Actually the only responsibility a company has, other than obeying the law, is to generate profit for its shareholders.
Not exactly. A publicly held company has an obligation to its shareholders. But that doesn't really matter unless a majority share is held by the public and not by individuals (ie, company officers)-- Since in many companies, officers are paid more in salary than dividends or trade value.
That brings up another point, many companies give paltry dividends, if any at all. Then generating profit for shareholders is not related to what the company does really at all, but moreover how the market feels about the company which is somewhat determined by press releases and quarterly statements but is largely indeterminate and random in nature.
They aren't covering up the history [...] European museums are relatively devoid of Nazi goods.
Perhaps you meant they are covering up the history.
It seems to me that removing an atrocious event in history from society in the name of "anti-hate" removes the reminders from the society of the wrong that was committed. How can we learn when we sweep all of our mistakes under the rug?
Just what we need, another piece of crap keyboard with a pile of extra garbage above the F-Keys. Its getting harder and harder to find a normal, sane, quality keyboard that has not been raped by japanese extra keys tentacles.
Whats most offensive lately is moving an extra set of keys (effectively useless keys, I might add) to the insert/home/pageup/pagedown/delete/end block and effectively throwing off the entire layout of that section rendering 20-30 years of standardized layout and familiarity out the window.
You used to be able to buy a cheap 5$ keyboard that had the standard layout, albeit a piece of crap, but it did the job. They're getting harder and harder to find. I couldn't even find one the last time I looked. There were no keyboards without at least 3 extra keys in addition to the windows keys, and this was at Fry's Electronics. Luckily I found a local shop selling old keyboards, and quality at that. I picked up several IBM Model-M PS/2 keyboards. Not as old as the AT style, but they are still over 10 years old and work perfectly. The keys are tactile and the layout is curved somewhat to make hiting the F-Keys easier. I got a few that make the loud clicking sound, and some of the quiet touch ones. They are both high quality keyboards, but I prefer the clicking noise:). Without a doubt these are the best keyboards I have ever owned and am aware of.
Check out this page that talks about them some. I think they sell them here. There's a review here, and a page of devoted model-m lovers here.
You should be able to pick them up used at a local used computer equipment shop, ebay, etc for under 20$ (I got mine for under 5$ a piece).
Wrong. If you would have RTFA you would have noticed that the legislation was passed during the Clinton administration and has nothing to do with the Patriot Act.
The identification requirement dates back to the Clinton administration, which put the measure in place just after the explosion of TWA Flight 800 in 1996.
If people would leave their partisanship behind and become logical, independant, clear thinkers they would realize that many times, both sides are on the wrong side.
Speaking of which, this color scheme is giving me a headache. Seriously. Who's the butthead that thought this scheme up? Can we vote on this?
Good God no kidding, as soon as I clicked on this link I immediately regretted it.
Speaking of building technology that doesn't suck, a good start would be a PDF viewer that doesn't have 50 plugins, 20 seconds of splash screenage, and an awkward crapwagon 'docking' search system. (I am referring to Acrobat Reader ver 6.x) Yes yes I've put all the plugins into the 'Optional' directory, turned off splash screens, turned off all the features I can find like browser integration, ebooks, web buy, update, etc. It is just plain slow and sucky. I'm sticking with 5.05 (and in some cases 4.x versions) until they get their shit together. I've also tried the free viewers like gsview/ghostview/xpdf and they seem to be really slow rendering although they start faster (but on par with acrobat v5 with all the tweaks).
Would someone at Adobe please pull their heads out of their asses and release some solid quality software? This is rhetorical because after the latest versions of the "CS" line of product activation encumbered software I already know the answer.
"Unlikely, since a full flip takes a few hundred years; it is not a sudden, catastrophic effect."
In one of the few observed magnetic field reversals, it took only a few years for the Sun's magnetic field to reverse. Actually this appears to happen every 11 years, corresponding to the sunspot cycle. The Sun's magnetic poles are different than our Earth's, since they are located on the surface at sunspots.
Perhaps the earth could not flip-flop poles altogether. Instead, maybe we could have two north poles. NASA's Ulysses space probe observed the Sun with two north poles for a month during a flyby.
An interesting note for the 2012 crowd, the Sun's next magnetic field reversal is set to happen in none other than, 2012.
