But people worry about worrying. So it is reasurring to know that we don't have to spend the next couple of decades worrying about it. Most likely we'll know soon that it is not a problem. It would suck to have to wait until the day of impact to know. A non-scientist might worry about that uncertainty.
There is no "correct" natural balance. There is a particular balance that our civilization is adapted to. We prefer that for the same reason that an organism prefers the geography it was adapted to rather than some other random one.
Re: the Constitution. Which one are you talking about? Slashdot readers come from dozens of countries.
I wish I could mod this up. The game is much more competitive and you need to move much more quickly. You can't let an idea incubate for five years or someone who DID raise VC will beat you.
No. This shows that interval arithemtic is needed. Why can't I know the precision of results? The printer should be able to know that the value is only accurate to n decimals (or binimals or whatever they're called:), and not print more.
How is keeping track of precision more helpful than merely preserving the exact number that the user typed in? Surely that's what they taught you in high school!
For the year I was a Mac user I kept meaning to write a list of the thing that annoyed me. There was a lot of great stuff and you hear about it all over the place. But nobody is really documenting the stuff they dislike.
Being less keyboard friendly was definitely part of it.
Incompatibility with office stuff was another. I use Firefox most of the time on Windows but there are times that I switch browsers to IE 6 for weirdly coded sites. I didn't have that option on the Mac. I could just cycle between three or four different minority browsers that were equally likely to have problems with the non-standard site. There is no Visio for the Mac.
Games of course...
For such a usable system the Mac takes a strangely application-centric view of windowing rather than a more modern document-centric view. You could kill all instances of textpad but textpad is still running. Whereas if you kill all instances of notepad, it is gone.
There seem to be a bunch of ways to install apps on the mac. Some have executable installers. Some are disk images. Some are disk images containing executable installers. Some are SIT files. Maybe there are even some SIT-compressed disk images containing installers. I dunno. I found it confusing.
If I recall correctly, the Mac was not as good at showing different media types within the context of a web browser app. So for instance having a PDF right in a browser window which is cleaned up by the browser like any other browser chrome. As I recall, Safari etc. would tend to download the PDF or.DOC to my desktop and I would have to manually delete it later.
I hated the pulsing light on the PowerBook. It's attempt to mimic "sleeping" would actually make it harder for me to sleep because I would see it through my eyelids. I had to throw a towel over it every night (yes, I use my laptop until I fall asleep and first thing in the morning).
You kind of have to get your head around the fact that there are two systems: Darwin and the gui on top. Sometimes I would naively think that the right way to do something was at the BSD level and find out that my actions were futile or destructive. For instance there are some commands that are made obsolete due to other directory services commands. Passwords are not handled through "passwd". You aren't supposed to start Apache from the command line. etc. Fink added another layer of weirdness. Why doesn't Darwin have its own package manager?
All of my laptops wear a lot where I rest my right wrist (bad habit). But the PowerBook is the first one where the paint totally peeled back so that the thing looked really old after a year.
Oh yeah: that annoying VGA dongle. I can't count the times where I was in one place and the dongle was in another. I never once used the DVI output so it was totally useless to me. (SVideo was nice though)
And then there are the Mac users. Annoying and smug...especially if they are long-time users and perceive you as a johnny-come-lately. Watch how they swarm this thread pointing out that my annoyances would not really be annoyances if I came around to the one true way of thinking.
That said, there was a lot to love about the Mac. Stable, powerful, easy to set-up, easy to use. But you don't need me to tell you about that. Just go down to the Mac store.
If I could choose my own environment, I'd still say the Mac is the best but I have to work with Windows-only apps and Virtual PC was just too painful (and had some really destructive bugs).
Sure. Blame the victim. "They" don't know how to take care of their computers. It has nothing to do with the software vendors making poorly designed, buggy and insecure software.
