Playing sort of fast and loose with the definition of "object," aren't they? I generally think of an object as a single item, not a collective. If this is an "object," then why isn't the universe itself an object? And if the universe is an object, then it's necessarily larger than this one.
The universe may be an object, but the universe isn't in the universe. Apparently this newly discovered object must be the biggest supercluster or something.
The biggest object in our solar system, for example, is Jupiter's magnetosphere (or so I've been told), and not the solar system itself. It would make the property of being "the biggest object in..." pretty useless if it was.
I don't know what it's like in the US, but in Netherland, a police officer always has to show his ID when a citizen asks for it. It's illegal to impersonate a police officer, and this is the only way people can check if you really are a police officer. Also vital if you need to file a complaint because you were treated badly by the police.
Expecting revenge attacks against police by normal civilians is silly. It's only going to get the perpetrator in prison for a very long time.
The police needs to trust the people a bit more. If not, how can the people possibly trust the police?
The wallet didn't strike me as strange either. Though upon further thought I now think it's a bad idea, as a theif can now steal everything valuable on your person in one convienent pakage:
I had an iWallet (yes, really) for my trusty old 2nd generation iPod. It had an unbreakable belt clip from which it could be detached really easily if you knew how, but not if you didn't. Unfortunately it's way too big for my current 5th generation iPod, and when I sit down, it sometimes spontaneously falls out of the clip, so I guess I'll have to buy a replacement. I haven't seen any good 5th generation wallets yet, so I might have to buy a new wallet too.
Interesting thing is: most people think my old iWallet contained an oversized cell phone. And I usually have some money in my pocket. If I have any money on me at all, that is.
You don't need to escape strings.
Just don't build your query on the fly.
Bind ALL parameters to placeholders in a prebuilt query.
I agree. Escaping works and is certainly a good idea if nothing else does the job, but in most decent programming languages, there is something much more appropriate to do the job.
All of these are desktop toys, and MS won because it controls the desktop, and uses that leverage to take over interesting desktop niches. For real databases, for example, people still prefer Oracle or MySql.
Visual Studio leads all competitors by far
It does? Only for Windows desktop applications, as far as I know. It's good, I admit, but Eclipse is more versatile if you don't want to be tied to a single platform.
Internet Explorer beat Netscape, Opera, Mozilla
IE beat Netscape because Netscape was an even worse piece of crap, and because IE had the desktop advantage. Opera and Mozilla are more recent players, and considering they have some market share, they must actually have won some despite IE's desktop advantage. Firefox, however, is seriously gaining ground. I think on our servers, IE is down to 80% now, the remaining being mostly Firefox.
.NET is beating Java
Is it? Not from where I'm standing. Java is big in enterprise stuff,.NET is big on Windows. But who wants to run important enterprise stuff on a Windows server?
IIS is gaining on Apache
I assume you mean: IIS is not quite dead yet. Apache is still the big leader in web servers. I can't think of any company other than MS that uses IIS (although I'm sure there are), and I've heard that even MS has adapted their IIS installation in order to make it actually work.
Ofcourse MS still has a major advantage: it still controls the desktop, which gives it an easy way into any desktop-based market. But outside that home turf, they're pitifully weak.
hat's actually true of commercial pop music artists, too. Look at the songs put out at the end of the New Kids, N'Sync, and Britney Spears' careers. Always something about how tough they are and how they'll be around for a long time....meaning one more week.
Wasn't it the Backstreet Boys that threatened us with: "As long as there is music we'll keep coming back again"?
..are all of random ships floating around in space. There to show off the "beautiful graphics" with absolutely no indication as to what a screen of actual gameplay looks like. Too many games out there rely on these cherry-picked screenshots as selling points.
Ah, but in EVE, the pretty graphics really are a major selling point. When I played it, a couple of years ago, I often spent my time flying from A to B admiring my beautiful ship against the gorgeous Hubble backgrounds.
The reasons I quit after a couple of months are:
The economy is based on mining, but mining is really incredibly tedious.
There are other ways to make tons of money, but they require more organisation and capital investment.
Suddenly everybody started flying around in battleships. A frigate or cruiser doesn't stand a chance against one, but I really preferred smaller ships. I owned several cruisers and frigates, and I simply didn't want a battleship.
