I notice how everyone is suddenly becoming defensive and apologetic. "Everyone else does it too" is not an excuse. You already know this -- it's almost cliche now -- and yet we still find people who will excuse the behavior of any corporation with "Meh. It's a corporation. That's what corporations do."
But that's not why I'm posting. Actually, I find a sense of gratification -- one could even call it glee -- that for once, I'm on the side of the corporations, who are lobbying for something I want, rather than being the "little guy" screaming at the top of his lungs, wishing desperately that he was relevant.
And that's not why I'm posting, either. I am posting because of this outright fallacy quoted in the summary:
Let me be clear of our intentions: Any public servant who cashes a check from the videogame industry will be exposed by the PTC as taking a stand against families, and his or her actions will be communicated to constituents in his or her congressional district.
Oh, I get it. You're with us, or you're with the terrorists.
Look, am I the only one who sees more possibilities here? If I was trying to get ahead politically, why wouldn't I cash a check from anyone? It's not as if the money itself is tainted. The MPAA could pay me all they want, and I would still legislate against them, not for them. They can threaten to pull funding -- fine, I'll use the last of their own money to buy some ads, exposing how they essentially tried to bribe/blackmail me into writing legislation for them. A message of "I'm doing the right thing, even if it costs me money" should serve to get me re-elected, right?
It would be much more relevant to ask what that check was for, and to actually look at what that particular public servant does. People who cash checks from the MPAA do tend to write stuff like the DMCA. Are people cashing checks from the videogame industry any more or less likely to write censorship legislation?
I know your type. MICROSOFT KILLS BABIES!!! Yeah, well, they're a company, don't act like you're surprised.
News flash: Incorporation does not automatically remove ethical responsibility.
Aside from that, in case you're the cynical type who views "doing the right thing" as a bleeding-heart, touchy-feely concept that has no place in a cold, capitalist world, try this: Free press and goodwill.
I should also point out that there are corporations which genuinely do just give, without necessarily a direct ulterior motive. Google's Sumer of Code is a good example.
Inserting large graphical images as the signature. I saw one of an animated Betty Boop. WTF?
Using the stationary functionality to give me a mock background image of a paper pad. Why?
Use of Comic Sans as a font.
My solution to this, at home, is to use KMail. (Not sure if it's possible to set this up using Thunderbird or Outlook.) It can show the textual representation instead, if there is one -- if there isn't, it just shows the raw HTML. There is a button at the top of this message which can be used to expose the HTML -- with the warning that this may be a security risk. And the HTML is shown without pictures -- there's another button, at this point, to include the pictures, with the same warning.
(In the case where there's a textual representation, I can browse through the attachment list -- shown as an actual MIME tree -- and find the HTML part, if I really want to.)
Thus, in cases where the client is smart enough to include a text version -- and Outlook is -- you can not deal with this particular brand of bullshit at all.
(Not that it's any less obnoxious -- I shouldn't have to filter/process your email just to make it readable.)
For example: As I said, our SVN repository is hosted by someone else. This implies that we must connect to them over the Internet, which means that, yes, if Internet in the office is down, we can't check in.
We also all have laptops. If necessary, we can just pick up our laptops, head down to the coffee shop, and continue working, with cups of coffee and chai being brought to us, until the Internet at work is fixed.
And we also have 100 mbit fiber shared among maybe five people, so if the Internet is up, no one person's BitTorrent is going to cause problems.
My point is not that being dependent on an Internet connection is always wrong or unworkable, but that if you want to not be dependent on the Internet, you're going to have to spend some money.
Love, yes, it's what we call fixating our basic sexual urge ion one person in particular. It is a survival trait. Of course it exists.
Basic affection? Really?
So we love cute kids, even kids who aren't our own, because we want to have sex with them? What about our parents? Grandparents?
Pornography, dead easy to define : depictions of sex acts in close-up.
Except when it's not close-up, or does not involve actual sex acts. What's softcore pornography? Is a simple striptease pornography?
Or, except when it's somehow considered art, or of historical importance. Is the Kama Sutra pornography? What about those little Taoist books?
It gets worse when we start talking about literature. At what point is a sex scene considered pornographic or obscene? Even movies can make this difficult -- if no body parts are shown, but the camera is kept close to their faces, or to one of their backs, is this pornography?
I happen to think obscenity is something we humans invented, but that does not make it less real -- it absolutely does have a measurable effect on the world.
But then, I don't see the problem with pr0n in the first place
I didn't say there was. Just that it's not as easy to define.
1/ "It's A Mystery That Man Can Not Comprehend" is an fallacious argument that religious people use when they're out of ideas for explaining away their inconsistencies
In that context, it's not valid, certainly. This is used to explain away sticky problems like how free will and most definitions of Heaven (and God) are incompatible. "How can you hope to know the mind of God" is not a valid response to someone who is attempting to disprove that there IS a mind of God.
But you have not provided a valid rebuttal to the concept in general. And you've certainly proven my point about multiple definitions.
I *shudder* at the thought of students single-stepping simple for loops and method invocations.
