A little variety is nice. After the Nth YROL nitpick or the 50th IPAQ review, I actually like to see what slashdot types think politically. Remember, there aren't too many places you can get the opinions of people like us. Certainly not in mainstream polls or news.
I noticed Alawi shook US politician's hands with his left hand. Touching someone with your left hand is an insult in Iraq and much of the middle east and near east, no?
I was encouraged by that and it seems to point in a different direction than this news item.
The fact that the country did not break into civil war is because we ARE a model democracy.
Nah, it was because people are fat and lazy and too busy watching their TVs. Seriously, can you see the average american inconveniencing themselves with a civil war? We're way too comfy. We've got a long way to slide before that happens, and it's not because we're a "model democracy"!
I'm curious now - given the materials necessary, how many slashdotters could construct a working nuclear weapon?
Who cares? It's getting the materials that is (hopefully) hard, not building one. Preventing countries and nut cases from refining or buying plutonium is far more important than controlling general knowledge about how a bomb works.
I used to interview candidates for programming positions quite often and one question I liked to ask was: Given a text file of 15,000,000 names, one per line, how would you go about sorting the file alphabetically. How would you build a list of duplicate entries?
Folks, I'll tell ya, finding the programmer that can actually answer that reasonably well is a challenge. Granted this was mostly during the internet boom, but I was appalled at how bad most of our applicants were.
Here is more info with details on what is and is not covered by patents.
In practice, whether or not anti-aliasing happens and how well depends on how freetype was compiled on the distro and also whether the app is set up to use true type fonts -- many Linux apps are not because they use, for example, gtk1. As gtk2 replaces gtk1 this might improve, but of course there are many apps with random X11 implementations that don't have the support needed to antialias text. I expect change to be somewhat slow outside of the real commonly used apps like browsers.
I live near Cambridge Mass and near MIT there's a large flock of white geese that shows up every year. I always figured it was some MIT prank gone wrong but eventually found out that they are the descendents of a couple of geese brought in during the early 1980's as guard animals to replace a deceased guard dog in protecting the MWRA water pumping station near the Boston University Bridge (or so they say -- this sound more like something you'd do on the great depression, but what do I know).
Anyway, they get fed much too much to do any guarding these days and there's a whole saga around protecting the flock from "attacks" of all sorts. Quite an interesting read in and of itself.
Why can't these studies ever give some indication of the number of jobs added during the bubble before the recession? And how about some info on number of people seeking the available jobs? Without that kind of background info, these numbers are useless.
Seems like a positive thing to me -- skip straight to more environmentally sound power. Besides, it won't fail as often as India's existing power tends to. Man, it's nerve wracking trying to get an email out from an internet cafe in India! Zzzapp... oops, power out again. Twiddle thumbs... bzzuummm OK see if it's on long enough to boot up this time. Decentralized power -- I'm all for it.
Duh, come *on*, please. The problem is not showing the ID. The problem is being denied the right to fly on a plane because your name matches an entry on a secret list. Ted Kennedy may have been able to get off the list in a mere month but others cannot and probably will not manage it in their life time.
Human rights violations with 9/11 as an excuse raise a vague concern that someday a "pro-terrorist" vote will become an issue. But as of today, anyone who is affraid of being punished for voting Democratic or Republican probably should be isolated from society because of mental instability.
There's no shortage of voter harassment in the US. Ask any african american living in most parts of the country. Ask anyone that's been campaigning or demonstrating against Bush or his policies. We have use of law enforcement to intimidate and beat down the opposing opinion all over our news just about every day lately, even to some extent on Fox and CNN. But somehow beating up and arresting peaceful demonstrators (and even random passers-by as it turned out at the RNC) or harassing elderly african americans in Florida doesn't make it into the american conciousness as voting-related harassment. Well, I think it most certainly is.
I'm not sure hypertaskers get stuff done faster. However they probably do have more fun doing several things at the same time. (How many of you are on IRC when you write code?)
Indeed. People that get a lot of work done are focused on the things that really matter and use the most efficient tool for the purpose. Doing stuff simultaneously is less useful than, say, getting someone to fax or email you something rather than jabbering endlessly about it on the phone. But IRC is great when you're stuck working with someone like that.
In actual fact, a lot of the work done in those long hours is BS busy work that's either pandering to the overblown ego of some nutso boss or tied up in Dilbertesque office politics and ridiculously heavy "business process". When's the last time you worked in a place that actually had a concept of what work leads to a better bottom line, and focused only on that? How much of the average job could be tossed out the window with no impact to the company's profitability? I wonder how the cost of basic inefficiency stacks up against this $300B.
So does anyone have any identifying characteristics for the spiders they use to find files? Then all we need to do is modify our web/ftp servers to id them and serve up an infinitely large fictitious file system just to keep them busy.
What a load of crap. I called Apple to get the iBook 800Mhz two years ago in the basic configuration with 128 Mb RAM. The Apple sales person told me (and I quote): "128 Mb is not enough memory for this computer, it will barely be usable".
And of course you believe everything you're told by sales people working on a commission?
My dear lord they are innovating at an exponential rate! Quite possibly next they will unleash "a pointer device cabable of interacting with the screen."
"This was a real wake up call for us. We just had to talk competitively, which we hadn't done since the WordPerfect days. I knew we had to deeply understand the technology," says Taylor.
