Actually, you're confusing ethics and morality. Morality is what society says is right. Therefore, society as a whole frowns on, say, cheating on your boyfriend/girlfriend, and calls it immoral, even if there's no specific law against it (cheating on your spouse, OTOH, is another matter).
Ethics, however, is the province of what is actually right or wrong, irrespective of society. Because people typically do not agree perfectly on what is right or wrong, one person's view of ethics will be different from other people's. Those parts of ethics which typically do agree with most people's are subsumed into morals, of course.
Continuing with the above example, many girls in Rio de Janeiro don't think it's much of a big deal to have more than one boyfriend at a time (though typically two or three is the maximum they can juggle if the boyfriends don't know about or don't care for each other). So it's not unethical in their view, even though it is immoral.
That's being foolish. There's plenty of "experimental" OSes around, many of them Free Software, like EROS; that isn't what the HURD should be doing. It shouldn't be this neat system where development breaks away completely from what programmers are used to writing, therefore guaranteeing that porting of applications will be a tedious, and ultimately fruitless, process.
What the HURD developers should be doing is (risking the wrath of the community) be less revolutionary, and get something going. The team spent God-knows-how-long stumped on that file system mmap() problem, which barred disks larger than 2GB from being mounted. If one runs across this kind of barrier during the development of a system, one should just drop the feature and use something else which is known to work, and leave that feature for version 2.0 or something.
Of course, if the software is too little revolutionary, it won't make any sense to use it: The L4 developers already have a Linux 2.6.10 running on top of their microkernel... There ought to be some kind of compromise, basically dropping features when the milestones keep getting pushed back.
Then again, the Hurd might have been just a victim of the Cathedral method it (used to) be developed with...
There have been some cases of firmware for multimedia appliances which contained GPL software secretly. Though in these cases, there was usually a choice between releasing all of the firmware as GPL code or removing the offending parts. One of them tried even to compress the strings so the strings utility couldn't find them, but they got busted. In the end, I think the product was really overhauled.
I agree. Like I said, it's a case of analyzing the situation and see what is cheaper -- an overhaul of the existing infrastructure or paying a consultancy to provide support. However, with commercial software the second option isn't available if the original developer suddenly disappears or goes bankrupt.
In this case, you have to overhaul, no matter if you have it in 350,073 different machines at 176 offices around the world and furthermore they all run a specialist extension to perform some special function your employees use frequently that would require some $100,000.00 and six months to port to the new platform...
In short, it's not about you recommending Firefox and then it proving to be a dud. If you recommended a proprietary solution that then barfed, you'd be in as much of a bind, if not even worse. Still, yes, I'm thinking big contracts, on the seven, eight-digit scale. It's likely you can't see the difference as much if you're thinking about four or five digits.
This is all nice and all, but they only gave us a pointer to an article in money.cnn.com. Does anybody subscribe to the Journal of Applied Physics and has seen that article? How does it work, what kind of performance can we expect, etc?
The bottom line is that in the real world, no one cares about having the source available. The investment is very small. If Firefox dies, what, are they going to hire a programmer to keep it alive so they dont have to switch? Lets get real. Trying to pitch anything but a polished product is, well, just asking for a beating.
In the real world, people DO care about having the source available, they just don't put it that way. It generally comes as some clause in the contract specifying that there must be some sort of contingency plan if the supplier for a certain part goes out of business. Open source is close to optimal solution: if the original supplier goes belly-up, shop around for someone willing to take it over -- there's plenty of small consultancies willing to do it.
You missed one. He doesnt advocate strapping bombs to people, and sending them off into resturants, parks, and nightclubs to blow themselves up and target civilians.
Rest assured that, if Islamic Jihad had access to F-16 and AH-64 in large amounts and the supply lines to keep them flying, they'd just drop the bombs from the air instead of strapping the explosives to their own torsos.