I shudder to think of them becoming dependent on that, so you're absolutely right there. But I don't really see another way to give them a thorough understanding of what the for loop and method invocation is actually doing -- generally, the way I see it done is pretty much a "human debugger" -- that is, someone at least running through each line, explaining what it does, at least once, to get you to think that way.
Yeah, congrats. Think of this: if you had your basic programming skills down pat before switching to lower-level techniques like pointers, linked-list implementations, etc. wouldn't it be an easier learning methodology than jumping in the deep side of the pool early?
Well, it's possible to teach those in C. No need for classes; what you're really looking for here is loops and functions.
Also, this same logic applies to the above comments about a debugger.
I'll happily submit that most self-taught programmers who jumped in the deep end of the pool can't speak to that kind of advancement 2 years after writing their first line of code.
I'll submit that this is as much because of the "self-taught" part as anything else.
I submit that making it easier to learn to program is a better thing than making it harder.
So teach them a debugger, first thing, right?
I will tell you one thing: I don't have all the answers. I don't even have most of them. All I will say for certain is that I dislike Java at just about any stage, and that there are at least four or five major kinds of language that people should learn -- in fact, at least three completely different, mutually-exclusive paradigms (imperative, functional, and reflective).
It is 3:45 AM, and I have insomnia, so it's possible that the above paragraph is incomplete, nonsensical, or a total ripoff of something on Wikipedia. If so, I apologize.
And it should theoretically be possible to use its hardware/software integration and key management to do precisely this sort of approach: to make documents viewable only with authorized software on authorized hardware, with verification going on so deeply in the hardware that it's impossible or nearly impossible to transfer without being issued a new, authorized key from the central key owners.
Not really going to work, for the reasons you've cited and more.
Or at least, it does not work for open source software, except as a way to close that software to future modifications. I absolutely am pro-GPLv3, at least in spirit. (In practice, people know a lot more about what v2 says and what it doesn't say, so I'm still a little gunshy about v3. Will have to read it through a couple more times.)
PGP and encrypted filesystems are a potentially useful intermediate step. I'd love to see OpenOffice, for example, support direct handling of encrypted files, and AutoCAD.
Except that these serve completely different uses. I don't see how either of those would work well for DRM.
In the late 80s, we were sharing little ASCII files, not big powerpoint presentations. And we were talking about a much smaller "scale" in terms of the sheer number of machines.
That does give me a bit more confidence in at least giving them a shot if I end up needing them, though.
As the parent suggests, price is not an indicator of performance.
While that is true, as soon as you find an IT guy who has as much expertise as the parent post here, you do want to pay them quite a bit to retain them.
For example, a email system of some kind in a necessity in most businesses and generally speaking they are fairly inexpensive (relatively at least), whilst electronic whiteboards (my per hate) or upgrading cat5 to cat6 cable (without changing anything else, - something suggested to me by a vendor recently to improve network performance..) bring only marginal benefits but are relatively expensive.
Case in point. Businesspeople don't know this, and it may be hard to convey the usefulness of a particular upgrade (just try explaining email when it first came out), vs the uselessness of another (just try explaining that faster cables isn't going to do anything significant).
Although I would suggest buying cat6 cable when you need cable at all -- for replacements, and for new cabling. I think it still falls under "dirt cheap", but it's been awhile since I looked, so I might not be remembering right.
Funny, the commands I use on a regular basis are all shorter than 8:
Aside from aptitude, you've just described stuff that I might use several times per minute, or one after the other. (Except w.) These are things where it does help to have a shorter command name, and where I might alias one if it didn't exist already.
Also, I cheated a bit, in a way which helps my point even when I show you the truth... ec2-describe-instances is also available as ec2din.
Same for all the ec2-* commands. ec2-describe-images is ec2dim; ec2-run-instances is ec2run, and so on.
It's not so much that I'm concerned of namespace conflicts, although there is that. I could certainly see having one 'ec2' command and following it up with an argument, like "ec2 describe-instances", although that doesn't always work (dpkg --reconfigure doesn't work; dpkg-reconfigure does).
It's more that this verbosity makes things much more readable. If you know what an ec2 "instance" is, vs an "image", then just about any ec2-* command I run (especially if I use long arguments) will immediately make sense to you. This is especially true if I put them in scripts, where you see things like start-stop-daemon.
All of your arguments are perfectly valid. The technical ones I can't confirm or deny, but I assume you're not making them up, so they're valid.
But all of your remarks are still based on the assumption that FreeBSD is an OS -- an alternative to Linux. I see it as just another quirky L/Unix distro.
That batteries do not come included doesn't exclude it from being a distro; Gentoo, for the longest time, came with a tarball. That's it. Ok, yes, there was a livecd, but you could use any livecd to install that tarball, provided it had a recent enough kernel and supported chrooting. And Gentoo is generally called a distro, and we say it "includes" various things -- certainly, we'd say it includes KDE, although that's absolutely not in the initial tarball. (In fact, if you're a purist and start from Stage1, almost nothing that came in that tarball will still be there by Stage3.)
