Come the revolution, the x86 will be the first against the wall!! Eh.. maybe.
Here's an paper by Eric S. Raymond describing his (and a couple friends) reasons for believing that there very much is a revolution in hardware coming soon to a technological infrastructure near you.. as soon as next year.
This contest is stupid. It's true because I'm not egostatistical and i dont have any pride.
Good programming is not about whatever this contest rates. It is about whatever I think I do every day. Programming about math and stuff is dumb because people don't have to now math to use programs.
Americans have better things do than achieve things and to being smart. I heard about a guy who was an American and he was smarter than this other guy I heard about who was from Djibouti. He was my friend, so it's.. its.. the'ir..
my thing is right.
". . . why is the techie at fault for not having teaching skills any more than the non-techie is for not having computer skills?"
It seems to me that the student is there specifically in order to learn computer skills, and is therefore not culpable for lacking them beforehand. Fixing that very lack is exactly what the purpose of the relationship is.
The teacher, however, has accepted responsibility for helping the student acquire computer skills, and as such is responsible for already having and exercising the people skills required to make that happen.
The people skills part is not one way, however. The student is also responsible for exercising the people skills required to not infuriate the teacher to the point of blind savage murder.
People skills are another way of saying normal civility and politeness. We all owe a certain measure of that to each other. The student's lack of computer skills is something they both are obliged to cooperate in order to solve.
In other words, and more to the point of answering the question, _both_ are at fault for a lack of people skills -- _neither_ is at fault for a lack of computer skills.
Whoa, PitaBred. The OP of this thread wasn't being offensive. There's no reason to think he's at all technically incompetent. He's probably not lazy or stupid. He wasn't "bitching".
He just wanted to when Linux would get easier. That's it. It's a reasonable question.
Name-calling and crazed ranting doesn't actually accomplish anything, PitaBred. It's an unreasonable response. Don't be mean.
I would like to gently suggest that what you want misses the point of Linux. If installing was just a matter of pushing a single button, then you wouldn't have any choice about how your system is run. There would be no partitioning your drives like you want, specifying network peculiarites, etc. There would not be the freedom to hack your system like you choose, less freedom to play 'what if' with settings and so on.
It's like buying a muscle car and treating it like a city bus. I don't want to ride the thing, I want to drive it.
And that's the best way I can explain it. Linux lets you drive. And in doing so, it necessarily requires that you know (and do) more than you need to just to ride.
To beat this analogy completely to death (and to get a little partisan here), I suppose Windows does let you drive, but only on pre-approved Microsoft-certified highways, which a verified safe (but aren't) and you have to pay extra fees based on mileage.
Um.. Not exactly. The author's assertion is that open source _serves_ the economic interests of those trying to compete in the software game right now.
C'mon.. just between us Perl programmers... it does tend to get ugly.
I am a Perl programmer, and I'm still fascinated by the language after seven years using it. It's powerful, it's fast, it's conducive to creativity and fast design, it makes easy things easy and hard things possible.
But it does tend to look like line-noise after awhile. Especially when you know all the tricks for things like writing a one-liner for reading your dog's mind.
C'mon.. admit it. Perl is awesome, and it can be pretty. But it doesn't have to be, and it usually ain't.
Like the parent, I read the PDF writeup (linked to from the story page), and got kind of eager to see and play with this.
I think this issue is that Microsoft is so large that it's becoming a sort of confederation of departments (though an analogy with a more totalitarian feel might be better), in which each part is by orgizational necessity granted a degree of autonomy. Also, with a company this big, I don't think you can truly speak of one, overarching "Microsoft Culture" to be found in all departments of the company.
I predict a movement of the "Microsoft as a whole still sucks, but Their Reasearch department is doing some *cool* stuff" variety in coming times.
Yeah, but how much of it is any good? There's no way to know which ones are easy to follow, provide good examples, are no longer live etc.
With a book on paper, you tend to get a consistent style. Most of the decision process with books is finding an author that writes in a manner that is clear and helpful to you.
With books, the tendency to reliability is greater (though arguably still none _too_ great), than that of a collection of search results.
Also, books are just easier. You can take a book more places than even a small laptop. You don't have to concern yourself much with connectivity,power,breakage,dirt,spills, etc.
It took me a while to turn on to Buffy. I had similar complaints as the parent post originally, and I couldn't understand what made some of my friends such uberfans.
But I watched an episode here and there, and I began to realize how good the writing really is. How good the stories get sometimes.
There's a lot of subtext in the Buffy scripts. Everything is a metaphor, especially the monster/vortex/curse/evilfishpeople of the week. So there's this one level on which the show is beautiful fluff - kick-ass chicks and scary blood-sucking monsters - and then there's this other level on which the single-minded, relentlessness of the monster is played as counterpoint to some other character's desire to get that boyfriend/that 'A'/that job at all costs, and hurt whoever they have to to get there.