Of course, the problem with introducing an editorial board is that there must be a way to decide whether the board is qualified to issue a ruling on the matter. Obviously, one may somehow get a tenured professor from a well-known university to edit (or rubber-stamp, whatever) articles about evolutionary biology, who gets to edit an article about the TV psychic phenomenon, or the controversy on John Kerry's Vietnam record? It's very difficult to amass all that kind of talent.
The names of the days of the week in old Rome were Solis dies, Lunae dies, Martis dies, Mercurii dies, Iouis (Jovis) dies, Veneris dies, and Saturnis dies. When the Empire converted to Christianity they only changed the name of the first day to Dominicus dies, the day of the Lord.
Germanic tribes which suffered Roman influence and adopted the seven-day week substituted the names of their own gods for the Latin ones, like Tyr, Thor, Odin, and Freya.
Portugal way over in the West of Europe, having a large population of Jews in the Middle Ages, adapted the Jewish system for numbering days, such that in Portuguese weekdays are called segunda-feira, terça-feira, etc. where feira is an old word for "day" and segunda, terça, etc. are ordinal numbers (in this case, for two and three, respectively).
Finally, to answer your question, the Christian Monotheistic God did not name the days of the weeks. Humans did. And they are under no compunctions to name them one way or another -- hell, they could have named them Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet! It would have been the same.
54 And that day was the preparation, and the sabbath drew on.
55 And the women also, which came with him from Galilee, followed after, and beheld the sepulchre, and how his body was laid.
56 And they returned, and prepared spices and ointments; and rested the sabbath day according to the commandment.
1 Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them.
In verse 54, "Preparation" is sometimes glossed as "Friday".
Not really. Eigenradio isn't something that's supposed to figure out what humans like or not. Eigenradio's about applying a linear algebra trick in a glut of signals and streaming out the resulting junk. It's a joke; either laugh at it or ignore it, but don't be offended.
I may have mixed roots, but what we've done in the last 100 years has earned us a place here. And, there is no other country we can now call home. That is more than I can say about anyone now illegally crossing the border or legally getting off a boat and taking our jobs. They need to spend some time and blood here before getting that priviledge.
Let me get this straight. You're saying that immigrants to the US should wait 50-100 years before getting a job? Buddy, are you on drugs? Or just plain out of your freaking mind? When your illegal immigrant great-grandfather came to the US, he took a job. Be thankful for it. Where do you think you would be if he hadn't? Probably wouldn't have even been born.
Being born in the United States does not give you the right to dictate who should or should not be able to work. Rather than feeling ashamed of your immigrant heritage, you should be ashamed of turning your back on it, even if you can't point to a single place of "origin"; in fact, even more so because of it.
In fact, if you're having trouble finding a job, have you considered emmigration? There's a lot of potential for honest people who are willing to work in Europe and Japan...
Worst thing is, most Americans don't think like that. But the few idiots who do spoil the image of the entire people in the eyes of foreigners.
There isn't much that can be done about graphics cards drivers (not X drivers); most video card companies won't publish the specs so that spanking-new card drivers can be written: they have to be reverse-engineered and it takes time. That being said, I had to wait a while in 2001, I think, for XFree86 4.1 to come out so it would support my ATI Radeon; I haven't had problems with graphics cards since, though, in spite of going through three other cards and four distros in this span of time.
As for something that comes close to Visual Studio, if you're talking about interface specifics, not even Kylix comes close (it's closer to C++ Builder, instead), but KDevelop is a pretty good IDE, and Eclipse is available on Linux, too (what with it being Java and all). If you could take a weekend to fiddle with one of those, I'm sure you'd be pleasantly surprised.
More difficult, perhaps. But difficult, still? We've been hearing a lot about the USPTO granting patents to many parties without due review. How likely is it anyway that a patent application in the software field will be rejected? That is, to me, the heart of the matter. After all, if it costs a lot of money, but it's guaranteed to succeed, you just have to find a VC, or perhaps a bank loan, willing to support you through the ride:
File a patent on a common process
Sue a large software company for patent infringement
Profit!
It's not like we haven't seen this one before, is it?