Unless Ports works very differently from what I expect, it just confirms my assertion that FreeBSD is effectively a minimalist L/Unix Distro, which allows you to install other packages -- even if, like Gentoo, they must be compiled first. Even Ubuntu is similar -- by default, you get it on a CD that's packed to the gills, and it installs just about everything that's on that CD, but you can certainly start with a more minimal version. It's really the repository and the community that defines the distro, and Ubuntu certainly has a lot of both.
And I'm not trying to put down any BSD, either. After all, I love my Ubuntu -- "just a distro" doesn't begin to cover it. (Ubuntu is responsible for things like network-manager, which makes Linux wireless bearable for everyone, on every distro smart enough to adopt it.) I'm just trying to explain why I don't see it as incredibly unique in the ways I often hear.
There are other ways in which it's unique, of course -- more liberal software license (could be good or bad), even smaller target for attack, possibly more secure, and details like filesystems -- wasn't there a BSD that supports ZFS? These are not issues which are important to me -- except license, maybe; I prefer GPL-ish for my own stuff. Low-level details are somewhat more important to me, and I know more about Linux there than about BSD, so I'm probably not giving BSD a fair shot -- although Linux, by nature of simply being more popular, has more people tweaking those details. But Linux is secure enough, and I prefer to be a low target through other means than OS choice.
As for not wanting life to be about operating systems, I hate to sound like a broken record, but Ubuntu all the way. I find myself almost missing the odd problems I'd have with Gentoo.
Something that can't even be defined can't be existing
It's not that it can't be defined, it's that there are multiple definitions.
Try Love, for a start. Or Pornography. Do they exist?
it's a "Mystery That Man Can Not Comprehend", and those have no influence whatsoever on the Universe we exist in, the one that we're explaining using Science.
You're assuming that things which cannot be explained using Science, or cannot be comprehended by Man, have no influence on the Universe we exist in.
Actually, there are a few things which cannot yet be comprehended by Man -- for instance, how to predict where an electron will be and how fast it is moving. Yet these things do influence the Universe we exist in -- obviously, that electron is somewhere, right?
As a poster on/. you should know that any additional unneeded overhead is a waste of time and resources.
As a poster on Slashdot, I can understand your instinct to see the human mind as a machine, and treat it as such.
Cleaning up the old messy legacy code is always a good idea
Alright, if religion is messy and legacy, what about love? Jealousy? Is there a logical reason to, for example, insist that a life partner not sleep with anyone else? Wouldn't you be happier if that, say, wasn't a concern for you at all?
These are not all rhetorical questions -- different people will have different answers. But that is the real point here -- you're going to have to make a better case than that it's old and useless, by your own arbitrary measure of usefulness.
(And yes, you could get rid of both love and jealousy, and the world would be just fine. It would look very different, though, and somewhat more depressing -- to me. But I'm a romantic.)
In general, technologies which try to traverse NAT are unreliable
I should've been clearer -- I thought it traversed NAT by going through the servers, at least for the IMs. I'd be more concerned about IMs being intercepted/monitored/etc, because those are searchable.
I was saying anything you could do on the web, could be included on the disc standalone and with a better UI.
Erm... Yes, you are obviously either not understanding or not bothring to read. Any UI you can do on the disc standalone, you can also do with a connection to the Web. Anything you can do in HDi, at least, which requires a Web connection, also requires a UI to be developed, client-side, in the same manner as you would do without the Web connection.
Obvious, I already knew this. BDJ you see is Java and thus can do more interesting things (or at least the same things) with all that same data stored locally.
Sounds like you need to read some Douglas Crockford.
But yes, at least the same things. Provided it has the same APIs available (do I have persistent storage?)
You are making the classic engineer mistake of trying to do something, just because you can - and it's *still* the worst example ever since it's nothing like what.999999999999% of all discs ever made will do.
Wow, almost 1% won't do this! (Sorry, couldn't resist.)
And the point you are missing is that someone hired us to do this.
Like video previews of each selected test pattern in a checklist you re-order by dragging items? Sorry.
The last time I saw a BDJ demo, animation was pitifully slow. By "pitiful", I mean "redrawing in large chunks, visibly." If the situation has changed, I'll retract that.
In any case BD-J is as I said at least equivilent - only *I* don't have network overhead an latency for calls, or have to have a network at all for that matter.
Neither do I, unless I want to.
If the commentary was ready before the disc was burned, it can be muxed in as a secondary video stream. (Note: 'a', implying there can be more than one secondary video stream.) If the commentary was not ready, or if, for some reason, people have a fetish with "live" commentary (maybe with some sort of IM window opened back to the director), then it can be streamed over the network, also.
If there's really a problem with reading from disc that fast, the whole thing can be preloaded into RAM or persistent storage.
I'm not sure if more than one such stream can be played at once, though.
Not exactly but it's part of the deal.
Not so much.
That is, there are three distinct reasons that I can think of that people would prefer "real" apps on the iPhone:
"Real" apps can interface more directly with the rest of the UI and the hardware, and thus do more. That's an API issue.
There's no offline browsing mode, so web apps require an Internet connection to run. That's a browser issue, and partly an API issue.
