This is par for the course where I live. I live near Amsterdam, 30km from Schiphol airport, yet flying is invariably much cheaper if I first go to Brussels, Frankfurt, or one of the other nearby airports. And quite often those flights make a stop in Amsterdam...
Although it won't be news to most of us - how many here have actually ever tried getting vendor support on a software application? I've had to call support for obscure hardware and software, but never for an operating system.
And once business see that Linux runs reliably and problems can be solved efficiently by the people they already pay anyway, the choice to migrate ever-larger systems to Linux becomes not only easy, but natural.
Serious question: would your company be interested in a large-scale data acquisition application? My company makes one; it was originally developer for a specific customer, but we are now looking for further customers. It is powerful and mature, and it runs happily on Windows and Linux (and other forms of UNIX)...
Could you maybe refer to us to the RFC that forbids the use of undesirable words in email addresses? If his name were l@bshitz, I understand why it wouldn't be possible, but this is just political correctness taken to its most silly extreme.
What's next? Should be be forbidden to get a telephone number in his own name? Not being allowed to open a bank account with his name on it? Be refused entry to any English-speaking countries for having a rude name?
Note that the article is just as guilty: they do not want to print the word "shit", asking the guy what they are supposed to print instead...
Some sort of transition period is indeed necessary, and the mechanism that you suggest should give anyone enough time to determine if they own any works they want to keep copyright on. Actually a fresh 14 years for every work would also be acceptable to me; the situation would normalize after those 14 years anyway.
I disagree with your last statement, though: it should be clear to everyone whether something is under copyright or not. That's why I want a simple and transparent process: if a work is under 14 years old it is automatically copyrighted. If it is over 14 years old, the copyright office may be queried to see if the work is still under copyright or not.
The copyright office keeps a list of works older than 14 years. If a work is on the list and marked as copyrighted, it is copyrighted. If a work is not on the list, or marked as lapsed, it is not copyrighted. By not involving them with any cases where a work is less than 14 years old, the workload for the copyright office stays managable (and for works older than 14 years, they get paid by the copyright owners anyway).
Incidentally, the Dutch patent system already works a bit like this: although there is a limit of 20 years, the last ten years see progressive fees for each further year of patent protection.
Copyright requires progressive taxation. That really is the answer: if people or corporations want something to be under copyright, let them pay for the privilege. Start of with a free period of, say, 14 years. Then make it progressively more expensive for each year afterwards.
That way Disney gets what they want (indefinite copyright on profitable characters), the public gets what it wants (most works will quickly revert into public domain), and the government gets what it wants (another new stream of income).
Here you go. Follow the links at the bottom for numerous examples of strings that are well over a thousand bits long, and represent programs in different computer languages.
He did mention "say goodbye to Word and Excel", which _is_ a tactical nuke as far as most companies are concerned. And it is probably safest to suggest it from some far away place, like a stable orbit...
Completely off-topic, I know, but at work I'm about to start a major project that will use OpenOffice for all its documentation needs. And it will not be a trial or something like that: we will be using it because it is the best tool for the job.
They could just let individual air lines react to market forces.
I have no problem with that. Although it is difficult to bring a decent weapon on board a plane today, I am big and strong enough that I can strangle most cell-phone users with my bare hands and maybe a seatbelt (if it's a fatty). I imagine that after this has happened 4-5 times during a flight, the others might get the hint.
I would however suggest a new rule, which is that you can keep the seat of anyone you kill for legitimate reasons while in flight. And their laptop, of course - so you have a decoy for when you go through border security.
I mean, if ever there was an excuse for raging bloodlust, it is being packed into a tiny container with hundreds of other people, all yapping away at their cellphones... With no possibility of escape...
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff wrote in an opinion piece published last month in USA Today that "the most dangerous contraband is often contained in laptop computers or other electronic devices." Searches have uncovered "violent jihadist materials" as well as images of child pornography, he wrote.
