It is not a problem for me - I don't care, but if MS
wants to turn Usenet into a reason for users to
"upgrade to the newest version of the Internet"
(ie upgrade their version of Windows) then
they do not want this to happen.
That makes a bit more sense. Sounds kind of like the
pacific
northwest portion of the US - there are tons on cool
little cafes with entertainment, cool people, and good
coffee. Now that I'm in a yuppie
hell thousands of miles from good coffee Starbucks is as
good as it gets, but when I'm in the NW I go to real coffee
shops despite the Starbucks on every corner.
Why? In some parts of the country it is the only place
that serves decent coffee. I know several girls who went
through HS and college working at Starbucks for better
money than they could make elsewhere.
The reason I say "they had better" make plaintext the only
option is that the perception of
their users will be colored by their first experiences
posting. If they post with.doc or rtf or html they will
probably be asked to post in plain text. Depending on the
group that request may be phrased in a very hostile
manner.
So if a user's first post is "Hey everybody, I share
your interest in foo. My stationary has unicorns on it.
Hooray!". And the response is "Don't %$#'ing ever post
binary attachments here again you %#$%'er!", then the
user could easily decide Usenet is scary and rude and go
back to the safety of their favorite web forum or mailing
list.
Most newsgroups actually are pretty good these days, as long as there's one where your interest is on-topic and you have decent filtering in your client to cut out the noise.
Change 'most' to 'many' and I agree with you. The quality
of discussion in a foucused news group is far higher than
that in a mailing list or web log.
So the problems to solve for users come down to: finding
'good' groups,
finding 'good' articles, discovering 'friends', monitoring
threads, and ignoring 'foes'.
Those problems have been solved by a large number of
newsreaders in the form of scorefiles, killfiles, and a
group listing view that accepts wildcards. One problem is
that normal human beings cannot use any of those
features - because their naive newsreader does not
support them or the interface is a windowized version
of 'rn'. This is accidental complexity and is the sort of UI
and standardization problem MS is good at solving.
Another problem is that for the user to communicate their
definition of "good" in a meaningful way is difficult. This
is inherently complex; explaining what is "good" to a
human being is difficult, much less a computer
program.
I wish them luck, but they had better fucking leave 'html'
and 'rich text' out of their news reader - completely. As in:
do not even make it an option that can be turned on
for posting and
don't render it for reading.
I've found a few books with a good mix of theory and
application.
"Calculus - An intuitive and physical approach", Morris Kline.
Very useful self-teaching intro to calculus. Gives some
great notes on different notations.
"Introduction to mathematical philosophy", Bertrand Russel.
Gives you some very good tools for how to think about
mathematics.
"Mathematical logic", W.V. Quine.
"The pleasures of counting", T.W. Korner.
Gives natural applications of math and how to decide what
tools to use to solve those problems.
"Math toolkit for real-time programming", Jack W.
Crenshaw.
How-to recipes for math primitives and how to use them to
build up to advanced applications.
Thanks for that link. I've written trie structures
based on the description in Perlman, the MIX-code
in Knuth, and the diagrams in the MIT algo book -
but this is the first chance I've had to look at
an actual implementation done by someone other than
myself.
g_foo means "global foo", and s_foo means "local stack foo", and h_foo means "heap foo"
In my experience s_foo more commonly is used to
indicate 'static' than stack. g_foo is probably not enough
label for a global in programs with more than 2 or 3 source
files.
The case where I find a type descriptive name to be
important is if I have to use a reinterpret_cast to treat
a chunk of raw memory as a pointer to a non-opaque type.
I think most uses of
'hungarian style' conventions that encode type
information are worthless or misleading.
And I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "privacy is a requirement for free speech". When you do speak freely, you're not keeping your thoughts private--you're putting them out in public.
An individual act of speech does not require a public
expression or general
public dissemination: beliefs, thoughts, fantasies, diaries,
etc. can all forms of protected speech. A person subject to
continued public exposure
may be harassed or intimidated for the subject matter of
a book they are writing, the books they read, the web sites
they visit, and so on.
Some people love nothing more than
to censure their neighbors, freedom requires that all are
able to tell such people "none of your business - go away".
Another key advantage, is that RB trees are automatically
sorted.
Most stl map implementations are based on a RB tree,
and often cause memory fragmentation.
That's not the end of
world for most programs, but data being located on
many different pages can trash average access times for
threaded programs (although constant use of the memory
allocator probably harms the program itself more).