Options are a huge cost for many corporations and a huge benefit to executives. No wonder, then, that they have fought ferociously to avoid making a charge against their earnings. Without blushing, almost all C.E.O.'s have told their shareholders that options are cost-free.
For these C.E.O.'s I have a proposition: Berkshire Hathaway will sell you insurance, carpeting or any of our other products in exchange for options identical to those you grant yourselves. It'll all be cash-free. But do you really think your corporation will not have incurred a cost when you hand over the options in exchange for the carpeting? Or do you really think that placing a value on the option is just too difficult to do, one of your other excuses for not expensing them? If these are the opinions you honestly hold, call me collect. We can do business.
Chief executives frequently claim that options have no cost because their issuance is cashless. But when they do so, they ignore the fact that many C.E.O.'s regularly include pension income in their earnings, though this item doesn't deliver a dime to their companies. They also ignore another reality: When corporations grant restricted stock to their executives these grants are routinely, and properly, expensed, even though no cash changes hands.
When a company gives something of value to its employees in return for their services, it is clearly a compensation expense. And if expenses don't belong in the earnings statement, where in the world do they belong?
Re:One DNF in hand is better than two pre-ordered
on
Employee Stock Options?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
My preferred compensation is profit-based bonus. So if a company is making profit, employees share the pie, it's like dividends to shareholders except you hold your "shares" in the form of employment/position.
There are many quickly growing companies that do not have profit because management has decided to reinvest it.
That isn't true. There was a time when theists believed that the sun revolved around the earth and they were dissuaded of this view by overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It probably took a long time for the evidence to become so compelling that no thinking person could dispute it. So it is with evolution. Don't give up.
They really do not have a website. I know someone who works there and he says that they don't bother to market because they are overwhelmed with business.
When I was in university I would spend 90% of the time putting together a "framework" to solve the actual problem (much more general and thus useful for future classe). Then I would spend 7% of the time debugging it. Then I would spend the remaining 3% desperately trying to figure out how to use the framework to solve the assigned problem.
There is some truth to what you say, but you could also argue that what you are describing is "business analysis". Programming is, strictly speaking, the task of turning the requirements into executable code. But anyhow, neither programming nor business analysis will go away until we have AIs.
Re:I find this quote more interesting
on
Linus Interviewed
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Anti-GPL arguments tend to boil down to one issue--if the code were truly "free," then you ought to be able to do anything you want with it, including slipping the original authors a deuce and taking the code and making it proprietary.
Nobody can make your code proprietary. You have a copy of it and the same rights you always had. What a person can do with BSD-licensed code is incorporate it into something with a more restrictive license. That doesn't hurt the original creators of the code. It just opens the code up to more uses. For the same reason that I don't consider unauthorized copying "theft" or "piracy", I don't consider reuse of code in propietary software "taking it and making it proprietary". The original owner is not deprived of their code.
They have been predicting the demise of programmers since the invention of COBOL in the 60s. It was supposed to turn ordinary business users into programmers thanks to its easy, English-like syntax. We're still waiting. Now this writer is talking about "codeless development environments" which are (like the 5GLs and expert systems of yesteryear) supposed to replace programmers.
Perhaps the UN is completely corrupt and unsalvagable. I'm not granting that but for the sake of this argument, I'll accept it. The thing that frustrates me about American nationalists is that they would rather curse the darkness rather than light a candle. Rather than createing another body that represents the democratic nations of the world, they would rather there existed no trans-national body with acknowledged legitimacy over serious issues like genocide, international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. As long as no such body exists, America can serve as the global policeman and the tiny percentage of people who can vote there are "supercitizens" who decide how the world is run. The rest have no voice except when they disobey as in Iran, Palestine and North Korea.
There are many countries other than just America where you can make it big on stock options. For instance, the Perimiter Institute was founded on the basis of the stock options of the founders of RIM. There is nothing uniquely American about the dream of making it big on the basis of your innovation and hard work.