The Sun's magnetic poles will remain as they are now, with the north magnetic pole pointing through the Sun's southern hemisphere, until the year 2012 when they will reverse again.
This is one of the most annoying things about other browsers. When you use Opera regularly you get used to how fast it is and don't think twice about using back/forward all the time. With IE I want to gouge my eyes out because it resubmits forms, talks to the server, etc, and with FF it takes quite a bit longer.
Another thing I love about Opera is when you submit a form of some kind (like on my bank), you can go back and look at the previous page without any worries-- or what I often do is while I'm filling out the form go back and look at the previous page, then go forward and keep filling out the form without losing any data. Opera caches it all. But in many other browsers you get a "page expired" error, or the form is cleared which really pisses me off.
I love gestures too, but gestures in moz/FF still cause random crashes and don't reliably recognize the correct gesture. I love Opera's transfer panel with the quick download option, and about twenty other things. I was a Netscape fan in the days of IE, and then an Opera fan in the early days of Mozilla. Opera has consistantly performed and innovated while others have copied and played catch-up.
I am not some kind of elitist, I think moz and FF are really cool, and not everyone is going to pay for their browser. I don't want to se IE go away, rather I would like as many browsers as possible and the most choice for the people. I regularly use Opera, IE, FireFox, dillo, lynx, and Konqueror. They all serve their particular purpose. When X is not up, or not working, I use lynx (or links, sometimes w3m as well). When on the Redhat machines at work I often use Konqueror. At home and on my windows boxen I use Opera, IE, and Firefox. On my slower laptop I use Opera and dillo.
I often hear people harping on Opera because it is not free (as in beer), or because they will only use software that is free (as in speech). I think we should support free (as in speech) software as alternatives to nonfree software, but at the same time not write off innovations and advances that exist purely because of your personal politics. Lets not stifle choice and diversity in the name of choice OR freedom from <insert large corporation name here>. Putting the power, as it were, in the hands of the few is always a bad idea; be it the few who give their source away for free, or the few who give their compiled executable code away for free.
In general, I agree about DDJ lacking meat, with the exception of the Ed Neisley articles.
I agree with you, the first article I always read is Embedded Space. BUT a few issues ago he did the article I referenced about acronyms et al which totally wasted paper. Then again I am currently doing embedded systems design so I like his articles with more juice.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who has noticed their meatless magazine of late. I was worried that the entire populus was slowly regressing in intelligence and the magazine was at the exact same relative comprehension level so no one said anything. I'm not holding my breath on that one.
Replying to myself here. I'd like to also point out a few music magazines I read.
Outburn Post-alternative music magazine which always has some interesting reviews of more obscure or lesser-known musicians/bands. Since I listen to a lot of industrial/futurepop/ebm/etc I also like Side-Line music magazine. This is a good magazine from Belgium I believe, and also the owners of Alfa-Matrix records (Home of Front 242, Collide, Regenerator, etc).
Isolation Tank is an online/mailorder record store that focuses on underground electronic/industrial and alternative music. I get their Asleep by Dawn paper quarterly. They had an interview with one of my favorites, Neuroticfish awhile back, and if you're into this style of music (or want to check it out) I'd suggest getting a copy of this free magazine that comes complete with an audio sampler in every issue. I also have read in the past (but haven't seen it in awhile) Industrial Nation magazine. Back in 1997 they had an interview with Apoptygma Berzerk (who I loved after hearing the album "7") before many people knew who he was (this is pre-'Welcome To Earth' which was released in 2000, which I strongly suggest purchasing if you've never heard APB before).
Is it any good? The last copy I have is probably from around '97. It regularly had more phreaking articles than 2600, which I liked at the time. Maybe post a small review/synopsis?
I buy 2600 magazine regularly and enjoy it. I used to also pickup blacklisted 411 but I haven't seen it anywhere in several years! Anyone read/read (thats currently read/have read before) it?
I also read DDJ and C/C++ users journal. But I've found DDJ hasn't had any meaty articles in ages. Mainly bought it for the cdrom full of backissues. What I'd really like is a mag with good algorithms and practices/approaches to solving problems. Either original code or analysis of existing GPL/free/etc code, what they are doing that works well, etc. There is a LOT of very advanced methods of problem solving out there but all I seem to see in these magazines are articles on things such as "string concatentation", a review of Windows XP SP2, and a lame "history" of jargon and acronyms (to cite a few sleepers). Anyone know any good magazines that fill this void?
