Hmm. If matters are that bad in American schools maybe the students should start employing cryptography - maybe by communicating via encrypted files or, more low-tech, exchange slips of paper with messages encrypted using a simple to remember cipher. Another way of keeping the messages secure could be the use of a non-standard alphabet, maybe a variant of the Alphabetum Maldeorum.
If the teachers don't trust the students enough to let them speak freely then ahy should the students trust the teachers enough to let them understand what's being said?
Microsoft not only suffer from a serious case of NIH, meaning that they will always use own technologies for eveything, they're also scared by the thought of anyone else using their stuff - effectively Microsoft is simultaneously pursuing an isolationist policy and trying to get a foothold in every market.
It's understandable that they feel they have to resort to unfair tactics - if they competed fairly their isolationism would make them a perpetual fringe player in every market they don't already control. Expansionist isolationism doesn't work if you can't strong-arm the rest of the world into allowing you to bend the rules.
Maybe we could start tagging stories referencing MS internal usability studies with "dogfood". And if their internal study showed they were behind their competitors in some area, we could tag it both "lunch" and "dogfood".;-)
Which perfectly fits a full time FOSS developer's diet.;)
So to summarise, they've said that Linux gets just over 364 days of uptime per 365 days whilest Windows gets 437 days of uptime per 365 days. I want one of those windows servers that can accumulate well over a year's worth of uptime in a year.
Seriously, a faulty software clock is not that great a feature...
No, it's entirely justified. You see, when the Interplanetary Crime Organization was formed the duties for planet-wide disaster related crimes were divided on a per-planet basis: Martians conned us into giving them a monopoly on looting, people from Mercury and Venus pillage and those from the outer planets commit insurance fraud. Earth was a bit late to the game and now we're stuck with gratutious copyright infringement.
In case you're wondering which planet-wide desaster allows us to infringe Earth copyrights at the moment just take a look at the software, movie and music markets.
Meanwhile people wo aren't that arrogant and mix OOP and functional programming whenever they feel like it (Symfony, Rails, Django, Zope) are kicking the collective asses of old-school hardcore 100% polymorphic OOP bloat advocates up and down the street (Java).
I don't know about the others, but Rails isn't functional. Functional programming is an entirely different programming paradigm that has nothing to do with languages like Ruby or Python. You're probably thinking of procedural programming.
0. Mixed code and markup is vile. If I were forking the language the first thing I'd do would be ripping out the ability to mix PHP and HTML, replacing it with a decent template engine.
4. I have a file that I always include which does nothing but clean up after stupid things like register_globals and magic_quotes. Modularity is great.
I think that PHP could be a great language if someone took the time to clean it up (ie. make function signatures consistent and get the namespaces in order). Now it's just a good language - not exactly elegant or prestigious, but quite usable for quick and dirty scripting.
Of course, the real problem is that even when you are offering big money to people barely out of university, you _still_ can't find 20 Perl people when you need them. And that's a biggest risk of Perl's unsexyness.
I read that as "using Perl artificially keeps your job stable because your boss won't dare firing you".
Do you have anything to back up that claim of "nothing else could cope", or is it simply baseless speculation?
No, it's common knowledge that Perl is the fastest possible language, which is why, for example, Amazon would never use C++ as their backend language. Perl executes ten instructions per CPU cycle and fits 32 bits into one byte. It also makes the system use less power and cures AIDS.
PHP, on the other hand, slowly turns the user into Saddam Hussein.
Broadband ain't that expensive over here, either. The telcos are giving each other enough competition to keep prices down (and I'm in a pretty well-saturated region; AFAIK I can choose between T-Online, Tiscali, QSC and various resellers). However, if they really wanted to they could artificially keep the prices high.
Remember: If they can make more money off price-fixing than the backlash (fines and damage to the corporate image) will cost them they will go and screw the customers immediately. They are corporations and their only concern is how to make more money, so they will go where he dough is. This applies especially when in some areas they are the sole provider so people won't be able to switch to someone else.
The genius of capitalism is that in the absence of a monopoly, eventually one competitor will out of short term greed.
Or a cartel forms.
Having only one provider is of course the kind of monopoly condition that will prevent positive change. Fortunately, there's competition between cable and DSL now and hopefully WiFi and maybe broadband over powerlines in the future.