But other than that, it can be a lot of fun. Tuning your ship, acquiring the right equipment to make it do exactly what you want it to, finding or buying better, rare equipment to get even more out of it, and then taking on a whole fleet of pirates on your own.
And ofcourse the real fun is supposed to be teaming up with others, setting up a big mining/R&D/production line and making tons of money, but I already have a job. But if you don't, this is a great game on which to waste what little money you still have.
Those games, although they contain a plot, are not plot orientated. The story in the games that you listed is there more as a secondary feature, not the primary. Those games are mainly about living out your own character, not telling a story
In KOTOR after the initial few sequences (about to the point you get out of the academy) the plot is put on hold until the last level. Sure there are sub plots to go through and a munch of mini missions along the way but the main plot doesn't continue anymore until the climax. If you were to write down the plot of KOTOR it would only end up being a few pages long, a short story or at most a novella.
Are you saying that games where the player has no control over the plot are more plot-driven than games where the player does? Maybe they have more plot, but at the cost of being less game. Certainly in KOTOR, the plot doesn't stop when you leave the Academy, it just gets more free, with more subplots (and a few plotholes, unfortunately), but it all leads to the final climax of the story.
And also, by "an internet was sent by my staff" I assume he means an email. Since when does it take days for an email to arrive? It's nutters! I'll say it again, who the fuck votes for these guys????
It can take days, and it always could. It has little to do with congestion of the lines, and a lot to do with bad configuration of networks, servers and mailreaders.
But only one of those two perspectives actually embraces and celebrates working under duress for someone else who is not working as hard, or as well, or at all.
We're celebrating work now? We're really deep into ideological utopia's, then. Thing is, in both systems other people benefit from your work. In one system it's the people who don't have it as good as you, in the other it's the people who have it better than you. Which one do you think is more fair?
Also in both systems, you benefit from living in an organised society. There's police to protect you against theft and violence, there's civil servants who should be working on keeping society livable (whether they're doing a good job is another matter), there's people to buy the goods you're producing, and if you're lucky, there's a safety net in case your company goes bankrupt, you lose your job, you can't find a job, or you're unable to work for some reason. Personaly, I'd rather not let people starve for having bad luck, becuase it could happen to me to. Maybe you're already financially secure, but what if you hadn't had the luck that got you where you are? Even the most skilled, brilliant people can have their lives ruined by bad luck.
And living in a society where bad luck isn't fatal costs money. And it's only fair to have the people who have benefitted the most from that society, also pay the most. Let the strongest shoulders carry the heaviest load.
So what about taking the fruit of someone's labour and giving it to stock holders? That's what your average capitalist company does. Ofcours the employee can quit, but if you don't like taxes, you're just as free to leave the country and move to a tax haven.
Like I said, it's all a matter of perspective. From your perspective, a fair distribution of wealth is theft, for me, tax is a way for the biggest takers to give something back to society.
To defraud someone of a dollar is to steal it. Theft is theft under any economic system,, but it's institutionalized under socialism. So... where were you headed with that again?
Ow, that's a shame. You were making so much sense, and now you make the same mistake as the guy to responded to: calling a legal system you don't like 'theft'. Socialism is not more thieving than capitalism is, unless you consider your own personal viewpoint to be higher than the law, but that works the other way around too.
It's anti-capitalist in the sense that nobody controls the capital (in this case, the source code), and nobody can milk that control for what it's worth (which is what many proprietary source companies are doing). Instead, you sell your service on an open market where people can compete for maintainance of and building for systems that were written by others.
Depending on your point of view and your definition of capitalism, OSS can be very capitalist (very free open markets) or very anti-capitalist (control of capital doesn't matter). I happen to have a very negative view of capitalism, so I see it as wonderfully anti-capitalist, but others will disagree.
The games I play these days are the ones that allow me to play in 15 minutes bursts.
Many 20+ hour games can be played in 15 minute bursts. On of the important factors to me is how quickly a game starts. Many take ages, with tons of splash and load screens, before you can finally start, and those don't get played nearly as much as even really big games that start up quickly.
