I think it's also important to make the distinction because there isn't just one internet or network or web. It is possible to do internetworking without connecting your inernet to the Internet. Similarly, the Net isn't the only net - heck, a purist would argue there's more room for confusion if you don't capitalize this one - most people don't deal with internets other than the Internet, but everyone deals with nets that aren't the Internet. (Considering that the Internet is a network of networks, you have to deal with nets that aren't the Internet just to deal with the Internet.)
Even the Web should be capitalized. I've certainly dealt with small proto-webs put together on networks that aren't connected to the Internet, and therefore can't possibly be part of the World Wide Web.
I realize that Wired is more of an e-oriented fashion magazine than a tech journal. Still, I think that as a pack of people who purport to have a working knowledge of both the English language and the wired world should be a bit more savvy with both than to claim that there is not and was never a reason to capitalize these three words.
And I realize that Wired probably doesn't care because most of their readership isn't geeky enough to figure out the etymology of the word 'internet' without some help, and they probably don't really understand what the Internet is and how it works, but I would still would like to see some sort of nod to the fact that the Internet is in fact a distinct and special individual that stands out from a whole host of peers.
At some point I remember hearing there is an exception to the no energy storage device rule specifically for the rotor. This suggests to me that, with this one necessary exception, even storing kinetic energy is a no-go.
Besides, I'd love to see a working design for using a flywheel. You're going to have to add a LOT of complexity (read: mass) to the system in order to get the flywheel hooked in, and then you're going to have have a flywheel big enough (read: massive or large) to have a ridiculous amount of angular momentum.
And it just keeps getting more and more complicated (read: heavier and heavier).
Hasn't the SCO fiasco taught you anything about what can happen if someone even makes up a story that your project benefited from the knowledge of somebody who helped write a competing product?
If it came out that a M$ employee who worked with an Office program's file format were involved in OpenOffice.org, you can be sure that both Sun and OpenOffice would be keel-hauled - if not by the courts, then by the cost of massive litigation.
Nowadays, typing is a necessary life skill - far more so than knowing how to write in cursive, which I'm sure the schools are still teaching. It's all about being an efficient communicator - as a touch typer, I can bang off an e-mail or memo or whatever in a couple minutes, and saying my thoughts on an instant message program only takes a few seconds. Without that, I take far longer to say not nearly as much. Diarrhia du clavier aside, this gives me the ability to make a better impression not just on my boss, but on my coworkers (on both a professional and personal level) and friends and family.
As computers become more prevalent, I think that questioning the value of being able to touch type as a career asset is going to become more and more akin to questioning the value of a working knowledge of basic personal hygiene techniques as a career asset.
Agreed on GNOME and KDE. I find it rather annoying that so many Linux, *BSD, etc. users will whine up and down about how much Windows sucks, but are also hopping on the bandwagon of trying to make the unix as much like Windows as possible.
I long to see a group of thoughtful geeks with some good knowledge of human-computer interaction sit down and say, "How do we want our OS to behave, really?" because right now with Gnome and KDE the plan seems to be to just get as many features out the door as quickly as possible without any realy overall planning and to heck with anyone who is noticing that they are both becoming serious contenders for the throne of "crappiest UI, ever."
And the geeks who are fed up with this go in completely the other direction and work hard at turning X into a text terminal that can also display graphics.
Meanwhile, I also sit around living with WindowMaker because it's the cleanest GUI I can find (with it's own set of problems, of course.)
What they really said was, "The iPod will only play songs you download from iTMS. Also, the iPod will play songs you download from (almost) anywhere else."
(assuming we're talking a library or something) it's ridiculous to think that the source is inherently the best documentation there is. Good commenting will tell you all sorts of information, including not just the data type of the function (assuming you're not using a statically typed language), but also what kinds of values to expect (for any language). It will also explain side effects and all of that. This stuff isn't built into the source, so you have to write it manually - which takes about as much effort to do properly in the source as it is in an external document, so I fail to see where commenting in the source is so great. In some ways it's worse. I don't personally like having to grep a source tree in order to find what function is in what file. So much easier to look in the documentation's index.
