Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
Ooh, the Angry Buddhist! Please check your facts.
First off, several games portray Buddhist and Taoist mythologies, when they're based on Eastern (Indian/Chinese/Japanese culture). However, since most games depict either European Middle-ages or Western Contemporaneous setting, settings which have far more Christian than Buddhist influence, it is natural that Christianity features more proeminently in those.
Furthermore, games are interesting when they are able to entertain or educate. I don't play Civilization III to escape the hopeless mediocrity of my urban middle class life. I rather play in order to amuse myself and sharpen my strategic thinking skills.
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
You'd certainly think that. Unfortunately, the Crusades were caused by an Economic need for more lands to accomodate the rising numbers of European Knights-errant, who weren't themselves priests. Similarly, the colonization of the New World and subsequent conversion was motivated by an economic need of European states to collect gold.
Speaking of the colonization of the New World, in Spanish and Portuguese America, most of the time the only thing between the native tribes and slavery was the protection of the Jesuit missionaries -- several times in the XVII and XVIII centuries the colonials tried to expel the priests from the New World in order to be able to make slaves of the indians in the Missions.
A little bit of this, a little bit of that. I agree completely with the code completion deal, it really does speed up development. Unfortunately, I hate the Forms Designer with a passion. I've been doing nothing but develop ASP.NET for a year now, and I dropped that thing in my third week.
Don't be fooled: the Forms Designer is great if you're building the simplest textbox-and-submit-button pages. When you start dealing with components (both third-party and self-made), the Forms Designer seriously barfs. It's also terrible at detecting that a control was instantiated in the base class for the codebehind, generating a double declaration and then dying when you run the application. You're better off previewing the page on the browser...
I don't believe these are meaningful OR valid considerations. I was an exchange student, myself, and I can say I never felt pressured or less-able to perform work for being away from my family and/or support system. In fact, immigrants who leave their countries in a non-exchange-student capacity aren't less able to do useful work, either -- the United States were, in a significant part, built upon the efforts of people in this condition. And neither is, in fact, the New Yorker who moves 5000 miles to the West Coast to work.
The only valid concern one could state about the guy being an exchange student is that he might be gone at the end of the school year. You take too little stock in the ability people have to work in foreign environments; and that has nothing to do with race.
Funniest thing is, I don't think great-grandparent was particularly racially biased; parent, though, is openly so.
Re:Why do Slashdotters like TMBG so much?
on
TMBG on DRM
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It depends on your definition of "shitty". I know plenty of shitty bands who would like very much to sue your pants off if you downloaded one of their songs...
This is off-topic, but it bothers me when someone blasts another for ignorance and then links into an otherwise perfectly good article ("The Myth of Self-Describing XML", by Eric Browne)which contains the following pearl:
The business logic cannot be constructed
post priori!
Doesn't it bother anyone that someone who doesn't know his Latin (but uses it, anyway, where a perfectly good "after the fact" would suffice) is used as an authoritative source by the author? If you're trying to prove someone's incompetence, you won't want to counteract it with further incompetence. Mr. Browne may be a genius in relational databases, but makes stuff up just the same.
And in the unlikely case Mr. Browne should read this post, the correct form is a posteriori, as any law student probably knows.
There are only three things that you are working with as a development manager: resources (people and money), features and the schedule.
Funny, I remember that one from XP theory, but it was a quadrilateral, then. Resources, Scope (features), Schedule, Quality. Sometimes one has to balance scope and quality and can't compromise on scope, the quality has to go -- thread safety, scalability, code size or whatever metric you may decide can be ignored...
I imagine I will be getting a lot of flak from my fellow programmers; no one likes doing shoddy work, myself included, but sometimes it becomes unavoidable.
Then again, every so-called 'grassroots' foundation (yes, even the FSS) is biased towards its stated mission. At any rate, to me, a group which dedicates itself to the moral defense of Capitalist principles is no better (or worse!) than the ones dedicated to the moral defense of Socialism. Socio-economic structural models are just that, models.
I agree wholeheartedly. We *should* be able to trust third party libraries... We *should* have rocket-cars, and jet-packs, and take vacations on the moon, too, but they never gave us that. As well as bug-free libraries.
