I'm finishing up my freshman year in college; unfortunately, mathematics has never been a strong point for me. Sure, I can follow a few simple procedures to do basic algebra, but the complicated steps necessary to differentiate and integrate functions is always a source of errors for me, and these errors cascade. I've always been prone to make stupid little mistakes while doing mathematical calculations, and this does not seem likely to change.
Another problem is that mathematics is incapable of holding my interest. Frankly, I don't see why some people get so excited about proving some formula. I'd rather read philosophy, draw sketches, write satire, or develop my linguistic talent. Say what you will about these hobbies being less applicable to real-life situations; I find them quite enjoyable.
For these reasons, this ultra geek is going to have to pick a new major.
Cascading Style Sheets are all well and good--actually, I use them on my website, and I love them--but the painful part is ensuring compliance among browsers. I'm a self-taught, amateur geek, and I code my XHTML and CSS by hand. I don't read tutorials: I read the W3C recommendations. Anyway, I like to think I can interpret rather exacting writing such as Web specifications without misunderstanding, but I always seem to botch something so that things are out of alignment and so forth in this or that browser--usually Internet Explorer.
In summary, CSS is good, but it'd be better if all browsers actually followed the standards and interpreted any ambiguity the same way. That's all I want, so I can remain sane!
I wish I could write some humorous BASIC code like the rest of you, but I was just too l33t for BASIC: I skipped right up to C++.
#include <iostream> using namespace std;// Invokes the Unprotected Sex Library
int main() { cout << "Hello, world!" << endl << "I\'m programming in C++, so that means I\'m l33ter" << endl << than you BASIC programmers out there!" << endl; return 0; }
As I stated in my previous comment, even when the program is superior, the users just won't switch out of inertia. My family only switched to Mozilla Firefox because I set it as the default browser on their computer, and they can't figure out how to make Internet Explorer the default again. Now they're used to it, and generally don't mind it unless a Flash animation or Java applet doesn't play (I never installed the worthless (in my opinion) plug-ins to play such crap).
I suppose, depending on what circles you socialize in, other people on your buddy list will be using Gaim; but, at least on my buddy list, everyone else is using the standard Windows version of AOL's AIM client.
These open-source advancements are good--no doubt about that--but the problem with an instant messaging system is that the people you communicate with need to use the system, too; and for now most users are trapped on AOL/AIM, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo! Messenger.
The ideal, of course, would be a standardized, nonproprietary instant messaging system as we have now for e-mail. I can see screen names being something like bob@host, laimer@aim.com, etc. Unfortunately, AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo! will never agree to this.
I don't know about your friends, but not all of my friends are extremely technically competent Linux hackers who will switch to an open protocol for ideological reasons. Most of them will continue to use AIM on Windows until AOL and Microsoft demand a kidney and a lung to continue using their products.
Most of them are so resistant to change, in fact, they won't even consider using Mozilla or Mozilla Firefox instead of Internet Explorer! If you think you can do a better job at moving these people away from Windows, Internet Explorer, and AIM, be my guest.
AOL users can still hear, "You've got mail!" so long as their IMAP e-mail client's new messages received sound event is set to that sound. I never used AOL, but my e-mail software has been set to play that sound for years. It makes me feel all 133t inside, all right?
Please. The distinction between fewer and less is minuscule at best. Yes, fewer is to be used for objects that are in an inferior countable number; and, yes, less is to be used for an inferior graduated amount; but what is significant is that both denote inferior quantity. Because whether an object is countable or graduated can be determined by the meaning of the word modified, the distinction is superfluous and so is obsolescent in informal language.
Moreover, many languages do lack such a distinction between countable and graduated. These languages' users somehow manage to get by, though. Indeed, they may be a little confused when they learn English and discover a semantic distinction they'd never thought about before!
I've had an utterly ridiculous time trying to get all my hardware on my months-old Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop working under Debian GNU/Linux 3.0. It's a real chore, and the costs aren't really worth the effort. I'll just reboot into Windows XP if I want to play music or watch movies now.
What does when you learned how to read or program have to do with now (other than you have these skills)? I admit it took me a little bit longer to learn how to read proficiently but then I soared past my peers. I learned how to program in C++ when I was 13, but I'm 19 now, so that doesn't mean much. What matters now is that I'm a college student; and, believe it or not, whether I have the intelligence and aptitude to solve all the hassles Linux likes to throw at me (I just had to use one of the "l33t" distributions, Debian 3.0, and on my laptop of all things), I simply don't have the time to spend a few hours working on configuration files to get something like sound working or downloading various dependencies to get one simple program to run.
In other words, ease of use isn't just for "stupid end users," but it's also for intelligent, technologically competent users who have lives!
At one time, there was only a command line. Your average person used it, they had to....[T]hey can get started using a command line in UNIX.