(Assuming we're not talking a library) It's stupid to expect all of your users to know how to read source code. Even if they can program, you shouldn't expect them to know the language you wrote the project in. No, not even if it's specificially designed for working with that programming language, because the person using the project could be new to programming. Like the parent commenter said, it's stupid to expect your users to read a huge pile of functions in order to understand how the program will respond to various user interactions when they could instead read a few well-written sentences of explanation. It's also stupid to assume that your users will even have a copy of the source on their computer. Some administrators like to compile binaries and install those rather than expecting their users to compile everything they are supposed to use or cluttering up a workstation with a pile of source code. (Especially if it's older and has a smaller hard drive.)
I have contacted a couple of smaller projects offering to work on documenting their code, but never got a reply.
I've gotten to the point on stuff like this that I try and avoid projects with bad documentation and/or commenting. I figure if they don't want their project to be usable then they probably don't really want people to be using their project all that bad.
The tractor/trailer concept is new, as far as I know, but there are already cars with both regular and railroad compatible wheels. Just drive over the railroad, drop the train wheels, and go.
Considering the main point of this system is to remove pathogens from the water, it'd probably be cheaper and more reliable to use fire or even funny square shaped tinfoil hats.
I think it's worth pointing out that a bootleg of a concert is much more different from a finished album than a lossy compressed version of that album, in a whole lot of ways.
It'd be interesting if the boss above her listened to marketing much. I've seen plenty of products that bear the signs of having been a good piece of softwate before the marketroids came along and eviscerated it at the last minute, and they might throw a shitfit if there's not enough T&A in a game bearing the Playboy name.
This is true. The growth methods used in agriculture nowadays severely deplete the nutritive qualities of the food, and a lot of the chemicals probably aren't that healthy, either. A lot of GM foods tend to be a lot worse, too.
Of course, these things tend to concentrate as you move up the food chain, so there's a decent chance that you'll find more pesticides and herbicides in a pound of beef than a pound of corn.
I think maybe the nuance here is that doing what's right for the environment isn't always fun. To the extreme environmentalist, it doesn't matter how good meat tastes because the only thing that matters is the environment. To the extreme hedonist, it doesn't matter how much you're harming the enviornment because you can't be bothered to make concessions for things like that. Nobody's saying anything useful with an argument as cursory as "Meat is murder" or "Meat taste good."
While we're on it, the evolution argument is totally shaky. We also evolved to hunt and gather for food rather than sit in cubicles typing all day to earn it. This fact is clearly illustrated by the problems we have with obesity and RSI related to our sedentary lifestyles. You can also make a fairly defensible argument that we did not evolve to be monogamous in any way shape or form, but that's still not saying that monogamy is a bad way to live your life.
Hell, if you're going to argue evolution, then it's silly to even pretend that you can argue about what we were meant to do. Evolution is about as existential a basis for an argument as you can get, and if you're going to accept it as a valid method of reasoning you've got to be willing to abandon arguments based on concepts like predetermination or some sort of Grand Purpose (unless you somehow fit God into the scheme, but that's also completely aside from the point).
You can use evolution as a basis for an argument if you're willing to argue that we should be slaves to our genes, but at that point you're pretty well forced into agreeing that we should be squatting under trees eating (and wearing) raw scraps of rotting carcasses becuse that is, in fact, what we evolved to do.
Unless you're willing to further argue that our brains allow us to go beyond the limits of our basic evolutionary foundations. But then you've suddenly gone full circle and admitted that you can't use evolution as a sturdy argument for anything because you've just really argued that we should be exercising some reason and agency in our choice of lifestyle.
And as one last point, the whole thing about how much a cow suffers has a lot to do with the farm practises. Free range cows do spend a few years wandering around eating the best food the ranch can afford to make available to them. Too bad everything that isn't explicitly labeled free range generally comes from feed lots rather than ranches.
What, and the parent wasn't a troll? Let's leave the troll moderation to people who are actually trolling rather than using it to push a side in some half-assed squabble.
It's true that this cow-gut memory storage device wouldn't be vegan, and it's fair to poke fun at vegans over it. But it's also true that the hormones and additives that go into mass-produced meat have adverse effects on humans that have been measured and documented in research. (Real, peer-reviewed research. All that bullshit pseudoscience 'research' that PETA and its spinoffs do doesn't count.)
What was that thing they used to tell us in grade school? Something like "Don't dish it out if you can't take it, too."
No, that's just a naming convention and actually changes depending on which filesystem you are running OS X on. It just tries to abstract the differences away since you shouldn't have to worry about them.
