I think the big question for older people is not about how young they started. It's about the ability to keep up with the times. I know people who program in Fortran because they learned it in college and "do not have time to learn another language".
I'm just out of mod points, but I think this is the really important question for older programmers. 25 years of experience is nice, but useless if you're still programming by '80s standards with '80s technology. On the other hand, 25 years of experience ranging from Fortran and C to Java and Ruby means you've got someone who knows the advantages and disadvantages of different languages and paradigms.
It also means you've got someone who is still able to learn new things, and curious enough to do so. And he hasn't gotten stuck in dead-end jobs because his experience with existing tech was more valuable than learning new stuff. Instead, he might have been the prime choice to explore new tech.
Someone like that could be worth gold, and worth more then someone with only a few years of experience and versed in all the latest new technologies.
Agreed, but my "happy place" is KDE. I can't figure out how to do anything on my gf's Mac without opening the terminal. WTF is the damn right mouse button? (Kidding, I *know.* There isn't one, and that's the way Steve likes it).
Mac mice do have a right mouse button, but pressing it is tricky. I'm completely unable to press it when mousing left-handed, and even right-handed it sometimes interprets it as a left-click.
I recall the 8-bit game ELITE created 10 whole "galaxies" along with descriptions of each star's major food exports, population, et cetera using nothing more than a seed and an equation. The reason they did this was because they were limited to 48 kilobytes of RAM and had no room for an actual database.
TFA says Elite had 8 galaxies of 256 planets each. I thought is was 8 galaxies of 1000 planets each. Whatever it was, it was a lot. And the Acorn Electron version had to fit it into only 32kB. And Frontier was even bigger. Well, it was only a single galaxy, but it had literally millions of stars, most of them orbited by several planets.
And now they come with a lame story about sky. That's not procedural content generation, it's procedural eye candy generation.
It was not so fun when the pirates attacked you 5 against 1.;-) You might as well just quit the game at that point.
Get military lasers! Unfortunately the Acorn Electron version didn't have them, but you could use a cool program called Elite Cheat to get them anyway. Or even the more powerful Cheat lasers that would kill almost any enemy in a single shot.
In Frontier I never had much problems fighting off enormous hordes of pirates. In First Encounters, fighting anyone at all got nearly impossible, though.
Sorry, but we Germans have earned quite a reputation of going large-scale berzerk in the last centuries and every neighbouring country of us has suffered from it.
Exactly. You worked hard for that reputation, so you earned it. I'd hate it if you had to start all over again. (Particularly since I'm one of those neighbours.)
I mean, I'm all about open source but nobody developing or promoting proprietary software? What about the business world and the wide variety of custom made software tailored to specific business segments?
That sort of thing is actually ideally suited for open software. Being open adds value to custom software, because if the vendor goes bankrupt, the customer can simply let another developer continue developing the software.
What about gaming?
You've got a much better argument here. While there are definitely open source games out there, it's not not even close to the scale of the proprietary games market. Tuxracer and Wesnoth not withstanding, this is the one area where OSS has a lot of catching up to do. And considering the time and investment involved, and the customer base's lack of money or eagerness to pirate, it doesn't look like an attractive market for large games. I suppose a patronage business model could work, but that's not easy to set up.
it's not my definition... it's the literal definition that is commonly accepted.
It's one of the many commonly accepted definitions. You seem to think yours is universal, but it isn't.
Lets start calling abortion "Rainbows"... BAN RAINBOWS!... makes no sense right? Words are tied to meanings, don't muddy the water by putting a reasonable idea next to a moronic one
I'm not putting ideas next to anything, I'm just calling it like it is. Or at least like quite a lot of other people call it.
And software patents in particular are not very well established.
They are well enough established that I, for one, couldn't afford to fight them in court. Can you ?
I've never tried. But as I understand, nobody has. In fact, as far as I can tell, software patents provide no legal protection whatsoever in the EU, and while laws have been proposed to make software patents legal, so far they've all been blocked by the EP.
I realise the dangers of fear mongers, and I certainly think this paralegal bullying needs to be stopped. But in the end, OSS is about code. We can't allow legalities to trump code.