Maybe we should do a project for an automatic code verifier (not validator, verifier), which proves code symbolic-mathematically to be bug-free. Then we could run the system libraries through it and finally declare them to work exactly as they should, no? Of course, who guarantees that the verifier doesn't have a bug? Do we run the verifier through itself? What if the bug makes it think it doesn't have any bugs when it does? It's madness, I tell you.
If you want a manga geared towards a more adult audience, I strongly recommend Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. It's released monthly in the 'Afternoon' serial, and has a really killer ambience. It's been going on for several years, now -- ykk.misago.org has an up-to-date archive (up to the latest chapter, the 117th) straight from Afternoon, while Mangaproject (mp.sigh.org/manga) does a slower translation, with higher resolution, based off the Tankoubon compilation.
As for other adult-oriented manga, I guess all the others I read are licensed and bought in the newspaper stand, so I can't help you there... Sorry.
There are several instances where scanslation is up to par with the serialized release (Shounen Jump, Afternoon, Hana to Yume, etc) Inuyasha has it, One Piece has it, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou has it, Mar (Flame of Recca's Anzai Nobuyuki's newest manga) has it, Busou Renkin (Rurouni Kenshin's Watsuki Nobuhiro's newest) has it, and several others I don't know about.
Fact is, most scanslation groups wait for the better-quality tankoubon compilation's release to make the scans, so chapters tend to be late at least three months from their release in the serial magazine.
Some even might, but that's not my point. My point is that constant bombardment by advertising ("propaganda") can soak into even a well-informed individual's brain and cause him (or her) to have preconceptions about an issue without knowing its source or even having a valid reason for it ("prejudice").
Not a religion, but more like a soccer team. No, I'm not trying to be funny. Passions run high, after all.
However, there is such a thing as inappropriate advertisement. Consider, for example, Johnnie Walker -- an upstanding liquor brand. No one would have any problems with them advertising on Linux Today or Slashdot, even if the geek crowd isn't quite on top of the whiskey drinking statistics.
However, what if they decided to advertise on the Discovery Kids homepage, targeted at children 3-7 years old and their supervising parents. It'd be an outrage, wouldn't it? Maybe it is an extreme example, but the point is that some discretion has to be exercised when assigning ads in mass media, and that means in the Internet as well.
Agah. We're not discussing whether Linux-heads who already have their opinions formed are offended by the blatant Linux bashing; we're discussing the problem that is when people who don't know any better go to a Linux site and have their experience colored by propaganda which is known to be false but is still shown anyway by virtue of the almighty buck.
Therefore, the savvy Firefox users with Adblock (myself included) are not the object of our concern, here.
While it's true that people won't generally develop for a platform that isn't used, the usage of platforms isn't frozen in time. More importantly, if a developer's client happens to hear all about the new, cross-platform, next-generation Web standard that's all the rage in the technology press (like WIRED), he may just ask his CTO, "hey, how come we don't have that?" And suddenly, there's a market for this snazzy new technology. The key word (well, phrase) here is 'media coverage'.
It would make it possible (maybe not popular) to license the use of the brand to registered corporations
... and then we'd have a tax on operating systems, just like in the one from Redmond. Why would we bother with it, then? I'd as soon switch to FreeBSD and stick with it. We can't have a double standard.
As for the grsecurity developer, it's unfortunate, but FOSS developers really do need a day-job. I understand him being angry at a sponsor who fell through on a contract, but holding the project hostage isn't really the decent thing to do.
The Billings method is the one you'd be referred to, if you went to talk to a Catholic priest. It's natural, involves no chemicals, and around 98.5% effective. It's also not abortive, which is why the Catholic church backs it.
At any rate, if you're allergic to contraceptives, it's worth a try.
I'm sorry, but it's easy to convert milliliters to liters, too. Why is it that if you have more guests coming it's easier to use two gallons rather than eight liters?
Anyway, I guess it will never be obvious to Imperials until they've tried to scale a plan using calculators...
73.66 mm * 3 = 220.98 mm.
2' 5" * 3 = ????
Java functionality does exist out of the box for FOSS systems. I present you Kaffe; their links page has links to several other open-source Java implementations, if it doesn't strike your fancy. In fact, the kernel has a module that allows Java execution directly like it executes ELF binaries; I don't know whether it's open or closed source, though, but it runs perfectly with *any* JVM you specify, not necessarily Sun's.
