You are assuming that there is a link between intelligence and the ability to spell. I am a horrible speller, and I consistantly score in the top 5% for intelligence.
A lot of departments give tests for general intelligence, and reject anyone who scores too high. I was just taking an opportunity to make fun of cops, and I wasn't the spellNazi.
For what it's worth, you sound just like my wife. Very intelligent, can't spell for shit. But I don't think there's an inverse correlation either. Grammar nazis are just assholes.
The survey didn't mention how subjects were selected, what if some of them are also drug users? And I think people are more willing to reveal their email addiction than their drug adddiction.
Studies also show that being a "researcher" at King's college makes you unable to construct a proper control group, or to understand the distinction between correlation and causality.
People's fluid definitions of 'innovation' (which change depending on which company they're talking about) annoy me at the best of times, but are you really saying that a me-too mp3 player is really a 'truly great innovation'?
Of course it was. Apple made it.
Hide your children and your karma! Mac-heads with mod points are out!
I only see three possibilities: no water in the kernal, not enough water in the kernal, or it leaks out during popping. 1 and 2 could be easily tested after popping some. Am I missing something?
You're missing how obvious this is. Other than that I have no idea. Funny, isn't it, how little grasp people have of basic experimental design?
I remember when I could not afford a 2 gig hard drive.
Oh yeah? I remember when BIOS couldn't support 2G. I remember when most computers didn't have hard drives. I remember when floppies were low density/360K. I remember punch cards. I remember when Babbage invented the mechanical computational engine.
OK, I lied about the last one. But I do remember Neal Stephenson fictionalizing it in the Baroque Cycle via Daniel Waterhouse...;)
Blame the standards committee. If the language wasn't damn near unparsable, it would be easy to support various things as warnings. But C++ is so hard to parse that many things that weren't flagged were parser errors, and were almost impossible to support in a new fixed parser.
Oh, I do blame them. But I still don't see why warnings are absolutely impossible for a lot of behavior - and I'm mostly talking about the stylistic "errors" that 3.0+ had. Seems if it parsed and compiled before...
Standards are the reason that computers are tolerable to use for any purpose.
If a programmer can't be bothered to follow an international standard of his own language, there is no guarantee that the code is future-proof.
1. The standard isn't static. 2. That's the point of warnings. If it will be an error within the next few years, it should be a warning now.
One can hardly blame the compiler vendor, as we can't expect a compiler to mindlessly maintain backwards compatibility with every weird use of a bug and every bizarre code construct that has ever been supported in the past.
Yes we can. It should be supported without flagging errors but with warnings for quite a while before previously unwarned code is broken.
The ability to compile code written for GCC in another compiler is a *good* thing.
Yes, it is. Conversely, the inability to compile code written in GCC using GCC is a bad thing.
If it requires informing the programmer that their code has always been broken
It wasn't broken. It worked quite well. It compiled. It didn't even get flagged as a warning. If the behavior was so bad (and it wasn't!) then it should have been flagged as a warning at least in the last version.
A little inconvenience is a small price to pay for standards compliance
Not when 1) it isn't a little, 2) it's unnecessary, and 3) it was avoidable. Blind and immediate implementation of standards isn't a virtue when it breaks backward compatibility. If you're a programmer, ask your boss if it's OK that you change a function upon which every program depends in a way that will break compatibility. See how far that gets you. There's a reason.
or should we expect that the GCC authors "embrace and extend" C and other languages
Actually, that's what they're basically doing. They're embracing NEW standards too quickly and breaking good code. I'm not suggesting they do anything that wasn't ever part of a standard - I'm suggesting they delay standard implementation, basing errors off the old standard and warnings off the new. Best of both worlds.
until so much code relies on weird GCC nuggets that programmers (and users) are "locked in" to using just that compiler?
It's better now when not only are you locked in to a compiler, you're locked in to a specific *version* of a compiler?
Maybe I am missing something. If so, please enlighten me (This is not a sarcastic remark--I haven't done much research on what 4.0 has broken so I may be way out of line).