Of course the number is extremely unrealistic! Here, 100 is standard lingo for "a large number". If you pay attention to the end of the review, you'll find out that 37 is a rounding of 100/e; choose a more appropriate number for you and calculate your own optimum.
Also, if you aren't able to rate your relationships with respect to one another, then you should forget about relationships altogether. Come on, you don't have to apply a mathematical formula for evaluation; you don't even have to come up with a numerical score. You just have to be able to order the relationships from worst to best: "I didn't like spending time with Jenny as much as I did with Claire, therefore Claire was better than Jenny". How hard is that, anyway?
And given that (simple) ability, if maths can give you a better chance of becoming happier, then by all means, use it! Or don't, the choice is yours. But discounting them wholesale because you're "uncomfortable" with them is sort of unfair...
... patents, which provide more comprehensive protection but are difficult to obtain...
Excuse me? Is it the author or the editor who's claiming that patents are difficult to obtain? Haven't we been seeing patents being awarded left and right for the most mundane industry processes? Difficult to obtain, indeed.
You miss the point that the EU is not a country. It is a union of countries, which is still something fairly new. (...)
You'd think so, but there's actually a prior example on this whole "union of countries" deal. They formed a common parliament, decided on a common currency, foreign policy, etc., just like the EU today.
But the problem was that some of the member states had some pretty strong views on some issues, while some others had the opposite view, and were adamant about it, too. Meanwhile, the supranational government did a great show of staying put on top of the wall in the middle, and they just basically let things fester until some of the countries decided they couldn't stay in that union any longer.
Then, of course, the supranational government decided they couldn't do that and sent the common defense force to beat the rogue members back into submission. After that, all of the member states found they could do less and less, as their sovereignty withered away.
What's the moral of this story? Firstly, you can learn a lot studying History. Secondly, if it's the EU's destiny to end up like that, they would do well to make the transition voluntary and relatively painless, rather than waiting for the weight of inevitability to drag it into some Frankensteinian half-country-half-bloc bureaucracy.
You, sir or madam, have a skewed perspective on life. There are plenty of people who work tirelessly to improve the lot of mankind who aren't saving people from burning buildings. And because they don't happen to be firefighters, they are just summarily dismissed from the sacred hall of heroes.
Remember, for every buiilding that doesn't burn down, there was an engineer (who looks a lot like an open-source geek) who designed it with correct safety standards, a standards committee who set forth such standards, and many, many people besides. They save a lot more people than the sum total of policemen and firemen ever will.
It does exist, though: object orientation is just like procedural programming except that we limit calling through class boundaries; this means that procedural languages get more flexibility than Object-oriented ones.
That, and true OO languages hold a lot of runtime information about datatypes which are rarely used and just take up memory, most of the time. With a procedural language, if you have need of a specific RTI, you create a struct that provides it and instantiate it strictly when necessary. Isn't it easier just letting the runtime library deal with this for you? It might, but it's something to think about when you are deciding which way to go.
Regardless, in a fixed-layout system, the burden is on the programmer to take large fonts and other accessibility options into consideration. In a dynamic layout editor, these considerations are naturally handled by the code.
It's just like OO. There's nothing you can do with objects that you can't do with ordinary functional or even unstructured programming; you have to be a lot more careful, though.
That's preposterous. Modularize the team rosters and player models/textures such that they can be updated yearly, if need be, changing a datafile with the relevant lists (downloadable from the company site). Changing the players around in a tree using a the editor that built the file in the first place is the work of a few man-hours, at most. The roster of textures/models only needs be updated with new players every year, which is certainly an automated process that can produce the 5% or so rookies in a few weeks.
There is NO REASON why sports games have to be re-released every year, except for the fact that top executives at EA and elsewhere want to milk the cow for however much it is worth.
Re:I haven't taken anything like this...
on
IT Literacy Test
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The idea of this test is fundamentally flawed. If you are good at problem solving, you will be good at problem solving in a technology-rich environment or a technology-poor environment equally. Analytical thought and problem solving has been around a lot longer than computers, and the same people that are good at solving problems with computers were good at solving problems with other things before computers.
