What's interesting is that the intellectual property lawyer behind the move, Horacio Gutierrez, has just been promoted to the rank of corporate vice president at Microsoft. Is this his way of announcing that he intends going on the attack against Linux?"
How is this important? Man gets promoted to lead IP division, proceeds to, well, lead IP division. I don't see why it's newsworthy that Microsoft's bigger court filings get filed by a high-ranking manager. The fact that he has just been promoted need not necessarily have anything to do with this.
To my claim that in dubio pro reo is a moral imperative to the general public you reply
It was never meant to be.
Which implies that there is some moral authority who gets to decide what a particular moral concept is "meant to be". On the other hand, you write
I can believe them to be guilty even if the findings are the opposite. That's called freedom. Freedom of thought is more important than the law. I'm free to judge. That I don't judge on your schedule doesn't mean I'm wrong, it means I'm different than you. Differences happen, and shouldn't be bashed just because it isn't what you'd do.
which claims the exact opposite: That there be no moral authority whatsoever.
Let me make my point clearer, since you seem to have missed it: Assuming someone's innocence until they are found guilty is a moral imperative, more so than a legislative one. It is founded on the categorical imperative: A society without this rule is a community of witch-hunters, where everyone can accuse anyone of everything. We don't want to be accused without a chance to defend ourselves, therefore we should not accusse others without a fair trial.
This has nothing to do with your personal freedom to think whatever you please about your neighbour. Instead, it is about your personal right to defend yourself, and be defended from prejudice. You cannot claim this right for yourself while simultaneously claiming a right to spread prejudice about others.
That's all it means. It is just a simple way of summing up our court system. It is NOT a command to the population at large.
You are painting a pretty bleak picture of this society. Of course everyone is free to believe whatever they want. But in a civilised society, under the rule of law, we like to let the law rule. That includes giving every man a chance to state their cause in court before judging them. That is indeed a "command to the population at large", although a moral one, not a legislative one.
I don't see how this is "the center of gravity shifting". Rather, the examples given appear to indicate a diversification of Operating systems rather than a general downward trend. e.g. While there may be a smaller OS X revision, the desktop revision gets larger with every release.
The next desktop version of OS X is expected to be much smaller than the current one.
From http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/:
Snow Leopard dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos.
While I agree with you that this story is a vacuous mix of buzz words, I do think that desktop OSes do get smaller indeed, and I think it's a good thing. But for different reasons. To me, it signals a shift on the OS developers' behalf, away from adding more functionality back to optimizing the code-base. Partly because their marketing strategy necessitates the system to run on mobile devices (Apple), partly because they have understood that the market is fed up with bloated OSes that get in the way (Microsoft). But regardless of the reasons, it's A Good Thing.
Actually, it doesn't need a root. Quite on the contrary, the developing graph could give amazing insight into the structure of research communities. It would be possible to identify researchers forming links between otherwise almost disconnected areas of research, and to find the great minds at the centre of such blocks. There is no "root" to the web of scientists. Even people like Erdös were only ever local subroots.
I think this project is a great idea. Unfortunately, it currently seems to consist of only a command line tool to sign reviews with GPG. That's nowhere near enough if it is to thrive beyond the CS world. It needs a simple, rock-solid GUI, and most importantly, lots of eye-candy for the graph. It will need to look cool and work well to build up the momentum for this to work at all.
I strongly support your statement. I am currently living in a European Country that I have no citizenship in. I am not allowed to vote, but I am allowed to pay taxes. But somehow that doesn't stop me from being the evil foreigner who takes away jobs for the locals.
The GP argument implicitly assumes that there is some fixed amount of work available, and that foreigners coming into the country somehow "take away" their work, or deteriorate their salary. I can assure you that, if anything, I am more expensive than a local (I get the same wage, but my employer paid a bonus to get me here. Also, I am stricter about taking all of my paid leave and not working overtime than the people around here).
The sad fact is that while the markets have become global, most workers still don't want to live global. It's just as easy for an American to get abroad as it is for an American company to hire people abroad. So why are Americans so hellbent on staying put? It can't be the standard of living: Many European countries offer a better deal than the States when it comes to work-live balance and purchasing power.