I used to enjoy Boot which I think is now Maximum PC. Haven't read it in a long time. Is it still any good? I remember they started a Maximum Linux or something and made a handful of issues before canning it.
We also have (Portland, OR area) a free magazine that's been around for ages that rocks called Computer Bits. Mainly just good for finding good deals on computers and related equipment/services from local companies. BUT back in the day they had a large list of local BBS's which was a good reference! They also sometimes have good articles.
But I guess the fact that inches has less than half the fidelty of centimeters doesn't matter to you?
I never mentioned inches vs cm. In fact, I was not arguing for american/imperial vs metric, instead I was showing the similarities between Fahrenheit and Celsius and some of the benefits of the Fahrenheit scale.
Now I feel obliged to point out that a centimeter is not the official SI Unit of measure. The meter is. The centimeter is a base-10 fraction of the SI basic unit of measure, the meter, while the inch is a base-12 fraction of the imperial basic unit of measure, the foot. The foot has greater whole-number fidelity than the meter.
Does this really matter? Not really since many people express useful measures like their height in cm, or in USA as feet + inches (ie, 6'3"). But weather temperatures are generally expressed in whole numbers, giving the fahrenheit system a higher fidelity in these cases. And its easy to remember 0-100 is an approximate range of habitable temperatures. For scientific measurements kelvin is the way to go, but the majority of temperature measurements that the public cares about on a day-to-day basis are weather reports and earth temperatures. Having an almost 2x greater fidelity in this region is a good thing. Keeping fractions/decimals out of the equation is also better for the general public.
However, those temperatures fluxtuate based upon your altitude. Celcius however is based upon the freezing and boiling points of pure water at sea level.
Fahrenheit is measured at standard pressure. It is not subject to the fluctuations you cite.
Now while celsius seems to make more sense based around the freezing and boiling points of water, notice that fahrenheit is as well:
0 degrees is the freezing point of an equal ice/salt mixture
32 degrees is the freezing point of water
212 is the boiling point of water
Now, 96 degrees (for the mean human body temperature) was originally the top bound (base-12 system, making eight segments). The boiling point of 212 was introduced later bumping 96 up to 98.6. However, since we're talking about base-12 here you can see that with a zero of 32 degrees and a high of 212 there are 180 degrees (360/2) of fidelity which are in 15 equal segments of 12 (12*15+32 = 212). So it really has the same characteristics of celsius, but it is using a different base.
Now one thing that is interesting is that 0 - 100 degrees fahrenheit is roughly the extents of normal temperatures in which we live and are able to function normally within. These map approximately to -18 to 38 degrees celsius. Now which system is more logical? The boiling point of water is not as important to me as my body temperature is, since our bodies cannot tolerate temperatures much beyond our internal temperature.
Also the celsius system has roughly half the fidelity of the fahrenheit system (56%). That means that when reporting temperatures I have a better idea what temp it is since there is less room for error. This could be avoided by providing temperatures with decimal points, but this isn't neccessary with the Fahrenheit system.
I don't really have much of a beef with celsius other than the lower useful bandwidth of whole numbers in the (meaningful) range of human habitability. That and base-12 is very handy. Speaking of twelve, check out this interesting link that shows the sequence of 12 repeating numbers for the iteration of -1/(sin(x)cos(x).
I have a LOT of music I like, don't get me wrong, but I have gone through an insane amount of music to find it. Send me a list I'd love to see what I'm missing!
As for the number of pirates, it is in the millions and millions, for sure.
And as for the number of good Artists, hundreds? Seriously, I am willing to bet that most people who have 50GB of mp3s have less than 1GB of music they really even remotely like. You have to sift through piles and piles of pure crap to find the gems.
So any figures I see about the amount of $$ someone has 'stolen' by downloading gigabytes of music I have to reject because they would never buy all that crap and if they had to, they would have given up long ago without finding anything they like. I for one have bought way too much music ever since I started downloading it. If its good I buy it. I have close to 1000 cds and over 100 vinyl.
