If you want to be democratic about it, have a platform where you can lend weight to peoples opinion ; in the context of Slashdot, your post is already weighted according to your karma when you initially post it, and later on, by people reviewing it.
Being well-spoken is essential to having a democratic debate. If you cannot express your opinion in a way which the other party can understand, you have no chance of having any discussion about it at all.
If you are well spoken, then those of us who are not well-spoken should be able to recognise someone who shares their opinion, but manages to express it more clearly, and lend their support to your ability to have it heard.
Prion diseases were well known before ; kuru in humans and scrapie in sheep.
Scrapie has been known about since the 18th century. It's the reason they don't feed ground up sheep to sheep. Kuru and conditions like it are probably one of the reasons there are taboos against cannibalism in most cultures.
Yup, I wish the UK measured how late it's trains were in seconds, like Japan. Instead of which, they don't even concede that they are late until their lateness exceeds 5 minutes.
This one : Focus Fusion has a reactor design that has a combination of magnetically decelerating helium ions and gamma-photovoltaic collection as the primary energy collection modes.
And a design reactor size that is more on the order of magnitude of "shipping container" than "aircraft carrier".
It's perhaps more ambitious (in terms of the physics) than ITER - but I think it's probably less ambitious in terms of general engineering problems, like how to breed enough tritium, etc.
Not true here in the UK. Steam is often priced 10-15% higher than retail, both via mail-order (the kind that houses it's warehouse in a tax haven and ships small-value packages to avoid paying it in the target country) and, for the big titles, the big-box supermarkets (like Asda) often have a competitive price as well.
Patenting GUI analogs of physical devices is an oxymoron - you're copying a user interface that already exists. The very reason you made that analog in a piece of software is because it ISN'T a new and innovative idea. It's familiar and obvious to people or there would be no point.
If you want to patent UI metaphors, you should first demonstrate that no-one understands how to use it without first reading the manual.
The very first test should be - ask a bunch of software guys - "If you had to do X in software, how would you do it?"
If ANY of them gets even close the patent should be thrown out.
That said, there shouldn't be any software patents. Asking how to improve the process of patenting software is like asking how to improve the process of circumcision. Just because you do it now, and lots of tribal elders say it's a great idea, doesn't mean it's true.
On that partition, nothing. I'm just referring to the tools required to manage it. The cloud folder is on my home folder, which as I said, is on another partition.
There's no way to punish Domino for it, because he held no patent on his packaging method. He relied on it being a trade secret... then gave it away.
More fool him. Packaging is big business. If you have a genuine patented innovation in the field and manage it right, you're on the gravy train until someone supercedes it. It might be small potatoes, but it's a LOT of small potatoes.
It's legal either way, whether it's a giant corporate bastard or a small independent bastard.
If there's no license for your software, though, you hold the copyright automatically. There is no legal recourse for any company that rips off your code and sells it, even if you paid for it to be marqueed across a billboard in Time Square.
Do you think media companies would accept the proposition that because they put their content on public broadcast networks, that anyone can copy it from there and sell it on as they desire?
You can store a crapload of anything in 23GB, apart from music, pretty pictures and video. Alas, these are the number one reason for having a tablet in the first place.
Let's see... on my current Linux install my root drive (no user documents or settings) is 9.5GB.
I have..
* A full office suite * An email / calendar program * A bitmap graphics program * A vector graphics program * A general diagram tool * A diagram tool for making GUI mockups * A UML modelling tool * A mind mapping tool * A project management tool * A selection of different media players, each tailored for a purpose (music, video) * A CD ripper * A CD creator * A DVD / video transcoding application * A webcam app * A photo management app * Two different web browsers * More than three different text editors, all with features that blow Notepad.exe out of the water * A backup system * Database management tools * The tools for three different version control systems * Development kits for C, C++, Ruby, Python, Perl, XML, Java, C# (probably missed some out) * Two Java development environments * File differencing tools * A hex editor * The thoroughly awesome GNU tool set which by itself makes you more productive with a large folder of text files than anything else * Encryption software * Archive tools for every common archive format and most of the uncommon ones
* Several sets of remote desktop / system management tools * VPN software * A Windows-compatible file server
* A sticky notes program * A BitTorrent client
* A unified instant messenger client * A specialized IRC client * Skype * A unified social network client
* A cloud folder with 5GB of complimentary storage
* A calculator * A few desk toys * A typing tutor
* The usual system management widgets
* A means of pretending to be Windows when the need arises
And
* A package management system that keeps ALL of it up to date (not just the operating system) * and doesn't need a reboot every time it does it... No, I don't think 40GB of Windows provides all of that.
