What I don't get is why they should care in the slightest if their trademark becomes genericized. They don't stand to loose a profit like Xerox would
No but they have a reputation to maintain. If they lost the trademark, any Tom Dick or Harry could snapshot Wikipedia, host it at "www.wikipediaref.org" load it up with ads and fail to give a toss about keeping it up to date, potentially bringing the real Wikipedia into disrepute. As an "open source" project, Wikipedia is particularly vulnerable to this.
Keeping their website recognizable is worthless if they are recognized primarily for being dicks.
(Why am I suddenly thinking of "Team America"?)
What damage does this do? The data on Wikipedia is still free - all they are saying is that they want the right to use the name "Wikipedia".
As I understand it, whether a trademark can be protected is decided on a per-market-segment basis.
That's fine if there are two well defined market segments (say, minced cow products vs. tartan kilts) but it didn't exactly keep the lawyers hungry in Apple Corp vs. Apple Computer:-)
Therefore, if Wikimedia don't defend their trademark in this case, then in future they run the risk that they won't be able to defend it against other art projects.
Even if this ends up in a ruling that "Wikipedia Art" was OK because it was the name of a specific work of art rather than an online information resource, Wikipedia will have defended their trademark and drawn their line in the sand.
A trademark typically becomes "genericized" when the products or services with which it is associated have acquired substantial market dominance or mind share. The term is legally significant in that unless a company works sufficiently to prevent such broad use of its trademark, its intellectual property rights in the trademark may be lost.
IANAL but, as I understand it, if Wikipedia are too free and easy about defending their trademark they won't have a leg to stand on when "Wikipedia Britannica" or "Microsoft Wikipedia" appear.
What happens if I live in TX and want to drive to or through an area where the battery replacement company I use at home doesn't operate?
Answer: batteries will have to be standardized, and battery replacement companies will have to have reciprocal financial arrangements and/or each company will need a national network of franchises.
This is, of course, the problem: a major switch to electric vehicles will require massive investment in infrastructure and a lot of joined-up-thinking. Not to mention a lot of new nuclear power stations to cope with the demand for electricity.
It might be simpler to build more railways, ban gas-powered cars and just use electric cars for local transport...:-)
When you buy a litre of petrol, it should take you a set distance.
On what planet? It depends on how fast and well you drive, how powerful your engine is and what condition it is in...
What you mean, is that a litre of standard petrol contains a known amount of usable chemical energy, whereas the yield of a fully charged battery will decline over time.
battery changing services have a lot of questions in regards to reliability and liabilities if it is to work.
You never actually own the battery - it belongs to the power company - you just pay a deposit when you pick up your first battery. Regular wear and tear on the battery is included in the fuel costs - mistreat it and you lose your deposit.
I'm sure that the legalities have all been pretty well worked out by the bottled gas industry (and a faulty gas cylinder is gonna raise far more liability issues than the cost of a tow truck).
Plus, any half-decent modern 'smart' battery is going to have a chip in it which monitors the charge/discharge history, so the condition of each battery can be automatically monitored and used for "fair" billing.
You're probably going to need an account with the power company that covers both home recharging (on some off-peak tariff) and pit stops.
Really? I thought we were talking about cultural attitudes to alcohol - in which case the issue is surely political and cultural groupings, not which tectonic plate you're sitting on.
Saying the UK is not part of Europe is like saying Hawaii is not part of the US.
Not true, politically speaking. The USA is a federal republic. The European Union is a free trade agreement between supposedly sovereign nations in the process of surreptitiously morphing into a federal republic in the hope that nobody will notice. In the EU, you don't use the 'f' word unless you want a political scandal.
For added spice, several of the member countries are ex-colonial superpowers who, historically (at least since the end of the Roman Empire), have had closer ties with Asia, Africa and the New World than their European neighbors.
Not that the states of the USA are particularly homogenous, but if and when the United States of Europe emerges it will be a very different animal.
I don't know what part of Europe you're in, but apparently England has some heavy drinking habits.
And, like the US, suffers from puritanical lobbying by anti-alcohol groups which turns alcohol into "forbidden fruit" and has other Unintended Consequences. E.g. restricted opening hours which turn an evening at the pub into a drinking race and simultaneously turn hoards of half-cut drinkers (who have just inhaled their last pint in 10 minutes) onto the street at 11:30.