OS X still uses the old OS9 style hierarchy (which is also similar to the one used in NEXTSTEP) with stuff in folders with names like System, Library, Applications, etc. rather than/etc,/lib,/bin, etc.
I've been using fink for a while, and I'd have to say that it does not have all the tools I love. It sure has a lot of them, but not all. Even some of the ones it does have are iffy - gnucash, for example.
As for beauty, if by beauty you mean having a computer that contains three marginally but not entirely independent file hierarchies, yes, fink is beautiful. If you use fink for much more than a few X apps you like and think it's fun to have to remember what crap you have in/, what crap you have in/sw, and what crap you have in both but is marginally different because / has the BSD version and/sw has the gnu version.
Fink is a great system for getting a few apps you need to work on your Mac, but it's not a perfect solution for every situation or every person. Heck, I dual boot Linux and OS X on my PB, but I also use Fink. Whatever works.
With Phantasy Star Collection, they crammed the first three Phantasy Star games onto one GBA cart, and had to write two emulators (Sega Master System for I, Sega Genesis for II and III.) For three great games, I spent 20 bucks.
Nintendo, on the other hand, wants me to spend 30 bucks apiece for these games. I find that hard to swallow considering that, even if some of these are amazing games, this series is still just shovelware.
But do you really want Joe College Student, who has a big fat two digit number in his pocket and a big negative five digit number on his student loan to be exposed to the risk of getting sued over some barely-tested and half-broken piece of software whose source he posted to the web incase somebody else wanted to work with it?
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed with the proper noun thing.
I think it's also important to make the distinction because there isn't just one internet or network or web. It is possible to do internetworking without connecting your inernet to the Internet. Similarly, the Net isn't the only net - heck, a purist would argue there's more room for confusion if you don't capitalize this one - most people don't deal with internets other than the Internet, but everyone deals with nets that aren't the Internet. (Considering that the Internet is a network of networks, you have to deal with nets that aren't the Internet just to deal with the Internet.)
Even the Web should be capitalized. I've certainly dealt with small proto-webs put together on networks that aren't connected to the Internet, and therefore can't possibly be part of the World Wide Web.
I realize that Wired is more of an e-oriented fashion magazine than a tech journal. Still, I think that as a pack of people who purport to have a working knowledge of both the English language and the wired world should be a bit more savvy with both than to claim that there is not and was never a reason to capitalize these three words.
And I realize that Wired probably doesn't care because most of their readership isn't geeky enough to figure out the etymology of the word 'internet' without some help, and they probably don't really understand what the Internet is and how it works, but I would still would like to see some sort of nod to the fact that the Internet is in fact a distinct and special individual that stands out from a whole host of peers.
Rule #24b: The human powering the helicopter must survive the flight.
This would keep teams from setting fire to the unlucky pilot and powering the helicopter with a steam engine, too. =D
At some point I remember hearing there is an exception to the no energy storage device rule specifically for the rotor. This suggests to me that, with this one necessary exception, even storing kinetic energy is a no-go.
Besides, I'd love to see a working design for using a flywheel. You're going to have to add a LOT of complexity (read: mass) to the system in order to get the flywheel hooked in, and then you're going to have have a flywheel big enough (read: massive or large) to have a ridiculous amount of angular momentum.
And it just keeps getting more and more complicated (read: heavier and heavier).
MySQL. Darwin. Mozilla. Any commercial Linux distro. MacGIMP. Get used to it.
Hasn't the SCO fiasco taught you anything about what can happen if someone even makes up a story that your project benefited from the knowledge of somebody who helped write a competing product?
If it came out that a M$ employee who worked with an Office program's file format were involved in OpenOffice.org, you can be sure that both Sun and OpenOffice would be keel-hauled - if not by the courts, then by the cost of massive litigation.
Nowadays, typing is a necessary life skill - far more so than knowing how to write in cursive, which I'm sure the schools are still teaching. It's all about being an efficient communicator - as a touch typer, I can bang off an e-mail or memo or whatever in a couple minutes, and saying my thoughts on an instant message program only takes a few seconds. Without that, I take far longer to say not nearly as much. Diarrhia du clavier aside, this gives me the ability to make a better impression not just on my boss, but on my coworkers (on both a professional and personal level) and friends and family.