Cable still exists? Over here in Germany I heard people discuss it in the late 90s, but like PLC (which has only recently resurfaced) it was pretty much dead. (Okay, a quick look at the 'Pedia tells me that German cable networks just aren't built for that kind of data transmission, which explains why cable is virtually nonexistant over here with an 0.2% market share.)
In the end we have DSL, a bit faster DSL, ISDN (offered by the same companies selling us DSL) and powerline, which has about the same market penetration as cable. Oh, and satellite, but nobody uses that. My hope actually rests on UMTS - it's not cheap but in some cases it's a good alternative to DSL.
NAT does, however, have one big advantage when you're dealing with a home network: Easy configurability. By default it's completely locked down, which is great when you try to install Windows without instantly joining some botnet. Also, I don't know what you pay for a decent router/firewall configuration, but NAT routers are pretty cheap.
You ran into a problem of the English language: It's sometimes impossible to distinguish between a comound and a verb/noun combination. "National Socialism" does not translate to "Nationaler Sozialismus" (socialism done in a nationalistic way) but to "Nationalsozialismus" (which has an entirely different meaning). The NSDAP had some socialistic undercurrents, but generally they were more social than socialistic (ie. they wanted to keep people fed and working - except for foreigners. And jews. And people they didn't like for another reason).
For the sake of clarity perhaps it'd be better to combine the two words with a hyphen when talking about the subject in English, ie.: "National-socialist German Workers' Party"
From a roleplayer's perspective (assuming a Shadowrun-like rule framework):
God A spent most of his points during character creation on Charisma, Reaction enhancement and skills like "Ecosystem (B/R)" and "Omnipresence".
God B spent most of his time during character creation boosting his character point pool by picking handicaps like "Nobody Will Ever See You" and spending those points on cyberware and gifts that allow him to start with an Intelligence score of 60.
God A put a lot of work into the descriptions of his connections.
God B didn't define any connections because he knows anything in advance, anyway.
God A avoids planet-wide disaster by means of quick reaction. Sometimes he causes planet-wide disaster.
God B avoids planet-wide disaster by blackmailing the GM. (Hey, how do you believe he got away with an INT of 60?)
True. Thinkpads used to be _the_ Linux laptop brand. The two most common laptops at my university('s CS courses) are Apples and IBMs - we're very *nix-centric and many students want to use a *nix on their laptop. People who couldn't even afford a student-priced (i|Mac)Book often go with a low-end Thinkpad because that's the best choice for cheap mobile Linux.
If Lenovo really ignores Linux I expect Apple usage to increase - most Linux-friendly laptops are more expensive than decently-specced (i|Mac)Books and studenty are, by definition, poor.
Huh? I thought Power Rangers tried to teach kids to buy cheap plastic "swords" made in Chinese sweatshops.
Good = giving your money to $SOULLESS_CORPORATION, even if it means stealing from mom and dad
Bad = selfishly keeping your money from $SOULLESS_CORPORATION
Penny Arcade isn't exactly one of the places to find biting social commentary, but they really hit the mark on this one.
Could this be the real reason music sales are decreasing?
I expect the mere existance of this comic to take down CD sales by another 2% or so. Seriously. This stuff has "lame" written all over it.
Who are they targetting anyway? Seven year olds wouldn't take the time to abstract from the comics to the real world - and they are usually smart enough to know that copying a book or plagiarising someones work is not stealing (they don't know what copyright infringement is, but they do know what stealing is and isn't). Teenagers don't give a shit about generic superheroes anymore - they're too busy discussing some of the more esoteric points of Mortal Kombat lore.
Seriously, whoever came up with this is even more disconnected from reality than an RIAA exec or a marketing droid.
They should make some Captain Obvious comics instead. That's one superhero I'd actually pay for.
Excuse me? Fifteen years? We Mac gamers clearly can do better than that. I have a copy of Colossal Cave Adventure on my Mac and that game is easily twice as old.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. If matters are that bad in American schools maybe the students should start employing cryptography - maybe by communicating via encrypted files or, more low-tech, exchange slips of paper with messages encrypted using a simple to remember cipher. Another way of keeping the messages secure could be the use of a non-standard alphabet, maybe a variant of the Alphabetum Maldeorum.
If the teachers don't trust the students enough to let them speak freely then ahy should the students trust the teachers enough to let them understand what's being said?