Not taken as such - what you're missing is that when you're maintaining a large project, that sort of behavior on behalf of your compiler is NOT acceptable, particularly in a corporate environment. No company will trust GCC if absolutely no backward compatibility is guaranteed, as managing legacy code is a reality, and rewriting it all isn't an option. Anything that will be flagged as a warning in the future should be flagged as a warning for quite some time. Particularly when the new "errors" are in large part stylistic.
Anyone who doesn't contribute code themselves should be greatful (or at least appreciative) of their efforts, even when they do make mistakes.
1. They do good work. 2. Appreciation doesn't mean silence, and it doesn't mean no suggestions. 3. These "mistakes" are intentional design decisions. Note I'm not jumping them for any bugs (if there are any). I'm suggesting that they need a new direction if they would like any sort of adoption of GCC for more mature applications involving codebases that will be in active use for more than a year.
Blame the standards committee, not the GCC maintainers.
They could have delayed implementation of parts of the standard, the standards committee doesn't have any power. There should be a period of years where anything that wasn't flagged is at least flagged as a warning before being flagged as an error.
A programmer should be able to *know* his code is going to break within a certain time, and if he still does it, his fault.
So yeah, I blame GCC. I wrote code that generated no errors. Ported it over to a system whose compiler was 1 year newer, and it wouldn't compile. That's bad. That's dumb.
Only did a dry-suit dive once (just for the experience of the suiting up proceedure,etc) and since they can act as a flotation device (especially wiht the warm fuzzies underneath) it shouldn't be much of a problem... Hands, feet, and face will be awful cold though.
That *is* the problem. You try actually surface swimming in that dry suit? You can't get anywhere because you float far too well. Can't get traction in the water.
I think the biggest problem with linux is its incessant forking.
Not all distros do. Pick an old-school, stable distro. Don't go with some flavor-of-the-month. Try something like Slackware, or shit if you want stable, Debian stable is rock solid. Linux gives you the freedom of choice to pick the right distro for you.
I find it astonishing when a person revels in their own ignorance.
And later you say you don't like ad hominem attacks. Tsk, tsk.
Do you understand why RMS professes the things he does? If you don't, why debase him? If you do, why debase him?
Um, I haven't talked to him. But I have a pretty decent idea. Mix of ideology and ego. I don't think I debase him. Gently poke fun, maybe. All I said was it's fun to see him get pissed, don't know why you're going nuts on this.
The fact that RMS has the courage to speak for his convictions despite the masses ridiculing him for it endlessly is worthy of admiration.
That's one possibility. Or it could be a measure of his arrogance. Replace "RMS" with "Hitler, 1930" and you get the same result. Certainly spoke out about his convictions in the face of ridicule. I don't think that's a virtue in itself.
Do you have that strong conviction in anything?
No, because I'm open-minded. My ideas aren't based in ideology and leap-of-faith. I don't consider my ideas to be inherently better to anyone else's, so I actually listen and change my mind on issues. I consider that a sign of flexibiltiy and a strength.
Furthermore... have you any cogent argument for why RMS's arguments for GNU/Linux are wrong?
I think that's kind of a taste/opinion issue, not really a fact-based right/wrong sort of determination. Furthermore, I don't care. That he does is funny. It also shows that he cares more substantially about credit for things than with propogation of information, which seems a tad at odds with his supposed beliefs.
I should mention, that I am yet to one say "GNU/Linux" and have probably typed it for the first time here... but that does not change matters of course. (Just want to preempt moronic "zealot" ad hominem attacks.)
Um...sure. Though if you aren't an RMS acolyte (see? I didn't say zealot:>), I wonder why you defend him so vigorously. Since I really didn't hammer him.
Put it this way - he's fun to poke because he takes himself FAR too seriously. There's also a certain amount of self-righteousness, arrogance, and holier-than-thou-ness to him. For a good example, try here: http://www.newsforge.com/print.pl?sid=04/12/08/222 9209. To the simple question of "what's your favorite beer," Stallman responds:
I do not like beer. It tastes bitter. In the AI Lab hacker community of the '70s, people did not like alcohol in general. We wanted to make our minds sharper, not duller. When our community was more or less wiped out in the '80s (see "Hackers," by Steve Levy), this and many of its other cultural traits were not adopted by the new hacker community. In this case, the foolish majority's influence triumphed over the wiser minority.
