BTW I do run a Linux desktop (not my main desktop) and my fileserver runs a command line installation of Debian.
When installing Windows not only had I to install drivers for my hardware (and reboot every fscking time in between), I had to use drivers that were supplied by the manufacturer. Linux, on the other hand, had the network, audio and video running immediately. So how exactly the hardware support inferior?
On this note and continuing from my previous comment, windows will get graphics and networking running on installation before having to turn to manufacturer supplied drivers. This is my experience based on installation of the dozens of boxes I've installed over my career as a computer hobbyist. The graphics may not be all the the hardware can support, but it will be there.
On the other hand I have yet to get a linux installation which works out of the box. This is with Mandrake (pretty but buggy), Gentoo (don't get me started), debian, Red hat. The closest I saw to decent support for hardware on a clean installation was Red Hat.
The next best was Debian, although there I still had to edit the x config file for graphics resolutions and mouse support, and add another module in to provide support for the network card.
Gentoo was too painful for words.
Mandrake was the pits. Frankly I'd prefer to be hacking around in the command line than some buggy GUI.
Knoppix was neat, but I was concerned about the sheer number of daemons it ran by default. I prefer to start with a minimal system and add features, than to start with complete system and remove features. That way I know what is actually on there.
Network? SN41G2? I spent 4 hours a couple of days before Christmas trying to get networking running on an SN41G2. I was trying to install the latest and greatest version of Mandrake. Not only did it not have the network drivers, the GUIs for controlling the networking were not working.
The machine was a Christmas present to my girlfriend and I was rather keen to have it working by Christmas Day.
After a quick google search it appears that the fix was to compile your own RPM to include support for the card (I'm a little hazy on details, it was a while ago). After 4 hours of fighting, I gave up and installed Win2K in about 30 minutes.
This was a clean vanilla install and the first thing I wanted to do was to hit the net to check for updates. Even at this time the chipset was not what you would call new. Frankly if that was the kind of pain I was going to go through with something as simple and fundimental as network support I could only see pain ahead, particularly for my non-technical girlfriend.
I am very surprised to hear of such a different experience with exactly the same hardware.
I know perl's isn't much better, but I'll gladly take horrible perl OOP over that joke of OOP that's is the representation in PHP 4
Last time I looked at Perl's OOP support I threw up my hands in disgust. IIRC you could add custom properties to instances of classes. I'm sorry but that is just wrong. At that point I decided that I would prefer to code in C++ rather than perl.
I haven't attempted to code OOP php so I can't comment. But I certainly found perl's pretty horrible.
I haven't. Fortunately development decisions rest largely in my hands. The design of the site isn't too bad, the issues that we have are more graphical display than anything. I work for a pretty small company so that might be part of it.
For a little while I left the company I am working for now and worked at another company. I left after 6 months because my suggestions were constantly being overruled. I don't understand how someone can overrule me on a purely technical matter when he hasn't written a line of code since the early 80s.
Have you ever gotten bawled out for doing the redesign in your own time anyway?
What is this "own time" that you speak of? I am not familiar with this phrase. I went to bed at 12:30 last night (working at home) and got up at 5:30 this morning to go to work.
You know the worst thing? I built it. This monster is my own creation. I didn't know as much when I started building this as I do now. I would do things differently now, make different mistakes.
Big time. When we made the move and found the problem I pretty unhappy (as in up-at-2-in-the-morning-coming-up-with-a-fix style unhappy).
It is just so unfortunate that IE is the dominant browser. It is just such a brain dead "security enhancement". It's supposed to protect you from porn sites that bombard you with a collection of files to download and hopefully you open one of them. The stupid thing about it is that it doesn't really protect you. If I do something like this:
The effect is exacly the same. Or better yet: function fn() {
while (1)
{
parent.frames[0].location = "file.php?doc=1"
} }
The second point is that I ran into the same problem, so...
I did look into that as another option. There were a few problems though. The major problem was the what I was dealing with was a large and pretty complicated web application. Frames nested 3 deep.
Documents could be linked to from pretty much anywhere in the application, which just added to the complications. So unless I was willing to rebuilt it with a new frameset, this wasn't a real option. I know that this is a better option techinally. I certainly prefer it but it just isn't practical in my case.
What I would have liked to do was build a new frameset which had a 1 pix frame along the top, which was then resized to display the metadata or an errors.
NSW, one of Australia's states, is just implementing legislation to make smoking illegal in pubs and clubs (places that serve alcohol). The main reason given is the health of those working in the industry. Victoria is going to follow suite.