Microsoft not only suffer from a serious case of NIH, meaning that they will always use own technologies for eveything, they're also scared by the thought of anyone else using their stuff - effectively Microsoft is simultaneously pursuing an isolationist policy and trying to get a foothold in every market.
It's understandable that they feel they have to resort to unfair tactics - if they competed fairly their isolationism would make them a perpetual fringe player in every market they don't already control. Expansionist isolationism doesn't work if you can't strong-arm the rest of the world into allowing you to bend the rules.
Maybe we could start tagging stories referencing MS internal usability studies with "dogfood". And if their internal study showed they were behind their competitors in some area, we could tag it both "lunch" and "dogfood". ;-)
;)
Which perfectly fits a full time FOSS developer's diet.
Not in the age of the internet. Nowadays every geeks has dozens of dates and their names all end in ".jpg".
Well, VMWare is eating Microsoft's lunch (via VirtualPC), but it's then passing on some of the nutrients. Kinda.
I'd better stop pursuing that analogy, there's a bad mental image coming up.
So to summarise, they've said that Linux gets just over 364 days of uptime per 365 days whilest Windows gets 437 days of uptime per 365 days. I want one of those windows servers that can accumulate well over a year's worth of uptime in a year.
Seriously, a faulty software clock is not that great a feature...
Jupiter and Nero, how Roman.
What do Romania and a CD burning software have to do with Jupiter?
No, it's entirely justified. You see, when the Interplanetary Crime Organization was formed the duties for planet-wide disaster related crimes were divided on a per-planet basis: Martians conned us into giving them a monopoly on looting, people from Mercury and Venus pillage and those from the outer planets commit insurance fraud. Earth was a bit late to the game and now we're stuck with gratutious copyright infringement.
In case you're wondering which planet-wide desaster allows us to infringe Earth copyrights at the moment just take a look at the software, movie and music markets.
Meanwhile people wo aren't that arrogant and mix OOP and functional programming whenever they feel like it (Symfony, Rails, Django, Zope) are kicking the collective asses of old-school hardcore 100% polymorphic OOP bloat advocates up and down the street (Java).
n g)
I don't know about the others, but Rails isn't functional. Functional programming is an entirely different programming paradigm that has nothing to do with languages like Ruby or Python. You're probably thinking of procedural programming.
Examples for functional languages would be Haskell or ML. (cf. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_Programmi
0. Mixed code and markup is vile. If I were forking the language the first thing I'd do would be ripping out the ability to mix PHP and HTML, replacing it with a decent template engine.
4. I have a file that I always include which does nothing but clean up after stupid things like register_globals and magic_quotes. Modularity is great.
I think that PHP could be a great language if someone took the time to clean it up (ie. make function signatures consistent and get the namespaces in order). Now it's just a good language - not exactly elegant or prestigious, but quite usable for quick and dirty scripting.
Of course, the real problem is that even when you are offering big money to people barely out of university, you _still_ can't find 20 Perl people when you need them. And that's a biggest risk of Perl's unsexyness.
I read that as "using Perl artificially keeps your job stable because your boss won't dare firing you".
Do you have anything to back up that claim of "nothing else could cope", or is it simply baseless speculation?
No, it's common knowledge that Perl is the fastest possible language, which is why, for example, Amazon would never use C++ as their backend language. Perl executes ten instructions per CPU cycle and fits 32 bits into one byte. It also makes the system use less power and cures AIDS.
PHP, on the other hand, slowly turns the user into Saddam Hussein.
Broadband ain't that expensive over here, either. The telcos are giving each other enough competition to keep prices down (and I'm in a pretty well-saturated region; AFAIK I can choose between T-Online, Tiscali, QSC and various resellers). However, if they really wanted to they could artificially keep the prices high.
Remember: If they can make more money off price-fixing than the backlash (fines and damage to the corporate image) will cost them they will go and screw the customers immediately. They are corporations and their only concern is how to make more money, so they will go where he dough is. This applies especially when in some areas they are the sole provider so people won't be able to switch to someone else.
The genius of capitalism is that in the absence of a monopoly, eventually one competitor will out of short term greed.
Or a cartel forms.
Having only one provider is of course the kind of monopoly condition that will prevent positive change. Fortunately, there's competition between cable and DSL now and hopefully WiFi and maybe broadband over powerlines in the future.