I agree that it would be better if people became less dependent on their jobs and employers, more eager, and more able, to start for themselves, but that's simply not the way my country or many other countries work. It is something I'd try to change if I were in politics, but right now, many people simply wouldn't know how to start their own business. I've got a university education, and I don't even know how to start my own company (although I want to).
And then there are people that don't want to, or that don't want to change jobs at all. I'm really happy with my job, but I can't see myself working in the same place in 10 years. My brother is also in IT, and although he's a lot less happy at his job, he's comfortable enough, and he's not going to switch. A lot of people are like that. They like their coworkers, have their lives on order (live near their job, near schools for their children, etc), and don't need the change that a new job might bring. And with high unemployment, getting a different job can be really hard. Much easier to keep your job and just negotiate better pay and better working conditions with your current employer.
What's so bad about negotiating? What's so bad about some solidarity among workers, and getting together to negotiate a common agreement? That's basically what unions are, and I really don't see what's so bad about that, considering the generally weaker position of workers on the job/labour market.
I sometimes get the impression from some people, especially Americans, that their unions are a bunch of criminal hoodlums plotting to destroy the economy, but where I live (and in many European countries, as far as I know), they do a good job, help people, and generally do their bit to ensure a healthy, stable economy where everybody, and not just the bold or wealthy, have a fair chance.
Unions are the organizational manifestation of the belief that some of us are employers (by birth) and some of us are employees (and are incapable of becoming employers.) The belief that they are necessary is rooted in this false pretense. That somehow a monopolistic organization is required to negotiate with an employer or an industry because employees have no other choice. Notice how this plays into the kings and peasants idealogy? You need a union because you are a "worker" and you'll never be anything else. That's hogwash. In the real world if your employer doesn't pay you enough then you find another employer. Even better, start a company in the same industry and put your employer out of business.
That's a really cute idea, and I wish it worked, but unfortunately the real world doesn't work like that. Some people are in a position of power, others aren't. If you live paycheck to paycheck, have a mortgage or have a family to support, you can't just quit your job and start your own company. Starting a company costs money and time that a lot of people don't have. These are exactly the people that are vulnerable to being underpaid and otherwise abused by greedy employers. And when unemployment is high, many people might even prefer that to the alternative.
Due to my education and my line of work, I'm in a position where I can start my company if I want to (and I plan to, in fact). I'm sure the same goes for you. But there are a lot of lines of work where a guy on his own with no money can't start his own company. Some businesses require a large investment of capital, and they don't have that, so others control their means of production, which means others have power over them, and they have no power of their own. But they so have power together, and harnessing that power is exactly what unions do. And rightly so, because before there were unions, at least in my country, workers were really badly paid and worked under in awful working conditions. I'm glad it stopped. People who work hard deserve fair pay.
Since when do you need a bank account for a job? I have never once been asked if I had a bank account. From 30,000 a year jobs to the almost 80,000 I make now; I have never been asked about a bank account.
You get paid in cash? For every single job I've ever had, I had to give a bank account to which my salary would be paid. Without as bank account, getting paid is hard. Not to mention suspicious: what kind of person would want to be paid in cash these days?
mcv.
Their goal is exactly the same as Microsoft's (and any other business): using whatever means they have to get richer themselves, as opposed to making other people richer (other people in this case being owners, customers and other workers who would be prepared to accept the job for slightly less money).
I realise you're a bit dim, but you'll have to trust me that not every organisation is automatically a business with the intent to make profit. A labour union, for example, is an association of workers, working for the benefit of its members, the workers.
Or at least it's supposed to. Things don't always go according to plan (a couple of years ago, Dutch railroad workers weren't happy with their union and started a new one), but in most of the civilised world, this is basically how it works.
Ofcourse it could be you're living in some sort of banana republic where unions only exist to prevent real unions for standing up for the interests of workers, but that's not the way things work in all other countries.
This is an international thing. I've seen it in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where they sell a magazine called "Straat" that's actually worth reading
All major Dutch cities have similar initiatives. Amsterdam has "Z", which I actually read regularly for some time (but not anymore). I think Utrecht and The Hague share "Straatkrant" or something like that. Not sure.
Warren Buffet is known to disagree with "inheritence". He beleives that wealth should be redistributed not passed on to family members. In fact to paraphrase something I read about him once, he wants to leave his own children enough that they be able to do what they want with their lives, but not so much that they can choose to do nothing with them.