Another strategy is to have specialized "citizen assemblies" for major governmental strategy choices. "Should we have public or private health care?" You have a lottery-selected citizen assembly listen to arguments from both sides and then work with lawyers to write a bill that they feel is appropriate.
The world is so complicated today that it makes sense to move away from an idea that a single legislative body should vote on everything. It implies that they can educate themselves on everything which is just not realistic.
Yes, Java's GC would notice that nothing is referring to them and remove the objects. This unlike a simple reference counting gc such as python's which would not notice this.
Your information about Python is about four years out of date.
Imagine if the parrot or mono guys wrote really slick bindings for this and made them availible on all supported platforms. Personally, I would rather have a game that is just "pretty" fast but isn't bound to a particular operating system to one that is really fast, but that I cannot take to any platform I want.
I don't see how these two sentences are related. The article already lists C/C++, Java, Perl, Ruby, and Python bindings. These languages are all portable. Most of them are VM or interpreter-based.
A language like PERL 6 which is supposed to be really slick thanks to ruby's influence on its design would be great for opening up game development to the masses.
If you consider Ruby to be a great design then why wouldn't you use it with this engine today rather than waiting 6 months for an alpha of Perl 6?
The way I see it, unless a game written in C/C++ is going to completely max out your CPU and GPU then it's probably worth being written in C# or PERL 6 eventually.
What is so special about those two languages??? The thing already supports a boatload of production quality langugaes and VMs. Why wait for these two to mature?
Since I don't pay taxes to the French government, and they in turn don't provide me with public services and protection, I shouldn't care what happens to them economically.
This implies that the only ties between human beings are those of the exchange of cash for goods and services. That's a sad view of life.
As far as I'm concerned, each governmemt should intervene to ensure that if a company trades in their country (i.e. takes money out of the economy) then it has an obligation to provide work to the citizens of that country (i.e. put money back into the economy).
The role of the corporation is to provide goods and services to a country. Imagine if Microsoft had to "provide work" for citiziens in every country in which it did basis on a proportional basis. Microsoft Europe and Microsoft Asia would have to be almost as big as Microsoft US. This implies that Microsoft US would be proportionally smaller (they aren't going to hire people to sit around doing nothing!). Is that really what you want?
As an American I'm concerned with the welfare of myself and my fellow citizens first and foremost, and this only makes sense. If I were more concerned about Nigeria, it would behoove me to move to Nigeria and become a citizen of that country, since I'm putting Nigerian interests before that of any other country.
Frankly: I find this logic (common though it is in the US) to be totally bizarre. It makes no fscking sense. Try this analogy: "I understand that having free trade across county boundaries is good for the well-being of the entire State and even the country but as a resident of King County I put my needs above those of the rest of Washington State and those of America. If I was primiarily interested in the needs of (say) Orange County then I would move there. The job of King county's government if first and foremost to provide for King county residents: the rest of the country be damned."
There are many levels of government and at this moment at the beginning of the 21st century we've somehow deluded ourselves into theinking that the nation is somehow special. During the early 20th century it was otherwise: most people thought that their allegiance belonged to their empire (which was larger than their nation). And before the civil war, many Americans had primary allegiance to their State, not to the federation.
Each of these views was short-sighted and temporary. As yours is. Your allegiance logically belongs either to a community small enough that you can participate and influence it (i.e. municipality) or to all of humanity (based solely on the Golden rule).
In fact, the *sole reason the government of the United States exists* is to provide for the American people.
That is incorrect. The United States government exists to exercise the collective will of the American people. Sometimes this will is to "do good" elsewhere. It looks, for example, as if Americans will put George Bush back into power based on his (shaky!) argument that he is going to democratize the Middle East. It is also the case that many Americans criticize the Bush administration for doing nothing in Darfur. According to your theory, there is nothing to criticize because it would be a breach of responsibility for him to do anything. Ditto, I suppose, for the intervention in Europe in WW II.