Funny, my grandpa is an electrical and civil engineer (class of '51), has managed some pretty large projects on his own, and served as a kind of guru to probably half the population of engineers in Rio de Janeiro in the 70's and 80's. However, he has only learned to use MS Word and Excel after extensive coaching, and even today will get stuck if something unexpected happens (like, say, a button disappears from the Excel toolbar). Computer literacy, and especially the UI concepts like what is a menu, toolbar, link, etc, what is drag-and-drop, and some most general notions of OO (in the form of plug-ins and OLE/COM/CORBA/Bonobo) go a long way in allowing people to understand how software usually works.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you're confusing ethics and morality. Morality is what society says is right. Therefore, society as a whole frowns on, say, cheating on your boyfriend/girlfriend, and calls it immoral, even if there's no specific law against it (cheating on your spouse, OTOH, is another matter). Ethics, however, is the province of what is actually right or wrong, irrespective of society. Because people typically do not agree perfectly on what is right or wrong, one person's view of ethics will be different from other people's. Those parts of ethics which typically do agree with most people's are subsumed into morals, of course. Continuing with the above example, many girls in Rio de Janeiro don't think it's much of a big deal to have more than one boyfriend at a time (though typically two or three is the maximum they can juggle if the boyfriends don't know about or don't care for each other). So it's not unethical in their view, even though it is immoral.
That's being foolish. There's plenty of "experimental" OSes around, many of them Free Software, like EROS; that isn't what the HURD should be doing. It shouldn't be this neat system where development breaks away completely from what programmers are used to writing, therefore guaranteeing that porting of applications will be a tedious, and ultimately fruitless, process.
What the HURD developers should be doing is (risking the wrath of the community) be less revolutionary, and get something going. The team spent God-knows-how-long stumped on that file system mmap() problem, which barred disks larger than 2GB from being mounted. If one runs across this kind of barrier during the development of a system, one should just drop the feature and use something else which is known to work, and leave that feature for version 2.0 or something.
Of course, if the software is too little revolutionary, it won't make any sense to use it: The L4 developers already have a Linux 2.6.10 running on top of their microkernel... There ought to be some kind of compromise, basically dropping features when the milestones keep getting pushed back.
Then again, the Hurd might have been just a victim of the Cathedral method it (used to) be developed with...
There have been some cases of firmware for multimedia appliances which contained GPL software secretly. Though in these cases, there was usually a choice between releasing all of the firmware as GPL code or removing the offending parts. One of them tried even to compress the strings so the strings utility couldn't find them, but they got busted. In the end, I think the product was really overhauled.
I agree. Like I said, it's a case of analyzing the situation and see what is cheaper -- an overhaul of the existing infrastructure or paying a consultancy to provide support. However, with commercial software the second option isn't available if the original developer suddenly disappears or goes bankrupt.
In this case, you have to overhaul, no matter if you have it in 350,073 different machines at 176 offices around the world and furthermore they all run a specialist extension to perform some special function your employees use frequently that would require some $100,000.00 and six months to port to the new platform...
In short, it's not about you recommending Firefox and then it proving to be a dud. If you recommended a proprietary solution that then barfed, you'd be in as much of a bind, if not even worse. Still, yes, I'm thinking big contracts, on the seven, eight-digit scale. It's likely you can't see the difference as much if you're thinking about four or five digits.
This is all nice and all, but they only gave us a pointer to an article in money.cnn.com. Does anybody subscribe to the Journal of Applied Physics and has seen that article? How does it work, what kind of performance can we expect, etc?
In the real world, people DO care about having the source available, they just don't put it that way. It generally comes as some clause in the contract specifying that there must be some sort of contingency plan if the supplier for a certain part goes out of business. Open source is close to optimal solution: if the original supplier goes belly-up, shop around for someone willing to take it over -- there's plenty of small consultancies willing to do it.
Rest assured that, if Islamic Jihad had access to F-16 and AH-64 in large amounts and the supply lines to keep them flying, they'd just drop the bombs from the air instead of strapping the explosives to their own torsos.