But that's excellent news! The most dangerous contraband in your country is not drugs, firearms, poisons, nuclear materials, deadly diseases, or anything of the kind - it is just words!
If you think about it, that happens to be absolutely true. The most dangerous thing out there today is "ideas". If you are an out of control fascist government, that is...
Yeah, all the free music from Beethoven can't hold a candle to Britney Spears.
What "free" music from Beethoven is that? Is there any place on the internet where you can legally download "free" music from Beethoven?
Beethoven himself might not be in a position to claim copyrights anymore, but any recording is _also_ subject to copyrights by the individual artists performing the music (according to the Rome Convention - look it up). So any Beethoven CD you can find in the shops today, or any Beethoven record your grandparents might have in the attack, is still subject to copyright, and that copyright will outlast you just as much as Beethoven's would, were he still alive.
Let's face it, the system is very carefully designed so that you will never, NEVER, see any works appear in the public domain.
Yeah, but at least it follows the SSAS ("Slashdot Standards for Accuracy in Summaries") pretty well! Let's see:
- The summary calls the vehicle "X38B". - The article calls it "X37B". - But the article also has a picture of a craft clearly labelled "X40A". Of course that could just be a red herring.
Maybe the editors figured they'd just average the numbers from the article to be on the safe side?
Sure, the US price probably doesn't include VAT while the European price does. So let's take those 20% (roughly) of the European prices: that will be $720 for Dreamweaver (1.8 times US cost), and $460 for Expression Web 2 (1.5 times US cost). And I've checked with a local retailer; those are prices for non-localized versions, so that excuse does not apply.
The catch is that we are being ripped off, plain and simple.
Incidentally, the same is true for books. Books are ridiculously overpriced here, and for scientific or technical books it is _always_ _much_ cheaper to order them from Amazon than to buy them from a local bookstore. Even including transportation cost, the difference can be well over a factor two!
The silver lining is of course, that Amazon sells software as well...
It's an MS Word addon that is specifically designed for highly technical formulas. I cannot personally rate it, as I don't use it. However the people who are using it are professors of electrical or computer engineering, so it clearly works for that field at least.
As a rule, you should mistrust anything electrical engineers do with computers. There is something in their mindset that makes them approach computers in a weird and often highly impractical way, in my (considerable) experience...
I write lots of technical documents at work (proposals, user manuals, test plans and reports, requirements documents, etc.) using DocBook, and for that purpose it is extremely useful. I don't have much use of equations, so I cannot really comment on how well that works.
One thing I've done is create a few extremely simple DTD's for things like user requirements, system requirements, and test cases. These are then transformed into DocBook using XSLT (the language of the devil, I tell you...), generating all the required tracing tables automatically, and in the process saving me an incredible amount of work.
I guess DocBook is a bit more limited than LaTeX, but for what I do it is great and it creates very pretty PDF's and HTML.
Are you actually proposing to edit XML-FO by hand? I had the impression that it was intended to be an intermediate format, generated only by conversion from more readable XML sources...
Europeans are even sillier these days where NATO and UN have to beg plead and extort to get a handful of European soldiers to come within a few hundred miles of a place where they might possibly get shot at.
Speak for yourself there. Why exactly should we come and clean up after you start not one, but two illegal and pointless wars? Wars that we strongly advised against? That is the reason you don't see too many European soldiers in Afghanistan or Iraq. It has precisely nothing to do with risk adversity, and everything with the american attitude of "we can do it alone".
Bad IT policy, or bad users? IT is sadly not as much a dictatorship as we'd like. If enough users whine, it ends up being policy that passwords get lax. These users "are too important to have to come up with complex passwords incorporating at least 3 different character types in 8 or more characters"
Make password policies too complex, users just write them down. Frying pan, fire...welcome to IT.
Of course! Take my PC at work: I am required to use a different password every six months, and it has to be long and contain three different character types. And after ten minutes of inactivity, my PC automatically locks the screen. Great security, right?
