If you're only using tabs, how are you going to implement this handy indentation scheme?
if x == 5 or ((i < 4 or i > 6)
and (i+a < 4 or i+a > 6)):
You can't do that with only tabs. You can do it with tabs and spaces, but only if you assume that a tab is 8 characters wide, which breaks the original idea of allowing everyone to set their tab width.
If everyone only uses spaces, such problems don't crop up.
... calm down, this isn't quite the heresy the subject line indicates it to be;-).
Having an open-source implementation of social bookmarking similar to del.icio.us is nifty, and kudos to the author for writing it. But what does the user actually gain by switching? Del.icio.us already has a web-service API (complete with Python wrapper) and RSS feeds of its data. The above link shows that the development process is already pretty open -- follow it and the links from there to see what people have done with del.icio.us.
Users of the new service will not be able to take advantage of the network effect that del.icio.us already has going for it; given that we're talking about social sites, this is significant. So, to summarize, yay source code, but what is the benefit here?
I read that as "cover them in Java" and immediately had the mental image of some weird plot by Sun microsystems to rain coffee beans down on Redmond, Washington.
With Perl, at least, there's a good reason: Perl is required by the base system, and it is important to keep the base small. IIRC, the way they do it with Perl now is the way the parent was saying would happen soon (erm, eventually:-p) with Ruby: there is a minimal package for the base system, but if you install the package called "perl", it will install much more.
The grandparent is correct. Shakespeare did not invent the tragic hero; the ancient Greeks did. Wikipedia, as usual, comes to the rescue.
I am sympathetic to those who can't stand history courses (I often include myself in that category), but every once and a while, those who complain that we are perilously ignorant of our own history are on the mark. An author who has not studied the Greek plays is like a coder who has not studied data structures: you're liable to repeat time-honored mistakes without even knowing it.
To be fair, of course, we can assume that you're not an author:-).
They are properly designed if they obey robots.txt files at all times... which prevents them from downloading certain files that the web site's author probably meant to allow them to download. Like an RSS feed, again.
Of course, that's assuming that you don't want your site indexed by any search engine (in which case, why is it exposed to the outside Internet to begin with?)
Incidentally, it also breaks properly-designed retrieval mechanisms (like, say, RSS readers -- yes, dailykos.com, I'm talking about you!)
You say that you do want to pay, but not pay American prices to get DRM-infested files. Here's the question, though: why would you want to pay except to support the artists? I, for one, am not running around looking for more people to give money to. I would probably pay for a downloading service if it were a system to cut out the middleman, where the artist gets at least 50% of what I'm paying. But why throw money at allofmp3.com? The analogy to cheap Chinese goods is something of a distraction; a better analogy might be bootleg DVDs from a country where bootlegging is legal.
The arguments made in other replies about convenience are all valid: I can see where someone (this someone not being a poor college student:-p) paying extra for 300kbps Ogg Vorbis files (or whatever floats one's boat). But supporting a hard-working non-oligarchal Russian company? Come on, there are better ways you could spend your money to help the Russian economy.
GTK-Gnutella does not suck either =). It might not be the most efficient if you're looking to download an entire album, but the selection available on the Gnutella network is still pretty wide.
Here's what I've never figured out: why anyone from any copyright alignment would use allofmp3.com.
If you either don't care about copyright or do not believe in the current copyright regime, your most important goal is just to download music. In that case, why would you use allofmp3.com when you could get the same music off filesharing networks for free?
If you believe that, regardless of the pleasantness of the current system, the artists (or the company the artists have chosen to represent them) should still be compensated for their work, then allofmp3.com should not be compatible with your stance. You know that they exist because of a quirk in copyright law and that they are not paying anybody anything, except perhaps some Russian licensing board.
So the way I see it, either you are wasting money by not downloading the mp3 yourself, or you are wasting money by paying allofmp3.com instead of the record company. The only audience who should be ok with this, therefore, are those for whom legality is more important than convenience or morality. Am I missing something big here?