"Real" apps are faster. For instance, you'd have to be insane to use an audio codec written in Javascript, let alone video. But for most "applications", this is a non-issue -- the CPU-intensive parts are already done in an API somewhere.
HDi has a sort-of OK API, compared to the absolute crap that is the browser API. There are still some genuine WTFs in there -- FileIO is way more limited than it needs to be -- but again, not a restriction of Javascript per se (or XML), but of the API chosen.
So then why even use it if you don't need it.
I don't know. I can play Quake3 fine singleplayer; why even include multiplayer if I don't need it?
Oh yeah, I remember now -- added value.
And I can also look for a network connection with BD-J and use it if I find it. So the network is irrelevant in this example.
The difference is that in your case, the network hardware may not even be available. If I remember, there was also a big joke about the PS3, despite having wired and wireless Internet for
It isn't hard, it's impossible. You would have to figure out how to distribute the app without any data. Can't do that, and the company won't let you distribute their data.
Oh, I see. You've confused "web" with "internet".
What, exactly, is the problem with an intranet app, available, at most, over a VPN? Or even SSL-secured web app?
They need to run without net access? Net access is like basic utilities, but fine, give them Apache and MySQL -- or whatever else you used. Most of the decent open source web app stacks will run on Windows. And for the hundreds of machines which don't need to be offline, you don't have to deal with the client at all -- it's just a browser.
A much better approach is to force the student to work through lower-level programming before ever reaching a modern layer that abstracts everything away.
I'm not really convinced of that.
There are many reasons I'd suggest not starting with Java, but I think, even if you end up doing nothing but Java for the rest of your life, you should have a solid foundation in higher-level languages, even functional languages.
1st year students are rarely taught debugging skills
WHY NOT?
Debugging is perhaps the best way to get a concrete understanding of what your program is doing. The only reason not to give them a debugger is that it might be used as a crutch.
Java's good for getting someone into the proper habits of programming. Let them cut their teeth there - make their typos, basic logic mistakes, etc in a safer sandbox.
As long as you can ensure that they will leave that sandbox at some point, maybe.
I started with QBASIC, but I never learned more than if/then and input there. With no goto or subroutines, I couldn't really call it programming.
But then I got a C++ book. At that point, I really felt like I understood programming. When I started using things like Perl, I knew what a hash table was. When I started playing with Java, I knew what reference counting was, and what garbage collection was.
I basically understood what was going on in any language. Assembly was a little strange, but it wasn't until Lisp, Haskell, and Erlang that I had to do some fundamental rethinking.
And I think that would have been much harder, had I started in Java. Concepts like callbacks make a lot more sense when you understand pointers. If you understand pointers, constructors, and destructors, then auto_ptr makes sense. If auto_ptr makes sense, then garbage collection does, and you come into Java well-armed.
I only wish I could figure out what book that was. It needs a bit of updating (yes, old enough that it breaks on modern compilers), but it actually taught C++ reasonably well to a non-programmer. Actually had transcripts -- the entire book was emailed, chapter by chapter, to a woman who barely understood computers at the beginning, and who frequently provided comments and asked questions. It actually taught you how to program, whereas I'm convinced my college Java course does not teach how to program, it only attempts to weed out the people who don't already know. (Java's Hello World is a horrible place to start, especially when you attempt to explain what every part means.)
Physically mailing a letter in response to an online petition suggests one of two things:
They are showing they care by spending extra effort on us. Maybe it was handwritten, and someone drew hearts on it or something.
This came from a part of the corporate machine that is rusty and creaking. Probably some lawyer had their secretary print out the petition for them, read through it with a highlighter, then typed up a response on a typewriter.
I'm betting on #2, based on my experience with ludicrously large companies -- often, they take an "ain't broke" attitude with respect to various departments. Some departments are broke, and so get fixed. Other departments ain't, and don't.
But I'm too lazy to get a free registration to view the original PDF. Anyone else want to confirm?
If the hardware signing is not controlled by the user, it's generally not considered Free Software, although it may well be open source.
But that is pretty much the only way to give someone the source, but not the content -- assuming you are trying to protect content. If you are trying to prevent people from copying your code, then you completely missed the point of "open source".
I would very much like to see a followup article, or a clarification, or some comment by the guy who made this post, to find out just what the living Hades he was thinking to come up with this idea. This is even worse than the last Ask Slashdot, where the guy was asking how to run a consolidated, distributed network -- also a contradiction in terms, except in a very limited context (something like Coda for a distributed FS, so there's no "servers")...
Maybe we're missing some context here? Because I'm going to have to cry if this is actually, say, an MBA who thinks "Open Source" is a good idea because he gets free labor and "DRM" is good because they need to "protect their rights," and why can't he have both?
The problem is, people switch distros quite regularly over the years. For a while Redhat was the defacto, or one derived from Debian, or Gentoo, or Ubuntu. Every few years the most recommended distro changes, which means different system layouts.
Recommended by whom?
RedHat has been RedHat for forever. Unless you are an enterprise user, recently, your RedHat was renamed to Fedora.