And rightly so. Leaving your children more than a million each is silly. Give them a good education and upbringing, a bit of money to get them on their way (or even a lot; a million still is quite a lot), and let them make their own lives, instead of relying on rich daddy for the rest of their lives.
Furthermore, there is an underlying undercurrent of Victorian philosophy behind a pro-union position. It presumes that some are born to be kings and some are peasants.
How is this a pro-union position? I don't know how unions work where you live, but over here they represent the workers, try to empower them and give them a voice in negotiations with government and employers. Their goal is to give workers the same power that "kings" (well, employers and governments) have, not to keep them in their place.
If unions aren't doing this job, the workers would do well to quit the union and start a new one. Some years ago, Dutch railroad workers weren't happy with what their union negotiated for them, so they started their own independent union and went on strike. Worked quite well for them.
I don't imagine anyone going off to 'forge new business relationships' if they hadn't brushed their teeth for a week
On the internet, nobody know's you haven't brushed your teeth.
There are many different kind of homeless. There's the people who really should be in psychiatric care (they're generally the ones smelling of pee), but there's also a lot of homeless who are normal people like you and I, but have just had some really bad luck. They want a home and a job, but because they have neither, they can't get either. To get a home, you need an income, to get an income, you need a job, to get a job, you need a back account, and guess what? To get a bank account you need an address. A home. It's a vicious cycle that keeps people homeless that really don't need to be.
Using internet to build up new contacts, a new business network, is a really great idea. You can do a lot without actually meeting people in person.
Slashdot Mirror
The universe may be an object, but the universe isn't in the universe. Apparently this newly discovered object must be the biggest supercluster or something.
The biggest object in our solar system, for example, is Jupiter's magnetosphere (or so I've been told), and not the solar system itself. It would make the property of being "the biggest object in ..." pretty useless if it was.
When reading the summary, I thought: only 200 light years and it contains galaxies? Most galaxies would count as a bigger object.
I don't know what it's like in the US, but in Netherland, a police officer always has to show his ID when a citizen asks for it. It's illegal to impersonate a police officer, and this is the only way people can check if you really are a police officer. Also vital if you need to file a complaint because you were treated badly by the police.
Expecting revenge attacks against police by normal civilians is silly. It's only going to get the perpetrator in prison for a very long time.
The police needs to trust the people a bit more. If not, how can the people possibly trust the police?
I had an iWallet (yes, really) for my trusty old 2nd generation iPod. It had an unbreakable belt clip from which it could be detached really easily if you knew how, but not if you didn't. Unfortunately it's way too big for my current 5th generation iPod, and when I sit down, it sometimes spontaneously falls out of the clip, so I guess I'll have to buy a replacement. I haven't seen any good 5th generation wallets yet, so I might have to buy a new wallet too.
Interesting thing is: most people think my old iWallet contained an oversized cell phone. And I usually have some money in my pocket. If I have any money on me at all, that is.
(Okay, actually it translates as "God be with us", but it's sort of similar.)
I assume you mean: IIS is not quite dead yet. Apache is still the big leader in web servers. I can't think of any company other than MS that uses IIS (although I'm sure there are), and I've heard that even MS has adapted their IIS installation in order to make it actually work.
Ofcourse MS still has a major advantage: it still controls the desktop, which gives it an easy way into any desktop-based market. But outside that home turf, they're pitifully weak. So was IBM.Ah, but in EVE, the pretty graphics really are a major selling point. When I played it, a couple of years ago, I often spent my time flying from A to B admiring my beautiful ship against the gorgeous Hubble backgrounds.
The reasons I quit after a couple of months are:But other than that, it can be a lot of fun. Tuning your ship, acquiring the right equipment to make it do exactly what you want it to, finding or buying better, rare equipment to get even more out of it, and then taking on a whole fleet of pirates on your own.
And ofcourse the real fun is supposed to be teaming up with others, setting up a big mining/R&D/production line and making tons of money, but I already have a job. But if you don't, this is a great game on which to waste what little money you still have.We're celebrating work now? We're really deep into ideological utopia's, then. Thing is, in both systems other people benefit from your work. In one system it's the people who don't have it as good as you, in the other it's the people who have it better than you. Which one do you think is more fair?