Hahahaha. When I was writing the GP, I thought of linking to the FSF's take on Intellectual Property, but decided that doing so would be pushing my agenda a little too hard.
This needs to be a FAQ on slashdot itself;-). Trademark law, patent law, and copyright law are three different things, all often grouped together under the problematic term "intellectual property" (which is a loaded term, of course).
In this case, the topic is trademark law. Trademarks are lost if the holder allows the name to become a generic term (like kleenex, for example). I'm not sure if you have to be the first person to use a term in a particular domain to trademark it, but I imagine you do. (The concept of "prior art" refers to patents only.)
I like that derivation, but it does sound to make like a backronym - an acronym invented after the fact. Likely, it just comes from o and p being right next to each other - so it's an easy typo to make, especially if you're firing off quick messages during an online clickfest.
I'm sure by the time I finish writing this there will be have a dozen comments about whether or not Roland Pickapeckofpickledpeppers is or is not a scummy plagiarist with a secret deal with the OSDN (Overlords of Slashdot Donations Network, that is), delivering vast quantities of cocaine in exchange for his stories automatically appearing on the slashdot front page.
To save everyone else the trouble of repeating the same arguments over and over, why don't you just read the main crux of the complaint and an official response. Then kindly move along unless you have something new and dramatic to add, in which case you might be able to get in one or two posts before the OSDN thugs and/or hired assassins start knocking on your door;-).
I'm also very glad that you mentioned Python in your comment. Certain tasks can be handled by a shell script, but once you have a certain level of code that must be written, Python is a nice compromise that will let you do just about anything, with the added bonuses that non-technical people (or ex-programmers in management, etc.) can look at it and have a rough idea what it's supposed to do, and that other programmers can modify the scrtipt relatively easily.
That's why every decently-sized company should have one programmer (not just IT staff, but someone who knows how to program): for automation and timesaving. Non-technical people are often content to do some repetitive task over and over again, not realizing that it can be automated. They are surprised when I tell them that a 10-line program could do the same thing for them. And then they worship you for the time you've saved them:-p.
This may not have been true when you posted your comment - but at the moment, I see three separate, top-level, +5 comments reminding us that correlation does not imply causation, one of which invokes the Latin term for the fallacy involved.
Yes, the power was granted to Congress by the Constitution, but only "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts", if my memory serves correctly. The argument would be that Congress has gone beyond the scope of the powers granted to it. I won't make an entire defense of their claim -- but you should read the actual filing linked to in the article itself, especially the Introduction section, which is (surprisingly) understandable and in plain English.
It looks to me like this case builds a lot on the Supreme Court's reasonings in Eldred v. Ashcroft, so just because the previous case was lost doesn't mean that this one is automatically doomed.
What exactly does EPIC provide, apart from a lot of work for compiler writers and a (theoretical) maximum 4-fold speed increase with current designs?
"All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
It's called the "Golden DVD", and our friends at Downhill Battle have already come up with that. Which means that the odds of the major labels doing it are slim to none.;-)
I took the test freshman year (three years ago), when it was still C++, but one can probably assume that the material on the test did not change substantially when the language did. Beyond just the language itself, the test did cover basic data structures: stacks, vectors, queues, linked lists, binary trees, and hashtables. And low-level implementation was indeed part of the test: I remember having to code linked lists and to implement other structures as modified linked lists. We wouldn't have to write our own hashing functions, but we did have to be familiar with the concept of what a hashing function did. Other topics included sorting, recursion, Big-O, etc. All in all, I think the test itself did a decent job of teaching CS fundamentals rather than just the language (although not everyone in my class derived that lesson, or any lesson other than "pointers suck").
The college board site has more information about the test (free.reg.req. for the juicy stuff).
Slashdot Mirror
If everyone only uses spaces, such problems don't crop up.
... calm down, this isn't quite the heresy the subject line indicates it to be ;-).