Acrobat is stupid. There've been FOSS PDF readers and/or writers for years, now. Why exactly do I want to use Adobe's? Their version 6 was much worse than 5; I still use that old version on my Windows machines, and they display every document perfectly. In my Linux machines, I use Gnome PDF Viewer, and so far I haven't had a problem.
As for Real Player, I've seen some Japanese sites which allow downloads in Real format; most streaming video out there on the Net, though, is generally some form of AVI. Frankly, I don't see much of a difference.
Finally, Flash. Now, I don't really know if there are any FOSS Flash Players, but it may become necessary to have that functionality especially if you have a graphic designer in your house. However, SVG use is on the rise, thanks to several folks including the GNOME project. Who knows? It might even displace Flash as a medium of choice for animation, one which does not leave you prone to sudden patent fees (.gif, anyone?)
Thank you for being concerned with the usability of desktop computers, but it pays to look what exactly is being discussed. No one said that having a Java VM out of the box is bad, only that having Sun's and claiming there's only FOSS in your distribution is.
They'd be tampering with stuff which resides on the bank's servers and isn't meant to be tampered with -- they'd be impersonating me. That isn't even reverse engineering, it's fraud. In this case, the network is being used to upload/download files using whatever (little) authentication is used on the real thing, honestly. It's not impersonating anyone.
Frankly, when I'm sharing stuff on my P2P client, I (as sharer) don't care if whoever gets it is using Kazaa, KCEasy, Morpheus or whatnot. I'm providing the content and the bandwidth and I don't appreciate Sharman telling me who can talk to me and get it and who can't.
3.2.something, I can't tell because I'm at work right now. Back when I last tried to compile a C++ project, it was the latest version available. I've been doing C since then and haven't had a reason to update.
As for a code snippet, a simple throw "Exception thrown"; will compile OK, but give out a linker error to the flavor of "Unresolved symbol __throw" everywhere there are throw statements... but maybe I've just messed up on the configuration when I compiled the blasted thing. Who knows?
Slashdot Mirror
Ooh, the Angry Buddhist! Please check your facts.
First off, several games portray Buddhist and Taoist mythologies, when they're based on Eastern (Indian/Chinese/Japanese culture). However, since most games depict either European Middle-ages or Western Contemporaneous setting, settings which have far more Christian than Buddhist influence, it is natural that Christianity features more proeminently in those.
Furthermore, games are interesting when they are able to entertain or educate. I don't play Civilization III to escape the hopeless mediocrity of my urban middle class life. I rather play in order to amuse myself and sharpen my strategic thinking skills.
You'd certainly think that. Unfortunately, the Crusades were caused by an Economic need for more lands to accomodate the rising numbers of European Knights-errant, who weren't themselves priests. Similarly, the colonization of the New World and subsequent conversion was motivated by an economic need of European states to collect gold.
Speaking of the colonization of the New World, in Spanish and Portuguese America, most of the time the only thing between the native tribes and slavery was the protection of the Jesuit missionaries -- several times in the XVII and XVIII centuries the colonials tried to expel the priests from the New World in order to be able to make slaves of the indians in the Missions.
Here, check out this place. You may be pleasantly surprised.
That's rich. And you are, of course, able to perceive with complete accuracy truth from lies. Maybe I should start worshipping you...
A little bit of this, a little bit of that. I agree completely with the code completion deal, it really does speed up development. Unfortunately, I hate the Forms Designer with a passion. I've been doing nothing but develop ASP.NET for a year now, and I dropped that thing in my third week.
Don't be fooled: the Forms Designer is great if you're building the simplest textbox-and-submit-button pages. When you start dealing with components (both third-party and self-made), the Forms Designer seriously barfs. It's also terrible at detecting that a control was instantiated in the base class for the codebehind, generating a double declaration and then dying when you run the application. You're better off previewing the page on the browser...
I don't believe these are meaningful OR valid considerations. I was an exchange student, myself, and I can say I never felt pressured or less-able to perform work for being away from my family and/or support system. In fact, immigrants who leave their countries in a non-exchange-student capacity aren't less able to do useful work, either -- the United States were, in a significant part, built upon the efforts of people in this condition. And neither is, in fact, the New Yorker who moves 5000 miles to the West Coast to work.
The only valid concern one could state about the guy being an exchange student is that he might be gone at the end of the school year. You take too little stock in the ability people have to work in foreign environments; and that has nothing to do with race.