Of course, the problem with introducing an editorial board is that there must be a way to decide whether the board is qualified to issue a ruling on the matter. Obviously, one may somehow get a tenured professor from a well-known university to edit (or rubber-stamp, whatever) articles about evolutionary biology, who gets to edit an article about the TV psychic phenomenon, or the controversy on John Kerry's Vietnam record? It's very difficult to amass all that kind of talent.
The names of the days of the week in old Rome were Solis dies, Lunae dies, Martis dies, Mercurii dies, Iouis (Jovis) dies, Veneris dies, and Saturnis dies. When the Empire converted to Christianity they only changed the name of the first day to Dominicus dies, the day of the Lord.
Germanic tribes which suffered Roman influence and adopted the seven-day week substituted the names of their own gods for the Latin ones, like Tyr, Thor, Odin, and Freya.
Portugal way over in the West of Europe, having a large population of Jews in the Middle Ages, adapted the Jewish system for numbering days, such that in Portuguese weekdays are called segunda-feira, terça-feira, etc. where feira is an old word for "day" and segunda, terça, etc. are ordinal numbers (in this case, for two and three, respectively).
Finally, to answer your question, the Christian Monotheistic God did not name the days of the weeks. Humans did. And they are under no compunctions to name them one way or another -- hell, they could have named them Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet! It would have been the same.
For example, Luke 23:54-56 and 24:1 --
In verse 54, "Preparation" is sometimes glossed as "Friday".
Yep, that's exactly like that. Congratulations! ;)
Not really. Eigenradio isn't something that's supposed to figure out what humans like or not. Eigenradio's about applying a linear algebra trick in a glut of signals and streaming out the resulting junk. It's a joke; either laugh at it or ignore it, but don't be offended.
Let me get this straight. You're saying that immigrants to the US should wait 50-100 years before getting a job? Buddy, are you on drugs? Or just plain out of your freaking mind? When your illegal immigrant great-grandfather came to the US, he took a job. Be thankful for it. Where do you think you would be if he hadn't? Probably wouldn't have even been born.
Being born in the United States does not give you the right to dictate who should or should not be able to work. Rather than feeling ashamed of your immigrant heritage, you should be ashamed of turning your back on it, even if you can't point to a single place of "origin"; in fact, even more so because of it.
In fact, if you're having trouble finding a job, have you considered emmigration? There's a lot of potential for honest people who are willing to work in Europe and Japan...
Worst thing is, most Americans don't think like that. But the few idiots who do spoil the image of the entire people in the eyes of foreigners.
There isn't much that can be done about graphics cards drivers (not X drivers); most video card companies won't publish the specs so that spanking-new card drivers can be written: they have to be reverse-engineered and it takes time. That being said, I had to wait a while in 2001, I think, for XFree86 4.1 to come out so it would support my ATI Radeon; I haven't had problems with graphics cards since, though, in spite of going through three other cards and four distros in this span of time.
As for something that comes close to Visual Studio, if you're talking about interface specifics, not even Kylix comes close (it's closer to C++ Builder, instead), but KDevelop is a pretty good IDE, and Eclipse is available on Linux, too (what with it being Java and all). If you could take a weekend to fiddle with one of those, I'm sure you'd be pleasantly surprised.
More difficult, perhaps. But difficult, still? We've been hearing a lot about the USPTO granting patents to many parties without due review. How likely is it anyway that a patent application in the software field will be rejected? That is, to me, the heart of the matter. After all, if it costs a lot of money, but it's guaranteed to succeed, you just have to find a VC, or perhaps a bank loan, willing to support you through the ride:
It's not like we haven't seen this one before, is it?
Of course the number is extremely unrealistic! Here, 100 is standard lingo for "a large number". If you pay attention to the end of the review, you'll find out that 37 is a rounding of 100/e; choose a more appropriate number for you and calculate your own optimum.
