No. Laziness. (Though they're not mutually exclusive.)
I remember one group project where one person didn't come to meetings and when she sent me some functional requirements, she didn't seem to command any understanding of what we were doing. I figured she was incompetent.
So I kicked her off the group. As usually happens, the deadline was fast approaching. The rule was that if you were booted from your group you had to do the whole thing yourself.
We figured she was going to fail. Turns out, she did what 5 of us took the whole term to do in one week. Granted, we got As and she got a C, but she did it.
This isn't the enlightened laziness of the Perl ethic because obviously she wound up working far harder than the rest of us. It's the "I'll do the minimum I can to scrape by" version. No sense of pride, no consideration of others, etc.
Why "outsource" when you can decompile Jad, change a few variable names and viola! Project Complete.
There were people in my senior year who did not know how to use a compiler.
I s*** you not. I don't know how they got that far, maybe this Rent-A-Coder thing explains it, but these people did not have the skill to do what you're saying.
I want elevators that subject the occupants to several g's of force when accelerating and braking, and which whip the doors open in a few milliseconds.
I think the trebuchet / bungie cord system is the way to go.
This will lead to a new generation, elevator shafts that do not require their own floor on the building, elevators that are capable to travel as many floors as we can build from a single shaft.
That's probably the biggest improvement.
Look at it from a builder's point of view: your biggest constraint is the number of square feet. It's pretty much fixed by budget and regulatory concerns. If you can get a whole room back, and maybe a few square feet each floor, you're not doing too badly.
The biggest problems remain: an elevator can only accelerate and decelerate so quickly and remain comfortable. (You can't, for example, have an elevator drop faster than 9.8m/ss.) You can still only have one elevator per shaft.
I don't understand why people on Slashdot insist upon arguing with a lawyer about the law. Do you challenge NBA basketball players to slam dunk contests as well?
RTFL: Section 2 "This License gives unlimited permission to privately modify and run the Program, provided you do not bring suit for patent infringement against anyone for making, using or distributing their own works based on the Program."
I'm decidedly uncomfortable with the neologism "privacy geek": it implies that wanting to be left the hell alone is now fringe.
Not necessarily. I think it implies more that some people invest considerably more resources into privacy than others when it might not be warranted.
Any reasonable person who wants to sunbathe nude in their backyard is going to build a fence. A "privacy geek" would build a fence just to build the fence.
Or it could imply someone who already has those resources.
Any reasonable person would want to encrypt their private emails, except that it takes a fair amount of training. Most of the people here are probably fairly familiar with public-key encryption and know enough people who are also familiar, so it's not much effort to do so.
One thing people don't consider about privacy is that you can acquire it simply by blending into the crowd. You only lose it when you take actions that make you stand out. So for most people, the most straightforward way to keep their privacy is to do nothing.
Since my ID is checked several times a day (military), I have a wallet with an external ID window. You could secure an inside compartment on such a wallet to give the best security / usefulness compromise.
* Note: This quote is often cited out of context as proof of the unfeeling lean of Thatcher's government.
* From an interview on September 23 1987, to Woman's Own, published October 31 1987.
* Full quote: "[People constantly requesting government intervention] are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours."/wiki
Obviously, our fellow users and programmers in the F/OSS community are equivalent to the "neighbors" Thatcher was referring to. And if there's a bug in F/OSS, you don't (I hope) spam message boards saying "the F/OSS community needs to fix this bug!" Instead, you'd probably fix it if it directly affected you, or if you felt concerned about the users of that software (your neighbors) you'd fix it for them.
I think the reason Thatcher said that was because many politicians (left and right) like to say that they fix problems and people tend to believe them. But when it comes down to it, in terms of actually making things happen "there is no such thing as society" because a physical person has to do work. Her detractors (and they are legion) are making a simple point out to be very controversial by means of misquoting her.
You're calling the power to take away other people's freedom, a "freedom" in itself. Rubbish. When liberty in an inalienable right for everybody, yes, the "Freedom" to own slaves will be lost. No tear shed here.
You're comparing the freedom to modify someone else's code (a freedom you didn't have until they wrote it, which is why they can't be taking it away in the first place) to chattel slavery. We're approaching Godwin's law here...
I'm surprised that you feel qualified to make this statement, since it would require you to have the rare combination of having top secret clearange (in order to know about all military projects) and have a "need to know" about each one of them and be in the habit of posting what you know to Slashdot.
I disagree since if you knew of a reasonable sample of declassified or public military projects and none of them used language X, there's no reason to assume that secret or top secret projects are going to be more inclined to use language X so it would be a reasonable statement.
That said, I doubt the grandparent had a reasonable sample.
There are a number of acronyms that can be just as "sexy" as marketdroid made-up name. Think MP3, PC or IBM.
Since none of yours are acronyms, it's only fair that we put.com as the best example of geeks outdoing marketers at their own job.