And all that aside, it's _entertaining_. What makes something entertaining is hard to define, but, in my subjective viewpoint, this show had it in spades. The imagery, the dialogue, the whole look and feel and sound and experience of it - it ain't TV crack, but it ain't bad.
I'm a longtime Firefox user and big, big fan of it. But thanks to this link I'm giving Opera another go around, and I.. uh.. I have to say I'm very impressed. Here's a short discussion of where *my* one opinion is coming from on the matter:
Positive things about Opera:
Fast - I forgot how fast it feels. Not just page loads, but the whole UI responsiveness feels really, really snappy. (One exception -- the keyboard configuration scrolling is really slow for no apparent reason)
Free - Finally, again!
Overall beautiful experience. I'm not sure how to justify saying something so vague, but that's exactly how it feels. It's a very nice experience.
Logical (to me) default keyboard shortcuts, no shortage of them, and they're easily configured if you've got your own ideas. I'm a sucker for keyboard shortcuts.
Concerns about Opera:
How much will I miss Firefox extensions? Does Opera have an equivalent? Opera _does_ include an equivalent for one of my favorite Firefox extensions - mouse gestures (which I originally fell in love with back during my first go around with Opera, come to think of it..)
Do they have a substitute for FF's developer tools? They've got something not _terribly_ unlike them in the quickly settable style sheet menu, but it's not really as full-featured as FF's web developer extension.
Why I left Opera before:
Banner ads, of course. These are gone, now.
Seemed.. flaky. As I recall, it crashed too often. So far (heavy usage just one day) it hasn't crashed once.
Firefox felt smaller, faster, more configurable. Oddly enough, and maybe it's just the novelty, Opera 8 now seems to have all those same advantages over Firefox.
These are just some preliminary thoughts. I'll keep playing with it to give myself time to both find other cool stuff about Opera and start missing features of Firefox. Will I switch to Opera permanently? Dunno, maybe. Right now, it looks pretty likely. I don't understand the fact that this is certain to offend some people, however. I am for open source, and I very much want it to live and thrive in all areas of information usage. But I am not, however, against for-profit businesses. I deplore the abuse of corporate power (rampant today), but I cannot say it is wrong for someone to offer to provide something in return for something else (the core principle of business, as I see it).
>At any rate, if you won't give Rexx a try, do me a favor and disbelieve the poster who says QBasic is better.;-)
Heh. My aplogies. I was a little hard on the language, due perhaps to the fact that my strongest memories of it are about how much cooler I found Perl to be.
>Perl/Python/Ruby etc. are pretty entrenched (and well they should be -- I _still_ maintain Rexx could have a place in the ecology, however).
I think you have a point there. In all fairness and honesty, Rexx is a good start to a pretty cool language. It's biggest failing is that it was kept closed for so, so long, which never allowed it to develop. I for one would be really pleased to discover that this open-sourcing of the language is not too late to give it a stronger place in the community.
<self>
Take a breath. I will not start a
flame war.. I will not start a flame war.. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, and I'm biased
to Perl anyway.. Ok. Now be nice and tactful..
</self>
Many, many people, myself being one, have been quite impressed with Perl for many reasons, primarily because of its flexibility. I have found, and continue to find, that Perl is a useful solution, and often the best solution, to an extraordinary number of problems. I like that it runs anywhere and can talk to anything, and doesn't require extreme effort to get it to do any of this.
I am only moderately familiar with REXX, and it may have improved much in the time since I've used it. It is, perhaps, an equally wonderful language today. But I am quite familiar with Perl, and to say it's not flexible seems to indicate an opportunity to be pleasantly surprised by a fuller understanding of the language.
Then again, the situation might well be that creative people very flexibly find solutions to problems using whatever they're familiar with, and modesty prompts them to attribute the virtue to their tools.
I went to work several years ago for a job mainly involving mangling files in various ways and into various things. REXX was used almost exclusively for this. I enjoyed coding in it, I guess.. right until the moment I disovered Perl, when I dropped that turgid monstrosity like a hot rock.
REXX is sort of like Perl's retarded younger brother.
REXX would need brass knuckles in order to even beat the crap out of QBASIC.
If languages were pets, REXX would be a pet rock.
REXX is my favorite language to hate.
Seriously, though -- in my opinion, REXX is of primarily historical interest. Come to think of it.. it might make a good first language for a young person. It just seemed so limited in what it could do. Why use REXX when there's Perl?
I must in fairness point out that these are the words of someone who used REXX some ten years ago, wasn't a terribly proficient programmer then, and hasn't touched the language since.