I'm not sure whether you can smoke in resturants and cafes, I think it is also illegal right now. Doesn't worry me as a non-smoker, but I can understand it would be annoying for smokers.
But the Internet is a lot of different things. The use of the Internet as, effectively, a billboard, with controlled content (moderation, web editing, etc), is not really at risk. BBC News is not at risk, nor are most generally non-interactive websites.
No. The internet is still vulnerable, it is just the vulerability is from a different source. DDOS attacks, Slammer, bandwidth usage for spam. All of these degrade the Internet. Sometime in the last year (I can't recall exactly when), Telstra, Australia's biggest ISP, experienced some serious difficulties due to spam. To the point that normal web usage was seriously degraded for those that used Telstra as an ISP. Today there is an article on The Register about the fact that they are experiencing a DDOS attack and had to switch off CSS.
Slashdot Mirror
mi2g is best known for producing astounding dollar figures on worm outbreaks. Generally without any explanation for the figures.
They aren't what you might call a reliable source of information.
This works until you want the help of the rest of the world, as you did when Colin Powell went before the UN with that speech.
If it treats the rest of the world in this way, it can expect the same treatment in return. America does not live in a vacuum.
I'm not supporting Kerry which is a pretty bitter pill to swallow
I'd have to agree with that. Reading some of Gore's the speeches recently it has been clear to me what an excellent president he would have made. Failing Gore, Dean looks like he would probably have been pretty good.
Still, Kerry is what is left.
Also not really my problem, not living in the US and all that.
In Australia you get fined for not voting.
I'm honestly not sure whether this is a good or a bad thing.
This may be information to you, but Iraq was a not an islamic state. Iraq was the least facist of the countries in the region.
I suggest you read E H Carr's What is History. This is not a new book but is considered as one of the classics of the writing of history. History and jouralism have an enormous amount in common, so this is very appropriate to the subject matter.
Carr makes the point that a historian must hold a balance between, on one hand, applying his own views to the facts, and on the other, reporting just the facts.
I would have to re-read the relevant section to properly explain why this is the case, but to provide a rough explanation:
1. Not all facts are facts, and discerning which and which aren't is in fact applying your own views to the facts.
2. One cannot draw a conslusion unless one applies a view to the facts.
Let me give you an example. I saw a news article summary on the Drudge report the other day that said there was a pentagon report floating around that said WMD had been shifted out of Iraq by Russian Special forces in the lead up to the invasion. I discounted this fact because:
1. The article was a neo-con wet dream, in that it looked like it was tailered to tie up a whole lot of loose ends
2. The link on drudge was to an article that didn't exist (or at least didn't when I clicked on the link)
3. Election on the 2nd Nov
4. Why has there be no earlier news on this? News of this momentus type is generally preceded by other news that point towards this one (ie other articles groping towards the same conclusion, but not getting there)
5. Lastly and most critically, it does not square with other facts that I am aware of. If I have a hundred pieces of evidence that support one conclusion and in my hand I have another piece of evidence the supports another, I'm going with the hundred.
In this case I have reached a conclusion that has dismissed a fact. This view has also been shaped by the facts.
I hope you aren't a journalist.
I did honestly miss this piece of news. Thanks for pointing it out. I was honestly apalled at this news and frankly I am glad to hear that it is not as bad as I initially believed it was. Thanks again.
And right there you proved the point.
No I have not. Let me try to explain what I mean.
Facts are nuanced by the events that surround them. The surroundings place the fact in context. Without that you can draw anything you want out of some event.
Reporters are not just reporting on a single event, they are reporting on a collection of facts to present people with a picture of the place.
Take the Sudan for instance. We have a government committing or at the least supporting genocide. Now if you hear that this government has arranged a $1000 educational grant to make ammends for the genocide. Are you going to report that the government of Sudan is benevolent and kind for offering this? I think not.
In the case of Israel, past performance makes people suspicious and less likely to trust the government. If you have read some of the followup articles on the shooting of the school girl (in one of the articles I linked), the army has said that company commander did not behave unethically.
Now, if this was the first event of this sort you had run accross, you might be inclined to take the Iaraeli army explanation at face value. However as this is not the first time (by any means) the Israeli army has failed to prosecute their soldiers for gorssly innappropriate behaviour (that is an understatement), then you are less likely to trust the Israeli army explanation.
Knowing also from previous events the kind of value that the Israeli army places on Palestinian lives, you might also be more likely to believe that this shooting was deliberate.
Point?
I really don't understand why I am arguing with a troll account created for the sole purpose of responding to this article, but anyway.