I mean, come on. This guy seems to have a problem with having any sort of a balanced life. He doesn't seem to have the confidence to relax and trust that he can let his guard down and have people take him seriously. Ironically, the result is actually the reverse.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter to me. As long as his proposal for GPL 3 doesn't materialize, because that could torpedo OSS. Although more likely it would make the FSF completely irrelevant, so it's his choice.
If RMS reads that line he'll have a freaking heart attack!
Not that I pay attention to the guy, but under his definition of Linux (just the kernel) that statement("Linux founder and leader Linus Torvalds..") would be quite correct.
Now if you said "GNU/Linux founder and leader, Linus..." he'd get pissed. In fact, I think that would be funny.
Nice. Our President lies to us about weapons of mass destruction and drags us into an unjust war that has cost thousands of Americn lives, but I'm the felon.
That might have been the red herring of the year. Congrats. Got a good response too.
It's good that they're developing something like this, but it's sick that they're trying to patent it. Next they will try to make money from it. An extension to something as important as 911 should not be corporate.
You could say the same thing about curing cancer, but see how far that gets you with the pharm industry. Fact is that it isn't cheaper to solve important problems than it is mundane ones - usually the reverse. If you expect a solution, and the government can't do it alone, the private sector needs to get involved. That means someone needs to make money off of it.
I can't help but wonder if after a certain point, that instead of taking classes where there's an actual lecturer, that instead a tape of the lecturer from a previous course is instead used for a class.
On top of that, actual questions could be answered from TAs, or perhaps the professor himself or herself.
My grad advisor did that. Guess he didn't want to spend time on a class anymore, so he taped it and showed that during successive years. A TA had all interaction with students.
It makes you think about what is happening to education, and if this is a good or bad thing.
I don't think it's good. Makes you wonder why kids would go to a "good" school if they get taught by TAs - I could go to a small state school and get actually get taught by profs.
Opera is an innovative company that puts out an outstanding and lightweight product. Google and the Firefox team have a lot to thank Opera for.
Yeah, it's nice of them to develop a good browser with nice features, not patent those features, and then let another group making a free browser steal it all and give their browser away.
It's tough to sell a product when your competitor is giving it away.
Regarding your libraries/filters argument, there's a difference between *forcing* libraries to use filters and *allowing* them to do it. In your example, forcing libraries to filter is illegal. Allowing them to do so is not. In this case, we have the state deciding to offer filtered net content. Different story.
Bottom line, any provider - ISP, library, rest stop, my personal network, school, company, whatever - whether gov or not - has the right to decide what content it wants to provide. However, the gov cannot prevent those entities from making their own decisions on that basis. That would be censorship.
Content providers can regulate the content they provide. Even for the press. You still have the right to provide your own content, or to get it through other means. But the government is not required to be a blind conduit, when it acts as a content provider it's allowed to decide what content it provides.
Thats funny, I bought 2 systems from Dell with Freedos on them. Dell does support alternatives, but only if it will be profitable.
Yeah? That's interesting. I'd like to see how you swung that. Seriously, how'd you go about it and how much did you save on the Windows tax?
I'm imagining you did it by taking an OS w/o support. That would probably still fit within my general thesis, in that the slight extra overhead of supporting FreeDOS gets them out of a support contract. A bit different than supporting a whole different line of chipsets and such.
Actually, there is a tariff on photocopiers and toner in Canada, with the proceeds going to rightsholders. And libraries have to keep complete logs send in part of their copy machine income to CanCopy [uwinnipeg.ca] as well.
Fantastic! You guys really have that corporate welfare thing kicking up there. I still want to know who divides the cash. I mean, don't get me wrong, we have our corporate handouts here in the states. But I like the refreshingly overt take you guys have on it, taxing everyone instead of the guilty.
I don't think the tariffs are high enough.