Funniest thing is, I don't think great-grandparent was particularly racially biased; parent, though, is openly so.
It depends on your definition of "shitty". I know plenty of shitty bands who would like very much to sue your pants off if you downloaded one of their songs...
This is off-topic, but it bothers me when someone blasts another for ignorance and then links into an otherwise perfectly good article ("The Myth of Self-Describing XML", by Eric Browne)which contains the following pearl:
Doesn't it bother anyone that someone who doesn't know his Latin (but uses it, anyway, where a perfectly good "after the fact" would suffice) is used as an authoritative source by the author? If you're trying to prove someone's incompetence, you won't want to counteract it with further incompetence. Mr. Browne may be a genius in relational databases, but makes stuff up just the same.
And in the unlikely case Mr. Browne should read this post, the correct form is a posteriori, as any law student probably knows.
There are only three things that you are working with as a development manager: resources (people and money), features and the schedule.
Funny, I remember that one from XP theory, but it was a quadrilateral, then. Resources, Scope (features), Schedule, Quality. Sometimes one has to balance scope and quality and can't compromise on scope, the quality has to go -- thread safety, scalability, code size or whatever metric you may decide can be ignored...
I imagine I will be getting a lot of flak from my fellow programmers; no one likes doing shoddy work, myself included, but sometimes it becomes unavoidable.
Then again, every so-called 'grassroots' foundation (yes, even the FSS) is biased towards its stated mission. At any rate, to me, a group which dedicates itself to the moral defense of Capitalist principles is no better (or worse!) than the ones dedicated to the moral defense of Socialism. Socio-economic structural models are just that, models.
I agree wholeheartedly. We *should* be able to trust third party libraries... We *should* have rocket-cars, and jet-packs, and take vacations on the moon, too, but they never gave us that. As well as bug-free libraries.
Maybe we should do a project for an automatic code verifier (not validator, verifier), which proves code symbolic-mathematically to be bug-free. Then we could run the system libraries through it and finally declare them to work exactly as they should, no? Of course, who guarantees that the verifier doesn't have a bug? Do we run the verifier through itself? What if the bug makes it think it doesn't have any bugs when it does? It's madness, I tell you.
If you want a manga geared towards a more adult audience, I strongly recommend Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. It's released monthly in the 'Afternoon' serial, and has a really killer ambience. It's been going on for several years, now -- ykk.misago.org has an up-to-date archive (up to the latest chapter, the 117th) straight from Afternoon, while Mangaproject (mp.sigh.org/manga) does a slower translation, with higher resolution, based off the Tankoubon compilation.
As for other adult-oriented manga, I guess all the others I read are licensed and bought in the newspaper stand, so I can't help you there... Sorry.
There are several instances where scanslation is up to par with the serialized release (Shounen Jump, Afternoon, Hana to Yume, etc) Inuyasha has it, One Piece has it, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou has it, Mar (Flame of Recca's Anzai Nobuyuki's newest manga) has it, Busou Renkin (Rurouni Kenshin's Watsuki Nobuhiro's newest) has it, and several others I don't know about.
Fact is, most scanslation groups wait for the better-quality tankoubon compilation's release to make the scans, so chapters tend to be late at least three months from their release in the serial magazine.
Some even might, but that's not my point. My point is that constant bombardment by advertising ("propaganda") can soak into even a well-informed individual's brain and cause him (or her) to have preconceptions about an issue without knowing its source or even having a valid reason for it ("prejudice").
Not a religion, but more like a soccer team. No, I'm not trying to be funny. Passions run high, after all.
However, there is such a thing as inappropriate advertisement. Consider, for example, Johnnie Walker -- an upstanding liquor brand. No one would have any problems with them advertising on Linux Today or Slashdot, even if the geek crowd isn't quite on top of the whiskey drinking statistics.
However, what if they decided to advertise on the Discovery Kids homepage, targeted at children 3-7 years old and their supervising parents. It'd be an outrage, wouldn't it? Maybe it is an extreme example, but the point is that some discretion has to be exercised when assigning ads in mass media, and that means in the Internet as well.
Agah. We're not discussing whether Linux-heads who already have their opinions formed are offended by the blatant Linux bashing; we're discussing the problem that is when people who don't know any better go to a Linux site and have their experience colored by propaganda which is known to be false but is still shown anyway by virtue of the almighty buck.