No, OSS is not about code, OSS is about the freedom to modify, use and redistribute programs as you see fit. Having the code is simply a means towards that end. The lack of code is an inconvenience, but can be worked around, as projects like Wine show; however, legalities - software patents specifically - are show-stoppers. Consequently, legalities trump code.
So far, software patents haven't stopped any show yet. And since they're not legal in many countries, efforts to keep OSS free are better spent on maintaining that situation or on introducing laws banning them completely, rather than on banning specific sponsors from OSS conferences.
Unfortunately we've learnt that politics affect code through laws that protect DRM, and SCO creating FUD about patent infringement to sell indemnity
I think the SCO case was about copyright infringement, which is something completely different from patents. And software patents in particular are not very well established. So SCO had a much stronger case than MS does, and look where they are now.
I realise the dangers of fear mongers, and I certainly think this paralegal bullying needs to be stopped. But in the end, OSS is about code. We can't allow legalities to trump code.
The problem here isn't Novell. As far as I understand (note that I know absolutely nothing about them), Novell contributes quite a lot of code to various OSS projects. The problem is extortion by frivolous bullying. This problem is not restricted to OSS, and it's a problem in the way the legal system works. It's the legal system that needs to change, and companies that resort to this sort of racketeering that need to be punished. Write to your MPs, senators and congressmen. Get legal organisations up in arms. But don't sacrifice good OSS, because that's not going to solve the real problem.
So Novell/Microsoft use software patents to remove some/most of the benefits of OSS.
How is that relevant? As far as I'm aware, in the US there's no jurisdiction regarding the legality of software patents whatsoever, and in several other countries there's simply no such thing as software patents.
So as long as the source is open, I couldn't care less what kind of patents MS thinks it owns.
What are the chances that these rubber duckies end up inside the tummy of some sea creature? In which case, that is just more pollution floating around in our oceans.
But floating oil slicks don't provide quite as much information as these rubber duckies. They're also less funny.
The point is, these guys aren't actually contributing anything. Instead they just sit around and criticize fucking awesome hackers. Mono is really fantastic software. If you don't like it, just don't use it.
In other words: it should be about the code, not the politics.
Thats not the point. There shouldnt be any freedom of speech limiting withing groups which both support open and free software.
Without a clear report of what really happened there it's impossible to decide where the blame lies, but if the protesters actually disrupted the conference, you could argue that they were limiting the free speech of others.
In the end, it's the organiser of the conference who decides what talks and what sponsors will be accepted. If you disagree, you can always organise your own conference.
On the other hand, if the protesters were merely wearing anti-Novell T-shirts or protesting outside, and not actually interfering with the proceedings of the conference itself, then I agree their freedom of speech has been seriously harmed.
While I'd love to agree with you, and don't have any particular love for Toyota, their cars do have a reputation for reliability, ruggedness, and in a few cases even indestructability.
If you want to be impressed by Toyotas, go to Africa. When I was in Timbuctoo, every single car leaving the town was a Toyota (mostly LandCruisers, and the occasional HiLux). During the drive back to civilisation, we encountered lots of other Toyotas, and only a single car from another brand: a Mitsubishi 4WD which had broken down. That country is one big Toyota commercial. Rumour has it you can buy spare parts in the middle of the desert, and it wouldn't surprise me if that's true.
Generally/. users don't understand why companies like this request these things. When you have IP you have to defend your IP, and if you do not defend it, then you are risk of loosing certain protections, or the IP all together. Toyota may not actually want to do this, but they have to, just to ensure that other legitiment infringments can be addressed as well.
Remember that time when someone made a Second Life parody and told Linden Labs where to send the cease & desist letters? He got a message from a Linden Labs lawyer refusing him a cease & desist, and explaining that this was well within fair use. And on the tiny chance that it wasn't, he also got permission to continue his parody.
