i love the irony of people who think that the stories on slashdot are totally pointless and stupid, and yet take the time to submit a comment about it.
why don't you just ignore it if it's not interesting to you?
been wondering something.. i do this all the time, print to a.ps and then convert with ps2pdf. but is there a way to get programs to print directly to pdf? perhaps something to do with CUPS or Foomatic? I'm pretty good with most things on linux, but printing has always been a bit evasive for me.
(For example, i still can't always get programs to print directly to my network's windows-networked printer, even though I can smbclient and upload to it just fine... bah!)
i REALLY hope they've improved the use of nautilus for smb browsing. It's "okay" for ftp browsing, though sometimes I have a bit of trouble getting it to accept my password, but it's HORRIBLE for samba. I use my laptop on my (Windows-)network at work, and I use samba to interact with other computers. I don't have it properly hooked up to the Windows domain server, so I manually have to enter the domain name whenever I use "smbclient". This works fine from the command line, but I've never ever gotten Nautilus to accept my domain name and password for browsing on the network. And only 30% of the time does it even ask me for my password before giving me an error.
Other than this, I absolute love Gnome (converted from KDE when I first booted up the Ubuntu live CD), and since I also enjoy working from the command line it doesn't bother me too much, but there are times I'd really like to use Nautilus for this.
I'd be interested to know what this is, and how it differs from a cross-compiled copy of uClinux..
Which, by the way, has supposedly now been integrated into 2.6, so my question could also be, how does this differ from vanilla kernel 2.6 compiled for MMU-less ARM?
or a giant LCD screen for a moving sky... line the walls too to make the interior look like it goes for miles.. maybe you could use that material they used for the Invisible Suit, which displays a different image depending on what direction you are looking from. It would be like a giant holodeck, as long as you don't go near the walls..
[p.456] In summary, the record and findings of the District Court lead us to two conclusions. First, Sony
demonstrated a significant likelihood that substantial numbers of copyright holders who license their
works for broadcast on free television would not object to having their broadcasts time- shifted by private
viewers. And second, respondents failed to demonstrate that time-shifting would cause any likelihood of
nonminimal harm to the potential market for, or the value of, their copyrighted works.
Can the same be said for file sharing?
(Just a question, I'm not making a judgement here.)
unfortunately, the truth is likely that in order to get decent results out of a speech recognition engine, that is-- in order for it to act like it understands what you're really asking it to do or saying to it, it must actually understand. There is no difference (from the computer's point of view) between acting appropriately and understanding.
So I think we won't really have satisfactory speech recognition until we manage to achieve a higher level of artifical intelligence. And this, sadly, is a long way off...
Until then, you'll have to learn to speak to your computer the same way you program: by specifying precisely what you want, with no ambiguity. For a computer to resolve ambiguity, it must understand "context", and that won't really happen until it is at least as intelligent as a teenage human. Will we ever get there?
it would be *very* cool if there was a decent way to handle different "levels" of each language.
For example, in quebec we use the word "char" for your car... "j'vais prenez le char ce soir", i'm going to take the car tonight.
this isn't *good* french, but it's good quebec slang. it's how people actually speak. however you wouldn't use it if you were trying to write a cover letter, but you might use it if you were writing an email to a french friend. A dictionary where you could specify "speaking" vs "writing", or even "polite" vs "friendly", some way of really characterizing the KIND of translation you want.
expressions too... sometimes expressions can be directly translated, other times you'll sound like an idiot if you just use the same phrase you would have said in english. Something that recognizes common phrases and gives corresponding expressions in another language would be incredibly useful.
I guess what I'm getting at is it's annoying when you look up a word in a translation dictionary and get like 4 or 5 choices but you have no idea what the difference between them is, or it gives you a word that actually is correct, but is so rarely used that when you say it people look at you funny.
A good software engineer should be aware of the whole process and how it needs to be conducted and be able to advise his manager (if he's not a manager himself) on how to proceed. It's part of his job.
And thus the manager should provide a working environment where it the programmer feels his ideas will be heard and considered. Often this isn't the case. Again we can shift the blame back to the managers.
Here's perhaps a better way of wording it: bad people, be it managers, programmers, or anything in between, create bad software.
No, it's because 90% of the times it's the cheapest.
except its not even the cheapest, its just that they advertise so much their name comes to mind immediately.. you see the arches and you say "oh, hey, hamburger!" even though you could walk 5 minutes down the street to get a REAL (ie not floppy and disgusting) hamburger.. but it will take you 5 minutes longer to figure out where to get the real burger, because you don't recognize the logo.. and you default to a bigmac.