Except... Outsiders cannot physically get into the office, and the PC cannot be reached from the internet, so the only potential source of hackers are my colleagues. And since all data is kept on network disks anyway, and since those are accessible to everyone in the office, what's the f'ing point!? All it does is make my fingers contort several times per day to enter an impossible password, even though "12345" would offer the exact same level of protection!
So yes, I have only limited respect for password policies. You'll find my PC password on the yellow post-it on the left monitor. That way my colleagues can check my mail when I'm not there. It makes me feel a whole lot better that important mails will not go missed during my absence...
The real attraction, though, is under their shoes.
If these crystals have never been observed before, shouldn't they be observing instead of walking on them?
That's ok they've also never been walked on before. So that's also a first.
Personally I'm more worried about the three dozen species of microbes we've never before encountered. If you read about a mysterious plague sweeping through Mexico and leaving no one alive, well - better get yourself enough water and food and ammo, and prepare to not let anyone near your house for a few months...
You know, this argument always comes up and I firmly believe it is rubbish. Software is NOT math, and the fact that computer science gets linked to math courses in almost every university is actually harmful (because it scares off people who might otherwise have become very good computer scientists, and because it propogates this "software is math" fallacy).
Granted, math is a tool used in software engineering to achieve certain effects. That does not turn software into math. And you can use math to describe (some) software. That also does not turn software into math.
The essential difference is this: software is an engineering discipline, while mathematics is a science. Therefore they cannot possibly be the same thing. And until I see a proper software science, I will not buy into the "software is math" fallacy, and neither should anyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
This is par for the course where I live. I live near Amsterdam, 30km from Schiphol airport, yet flying is invariably much cheaper if I first go to Brussels, Frankfurt, or one of the other nearby airports. And quite often those flights make a stop in Amsterdam...
Although it won't be news to most of us - how many here have actually ever tried getting vendor support on a software application? I've had to call support for obscure hardware and software, but never for an operating system.
And once business see that Linux runs reliably and problems can be solved efficiently by the people they already pay anyway, the choice to migrate ever-larger systems to Linux becomes not only easy, but natural.
Those smug Java-bastards will no doubt be scratching their collective heads now - hahaha, you wish you had a void* now huh?
The only job left for you in the future will be collecting garbage!
(I think I can see the humorless trolls circling already ;-) )
Serious question: would your company be interested in a large-scale data acquisition application? My company makes one; it was originally developer for a specific customer, but we are now looking for further customers. It is powerful and mature, and it runs happily on Windows and Linux (and other forms of UNIX)...
What's Oxygene?
It is one of the two types of Atomes that make up Watere. The other is Hydrogene.
If you have any other questions about Chemistrye, I'll be happy to answer them for you!
Could you maybe refer to us to the RFC that forbids the use of undesirable words in email addresses? If his name were l@bshitz, I understand why it wouldn't be possible, but this is just political correctness taken to its most silly extreme.
What's next? Should be be forbidden to get a telephone number in his own name? Not being allowed to open a bank account with his name on it? Be refused entry to any English-speaking countries for having a rude name?
Note that the article is just as guilty: they do not want to print the word "shit", asking the guy what they are supposed to print instead...
Some sort of transition period is indeed necessary, and the mechanism that you suggest should give anyone enough time to determine if they own any works they want to keep copyright on. Actually a fresh 14 years for every work would also be acceptable to me; the situation would normalize after those 14 years anyway.
I disagree with your last statement, though: it should be clear to everyone whether something is under copyright or not. That's why I want a simple and transparent process: if a work is under 14 years old it is automatically copyrighted. If it is over 14 years old, the copyright office may be queried to see if the work is still under copyright or not.
The copyright office keeps a list of works older than 14 years. If a work is on the list and marked as copyrighted, it is copyrighted. If a work is not on the list, or marked as lapsed, it is not copyrighted. By not involving them with any cases where a work is less than 14 years old, the workload for the copyright office stays managable (and for works older than 14 years, they get paid by the copyright owners anyway).