(no, not all of this came out of the box, but all of it was available for free, and all of it fits in that 9.5GB ; there's some "payware" on there too but I didn't include it above)
Pulseaudio solves the problem that only one process can use the sound card at once, by being that process and pretending to be the sound card for everything else ; even programs compiled against ALSA. This means you can hear your email ping, even when you listen to music.
It's a similar design to the sound system you get on Windows ; each application gets it's own volume, etc. The main problem I've had with it is that it's not 100% robust (it would go into a loop sometimes when receiving bad sound input), which seems to have improved greatly in the release included with 12.10.
Possibly the other problem with it is too much YAGNI (you ain't gonna need it). It includes a bunch of features like being able to tunnel sound across networks. I would rather they had focussed on it just being a bulletproof sound multiplexer for one machine before they started on clever stuff.
That part alone is probably not nonsense. Linux engineers probably are more expensive.
On the other hand, I would expect you to need to hire fewer Linux engineers, and for the ones you got to be generally better quality and get more work done than the average MCSE.
The arg0 thing is where there are no available sources to look up for the API you are targetting.
The 3.8 build of Juno is much snappier than the 4.2 build. But I get you about the "getting used to it". When I've tried NetBeans I've usually just fled back to Eclipse because that's what I'm used to.
Nit pick : the requirement to not give the binaries to Al Qaeda would not meed the OSI definition of Open Source software. You're not permitted to add stipulations on who receives sources or what they are used for. If Al Qaeda uses your software to make cluster bombs that drop live kittens packed with C4, that's fair game for Open Source licenses.
Version control software is written to be generic - in the main, it doesn't try to understand the files you feed into it. It treats everything as a text file (unless it's obviously not). The only concessions to this are the features for line end munging written into some systems (which probably make most sense on mixed-OS projects), and the provision of hooks that can occur as the result of some events (before you commit, after you commit, etc).
The upside to this is that you get VCS software that works for the majority of programmers resources without messing with them. Something that stripped indents and then tried to infer what they should be from code structure would totally destroy Python code, where the indent IS the code structure.
The downside, as you note, is that it doesn't hold your hand or enforce conformity.
Using hooks for this is a problem because there's always one ass who doesn't set them up. What's that - use the VCS itself to distribute hooks? Massive security hole - commit an evil script and watch the chaos.
Using IDE settings for this is a problem because while some settings will matter - code indenting, etc - other settings will not, and will antagonise needlessly - fonts, colours, etc. Even if you settle on the default settings shipped with your standard IDE (which I think is in the main very sensible because it's at most likely to be the settings that are configured on any given machine), some of them behave differently by default on different platforms (Eclipse, for example, uses CRLF on Windows and LF on Linux/Mac, and uses the default Java code page - CP1252 on Western Windows and UTF-8 on most Linux and Mac).
Some editors understand hints in the code file (vim). Some editors guess what the indenting should be from what's already in the file, but know nothing about the other points of code formatting like those mentioned in the document linked to the article.
Some build systems can configure your IDE for you (Maven). But you can't always force people to all use the same IDE. Or to do anything.
In other words, it's a big thorny problem with no universal solution. And the kind of guys who write version control systems are in the main, the kind of guys who expect other guys to grow up, be a professional, and review their diffs before they commit them to make sure they aren't ruining everyone else's day. The audience of people who use VCS software is currently mostly limited to people you can at least explain this concept to, so it's less hassle on a case-by-case basis to chew them out and get them to behave nicely, than it is to be that first guy who implements a VCS that understands the structural nuances of the languages involved.
There have been some attempts to produce programming languages / files that don't have any whitespace, and only consist of structured files, and that get rendered in the style of your choosing by the IDE, but they haven't taken off for a couple of reasons..
i) The VCS software doesn't understand the files ii) You have to have the particular IDE for them, which limits the options of programmers for editing the files, which they hate
VB6 suffered from this to a degree - forms had resource files defining the properties of the form which seldom merged right - some regions were encoded binary, etc. They fixed this in.NET - the IDE generates code that defines the form. You can edit the code, or the form using the IDE, and it round-trips properly. And because it's code, it merges using standard VCS tools.