(The norm is for such people to find a "night club" that gets around the laws on a technicality. Jeans or trainers not allowed - necking a dozen shorts and projectile vomiting welcome).
Other times the standout show simply can't compete with American television
Nonsense. British television has a pretty good track record of competing with US shows. I give you:
Pop Idol (American Idol)
Strictly Come Dancing (Dancing with the Stars)
Weakest Link
Who wants to be a Millionaire?
I.e. several of the really annoying but massively successful reality/talent/quiz shows in the US are licensed from British formats (the rest are licensed from Dutch formats, of course).
Of course, they might not be the kind of shows you are talking about.
Another problem is that British drama/comedy shows tend to have very short runs and BBC shows, in particular, have odd (by US standard) running times because of the lack of commercials - each "series" of Red Dwarf was only 6, 30 minute episodes. Add to that the occasional habit of British TV of winding up good shows while they're still good (e.g. Life on Mars, UK) and you get shows which don't "fit" the US pattern of 42 minute (1 hour with ads) episodes in 20+ episode "seasons" and, hence, won't get decent time slots in the US.
Result: remakes, that risk losing whatever chemistry it was that made the original successful. When I found out how the US remake of "Life on Mars" ended, my first reaction was that it was an April fool's joke, and then I threw up in my mouth a little bit.
As for Ab Fab, I always felt that the critical success of the original was disproportionate anyway. Hypothesis: TV critics probably get to deal with real-life Patsies and Edinas every day.
According to Wikipedia, "teleportation" was coined by Charles Fort so whether that's "science fiction" is a matter of opinion, but the term was certainly popularised by science fiction long before it was applied to a real physical phenomena (which is, admittedly, more boring than the SF version).
Anyone else find his stories hard to follow or is it just me?
Which ones? He's pretty diverse - I don't think you'd guess that "Blood Music" (brilliant), "Eon" (very good), "Queen of Angels" (heavy going, but worth it) and "Vitals" (dull Michael Crighton-style techno thriller) were by the same author.
...and that's assuming you don't get him mixed up with Greg Egan (hmmm - Master Chief as an androgynous posthuman software entity...)
Yeah, but even your average phone is more powerful than your average PC was in 1982...
Actually, when the ARM appeared in 1987 it wasn't touted as a low-power chip, but was developed by Acorn as part of a desktop workstation chipset that could easily show the x86s of the day a clean pair of heels. One of the first products was actually an accelerator card for the PC.
The Archimedes/Risc-PC "workstations" stayed in production to the late 90s (and there have been Amiga-style holdout products until very recently) and were always decently fast - but they couldn't compete with the Wintel dupooly and started to lose out when FPUs and, later, accelerated graphics cards became the norm on PCs. By this time, ARM had been spun off and had (wisely) started to concentrate on embedded systems which (at the time) didn't need such things.
Now, I'm not a FOSS purist who's going to curse them unto the seventh generation for merely using Flash, but if FOSS/Linux is going to be one of their USPs they might want to consider their target market!
So, if the console/software designers had any role in that website - forget it.
Also, both sides know perfectly well that whatever they give, the other side won't be allowed to keep it as a matter of anti-corruption policy.
Which means that symbolic pen-holders and signed photos of heads of state (which can be used on official occasions* and/or look good in a glass case in the White House museum) are very appropriate choices, whereas iPods and boxed sets of Hollywood Greats DVDs do have, as TFA said, an air of Dulles Airport gift shop about them.
Of course, perhaps the DVDs were made from polycarbonate taken from the windows of the Space Shuttle...
Agreed that there may be more important things going on in the world, though.
(* Ding-dong. "Oh shit, its the Queen! Quick, get that photo she gave us at the G20 summit out of the attic... Uh-ho, Gordon's with her and he'll probably want us to sign his bloody treaty so get that nice pen and holder too - don't know who used this desk last, but all I can find in the drawers are crayons... )
So, if I believed that, oh, the local priest molested little boys, I could stand out and say that without being sued.
Funny. I was under the impression that, in the good old USA, anybody could sue you for anything and, even if their case got laughed out of court, you'd still have to re-mortgage your home to pay your legal fees - whereas in most of the rest of the world anyone bringing a frivolous lawsuit risks having to pay for the entire cost of the process.
Even no-win-no-fee relies on the lawyers (or their insurance company) seeing a case as a "good risk".