Debian has been Debian forever. If you really want to, you can try Ubuntu, but it's not going to be much different than Debian -- and Ubuntu has been Ubuntu for as long as it's existed.
With one group who maintains the stack, there is an added consistency and a larger community to evolve the distribution.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA....
Seriously, are you trying to say that the various open BSDs combined have a larger user-base than Ubuntu alone?
That just makes my point for me. I mean, I don't have anything against BSD, and I mean no offense when I say this, but all of the advantages you've cited are distro advantages, not OS advantages.
The "quirks" in FreeBSD are, most likely, the traditional way that UNIX (SysV or BSD) operated. Linux and the GNU tooling are known for making "changes".
And as many of these changes are reasonably consistent across distros, I welcome them. It was an abrupt change to go from Debian's standard network init script to Ubuntu's GUI network daemon, but on a laptop, I wouldn't have it any other way.
It may be that BSD is just different, but I do think that there are actually features in the Linux tools that I find lacking in the BSDs.
Great. Now when IT-required Windows Updates which require a reboot are run, the system will be hibernated with that reboot dialog still there -- if it's not automatically trying to do a reboot anyway.
So the user resumes the next morning to either a reboot, or to a system that wants to reboot. If they ignore it, updates never get applied.
I'm sure it's possible to get this right, but it's not as trivial as you're suggesting.
And how many UNIX commands do you regularly use that are longer than 8 characters?
Let's see...
ec2-describe-instances
ec2-run-instances
ec2-* (lots more examples where that came from)
wineconfig
update-alternatives
dpkg-reconfigure
Need I go on?
Shells in Windows NT and FreeDOS support longer file names, but this is true for MS-DOS.
In NT, they are no longer what I would call "DOS prompts".
Also pretty much true of the UNIX command line. The only 'command line' I've seen that's a good counter to this is AppleScript.
Unless they run X, where they don't need their own drivers. And I can do all kinds of fun things from the commandline, including feed arbitrary Javascript into my browser, change songs, etc.
True, although I've seen a few *NIX installs configured with . in $PATH.
The difference is, you can set $PATH to not include . on *NIX. Can't do that in DOS.
You could also run the DOS shell in a GUI which allowed copying and pasting from the terminal; remember, mouse support is a feature of the terminal, not the shell.
Not sure I'd call it strictly DOS, in that case. Goes for the web browser example, too.
Regardless, even if all that's happened is better terminals, from your post, it seems you'd agree with me that progress in commandline environments does happen. That is the point I was trying to make.
Slashdot Mirror
I notice how everyone is suddenly becoming defensive and apologetic. "Everyone else does it too" is not an excuse. You already know this -- it's almost cliche now -- and yet we still find people who will excuse the behavior of any corporation with "Meh. It's a corporation. That's what corporations do."
But that's not why I'm posting. Actually, I find a sense of gratification -- one could even call it glee -- that for once, I'm on the side of the corporations, who are lobbying for something I want, rather than being the "little guy" screaming at the top of his lungs, wishing desperately that he was relevant.
And that's not why I'm posting, either. I am posting because of this outright fallacy quoted in the summary:
Oh, I get it. You're with us, or you're with the terrorists.
Look, am I the only one who sees more possibilities here? If I was trying to get ahead politically, why wouldn't I cash a check from anyone? It's not as if the money itself is tainted. The MPAA could pay me all they want, and I would still legislate against them, not for them. They can threaten to pull funding -- fine, I'll use the last of their own money to buy some ads, exposing how they essentially tried to bribe/blackmail me into writing legislation for them. A message of "I'm doing the right thing, even if it costs me money" should serve to get me re-elected, right?
It would be much more relevant to ask what that check was for, and to actually look at what that particular public servant does. People who cash checks from the MPAA do tend to write stuff like the DMCA. Are people cashing checks from the videogame industry any more or less likely to write censorship legislation?
Even if you assume that these are the same Slashdotters, Microsoft is a monopoly. Apple is not.
Monopolies have to play by different rules.
I know your type. MICROSOFT KILLS BABIES!!! Yeah, well, they're a company, don't act like you're surprised.
News flash: Incorporation does not automatically remove ethical responsibility.
Aside from that, in case you're the cynical type who views "doing the right thing" as a bleeding-heart, touchy-feely concept that has no place in a cold, capitalist world, try this: Free press and goodwill.
I should also point out that there are corporations which genuinely do just give, without necessarily a direct ulterior motive. Google's Sumer of Code is a good example.
My solution to this, at home, is to use KMail. (Not sure if it's possible to set this up using Thunderbird or Outlook.) It can show the textual representation instead, if there is one -- if there isn't, it just shows the raw HTML. There is a button at the top of this message which can be used to expose the HTML -- with the warning that this may be a security risk. And the HTML is shown without pictures -- there's another button, at this point, to include the pictures, with the same warning.
(In the case where there's a textual representation, I can browse through the attachment list -- shown as an actual MIME tree -- and find the HTML part, if I really want to.)
Thus, in cases where the client is smart enough to include a text version -- and Outlook is -- you can not deal with this particular brand of bullshit at all.