I'm pretty sure the GP's numbers are kilos of CO2 per person, per flight.
According to David MacKay's excellent book, an intercontinental flight uses about 12,000 kWh of Energy per passenger. Let's imagine the meeting takes about 10 hours. Unless your IT infrastructure uses 1.2 Megawatts, solely for this one video conference, there's no point in flying, CO2-wise.
I don't know anything about this particular case, and this discussion is not about this particular person. But you will easily find a lot of unreasonable people on the internet. Because the more unreasonable they are, the louder they tend to voice their anger.
In other words: If someone actually commits libel against you in an internet forum, you are screwed:
If you sue them, you create a lot of headlines (the streisand effect), causing much more damage to your reputation. If you win the case, nobody will care (the media is not interested in some random dude being wrong in a forum). If you lose, it's even worse.
So what else can you do, really? Must be something that doesn't cause negative publicity. You might try adding a positive review to the forum under a pseudonym. But if anyone finds out about this, you have caused even more harm to your reputation.
The takeaway message seems to be: Don't trust anyone on the internet, for there is no penalty for lying on there.
Seconded. Shapewriting was invented by Per Ola Kristensson before 2004 (pdf warning), not by Kliff Kushler in 2008. WritingPad has been available on the iPhone for almost a year now. It has even been praised by Time magazine. These guys are jumping on the bandwagon. They only get more press since they are "the people who invented T9".
I don't have any idea about the history of the term "eating our own dogfood", but since this is slashdot, pure conjecture might be okay.
I could imagine that the term evolved from both the sources you mention, and that it always was a self-deprecating joke. It doesn't make employees look like dogs. It acknowledges that the product they are alpha-testing is not quite up to scratch yet, but that they are willing to use it anyway, since it's "one of ours".
Simon is still working on and in Haskell.
However, he has been working closely with Don Syme, the creator of F#. And yes, F# rocks. It's an absolutely beautiful language. Easy to learn (for a functional language) and with an extremely clean syntax. I do scientific computing, and I use it for everything now. (Except for plots, which I still do in Python).
So in trying desperately to distance itself from the Nazi legacy, the German government has effectively become a bunch of Nazis again.
There is broad support for these measures in the German public. It's not like "the government" had imposed an evil ban on those cute little Swastikas. Rather, it is commonly accepted that we need to limit free speech a tiny little bit to weed out the rot from a society that almost caused Europe to collapse barely 70 years ago.
In turn, these symbols have become so socially inacceptable that you can be sure anyone sporting them deserves a night in a cell, at the very least, in any case.
In 6 Scripting Languages Your Developers Wish You'd Let Them Use, CIO looks at several (including Groovy, Scala, Lua, F#, Clojure and Boo)
Sorry, but what is their definition of a scripting language? F#, for one, is a full-fledged functional language, with full access to the.NET framework. You can write stand-alone applications in it just as easily as in C#. And yes, people actually do that.
It's a rubbish use of the term. I guess Amazon might even be a bigger search engine than YouTube. Some of the big DNS servers are probably pretty big search engines as well.
The unavoidable energy requirement
to concentrate CO2 from 0.03% to 100% at atmospheric pressure is kT ln 100/0.03 per molecule, which is 0.13 kWh per kg. The ideal energy cost of compression of CO2 to 110 bar (a pressure mentioned for geological storage) is
0.067 kWh/kg. So the total ideal cost of CO2 capture and compression is 0.2 kWh/kg. According to the IPCC special report on carbon capture and storage, the practical cost of the second step, compression of CO2 to 110 bar, is 0.11 kWh per kg. (0.4 GJ per t CO; 18 kJ per mole CO; 7 kT per molecule.)
In other words: It'll be at least 200kW per tonne, unless they think the CO2 will somehow magically compress itself to be stored, which is not going to happen. That, or they just invented a perpetuum mobile.
Functional programming languages are still new, and they do take some getting used to. However, once you have wrapped your head around them, you will not want to go back to imperative style coding.
There are jobs where having functional language experience is an asset. Most of them also require a PhD in CS, and in most of them the knowledge gained by designing the software is more valuable than the software itself.
automated trading algorithms, for example, or search. Pretty much every elaborate Machine Learning application can gain massively from functional implementations.