Cable still exists? Over here in Germany I heard people discuss it in the late 90s, but like PLC (which has only recently resurfaced) it was pretty much dead. (Okay, a quick look at the 'Pedia tells me that German cable networks just aren't built for that kind of data transmission, which explains why cable is virtually nonexistant over here with an 0.2% market share.)
In the end we have DSL, a bit faster DSL, ISDN (offered by the same companies selling us DSL) and powerline, which has about the same market penetration as cable. Oh, and satellite, but nobody uses that. My hope actually rests on UMTS - it's not cheap but in some cases it's a good alternative to DSL.
NAT does, however, have one big advantage when you're dealing with a home network: Easy configurability. By default it's completely locked down, which is great when you try to install Windows without instantly joining some botnet. Also, I don't know what you pay for a decent router/firewall configuration, but NAT routers are pretty cheap.
You ran into a problem of the English language: It's sometimes impossible to distinguish between a comound and a verb/noun combination. "National Socialism" does not translate to "Nationaler Sozialismus" (socialism done in a nationalistic way) but to "Nationalsozialismus" (which has an entirely different meaning). The NSDAP had some socialistic undercurrents, but generally they were more social than socialistic (ie. they wanted to keep people fed and working - except for foreigners. And jews. And people they didn't like for another reason).
For the sake of clarity perhaps it'd be better to combine the two words with a hyphen when talking about the subject in English, ie.: "National-socialist German Workers' Party"
From a roleplayer's perspective (assuming a Shadowrun-like rule framework):
God A spent most of his points during character creation on Charisma, Reaction enhancement and skills like "Ecosystem (B/R)" and "Omnipresence".
God B spent most of his time during character creation boosting his character point pool by picking handicaps like "Nobody Will Ever See You" and spending those points on cyberware and gifts that allow him to start with an Intelligence score of 60.
God A put a lot of work into the descriptions of his connections.
God B didn't define any connections because he knows anything in advance, anyway.
God A avoids planet-wide disaster by means of quick reaction. Sometimes he causes planet-wide disaster.
God B avoids planet-wide disaster by blackmailing the GM. (Hey, how do you believe he got away with an INT of 60?)
In other words: God B is a dick.
It does catch on, at least a bit... I wanted to make that exact statement, too.
No, what we need is an MST addon for TVs. You just plug it in and it automatically starts riffing bad movies.
The more expensive versions could come with a DVD furnace, though.
True. Thinkpads used to be _the_ Linux laptop brand. The two most common laptops at my university('s CS courses) are Apples and IBMs - we're very *nix-centric and many students want to use a *nix on their laptop. People who couldn't even afford a student-priced (i|Mac)Book often go with a low-end Thinkpad because that's the best choice for cheap mobile Linux.
If Lenovo really ignores Linux I expect Apple usage to increase - most Linux-friendly laptops are more expensive than decently-specced (i|Mac)Books and studenty are, by definition, poor.
Huh? I thought Power Rangers tried to teach kids to buy cheap plastic "swords" made in Chinese sweatshops.
Good = giving your money to $SOULLESS_CORPORATION, even if it means stealing from mom and dad
Bad = selfishly keeping your money from $SOULLESS_CORPORATION
Penny Arcade isn't exactly one of the places to find biting social commentary, but they really hit the mark on this one.
Could this be the real reason music sales are decreasing?
I expect the mere existance of this comic to take down CD sales by another 2% or so. Seriously. This stuff has "lame" written all over it.
Who are they targetting anyway? Seven year olds wouldn't take the time to abstract from the comics to the real world - and they are usually smart enough to know that copying a book or plagiarising someones work is not stealing (they don't know what copyright infringement is, but they do know what stealing is and isn't). Teenagers don't give a shit about generic superheroes anymore - they're too busy discussing some of the more esoteric points of Mortal Kombat lore.
Seriously, whoever came up with this is even more disconnected from reality than an RIAA exec or a marketing droid.
They should make some Captain Obvious comics instead. That's one superhero I'd actually pay for.
Excuse me? Fifteen years? We Mac gamers clearly can do better than that. I have a copy of Colossal Cave Adventure on my Mac and that game is easily twice as old.
> 1) I'm a man fanboy. That's a given for Mac users!
No, some of us are really into info, you know. man's just for kiddies.
Heck, the one BBS I recall, the owner, upon finally getting onto the intarwab, gave me his site's address. In numbers. w1n.
So that's what numbers stations are used for!