Also in both systems, you benefit from living in an organised society. There's police to protect you against theft and violence, there's civil servants who should be working on keeping society livable (whether they're doing a good job is another matter), there's people to buy the goods you're producing, and if you're lucky, there's a safety net in case your company goes bankrupt, you lose your job, you can't find a job, or you're unable to work for some reason. Personaly, I'd rather not let people starve for having bad luck, becuase it could happen to me to. Maybe you're already financially secure, but what if you hadn't had the luck that got you where you are? Even the most skilled, brilliant people can have their lives ruined by bad luck.
And living in a society where bad luck isn't fatal costs money. And it's only fair to have the people who have benefitted the most from that society, also pay the most. Let the strongest shoulders carry the heaviest load.
Like I said, it's all a matter of perspective. From your perspective, a fair distribution of wealth is theft, for me, tax is a way for the biggest takers to give something back to society.
It's anti-capitalist in the sense that nobody controls the capital (in this case, the source code), and nobody can milk that control for what it's worth (which is what many proprietary source companies are doing). Instead, you sell your service on an open market where people can compete for maintainance of and building for systems that were written by others.
Depending on your point of view and your definition of capitalism, OSS can be very capitalist (very free open markets) or very anti-capitalist (control of capital doesn't matter). I happen to have a very negative view of capitalism, so I see it as wonderfully anti-capitalist, but others will disagree.
And then there are people that don't want to, or that don't want to change jobs at all. I'm really happy with my job, but I can't see myself working in the same place in 10 years. My brother is also in IT, and although he's a lot less happy at his job, he's comfortable enough, and he's not going to switch. A lot of people are like that. They like their coworkers, have their lives on order (live near their job, near schools for their children, etc), and don't need the change that a new job might bring. And with high unemployment, getting a different job can be really hard. Much easier to keep your job and just negotiate better pay and better working conditions with your current employer.
What's so bad about negotiating? What's so bad about some solidarity among workers, and getting together to negotiate a common agreement? That's basically what unions are, and I really don't see what's so bad about that, considering the generally weaker position of workers on the job/labour market.
I sometimes get the impression from some people, especially Americans, that their unions are a bunch of criminal hoodlums plotting to destroy the economy, but where I live (and in many European countries, as far as I know), they do a good job, help people, and generally do their bit to ensure a healthy, stable economy where everybody, and not just the bold or wealthy, have a fair chance.
Due to my education and my line of work, I'm in a position where I can start my company if I want to (and I plan to, in fact). I'm sure the same goes for you. But there are a lot of lines of work where a guy on his own with no money can't start his own company. Some businesses require a large investment of capital, and they don't have that, so others control their means of production, which means others have power over them, and they have no power of their own. But they so have power together, and harnessing that power is exactly what unions do. And rightly so, because before there were unions, at least in my country, workers were really badly paid and worked under in awful working conditions. I'm glad it stopped. People who work hard deserve fair pay.
Or at least it's supposed to. Things don't always go according to plan (a couple of years ago, Dutch railroad workers weren't happy with their union and started a new one), but in most of the civilised world, this is basically how it works.
Ofcourse it could be you're living in some sort of banana republic where unions only exist to prevent real unions for standing up for the interests of workers, but that's not the way things work in all other countries.
It's definitely what I'd do if I were that rich.
If unions aren't doing this job, the workers would do well to quit the union and start a new one. Some years ago, Dutch railroad workers weren't happy with what their union negotiated for them, so they started their own independent union and went on strike. Worked quite well for them.
Unions need to remember who they work for.
There are many different kind of homeless. There's the people who really should be in psychiatric care (they're generally the ones smelling of pee), but there's also a lot of homeless who are normal people like you and I, but have just had some really bad luck. They want a home and a job, but because they have neither, they can't get either. To get a home, you need an income, to get an income, you need a job, to get a job, you need a back account, and guess what? To get a bank account you need an address. A home. It's a vicious cycle that keeps people homeless that really don't need to be.
Using internet to build up new contacts, a new business network, is a really great idea. You can do a lot without actually meeting people in person.