And they're doing that by getting certified as Linux engineers? Yea, right, this is all bluff and bluster to diffuse the perception that they're running scared.
"I was high-fiving everyone I could find when Novell bought [German Linux distributor] SuSe. We already won once against Novell."
They are deluding themselves if they think the battle against linux is familiar just because it involves Novell again.
Take the two quotes above plus the claim that Taylor "shed a tear" at the stupid new commercials and it's pretty clear this guy is a real nitwit, corporate style. What will they try next?
Just blindly posting patents for the idea is wrong. Software patents should be more specific and not on the general idea. Yes you can have a patent on a tabbed browser but not on the tab metod itself just your way of coding it.
That's a copyright, not a patent. And, yes, I totally agree with you: Let's have copyrights for code and not patents! It's the long hours of coding and debugging into a robust well-written system that is where the value's at, not the idea jotted down on a napkin after 10 minutes of thought over a burger.
Don't forget Wing IDE -- probably the most advanced Python IDE out there. Doesn't have Komodo's level of support for non-Python (it's a Python-specific IDE) but worth a look.
In other news... Gartner group determined today that employee's brains can be used to store and take company data off site; recommends employees check their brains at the door.
Slashdot Mirror
A little variety is nice. After the Nth YROL nitpick or the 50th IPAQ review, I actually like to see what slashdot types think politically. Remember, there aren't too many places you can get the opinions of people like us. Certainly not in mainstream polls or news.
I was encouraged by that and it seems to point in a different direction than this news item.
Right, and the website forgets to mention Bill Gate's cameo as Sauron.
Nah, it was because people are fat and lazy and too busy watching their TVs. Seriously, can you see the average american inconveniencing themselves with a civil war? We're way too comfy. We've got a long way to slide before that happens, and it's not because we're a "model democracy"!
Who cares? It's getting the materials that is (hopefully) hard, not building one. Preventing countries and nut cases from refining or buying plutonium is far more important than controlling general knowledge about how a bomb works.
Yes. People who choose technologies are sheep -- show them the flock and they'll follow.
Google on "____ success stories" where ____ is your favorite open source technology.
Linux, apache, python, and perl all turn up useful case studies.
Folks, I'll tell ya, finding the programmer that can actually answer that reasonably well is a challenge. Granted this was mostly during the internet boom, but I was appalled at how bad most of our applicants were.
In practice, whether or not anti-aliasing happens and how well depends on how freetype was compiled on the distro and also whether the app is set up to use true type fonts -- many Linux apps are not because they use, for example, gtk1. As gtk2 replaces gtk1 this might improve, but of course there are many apps with random X11 implementations that don't have the support needed to antialias text. I expect change to be somewhat slow outside of the real commonly used apps like browsers.
Anyway, they get fed much too much to do any guarding these days and there's a whole saga around protecting the flock from "attacks" of all sorts. Quite an interesting read in and of itself.
My bias is towards Wing IDE (note 2.0 is still in beta tho).
Duh, come *on*, please. The problem is not showing the ID. The problem is being denied the right to fly on a plane because your name matches an entry on a secret list. Ted Kennedy may have been able to get off the list in a mere month but others cannot and probably will not manage it in their life time.
There's no shortage of voter harassment in the US. Ask any african american living in most parts of the country. Ask anyone that's been campaigning or demonstrating against Bush or his policies. We have use of law enforcement to intimidate and beat down the opposing opinion all over our news just about every day lately, even to some extent on Fox and CNN. But somehow beating up and arresting peaceful demonstrators (and even random passers-by as it turned out at the RNC) or harassing elderly african americans in Florida doesn't make it into the american conciousness as voting-related harassment. Well, I think it most certainly is.
Indeed. People that get a lot of work done are focused on the things that really matter and use the most efficient tool for the purpose. Doing stuff simultaneously is less useful than, say, getting someone to fax or email you something rather than jabbering endlessly about it on the phone. But IRC is great when you're stuck working with someone like that.
So does anyone have any identifying characteristics for the spiders they use to find files? Then all we need to do is modify our web/ftp servers to id them and serve up an infinitely large fictitious file system just to keep them busy.
These are people that favor a search engine called "dogpile" ... does this bias the sample, ya think?
And of course you believe everything you're told by sales people working on a commission?
Got one of those in my pants, already...
Yea and "It is impossible to underestimate the intelligence of the American people" -- though that Twain, or HL Menken or someone like that.
And they're doing that by getting certified as Linux engineers? Yea, right, this is all bluff and bluster to diffuse the perception that they're running scared.
"I was high-fiving everyone I could find when Novell bought [German Linux distributor] SuSe. We already won once against Novell."
They are deluding themselves if they think the battle against linux is familiar just because it involves Novell again.
Take the two quotes above plus the claim that Taylor "shed a tear" at the stupid new commercials and it's pretty clear this guy is a real nitwit, corporate style. What will they try next?
That's a copyright, not a patent. And, yes, I totally agree with you: Let's have copyrights for code and not patents! It's the long hours of coding and debugging into a robust well-written system that is where the value's at, not the idea jotted down on a napkin after 10 minutes of thought over a burger.
See also this list of Python IDEs (much more complete).
In other news... Gartner group determined today that employee's brains can be used to store and take company data off site; recommends employees check their brains at the door.