Its probably true that the UK libel laws are worse than the US (freedom of speech is lurking somewhere amongst tradition, Magna Carta and the European Court of Human Rights, but its hard to pin down), but the real problem in this case is that ISPs would rather delete a website accused of defamation/copyright violation/hate speech/supporting terrorism than get embroiled in litigation which, whichever side of the Atlantic you live on, is never a one-way-bet (unless you are a lawyer). The old "how much justice can you afford" problem is not limited to a single country.
...is not the age rating, its the dichotomy of trying to produce a movie with "arthouse" audience appeal with special effects that dictate a popcorn blockbuster budget.
I'm sure Watchmen could have been made PG-13 by cutting a few minutes. Giving Dr Manhatten a thong might lose a minor point about his diminishing humanity, but its hardly going to ruin the movie; and it should be possible to establish that Rorschach was Not a Nice Person without employing an angle grinder.
However... would that have stopped 13-year olds (who might not "get" the politics, psychology or the artistic application of comic-book visual styles to cinematography) from being absolutely bored to tears after an hour and a half? Doubt it.
Ironically, when I watched it, the cinema was plugging their latest wheeze: by popular demand, over-18s-only screenings of PG/12A movies. So, obviously no market for 18-and-over-films.
Of course, this is in the UK where Watchmen was certificate 18, and most cinemas do at least try not to let in anybody holding a teddy bear; There's also a 15 cert which gets used for things like Serenity, V for Vendetta and the DVDs of the new BSG. "Watchman" could almost certainly have been trimmed down to a 15.
Sounds like the US could do with something between PG-13 and R (spurious precision, of course, but this is a political game, not a practical one).
From TFA: In the past, the answer was simple: Hook up an official database, pour the data into it, and let the machine sort everything out for you while you spend your time writing big checks to the database manufacturer.
What? Where has this wondrous product been all my life!? I mean, I've always stuck with the free shit like MySQL and Postgres on the assumption that paying top dollar would only get me a bit of extra polish and maybe some support from people who own socks.
Little did I realize that, had I re-mortgaged the house and bought one of these wonderous, I could "just pour my data in" and I'd miraculously reap the benefits of advanced relational technology without all those tedious decisions about data structures, normalisation, and writing queries. Not only that but (looking at the rest of the article) it sounds like merely using an industry strength RDMS will guarantee data intergrity? OMG! That would be cheap at any price! It would certainly cheaper than succumbing to that nagging feeling that maybe I should park my ego and pay a RDB specialist to do it properly.
Now I feel really stupid. There was me assuming that even a high-end relational DBMS would only be efficient and secure if the database was designed and coded carefully by someone with a clue, and that if you're just going to bosh something together to get the job done you might as well stick it in a flat file (or the ancient pre-InnoDB version of MySQL which comes with your web hosting package) and only worry about scaling it to cope with a billion records when someone paid you to do that.
The scales have fallen from my eyes. I'm writing that check to Oracle right now.
Or perhaps it was just me that found the concept initially hard to grasp.
Try doing objects in Javascript sometime;-) The "Eigenclass" name seems to be unique to Ruby.
I think the summary is that a decent CS course, even if it majors on a few common languages (and C/C++/Java are probably still the 3 safest bets), should also cover the diversity of languages and paradigms and the underlying theory. Otherwise, why not buy a copy of "Java for Dummies" and save 3 years of your life?
I actually did a Physics degree, not CS, and the computing course was like "Day 1: learn Pascal; Day 2: model the soliton solution for the Korteweg-de Vries wave equation"... (The "build a CPU from TTL" day was fun, too - even though you were pretty much told what to do).
Is a web browser that talks to a None Free web server Not Free?
A Free web browser which could only talk to a non-Free web server would not be Free enough to satisfy a free-software purist (it would also be a pretty odd web browser).
The argument is quite reasonable: the owner of the non-free server could withdraw it at any time: the Free client, along with any contributions from the free software community, then has scrap value only (maybe there's some re-usable code in there, maybe not).
The counter-argument is more pragmatic (so Free Software purists won't like it): What's the alternative? Isn't it better to have a Free client and a closed server than to have both closed? You get to look at the code for the client, learn from it, port it to minority platforms and can probably deduce the server protocol and write your own server. There may be good reason why the server can't be Free (e.g. it may be serving proprietary data such as maps, and be useless without that data). Its a bit like the Linux argument - binary drivers are Bad but if Linux can't play Flash, MP3s or run NVidia cards then who is going to use it (given that RMS is presumably using Hurd).