I am unashamed about the fact that my allegiance is first and foremost to humanity. My local national government has dual roles as the local provider of laws and a tool I use to advance the needs of human beings everywhere. When I look across a border and see human beings on the other side I don't see their needs as being less important than mine by virtue of the fact that they are on the other side of the border and neither should my government. That said: for practical reasons the government must distinguish between citizens and non-citizens and treat citizens differently.
Why would they want a better search engine since they would be censoring a lot of it anyways.
You know there are vast quantities of information on the Internet that the Chinese government considers benign. Vast shopping malls. Massive physics and computer science knowledge repositories. Fan sites. etc.
Slashdot Mirror
But people worry about worrying. So it is reasurring to know that we don't have to spend the next couple of decades worrying about it. Most likely we'll know soon that it is not a problem. It would suck to have to wait until the day of impact to know. A non-scientist might worry about that uncertainty.
There is no "correct" natural balance. There is a particular balance that our civilization is adapted to. We prefer that for the same reason that an organism prefers the geography it was adapted to rather than some other random one. Re: the Constitution. Which one are you talking about? Slashdot readers come from dozens of countries.
I wish I could mod this up. The game is much more competitive and you need to move much more quickly. You can't let an idea incubate for five years or someone who DID raise VC will beat you.
No. This shows that interval arithemtic is needed. Why can't I know the precision of results? The printer should be able to know that the value is only accurate to n decimals (or binimals or whatever they're called :), and not print more.
How is keeping track of precision more helpful than merely preserving the exact number that the user typed in? Surely that's what they taught you in high school!
For the year I was a Mac user I kept meaning to write a list of the thing that annoyed me. There was a lot of great stuff and you hear about it all over the place. But nobody is really documenting the stuff they dislike.
Being less keyboard friendly was definitely part of it.
Incompatibility with office stuff was another. I use Firefox most of the time on Windows but there are times that I switch browsers to IE 6 for weirdly coded sites. I didn't have that option on the Mac. I could just cycle between three or four different minority browsers that were equally likely to have problems with the non-standard site. There is no Visio for the Mac.
Games of course...
For such a usable system the Mac takes a strangely application-centric view of windowing rather than a more modern document-centric view. You could kill all instances of textpad but textpad is still running. Whereas if you kill all instances of notepad, it is gone.
There seem to be a bunch of ways to install apps on the mac. Some have executable installers. Some are disk images. Some are disk images containing executable installers. Some are SIT files. Maybe there are even some SIT-compressed disk images containing installers. I dunno. I found it confusing.
If I recall correctly, the Mac was not as good at showing different media types within the context of a web browser app. So for instance having a PDF right in a browser window which is cleaned up by the browser like any other browser chrome. As I recall, Safari etc. would tend to download the PDF or .DOC to my desktop and I would have to manually delete it later.
I hated the pulsing light on the PowerBook. It's attempt to mimic "sleeping" would actually make it harder for me to sleep because I would see it through my eyelids. I had to throw a towel over it every night (yes, I use my laptop until I fall asleep and first thing in the morning).
You kind of have to get your head around the fact that there are two systems: Darwin and the gui on top. Sometimes I would naively think that the right way to do something was at the BSD level and find out that my actions were futile or destructive. For instance there are some commands that are made obsolete due to other directory services commands. Passwords are not handled through "passwd". You aren't supposed to start Apache from the command line. etc. Fink added another layer of weirdness. Why doesn't Darwin have its own package manager?
All of my laptops wear a lot where I rest my right wrist (bad habit). But the PowerBook is the first one where the paint totally peeled back so that the thing looked really old after a year.
Oh yeah: that annoying VGA dongle. I can't count the times where I was in one place and the dongle was in another. I never once used the DVI output so it was totally useless to me. (SVideo was nice though)
And then there are the Mac users. Annoying and smug...especially if they are long-time users and perceive you as a johnny-come-lately. Watch how they swarm this thread pointing out that my annoyances would not really be annoyances if I came around to the one true way of thinking.