Think about it, how much of your collection is something you'd buy or already own and how much is refuse you have collected and somehow can't delete? How many people have binders full of software they never use, music they don't like, and movies/tv shows they haven't watched or don't like? I know several.
how many times do you make a httpd.conf change, only to then have to kill the httpd processes, and manually re-invoke them? Quite often. With SysV, the worst is/etc/init.d/httpd restart.
I have actually run across that same scenario recently, and I typed/etc/rc.d/rc.httpd restart. Slackware has had start/stop/restart functionality in their rc.d/rc.* scripts for as long as I can remember.
It was a hypothetical situation. Scripts change, too easily in fact.
Slackware's init scripts haven't changed the way they call/etc/init.d/rc.* scripts since I've been using it (Slackware 3.x), and probably have always worked that way. That is how BSD style init scripts work. Just as the SXX, KXX, etc prefixes in the rc.X directories under SysV work a certain way since thats how they were designed.
Those of us who don't like hackish solutions like removing an +x bit prefer something manageable, like sysv.
I'd hardly call BSD inits hackish, rather I'd call it logical, and elegant in its simplicity. Take all the tools away and which one is easier? I believe one of the primary ideas behind slack is that anything should be fast and easy using only a text editor and the standard unix tools (chmod is one of those). In that vein it succeeds. If you look at SysV in this light, you are forced doing what others have pointed out (manual renaming/linking/removing/etc of scripts in several subdirectories).
Many of us Slack users have been around the block and had to fix things in a pinch. Doing things manually prepares you for these times and also teaches you a little more about how the underlying system works. If slack forced you to do it manually but used SysV no one would like slack. But slack makes it easy to do 'the hard way'. And this extends way beyond the BSD/SysV debate. Everything follows this notion, which is the reason why so many have brought up slackware's ease of administration. Everything is up front and there for the tweaking.
If you haven't given slackware more than a simple glance, I suggest running it for awhile to get the feel of it. I am not a blind-eyed zealot either, I have used redhat, mandrake, gentoo and sourcemage and run several distros regularly. I believe there is wisdom to be gained from most distros and that 'everything according to its purpose' is a good mantra here.
Re:Can I have an infinite budget to write the code
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Java Faster Than C++?
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Qt for X11 is free. The other OS/Arch options are the ones that are not free:
Re:Can I have an infinite budget to write the code
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Java Faster Than C++?
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I wish all Unix GUIs were done in Java.
That line made my blood curdle. Of all the UNIX apps I've used, the ones that were written in Java are my least favorite and least used apps. I prefer apps written in C with a toolkit like Qt or Gtk+. Both of those are exceptionally fast and modern looking. Toolkits like WxWindows compile natively with no extra dynamic libraries required and are crossplatform.
But as anyone really using *NIX knows (yes I'm talking about you gentoo, sourcemage, LFS and slackware guys), you always pick the app written in C before the app linked against libstdc++. It may sound elitist but it just seems that people writing in C know what they're doing and take the time to write more solid code. Not to say you can't write a crapwagon C program, perhaps its just easier to fuck it up when you're writing C++.
To go back to your line that made me choke, "I wish all Unix GUIs were done in Java." Perhaps large one-off or custom design software could benefit from Java. But I think this is the minority not the rule. The apps I use on a daily basis are the window manager, xterms, media players, web browsers, document viewing/creation apps, etc. These types of apps have matured over the last 10 years and are all (the ones I use at least) written in C. That is why I can use X and actually do work with no problems on my P133 laptop. Compare that to OpenOffice, Limewire, etc al that I would not touch with a 10' pole for fear of my laptop shutting itself quickly and breaking off my fingers in retaliation.
Easily readable code is more important to the programmer, however more efficient code is much more important to the user. If you are planning on selling your software or having anyone actually use it, you'd better at least think about efficiency. Also, you seem to think efficiency and readability/maintainability are mutually exclusive. That is simply not the case.
SO WHAT! Programs should only be optimized if:
1) the program is doing stuff so intensive that it runs slow
What is your metric for 'running slow'? Running slow with no other programs running? Running slow on your development machine, a machine that is likely faster than your user's machine? I think it would do developers a lot of good to test all software on systems half the speed of the current middle-of-the-line system.