Web browsers are a bad example, because they use standard protocols and are therefore useful with any server.
A better question, which I'm sure must have come up before, is whether any software written for a proprietary OS can be Free? If I take a GPL3 program, tack on a nice native Windows or OS X GUI and distribute it, am I in trouble because you still need a Windows/OSX license from MS or Apple to use it?
...See, now you made me stop bluffing and go and look up what an Eigenclass really is. Thank you - beforehand, when I've done that sort of thing in Javascript or Actionscript I've felt all dirty and lazy, but now I know that there is a fancy name that makes it sound like something out of quantum mechanics, my self esteem is restored.
Shame about the principle of encapsulation, though...
But seriously, if you've done Java, "oh, right, so I can add new methods to an instance" shouldn't be a major conceptual leap (even if it makes you throw up in your mouth a little).
OOP in Java and C++ is very different to OOP in, say, Smalltalk or Lisp
Well, I did qualify my statement as "other procedural/OOP languages like Pascal, C#". Since the OP was basically inquiring about employment prospects, spending time becoming expert on Smalltalk or Ruby (off the rails) would be a brave decision.
Plus, we're giving the benefit of the doubt here and assuming that the OP was on a proper Comp. Sci. course that covered some of the theory behind the various programming paradigms, and will look at Lisp and say "Oh, yeah, that's just lambda calculus".
You don't run across Eigenclasses a lot in Java, after all
Slashdot Mirror
What I don't get is why they should care in the slightest if their trademark becomes genericized. They don't stand to loose a profit like Xerox would
No but they have a reputation to maintain. If they lost the trademark, any Tom Dick or Harry could snapshot Wikipedia, host it at "www.wikipediaref.org" load it up with ads and fail to give a toss about keeping it up to date, potentially bringing the real Wikipedia into disrepute. As an "open source" project, Wikipedia is particularly vulnerable to this.
Keeping their website recognizable is worthless if they are recognized primarily for being dicks.
(Why am I suddenly thinking of "Team America"?)
What damage does this do? The data on Wikipedia is still free - all they are saying is that they want the right to use the name "Wikipedia".
As I understand it, whether a trademark can be protected is decided on a per-market-segment basis.
That's fine if there are two well defined market segments (say, minced cow products vs. tartan kilts) but it didn't exactly keep the lawyers hungry in Apple Corp vs. Apple Computer :-)
Therefore, if Wikimedia don't defend their trademark in this case, then in future they run the risk that they won't be able to defend it against other art projects.
Wikipedia has stuff about art.
Even if this ends up in a ruling that "Wikipedia Art" was OK because it was the name of a specific work of art rather than an online information resource, Wikipedia will have defended their trademark and drawn their line in the sand.
Quoth Wikipedia itself:
A trademark typically becomes "genericized" when the products or services with which it is associated have acquired substantial market dominance or mind share. The term is legally significant in that unless a company works sufficiently to prevent such broad use of its trademark, its intellectual property rights in the trademark may be lost.
IANAL but, as I understand it, if Wikipedia are too free and easy about defending their trademark they won't have a leg to stand on when "Wikipedia Britannica" or "Microsoft Wikipedia" appear.
What happens if I live in TX and want to drive to or through an area where the battery replacement company I use at home doesn't operate?
Answer: batteries will have to be standardized, and battery replacement companies will have to have reciprocal financial arrangements and/or each company will need a national network of franchises.
This is, of course, the problem: a major switch to electric vehicles will require massive investment in infrastructure and a lot of joined-up-thinking. Not to mention a lot of new nuclear power stations to cope with the demand for electricity.
It might be simpler to build more railways, ban gas-powered cars and just use electric cars for local transport... :-)
When you buy a litre of petrol, it should take you a set distance.
On what planet? It depends on how fast and well you drive, how powerful your engine is and what condition it is in...
What you mean, is that a litre of standard petrol contains a known amount of usable chemical energy, whereas the yield of a fully charged battery will decline over time.
battery changing services have a lot of questions in regards to reliability and liabilities if it is to work.
You never actually own the battery - it belongs to the power company - you just pay a deposit when you pick up your first battery. Regular wear and tear on the battery is included in the fuel costs - mistreat it and you lose your deposit.