That is how the world once worked, perhaps, or never did but should work. This is the capitalist ideal: best product wins. Unfortunately this is not the world we live in. We live in a commercialist world, which is perhaps an (inevitable?) end-point of capitalism but is not the same thing. In commercialism, not the best product, but the best marketing wins. I see examples of this everywhere, every day. This a huge part of the world's problems. (Think: lobbying... governments are swayed by rhetoric and money rather than by the actual issues at hand. It's the same deal.)
however, patents are not bad. patents, in their most basic and innocent form, are supposed to protect the rights of inventors so they can make a profit on their hard work. nothing wrong there.
what's "bad" is patent ABUSE. like companies that patent things that they'll never use, just in case someone uses it, so they can sue them. Patents should not be made with the intent to sue or collect license fees. Patents should be made so that a decent product can be funded and sold at a practical price.
So in the end, capitalism falls for the same reason as communism: People who take advantage of the system. Too bad the world is full of assholes.
no shit they should open up the debates
on
Open the Debates
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
of COURSE they should open up the debates.. why is this even in question?
One thing that never ceases to irk me is that the US goes around talking about democracy and how great it is and goes as far as starting WARS in the name of democracy, when they BARELY EVEN HAVE ONE.
I'm sorry, but a two-party system is NOT my definition of democracy. Democracy is supposed to represent CHOICE, and when you're forced two choose between the lesser of two evils, in what way does that represent freedom?
And as to whether or not it is doable: We have 4-party debates in every election in Canada and although granted the votes usually fall mostly on two of the more prominent parties, at least we give people the option. (Consider that if a party has no voice, it's not really an option, is it, since no one will have any idea what their vote would be representing.) Frankly I was apalled this year in our election debates when I discovered that the Green Party had a candidate in almost every riding, and yet was not invited to the debate. I'm not a Green Party advocate, but I think if you've got something to say, and you're willing to say it all over the country, you should be given a chance to do so.
Face it, the "democracy" in the states is nothing more than two huge power groupings fighting over control. It is focused entirely on collecting votes, and has nothing to do with actual issues. It has nothing to do with what's good for the people, which is supposed to be what democracy is all about. The American political system doesn't consider votes the be the expression of peoples' opinions on various issues, it considers them some kind of currency, and the political parties are nothing but profit-centered corporations that use commercialism and subversive techniques to make as much "vote-profit" as possible.
i wish text adventure games would come back. this is going to be great!
command-line gaming at its best.
hey, i've heard rumours that production levels across the nation dipped visibly when Adventure first came out, is that true?
Slashdot Mirror
i love the irony of people who think that the stories on slashdot are totally pointless and stupid, and yet take the time to submit a comment about it. why don't you just ignore it if it's not interesting to you?
been wondering something.. i do this all the time, print to a .ps and then convert with ps2pdf. but is there a way to get programs to print directly to pdf? perhaps something to do with CUPS or Foomatic? I'm pretty good with most things on linux, but printing has always been a bit evasive for me.
(For example, i still can't always get programs to print directly to my network's windows-networked printer, even though I can smbclient and upload to it just fine... bah!)
demachina writes "NASA's Spitzer Infrared space telescope has discovered 'a mysterious population
.. i almost pissed myself...
A bike.
Really? But GTK is LGPL.. well, maybe its more relaxed but it's similar to GPL. Oh well, whatever.
Supposedly there is an implemented SWT port for Qt, but it has not been released because of licensing issues. Will it be possible now?
(Not that I have a problem running it with GTK+..)
i REALLY hope they've improved the use of nautilus for smb browsing. It's "okay" for ftp browsing, though sometimes I have a bit of trouble getting it to accept my password, but it's HORRIBLE for samba. I use my laptop on my (Windows-)network at work, and I use samba to interact with other computers. I don't have it properly hooked up to the Windows domain server, so I manually have to enter the domain name whenever I use "smbclient". This works fine from the command line, but I've never ever gotten Nautilus to accept my domain name and password for browsing on the network. And only 30% of the time does it even ask me for my password before giving me an error.
Other than this, I absolute love Gnome (converted from KDE when I first booted up the Ubuntu live CD), and since I also enjoy working from the command line it doesn't bother me too much, but there are times I'd really like to use Nautilus for this.
i'm sure any smart virus writer will make sure to use the backdoor.
i don't live in the states, but i was always told that flag burning was illegal for americans...
it's not?
news to me.
can anyone tell me the exact law on this? i'm just curious..
I'd say it's even the opposite of that.
... *sigh*
You can't protect the world from stupid people. There are too many of them.
They're WINNING dammit!
I'd be interested to know what this is, and how it differs from a cross-compiled copy of uClinux..
Which, by the way, has supposedly now been integrated into 2.6, so my question could also be, how does this differ from vanilla kernel 2.6 compiled for MMU-less ARM?
or a giant LCD screen for a moving sky... line the walls too to make the interior look like it goes for miles..
maybe you could use that material they used for the Invisible Suit, which displays a different image depending on what direction you are looking from. It would be like a giant holodeck, as long as you don't go near the walls..
okay i'll shut up now.
that, i believe, would be the part of the post you didn't quote.
i wonder if it's possible to engineer something that would have them continuously recharge from the movement of the undersea water currents..
