The future belongs to those who own the Net. The Net belongs to a culture; it always has, and always will. The culture is bigger than goverments, stronger than armies, and yet listens to the tiniest whisper of knowledge, wisdom, or freedom.
The future belongs to us. We will choose as our heroes those who inform us, inspire us, and remind us of our best selves. They struggle against the forces who would keep us ignorant, cowed, and small.
It is not only the well-known who will be our heroes. A hero struggles against some enemy faced by his fellow man and overcomes it. She scares the lion with a burning stick, he sits on an exploding bucket and rides it into space, stands in front of a tyrant's advancing tank, and writes cool software because "it pleases the Author of his story".
It's not necessary to rank a hero's deeds alongside those of other heroes. Clearly it cheapens them all to try to compare them. We acknowledge and admire their greatness, sacrifice, courage, and inspiration; that is enough.
Become a diamond.LifeGem of Chicago, Illinois, the book reveals, will take a few grains of your cremated remains, subject them to high pressure and temperature, and you will emerge from the process, 18 weeks later, as a sparkling one-carat diamond.
That one-carat rock of eternity will cost your estate $14,000. Plus tax. Sign here.
I used to be a pathological liar, so this is an area of some interest to me.
I tell my kids that a lie forces the liar to construct and maintain two universes: the one the lie would work in and the one the truth occupies. Since telling one lie usually forces liars to tell another, a repeated doubling effect occurs, forcing them to maintain exponentially increasing sets of information.
Liars try to overlay these false realities on top of one another, keeping track only of the differences. Since they aren't aware that they are trying to juggle an exponentially expanding set of universes, or because it's a losing proposition anyway, they always miss something.
All lies can be detected by some inconsistency. They are either internally inconsistent or externally inconsistent. That is, a liar either contradicts himself or some known fact, either directly or by logical inference.
It also seems there is a small set of people who have the innate ability to detect a lie. The rest of us don't see the lie, and tend not to care.
That's a red herriing. You're trying to shift the debate to be between defense spending and medical research spending, which is an orthogonal topic. It's like trying to decide which kind of peas to buy (fresh or frozen) by saying you should save money on car insurance by taking a higher deductible.
It's debatable whether the goal of achieving medical breakthroughs with embryonic stem cells is "noble". I'm not sure I get your meaning. "Noble" implies some kind of self-sacrifice -- who is doing the sacrificing?
More importantly, it's not necessarily the goal, but the path to get to it that it problematic.
But when I read "Principle: The user is in charge and should be free to carry out any activity at any time without fear of reprisals" I just about lost my lunch.
It appears that everyone is guilty of having a framework. This guy, you, me, everyone. We think that what we experience in the world, and what we think about it, is all there is. We're all pretty small, even the wisest of us.
In this case, a Mac guy says the user is in charge, and thinks it's a law of nature.
Microsoft treats users as a renewable resource, to be used and reused as needed.
We Unix types, on the other hand, know that users are an unfortunate side effect.
However, embryonic stem cells are the cells which hold the real promise for research.
Embryonic cells are growing too fast, and are too unstable. They end up growing into a mess, since they can't be told what to grow into.
Adult cells are by definition those that are stable, having already grown into whatever their "children" will be. Embryonic cells (found in embryos with 1024 or fewer cells) can still grow into any type of cell, which we can't yet control.
It's true that embryonic cells hold "promise", but it comes at a cost. While we're trying to figure out (through the research you want) how to keep a group of embryonic stem cells from growing into an amorphous blob of cells for a discordant mixture body parts, how much effort and money are we spending on it that could be better spent on adult cell research, or even more efficiently by developing a cholesterol-enhancing french fry?
There's only so much money to go around. It's a balance between the far-off possibility of taming the embryonic cells versus the reality of using adult cells to fix broken bodies today.
Writing an article about a guy who modded his case to look like a video game
- or the clear winner -
Commenting on an article about a guy who modded his case to look like a video game, when you know you're just going to get modded down Troll, Flamebait and Off-Topic?
PLATO had English as a second language, as well as Spanish, French, German, and even Esperanto in the late 1970's. They also had math lessons ranging from "2+2=4" to DiffEq (and probably beyond that). It was all interactive, to say the least.
To me, "records" will always be vinyl 33 1/3 rpm LPs.