Therefore, the savvy Firefox users with Adblock (myself included) are not the object of our concern, here.
While it's true that people won't generally develop for a platform that isn't used, the usage of platforms isn't frozen in time. More importantly, if a developer's client happens to hear all about the new, cross-platform, next-generation Web standard that's all the rage in the technology press (like WIRED), he may just ask his CTO, "hey, how come we don't have that?" And suddenly, there's a market for this snazzy new technology. The key word (well, phrase) here is 'media coverage'.
It would make it possible (maybe not popular) to license the use of the brand to registered corporations
... and then we'd have a tax on operating systems, just like in the one from Redmond. Why would we bother with it, then? I'd as soon switch to FreeBSD and stick with it. We can't have a double standard.
As for the grsecurity developer, it's unfortunate, but FOSS developers really do need a day-job. I understand him being angry at a sponsor who fell through on a contract, but holding the project hostage isn't really the decent thing to do.
The Billings method is the one you'd be referred to, if you went to talk to a Catholic priest. It's natural, involves no chemicals, and around 98.5% effective. It's also not abortive, which is why the Catholic church backs it.
At any rate, if you're allergic to contraceptives, it's worth a try.
2.54cm at a time, you mean :)
2kg / 5 = 400g
2kg / 8 = 250g
2kg / 13 ~ 154g
Whatever divisor you may choose, there's a division. Of course, there may be some rounding involved, but we can't keep infinite significant figures...
By contrast, two pounds divided by 13 is one and 3/13 ounces... a clumsy number for use.
I'm sorry, but it's easy to convert milliliters to liters, too. Why is it that if you have more guests coming it's easier to use two gallons rather than eight liters?
Anyway, I guess it will never be obvious to Imperials until they've tried to scale a plan using calculators...
73.66 mm * 3 = 220.98 mm.
2' 5" * 3 = ????
Java functionality does exist out of the box for FOSS systems. I present you Kaffe; their links page has links to several other open-source Java implementations, if it doesn't strike your fancy. In fact, the kernel has a module that allows Java execution directly like it executes ELF binaries; I don't know whether it's open or closed source, though, but it runs perfectly with *any* JVM you specify, not necessarily Sun's.
Acrobat is stupid. There've been FOSS PDF readers and/or writers for years, now. Why exactly do I want to use Adobe's? Their version 6 was much worse than 5; I still use that old version on my Windows machines, and they display every document perfectly. In my Linux machines, I use Gnome PDF Viewer, and so far I haven't had a problem.
As for Real Player, I've seen some Japanese sites which allow downloads in Real format; most streaming video out there on the Net, though, is generally some form of AVI. Frankly, I don't see much of a difference.
Finally, Flash. Now, I don't really know if there are any FOSS Flash Players, but it may become necessary to have that functionality especially if you have a graphic designer in your house. However, SVG use is on the rise, thanks to several folks including the GNOME project. Who knows? It might even displace Flash as a medium of choice for animation, one which does not leave you prone to sudden patent fees (.gif, anyone?)
Thank you for being concerned with the usability of desktop computers, but it pays to look what exactly is being discussed. No one said that having a Java VM out of the box is bad, only that having Sun's and claiming there's only FOSS in your distribution is.
They'd be tampering with stuff which resides on the bank's servers and isn't meant to be tampered with -- they'd be impersonating me. That isn't even reverse engineering, it's fraud. In this case, the network is being used to upload/download files using whatever (little) authentication is used on the real thing, honestly. It's not impersonating anyone.
Frankly, when I'm sharing stuff on my P2P client, I (as sharer) don't care if whoever gets it is using Kazaa, KCEasy, Morpheus or whatnot. I'm providing the content and the bandwidth and I don't appreciate Sharman telling me who can talk to me and get it and who can't.
3.2.something, I can't tell because I'm at work right now. Back when I last tried to compile a C++ project, it was the latest version available. I've been doing C since then and haven't had a reason to update.
As for a code snippet, a simple throw "Exception thrown"; will compile OK, but give out a linker error to the flavor of "Unresolved symbol __throw" everywhere there are throw statements... but maybe I've just messed up on the configuration when I compiled the blasted thing. Who knows?