Reading your linked article, I think that the reason the reporters might be biased against Israel might be due to Israel's recent performance, but that might be just me. There are plenty of other examples of similar behavior (shooting of UK civilian by sniper, shootings of palestinian children by snipers, the Israeli tank that fired two tank shells into a group of unarmed civilians), but I can't be bothered to dig for specific articles. You might also note the following article.
Exceptions are more controlled. When you have a catch block, it can only refer to the throw block above it, whereas with goto you open the door to jumping to that stop from anywhere on your code.
You can do similar things with exceptions and gotos, but exceptions offer less chances to shoot yourself in the foot.
It isn't just Iraq. This is the flaw in the doctrine of Pre-emptive strike. The doctrine (as propogated by the US) says if we feel threatened we will invade. This doctrine was effectively in place before 9/11.
However it is a double edged sword. Under this doctrine Nth Korea is perfectly justified in invading America, or for that matter invading South Korea.
Iraq will be a major area in which US military will be stationed
No doubt about that.
and therefore be able to quickly smack around terrorists in the middle east
I think you have made a mistake here. I think it more like fighting "terrorists" created by an illegal & heavy handed occupation. Sure the troops are going to be there a while. They'll need to be there to clean up the mess they have created. And they will be tied down and unable to do anything positive in the region. They'll be able to kill more civilians & create more "terrorists" though.
Go America!
Don't forget S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
TMTOWTDI.
... else block and recognise it before you actually read it. Perl makes this so much more difficult by greatly increasing the number of valid ways to write the same thing.
I hate that acronym. I cannot understand how perl programmers are proud of this. It is like holding up a sign saying "I write unmaintainable code".
Why is there more than one way to do it? Is this a deliberate attempt to obfuscate code written in perl? Why can't they pick one or two good ways to do things and leave it at that?
One thing that makes it easier reading someone else's code (or even your own 6 months later) is that you can recognise patterns. You can glance at an if
Programming is hard enough, why make it harder?
I do write some code in perl, for example I recently updated a series of perl scripts that I use for change management. However I will never work with someone else's perl code and I use only a small number of the available constructs. I will also never write something in perl that I think may grow to over 1000 lines of code.
Back to classes:
From the documentation I am reading, you have to work hard to do the right thing. That is just dumb. It should be *easy* to do the right thing, and hard to do the *wrong* thing. The default option is generally what people will keep using.
But I take it you tried 9.x series of the OS
Yep. I have now officially sworn off Mandrake. My previous experience (it was either 6.1 or 8.1) was somwhat more painful than this one.
Yes, you have to be a bit selective about hardware, before you buy it's wise to check that it is supported
I don't have to with windows. In the case of my girlfriend's machine, I needed to get something that looked good and had a small footprint. Add in the fact that she would have killed me if I spent too much and I'm not left with a huge choice hardware.
Even the 2.6 kernel isn't too flash, or at least to my somewhat inexperienced tinkering it isn't. I installed a 2.6 desktop (debian), and tried 3 different network cards, none of which were supported (DLink 530TX, Netgear 411, old 3Com card). In the end went with the DLink card and had to add in a module as part of the bootup sequence. None of these cards was particularly new.
It is possible that these issues might be have been a combination of my experience and Debian.
BTW I do run a Linux desktop (not my main desktop) and my fileserver runs a command line installation of Debian.
When installing Windows not only had I to install drivers for my hardware (and reboot every fscking time in between), I had to use drivers that were supplied by the manufacturer. Linux, on the other hand, had the network, audio and video running immediately. So how exactly the hardware support inferior?
On this note and continuing from my previous comment, windows will get graphics and networking running on installation before having to turn to manufacturer supplied drivers. This is my experience based on installation of the dozens of boxes I've installed over my career as a computer hobbyist. The graphics may not be all the the hardware can support, but it will be there.
On the other hand I have yet to get a linux installation which works out of the box. This is with Mandrake (pretty but buggy), Gentoo (don't get me started), debian, Red hat. The closest I saw to decent support for hardware on a clean installation was Red Hat.
The next best was Debian, although there I still had to edit the x config file for graphics resolutions and mouse support, and add another module in to provide support for the network card.
Gentoo was too painful for words.
Mandrake was the pits. Frankly I'd prefer to be hacking around in the command line than some buggy GUI.
Knoppix was neat, but I was concerned about the sheer number of daemons it ran by default. I prefer to start with a minimal system and add features, than to start with complete system and remove features. That way I know what is actually on there.