A hash gives good memory locality and good average
lookup performance, if data is constant (or near constant) a
sorted vector gives you excellent lookup performance and
very good memory locality.
But I don't think flat out optimization is that important to
python, otherwise they'd use low level hacks like perl
reading directly out of the stdio FILE buffers to optimize
IO.
By that level of reasoning, there's also a constitutional right to profit.
The seeking of profit or privacy are both
"others (rights) retained
by the people". The government
creates laws and policies (subsidies, copyright)
that encourage people to create businesses that make
profit, as profit is something that is seen as beneficial to
society. The DNC list is the case of the government creating
a law that encourages privacy, as privacy is seen as
beneficial to society.
We recognize the necessity of
anonymity (a form of privacy) for free voting, require a
court order before law enforcement can search your
property, have specific laws against invasion of privacy by
private citizens, have laws against trespassing, etc.
I'm confused as to why there are suddenly so many people
so insistent about there being no right to privacy. It is
obvious that privacy is a requirement for free speech - free
thought and expression are not possible if you are worried
about what the neighbors think.
One of my customers said it best: "We are becoming a nation of whores and mercenaries."
Why do people pretend like all this is new? You must have
read enough history in college to recognize that enterprise
and economics are about nothing but turning people into
whores and mercanaries.
Ever done something for money that you would not have
done otherwise? Congrats, you are a whore.
Ever done something you thought was wrong for money?
If so I welcome you to the mercenary brotherhood.
You don't get to have it both ways: if government allows or
encourages large business then you get an economic boost,
but those businesses will treat the non-owners (your
citizens) like animals or machines to be replaced with
someone or something cheaper at the first opportunity.
Instead of worrying about the number, focus on the model. People who want to use numbers to discredit models, are wasting time. The model works.
So you never did proofs in school? The model is useless
until you run real numbers through it, at best your
model is a SWAG (scientific wild ass guess), at worst -
valueless trash, you can't know until you try the model
with numbers.
Hell, you'll just ignore them and insist Henry Ford was paying those people bottom of the barrel wages.
No, I'll insist that Ford was using his strength
to force those workers to accept demeaning and
unreasonable conditions for working for better
wages than they could make elsewhere.
But freedom is me and my employer being able to reach agreement on my working conditions-- without your sticking your nose in and demanding that I have to take vacation (When I'd rather give it up and be paid more), or whatever your petty little mind wants to FORCE US to do.
I don't care whether you actually take a vacation
or not, I only care that you be able to take one
if you wish.
You should be allowed to make the choice to trade
in vacation for additional pay. If employers were
not required to provide vacation then most
people would not even have that choice and
employers would treat the money saved as profit
and never think twice about raising wages.
Why do you not only insist on getting your way, but have to bring guns into it? And you don't even have the guts to do it yourself-- you hire thugs from the government to force companies to accept unions-- unions that eventually drive them into bankruptcy as they did Chrysler and the airlines.
The reason that early unions were protected by
force was that workers who tried to unionize were
attacked by private security forces hired by
business owners. A government force was required
to allow the workers to form unions without
being threatened with violence, just as a society
sanctioned force was required to ensure civil
rights, just as the police provide the threat of
force which protects your property, just as we use
economic or millitary force to bend other nations
to our way of thinking. Part of the job of
government is the application of force to achieve
the ends of the nation.
Fact of the matter is, a worker who didn't like Henries no-talking rule could go work somewhere else for less money.
Fact is, that the no-talking rule was demeaning.
Fact is, a man making a living wage (or just above
it) will accept a little humiliation (and change it
in his mind to make it acceptable) for the extra
money.
Fact is, unions in the U.S. have resulted
in a great increase in the standard of living for
workers and greatly enlarged the middle class .
(Please note well: I'm being a bit mocking in my
application of the label 'fact'. Fact of the
matter is, I'm a bit leery of self-labeled facts.)
Unions are flawed, and they suck, and they are
corrupt, and are filled with people I disagree
with - just like every other organization that
functions in the real world. The cost of unions
is less than the cost of not having unions.
Least this Fam guy is better than that awful
'mensa babe', whose tedious schtick includs
gems like "pretending to be a woman",
"pretending to be in mensa", "making intentional
spelling errors in.sig", and many (not really)
more.
I had to laugh seeing this little gem attached to
the story:
Special Report The Google gods
Does the search engine's power
threaten the Web's independence?
The Web's independence? The fucking web
is a sad little microcosm of the real world.