That incident made me believe that IP laws might actually not be entirely insane; that companies do not have to sue everybody for trivial nonsense, and that it's just bad lawyers misinterpreting the law who do that.
creationist doesn't literally mean "God created us", it means believes creation follows the bible literally. Yes, there are non-christian creationists... all of the religions that stemmed from these faiths (Islamic, Jewish, ect)... and I'm sure there are people outside of that... my point is they are using the term wrong.
Only for Young Earth Creationists. Old Earth Creationists, as their label implies, believe (or at least keep the option open that) the Earth is quite a bit older.
OEC's aren't creationists then. They're saying the bible isn't literally correct, and as such need to get a new word to avoid this nonsense.
Why do you insist that your definition of a word is better than someone else's? I just told you that there are a lot of people who use a different definition, yet you insist that they are wrong and that your definition is the only right one.
If you want to insist of the purity of your own definition, why don't you pick your own word?
That's how the word is defined, that's what it means...
No. All it means is that the world was created, rather than having come about in a natural way. Everything else is just extra interpretation that you're piling on top of it.
inproper use of the word is starting to blur it's meaning, I'll admit... but a person not understanding the words they are saying in my opinion doesn't dismiss them from being lumped together as just another idiot untill they realise what they're doing wrong.
You're kidding, right? I guess you haven't seen the Firefox support forums? 22 different, active support topics just in the past hour. That's 528 a day if that rate keeps up. Not exactly a shining example of a no-support OSS project.
I wasn't aware that people had so many problems with it, but I know a lot of people and several companies that use various versions of Firefox and as far as I can tell, for them it just works.
It certainly doesn't require more support than equally unsupported proprietary software like IE or Opera.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the big question for older people is not about how young they started. It's about the ability to keep up with the times. I know people who program in Fortran because they learned it in college and "do not have time to learn another language".
I'm just out of mod points, but I think this is the really important question for older programmers. 25 years of experience is nice, but useless if you're still programming by '80s standards with '80s technology. On the other hand, 25 years of experience ranging from Fortran and C to Java and Ruby means you've got someone who knows the advantages and disadvantages of different languages and paradigms.
It also means you've got someone who is still able to learn new things, and curious enough to do so. And he hasn't gotten stuck in dead-end jobs because his experience with existing tech was more valuable than learning new stuff. Instead, he might have been the prime choice to explore new tech.
Someone like that could be worth gold, and worth more then someone with only a few years of experience and versed in all the latest new technologies.
Agreed, but my "happy place" is KDE. I can't figure out how to do anything on my gf's Mac without opening the terminal. WTF is the damn right mouse button? (Kidding, I *know.* There isn't one, and that's the way Steve likes it).
Mac mice do have a right mouse button, but pressing it is tricky. I'm completely unable to press it when mousing left-handed, and even right-handed it sometimes interprets it as a left-click.
I recall the 8-bit game ELITE created 10 whole "galaxies" along with descriptions of each star's major food exports, population, et cetera using nothing more than a seed and an equation. The reason they did this was because they were limited to 48 kilobytes of RAM and had no room for an actual database.
TFA says Elite had 8 galaxies of 256 planets each. I thought is was 8 galaxies of 1000 planets each. Whatever it was, it was a lot. And the Acorn Electron version had to fit it into only 32kB. And Frontier was even bigger. Well, it was only a single galaxy, but it had literally millions of stars, most of them orbited by several planets.
And now they come with a lame story about sky. That's not procedural content generation, it's procedural eye candy generation.
It was not so fun when the pirates attacked you 5 against 1. ;-) You might as well just quit the game at that point.
Get military lasers! Unfortunately the Acorn Electron version didn't have them, but you could use a cool program called Elite Cheat to get them anyway. Or even the more powerful Cheat lasers that would kill almost any enemy in a single shot.
In Frontier I never had much problems fighting off enormous hordes of pirates. In First Encounters, fighting anyone at all got nearly impossible, though.
If you want to get modded up, you'll have to start your post with "I'll probably get modded down for this but...".
Sorry, but we Germans have earned quite a reputation of going large-scale berzerk in the last centuries and every neighbouring country of us has suffered from it.
Exactly. You worked hard for that reputation, so you earned it. I'd hate it if you had to start all over again. (Particularly since I'm one of those neighbours.)