Network? SN41G2? I spent 4 hours a couple of days before Christmas trying to get networking running on an SN41G2. I was trying to install the latest and greatest version of Mandrake. Not only did it not have the network drivers, the GUIs for controlling the networking were not working.
The machine was a Christmas present to my girlfriend and I was rather keen to have it working by Christmas Day.
After a quick google search it appears that the fix was to compile your own RPM to include support for the card (I'm a little hazy on details, it was a while ago). After 4 hours of fighting, I gave up and installed Win2K in about 30 minutes.
This was a clean vanilla install and the first thing I wanted to do was to hit the net to check for updates. Even at this time the chipset was not what you would call new. Frankly if that was the kind of pain I was going to go through with something as simple and fundimental as network support I could only see pain ahead, particularly for my non-technical girlfriend.
I am very surprised to hear of such a different experience with exactly the same hardware.
I know perl's isn't much better, but I'll gladly take horrible perl OOP over that joke of OOP that's is the representation in PHP 4
Last time I looked at Perl's OOP support I threw up my hands in disgust. IIRC you could add custom properties to instances of classes. I'm sorry but that is just wrong. At that point I decided that I would prefer to code in C++ rather than perl.
I haven't attempted to code OOP php so I can't comment. But I certainly found perl's pretty horrible.
But I haven't seen him at Wal-Mart recently
So you say.
I'm not likely to see him at Walmart, I"ve never been in a Walmart in my life.
Re your sig, my God is alive after being nailed to a tree.
I haven't. Fortunately development decisions rest largely in my hands. The design of the site isn't too bad, the issues that we have are more graphical display than anything. I work for a pretty small company so that might be part of it.
For a little while I left the company I am working for now and worked at another company. I left after 6 months because my suggestions were constantly being overruled. I don't understand how someone can overrule me on a purely technical matter when he hasn't written a line of code since the early 80s.
Have you ever gotten bawled out for doing the redesign in your own time anyway?
What is this "own time" that you speak of? I am not familiar with this phrase. I went to bed at 12:30 last night (working at home) and got up at 5:30 this morning to go to work.
Gah. OK, I've been there.
You know the worst thing? I built it. This monster is my own creation. I didn't know as much when I started building this as I do now. I would do things differently now, make different mistakes.
First, that's clearly a bug in IE
Big time. When we made the move and found the problem I pretty unhappy (as in up-at-2-in-the-morning-coming-up-with-a-fix style unhappy).
It is just so unfortunate that IE is the dominant browser. It is just such a brain dead "security enhancement". It's supposed to protect you from porn sites that bombard you with a collection of files to download and hopefully you open one of them. The stupid thing about it is that it doesn't really protect you. If I do something like this:
function fn()
{
parent.frames[0].location = "file.php?doc=1"
parent.frames[0].location = "file.php?doc=2"
parent.frames[0].location = "file.php?doc=3"
parent.frames[0].location = "file.php?doc=4"
parent.frames[0].location = "file.php?doc=5"
}
The effect is exacly the same. Or better yet:
function fn()
{
while (1)
{
parent.frames[0].location = "file.php?doc=1"
}
}
The second point is that I ran into the same problem, so...
I did look into that as another option. There were a few problems though. The major problem was the what I was dealing with was a large and pretty complicated web application. Frames nested 3 deep.
Documents could be linked to from pretty much anywhere in the application, which just added to the complications. So unless I was willing to rebuilt it with a new frameset, this wasn't a real option. I know that this is a better option techinally. I certainly prefer it but it just isn't practical in my case.
What I would have liked to do was build a new frameset which had a 1 pix frame along the top, which was then resized to display the metadata or an errors.
NSW, one of Australia's states, is just implementing legislation to make smoking illegal in pubs and clubs (places that serve alcohol). The main reason given is the health of those working in the industry. Victoria is going to follow suite.
I'm not sure whether you can smoke in resturants and cafes, I think it is also illegal right now. Doesn't worry me as a non-smoker, but I can understand it would be annoying for smokers.
But the Internet is a lot of different things. The use of the Internet as, effectively, a billboard, with controlled content (moderation, web editing, etc), is not really at risk. BBC News is not at risk, nor are most generally non-interactive websites.
No. The internet is still vulnerable, it is just the vulerability is from a different source. DDOS attacks, Slammer, bandwidth usage for spam. All of these degrade the Internet. Sometime in the last year (I can't recall exactly when), Telstra, Australia's biggest ISP, experienced some serious difficulties due to spam. To the point that normal web usage was seriously degraded for those that used Telstra as an ISP. Today there is an article on The Register about the fact that they are experiencing a DDOS attack and had to switch off CSS.