Having an open-source implementation of social bookmarking similar to del.icio.us is nifty, and kudos to the author for writing it. But what does the user actually gain by switching? Del.icio.us already has a web-service API (complete with Python wrapper) and RSS feeds of its data. The above link shows that the development process is already pretty open -- follow it and the links from there to see what people have done with del.icio.us.
Users of the new service will not be able to take advantage of the network effect that del.icio.us already has going for it; given that we're talking about social sites, this is significant. So, to summarize, yay source code, but what is the benefit here?
I read that as "cover them in Java" and immediately had the mental image of some weird plot by Sun microsystems to rain coffee beans down on Redmond, Washington.
(methinks I need more sleep... or more caffeine)
With Perl, at least, there's a good reason: Perl is required by the base system, and it is important to keep the base small. IIRC, the way they do it with Perl now is the way the parent was saying would happen soon (erm, eventually :-p) with Ruby: there is a minimal package for the base system, but if you install the package called "perl", it will install much more.
The grandparent is correct. Shakespeare did not invent the tragic hero; the ancient Greeks did. Wikipedia, as usual, comes to the rescue.
:-).
I am sympathetic to those who can't stand history courses (I often include myself in that category), but every once and a while, those who complain that we are perilously ignorant of our own history are on the mark. An author who has not studied the Greek plays is like a coder who has not studied data structures: you're liable to repeat time-honored mistakes without even knowing it.
To be fair, of course, we can assume that you're not an author
They are properly designed if they obey robots.txt files at all times... which prevents them from downloading certain files that the web site's author probably meant to allow them to download. Like an RSS feed, again.
Of course, that's assuming that you don't want your site indexed by any search engine (in which case, why is it exposed to the outside Internet to begin with?)
Incidentally, it also breaks properly-designed retrieval mechanisms (like, say, RSS readers -- yes, dailykos.com, I'm talking about you!)
I wanted to find an mp3 of 4'33'' the other day. I searched all the filesharing networks... there wasn't one *anywhere*!
You say that you do want to pay, but not pay American prices to get DRM-infested files. Here's the question, though: why would you want to pay except to support the artists? I, for one, am not running around looking for more people to give money to. I would probably pay for a downloading service if it were a system to cut out the middleman, where the artist gets at least 50% of what I'm paying. But why throw money at allofmp3.com? The analogy to cheap Chinese goods is something of a distraction; a better analogy might be bootleg DVDs from a country where bootlegging is legal.
:-p) paying extra for 300kbps Ogg Vorbis files (or whatever floats one's boat). But supporting a hard-working non-oligarchal Russian company? Come on, there are better ways you could spend your money to help the Russian economy.
The arguments made in other replies about convenience are all valid: I can see where someone (this someone not being a poor college student
GTK-Gnutella does not suck either =). It might not be the most efficient if you're looking to download an entire album, but the selection available on the Gnutella network is still pretty wide.
Here's what I've never figured out: why anyone from any copyright alignment would use allofmp3.com.
If you either don't care about copyright or do not believe in the current copyright regime, your most important goal is just to download music. In that case, why would you use allofmp3.com when you could get the same music off filesharing networks for free?
If you believe that, regardless of the pleasantness of the current system, the artists (or the company the artists have chosen to represent them) should still be compensated for their work, then allofmp3.com should not be compatible with your stance. You know that they exist because of a quirk in copyright law and that they are not paying anybody anything, except perhaps some Russian licensing board.
So the way I see it, either you are wasting money by not downloading the mp3 yourself, or you are wasting money by paying allofmp3.com instead of the record company. The only audience who should be ok with this, therefore, are those for whom legality is more important than convenience or morality. Am I missing something big here?
Hahahaha. When I was writing the GP, I thought of linking to the FSF's take on Intellectual Property, but decided that doing so would be pushing my agenda a little too hard.
You, sir, have read me well.