I do have a fondness for it, however, and I'm glad it's finally open-sourced.
Slashdot Mirror
Erk.. irrelevant. My bad.
Come the revolution, the x86 will be the first against the wall!! Eh.. maybe.
n /world-domination-201.html
Here's an paper by Eric S. Raymond describing his (and a couple friends) reasons for believing that there very much is a revolution in hardware coming soon to a technological infrastructure near you.. as soon as next year.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/world-dominatio
Good programming is not about whatever this contest rates. It is about whatever I think I do every day. Programming about math and stuff is dumb because people don't have to now math to use programs.
Americans have better things do than achieve things and to being smart. I heard about a guy who was an American and he was smarter than this other guy I heard about who was from Djibouti. He was my friend, so it's.. its.. the'ir..
my thing is right.
Las Vegas sucks anyway.
". . . why is the techie at fault for not having teaching skills any more than the non-techie is for not having computer skills?"
It seems to me that the student is there specifically in order to learn computer skills, and is therefore not culpable for lacking them beforehand. Fixing that very lack is exactly what the purpose of the relationship is.
The teacher, however, has accepted responsibility for helping the student acquire computer skills, and as such is responsible for already having and exercising the people skills required to make that happen.
The people skills part is not one way, however. The student is also responsible for exercising the people skills required to not infuriate the teacher to the point of blind savage murder.
People skills are another way of saying normal civility and politeness. We all owe a certain measure of that to each other. The student's lack of computer skills is something they both are obliged to cooperate in order to solve.
In other words, and more to the point of answering the question, _both_ are at fault for a lack of people skills -- _neither_ is at fault for a lack of computer skills.
by Anonymous Coward"
He just wanted to when Linux would get easier. That's it. It's a reasonable question.
Name-calling and crazed ranting doesn't actually accomplish anything, PitaBred. It's an unreasonable response. Don't be mean.
I would like to gently suggest that what you want misses the point of Linux. If installing was just a matter of pushing a single button, then you wouldn't have any choice about how your system is run. There would be no partitioning your drives like you want, specifying network peculiarites, etc. There would not be the freedom to hack your system like you choose, less freedom to play 'what if' with settings and so on.
It's like buying a muscle car and treating it like a city bus. I don't want to ride the thing, I want to drive it.
And that's the best way I can explain it. Linux lets you drive. And in doing so, it necessarily requires that you know (and do) more than you need to just to ride.
To beat this analogy completely to death (and to get a little partisan here), I suppose Windows does let you drive, but only on pre-approved Microsoft-certified highways, which a verified safe (but aren't) and you have to pay extra fees based on mileage.
But we do throw the bums out periodically. Every 4-8 years for the President, and 2 or 6 years for legislators. It's how the system was designed.
Technophiles, I suppose. Or, video gamers whose hands have permanently cramped in that position.
Um.. Not exactly. The author's assertion is that open source _serves_ the economic interests of those trying to compete in the software game right now.
I am a Perl programmer, and I'm still fascinated by the language after seven years using it. It's powerful, it's fast, it's conducive to creativity and fast design, it makes easy things easy and hard things possible.
But it does tend to look like line-noise after awhile. Especially when you know all the tricks for things like writing a one-liner for reading your dog's mind.
C'mon.. admit it. Perl is awesome, and it can be pretty. But it doesn't have to be, and it usually ain't.
Uh..
Well..
"Beginning Python: From Novice to Professional"?
I hear it's pretty good.
In case you have difficulty finding.. oh, I don't know.. a review of it, here's a link. Just click on it and scroll to the top:
CLICK ME
Like the parent, I read the PDF writeup (linked to from the story page), and got kind of eager to see and play with this.
I think this issue is that Microsoft is so large that it's becoming a sort of confederation of departments (though an analogy with a more totalitarian feel might be better), in which each part is by orgizational necessity granted a degree of autonomy. Also, with a company this big, I don't think you can truly speak of one, overarching "Microsoft Culture" to be found in all departments of the company.
I predict a movement of the "Microsoft as a whole still sucks, but Their Reasearch department is doing some *cool* stuff" variety in coming times.
Just my 0.0167 EUR
With a book on paper, you tend to get a consistent style. Most of the decision process with books is finding an author that writes in a manner that is clear and helpful to you.
With books, the tendency to reliability is greater (though arguably still none _too_ great), than that of a collection of search results.
Also, books are just easier. You can take a book more places than even a small laptop. You don't have to concern yourself much with connectivity,power,breakage,dirt,spills, etc.
But I watched an episode here and there, and I began to realize how good the writing really is. How good the stories get sometimes.