That said, there was a lot to love about the Mac. Stable, powerful, easy to set-up, easy to use. But you don't need me to tell you about that. Just go down to the Mac store.
If I could choose my own environment, I'd still say the Mac is the best but I have to work with Windows-only apps and Virtual PC was just too painful (and had some really destructive bugs).
Sure. Blame the victim. "They" don't know how to take care of their computers. It has nothing to do with the software vendors making poorly designed, buggy and insecure software.
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/20 03_archives/000668.html
My preferred compensation is profit-based bonus. So if a company is making profit, employees share the pie, it's like dividends to shareholders except you hold your "shares" in the form of employment/position.
There are many quickly growing companies that do not have profit because management has decided to reinvest it.
That isn't true. There was a time when theists believed that the sun revolved around the earth and they were dissuaded of this view by overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It probably took a long time for the evidence to become so compelling that no thinking person could dispute it. So it is with evolution. Don't give up.
They really do not have a website. I know someone who works there and he says that they don't bother to market because they are overwhelmed with business.
When I was in university I would spend 90% of the time putting together a "framework" to solve the actual problem (much more general and thus useful for future classe). Then I would spend 7% of the time debugging it. Then I would spend the remaining 3% desperately trying to figure out how to use the framework to solve the assigned problem.
There is some truth to what you say, but you could also argue that what you are describing is "business analysis". Programming is, strictly speaking, the task of turning the requirements into executable code. But anyhow, neither programming nor business analysis will go away until we have AIs.
Anti-GPL arguments tend to boil down to one issue--if the code were truly "free," then you ought to be able to do anything you want with it, including slipping the original authors a deuce and taking the code and making it proprietary.
Nobody can make your code proprietary. You have a copy of it and the same rights you always had. What a person can do with BSD-licensed code is incorporate it into something with a more restrictive license. That doesn't hurt the original creators of the code. It just opens the code up to more uses. For the same reason that I don't consider unauthorized copying "theft" or "piracy", I don't consider reuse of code in propietary software "taking it and making it proprietary". The original owner is not deprived of their code.
They have been predicting the demise of programmers since the invention of COBOL in the 60s. It was supposed to turn ordinary business users into programmers thanks to its easy, English-like syntax. We're still waiting. Now this writer is talking about "codeless development environments" which are (like the 5GLs and expert systems of yesteryear) supposed to replace programmers.
Why not RTFA?
Companies don't outsource their CIO. They need the CIO to negotiate with the companies that they outsource to!
Perhaps the UN is completely corrupt and unsalvagable. I'm not granting that but for the sake of this argument, I'll accept it. The thing that frustrates me about American nationalists is that they would rather curse the darkness rather than light a candle. Rather than createing another body that represents the democratic nations of the world, they would rather there existed no trans-national body with acknowledged legitimacy over serious issues like genocide, international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. As long as no such body exists, America can serve as the global policeman and the tiny percentage of people who can vote there are "supercitizens" who decide how the world is run. The rest have no voice except when they disobey as in Iran, Palestine and North Korea.
There are many countries other than just America where you can make it big on stock options. For instance, the Perimiter Institute was founded on the basis of the stock options of the founders of RIM. There is nothing uniquely American about the dream of making it big on the basis of your innovation and hard work.
Another strategy is to have specialized "citizen assemblies" for major governmental strategy choices. "Should we have public or private health care?" You have a lottery-selected citizen assembly listen to arguments from both sides and then work with lawyers to write a bill that they feel is appropriate.
The world is so complicated today that it makes sense to move away from an idea that a single legislative body should vote on everything. It implies that they can educate themselves on everything which is just not realistic.
Yes, Java's GC would notice that nothing is referring to them and remove the objects. This unlike a simple reference counting gc such as python's which would not notice this.
Your information about Python is about four years out of date.