Before Windows and even during the days of Windows 3.1x, most PC users had no real familiarity with MS-DOS. They usually had a cheat sheet of things to do to get into Windows or to start whatever programs they used most often. If they ever had to go beyond what was on their cheat sheet, they were at a complete loss.
I doubt the typical work/home computer user could do any better at a *nix command-line interface. Having to log on to the system would add further complexity for them, as would the terser online help system that they might never even find out about. My father, for example, though a rather intelligent person, is so set in his ways that even going slightly beyond the routine tasks he does in Windows is a source of frustration for him. I would never set him, my grandfather, or any of my non-computer-geek friends in front of a *nix terminal even if I were there to tell them what to type.
Is it just me, or is it preferable to think about what you can do by writing a program rather than how you can get it done under technical constraints? If programming were all about making sure this or that about some register was good or some small amount of memory was not used up, I'd probably have no interest in it at all, and I would have gone back to playing video games or something.
I'll take my high-level object-oriented programming languages, like C++ and Java, running on modern systems any day!
Christians have a funny habit of saying their place where evil people go after they die freezes over (I guess opposed to the usual fire and grimstone) whenever an unusual event occurs.
If Jesus weren't nailed to a cross about two thousand years ago (it must be true: it was in a movie!) and he had some sort of divine power of immortality, I'm sure he'd be telling all of us that Hell has, indeed, just frozen over.
I'm still not persuaded to read this book, and I can't see any reason why I possibly should. It's not like I've fallen for the seductive promises of a colorful Microsoft commercial with a dude in a butterfly costume before.
"Besides adding to the cost, cable companies say, selling channels individually might make it difficult for lesser-watched, niche channels to survive."
This is bad how?
Unless you prefer ESPN, MTV, VH1, CNN, Fox News Channel, USA, etc., your favorite channels may be goners.
I primarily watch "geeky" channels, so this would definitely be a good idea for me. I couldn't care less about the popular channels (except for Comedy Central); I watch the following: Comedy Central (for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and South Park), National Geographic, TechTV (rarely, it's so newbish), the Travel Channel (if I can't go somewhere, at least I can pretend to be there), TV5 (French), the History Channel, and History International. I used to watch the Discovery Channel and The Learning Channel (TLC) before they were taken over by home-repair, interior decorating, and gardening shows.
I can imagine developing closed-source software to make ends meet and then using some free time to work on interesting free software projects. There's no reason it has to be an either-or situation.
Of course, if you're like most people, by the time you come home from work, you don't want to spend more time doing what you did all day at work just for fun. However, I take it free software developers are not most people.
I can also see, if you have own your own software development business, the luxury of releasing your software as GPL-compatible free software after a certain amount of time. That way, you wouldn't be spending all your free time doing the same thing you do at work. More commercial software companies should do this, truthfully: Microsoft is not getting any value out of MS-DOS 6.22 anymore, so they have few good reasons not to release the MS-DOS source code under a GPL-like license.
I don't see much insight in this post. I'd say liberalism is simply giving the people power in their lives. To clarify, this means extending civil rights to all people, freeing people from discrimination in employment, ensuring all members of society have access to higher education and health care, etc. The specifics of how a liberal agenda, through significant government regulation and subsidies or a primarily private-sector economy, are not crucial to this. The key thing is that all people are free to pursue happiness as they see it as long as they don't harm others.
It just so happens that a conservative Republican agenda in result works against liberal ideals; this is why you can't call them liberal--unless someone can tell me what's so liberal about eliminating minimum wage laws and such so that fast-food workers (they're not just teen-agers looking for a summer/part-time job, try laid-off older people, mentally challenged, those from rough families, et ali.) can't even afford to rent a cardboard box in an alley downtown.
I sure hope not, what with the libertarians being the right's equivalent to the left's communists. Either extreme is no good. A mixed economy with heavily socialist leanings is the best mix for the real world.
With all the funds Roman officials spent on public works to assure a long stay in power, I'd say it's the politicians who "productize" the people, not vice versa. Julius Caesar threw massive parties with charioteers and gladiators. It's no wonder he became dictator for life.
Today, things really aren't much different. Bush throws out religion talk to satiate his fundamentalist electorate, some efforts for business, etc.
I'll admit the first programming language I started learning was JavaScript because I already had an interpreter for it (the browser) and I already knew some HTML. JavaScript was too limited to do the things I wanted to do, so I eventually found a decent C and C++ tutorial, purchased Visual C++ 6.0, and began learning a real programming language.
Now I'm a college freshman dealing with Java, which is nice in that I don't have to do memory management but a little on the slow side.