"Album" predates LP's and originally referred to a collection of 8-10 separate 78rpm disks. They were packaged in a binder, shaped like a photo album. ("Like a what?")
I hate it when people steal words. But then, I also hate the word police, so I'm stuck.
They help, but they don't have a monopoly on handling complexity.
Any programming language that allows you to subdivide a program into chunks of some kind with good hiding of the innards of the chunks can be used to write complex programs.
To really beat complexity, try shell scripts. Since you can't (really) do simple stuff like adding numbers, it forces you to hide the details, which reduces the feel of the complexity. And stuff.
This is the kind of result that you should have to be trying to achieve for it to happen.
No, this is the kind of result that you should not be able to achieve, no matter how bad a sysadmin you are and how little you try, or no matter how good you are and no matter how hard you try.
The Fine Article, in its point 0, says that the user isn't trying to use the program, they're trying to get their work done. That's correct. Think of your program as a screwdriver. What's the user interface on a screwdriver? A handle. When's the last time you had to think about the handle on a screwdriver? That's a good interface.
(I don't want to get sidetracked with tool analogies, so I won't talk about why a Leatherman is good while a Swiss Army Knife is bad. Ok, I will: it's easy to access all of the functions of a Leatherman, because of the way the blades and such are arranged, but it always takes me fumbling and cursing of fingernails to get at the right part of a Swiss Army Knife.)
But TFA is mistaken to say that Ficks Law dictates placement of controls in a GUI. There are othe factors at work.
English-speaking readers (and anyone else who reads left-to-right) have been trained to read left to right, top to bottom (LTRTTB). Therefore the most important spot on the screen is the upper-left corner. Since 'Back' is the most oft-used function, its control should be in the upper-left corner.
In general, location should be sorted by relevance, since you really don't know where the mouse pointer will be. Vision is random-access, but search patterns for a person's focus are dictated by the LTRTTB training. Developers targeting, e.g., East Asian or Semitic readers (who may read in a different direction) may want to take that into account.
The other principle is cleanness. Common functions should be easy to invoke, while dangerous hacks should take more work. In no case should a user have to look outside the program to find information needed to navigate it. I cry foul on cheat sheets.
Then they will see they were wrong for deserting me. Our product is safe: it doesn't explode, give you cancer, or get you arrested. What is security if not safety? I'm the Chief Software Architect, for it, you know.
I'll show you who is right, and then you'll pay -- you'll all pay!
Simply don your Slashdot-approved tin hat (available now at OSDN.com), as it has built-in protection from cell phone radiation. Make sure to use the supplied grounding strap, affixing the free end firmly to the steel pad on the bottom of your shoe.
I've realized why the cell phone makers aren't concerned about random explosions. It just saves their users from succombing to brain cancer. Humane, in a way, and cheaper to litigate.
With a full-time gig, you have safety and the security of knowing that your income is whatever they decide to give you. As a contractor, you are in business for yourself; it's the first step to a life in which your income has no set limit.
[...] Although you might want to receive $20 per hour in pocket take home, you will need to bill around $50 per hour just to cover all your expenses. Maybe even more.
Yep. And keep track of it in 1- , 5-, or 6-minute increments, whatever makes the most sense to you. And be merciless with your billing.
They want you to be a contractor, so always treat them as a customer, not an employer. Customers and bosses are always right, of course, but it makes a difference to your self-esteem.
And finally, the benefit. Every cost you incur in your business is pretax deductible. Every cost you incur as an individual is after tax. This makes it very smart to be in your own business just for the tax savings of things you would buy anyhow.
This is huge. I spend about $300/month on gasoline, and I get to write off $0.37/mile. Every computer widget I use in my business, everything I can call a business expense, I document and take off my taxable income. Even my cell phone, Internet access, and other stuff where I can show a business percentage of the use I take off, too.
If you don't keep track of it, you'll wind up paying everything you earn to the feds, or making it up and hoping they don't audit you and send you to jail.
Slashdot Mirror
You've killed Kenny!
>Are you lying?
I'm lying right now.
The future belongs to those who own the Net. The Net belongs to a culture; it always has, and always will. The culture is bigger than goverments, stronger than armies, and yet listens to the tiniest whisper of knowledge, wisdom, or freedom.