Incidentally, the Dutch patent system already works a bit like this: although there is a limit of 20 years, the last ten years see progressive fees for each further year of patent protection.
Copyright requires progressive taxation. That really is the answer: if people or corporations want something to be under copyright, let them pay for the privilege. Start of with a free period of, say, 14 years. Then make it progressively more expensive for each year afterwards.
That way Disney gets what they want (indefinite copyright on profitable characters), the public gets what it wants (most works will quickly revert into public domain), and the government gets what it wants (another new stream of income).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyglot_(computing)
Here you go. Follow the links at the bottom for numerous examples of strings that are well over a thousand bits long, and represent programs in different computer languages.
He did mention "say goodbye to Word and Excel", which _is_ a tactical nuke as far as most companies are concerned. And it is probably safest to suggest it from some far away place, like a stable orbit...
Completely off-topic, I know, but at work I'm about to start a major project that will use OpenOffice for all its documentation needs. And it will not be a trial or something like that: we will be using it because it is the best tool for the job.
They could just let individual air lines react to market forces.
I have no problem with that. Although it is difficult to bring a decent weapon on board a plane today, I am big and strong enough that I can strangle most cell-phone users with my bare hands and maybe a seatbelt (if it's a fatty). I imagine that after this has happened 4-5 times during a flight, the others might get the hint.
I would however suggest a new rule, which is that you can keep the seat of anyone you kill for legitimate reasons while in flight. And their laptop, of course - so you have a decoy for when you go through border security.
I mean, if ever there was an excuse for raging bloodlust, it is being packed into a tiny container with hundreds of other people, all yapping away at their cellphones... With no possibility of escape...
But that's excellent news! The most dangerous contraband in your country is not drugs, firearms, poisons, nuclear materials, deadly diseases, or anything of the kind - it is just words!
If you think about it, that happens to be absolutely true. The most dangerous thing out there today is "ideas". If you are an out of control fascist government, that is...
Yeah, all the free music from Beethoven can't hold a candle to Britney Spears.
What "free" music from Beethoven is that? Is there any place on the internet where you can legally download "free" music from Beethoven?
Beethoven himself might not be in a position to claim copyrights anymore, but any recording is _also_ subject to copyrights by the individual artists performing the music (according to the Rome Convention - look it up). So any Beethoven CD you can find in the shops today, or any Beethoven record your grandparents might have in the attack, is still subject to copyright, and that copyright will outlast you just as much as Beethoven's would, were he still alive.
Let's face it, the system is very carefully designed so that you will never, NEVER, see any works appear in the public domain.
If you define 'innovation' as copying someone else's idea in almost every detail.
The innovation here is that the game now plays on the internet.
Hey, it is good enough for patents...
Yeah, but at least it follows the SSAS ("Slashdot Standards for Accuracy in Summaries") pretty well! Let's see:
- The summary calls the vehicle "X38B".
- The article calls it "X37B".
- But the article also has a picture of a craft clearly labelled "X40A". Of course that could just be a red herring.
Maybe the editors figured they'd just average the numbers from the article to be on the safe side?
It comes up with all my carefully hidden pr0n links, which can lead to embarrassing situations when someone else is using my computer.
Really, that's all that's wrong with the awesome bar...
Simple. They can get away with it.
Sure, the US price probably doesn't include VAT while the European price does. So let's take those 20% (roughly) of the European prices: that will be $720 for Dreamweaver (1.8 times US cost), and $460 for Expression Web 2 (1.5 times US cost). And I've checked with a local retailer; those are prices for non-localized versions, so that excuse does not apply.
The catch is that we are being ripped off, plain and simple.
Incidentally, the same is true for books. Books are ridiculously overpriced here, and for scientific or technical books it is _always_ _much_ cheaper to order them from Amazon than to buy them from a local bookstore. Even including transportation cost, the difference can be well over a factor two!