Google is one of the few reasons I can still
stand the web, and silly statements like
"Google is making copies of all the Web sites they index and they're not asking permission" are the
reason the web sucks so bad. When everyone is
deathly afraid of being sued or prosecuted for
something it's no wonder that the web
is such a clown town of worthless crap.
Lowering your enemies expectations about your ability is a tactic right out of "The Art of War,"
and GWB has been relying on it ever since he decided to run against Ann Richards to become governor of Texas.
It takes real genius to convince all the people who would not have voted for you anyway that you are a bungling idiot, while still building the support of almost everybody else.
So there is some sort of Republican newsletter
that lets them in on the plan? Why would people
vote for someone who intentionally acts like a
buffoon unless it were strictly on party lines.
The name, the connections, and the advertising
could have some bearing on it as well. Bush is
not an idiot, but he would never become president
on his own merit.
"First, let me make it very clear, poor people aren't necessarily killers. Just because you happen to be not rich doesn't mean you're willing to kill."
"I recently met with the finance minister of the Palestinian Authority, was very impressed by his grasp of finances."
"The war on terror involves Saddam Hussein because of the nature of Saddam Hussein, the history of Saddam Hussein, and his willingness to terrorize himself."
"Please," Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "don't kill me."
-Bush mocking a woman he condemed to die
Anyone (even a dolt) from the upper class can get
a
college degree if they want it.
I don't think Bush is a dolt, I just don't think
he
is any smarter than any of the college educated
middle managers I've dealt with. A degree is no
guarantee of intelligence, wisdom, or even a
meaningful education.
So far, I'll play poker with anybody that truly believes GW is dumb cause my first assessment of you that you are conceited and an egotistical elitist. The kind that I would like to surround myself with at the poker table.
I don't play much poker, bridge is more my speed -
it fits my egotistical nature to get to play
whether my hand is good or not. I try to be a
realistic elitist and not throw away money.
Now, I'm not posting and responding to try and convince you of anything. I'm posting and responding to remind you that yours is just opinion and is no more correct or certain then mine.
I think that is a given in this forum. We
obviously disagree on important qualities for
elected officials and neither of us is going to
shift the opinion of the other.
I also love all these hollywood high school dropouts calling Bush (MBA Harvard) dumb.
He is somewhat educated and I'd guess he is in
the "bright average" category in terms of
intelligence, but he is wilfully ignorant and often
holds simplistic views.
I wouldn't say that Bush is stupid (and he has
lots of very smart people working for him), but I
don't think he has the
intelligence of Clinton or Bush Sr. He may be as
smart as Reagan but does not have near his
charisma or cunning. I don't think he is
of presidential caliber in any of his qualities.
The left is pretty diverse, but one of the few
constants in left thinking is a poor opinion of a
strong millitary. Most everyone recognizes that
barring a major change in human nature that a
millitary force is a requirement, but the left
generally thinks it should be used only for
self-defense.
Only gays and religious people care about the gay marriage issue.
I'm not gay or religious and I think that gay
marriage should be allowed. Why should straight
people even care? Divorce and sex outside of
wedlock are
a bigger mockery of christian marriage than gay
marriage could ever be.
conservative(smaller government reduced government influence)
Modern conservative opinion only believes in
reduced government with less influence when they
don't get to direct it.
Slashdot Mirror
It is not a problem for me - I don't care, but if MS wants to turn Usenet into a reason for users to "upgrade to the newest version of the Internet" (ie upgrade their version of Windows) then they do not want this to happen.
Took me a while to get used to Starbucks, but now I'm okay with it. So yeah, I call it decent.
That makes a bit more sense. Sounds kind of like the pacific northwest portion of the US - there are tons on cool little cafes with entertainment, cool people, and good coffee. Now that I'm in a yuppie hell thousands of miles from good coffee Starbucks is as good as it gets, but when I'm in the NW I go to real coffee shops despite the Starbucks on every corner.
OT, but I have to ask.
Why? In some parts of the country it is the only place that serves decent coffee. I know several girls who went through HS and college working at Starbucks for better money than they could make elsewhere.
So if a user's first post is "Hey everybody, I share your interest in foo. My stationary has unicorns on it. Hooray!". And the response is "Don't %$#'ing ever post binary attachments here again you %#$%'er!", then the user could easily decide Usenet is scary and rude and go back to the safety of their favorite web forum or mailing list.
The enterprise series and 1120 machines have had a horrifying number of ecache problems. That has caused credibility problems for Sun hw reliability.