(Not that it's any less obnoxious -- I shouldn't have to filter/process your email just to make it readable.)
For example: As I said, our SVN repository is hosted by someone else. This implies that we must connect to them over the Internet, which means that, yes, if Internet in the office is down, we can't check in.
We also all have laptops. If necessary, we can just pick up our laptops, head down to the coffee shop, and continue working, with cups of coffee and chai being brought to us, until the Internet at work is fixed.
And we also have 100 mbit fiber shared among maybe five people, so if the Internet is up, no one person's BitTorrent is going to cause problems.
My point is not that being dependent on an Internet connection is always wrong or unworkable, but that if you want to not be dependent on the Internet, you're going to have to spend some money.
Basic affection? Really?
So we love cute kids, even kids who aren't our own, because we want to have sex with them? What about our parents? Grandparents?
Except when it's not close-up, or does not involve actual sex acts. What's softcore pornography? Is a simple striptease pornography?
Or, except when it's somehow considered art, or of historical importance. Is the Kama Sutra pornography? What about those little Taoist books?
It gets worse when we start talking about literature. At what point is a sex scene considered pornographic or obscene? Even movies can make this difficult -- if no body parts are shown, but the camera is kept close to their faces, or to one of their backs, is this pornography?
I happen to think obscenity is something we humans invented, but that does not make it less real -- it absolutely does have a measurable effect on the world.
I didn't say there was. Just that it's not as easy to define.
In that context, it's not valid, certainly. This is used to explain away sticky problems like how free will and most definitions of Heaven (and God) are incompatible. "How can you hope to know the mind of God" is not a valid response to someone who is attempting to disprove that there IS a mind of God.
But you have not provided a valid rebuttal to the concept in general. And you've certainly proven my point about multiple definitions.
I shudder to think of them becoming dependent on that, so you're absolutely right there. But I don't really see another way to give them a thorough understanding of what the for loop and method invocation is actually doing -- generally, the way I see it done is pretty much a "human debugger" -- that is, someone at least running through each line, explaining what it does, at least once, to get you to think that way.
Well, it's possible to teach those in C. No need for classes; what you're really looking for here is loops and functions.
Also, this same logic applies to the above comments about a debugger.
I'll submit that this is as much because of the "self-taught" part as anything else.
So teach them a debugger, first thing, right?
I will tell you one thing: I don't have all the answers. I don't even have most of them. All I will say for certain is that I dislike Java at just about any stage, and that there are at least four or five major kinds of language that people should learn -- in fact, at least three completely different, mutually-exclusive paradigms (imperative, functional, and reflective).
It is 3:45 AM, and I have insomnia, so it's possible that the above paragraph is incomplete, nonsensical, or a total ripoff of something on Wikipedia. If so, I apologize.
Not really going to work, for the reasons you've cited and more.
Or at least, it does not work for open source software, except as a way to close that software to future modifications. I absolutely am pro-GPLv3, at least in spirit. (In practice, people know a lot more about what v2 says and what it doesn't say, so I'm still a little gunshy about v3. Will have to read it through a couple more times.)
Except that these serve completely different uses. I don't see how either of those would work well for DRM.
In the late 80s, we were sharing little ASCII files, not big powerpoint presentations. And we were talking about a much smaller "scale" in terms of the sheer number of machines.
That does give me a bit more confidence in at least giving them a shot if I end up needing them, though.
While that is true, as soon as you find an IT guy who has as much expertise as the parent post here, you do want to pay them quite a bit to retain them.
Case in point. Businesspeople don't know this, and it may be hard to convey the usefulness of a particular upgrade (just try explaining email when it first came out), vs the uselessness of another (just try explaining that faster cables isn't going to do anything significant).
Although I would suggest buying cat6 cable when you need cable at all -- for replacements, and for new cabling. I think it still falls under "dirt cheap", but it's been awhile since I looked, so I might not be remembering right.
Yeah, most of them every day.
Aside from aptitude, you've just described stuff that I might use several times per minute, or one after the other. (Except w.) These are things where it does help to have a shorter command name, and where I might alias one if it didn't exist already.
Also, I cheated a bit, in a way which helps my point even when I show you the truth... ec2-describe-instances is also available as ec2din.
Same for all the ec2-* commands. ec2-describe-images is ec2dim; ec2-run-instances is ec2run, and so on.
It's not so much that I'm concerned of namespace conflicts, although there is that. I could certainly see having one 'ec2' command and following it up with an argument, like "ec2 describe-instances", although that doesn't always work (dpkg --reconfigure doesn't work; dpkg-reconfigure does).
It's more that this verbosity makes things much more readable. If you know what an ec2 "instance" is, vs an "image", then just about any ec2-* command I run (especially if I use long arguments) will immediately make sense to you. This is especially true if I put them in scripts, where you see things like start-stop-daemon.
All of your arguments are perfectly valid. The technical ones I can't confirm or deny, but I assume you're not making them up, so they're valid.
But all of your remarks are still based on the assumption that FreeBSD is an OS -- an alternative to Linux. I see it as just another quirky L/Unix distro.