Scientific computing is just starting to realise the power of functional programming. It allows very rapid development (switching to F# from Matlab and C# has easily doubled my productivity), and is great for applications where design-time is often longer than use-time.
The point is that there's nothing those languages can do that can't be done, often more easily, with the current crop of popular languages.
There is also nothing that can be done in C that cannot be done in Assembler.
In Europe, we like our scales inverted: 65 mpg is 4.3 litres per 100 km. That's worse than a 1998 VW Lupo 3l, or a 1994 Smart ForTwo, both of which are only slightly smaller than the new Fiesta, and make it to about 85 mpg. Using Diesel engines (which, as it happens, was actually cheaper in continental Europe than standard unleaded, for a long time).
Such cars are actually rather common in the old world, where most people have a short commute and rarely travel long distances.
You see, that's the problem: Most people, like you, assume that because people know your name, they must be your friends; the ones you "hang out" with.
If you had ever had a social life, you would see the fallacy of this assumption.
Weirdly though, 20% of all hiring managers seem to agree with you.
Great way to spend your time. Fight a battle against twenty stoners who think it's cool to tag pictures with your name.
My friend, I'm not even on facebook and people have still tagged pictures with my name. People who probably thought they were doing me a favour. Being able to untag yourself is an absolutely useless feature. Being able to forbid other people to link to your profile in any way, now that would be a feature.
You are in effect complaining about their products being too stable and polished to be called beta !
No, I'm complaining about them being called beta forever. For what it's worth, Chrome might well be a true beta. But gmail certainly is not a beta product in the "old" sense of the concept.
"Beta" is supposed to convey the idea that the product has reached a late stage of development, where a larger deployment base is needed to complete bugfixing. The public is invited to test the product for free, but is strongly dissuaded from expecting a complete product and should not use it for any critical applications.
Google, it seems, is instead using the "beta" tag as a perpetual excuse for any bugs that might show up at any point during the lifetime of the product, even long after a full release. Gmail is now used in mission critical settings by many companies (as in, their whole e-mail infrastructure), showing that nobody considers it beta any more, except for Google themselves.
The reason why I posted my little rant up there was the GP's statement implying one cannot critizise Google for any bugs in programs that "are still in beta". Of course Chrome is buggy, it's a true beta release. But Google, in my eyes, have lost the right to use this excuse, since they have cheekily extended it's validity to cover almost their whole product range, with the exception of search. I happily accept Microsoft's IE8b2 as a beta (at this point, it actually seems to have less bugs than Chrome), because I know MS will release a full version within a reasonable time-frame. Google, however, will have to decide whether they want to have their cake or eat it.
Slashdot Mirror
How is this important? Man gets promoted to lead IP division, proceeds to, well, lead IP division. I don't see why it's newsworthy that Microsoft's bigger court filings get filed by a high-ranking manager. The fact that he has just been promoted need not necessarily have anything to do with this.
To my claim that in dubio pro reo is a moral imperative to the general public you reply
Which implies that there is some moral authority who gets to decide what a particular moral concept is "meant to be". On the other hand, you write
which claims the exact opposite: That there be no moral authority whatsoever.
Let me make my point clearer, since you seem to have missed it: Assuming someone's innocence until they are found guilty is a moral imperative, more so than a legislative one. It is founded on the categorical imperative: A society without this rule is a community of witch-hunters, where everyone can accuse anyone of everything. We don't want to be accused without a chance to defend ourselves, therefore we should not accusse others without a fair trial.
This has nothing to do with your personal freedom to think whatever you please about your neighbour. Instead, it is about your personal right to defend yourself, and be defended from prejudice. You cannot claim this right for yourself while simultaneously claiming a right to spread prejudice about others.
You are painting a pretty bleak picture of this society. Of course everyone is free to believe whatever they want. But in a civilised society, under the rule of law, we like to let the law rule. That includes giving every man a chance to state their cause in court before judging them. That is indeed a "command to the population at large", although a moral one, not a legislative one.
I don't see how this is "the center of gravity shifting". Rather, the examples given appear to indicate a diversification of Operating systems rather than a general downward trend. e.g. While there may be a smaller OS X revision, the desktop revision gets larger with every release.