Imagine if the parrot or mono guys wrote really slick bindings for this and made them availible on all supported platforms. Personally, I would rather have a game that is just "pretty" fast but isn't bound to a particular operating system to one that is really fast, but that I cannot take to any platform I want.
I don't see how these two sentences are related. The article already lists C/C++, Java, Perl, Ruby, and Python bindings. These languages are all portable. Most of them are VM or interpreter-based.
A language like PERL 6 which is supposed to be really slick thanks to ruby's influence on its design would be great for opening up game development to the masses.
If you consider Ruby to be a great design then why wouldn't you use it with this engine today rather than waiting 6 months for an alpha of Perl 6?
The way I see it, unless a game written in C/C++ is going to completely max out your CPU and GPU then it's probably worth being written in C# or PERL 6 eventually.
What is so special about those two languages??? The thing already supports a boatload of production quality langugaes and VMs. Why wait for these two to mature?
Since I don't pay taxes to the French government, and they in turn don't provide me with public services and protection, I shouldn't care what happens to them economically.
This implies that the only ties between human beings are those of the exchange of cash for goods and services. That's a sad view of life.
As far as I'm concerned, each governmemt should intervene to ensure that if a company trades in their country (i.e. takes money out of the economy) then it has an obligation to provide work to the citizens of that country (i.e. put money back into the economy).
The role of the corporation is to provide goods and services to a country. Imagine if Microsoft had to "provide work" for citiziens in every country in which it did basis on a proportional basis. Microsoft Europe and Microsoft Asia would have to be almost as big as Microsoft US. This implies that Microsoft US would be proportionally smaller (they aren't going to hire people to sit around doing nothing!). Is that really what you want?
As an American I'm concerned with the welfare of myself and my fellow citizens first and foremost, and this only makes sense. If I were more concerned about Nigeria, it would behoove me to move to Nigeria and become a citizen of that country, since I'm putting Nigerian interests before that of any other country.
Frankly: I find this logic (common though it is in the US) to be totally bizarre. It makes no fscking sense. Try this analogy: "I understand that having free trade across county boundaries is good for the well-being of the entire State and even the country but as a resident of King County I put my needs above those of the rest of Washington State and those of America. If I was primiarily interested in the needs of (say) Orange County then I would move there. The job of King county's government if first and foremost to provide for King county residents: the rest of the country be damned."
There are many levels of government and at this moment at the beginning of the 21st century we've somehow deluded ourselves into theinking that the nation is somehow special. During the early 20th century it was otherwise: most people thought that their allegiance belonged to their empire (which was larger than their nation). And before the civil war, many Americans had primary allegiance to their State, not to the federation.
Each of these views was short-sighted and temporary. As yours is. Your allegiance logically belongs either to a community small enough that you can participate and influence it (i.e. municipality) or to all of humanity (based solely on the Golden rule).
In fact, the *sole reason the government of the United States exists* is to provide for the American people.
That is incorrect. The United States government exists to exercise the collective will of the American people. Sometimes this will is to "do good" elsewhere. It looks, for example, as if Americans will put George Bush back into power based on his (shaky!) argument that he is going to democratize the Middle East. It is also the case that many Americans criticize the Bush administration for doing nothing in Darfur. According to your theory, there is nothing to criticize because it would be a breach of responsibility for him to do anything. Ditto, I suppose, for the intervention in Europe in WW II.
I am unashamed about the fact that my allegiance is first and foremost to humanity. My local national government has dual roles as the local provider of laws and a tool I use to advance the needs of human beings everywhere. When I look across a border and see human beings on the other side I don't see their needs as being less important than mine by virtue of the fact that they are on the other side of the border and neither should my government. That said: for practical reasons the government must distinguish between citizens and non-citizens and treat citizens differently.
Why would they want a better search engine since they would be censoring a lot of it anyways.
You know there are vast quantities of information on the Internet that the Chinese government considers benign. Vast shopping malls. Massive physics and computer science knowledge repositories. Fan sites. etc.