I, personally, think that *all* technical terms should be hidden behind abbreviations. The problem is that if laymen (esp. journos) see an English-sounding word they automatically assume they understand what it is even if they haven't got the faintest idea.
Some words, like "hacker" simply become too ambiguous to be useful. Other's like "cookies" are the basis of non-stories getting blown out of proportion. And it just irritates the fuck out of me when someone asks for my "input."
I say we either use abbreviations, Latin or mathematical notation whenever possible.
But in many ways, RSS is like the old "push" hype of the late mid-90s, and push died.
Push tried to make the web work like television and suffered from similar problems we see when people put video edited for TV on the web. In short, people on the web are far more active than people watching TV. Different states of mind.
The way I remember PointCast (or maybe it was some other app) was that it would take over the whole screen, or at the very least, I would have to sit their watching it. I just uninstalled it after five minutes because I don't sit down at my computer to just sit and watch something unless it's a DVD. (In which case I'm using it like a television, so...)
I don't have a problem with RSS. It makes my Firefox toolbar useful because I can flip through all the menus and see which sites have got new stuff if I'm bored. Some sites don't work too well, so I just have regular links to their homepages.
As a site designer, I'm going to build an RSS feed into my code simply because it's not a big deal for me to do so.
Apple shipped over 600k G5 desktops last quarter; Microsoft shipped only 400k XBox 360s this Christmas. Apple probably also shipped another 600k G5 desktops in the same period Microsoft shipped their consoles.
There's another issue. Desktop systems use a whole range of chips, including last year's model and the latest and greatest. Next year MS will be using the same chip they did this year.
Slashdot Mirror
No reason to stop smoking now. Everyone light up!
It's a celebration, bitches!
but the education of every American and Canadian.
Not the Canadians, too!!!
MONEY
No. Laziness. (Though they're not mutually exclusive.)
I remember one group project where one person didn't come to meetings and when she sent me some functional requirements, she didn't seem to command any understanding of what we were doing. I figured she was incompetent.
So I kicked her off the group. As usually happens, the deadline was fast approaching. The rule was that if you were booted from your group you had to do the whole thing yourself.
We figured she was going to fail. Turns out, she did what 5 of us took the whole term to do in one week. Granted, we got As and she got a C, but she did it.
This isn't the enlightened laziness of the Perl ethic because obviously she wound up working far harder than the rest of us. It's the "I'll do the minimum I can to scrape by" version. No sense of pride, no consideration of others, etc.
Why "outsource" when you can decompile Jad, change a few variable names and viola! Project Complete.
There were people in my senior year who did not know how to use a compiler.
I s*** you not. I don't know how they got that far, maybe this Rent-A-Coder thing explains it, but these people did not have the skill to do what you're saying.
I want elevators that subject the occupants to several g's of force when accelerating and braking, and which whip the doors open in a few milliseconds.
I think the trebuchet / bungie cord system is the way to go.
This will lead to a new generation, elevator shafts that do not require their own floor on the building, elevators that are capable to travel as many floors as we can build from a single shaft.
That's probably the biggest improvement.
Look at it from a builder's point of view: your biggest constraint is the number of square feet. It's pretty much fixed by budget and regulatory concerns. If you can get a whole room back, and maybe a few square feet each floor, you're not doing too badly.
The biggest problems remain: an elevator can only accelerate and decelerate so quickly and remain comfortable. (You can't, for example, have an elevator drop faster than 9.8m/ss.) You can still only have one elevator per shaft.
Actually, USians is Canadian slang, can you guess why?
Oh, please. Everyone knows that "Canadia" doesn't exist. It's far too cold up there for any intelligent life to survive.
I don't understand why people on Slashdot insist upon arguing with a lawyer about the law. Do you challenge NBA basketball players to slam dunk contests as well?
/..
A "lawyer" citing Wikipedia. Only on
RTFL: Section 2 "This License gives unlimited permission to privately modify and run the Program, provided you do not bring suit for patent infringement against anyone for making, using or distributing their own works based on the Program."
I'm decidedly uncomfortable with the neologism "privacy geek": it implies that wanting to be left the hell alone is now fringe.
Not necessarily. I think it implies more that some people invest considerably more resources into privacy than others when it might not be warranted.
Any reasonable person who wants to sunbathe nude in their backyard is going to build a fence. A "privacy geek" would build a fence just to build the fence.
Or it could imply someone who already has those resources.
Any reasonable person would want to encrypt their private emails, except that it takes a fair amount of training. Most of the people here are probably fairly familiar with public-key encryption and know enough people who are also familiar, so it's not much effort to do so.
One thing people don't consider about privacy is that you can acquire it simply by blending into the crowd. You only lose it when you take actions that make you stand out. So for most people, the most straightforward way to keep their privacy is to do nothing.
2. Start asking us EU citizens if we'd mind you spending our cash on something that isn't really required
Good luck!