Um, why? Are you a publishing house? Do you like handing over your money to a goverment/business consortium? Do you have a masochistic streak? Do you overpay your income taxes as well just to stay on the safe side?
There's no "punishment"
That tax is a punishment. You're not paying the copyright industry because they're nice guys. You're paying them (nominally) to compensate them for illegal behavior on the behalf of other people. I call that a punishment.
and you don't help your argument by using such loaded language.
I call it like I see it. Call it a punishment, a penalty, whatever. It amounts to the same thing. You're penalizing the innocent. Here in the states, we at least make sure the RIAA penalizes the "guilty," and we don't much like that either.
We agree. If your gun is designed for killing people, handguns for example, you'll go to jail for owning it. Better stick to hunting rifles and shotguns.
It's not punishment. Its trying to be fair to everyone.
It's not fair to anyone who's not pirating!
Copiers aren't taxed since they don't affect the business models of book publishers to any great degree. The tariff money is supposed to be evenly divided amongst copyright holders.
Man, talk about corporate welfare! And what does "evenly divided" mean? And does any of that get to artists? Which ones?
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of departments give tests for general intelligence, and reject anyone who scores too high. I was just taking an opportunity to make fun of cops, and I wasn't the spellNazi.
For what it's worth, you sound just like my wife. Very intelligent, can't spell for shit. But I don't think there's an inverse correlation either. Grammar nazis are just assholes.
The survey didn't mention how subjects were selected, what if some of them are also drug users? And I think people are more willing to reveal their email addiction than their drug adddiction.
Studies also show that being a "researcher" at King's college makes you unable to construct a proper control group, or to understand the distinction between correlation and causality.
Not his fault. His department probably rejects anyone who scores too high on the entrance exam as they do here (scroll down a few stories).
Of course it was. Apple made it.
Hide your children and your karma! Mac-heads with mod points are out!
You're missing how obvious this is. Other than that I have no idea. Funny, isn't it, how little grasp people have of basic experimental design?
Oh yeah? I remember when BIOS couldn't support 2G. I remember when most computers didn't have hard drives. I remember when floppies were low density/360K. I remember punch cards. I remember when Babbage invented the mechanical computational engine.
OK, I lied about the last one. But I do remember Neal Stephenson fictionalizing it in the Baroque Cycle via Daniel Waterhouse...;)
Oh, I do blame them. But I still don't see why warnings are absolutely impossible for a lot of behavior - and I'm mostly talking about the stylistic "errors" that 3.0+ had. Seems if it parsed and compiled before...
This is true. But no one mentioned a weightbelt, perhaps I'm being obnoxious today.
but without flippers it will be hard to get enough "shove" in the water to move.
Also true. Oddly enough, I gave him credit for fins if not the belt.
I do like the idea of an outboard motor though :)
I've thought about it while trying to get out a few hundred yards in the Pacifid before descending. ;)
1. The standard isn't static. 2. That's the point of warnings. If it will be an error within the next few years, it should be a warning now.
One can hardly blame the compiler vendor, as we can't expect a compiler to mindlessly maintain backwards compatibility with every weird use of a bug and every bizarre code construct that has ever been supported in the past.
Yes we can. It should be supported without flagging errors but with warnings for quite a while before previously unwarned code is broken.
The ability to compile code written for GCC in another compiler is a *good* thing.
Yes, it is. Conversely, the inability to compile code written in GCC using GCC is a bad thing.
If it requires informing the programmer that their code has always been broken
It wasn't broken. It worked quite well. It compiled. It didn't even get flagged as a warning. If the behavior was so bad (and it wasn't!) then it should have been flagged as a warning at least in the last version.
A little inconvenience is a small price to pay for standards compliance
Not when 1) it isn't a little, 2) it's unnecessary, and 3) it was avoidable. Blind and immediate implementation of standards isn't a virtue when it breaks backward compatibility. If you're a programmer, ask your boss if it's OK that you change a function upon which every program depends in a way that will break compatibility. See how far that gets you. There's a reason.
or should we expect that the GCC authors "embrace and extend" C and other languages
Actually, that's what they're basically doing. They're embracing NEW standards too quickly and breaking good code. I'm not suggesting they do anything that wasn't ever part of a standard - I'm suggesting they delay standard implementation, basing errors off the old standard and warnings off the new. Best of both worlds.
until so much code relies on weird GCC nuggets that programmers (and users) are "locked in" to using just that compiler?