Change 'most' to 'many' and I agree with you. The quality of discussion in a foucused news group is far higher than that in a mailing list or web log.
So the problems to solve for users come down to: finding 'good' groups, finding 'good' articles, discovering 'friends', monitoring threads, and ignoring 'foes'.
Those problems have been solved by a large number of newsreaders in the form of scorefiles, killfiles, and a group listing view that accepts wildcards. One problem is that normal human beings cannot use any of those features - because their naive newsreader does not support them or the interface is a windowized version of 'rn'. This is accidental complexity and is the sort of UI and standardization problem MS is good at solving. Another problem is that for the user to communicate their definition of "good" in a meaningful way is difficult. This is inherently complex; explaining what is "good" to a human being is difficult, much less a computer program.
I wish them luck, but they had better fucking leave 'html' and 'rich text' out of their news reader - completely. As in: do not even make it an option that can be turned on for posting and don't render it for reading.
"My pal Mickey tells me to start fires."
"My pal Mickey told me to take $20 out of Mommies purse."
"My pal Mickey tells me to run with scissors."
"My pal Mickey told me that Micheal Eisner had Sonny Bono assassinated because he had served his purpose and was becoming a liability."
"My pal Mickey told me that Ashcroft is the devil."
"Calculus - An intuitive and physical approach", Morris Kline.
Very useful self-teaching intro to calculus. Gives some great notes on different notations.
"Introduction to mathematical philosophy", Bertrand Russel.
Gives you some very good tools for how to think about mathematics.
"Mathematical logic", W.V. Quine.
"The pleasures of counting", T.W. Korner.
Gives natural applications of math and how to decide what tools to use to solve those problems.
"Math toolkit for real-time programming", Jack W. Crenshaw.
How-to recipes for math primitives and how to use them to build up to advanced applications.
Thanks for that link. I've written trie structures based on the description in Perlman, the MIX-code in Knuth, and the diagrams in the MIT algo book - but this is the first chance I've had to look at an actual implementation done by someone other than myself.
In my experience s_foo more commonly is used to indicate 'static' than stack. g_foo is probably not enough label for a global in programs with more than 2 or 3 source files.
The case where I find a type descriptive name to be important is if I have to use a reinterpret_cast to treat a chunk of raw memory as a pointer to a non-opaque type. I think most uses of 'hungarian style' conventions that encode type information are worthless or misleading.
An individual act of speech does not require a public expression or general public dissemination: beliefs, thoughts, fantasies, diaries, etc. can all forms of protected speech. A person subject to continued public exposure may be harassed or intimidated for the subject matter of a book they are writing, the books they read, the web sites they visit, and so on.
Some people love nothing more than to censure their neighbors, freedom requires that all are able to tell such people "none of your business - go away".
Most stl map implementations are based on a RB tree, and often cause memory fragmentation. That's not the end of world for most programs, but data being located on many different pages can trash average access times for threaded programs (although constant use of the memory allocator probably harms the program itself more).
A hash gives good memory locality and good average lookup performance, if data is constant (or near constant) a sorted vector gives you excellent lookup performance and very good memory locality.
But I don't think flat out optimization is that important to python, otherwise they'd use low level hacks like perl reading directly out of the stdio FILE buffers to optimize IO.
The seeking of profit or privacy are both "others (rights) retained by the people". The government creates laws and policies (subsidies, copyright) that encourage people to create businesses that make profit, as profit is something that is seen as beneficial to society. The DNC list is the case of the government creating a law that encourages privacy, as privacy is seen as beneficial to society.
We recognize the necessity of anonymity (a form of privacy) for free voting, require a court order before law enforcement can search your property, have specific laws against invasion of privacy by private citizens, have laws against trespassing, etc.
I'm confused as to why there are suddenly so many people so insistent about there being no right to privacy. It is obvious that privacy is a requirement for free speech - free thought and expression are not possible if you are worried about what the neighbors think.
Why do people pretend like all this is new? You must have read enough history in college to recognize that enterprise and economics are about nothing but turning people into whores and mercanaries.
Ever done something for money that you would not have done otherwise? Congrats, you are a whore.
Ever done something you thought was wrong for money? If so I welcome you to the mercenary brotherhood.
You don't get to have it both ways: if government allows or encourages large business then you get an economic boost, but those businesses will treat the non-owners (your citizens) like animals or machines to be replaced with someone or something cheaper at the first opportunity.