The silver lining is of course, that Amazon sells software as well...
It's an MS Word addon that is specifically designed for highly technical formulas. I cannot personally rate it, as I don't use it. However the people who are using it are professors of electrical or computer engineering, so it clearly works for that field at least.
As a rule, you should mistrust anything electrical engineers do with computers. There is something in their mindset that makes them approach computers in a weird and often highly impractical way, in my (considerable) experience...
I write lots of technical documents at work (proposals, user manuals, test plans and reports, requirements documents, etc.) using DocBook, and for that purpose it is extremely useful. I don't have much use of equations, so I cannot really comment on how well that works.
One thing I've done is create a few extremely simple DTD's for things like user requirements, system requirements, and test cases. These are then transformed into DocBook using XSLT (the language of the devil, I tell you...), generating all the required tracing tables automatically, and in the process saving me an incredible amount of work.
I guess DocBook is a bit more limited than LaTeX, but for what I do it is great and it creates very pretty PDF's and HTML.
Are you actually proposing to edit XML-FO by hand? I had the impression that it was intended to be an intermediate format, generated only by conversion from more readable XML sources...
Europeans are even sillier these days where NATO and UN have to beg plead and extort to get a handful of European soldiers to come within a few hundred miles of a place where they might possibly get shot at.
Speak for yourself there. Why exactly should we come and clean up after you start not one, but two illegal and pointless wars? Wars that we strongly advised against? That is the reason you don't see too many European soldiers in Afghanistan or Iraq. It has precisely nothing to do with risk adversity, and everything with the american attitude of "we can do it alone".
Bad IT policy, or bad users? IT is sadly not as much a dictatorship as we'd like. If enough users whine, it ends up being policy that passwords get lax. These users "are too important to have to come up with complex passwords incorporating at least 3 different character types in 8 or more characters"
Make password policies too complex, users just write them down. Frying pan, fire...welcome to IT.
Of course! Take my PC at work: I am required to use a different password every six months, and it has to be long and contain three different character types. And after ten minutes of inactivity, my PC automatically locks the screen. Great security, right?
Except... Outsiders cannot physically get into the office, and the PC cannot be reached from the internet, so the only potential source of hackers are my colleagues. And since all data is kept on network disks anyway, and since those are accessible to everyone in the office, what's the f'ing point!? All it does is make my fingers contort several times per day to enter an impossible password, even though "12345" would offer the exact same level of protection!
So yes, I have only limited respect for password policies. You'll find my PC password on the yellow post-it on the left monitor. That way my colleagues can check my mail when I'm not there. It makes me feel a whole lot better that important mails will not go missed during my absence...
Ah damn it, I meant to say *New* Mexico...
The real attraction, though, is under their shoes.
If these crystals have never been observed before, shouldn't they be observing instead of walking on them?
That's ok they've also never been walked on before. So that's also a first.
Personally I'm more worried about the three dozen species of microbes we've never before encountered. If you read about a mysterious plague sweeping through Mexico and leaving no one alive, well - better get yourself enough water and food and ammo, and prepare to not let anyone near your house for a few months...
You know, this argument always comes up and I firmly believe it is rubbish. Software is NOT math, and the fact that computer science gets linked to math courses in almost every university is actually harmful (because it scares off people who might otherwise have become very good computer scientists, and because it propogates this "software is math" fallacy).
Granted, math is a tool used in software engineering to achieve certain effects. That does not turn software into math. And you can use math to describe (some) software. That also does not turn software into math.
The essential difference is this: software is an engineering discipline, while mathematics is a science. Therefore they cannot possibly be the same thing. And until I see a proper software science, I will not buy into the "software is math" fallacy, and neither should anyone else.
Hans
I know. Although I haven't really seen any major new methodology rise since Agile. Maybe I'm losing track. Maybe you should get off my lawn.