There's a lot of subtext in the Buffy scripts. Everything is a metaphor, especially the monster/vortex/curse/evilfishpeople of the week. So there's this one level on which the show is beautiful fluff - kick-ass chicks and scary blood-sucking monsters - and then there's this other level on which the single-minded, relentlessness of the monster is played as counterpoint to some other character's desire to get that boyfriend/that 'A'/that job at all costs, and hurt whoever they have to to get there.
And all that aside, it's _entertaining_. What makes something entertaining is hard to define, but, in my subjective viewpoint, this show had it in spades. The imagery, the dialogue, the whole look and feel and sound and experience of it - it ain't TV crack, but it ain't bad.
Positive things about Opera:
- Fast - I forgot how fast it feels. Not just page loads, but the whole UI responsiveness feels really, really snappy. (One exception -- the keyboard configuration scrolling is really slow for no apparent reason)
- Free - Finally, again!
- Overall beautiful experience. I'm not sure how to justify saying something so vague, but that's exactly how it feels. It's a very nice experience.
- Logical (to me) default keyboard shortcuts, no shortage of them, and they're easily configured if you've got your own ideas. I'm a sucker for keyboard shortcuts.
Concerns about Opera:- How much will I miss Firefox extensions? Does Opera have an equivalent? Opera _does_ include an equivalent for one of my favorite Firefox extensions - mouse gestures (which I originally fell in love with back during my first go around with Opera, come to think of it..)
- Do they have a substitute for FF's developer tools? They've got something not _terribly_ unlike them in the quickly settable style sheet menu, but it's not really as full-featured as FF's web developer extension.
Why I left Opera before:- Banner ads, of course. These are gone, now.
- Seemed.. flaky. As I recall, it crashed too often. So far (heavy usage just one day) it hasn't crashed once.
- Firefox felt smaller, faster, more configurable. Oddly enough, and maybe it's just the novelty, Opera 8 now seems to have all those same advantages over Firefox.
These are just some preliminary thoughts. I'll keep playing with it to give myself time to both find other cool stuff about Opera and start missing features of Firefox. Will I switch to Opera permanently? Dunno, maybe. Right now, it looks pretty likely. I don't understand the fact that this is certain to offend some people, however. I am for open source, and I very much want it to live and thrive in all areas of information usage. But I am not, however, against for-profit businesses. I deplore the abuse of corporate power (rampant today), but I cannot say it is wrong for someone to offer to provide something in return for something else (the core principle of business, as I see it).Heh. My aplogies. I was a little hard on the language, due perhaps to the fact that my strongest memories of it are about how much cooler I found Perl to be.
>Perl/Python/Ruby etc. are pretty entrenched (and well they should be -- I _still_ maintain Rexx could have a place in the ecology, however).
I think you have a point there. In all fairness and honesty, Rexx is a good start to a pretty cool language. It's biggest failing is that it was kept closed for so, so long, which never allowed it to develop. I for one would be really pleased to discover that this open-sourcing of the language is not too late to give it a stronger place in the community.
<self>
Take a breath. I will not start a
flame war.. I will not start a flame war..
Everyone is entitled to an opinion, and I'm biased
to Perl anyway.. Ok. Now be nice and tactful..
</self>
Many, many people, myself being one, have been quite impressed with Perl for many reasons, primarily because of its flexibility. I have found, and continue to find, that Perl is a useful solution, and often the best solution, to an extraordinary number of problems. I like that it runs anywhere and can talk to anything, and doesn't require extreme effort to get it to do any of this.
I am only moderately familiar with REXX, and it may have improved much in the time since I've used it. It is, perhaps, an equally wonderful language today. But I am quite familiar with Perl, and to say it's not flexible seems to indicate an opportunity to be pleasantly surprised by a fuller understanding of the language.
Then again, the situation might well be that creative people very flexibly find solutions to problems using whatever they're familiar with, and modesty prompts them to attribute the virtue to their tools.
I went to work several years ago for a job mainly involving mangling files in various ways and into various things. REXX was used almost exclusively for this. I enjoyed coding in it, I guess.. right until the moment I disovered Perl, when I dropped that turgid monstrosity like a hot rock.
REXX is sort of like Perl's retarded younger brother.
REXX would need brass knuckles in order to even beat the crap out of QBASIC.
If languages were pets, REXX would be a pet rock.
REXX is my favorite language to hate.
Seriously, though -- in my opinion, REXX is of primarily historical interest. Come to think of it.. it might make a good first language for a young person. It just seemed so limited in what it could do. Why use REXX when there's Perl?
I must in fairness point out that these are the words of someone who used REXX some ten years ago, wasn't a terribly proficient programmer then, and hasn't touched the language since.
I do have a fondness for it, however, and I'm glad it's finally open-sourced.