Also, if you aren't able to rate your relationships with respect to one another, then you should forget about relationships altogether. Come on, you don't have to apply a mathematical formula for evaluation; you don't even have to come up with a numerical score. You just have to be able to order the relationships from worst to best: "I didn't like spending time with Jenny as much as I did with Claire, therefore Claire was better than Jenny". How hard is that, anyway?
And given that (simple) ability, if maths can give you a better chance of becoming happier, then by all means, use it! Or don't, the choice is yours. But discounting them wholesale because you're "uncomfortable" with them is sort of unfair...
Excuse me? Is it the author or the editor who's claiming that patents are difficult to obtain? Haven't we been seeing patents being awarded left and right for the most mundane industry processes? Difficult to obtain, indeed.
Oops. My bad; I must be going dysxelic...
You'd think so, but there's actually a prior example on this whole "union of countries" deal. They formed a common parliament, decided on a common currency, foreign policy, etc., just like the EU today.
But the problem was that some of the member states had some pretty strong views on some issues, while some others had the opposite view, and were adamant about it, too. Meanwhile, the supranational government did a great show of staying put on top of the wall in the middle, and they just basically let things fester until some of the countries decided they couldn't stay in that union any longer.
Then, of course, the supranational government decided they couldn't do that and sent the common defense force to beat the rogue members back into submission. After that, all of the member states found they could do less and less, as their sovereignty withered away.
What's the moral of this story? Firstly, you can learn a lot studying History. Secondly, if it's the EU's destiny to end up like that, they would do well to make the transition voluntary and relatively painless, rather than waiting for the weight of inevitability to drag it into some Frankensteinian half-country-half-bloc bureaucracy.
In C, there's no exponentiation operator. Instead, you use a <math.h> function,
Therefore,You, sir or madam, have a skewed perspective on life. There are plenty of people who work tirelessly to improve the lot of mankind who aren't saving people from burning buildings. And because they don't happen to be firefighters, they are just summarily dismissed from the sacred hall of heroes.
Remember, for every buiilding that doesn't burn down, there was an engineer (who looks a lot like an open-source geek) who designed it with correct safety standards, a standards committee who set forth such standards, and many, many people besides. They save a lot more people than the sum total of policemen and firemen ever will.
It does exist, though: object orientation is just like procedural programming except that we limit calling through class boundaries; this means that procedural languages get more flexibility than Object-oriented ones. That, and true OO languages hold a lot of runtime information about datatypes which are rarely used and just take up memory, most of the time. With a procedural language, if you have need of a specific RTI, you create a struct that provides it and instantiate it strictly when necessary. Isn't it easier just letting the runtime library deal with this for you? It might, but it's something to think about when you are deciding which way to go.
Regardless, in a fixed-layout system, the burden is on the programmer to take large fonts and other accessibility options into consideration. In a dynamic layout editor, these considerations are naturally handled by the code.
It's just like OO. There's nothing you can do with objects that you can't do with ordinary functional or even unstructured programming; you have to be a lot more careful, though.
That's preposterous. Modularize the team rosters and player models/textures such that they can be updated yearly, if need be, changing a datafile with the relevant lists (downloadable from the company site). Changing the players around in a tree using a the editor that built the file in the first place is the work of a few man-hours, at most. The roster of textures/models only needs be updated with new players every year, which is certainly an automated process that can produce the 5% or so rookies in a few weeks.
There is NO REASON why sports games have to be re-released every year, except for the fact that top executives at EA and elsewhere want to milk the cow for however much it is worth.
Funny, my grandpa is an electrical and civil engineer (class of '51), has managed some pretty large projects on his own, and served as a kind of guru to probably half the population of engineers in Rio de Janeiro in the 70's and 80's. However, he has only learned to use MS Word and Excel after extensive coaching, and even today will get stuck if something unexpected happens (like, say, a button disappears from the Excel toolbar). Computer literacy, and especially the UI concepts like what is a menu, toolbar, link, etc, what is drag-and-drop, and some most general notions of OO (in the form of plug-ins and OLE/COM/CORBA/Bonobo) go a long way in allowing people to understand how software usually works.