It is somewhat inconveniencing having these prettied up faces on the side of a supposedly serious news article in the New York Times. If you've got someone behind your shoulder, they might be given the impression you're not reading an article about virus makers.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm finishing up my freshman year in college; unfortunately, mathematics has never been a strong point for me. Sure, I can follow a few simple procedures to do basic algebra, but the complicated steps necessary to differentiate and integrate functions is always a source of errors for me, and these errors cascade. I've always been prone to make stupid little mistakes while doing mathematical calculations, and this does not seem likely to change.
Another problem is that mathematics is incapable of holding my interest. Frankly, I don't see why some people get so excited about proving some formula. I'd rather read philosophy, draw sketches, write satire, or develop my linguistic talent. Say what you will about these hobbies being less applicable to real-life situations; I find them quite enjoyable.
For these reasons, this ultra geek is going to have to pick a new major.
Cascading Style Sheets are all well and good--actually, I use them on my website, and I love them--but the painful part is ensuring compliance among browsers. I'm a self-taught, amateur geek, and I code my XHTML and CSS by hand. I don't read tutorials: I read the W3C recommendations. Anyway, I like to think I can interpret rather exacting writing such as Web specifications without misunderstanding, but I always seem to botch something so that things are out of alignment and so forth in this or that browser--usually Internet Explorer.
In summary, CSS is good, but it'd be better if all browsers actually followed the standards and interpreted any ambiguity the same way. That's all I want, so I can remain sane!
I wish I could write some humorous BASIC code like the rest of you, but I was just too l33t for BASIC: I skipped right up to C++.
As I stated in my previous comment, even when the program is superior, the users just won't switch out of inertia. My family only switched to Mozilla Firefox because I set it as the default browser on their computer, and they can't figure out how to make Internet Explorer the default again. Now they're used to it, and generally don't mind it unless a Flash animation or Java applet doesn't play (I never installed the worthless (in my opinion) plug-ins to play such crap).
I suppose, depending on what circles you socialize in, other people on your buddy list will be using Gaim; but, at least on my buddy list, everyone else is using the standard Windows version of AOL's AIM client.
These open-source advancements are good--no doubt about that--but the problem with an instant messaging system is that the people you communicate with need to use the system, too; and for now most users are trapped on AOL/AIM, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo! Messenger.
The ideal, of course, would be a standardized, nonproprietary instant messaging system as we have now for e-mail. I can see screen names being something like bob@host, laimer@aim.com, etc. Unfortunately, AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo! will never agree to this.
My computer is my friend, confident, secret lover!
I don't know about your friends, but not all of my friends are extremely technically competent Linux hackers who will switch to an open protocol for ideological reasons. Most of them will continue to use AIM on Windows until AOL and Microsoft demand a kidney and a lung to continue using their products.
Most of them are so resistant to change, in fact, they won't even consider using Mozilla or Mozilla Firefox instead of Internet Explorer! If you think you can do a better job at moving these people away from Windows, Internet Explorer, and AIM, be my guest.
AOL users can still hear, "You've got mail!" so long as their IMAP e-mail client's new messages received sound event is set to that sound. I never used AOL, but my e-mail software has been set to play that sound for years. It makes me feel all 133t inside, all right?
Please. The distinction between fewer and less is minuscule at best. Yes, fewer is to be used for objects that are in an inferior countable number; and, yes, less is to be used for an inferior graduated amount; but what is significant is that both denote inferior quantity. Because whether an object is countable or graduated can be determined by the meaning of the word modified, the distinction is superfluous and so is obsolescent in informal language.
Moreover, many languages do lack such a distinction between countable and graduated. These languages' users somehow manage to get by, though. Indeed, they may be a little confused when they learn English and discover a semantic distinction they'd never thought about before!
As Bill Gates would say, it's not a vulnerability; it's a feature!
I've had an utterly ridiculous time trying to get all my hardware on my months-old Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop working under Debian GNU/Linux 3.0. It's a real chore, and the costs aren't really worth the effort. I'll just reboot into Windows XP if I want to play music or watch movies now.
What does when you learned how to read or program have to do with now (other than you have these skills)? I admit it took me a little bit longer to learn how to read proficiently but then I soared past my peers. I learned how to program in C++ when I was 13, but I'm 19 now, so that doesn't mean much. What matters now is that I'm a college student; and, believe it or not, whether I have the intelligence and aptitude to solve all the hassles Linux likes to throw at me (I just had to use one of the "l33t" distributions, Debian 3.0, and on my laptop of all things), I simply don't have the time to spend a few hours working on configuration files to get something like sound working or downloading various dependencies to get one simple program to run.
In other words, ease of use isn't just for "stupid end users," but it's also for intelligent, technologically competent users who have lives!