2) It is being run all the time in the background by the system and can slow down the system as a whole.
Most software is used in conjunction with, or adjacent to, several other pieces of software. You should not be forced to run the program standalone because of its excessive resource requirements.
98% of the time it just does not matter.
It is thinking like this that causes the escalation of poor, slow, bloated software.
The "Laws" of physics change all the time, as we make new discoveries and adopt new theories.
Well the Laws don't change at all, we just get closer and closer to fully understanding them as time goes on. As in, there is a truth that we observe as X. The truth is elusive, and the best way we can describe it currently is X. We call this the 'Laws of Physics' which are the simplest explanation for what is happening, and generally correct to a certain fidelity. This fidelity increases as our understanding of the actual Law increases.
So really, what you should have said was "Our understanding of the Laws of physics change all the time as we make new discoveries and adopt new theories".
Slashdot Mirror
Not exactly. A publicly held company has an obligation to its shareholders. But that doesn't really matter unless a majority share is held by the public and not by individuals (ie, company officers)-- Since in many companies, officers are paid more in salary than dividends or trade value.
That brings up another point, many companies give paltry dividends, if any at all. Then generating profit for shareholders is not related to what the company does really at all, but moreover how the market feels about the company which is somewhat determined by press releases and quarterly statements but is largely indeterminate and random in nature.
It seems to me that removing an atrocious event in history from society in the name of "anti-hate" removes the reminders from the society of the wrong that was committed. How can we learn when we sweep all of our mistakes under the rug?
Whats most offensive lately is moving an extra set of keys (effectively useless keys, I might add) to the insert/home/pageup/pagedown/delete/end block and effectively throwing off the entire layout of that section rendering 20-30 years of standardized layout and familiarity out the window.
You used to be able to buy a cheap 5$ keyboard that had the standard layout, albeit a piece of crap, but it did the job. They're getting harder and harder to find. I couldn't even find one the last time I looked. There were no keyboards without at least 3 extra keys in addition to the windows keys, and this was at Fry's Electronics. Luckily I found a local shop selling old keyboards, and quality at that. I picked up several IBM Model-M PS/2 keyboards. Not as old as the AT style, but they are still over 10 years old and work perfectly. The keys are tactile and the layout is curved somewhat to make hiting the F-Keys easier. I got a few that make the loud clicking sound, and some of the quiet touch ones. They are both high quality keyboards, but I prefer the clicking noise :). Without a doubt these are the best keyboards I have ever owned and am aware of.
Check out this page that talks about them some. I think they sell them here. There's a review here, and a page of devoted model-m lovers here.
You should be able to pick them up used at a local used computer equipment shop, ebay, etc for under 20$ (I got mine for under 5$ a piece).
Is that anything like a checkerstaco?
"I'd like a connectfoursalad with a side of strategofries please."
"Would you like any chutesandladders sauce?"
"No thanks, I always keep some hiddenvalleyaxisandalliesranch on me to dip them in."
Wrong. If you would have RTFA you would have noticed that the legislation was passed during the Clinton administration and has nothing to do with the Patriot Act.
If people would leave their partisanship behind and become logical, independant, clear thinkers they would realize that many times, both sides are on the wrong side.
Good God no kidding, as soon as I clicked on this link I immediately regretted it.
Speaking of building technology that doesn't suck, a good start would be a PDF viewer that doesn't have 50 plugins, 20 seconds of splash screenage, and an awkward crapwagon 'docking' search system. (I am referring to Acrobat Reader ver 6.x) Yes yes I've put all the plugins into the 'Optional' directory, turned off splash screens, turned off all the features I can find like browser integration, ebooks, web buy, update, etc. It is just plain slow and sucky. I'm sticking with 5.05 (and in some cases 4.x versions) until they get their shit together. I've also tried the free viewers like gsview/ghostview/xpdf and they seem to be really slow rendering although they start faster (but on par with acrobat v5 with all the tweaks).
Would someone at Adobe please pull their heads out of their asses and release some solid quality software? This is rhetorical because after the latest versions of the "CS" line of product activation encumbered software I already know the answer.
you're playing communism!
wait that one works
In one of the few observed magnetic field reversals, it took only a few years for the Sun's magnetic field to reverse. Actually this appears to happen every 11 years, corresponding to the sunspot cycle. The Sun's magnetic poles are different than our Earth's, since they are located on the surface at sunspots.