I'm sure that the legalities have all been pretty well worked out by the bottled gas industry (and a faulty gas cylinder is gonna raise far more liability issues than the cost of a tow truck).
Plus, any half-decent modern 'smart' battery is going to have a chip in it which monitors the charge/discharge history, so the condition of each battery can be automatically monitored and used for "fair" billing.
You're probably going to need an account with the power company that covers both home recharging (on some off-peak tariff) and pit stops.
The OP was talking about Europe the continent
Really? I thought we were talking about cultural attitudes to alcohol - in which case the issue is surely political and cultural groupings, not which tectonic plate you're sitting on.
Saying the UK is not part of Europe is like saying Hawaii is not part of the US.
Not true, politically speaking. The USA is a federal republic. The European Union is a free trade agreement between supposedly sovereign nations in the process of surreptitiously morphing into a federal republic in the hope that nobody will notice. In the EU, you don't use the 'f' word unless you want a political scandal.
For added spice, several of the member countries are ex-colonial superpowers who, historically (at least since the end of the Roman Empire), have had closer ties with Asia, Africa and the New World than their European neighbors.
Not that the states of the USA are particularly homogenous, but if and when the United States of Europe emerges it will be a very different animal.
That and the UK used to be a physical part of the continent as well
So did everywhere. Ever hear of Pangea?
I don't know what part of Europe you're in, but apparently England has some heavy drinking habits.
And, like the US, suffers from puritanical lobbying by anti-alcohol groups which turns alcohol into "forbidden fruit" and has other Unintended Consequences. E.g. restricted opening hours which turn an evening at the pub into a drinking race and simultaneously turn hoards of half-cut drinkers (who have just inhaled their last pint in 10 minutes) onto the street at 11:30.
(The norm is for such people to find a "night club" that gets around the laws on a technicality. Jeans or trainers not allowed - necking a dozen shorts and projectile vomiting welcome).
Coincidence?
Other times the standout show simply can't compete with American television
Nonsense. British television has a pretty good track record of competing with US shows. I give you:
Pop Idol (American Idol)
Strictly Come Dancing (Dancing with the Stars)
Weakest Link
Who wants to be a Millionaire?
I.e. several of the really annoying but massively successful reality/talent/quiz shows in the US are licensed from British formats (the rest are licensed from Dutch formats, of course).
Of course, they might not be the kind of shows you are talking about.
Another problem is that British drama/comedy shows tend to have very short runs and BBC shows, in particular, have odd (by US standard) running times because of the lack of commercials - each "series" of Red Dwarf was only 6, 30 minute episodes. Add to that the occasional habit of British TV of winding up good shows while they're still good (e.g. Life on Mars, UK) and you get shows which don't "fit" the US pattern of 42 minute (1 hour with ads) episodes in 20+ episode "seasons" and, hence, won't get decent time slots in the US.
Result: remakes, that risk losing whatever chemistry it was that made the original successful. When I found out how the US remake of "Life on Mars" ended, my first reaction was that it was an April fool's joke, and then I threw up in my mouth a little bit.
As for Ab Fab, I always felt that the critical success of the original was disproportionate anyway. Hypothesis: TV critics probably get to deal with real-life Patsies and Edinas every day.
Why would they have had the entire film print there, just in case? It doesn't make sense...
"Keep 'em talking Spock! We're downloading the torrent..."
Or maybe, just maybe, it could have been a pre-planned stunt.
According to Wikipedia, "teleportation" was coined by Charles Fort so whether that's "science fiction" is a matter of opinion, but the term was certainly popularised by science fiction long before it was applied to a real physical phenomena (which is, admittedly, more boring than the SF version).
Doc Smith was writing about hyperspace
No, that was hyperbolespace.
It is literally indescribable :-)
Anyone else find his stories hard to follow or is it just me?
Which ones? He's pretty diverse - I don't think you'd guess that "Blood Music" (brilliant), "Eon" (very good), "Queen of Angels" (heavy going, but worth it) and "Vitals" (dull Michael Crighton-style techno thriller) were by the same author.
...and that's assuming you don't get him mixed up with Greg Egan (hmmm - Master Chief as an androgynous posthuman software entity...)
Yeah, but even your average phone is more powerful than your average PC was in 1982...
Actually, when the ARM appeared in 1987 it wasn't touted as a low-power chip, but was developed by Acorn as part of a desktop workstation chipset that could easily show the x86s of the day a clean pair of heels. One of the first products was actually an accelerator card for the PC.