Before Windows and even during the days of Windows 3.1x, most PC users had no real familiarity with MS-DOS. They usually had a cheat sheet of things to do to get into Windows or to start whatever programs they used most often. If they ever had to go beyond what was on their cheat sheet, they were at a complete loss.
I doubt the typical work/home computer user could do any better at a *nix command-line interface. Having to log on to the system would add further complexity for them, as would the terser online help system that they might never even find out about. My father, for example, though a rather intelligent person, is so set in his ways that even going slightly beyond the routine tasks he does in Windows is a source of frustration for him. I would never set him, my grandfather, or any of my non-computer-geek friends in front of a *nix terminal even if I were there to tell them what to type.
Is it just me, or is it preferable to think about what you can do by writing a program rather than how you can get it done under technical constraints? If programming were all about making sure this or that about some register was good or some small amount of memory was not used up, I'd probably have no interest in it at all, and I would have gone back to playing video games or something.
I'll take my high-level object-oriented programming languages, like C++ and Java, running on modern systems any day!
This experiment is hardly groundbreaking. My whole family already communicates like chimpanzees!
Christians have a funny habit of saying their place where evil people go after they die freezes over (I guess opposed to the usual fire and grimstone) whenever an unusual event occurs.
If Jesus weren't nailed to a cross about two thousand years ago (it must be true: it was in a movie!) and he had some sort of divine power of immortality, I'm sure he'd be telling all of us that Hell has, indeed, just frozen over.
By the way, is up down and down up now?
I'm still not persuaded to read this book, and I can't see any reason why I possibly should. It's not like I've fallen for the seductive promises of a colorful Microsoft commercial with a dude in a butterfly costume before.
I thought France set the trends! They're just following the U.S.'s lead (i.e., the DMCA) with this foolery! C'est triste!
Unless you prefer ESPN, MTV, VH1, CNN, Fox News Channel, USA, etc., your favorite channels may be goners.
I primarily watch "geeky" channels, so this would definitely be a good idea for me. I couldn't care less about the popular channels (except for Comedy Central); I watch the following: Comedy Central (for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and South Park), National Geographic, TechTV (rarely, it's so newbish), the Travel Channel (if I can't go somewhere, at least I can pretend to be there), TV5 (French), the History Channel, and History International. I used to watch the Discovery Channel and The Learning Channel (TLC) before they were taken over by home-repair, interior decorating, and gardening shows.
I can imagine developing closed-source software to make ends meet and then using some free time to work on interesting free software projects. There's no reason it has to be an either-or situation.
Of course, if you're like most people, by the time you come home from work, you don't want to spend more time doing what you did all day at work just for fun. However, I take it free software developers are not most people.
I can also see, if you have own your own software development business, the luxury of releasing your software as GPL-compatible free software after a certain amount of time. That way, you wouldn't be spending all your free time doing the same thing you do at work. More commercial software companies should do this, truthfully: Microsoft is not getting any value out of MS-DOS 6.22 anymore, so they have few good reasons not to release the MS-DOS source code under a GPL-like license.
I don't see much insight in this post. I'd say liberalism is simply giving the people power in their lives. To clarify, this means extending civil rights to all people, freeing people from discrimination in employment, ensuring all members of society have access to higher education and health care, etc. The specifics of how a liberal agenda, through significant government regulation and subsidies or a primarily private-sector economy, are not crucial to this. The key thing is that all people are free to pursue happiness as they see it as long as they don't harm others.
It just so happens that a conservative Republican agenda in result works against liberal ideals; this is why you can't call them liberal--unless someone can tell me what's so liberal about eliminating minimum wage laws and such so that fast-food workers (they're not just teen-agers looking for a summer/part-time job, try laid-off older people, mentally challenged, those from rough families, et ali.) can't even afford to rent a cardboard box in an alley downtown.
I sure hope not, what with the libertarians being the right's equivalent to the left's communists. Either extreme is no good. A mixed economy with heavily socialist leanings is the best mix for the real world.
With all the funds Roman officials spent on public works to assure a long stay in power, I'd say it's the politicians who "productize" the people, not vice versa. Julius Caesar threw massive parties with charioteers and gladiators. It's no wonder he became dictator for life.
Today, things really aren't much different. Bush throws out religion talk to satiate his fundamentalist electorate, some efforts for business, etc.
I'll admit the first programming language I started learning was JavaScript because I already had an interpreter for it (the browser) and I already knew some HTML. JavaScript was too limited to do the things I wanted to do, so I eventually found a decent C and C++ tutorial, purchased Visual C++ 6.0, and began learning a real programming language.
Now I'm a college freshman dealing with Java, which is nice in that I don't have to do memory management but a little on the slow side.
It is somewhat inconveniencing having these prettied up faces on the side of a supposedly serious news article in the New York Times. If you've got someone behind your shoulder, they might be given the impression you're not reading an article about virus makers.