It's better now when not only are you locked in to a compiler, you're locked in to a specific *version* of a compiler?
Maybe I am missing something. If so, please enlighten me (This is not a sarcastic remark--I haven't done much research on what 4.0 has broken so I may be way out of line).
Not taken as such - what you're missing is that when you're maintaining a large project, that sort of behavior on behalf of your compiler is NOT acceptable, particularly in a corporate environment. No company will trust GCC if absolutely no backward compatibility is guaranteed, as managing legacy code is a reality, and rewriting it all isn't an option. Anything that will be flagged as a warning in the future should be flagged as a warning for quite some time. Particularly when the new "errors" are in large part stylistic.
Anyone who doesn't contribute code themselves should be greatful (or at least appreciative) of their efforts, even when they do make mistakes.
1. They do good work. 2. Appreciation doesn't mean silence, and it doesn't mean no suggestions. 3. These "mistakes" are intentional design decisions. Note I'm not jumping them for any bugs (if there are any). I'm suggesting that they need a new direction if they would like any sort of adoption of GCC for more mature applications involving codebases that will be in active use for more than a year.
They could have delayed implementation of parts of the standard, the standards committee doesn't have any power. There should be a period of years where anything that wasn't flagged is at least flagged as a warning before being flagged as an error.
A programmer should be able to *know* his code is going to break within a certain time, and if he still does it, his fault.
So yeah, I blame GCC. I wrote code that generated no errors. Ported it over to a system whose compiler was 1 year newer, and it wouldn't compile. That's bad. That's dumb.
That *is* the problem. You try actually surface swimming in that dry suit? You can't get anywhere because you float far too well. Can't get traction in the water.
Maybe a drysuit and an outboard motor?
Did you not get pleasure out of things being errors in 3.0 that weren't even warnings in 2.95?
I'm sure all the contractors loved it! ;)
GCC motto: "What code can we break today?
Not all distros do. Pick an old-school, stable distro. Don't go with some flavor-of-the-month. Try something like Slackware, or shit if you want stable, Debian stable is rock solid. Linux gives you the freedom of choice to pick the right distro for you.
I find it astonishing when a person revels in their own ignorance.
And later you say you don't like ad hominem attacks. Tsk, tsk.
Do you understand why RMS professes the things he does? If you don't, why debase him? If you do, why debase him?
Um, I haven't talked to him. But I have a pretty decent idea. Mix of ideology and ego. I don't think I debase him. Gently poke fun, maybe. All I said was it's fun to see him get pissed, don't know why you're going nuts on this.
The fact that RMS has the courage to speak for his convictions despite the masses ridiculing him for it endlessly is worthy of admiration.
That's one possibility. Or it could be a measure of his arrogance. Replace "RMS" with "Hitler, 1930" and you get the same result. Certainly spoke out about his convictions in the face of ridicule. I don't think that's a virtue in itself.
Do you have that strong conviction in anything?
No, because I'm open-minded. My ideas aren't based in ideology and leap-of-faith. I don't consider my ideas to be inherently better to anyone else's, so I actually listen and change my mind on issues. I consider that a sign of flexibiltiy and a strength.
Furthermore... have you any cogent argument for why RMS's arguments for GNU/Linux are wrong?
I think that's kind of a taste/opinion issue, not really a fact-based right/wrong sort of determination. Furthermore, I don't care. That he does is funny. It also shows that he cares more substantially about credit for things than with propogation of information, which seems a tad at odds with his supposed beliefs.
I should mention, that I am yet to one say "GNU/Linux" and have probably typed it for the first time here... but that does not change matters of course. (Just want to preempt moronic "zealot" ad hominem attacks.)
Um...sure. Though if you aren't an RMS acolyte (see? I didn't say zealot:>), I wonder why you defend him so vigorously. Since I really didn't hammer him.