Since my ID is checked several times a day (military), I have a wallet with an external ID window. You could secure an inside compartment on such a wallet to give the best security / usefulness compromise.
Wouldn't the guy say, "why are you putting a lock on a tent flap?"
If you can get a Mac user to double-click on a DMG attachment, programs can automatically execute.
DMGs don't autorun anything. They can pop up a license agreement, open a Finder window or copy their contents and trash themselves.
Chances are, we will deal with N. Korea with military means once we are sure Europe can take on Iran.
Um, wouldn't Europe need a military to take on Iran?
From wiki:
/wiki
"There's no such thing as society"
* Note: This quote is often cited out of context as proof of the unfeeling lean of Thatcher's government.
* From an interview on September 23 1987, to Woman's Own, published October 31 1987.
* Full quote: "[People constantly requesting government intervention] are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours."
Obviously, our fellow users and programmers in the F/OSS community are equivalent to the "neighbors" Thatcher was referring to. And if there's a bug in F/OSS, you don't (I hope) spam message boards saying "the F/OSS community needs to fix this bug!" Instead, you'd probably fix it if it directly affected you, or if you felt concerned about the users of that software (your neighbors) you'd fix it for them.
I think the reason Thatcher said that was because many politicians (left and right) like to say that they fix problems and people tend to believe them. But when it comes down to it, in terms of actually making things happen "there is no such thing as society" because a physical person has to do work. Her detractors (and they are legion) are making a simple point out to be very controversial by means of misquoting her.
You're calling the power to take away other people's freedom, a "freedom" in itself. Rubbish. When liberty in an inalienable right for everybody, yes, the "Freedom" to own slaves will be lost. No tear shed here.
You're comparing the freedom to modify someone else's code (a freedom you didn't have until they wrote it, which is why they can't be taking it away in the first place) to chattel slavery. We're approaching Godwin's law here...
This "review" is flawed in so many ways it's not even funny
The review is tongue in cheek... ah, forget it.
The potential for transporting goods seems like its best use, although I don't think the trucking industry/lobby is going to like it very much.
It would have the same problem as freight trains: rather difficult to find a parking spot.
Flatten it out so it can travel at higher speeds, then whe it slows down, puff it up and it can be more blimpy.
Or, have it transform into a giant robot so it can do kung fu, should the need arise.
I'm surprised that you feel qualified to make this statement, since it would require you to have the rare combination of having top secret clearange (in order to know about all military projects) and have a "need to know" about each one of them and be in the habit of posting what you know to Slashdot.
I disagree since if you knew of a reasonable sample of declassified or public military projects and none of them used language X, there's no reason to assume that secret or top secret projects are going to be more inclined to use language X so it would be a reasonable statement.
That said, I doubt the grandparent had a reasonable sample.
It's right there at the end of the adress line.
It's a usability problem. By the time you've loaded the webpage, you're looking down, not at the address bar. So no one ever seems the damned icon.
And then a webpage gives you a hyperlink to their RSS feed, but even if you have an RSS reader installed or built in, you just get an XML page.
There are a number of acronyms that can be just as "sexy" as marketdroid made-up name. Think MP3, PC or IBM.
.com as the best example of geeks outdoing marketers at their own job.
Since none of yours are acronyms, it's only fair that we put
I, personally, think that *all* technical terms should be hidden behind abbreviations. The problem is that if laymen (esp. journos) see an English-sounding word they automatically assume they understand what it is even if they haven't got the faintest idea.
Some words, like "hacker" simply become too ambiguous to be useful. Other's like "cookies" are the basis of non-stories getting blown out of proportion. And it just irritates the fuck out of me when someone asks for my "input."
I say we either use abbreviations, Latin or mathematical notation whenever possible.
But in many ways, RSS is like the old "push" hype of the late mid-90s, and push died.
Push tried to make the web work like television and suffered from similar problems we see when people put video edited for TV on the web. In short, people on the web are far more active than people watching TV. Different states of mind.
The way I remember PointCast (or maybe it was some other app) was that it would take over the whole screen, or at the very least, I would have to sit their watching it. I just uninstalled it after five minutes because I don't sit down at my computer to just sit and watch something unless it's a DVD. (In which case I'm using it like a television, so...)
I don't have a problem with RSS. It makes my Firefox toolbar useful because I can flip through all the menus and see which sites have got new stuff if I'm bored. Some sites don't work too well, so I just have regular links to their homepages.
As a site designer, I'm going to build an RSS feed into my code simply because it's not a big deal for me to do so.
Apple shipped over 600k G5 desktops last quarter; Microsoft shipped only 400k XBox 360s this Christmas. Apple probably also shipped another 600k G5 desktops in the same period Microsoft shipped their consoles.
There's another issue. Desktop systems use a whole range of chips, including last year's model and the latest and greatest. Next year MS will be using the same chip they did this year.