Perhaps the earth could not flip-flop poles altogether. Instead, maybe we could have two north poles. NASA's Ulysses space probe observed the Sun with two north poles for a month during a flyby.
An interesting note for the 2012 crowd, the Sun's next magnetic field reversal is set to happen in none other than, 2012.
Another thing I love about Opera is when you submit a form of some kind (like on my bank), you can go back and look at the previous page without any worries-- or what I often do is while I'm filling out the form go back and look at the previous page, then go forward and keep filling out the form without losing any data. Opera caches it all. But in many other browsers you get a "page expired" error, or the form is cleared which really pisses me off.
I love gestures too, but gestures in moz/FF still cause random crashes and don't reliably recognize the correct gesture. I love Opera's transfer panel with the quick download option, and about twenty other things. I was a Netscape fan in the days of IE, and then an Opera fan in the early days of Mozilla. Opera has consistantly performed and innovated while others have copied and played catch-up.
I am not some kind of elitist, I think moz and FF are really cool, and not everyone is going to pay for their browser. I don't want to se IE go away, rather I would like as many browsers as possible and the most choice for the people. I regularly use Opera, IE, FireFox, dillo, lynx, and Konqueror. They all serve their particular purpose. When X is not up, or not working, I use lynx (or links, sometimes w3m as well). When on the Redhat machines at work I often use Konqueror. At home and on my windows boxen I use Opera, IE, and Firefox. On my slower laptop I use Opera and dillo.
I often hear people harping on Opera because it is not free (as in beer), or because they will only use software that is free (as in speech). I think we should support free (as in speech) software as alternatives to nonfree software, but at the same time not write off innovations and advances that exist purely because of your personal politics. Lets not stifle choice and diversity in the name of choice OR freedom from <insert large corporation name here>. Putting the power, as it were, in the hands of the few is always a bad idea; be it the few who give their source away for free, or the few who give their compiled executable code away for free.
I put it in that place I put that one thing that one time.
I agree with you, the first article I always read is Embedded Space. BUT a few issues ago he did the article I referenced about acronyms et al which totally wasted paper. Then again I am currently doing embedded systems design so I like his articles with more juice.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who has noticed their meatless magazine of late. I was worried that the entire populus was slowly regressing in intelligence and the magazine was at the exact same relative comprehension level so no one said anything. I'm not holding my breath on that one.
Outburn Post-alternative music magazine which always has some interesting reviews of more obscure or lesser-known musicians/bands. Since I listen to a lot of industrial/futurepop/ebm/etc I also like Side-Line music magazine. This is a good magazine from Belgium I believe, and also the owners of Alfa-Matrix records (Home of Front 242, Collide, Regenerator, etc).
Isolation Tank is an online/mailorder record store that focuses on underground electronic/industrial and alternative music. I get their Asleep by Dawn paper quarterly. They had an interview with one of my favorites, Neuroticfish awhile back, and if you're into this style of music (or want to check it out) I'd suggest getting a copy of this free magazine that comes complete with an audio sampler in every issue. I also have read in the past (but haven't seen it in awhile) Industrial Nation magazine. Back in 1997 they had an interview with Apoptygma Berzerk (who I loved after hearing the album "7") before many people knew who he was (this is pre-'Welcome To Earth' which was released in 2000, which I strongly suggest purchasing if you've never heard APB before).
In this vein there are also some magazines I haven't read but have heard are good. There's Moving Hands magazine and the swedish-language Zero Music Magazine.
Is it any good? The last copy I have is probably from around '97. It regularly had more phreaking articles than 2600, which I liked at the time. Maybe post a small review/synopsis?
I also read DDJ and C/C++ users journal. But I've found DDJ hasn't had any meaty articles in ages. Mainly bought it for the cdrom full of backissues. What I'd really like is a mag with good algorithms and practices/approaches to solving problems. Either original code or analysis of existing GPL/free/etc code, what they are doing that works well, etc. There is a LOT of very advanced methods of problem solving out there but all I seem to see in these magazines are articles on things such as "string concatentation", a review of Windows XP SP2, and a lame "history" of jargon and acronyms (to cite a few sleepers). Anyone know any good magazines that fill this void?