Put it this way - he's fun to poke because he takes himself FAR too seriously. There's also a certain amount of self-righteousness, arrogance, and holier-than-thou-ness to him. For a good example, try here: http://www.newsforge.com/print.pl?sid=04/12/08/222 9209. To the simple question of "what's your favorite beer," Stallman responds:
I mean, come on. This guy seems to have a problem with having any sort of a balanced life. He doesn't seem to have the confidence to relax and trust that he can let his guard down and have people take him seriously. Ironically, the result is actually the reverse.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter to me. As long as his proposal for GPL 3 doesn't materialize, because that could torpedo OSS. Although more likely it would make the FSF completely irrelevant, so it's his choice.
Hope that answers your question. ;)
Not that I pay attention to the guy, but under his definition of Linux (just the kernel) that statement("Linux founder and leader Linus Torvalds ..") would be quite correct.
Now if you said "GNU/Linux founder and leader, Linus..." he'd get pissed. In fact, I think that would be funny.
That might have been the red herring of the year. Congrats. Got a good response too.
You could say the same thing about curing cancer, but see how far that gets you with the pharm industry. Fact is that it isn't cheaper to solve important problems than it is mundane ones - usually the reverse. If you expect a solution, and the government can't do it alone, the private sector needs to get involved. That means someone needs to make money off of it.
Not even doctors work for free.
My grad advisor did that. Guess he didn't want to spend time on a class anymore, so he taped it and showed that during successive years. A TA had all interaction with students.
It makes you think about what is happening to education, and if this is a good or bad thing.
I don't think it's good. Makes you wonder why kids would go to a "good" school if they get taught by TAs - I could go to a small state school and get actually get taught by profs.
I don't know who's dumber - you or the four retards who put you up to +5.
Yeah, it's nice of them to develop a good browser with nice features, not patent those features, and then let another group making a free browser steal it all and give their browser away.
It's tough to sell a product when your competitor is giving it away.
Bottom line, any provider - ISP, library, rest stop, my personal network, school, company, whatever - whether gov or not - has the right to decide what content it wants to provide. However, the gov cannot prevent those entities from making their own decisions on that basis. That would be censorship.
Content providers can regulate the content they provide. Even for the press. You still have the right to provide your own content, or to get it through other means. But the government is not required to be a blind conduit, when it acts as a content provider it's allowed to decide what content it provides.
Yeah? That's interesting. I'd like to see how you swung that. Seriously, how'd you go about it and how much did you save on the Windows tax?
I'm imagining you did it by taking an OS w/o support. That would probably still fit within my general thesis, in that the slight extra overhead of supporting FreeDOS gets them out of a support contract. A bit different than supporting a whole different line of chipsets and such.
Fantastic! You guys really have that corporate welfare thing kicking up there. I still want to know who divides the cash. I mean, don't get me wrong, we have our corporate handouts here in the states. But I like the refreshingly overt take you guys have on it, taxing everyone instead of the guilty.
I don't think the tariffs are high enough.
Um, why? Are you a publishing house? Do you like handing over your money to a goverment/business consortium? Do you have a masochistic streak? Do you overpay your income taxes as well just to stay on the safe side?
There's no "punishment"
That tax is a punishment. You're not paying the copyright industry because they're nice guys. You're paying them (nominally) to compensate them for illegal behavior on the behalf of other people. I call that a punishment.
and you don't help your argument by using such loaded language.
I call it like I see it. Call it a punishment, a penalty, whatever. It amounts to the same thing. You're penalizing the innocent. Here in the states, we at least make sure the RIAA penalizes the "guilty," and we don't much like that either.
Fine. Substitute "car" and "driving drunk."
Greater than zero is onerous.
It's not punishment. Its trying to be fair to everyone.
It's not fair to anyone who's not pirating!
Copiers aren't taxed since they don't affect the business models of book publishers to any great degree. The tariff money is supposed to be evenly divided amongst copyright holders.
Man, talk about corporate welfare! And what does "evenly divided" mean? And does any of that get to artists? Which ones?