The future belongs to us. We will choose as our heroes those who inform us, inspire us, and remind us of our best selves. They struggle against the forces who would keep us ignorant, cowed, and small.
It is not only the well-known who will be our heroes. A hero struggles against some enemy faced by his fellow man and overcomes it. She scares the lion with a burning stick, he sits on an exploding bucket and rides it into space, stands in front of a tyrant's advancing tank, and writes cool software because "it pleases the Author of his story".
It's not necessary to rank a hero's deeds alongside those of other heroes. Clearly it cheapens them all to try to compare them. We acknowledge and admire their greatness, sacrifice, courage, and inspiration; that is enough.
That one-carat rock of eternity will cost your estate $14,000. Plus tax. Sign here.
I wonder if my wife would wear me in a ring, or keep me on a nice pedestal in the foyer?
"Yer criminals are basically stupid."
I used to be a pathological liar, so this is an area of some interest to me.
I tell my kids that a lie forces the liar to construct and maintain two universes: the one the lie would work in and the one the truth occupies. Since telling one lie usually forces liars to tell another, a repeated doubling effect occurs, forcing them to maintain exponentially increasing sets of information.
Liars try to overlay these false realities on top of one another, keeping track only of the differences. Since they aren't aware that they are trying to juggle an exponentially expanding set of universes, or because it's a losing proposition anyway, they always miss something.
All lies can be detected by some inconsistency. They are either internally inconsistent or externally inconsistent. That is, a liar either contradicts himself or some known fact, either directly or by logical inference.
It also seems there is a small set of people who have the innate ability to detect a lie. The rest of us don't see the lie, and tend not to care.
... a lot of old spammers there. A lot of the spam my server blocks is from .kr addresses.
>Star Wars
That's a red herriing. You're trying to shift the debate to be between defense spending and medical research spending, which is an orthogonal topic. It's like trying to decide which kind of peas to buy (fresh or frozen) by saying you should save money on car insurance by taking a higher deductible.
It's debatable whether the goal of achieving medical breakthroughs with embryonic stem cells is "noble". I'm not sure I get your meaning. "Noble" implies some kind of self-sacrifice -- who is doing the sacrificing?
More importantly, it's not necessarily the goal, but the path to get to it that it problematic.
It appears that everyone is guilty of having a framework. This guy, you, me, everyone. We think that what we experience in the world, and what we think about it, is all there is. We're all pretty small, even the wisest of us.
In this case, a Mac guy says the user is in charge, and thinks it's a law of nature.
Microsoft treats users as a renewable resource, to be used and reused as needed.
We Unix types, on the other hand, know that users are an unfortunate side effect.
Embryonic cells are growing too fast, and are too unstable. They end up growing into a mess, since they can't be told what to grow into.
Adult cells are by definition those that are stable, having already grown into whatever their "children" will be. Embryonic cells (found in embryos with 1024 or fewer cells) can still grow into any type of cell, which we can't yet control.
It's true that embryonic cells hold "promise", but it comes at a cost. While we're trying to figure out (through the research you want) how to keep a group of embryonic stem cells from growing into an amorphous blob of cells for a discordant mixture body parts, how much effort and money are we spending on it that could be better spent on adult cell research, or even more efficiently by developing a cholesterol-enhancing french fry?
There's only so much money to go around. It's a balance between the far-off possibility of taming the embryonic cells versus the reality of using adult cells to fix broken bodies today.
See:http://www.stemcellresearch.org/stemcellreport
You used to be able to order optical sensors and other generic components by the box for less than the cost of a mouse.
I haven't checked lately, but why is it cheaper to hack a mouse than build a simple circuit? ...]
[Sound of luser googling
Hmmm, maybe it is cheaper.
I can't find prices at places like http://www.aromat.com/pcsd/product/sens/select_mot ion.html
, so maybe "if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it".
Get A Life
Which is a bigger waste of time:
- or the clear winner -
This post is a waste even on its own terms.
I need a life, and fast.
PLATO had English as a second language, as well as Spanish, French, German, and even Esperanto in the late 1970's. They also had math lessons ranging from "2+2=4" to DiffEq (and probably beyond that). It was all interactive, to say the least.
Yeah, I know. I'm not sure what I was thinking there, except something like cloning (of bacteria, mice, etc.) without the wait.
too.
To me, "records" will always be vinyl 33 1/3 rpm LPs.