As computers become more prevalent, I think that questioning the value of being able to touch type as a career asset is going to become more and more akin to questioning the value of a working knowledge of basic personal hygiene techniques as a career asset.
Agreed on GNOME and KDE. I find it rather annoying that so many Linux, *BSD, etc. users will whine up and down about how much Windows sucks, but are also hopping on the bandwagon of trying to make the unix as much like Windows as possible.
I long to see a group of thoughtful geeks with some good knowledge of human-computer interaction sit down and say, "How do we want our OS to behave, really?" because right now with Gnome and KDE the plan seems to be to just get as many features out the door as quickly as possible without any realy overall planning and to heck with anyone who is noticing that they are both becoming serious contenders for the throne of "crappiest UI, ever."
And the geeks who are fed up with this go in completely the other direction and work hard at turning X into a text terminal that can also display graphics.
Meanwhile, I also sit around living with WindowMaker because it's the cleanest GUI I can find (with it's own set of problems, of course.)
What they really said was, "The iPod will only play songs you download from iTMS. Also, the iPod will play songs you download from (almost) anywhere else."
(assuming we're talking a library or something)
it's ridiculous to think that the source is inherently the best documentation there is. Good commenting will tell you all sorts of information, including not just the data type of the function (assuming you're not using a statically typed language), but also what kinds of values to expect (for any language). It will also explain side effects and all of that.
This stuff isn't built into the source, so you have to write it manually - which takes about as much effort to do properly in the source as it is in an external document, so I fail to see where commenting in the source is so great. In some ways it's worse. I don't personally like having to grep a source tree in order to find what function is in what file. So much easier to look in the documentation's index.
(Assuming we're not talking a library)
It's stupid to expect all of your users to know how to read source code. Even if they can program, you shouldn't expect them to know the language you wrote the project in. No, not even if it's specificially designed for working with that programming language, because the person using the project could be new to programming.
Like the parent commenter said, it's stupid to expect your users to read a huge pile of functions in order to understand how the program will respond to various user interactions when they could instead read a few well-written sentences of explanation.
It's also stupid to assume that your users will even have a copy of the source on their computer. Some administrators like to compile binaries and install those rather than expecting their users to compile everything they are supposed to use or cluttering up a workstation with a pile of source code. (Especially if it's older and has a smaller hard drive.)
I have contacted a couple of smaller projects offering to work on documenting their code, but never got a reply.
I've gotten to the point on stuff like this that I try and avoid projects with bad documentation and/or commenting. I figure if they don't want their project to be usable then they probably don't really want people to be using their project all that bad.
. . .that's a plagarism!
Really, editors. Read the articles and if the submitter ripped part of it in place of writing their own synopsis, give credit where credit is due.
The tractor/trailer concept is new, as far as I know, but there are already cars with both regular and railroad compatible wheels. Just drive over the railroad, drop the train wheels, and go.
Considering the main point of this system is to remove pathogens from the water, it'd probably be cheaper and more reliable to use fire or even funny square shaped tinfoil hats.
I think it's worth pointing out that a bootleg of a concert is much more different from a finished album than a lossy compressed version of that album, in a whole lot of ways.
I believe the words you forgot to read are "in the same way." Here, try it with me.
I can flip through those magazines and not have it effect me
I can flip through those magazines and not have it effect me in the same way
See the difference?
Here, we'll try it in context so you can see how much these words matter:
I can flip through those magazines and not have it effect me that it would clearly affect a heterosexual male.
Notice how without them it isn't even a sentence?
And here's a simplified example to show how much they change the meaning of a sentence even without that sort of context:
I don't like foo GUI because it doesn't do drag and drop
I don't like foo GUI because it doesn't do drag and drop in the same way
It'd be interesting if the boss above her listened to marketing much. I've seen plenty of products that bear the signs of having been a good piece of softwate before the marketroids came along and eviscerated it at the last minute, and they might throw a shitfit if there's not enough T&A in a game bearing the Playboy name.
This is true. The growth methods used in agriculture nowadays severely deplete the nutritive qualities of the food, and a lot of the chemicals probably aren't that healthy, either. A lot of GM foods tend to be a lot worse, too.
Of course, these things tend to concentrate as you move up the food chain, so there's a decent chance that you'll find more pesticides and herbicides in a pound of beef than a pound of corn.