(Sorry about the PDF links: the parent site is http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/)
The Archimedes/Risc-PC "workstations" stayed in production to the late 90s (and there have been Amiga-style holdout products until very recently) and were always decently fast - but they couldn't compete with the Wintel dupooly and started to lose out when FPUs and, later, accelerated graphics cards became the norm on PCs. By this time, ARM had been spun off and had (wisely) started to concentrate on embedded systems which (at the time) didn't need such things.
(that website, yikes)
Hmm - Flash used gratuitously where regular HTML + bitmaps would do nicely: CHECK.
Given that they're going to use Flash, failure to take advantage of Flash's main advantage, vis. nice, scalable, anti-aliased vector images: CHECK.
Annoying "mystery meat" navigation system: CHECK.
Annoying textured backgrounds under text: CHECK (at least choose a texture that doesn't look like compression artefacts!)
Crummy English: CHECK. (two words, guys: proof reading!)
Now, I'm not a FOSS purist who's going to curse them unto the seventh generation for merely using Flash, but if FOSS/Linux is going to be one of their USPs they might want to consider their target market!
So, if the console/software designers had any role in that website - forget it.
Also, both sides know perfectly well that whatever they give, the other side won't be allowed to keep it as a matter of anti-corruption policy.
Which means that symbolic pen-holders and signed photos of heads of state (which can be used on official occasions* and/or look good in a glass case in the White House museum) are very appropriate choices, whereas iPods and boxed sets of Hollywood Greats DVDs do have, as TFA said, an air of Dulles Airport gift shop about them.
Of course, perhaps the DVDs were made from polycarbonate taken from the windows of the Space Shuttle...
Agreed that there may be more important things going on in the world, though.
(* Ding-dong. "Oh shit, its the Queen! Quick, get that photo she gave us at the G20 summit out of the attic... Uh-ho, Gordon's with her and he'll probably want us to sign his bloody treaty so get that nice pen and holder too - don't know who used this desk last, but all I can find in the drawers are crayons... )
So, if I believed that, oh, the local priest molested little boys, I could stand out and say that without being sued.
Funny. I was under the impression that, in the good old USA, anybody could sue you for anything and, even if their case got laughed out of court, you'd still have to re-mortgage your home to pay your legal fees - whereas in most of the rest of the world anyone bringing a frivolous lawsuit risks having to pay for the entire cost of the process.
Even no-win-no-fee relies on the lawyers (or their insurance company) seeing a case as a "good risk".
Its probably true that the UK libel laws are worse than the US (freedom of speech is lurking somewhere amongst tradition, Magna Carta and the European Court of Human Rights, but its hard to pin down), but the real problem in this case is that ISPs would rather delete a website accused of defamation/copyright violation/hate speech/supporting terrorism than get embroiled in litigation which, whichever side of the Atlantic you live on, is never a one-way-bet (unless you are a lawyer). The old "how much justice can you afford" problem is not limited to a single country.
...is not the age rating, its the dichotomy of trying to produce a movie with "arthouse" audience appeal with special effects that dictate a popcorn blockbuster budget.
I'm sure Watchmen could have been made PG-13 by cutting a few minutes. Giving Dr Manhatten a thong might lose a minor point about his diminishing humanity, but its hardly going to ruin the movie; and it should be possible to establish that Rorschach was Not a Nice Person without employing an angle grinder.
However... would that have stopped 13-year olds (who might not "get" the politics, psychology or the artistic application of comic-book visual styles to cinematography) from being absolutely bored to tears after an hour and a half? Doubt it.
Ironically, when I watched it, the cinema was plugging their latest wheeze: by popular demand, over-18s-only screenings of PG/12A movies. So, obviously no market for 18-and-over-films.
Of course, this is in the UK where Watchmen was certificate 18, and most cinemas do at least try not to let in anybody holding a teddy bear; There's also a 15 cert which gets used for things like Serenity, V for Vendetta and the DVDs of the new BSG. "Watchman" could almost certainly have been trimmed down to a 15.
Sounds like the US could do with something between PG-13 and R (spurious precision, of course, but this is a political game, not a practical one).
After all that head scratching, who would you bet on that hair belonging to?
Some person in a third-world slum somewhere who got 50 cents for selling their hair to HairExtensions'R'Us?