Threatened? I'm guessing that it was probably at work by a fat ass IT bufoon - those people are unstable.
So you never did proofs in school? The model is useless until you run real numbers through it, at best your model is a SWAG (scientific wild ass guess), at worst - valueless trash, you can't know until you try the model with numbers.
No, I'll insist that Ford was using his strength to force those workers to accept demeaning and unreasonable conditions for working for better wages than they could make elsewhere.
But freedom is me and my employer being able to reach agreement on my working conditions-- without your sticking your nose in and demanding that I have to take vacation (When I'd rather give it up and be paid more), or whatever your petty little mind wants to FORCE US to do.
I don't care whether you actually take a vacation or not, I only care that you be able to take one if you wish. You should be allowed to make the choice to trade in vacation for additional pay. If employers were not required to provide vacation then most people would not even have that choice and employers would treat the money saved as profit and never think twice about raising wages.
Why do you not only insist on getting your way, but have to bring guns into it? And you don't even have the guts to do it yourself-- you hire thugs from the government to force companies to accept unions-- unions that eventually drive them into bankruptcy as they did Chrysler and the airlines.
The reason that early unions were protected by force was that workers who tried to unionize were attacked by private security forces hired by business owners. A government force was required to allow the workers to form unions without being threatened with violence, just as a society sanctioned force was required to ensure civil rights, just as the police provide the threat of force which protects your property, just as we use economic or millitary force to bend other nations to our way of thinking. Part of the job of government is the application of force to achieve the ends of the nation.
Fact is, that the no-talking rule was demeaning. Fact is, a man making a living wage (or just above it) will accept a little humiliation (and change it in his mind to make it acceptable) for the extra money.
Fact is, unions in the U.S. have resulted in a great increase in the standard of living for workers and greatly enlarged the middle class .
(Please note well: I'm being a bit mocking in my application of the label 'fact'. Fact of the matter is, I'm a bit leery of self-labeled facts.)
Unions are flawed, and they suck, and they are corrupt, and are filled with people I disagree with - just like every other organization that functions in the real world. The cost of unions is less than the cost of not having unions.
Least this Fam guy is better than that awful 'mensa babe', whose tedious schtick includs gems like "pretending to be a woman", "pretending to be in mensa", "making intentional spelling errors in .sig", and many (not really)
more.
It takes real genius to convince all the people who would not have voted for you anyway that you are a bungling idiot, while still building the support of almost everybody else.
So there is some sort of Republican newsletter that lets them in on the plan? Why would people vote for someone who intentionally acts like a buffoon unless it were strictly on party lines. The name, the connections, and the advertising could have some bearing on it as well. Bush is not an idiot, but he would never become president on his own merit.
Anyone (even a dolt) from the upper class can get a college degree if they want it. I don't think Bush is a dolt, I just don't think he is any smarter than any of the college educated middle managers I've dealt with. A degree is no guarantee of intelligence, wisdom, or even a meaningful education.
So far, I'll play poker with anybody that truly believes GW is dumb cause my first assessment of you that you are conceited and an egotistical elitist. The kind that I would like to surround myself with at the poker table.
I don't play much poker, bridge is more my speed - it fits my egotistical nature to get to play whether my hand is good or not. I try to be a realistic elitist and not throw away money.
Now, I'm not posting and responding to try and convince you of anything. I'm posting and responding to remind you that yours is just opinion and is no more correct or certain then mine.
I think that is a given in this forum. We obviously disagree on important qualities for elected officials and neither of us is going to shift the opinion of the other.
He is somewhat educated and I'd guess he is in the "bright average" category in terms of intelligence, but he is wilfully ignorant and often holds simplistic views.
I wouldn't say that Bush is stupid (and he has lots of very smart people working for him), but I don't think he has the intelligence of Clinton or Bush Sr. He may be as smart as Reagan but does not have near his charisma or cunning. I don't think he is of presidential caliber in any of his qualities.
The left is pretty diverse, but one of the few constants in left thinking is a poor opinion of a strong millitary. Most everyone recognizes that barring a major change in human nature that a millitary force is a requirement, but the left generally thinks it should be used only for self-defense.
Only gays and religious people care about the gay marriage issue.
I'm not gay or religious and I think that gay marriage should be allowed. Why should straight people even care? Divorce and sex outside of wedlock are a bigger mockery of christian marriage than gay marriage could ever be.
conservative(smaller government reduced government influence)
Modern conservative opinion only believes in reduced government with less influence when they don't get to direct it.