That batteries do not come included doesn't exclude it from being a distro; Gentoo, for the longest time, came with a tarball. That's it. Ok, yes, there was a livecd, but you could use any livecd to install that tarball, provided it had a recent enough kernel and supported chrooting. And Gentoo is generally called a distro, and we say it "includes" various things -- certainly, we'd say it includes KDE, although that's absolutely not in the initial tarball. (In fact, if you're a purist and start from Stage1, almost nothing that came in that tarball will still be there by Stage3.)
Unless Ports works very differently from what I expect, it just confirms my assertion that FreeBSD is effectively a minimalist L/Unix Distro, which allows you to install other packages -- even if, like Gentoo, they must be compiled first. Even Ubuntu is similar -- by default, you get it on a CD that's packed to the gills, and it installs just about everything that's on that CD, but you can certainly start with a more minimal version. It's really the repository and the community that defines the distro, and Ubuntu certainly has a lot of both.
And I'm not trying to put down any BSD, either. After all, I love my Ubuntu -- "just a distro" doesn't begin to cover it. (Ubuntu is responsible for things like network-manager, which makes Linux wireless bearable for everyone, on every distro smart enough to adopt it.) I'm just trying to explain why I don't see it as incredibly unique in the ways I often hear.
There are other ways in which it's unique, of course -- more liberal software license (could be good or bad), even smaller target for attack, possibly more secure, and details like filesystems -- wasn't there a BSD that supports ZFS? These are not issues which are important to me -- except license, maybe; I prefer GPL-ish for my own stuff. Low-level details are somewhat more important to me, and I know more about Linux there than about BSD, so I'm probably not giving BSD a fair shot -- although Linux, by nature of simply being more popular, has more people tweaking those details. But Linux is secure enough, and I prefer to be a low target through other means than OS choice.
As for not wanting life to be about operating systems, I hate to sound like a broken record, but Ubuntu all the way. I find myself almost missing the odd problems I'd have with Gentoo.
It's not that it can't be defined, it's that there are multiple definitions.
Try Love, for a start. Or Pornography. Do they exist?
You're assuming that things which cannot be explained using Science, or cannot be comprehended by Man, have no influence on the Universe we exist in.
Actually, there are a few things which cannot yet be comprehended by Man -- for instance, how to predict where an electron will be and how fast it is moving. Yet these things do influence the Universe we exist in -- obviously, that electron is somewhere, right?
As a poster on Slashdot, I can understand your instinct to see the human mind as a machine, and treat it as such.
Alright, if religion is messy and legacy, what about love? Jealousy? Is there a logical reason to, for example, insist that a life partner not sleep with anyone else? Wouldn't you be happier if that, say, wasn't a concern for you at all?
These are not all rhetorical questions -- different people will have different answers. But that is the real point here -- you're going to have to make a better case than that it's old and useless, by your own arbitrary measure of usefulness.
(And yes, you could get rid of both love and jealousy, and the world would be just fine. It would look very different, though, and somewhat more depressing -- to me. But I'm a romantic.)
I should've been clearer -- I thought it traversed NAT by going through the servers, at least for the IMs. I'd be more concerned about IMs being intercepted/monitored/etc, because those are searchable.
Erm... Yes, you are obviously either not understanding or not bothring to read. Any UI you can do on the disc standalone, you can also do with a connection to the Web. Anything you can do in HDi, at least, which requires a Web connection, also requires a UI to be developed, client-side, in the same manner as you would do without the Web connection.
Sounds like you need to read some Douglas Crockford.
But yes, at least the same things. Provided it has the same APIs available (do I have persistent storage?)
Wow, almost 1% won't do this! (Sorry, couldn't resist.)
And the point you are missing is that someone hired us to do this.
The last time I saw a BDJ demo, animation was pitifully slow. By "pitiful", I mean "redrawing in large chunks, visibly." If the situation has changed, I'll retract that.
Neither do I, unless I want to.
If the commentary was ready before the disc was burned, it can be muxed in as a secondary video stream. (Note: 'a', implying there can be more than one secondary video stream.) If the commentary was not ready, or if, for some reason, people have a fetish with "live" commentary (maybe with some sort of IM window opened back to the director), then it can be streamed over the network, also.
If there's really a problem with reading from disc that fast, the whole thing can be preloaded into RAM or persistent storage.
I'm not sure if more than one such stream can be played at once, though.
Not so much.
That is, there are three distinct reasons that I can think of that people would prefer "real" apps on the iPhone:
HDi has a sort-of OK API, compared to the absolute crap that is the browser API. There are still some genuine WTFs in there -- FileIO is way more limited than it needs to be -- but again, not a restriction of Javascript per se (or XML), but of the API chosen.
I don't know. I can play Quake3 fine singleplayer; why even include multiplayer if I don't need it?
Oh yeah, I remember now -- added value.
The difference is that in your case, the network hardware may not even be available. If I remember, there was also a big joke about the PS3, despite having wired and wireless Internet for
I fail to see how RDP is either. Certainly, the Web app could be much more efficient at bandwidth usage.