This needs to be a FAQ on slashdot itself ;-). Trademark law, patent law, and copyright law are three different things, all often grouped together under the problematic term "intellectual property" (which is a loaded term, of course).
In this case, the topic is trademark law. Trademarks are lost if the holder allows the name to become a generic term (like kleenex, for example). I'm not sure if you have to be the first person to use a term in a particular domain to trademark it, but I imagine you do. (The concept of "prior art" refers to patents only.)
I like that derivation, but it does sound to make like a backronym - an acronym invented after the fact. Likely, it just comes from o and p being right next to each other - so it's an easy typo to make, especially if you're firing off quick messages during an online clickfest.
The author obviously has never been to Atlanta.
Ah, whoops, that's what I get for not previewing. The main crux of the complaint should have been a link. Bummer.
I'm sure by the time I finish writing this there will be have a dozen comments about whether or not Roland Pickapeckofpickledpeppers is or is not a scummy plagiarist with a secret deal with the OSDN (Overlords of Slashdot Donations Network, that is), delivering vast quantities of cocaine in exchange for his stories automatically appearing on the slashdot front page.
;-).
To save everyone else the trouble of repeating the same arguments over and over, why don't you just read the main crux of the complaint and an official response. Then kindly move along unless you have something new and dramatic to add, in which case you might be able to get in one or two posts before the OSDN thugs and/or hired assassins start knocking on your door
Hear, hear!
:-p.
I'm also very glad that you mentioned Python in your comment. Certain tasks can be handled by a shell script, but once you have a certain level of code that must be written, Python is a nice compromise that will let you do just about anything, with the added bonuses that non-technical people (or ex-programmers in management, etc.) can look at it and have a rough idea what it's supposed to do, and that other programmers can modify the scrtipt relatively easily.
That's why every decently-sized company should have one programmer (not just IT staff, but someone who knows how to program): for automation and timesaving. Non-technical people are often content to do some repetitive task over and over again, not realizing that it can be automated. They are surprised when I tell them that a 10-line program could do the same thing for them. And then they worship you for the time you've saved them
This may not have been true when you posted your comment - but at the moment, I see three separate, top-level, +5 comments reminding us that correlation does not imply causation, one of which invokes the Latin term for the fallacy involved.
:-).
So it seems that the pessimism is unwarranted
Yes, the power was granted to Congress by the Constitution, but only "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts", if my memory serves correctly. The argument would be that Congress has gone beyond the scope of the powers granted to it. I won't make an entire defense of their claim -- but you should read the actual filing linked to in the article itself, especially the Introduction section, which is (surprisingly) understandable and in plain English.
It looks to me like this case builds a lot on the Supreme Court's reasonings in Eldred v. Ashcroft, so just because the previous case was lost doesn't mean that this one is automatically doomed.
What exactly does EPIC provide, apart from a lot of work for compiler writers and a (theoretical) maximum 4-fold speed increase with current designs?
"All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
It's called the "Golden DVD", and our friends at Downhill Battle have already come up with that. Which means that the odds of the major labels doing it are slim to none. ;-)
Yep, I have the 43-minute Thick as a Brick, too. No link, but it's out there on the filesharing networks (gnutella, at least).
I took the test freshman year (three years ago), when it was still C++, but one can probably assume that the material on the test did not change substantially when the language did. Beyond just the language itself, the test did cover basic data structures: stacks, vectors, queues, linked lists, binary trees, and hashtables. And low-level implementation was indeed part of the test: I remember having to code linked lists and to implement other structures as modified linked lists. We wouldn't have to write our own hashing functions, but we did have to be familiar with the concept of what a hashing function did. Other topics included sorting, recursion, Big-O, etc. All in all, I think the test itself did a decent job of teaching CS fundamentals rather than just the language (although not everyone in my class derived that lesson, or any lesson other than "pointers suck").
The college board site has more information about the test (free.reg.req. for the juicy stuff).