The BBC at least puts quotes around "murdered". Also, "found murdered" sounds to me like it was a recent crime.
Did anyone else read this as "the woman's teeth were found 50 km away from the rest of her body"? That would be one hell of a sucker-punch!
As if "Nuclear family" wasn't confusing enough.
I thought a family that was famous for something nuclear-related in the '50s had recently been killed.
Hell more than half the posts I read nowadays are from UIDs higher than mine, and I don't exactly consider mine low.
I'm permanently surprised I've got a sub-million uid.
If someone rewrote the bible with spaceships and lasers, I'd read it.
Then go read the book of Ezekiel.
I mean, I'm all about open source but nobody developing or promoting proprietary software? What about the business world and the wide variety of custom made software tailored to specific business segments?
That sort of thing is actually ideally suited for open software. Being open adds value to custom software, because if the vendor goes bankrupt, the customer can simply let another developer continue developing the software.
What about gaming?
You've got a much better argument here. While there are definitely open source games out there, it's not not even close to the scale of the proprietary games market. Tuxracer and Wesnoth not withstanding, this is the one area where OSS has a lot of catching up to do. And considering the time and investment involved, and the customer base's lack of money or eagerness to pirate, it doesn't look like an attractive market for large games. I suppose a patronage business model could work, but that's not easy to set up.
it's not my definition... it's the literal definition that is commonly accepted.
It's one of the many commonly accepted definitions. You seem to think yours is universal, but it isn't.
Lets start calling abortion "Rainbows"... BAN RAINBOWS!... makes no sense right? Words are tied to meanings, don't muddy the water by putting a reasonable idea next to a moronic one
I'm not putting ideas next to anything, I'm just calling it like it is. Or at least like quite a lot of other people call it.
They are well enough established that I, for one, couldn't afford to fight them in court. Can you ?
I've never tried. But as I understand, nobody has. In fact, as far as I can tell, software patents provide no legal protection whatsoever in the EU, and while laws have been proposed to make software patents legal, so far they've all been blocked by the EP.
No, OSS is not about code, OSS is about the freedom to modify, use and redistribute programs as you see fit. Having the code is simply a means towards that end. The lack of code is an inconvenience, but can be worked around, as projects like Wine show; however, legalities - software patents specifically - are show-stoppers. Consequently, legalities trump code.
So far, software patents haven't stopped any show yet. And since they're not legal in many countries, efforts to keep OSS free are better spent on maintaining that situation or on introducing laws banning them completely, rather than on banning specific sponsors from OSS conferences.
Unfortunately we've learnt that politics affect code through laws that protect DRM, and SCO creating FUD about patent infringement to sell indemnity
I think the SCO case was about copyright infringement, which is something completely different from patents. And software patents in particular are not very well established. So SCO had a much stronger case than MS does, and look where they are now.
I'd like to leave politics out but unfortunately that's not the world we live in. This youtube video explains everything :(
I realise the dangers of fear mongers, and I certainly think this paralegal bullying needs to be stopped. But in the end, OSS is about code. We can't allow legalities to trump code.
The problem here isn't Novell. As far as I understand (note that I know absolutely nothing about them), Novell contributes quite a lot of code to various OSS projects. The problem is extortion by frivolous bullying. This problem is not restricted to OSS, and it's a problem in the way the legal system works. It's the legal system that needs to change, and companies that resort to this sort of racketeering that need to be punished. Write to your MPs, senators and congressmen. Get legal organisations up in arms. But don't sacrifice good OSS, because that's not going to solve the real problem.
So Novell/Microsoft use software patents to remove some/most of the benefits of OSS.
How is that relevant? As far as I'm aware, in the US there's no jurisdiction regarding the legality of software patents whatsoever, and in several other countries there's simply no such thing as software patents.
So as long as the source is open, I couldn't care less what kind of patents MS thinks it owns.
What are the chances that these rubber duckies end up inside the tummy of some sea creature? In which case, that is just more pollution floating around in our oceans.