I used to enjoy Boot which I think is now Maximum PC. Haven't read it in a long time. Is it still any good? I remember they started a Maximum Linux or something and made a handful of issues before canning it.
We also have (Portland, OR area) a free magazine that's been around for ages that rocks called Computer Bits. Mainly just good for finding good deals on computers and related equipment/services from local companies. BUT back in the day they had a large list of local BBS's which was a good reference! They also sometimes have good articles.
I never mentioned inches vs cm. In fact, I was not arguing for american/imperial vs metric, instead I was showing the similarities between Fahrenheit and Celsius and some of the benefits of the Fahrenheit scale.
Now I feel obliged to point out that a centimeter is not the official SI Unit of measure. The meter is. The centimeter is a base-10 fraction of the SI basic unit of measure, the meter, while the inch is a base-12 fraction of the imperial basic unit of measure, the foot. The foot has greater whole-number fidelity than the meter.
Does this really matter? Not really since many people express useful measures like their height in cm, or in USA as feet + inches (ie, 6'3"). But weather temperatures are generally expressed in whole numbers, giving the fahrenheit system a higher fidelity in these cases. And its easy to remember 0-100 is an approximate range of habitable temperatures. For scientific measurements kelvin is the way to go, but the majority of temperature measurements that the public cares about on a day-to-day basis are weather reports and earth temperatures. Having an almost 2x greater fidelity in this region is a good thing. Keeping fractions/decimals out of the equation is also better for the general public.
Fahrenheit is measured at standard pressure. It is not subject to the fluctuations you cite.
Now while celsius seems to make more sense based around the freezing and boiling points of water, notice that fahrenheit is as well:
0 degrees is the freezing point of an equal ice/salt mixture
32 degrees is the freezing point of water
212 is the boiling point of water
Now, 96 degrees (for the mean human body temperature) was originally the top bound (base-12 system, making eight segments). The boiling point of 212 was introduced later bumping 96 up to 98.6. However, since we're talking about base-12 here you can see that with a zero of 32 degrees and a high of 212 there are 180 degrees (360/2) of fidelity which are in 15 equal segments of 12 (12*15+32 = 212). So it really has the same characteristics of celsius, but it is using a different base.
Now one thing that is interesting is that 0 - 100 degrees fahrenheit is roughly the extents of normal temperatures in which we live and are able to function normally within. These map approximately to -18 to 38 degrees celsius. Now which system is more logical? The boiling point of water is not as important to me as my body temperature is, since our bodies cannot tolerate temperatures much beyond our internal temperature.
Also the celsius system has roughly half the fidelity of the fahrenheit system (56%). That means that when reporting temperatures I have a better idea what temp it is since there is less room for error. This could be avoided by providing temperatures with decimal points, but this isn't neccessary with the Fahrenheit system.
I don't really have much of a beef with celsius other than the lower useful bandwidth of whole numbers in the (meaningful) range of human habitability. That and base-12 is very handy. Speaking of twelve, check out this interesting link that shows the sequence of 12 repeating numbers for the iteration of -1/(sin(x)cos(x).
I have a LOT of music I like, don't get me wrong, but I have gone through an insane amount of music to find it. Send me a list I'd love to see what I'm missing!
And as for the number of good Artists, hundreds? Seriously, I am willing to bet that most people who have 50GB of mp3s have less than 1GB of music they really even remotely like. You have to sift through piles and piles of pure crap to find the gems.
So any figures I see about the amount of $$ someone has 'stolen' by downloading gigabytes of music I have to reject because they would never buy all that crap and if they had to, they would have given up long ago without finding anything they like. I for one have bought way too much music ever since I started downloading it. If its good I buy it. I have close to 1000 cds and over 100 vinyl.
Think about it, how much of your collection is something you'd buy or already own and how much is refuse you have collected and somehow can't delete? How many people have binders full of software they never use, music they don't like, and movies/tv shows they haven't watched or don't like? I know several.
There have been lists of the usernames before but I can't find one for this round of lawsuits.