I mean, this is Hollywood - that hair ain't gonna be natural :-)
From TFA: In the past, the answer was simple: Hook up an official database, pour the data into it, and let the machine sort everything out for you while you spend your time writing big checks to the database manufacturer.
What? Where has this wondrous product been all my life!? I mean, I've always stuck with the free shit like MySQL and Postgres on the assumption that paying top dollar would only get me a bit of extra polish and maybe some support from people who own socks.
Little did I realize that, had I re-mortgaged the house and bought one of these wonderous, I could "just pour my data in" and I'd miraculously reap the benefits of advanced relational technology without all those tedious decisions about data structures, normalisation, and writing queries. Not only that but (looking at the rest of the article) it sounds like merely using an industry strength RDMS will guarantee data intergrity? OMG! That would be cheap at any price! It would certainly cheaper than succumbing to that nagging feeling that maybe I should park my ego and pay a RDB specialist to do it properly.
Now I feel really stupid. There was me assuming that even a high-end relational DBMS would only be efficient and secure if the database was designed and coded carefully by someone with a clue, and that if you're just going to bosh something together to get the job done you might as well stick it in a flat file (or the ancient pre-InnoDB version of MySQL which comes with your web hosting package) and only worry about scaling it to cope with a billion records when someone paid you to do that.
The scales have fallen from my eyes. I'm writing that check to Oracle right now.
Or perhaps it was just me that found the concept initially hard to grasp.
Try doing objects in Javascript sometime ;-) The "Eigenclass" name seems to be unique to Ruby.
I think the summary is that a decent CS course, even if it majors on a few common languages (and C/C++/Java are probably still the 3 safest bets), should also cover the diversity of languages and paradigms and the underlying theory. Otherwise, why not buy a copy of "Java for Dummies" and save 3 years of your life?
I actually did a Physics degree, not CS, and the computing course was like "Day 1: learn Pascal; Day 2: model the soliton solution for the Korteweg-de Vries wave equation"... (The "build a CPU from TTL" day was fun, too - even though you were pretty much told what to do).
Is a web browser that talks to a None Free web server Not Free?
A Free web browser which could only talk to a non-Free web server would not be Free enough to satisfy a free-software purist (it would also be a pretty odd web browser).
The argument is quite reasonable: the owner of the non-free server could withdraw it at any time: the Free client, along with any contributions from the free software community, then has scrap value only (maybe there's some re-usable code in there, maybe not).
The counter-argument is more pragmatic (so Free Software purists won't like it): What's the alternative? Isn't it better to have a Free client and a closed server than to have both closed? You get to look at the code for the client, learn from it, port it to minority platforms and can probably deduce the server protocol and write your own server. There may be good reason why the server can't be Free (e.g. it may be serving proprietary data such as maps, and be useless without that data). Its a bit like the Linux argument - binary drivers are Bad but if Linux can't play Flash, MP3s or run NVidia cards then who is going to use it (given that RMS is presumably using Hurd).
Web browsers are a bad example, because they use standard protocols and are therefore useful with any server.
A better question, which I'm sure must have come up before, is whether any software written for a proprietary OS can be Free? If I take a GPL3 program, tack on a nice native Windows or OS X GUI and distribute it, am I in trouble because you still need a Windows/OSX license from MS or Apple to use it?
They're actually not that uncommon in RoR
...See, now you made me stop bluffing and go and look up what an Eigenclass really is. Thank you - beforehand, when I've done that sort of thing in Javascript or Actionscript I've felt all dirty and lazy, but now I know that there is a fancy name that makes it sound like something out of quantum mechanics, my self esteem is restored.
Shame about the principle of encapsulation, though...
But seriously, if you've done Java, "oh, right, so I can add new methods to an instance" shouldn't be a major conceptual leap (even if it makes you throw up in your mouth a little).
OOP in Java and C++ is very different to OOP in, say, Smalltalk or Lisp
Well, I did qualify my statement as "other procedural/OOP languages like Pascal, C#". Since the OP was basically inquiring about employment prospects, spending time becoming expert on Smalltalk or Ruby (off the rails) would be a brave decision.
Plus, we're giving the benefit of the doubt here and assuming that the OP was on a proper Comp. Sci. course that covered some of the theory behind the various programming paradigms, and will look at Lisp and say "Oh, yeah, that's just lambda calculus".
You don't run across Eigenclasses a lot in Java, after all
Or in commercial programming, I suspect...