But floating oil slicks don't provide quite as much information as these rubber duckies. They're also less funny.
Someone further up in the comments noted that Novell is the only one allowed to distribute Mono.
How is that even possible? Isn't Mono supposed to be OSS?
Totalitarian communists are certainly assholes.
I think it's safe to expand this statement to: Totalitarians are assholes.
The point is, these guys aren't actually contributing anything. Instead they just sit around and criticize fucking awesome hackers. Mono is really fantastic software. If you don't like it, just don't use it.
In other words: it should be about the code, not the politics.
Thats not the point. There shouldnt be any freedom of speech limiting withing groups which both support open and free software.
Without a clear report of what really happened there it's impossible to decide where the blame lies, but if the protesters actually disrupted the conference, you could argue that they were limiting the free speech of others.
In the end, it's the organiser of the conference who decides what talks and what sponsors will be accepted. If you disagree, you can always organise your own conference.
On the other hand, if the protesters were merely wearing anti-Novell T-shirts or protesting outside, and not actually interfering with the proceedings of the conference itself, then I agree their freedom of speech has been seriously harmed.
Yeah. I expected a bit more substance.
While I'd love to agree with you, and don't have any particular love for Toyota, their cars do have a reputation for reliability, ruggedness, and in a few cases even indestructability.
If you want to be impressed by Toyotas, go to Africa. When I was in Timbuctoo, every single car leaving the town was a Toyota (mostly LandCruisers, and the occasional HiLux). During the drive back to civilisation, we encountered lots of other Toyotas, and only a single car from another brand: a Mitsubishi 4WD which had broken down. That country is one big Toyota commercial. Rumour has it you can buy spare parts in the middle of the desert, and it wouldn't surprise me if that's true.
Generally /. users don't understand why companies like this request these things. When you have IP you have to defend your IP, and if you do not defend it, then you are risk of loosing certain protections, or the IP all together. Toyota may not actually want to do this, but they have to, just to ensure that other legitiment infringments can be addressed as well.
Remember that time when someone made a Second Life parody and told Linden Labs where to send the cease & desist letters? He got a message from a Linden Labs lawyer refusing him a cease & desist, and explaining that this was well within fair use. And on the tiny chance that it wasn't, he also got permission to continue his parody.
That incident made me believe that IP laws might actually not be entirely insane; that companies do not have to sue everybody for trivial nonsense, and that it's just bad lawyers misinterpreting the law who do that.
I apologise for the misspelling Toyota. Spell check didn't catch it, and all I can say in my defence is that I'm a star wars fan. Sorry.
apologize
defense
I guess Webster's threw a DMCA down on spellcheck too?
Webster is not the only English dictionary in the world. These two words are spelled correctly.
creationist doesn't literally mean "God created us", it means believes creation follows the bible literally. Yes, there are non-christian creationists... all of the religions that stemmed from these faiths (Islamic, Jewish, ect)... and I'm sure there are people outside of that... my point is they are using the term wrong.
OEC's aren't creationists then. They're saying the bible isn't literally correct, and as such need to get a new word to avoid this nonsense.
Why do you insist that your definition of a word is better than someone else's? I just told you that there are a lot of people who use a different definition, yet you insist that they are wrong and that your definition is the only right one.
If you want to insist of the purity of your own definition, why don't you pick your own word?
That's how the word is defined, that's what it means...
No. All it means is that the world was created, rather than having come about in a natural way. Everything else is just extra interpretation that you're piling on top of it.
inproper use of the word is starting to blur it's meaning, I'll admit... but a person not understanding the words they are saying in my opinion doesn't dismiss them from being lumped together as just another idiot untill they realise what they're doing wrong.
Right.
You're kidding, right? I guess you haven't seen the Firefox support forums? 22 different, active support topics just in the past hour. That's 528 a day if that rate keeps up. Not exactly a shining example of a no-support OSS project.
I wasn't aware that people had so many problems with it, but I know a lot of people and several companies that use various versions of Firefox and as far as I can tell, for them it just works.
It certainly doesn't require more support than equally unsupported proprietary software like IE or Opera.