(Yes, I know RDP is more efficient than VNC. But it's still less efficient than a custom protocol, even if it is based on gzipped XML/JSON/YAML.)
Oh, I see. You've confused "web" with "internet".
What, exactly, is the problem with an intranet app, available, at most, over a VPN? Or even SSL-secured web app?
They need to run without net access? Net access is like basic utilities, but fine, give them Apache and MySQL -- or whatever else you used. Most of the decent open source web app stacks will run on Windows. And for the hundreds of machines which don't need to be offline, you don't have to deal with the client at all -- it's just a browser.
I'm not really convinced of that.
There are many reasons I'd suggest not starting with Java, but I think, even if you end up doing nothing but Java for the rest of your life, you should have a solid foundation in higher-level languages, even functional languages.
WHY NOT?
Debugging is perhaps the best way to get a concrete understanding of what your program is doing. The only reason not to give them a debugger is that it might be used as a crutch.
As long as you can ensure that they will leave that sandbox at some point, maybe.
I started with QBASIC, but I never learned more than if/then and input there. With no goto or subroutines, I couldn't really call it programming.
But then I got a C++ book. At that point, I really felt like I understood programming. When I started using things like Perl, I knew what a hash table was. When I started playing with Java, I knew what reference counting was, and what garbage collection was.
I basically understood what was going on in any language. Assembly was a little strange, but it wasn't until Lisp, Haskell, and Erlang that I had to do some fundamental rethinking.
And I think that would have been much harder, had I started in Java. Concepts like callbacks make a lot more sense when you understand pointers. If you understand pointers, constructors, and destructors, then auto_ptr makes sense. If auto_ptr makes sense, then garbage collection does, and you come into Java well-armed.
I only wish I could figure out what book that was. It needs a bit of updating (yes, old enough that it breaks on modern compilers), but it actually taught C++ reasonably well to a non-programmer. Actually had transcripts -- the entire book was emailed, chapter by chapter, to a woman who barely understood computers at the beginning, and who frequently provided comments and asked questions. It actually taught you how to program, whereas I'm convinced my college Java course does not teach how to program, it only attempts to weed out the people who don't already know. (Java's Hello World is a horrible place to start, especially when you attempt to explain what every part means.)
Physically mailing a letter in response to an online petition suggests one of two things:
I'm betting on #2, based on my experience with ludicrously large companies -- often, they take an "ain't broke" attitude with respect to various departments. Some departments are broke, and so get fixed. Other departments ain't, and don't.
But I'm too lazy to get a free registration to view the original PDF. Anyone else want to confirm?
If the hardware signing is not controlled by the user, it's generally not considered Free Software, although it may well be open source.
But that is pretty much the only way to give someone the source, but not the content -- assuming you are trying to protect content. If you are trying to prevent people from copying your code, then you completely missed the point of "open source".
I would very much like to see a followup article, or a clarification, or some comment by the guy who made this post, to find out just what the living Hades he was thinking to come up with this idea. This is even worse than the last Ask Slashdot, where the guy was asking how to run a consolidated, distributed network -- also a contradiction in terms, except in a very limited context (something like Coda for a distributed FS, so there's no "servers")...
Maybe we're missing some context here? Because I'm going to have to cry if this is actually, say, an MBA who thinks "Open Source" is a good idea because he gets free labor and "DRM" is good because they need to "protect their rights," and why can't he have both?
Recommended by whom?
RedHat has been RedHat for forever. Unless you are an enterprise user, recently, your RedHat was renamed to Fedora.
Debian has been Debian forever. If you really want to, you can try Ubuntu, but it's not going to be much different than Debian -- and Ubuntu has been Ubuntu for as long as it's existed.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA....
Seriously, are you trying to say that the various open BSDs combined have a larger user-base than Ubuntu alone?
That just makes my point for me. I mean, I don't have anything against BSD, and I mean no offense when I say this, but all of the advantages you've cited are distro advantages, not OS advantages.
And as many of these changes are reasonably consistent across distros, I welcome them. It was an abrupt change to go from Debian's standard network init script to Ubuntu's GUI network daemon, but on a laptop, I wouldn't have it any other way.
It may be that BSD is just different, but I do think that there are actually features in the Linux tools that I find lacking in the BSDs.
Great. Now when IT-required Windows Updates which require a reboot are run, the system will be hibernated with that reboot dialog still there -- if it's not automatically trying to do a reboot anyway.
So the user resumes the next morning to either a reboot, or to a system that wants to reboot. If they ignore it, updates never get applied.
I'm sure it's possible to get this right, but it's not as trivial as you're suggesting.
Let's see...
Need I go on?
In NT, they are no longer what I would call "DOS prompts".
Unless they run X, where they don't need their own drivers. And I can do all kinds of fun things from the commandline, including feed arbitrary Javascript into my browser, change songs, etc.
The difference is, you can set $PATH to not include . on *NIX. Can't do that in DOS.
Not sure I'd call it strictly DOS, in that case. Goes for the web browser example, too.
Regardless, even if all that's happened is better terminals, from your post, it seems you'd agree with me that progress in commandline environments does happen. That is the point I was trying to make.