"Album" predates LP's and originally referred to a collection of 8-10 separate 78rpm disks. They were packaged in a binder, shaped like a photo album. ("Like a what?")
I hate it when people steal words. But then, I also hate the word police, so I'm stuck.
They help, but they don't have a monopoly on handling complexity. Any programming language that allows you to subdivide a program into chunks of some kind with good hiding of the innards of the chunks can be used to write complex programs. To really beat complexity, try shell scripts. Since you can't (really) do simple stuff like adding numbers, it forces you to hide the details, which reduces the feel of the complexity. And stuff.
This guy is Out There.
Or maybe I'm a Luddite. It just seems like an unusual focus for one's life's work.
Oh yeah, and I have to make an obligatory "global warming" mention, just like everyone else.
60,000 of these!
First, Slackware doesn't normally use RPMs. If you want to use rpm, use RH/Fedora or Mandrake. I'll assume you meant pkgtool.
Second, Patrick Volkerding and the Slackware community don't tell you to push out massive upgrades, using pkgtool or otherwise.
Third, you still would have to try to configure a network so badly to cause an attempted upgrade to 7 machines to crash 60,000.
This is the kind of result that you should have to be trying to achieve for it to happen.
No, this is the kind of result that you should not be able to achieve, no matter how bad a sysadmin you are and how little you try, or no matter how good you are and no matter how hard you try.
Look where that got him - he's dead!
I, on the other hand, am merely stuffed.
The Fine Article, in its point 0, says that the user isn't trying to use the program, they're trying to get their work done. That's correct. Think of your program as a screwdriver. What's the user interface on a screwdriver? A handle. When's the last time you had to think about the handle on a screwdriver? That's a good interface.
(I don't want to get sidetracked with tool analogies, so I won't talk about why a Leatherman is good while a Swiss Army Knife is bad. Ok, I will: it's easy to access all of the functions of a Leatherman, because of the way the blades and such are arranged, but it always takes me fumbling and cursing of fingernails to get at the right part of a Swiss Army Knife.)
But TFA is mistaken to say that Ficks Law dictates placement of controls in a GUI. There are othe factors at work.
English-speaking readers (and anyone else who reads left-to-right) have been trained to read left to right, top to bottom (LTRTTB). Therefore the most important spot on the screen is the upper-left corner. Since 'Back' is the most oft-used function, its control should be in the upper-left corner.
In general, location should be sorted by relevance, since you really don't know where the mouse pointer will be. Vision is random-access, but search patterns for a person's focus are dictated by the LTRTTB training. Developers targeting, e.g., East Asian or Semitic readers (who may read in a different direction) may want to take that into account.
The other principle is cleanness. Common functions should be easy to invoke, while dangerous hacks should take more work. In no case should a user have to look outside the program to find information needed to navigate it. I cry foul on cheat sheets.
Just my take.
Then they will see they were wrong for deserting me. Our product is safe: it doesn't explode, give you cancer, or get you arrested. What is security if not safety? I'm the Chief Software Architect, for it, you know.
I'll show you who is right, and then you'll pay -- you'll all pay!
- Bill G
Simply don your Slashdot-approved tin hat (available now at OSDN.com), as it has built-in protection from cell phone radiation. Make sure to use the supplied grounding strap, affixing the free end firmly to the steel pad on the bottom of your shoe.
I've realized why the cell phone makers aren't concerned about random explosions. It just saves their users from succombing to brain cancer. Humane, in a way, and cheaper to litigate.
With a full-time gig, you have safety and the security of knowing that your income is whatever they decide to give you. As a contractor, you are in business for yourself; it's the first step to a life in which your income has no set limit.
Yep. And keep track of it in 1- , 5-, or 6-minute increments, whatever makes the most sense to you. And be merciless with your billing.
They want you to be a contractor, so always treat them as a customer, not an employer. Customers and bosses are always right, of course, but it makes a difference to your self-esteem.
This is huge. I spend about $300/month on gasoline, and I get to write off $0.37/mile. Every computer widget I use in my business, everything I can call a business expense, I document and take off my taxable income. Even my cell phone, Internet access, and other stuff where I can show a business percentage of the use I take off, too.
If you don't keep track of it, you'll wind up paying everything you earn to the feds, or making it up and hoping they don't audit you and send you to jail.