I have actually run across that same scenario recently, and I typed /etc/rc.d/rc.httpd restart. Slackware has had start/stop/restart functionality in their rc.d/rc.* scripts for as long as I can remember.
Slackware's init scripts haven't changed the way they call /etc/init.d/rc.* scripts since I've been using it (Slackware 3.x), and probably have always worked that way. That is how BSD style init scripts work. Just as the SXX, KXX, etc prefixes in the rc.X directories under SysV work a certain way since thats how they were designed.
Those of us who don't like hackish solutions like removing an +x bit prefer something manageable, like sysv.
I'd hardly call BSD inits hackish, rather I'd call it logical, and elegant in its simplicity. Take all the tools away and which one is easier? I believe one of the primary ideas behind slack is that anything should be fast and easy using only a text editor and the standard unix tools (chmod is one of those). In that vein it succeeds. If you look at SysV in this light, you are forced doing what others have pointed out (manual renaming/linking/removing/etc of scripts in several subdirectories).
Many of us Slack users have been around the block and had to fix things in a pinch. Doing things manually prepares you for these times and also teaches you a little more about how the underlying system works. If slack forced you to do it manually but used SysV no one would like slack. But slack makes it easy to do 'the hard way'. And this extends way beyond the BSD/SysV debate. Everything follows this notion, which is the reason why so many have brought up slackware's ease of administration. Everything is up front and there for the tweaking.
If you haven't given slackware more than a simple glance, I suggest running it for awhile to get the feel of it. I am not a blind-eyed zealot either, I have used redhat, mandrake, gentoo and sourcemage and run several distros regularly. I believe there is wisdom to be gained from most distros and that 'everything according to its purpose' is a good mantra here.
Qt/X11 Free Edition
That line made my blood curdle. Of all the UNIX apps I've used, the ones that were written in Java are my least favorite and least used apps. I prefer apps written in C with a toolkit like Qt or Gtk+. Both of those are exceptionally fast and modern looking. Toolkits like WxWindows compile natively with no extra dynamic libraries required and are crossplatform.
But as anyone really using *NIX knows (yes I'm talking about you gentoo, sourcemage, LFS and slackware guys), you always pick the app written in C before the app linked against libstdc++. It may sound elitist but it just seems that people writing in C know what they're doing and take the time to write more solid code. Not to say you can't write a crapwagon C program, perhaps its just easier to fuck it up when you're writing C++.
To go back to your line that made me choke, "I wish all Unix GUIs were done in Java." Perhaps large one-off or custom design software could benefit from Java. But I think this is the minority not the rule. The apps I use on a daily basis are the window manager, xterms, media players, web browsers, document viewing/creation apps, etc. These types of apps have matured over the last 10 years and are all (the ones I use at least) written in C. That is why I can use X and actually do work with no problems on my P133 laptop. Compare that to OpenOffice, Limewire, etc al that I would not touch with a 10' pole for fear of my laptop shutting itself quickly and breaking off my fingers in retaliation.
Easily readable code is more important to the programmer, however more efficient code is much more important to the user. If you are planning on selling your software or having anyone actually use it, you'd better at least think about efficiency. Also, you seem to think efficiency and readability/maintainability are mutually exclusive. That is simply not the case.
SO WHAT! Programs should only be optimized if:
1) the program is doing stuff so intensive that it runs slow
What is your metric for 'running slow'? Running slow with no other programs running? Running slow on your development machine, a machine that is likely faster than your user's machine? I think it would do developers a lot of good to test all software on systems half the speed of the current middle-of-the-line system.
2) It is being run all the time in the background by the system and can slow down the system as a whole.
Most software is used in conjunction with, or adjacent to, several other pieces of software. You should not be forced to run the program standalone because of its excessive resource requirements.
98% of the time it just does not matter.
It is thinking like this that causes the escalation of poor, slow, bloated software.
Well the Laws don't change at all, we just get closer and closer to fully understanding them as time goes on. As in, there is a truth that we observe as X. The truth is elusive, and the best way we can describe it currently is X. We call this the 'Laws of Physics' which are the simplest explanation for what is happening, and generally correct to a certain fidelity. This fidelity increases as our understanding of the actual Law increases.
So really, what you should have said was "Our understanding of the Laws of physics change all the time as we make new discoveries and adopt new theories".