Can the same be said for file sharing? (Just a question, I'm not making a judgement here.)
So I think we won't really have satisfactory speech recognition until we manage to achieve a higher level of artifical intelligence. And this, sadly, is a long way off...
Until then, you'll have to learn to speak to your computer the same way you program: by specifying precisely what you want, with no ambiguity. For a computer to resolve ambiguity, it must understand "context", and that won't really happen until it is at least as intelligent as a teenage human. Will we ever get there?
it would be *very* cool if there was a decent way to handle different "levels" of each language.
For example, in quebec we use the word "char" for your car... "j'vais prenez le char ce soir", i'm going to take the car tonight.
this isn't *good* french, but it's good quebec slang. it's how people actually speak. however you wouldn't use it if you were trying to write a cover letter, but you might use it if you were writing an email to a french friend. A dictionary where you could specify "speaking" vs "writing", or even "polite" vs "friendly", some way of really characterizing the KIND of translation you want.
expressions too... sometimes expressions can be directly translated, other times you'll sound like an idiot if you just use the same phrase you would have said in english. Something that recognizes common phrases and gives corresponding expressions in another language would be incredibly useful.
I guess what I'm getting at is it's annoying when you look up a word in a translation dictionary and get like 4 or 5 choices but you have no idea what the difference between them is, or it gives you a word that actually is correct, but is so rarely used that when you say it people look at you funny.
an article on humour in games that doesn't mention Earthworm Jim!??
A game where you get to fight lawyers with briefcases and jump into toilet-warps...
And thus the manager should provide a working environment where it the programmer feels his ideas will be heard and considered. Often this isn't the case. Again we can shift the blame back to the managers.
Here's perhaps a better way of wording it: bad people, be it managers, programmers, or anything in between, create bad software.
except its not even the cheapest, its just that they advertise so much their name comes to mind immediately.. you see the arches and you say "oh, hey, hamburger!" even though you could walk 5 minutes down the street to get a REAL (ie not floppy and disgusting) hamburger.. but it will take you 5 minutes longer to figure out where to get the real burger, because you don't recognize the logo.. and you default to a bigmac.
That is how the world once worked, perhaps, or never did but should work. This is the capitalist ideal: best product wins. Unfortunately this is not the world we live in. We live in a commercialist world, which is perhaps an (inevitable?) end-point of capitalism but is not the same thing. In commercialism, not the best product, but the best marketing wins. I see examples of this everywhere, every day. This a huge part of the world's problems. (Think: lobbying... governments are swayed by rhetoric and money rather than by the actual issues at hand. It's the same deal.)
All I ask is, where the hell do they get these kind of figures?
For more information, please consult the National Department of Arbitrary Statistics.
however, patents are not bad. patents, in their most basic and innocent form, are supposed to protect the rights of inventors so they can make a profit on their hard work. nothing wrong there.
what's "bad" is patent ABUSE. like companies that patent things that they'll never use, just in case someone uses it, so they can sue them. Patents should not be made with the intent to sue or collect license fees. Patents should be made so that a decent product can be funded and sold at a practical price.
So in the end, capitalism falls for the same reason as communism: People who take advantage of the system. Too bad the world is full of assholes.
of COURSE they should open up the debates.. why is this even in question? One thing that never ceases to irk me is that the US goes around talking about democracy and how great it is and goes as far as starting WARS in the name of democracy, when they BARELY EVEN HAVE ONE. I'm sorry, but a two-party system is NOT my definition of democracy. Democracy is supposed to represent CHOICE, and when you're forced two choose between the lesser of two evils, in what way does that represent freedom? And as to whether or not it is doable: We have 4-party debates in every election in Canada and although granted the votes usually fall mostly on two of the more prominent parties, at least we give people the option. (Consider that if a party has no voice, it's not really an option, is it, since no one will have any idea what their vote would be representing.) Frankly I was apalled this year in our election debates when I discovered that the Green Party had a candidate in almost every riding, and yet was not invited to the debate. I'm not a Green Party advocate, but I think if you've got something to say, and you're willing to say it all over the country, you should be given a chance to do so. Face it, the "democracy" in the states is nothing more than two huge power groupings fighting over control. It is focused entirely on collecting votes, and has nothing to do with actual issues. It has nothing to do with what's good for the people, which is supposed to be what democracy is all about. The American political system doesn't consider votes the be the expression of peoples' opinions on various issues, it considers them some kind of currency, and the political parties are nothing but profit-centered corporations that use commercialism and subversive techniques to make as much "vote-profit" as possible.
i wish text adventure games would come back. this is going to be great! command-line gaming at its best. hey, i've heard rumours that production levels across the nation dipped visibly when Adventure first came out, is that true?