The next desktop version of OS X is expected to be much smaller than the current one. From http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/:
Snow Leopard dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos.
While I agree with you that this story is a vacuous mix of buzz words, I do think that desktop OSes do get smaller indeed, and I think it's a good thing. But for different reasons. To me, it signals a shift on the OS developers' behalf, away from adding more functionality back to optimizing the code-base. Partly because their marketing strategy necessitates the system to run on mobile devices (Apple), partly because they have understood that the market is fed up with bloated OSes that get in the way (Microsoft). But regardless of the reasons, it's A Good Thing.
Actually, it doesn't need a root. Quite on the contrary, the developing graph could give amazing insight into the structure of research communities. It would be possible to identify researchers forming links between otherwise almost disconnected areas of research, and to find the great minds at the centre of such blocks. There is no "root" to the web of scientists. Even people like Erdös were only ever local subroots.
I think this project is a great idea. Unfortunately, it currently seems to consist of only a command line tool to sign reviews with GPG. That's nowhere near enough if it is to thrive beyond the CS world. It needs a simple, rock-solid GUI, and most importantly, lots of eye-candy for the graph. It will need to look cool and work well to build up the momentum for this to work at all.
I strongly support your statement. I am currently living in a European Country that I have no citizenship in. I am not allowed to vote, but I am allowed to pay taxes. But somehow that doesn't stop me from being the evil foreigner who takes away jobs for the locals.
The GP argument implicitly assumes that there is some fixed amount of work available, and that foreigners coming into the country somehow "take away" their work, or deteriorate their salary. I can assure you that, if anything, I am more expensive than a local (I get the same wage, but my employer paid a bonus to get me here. Also, I am stricter about taking all of my paid leave and not working overtime than the people around here).
The sad fact is that while the markets have become global, most workers still don't want to live global. It's just as easy for an American to get abroad as it is for an American company to hire people abroad. So why are Americans so hellbent on staying put? It can't be the standard of living: Many European countries offer a better deal than the States when it comes to work-live balance and purchasing power.
I'm pretty sure the GP's numbers are kilos of CO2 per person, per flight.
According to David MacKay's excellent book, an intercontinental flight uses about 12,000 kWh of Energy per passenger. Let's imagine the meeting takes about 10 hours. Unless your IT infrastructure uses 1.2 Megawatts, solely for this one video conference, there's no point in flying, CO2-wise.
No offence, but you must be new to the internet.
I don't know anything about this particular case, and this discussion is not about this particular person. But you will easily find a lot of unreasonable people on the internet. Because the more unreasonable they are, the louder they tend to voice their anger.
In other words: If someone actually commits libel against you in an internet forum, you are screwed:
If you sue them, you create a lot of headlines (the streisand effect), causing much more damage to your reputation. If you win the case, nobody will care (the media is not interested in some random dude being wrong in a forum). If you lose, it's even worse.
So what else can you do, really? Must be something that doesn't cause negative publicity. You might try adding a positive review to the forum under a pseudonym. But if anyone finds out about this, you have caused even more harm to your reputation.
The takeaway message seems to be: Don't trust anyone on the internet, for there is no penalty for lying on there.
Seconded. Shapewriting was invented by Per Ola Kristensson before 2004 (pdf warning), not by Kliff Kushler in 2008. WritingPad has been available on the iPhone for almost a year now. It has even been praised by Time magazine. These guys are jumping on the bandwagon. They only get more press since they are "the people who invented T9".
I don't have any idea about the history of the term "eating our own dogfood", but since this is slashdot, pure conjecture might be okay.
I could imagine that the term evolved from both the sources you mention, and that it always was a self-deprecating joke. It doesn't make employees look like dogs. It acknowledges that the product they are alpha-testing is not quite up to scratch yet, but that they are willing to use it anyway, since it's "one of ours".
Sorry to nitpick a bit, but German is a very precise language:
"Frei" is the German word for "free" as in speech. The word for "free" as in beer is "kostenlos".
Simon is still working on and in Haskell.
However, he has been working closely with Don Syme, the creator of F#. And yes, F# rocks. It's an absolutely beautiful language. Easy to learn (for a functional language) and with an extremely clean syntax. I do scientific computing, and I use it for everything now. (Except for plots, which I still do in Python).