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is down to inflammation of the tendons ; the carpal tunnel is the sleeve bearing that the finger tendons pass through in your wrist. The other things that passes through there is the median nerve.
If you get tendonitis of these tendons, the inflammation can compress the median nerve, which is what causes carpal tunnel syndrome. It makes some sort of sense that strengthening this overall group of muscles can improve matters - if you predominantly use one or two fingers for your grip, spreading the load will lead to less strain on these tendons and less inflammation.
The muscles involved in grip strength are predominantly in your forearm, and connect to these tendons. Muscles in the fingers and hand are mostly limited to fine posture - like the ability to flex the finger at the most proximal joint while the other joints remain extended (like an L shape), and the ability to splay your fingers.
Through bad posture or excessive exercise (like a two week rowing course) I sometimes inflame the tendons on my little fingers and get a kind of bi-state "clunk" when the swollen part passes through the sheathe, and that finger will only hold postures either side of the lump - straight, or claw. And I sometimes get a generalized soreness of my fingers if I drive a lot (I tend to lean on the wheel badly). I have a Powerball of the type you describe, but not the discipline to use it regularly.
My main problem is that if you drop one, the metal axis of the 'scope nicks the inner plastic bearing it runs on, making the thing useless (it goes *tick tick tick* and you can't speed it up as much). I thought about buying the all-metal version but as I said, I don't use it enough to justify it.
This royally fucks up your version control history.
Most modern systems have the means to annotate a file - every line - with the revision that last changed it. It's invaluable if you want to work out which revision introduced a particular bug.
If you all have a whitespace war, every revision that touches the file will touch every line in the file.
Unless your merge driver is enlightened as well, you'll find it plays hell with your changes as well, every time you pull changes you'll get a conflict.
It's just rude, the hallmark of a prima donna programmer who's never worked with others.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to be democratic about it, have a platform where you can lend weight to peoples opinion ; in the context of Slashdot, your post is already weighted according to your karma when you initially post it, and later on, by people reviewing it.
Being well-spoken is essential to having a democratic debate. If you cannot express your opinion in a way which the other party can understand, you have no chance of having any discussion about it at all.
If you are well spoken, then those of us who are not well-spoken should be able to recognise someone who shares their opinion, but manages to express it more clearly, and lend their support to your ability to have it heard.
Prion diseases were well known before ; kuru in humans and scrapie in sheep.
Scrapie has been known about since the 18th century. It's the reason they don't feed ground up sheep to sheep. Kuru and conditions like it are probably one of the reasons there are taboos against cannibalism in most cultures.
Yup, I wish the UK measured how late it's trains were in seconds, like Japan. Instead of which, they don't even concede that they are late until their lateness exceeds 5 minutes.
Not all of them are glorified kettle boilers.
This one : Focus Fusion has a reactor design that has a combination of magnetically decelerating helium ions and gamma-photovoltaic collection as the primary energy collection modes.
And a design reactor size that is more on the order of magnitude of "shipping container" than "aircraft carrier".
It's perhaps more ambitious (in terms of the physics) than ITER - but I think it's probably less ambitious in terms of general engineering problems, like how to breed enough tritium, etc.
Not true here in the UK. Steam is often priced 10-15% higher than retail, both via mail-order (the kind that houses it's warehouse in a tax haven and ships small-value packages to avoid paying it in the target country) and, for the big titles, the big-box supermarkets (like Asda) often have a competitive price as well.
Indeed.
Swipe to unlock for doors == a bolt.
Swipe to unlock for GUI == ?
Patenting GUI analogs of physical devices is an oxymoron - you're copying a user interface that already exists. The very reason you made that analog in a piece of software is because it ISN'T a new and innovative idea. It's familiar and obvious to people or there would be no point.
If you want to patent UI metaphors, you should first demonstrate that no-one understands how to use it without first reading the manual.
The very first test should be - ask a bunch of software guys - "If you had to do X in software, how would you do it?"
If ANY of them gets even close the patent should be thrown out.
That said, there shouldn't be any software patents. Asking how to improve the process of patenting software is like asking how to improve the process of circumcision. Just because you do it now, and lots of tribal elders say it's a great idea, doesn't mean it's true.
On that partition, nothing. I'm just referring to the tools required to manage it. The cloud folder is on my home folder, which as I said, is on another partition.
There's no way to punish Domino for it, because he held no patent on his packaging method. He relied on it being a trade secret... then gave it away.