I think maybe the nuance here is that doing what's right for the environment isn't always fun. To the extreme environmentalist, it doesn't matter how good meat tastes because the only thing that matters is the environment. To the extreme hedonist, it doesn't matter how much you're harming the enviornment because you can't be bothered to make concessions for things like that. Nobody's saying anything useful with an argument as cursory as "Meat is murder" or "Meat taste good."
While we're on it, the evolution argument is totally shaky. We also evolved to hunt and gather for food rather than sit in cubicles typing all day to earn it. This fact is clearly illustrated by the problems we have with obesity and RSI related to our sedentary lifestyles. You can also make a fairly defensible argument that we did not evolve to be monogamous in any way shape or form, but that's still not saying that monogamy is a bad way to live your life.
Hell, if you're going to argue evolution, then it's silly to even pretend that you can argue about what we were meant to do. Evolution is about as existential a basis for an argument as you can get, and if you're going to accept it as a valid method of reasoning you've got to be willing to abandon arguments based on concepts like predetermination or some sort of Grand Purpose (unless you somehow fit God into the scheme, but that's also completely aside from the point).
You can use evolution as a basis for an argument if you're willing to argue that we should be slaves to our genes, but at that point you're pretty well forced into agreeing that we should be squatting under trees eating (and wearing) raw scraps of rotting carcasses becuse that is, in fact, what we evolved to do.
Unless you're willing to further argue that our brains allow us to go beyond the limits of our basic evolutionary foundations. But then you've suddenly gone full circle and admitted that you can't use evolution as a sturdy argument for anything because you've just really argued that we should be exercising some reason and agency in our choice of lifestyle.
And as one last point, the whole thing about how much a cow suffers has a lot to do with the farm practises. Free range cows do spend a few years wandering around eating the best food the ranch can afford to make available to them. Too bad everything that isn't explicitly labeled free range generally comes from feed lots rather than ranches.
What, and the parent wasn't a troll? Let's leave the troll moderation to people who are actually trolling rather than using it to push a side in some half-assed squabble.
It's true that this cow-gut memory storage device wouldn't be vegan, and it's fair to poke fun at vegans over it. But it's also true that the hormones and additives that go into mass-produced meat have adverse effects on humans that have been measured and documented in research. (Real, peer-reviewed research. All that bullshit pseudoscience 'research' that PETA and its spinoffs do doesn't count.)
What was that thing they used to tell us in grade school? Something like "Don't dish it out if you can't take it, too."
No, that's just a naming convention and actually changes depending on which filesystem you are running OS X on. It just tries to abstract the differences away since you shouldn't have to worry about them.
/etc, /lib, /bin, etc.
OS X still uses the old OS9 style hierarchy (which is also similar to the one used in NEXTSTEP) with stuff in folders with names like System, Library, Applications, etc. rather than
I've been using fink for a while, and I'd have to say that it does not have all the tools I love. It sure has a lot of them, but not all. Even some of the ones it does have are iffy - gnucash, for example.
/, what crap you have in /sw, and what crap you have in both but is marginally different because / has the BSD version and /sw has the gnu version.
As for beauty, if by beauty you mean having a computer that contains three marginally but not entirely independent file hierarchies, yes, fink is beautiful. If you use fink for much more than a few X apps you like and think it's fun to have to remember what crap you have in
Fink is a great system for getting a few apps you need to work on your Mac, but it's not a perfect solution for every situation or every person. Heck, I dual boot Linux and OS X on my PB, but I also use Fink. Whatever works.
With Phantasy Star Collection, they crammed the first three Phantasy Star games onto one GBA cart, and had to write two emulators (Sega Master System for I, Sega Genesis for II and III.) For three great games, I spent 20 bucks.
Nintendo, on the other hand, wants me to spend 30 bucks apiece for these games. I find that hard to swallow considering that, even if some of these are amazing games, this series is still just shovelware.
I didn't spring for the VGA graphics card just to waste it on drawing a GUI.
But do you really want Joe College Student, who has a big fat two digit number in his pocket and a big negative five digit number on his student loan to be exposed to the risk of getting sued over some barely-tested and half-broken piece of software whose source he posted to the web incase somebody else wanted to work with it?
Ask the legal team who gets that money when the gift certificate expires and why it says no cash value.
The customer didn't open an account with the Gap, they bought an I.O.U. from the Gap.