The true number is actually much higher, but with all the technology going overseas, the feds have to do with 8bit registers.
Badabumm - disssssh. Thanks! I'll be here all week. Try the lamb.
So in trying desperately to distance itself from the Nazi legacy, the German government has effectively become a bunch of Nazis again.
There is broad support for these measures in the German public. It's not like "the government" had imposed an evil ban on those cute little Swastikas. Rather, it is commonly accepted that we need to limit free speech a tiny little bit to weed out the rot from a society that almost caused Europe to collapse barely 70 years ago.
In turn, these symbols have become so socially inacceptable that you can be sure anyone sporting them deserves a night in a cell, at the very least, in any case.
Sorry, but what is their definition of a scripting language? F#, for one, is a full-fledged functional language, with full access to the .NET framework. You can write stand-alone applications in it just as easily as in C#. And yes, people actually do that.
It's a rubbish use of the term. I guess Amazon might even be a bigger search engine than YouTube. Some of the big DNS servers are probably pretty big search engines as well.
What a useless way of using words.
Right. Sorry, I missed that h.
According to David MacKay:
In other words: It'll be at least 200kW per tonne, unless they think the CO2 will somehow magically compress itself to be stored, which is not going to happen. That, or they just invented a perpetuum mobile.
There are jobs where having functional language experience is an asset. Most of them also require a PhD in CS, and in most of them the knowledge gained by designing the software is more valuable than the software itself.
automated trading algorithms, for example, or search. Pretty much every elaborate Machine Learning application can gain massively from functional implementations.
Scientific computing is just starting to realise the power of functional programming. It allows very rapid development (switching to F# from Matlab and C# has easily doubled my productivity), and is great for applications where design-time is often longer than use-time.
There is also nothing that can be done in C that cannot be done in Assembler.
Please elaborate. How is a duel (with guns) not a "deliberate causing" of "death"?
In Europe, we like our scales inverted: 65 mpg is 4.3 litres per 100 km. That's worse than a 1998 VW Lupo 3l, or a 1994 Smart ForTwo, both of which are only slightly smaller than the new Fiesta, and make it to about 85 mpg. Using Diesel engines (which, as it happens, was actually cheaper in continental Europe than standard unleaded, for a long time).
Such cars are actually rather common in the old world, where most people have a short commute and rarely travel long distances.
You see, that's the problem: Most people, like you, assume that because people know your name, they must be your friends; the ones you "hang out" with.
If you had ever had a social life, you would see the fallacy of this assumption.
Weirdly though, 20% of all hiring managers seem to agree with you.
Great way to spend your time. Fight a battle against twenty stoners who think it's cool to tag pictures with your name.
My friend, I'm not even on facebook and people have still tagged pictures with my name. People who probably thought they were doing me a favour. Being able to untag yourself is an absolutely useless feature. Being able to forbid other people to link to your profile in any way, now that would be a feature.
No, I'm complaining about them being called beta forever. For what it's worth, Chrome might well be a true beta. But gmail certainly is not a beta product in the "old" sense of the concept.
"Beta" is supposed to convey the idea that the product has reached a late stage of development, where a larger deployment base is needed to complete bugfixing. The public is invited to test the product for free, but is strongly dissuaded from expecting a complete product and should not use it for any critical applications.
Google, it seems, is instead using the "beta" tag as a perpetual excuse for any bugs that might show up at any point during the lifetime of the product, even long after a full release. Gmail is now used in mission critical settings by many companies (as in, their whole e-mail infrastructure), showing that nobody considers it beta any more, except for Google themselves.
The reason why I posted my little rant up there was the GP's statement implying one cannot critizise Google for any bugs in programs that "are still in beta". Of course Chrome is buggy, it's a true beta release. But Google, in my eyes, have lost the right to use this excuse, since they have cheekily extended it's validity to cover almost their whole product range, with the exception of search. I happily accept Microsoft's IE8b2 as a beta (at this point, it actually seems to have less bugs than Chrome), because I know MS will release a full version within a reasonable time-frame. Google, however, will have to decide whether they want to have their cake or eat it.