More fool him. Packaging is big business. If you have a genuine patented innovation in the field and manage it right, you're on the gravy train until someone supercedes it. It might be small potatoes, but it's a LOT of small potatoes.
It's legal either way, whether it's a giant corporate bastard or a small independent bastard.
If there's no license for your software, though, you hold the copyright automatically. There is no legal recourse for any company that rips off your code and sells it, even if you paid for it to be marqueed across a billboard in Time Square.
Do you think media companies would accept the proposition that because they put their content on public broadcast networks, that anyone can copy it from there and sell it on as they desire?
You can store a crapload of anything in 23GB, apart from music, pretty pictures and video. Alas, these are the number one reason for having a tablet in the first place.
There's no reason to hibernate a tablet computer though - the things are designed to be in perpetual standby.
Let's see... on my current Linux install my root drive (no user documents or settings) is 9.5GB.
I have..
* A full office suite
* An email / calendar program
* A bitmap graphics program
* A vector graphics program
* A general diagram tool
* A diagram tool for making GUI mockups
* A UML modelling tool
* A mind mapping tool
* A project management tool
* A selection of different media players, each tailored for a purpose (music, video)
* A CD ripper
* A CD creator
* A DVD / video transcoding application
* A webcam app
* A photo management app
* Two different web browsers
* More than three different text editors, all with features that blow Notepad.exe out of the water
* A backup system
* Database management tools
* The tools for three different version control systems
* Development kits for C, C++, Ruby, Python, Perl, XML, Java, C# (probably missed some out)
* Two Java development environments
* File differencing tools
* A hex editor
* The thoroughly awesome GNU tool set which by itself makes you more productive with a large folder of text files than anything else
* Encryption software
* Archive tools for every common archive format and most of the uncommon ones
* Several sets of remote desktop / system management tools
* VPN software
* A Windows-compatible file server
* A sticky notes program
* A BitTorrent client
* A unified instant messenger client
* A specialized IRC client
* Skype
* A unified social network client
* A cloud folder with 5GB of complimentary storage
* A calculator
* A few desk toys
* A typing tutor
* The usual system management widgets
* A means of pretending to be Windows when the need arises
And
* A package management system that keeps ALL of it up to date (not just the operating system) ... No, I don't think 40GB of Windows provides all of that.
* and doesn't need a reboot every time it does it
(no, not all of this came out of the box, but all of it was available for free, and all of it fits in that 9.5GB ; there's some "payware" on there too but I didn't include it above)
They based a lot of the characterization of Tony Stark in the recent movies on Elon Musk.
Pulseaudio solves the problem that only one process can use the sound card at once, by being that process and pretending to be the sound card for everything else ; even programs compiled against ALSA. This means you can hear your email ping, even when you listen to music.
It's a similar design to the sound system you get on Windows ; each application gets it's own volume, etc. The main problem I've had with it is that it's not 100% robust (it would go into a loop sometimes when receiving bad sound input), which seems to have improved greatly in the release included with 12.10.
Possibly the other problem with it is too much YAGNI (you ain't gonna need it). It includes a bunch of features like being able to tunnel sound across networks. I would rather they had focussed on it just being a bulletproof sound multiplexer for one machine before they started on clever stuff.
That part alone is probably not nonsense. Linux engineers probably are more expensive.
On the other hand, I would expect you to need to hire fewer Linux engineers, and for the ones you got to be generally better quality and get more work done than the average MCSE.
Just wait until they come back to sterilize his mistake....
The real bastards here are the people discriminating against you on penis size.
Hamburger get's it's name from the town of Hamburg.
The arg0 thing is where there are no available sources to look up for the API you are targetting.
The 3.8 build of Juno is much snappier than the 4.2 build. But I get you about the "getting used to it". When I've tried NetBeans I've usually just fled back to Eclipse because that's what I'm used to.
Nit pick : the requirement to not give the binaries to Al Qaeda would not meed the OSI definition of Open Source software. You're not permitted to add stipulations on who receives sources or what they are used for. If Al Qaeda uses your software to make cluster bombs that drop live kittens packed with C4, that's fair game for Open Source licenses.
No.
Polarized sunglasses cut glare because reflected light tends to be polarized in one direction. Therefore you can selectively block it out.
Alas, modern flat panel displays all use polarized filters to work. So they don't work too well with polarized glasses.
Version control software is written to be generic - in the main, it doesn't try to understand the files you feed into it. It treats everything as a text file (unless it's obviously not). The only concessions to this are the features for line end munging written into some systems (which probably make most sense on mixed-OS projects), and the provision of hooks that can occur as the result of some events (before you commit, after you commit, etc).
The upside to this is that you get VCS software that works for the majority of programmers resources without messing with them. Something that stripped indents and then tried to infer what they should be from code structure would totally destroy Python code, where the indent IS the code structure.
The downside, as you note, is that it doesn't hold your hand or enforce conformity.
Using hooks for this is a problem because there's always one ass who doesn't set them up. What's that - use the VCS itself to distribute hooks? Massive security hole - commit an evil script and watch the chaos.
Using IDE settings for this is a problem because while some settings will matter - code indenting, etc - other settings will not, and will antagonise needlessly - fonts, colours, etc. Even if you settle on the default settings shipped with your standard IDE (which I think is in the main very sensible because it's at most likely to be the settings that are configured on any given machine), some of them behave differently by default on different platforms (Eclipse, for example, uses CRLF on Windows and LF on Linux/Mac, and uses the default Java code page - CP1252 on Western Windows and UTF-8 on most Linux and Mac).
Some editors understand hints in the code file (vim). Some editors guess what the indenting should be from what's already in the file, but know nothing about the other points of code formatting like those mentioned in the document linked to the article.
Some build systems can configure your IDE for you (Maven). But you can't always force people to all use the same IDE. Or to do anything.
In other words, it's a big thorny problem with no universal solution. And the kind of guys who write version control systems are in the main, the kind of guys who expect other guys to grow up, be a professional, and review their diffs before they commit them to make sure they aren't ruining everyone else's day. The audience of people who use VCS software is currently mostly limited to people you can at least explain this concept to, so it's less hassle on a case-by-case basis to chew them out and get them to behave nicely, than it is to be that first guy who implements a VCS that understands the structural nuances of the languages involved.
There have been some attempts to produce programming languages / files that don't have any whitespace, and only consist of structured files, and that get rendered in the style of your choosing by the IDE, but they haven't taken off for a couple of reasons..
i) The VCS software doesn't understand the files
ii) You have to have the particular IDE for them, which limits the options of programmers for editing the files, which they hate
VB6 suffered from this to a degree - forms had resource files defining the properties of the form which seldom merged right - some regions were encoded binary, etc. They fixed this in .NET - the IDE generates code that defines the form. You can edit the code, or the form using the IDE, and it round-trips properly. And because it's code, it merges using standard VCS tools.
Oh, and I can't start it with my finger and I keep losing the &!"%£&* bits of string.
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is down to inflammation of the tendons ; the carpal tunnel is the sleeve bearing that the finger tendons pass through in your wrist. The other things that passes through there is the median nerve.
If you get tendonitis of these tendons, the inflammation can compress the median nerve, which is what causes carpal tunnel syndrome. It makes some sort of sense that strengthening this overall group of muscles can improve matters - if you predominantly use one or two fingers for your grip, spreading the load will lead to less strain on these tendons and less inflammation.
The muscles involved in grip strength are predominantly in your forearm, and connect to these tendons. Muscles in the fingers and hand are mostly limited to fine posture - like the ability to flex the finger at the most proximal joint while the other joints remain extended (like an L shape), and the ability to splay your fingers.
Through bad posture or excessive exercise (like a two week rowing course) I sometimes inflame the tendons on my little fingers and get a kind of bi-state "clunk" when the swollen part passes through the sheathe, and that finger will only hold postures either side of the lump - straight, or claw. And I sometimes get a generalized soreness of my fingers if I drive a lot (I tend to lean on the wheel badly). I have a Powerball of the type you describe, but not the discipline to use it regularly.
My main problem is that if you drop one, the metal axis of the 'scope nicks the inner plastic bearing it runs on, making the thing useless (it goes *tick tick tick* and you can't speed it up as much). I thought about buying the all-metal version but as I said, I don't use it enough to justify it.
This royally fucks up your version control history.
Most modern systems have the means to annotate a file - every line - with the revision that last changed it. It's invaluable if you want to work out which revision introduced a particular bug.
If you all have a whitespace war, every revision that touches the file will touch every line in the file.
Unless your merge driver is enlightened as well, you'll find it plays hell with your changes as well, every time you pull changes you'll get a conflict.
It's just rude, the hallmark of a prima donna programmer who's never worked with others.