The sooner the US realises that Pakistan is a natural ally of Islamic fundamentalists and China much more than it is a natural ally of the west, the better.
I agree for adults, who should be allowed to make their own mistakes. But children aren't adults. There was an interesting article in slate about this in slate -
He proposes three boundary ages, and has studies to justify each one.
12 - when you can physically have sex - when women reach puberty 16 - when you're intellectually mature - people under 16 score quite badly on intelligence tests 25 - when you have some kind of emotional maturity - people under that age don't have proper self regulatory systems
Which is a bit like a boot sequence when you think of it - I particularly like the way there's ten years between 16 and 25 where you're smart but clueless.
As he puts it -
I'd draw the object line at 12, the cognitive line at 16, and the self-regulatory line at 25. I'd lock up anyone who went after a 5-year-old. I'd come down hard on a 38-year-old who married a 15-year-old. And if I ran a college, I'd discipline professors for sleeping with freshmen. When you're 35, "she's legal" isn't good enough.
What I wouldn't do is slap a mandatory sentence on a 17-year-old, even if his nominal girlfriend were 12.
Is that really possible though? I can see if you convert from DOC to OOXML you could convert from the old legacy encoding to the new one which would be a superset. And later on you could to spot patterns of uses of the new superset which can be converted back to lineBreaksLikeWord95. But then people will edit it and even just resaving would presumably regenerate the file, and I can't really see how the converter can convert that back to lineBreaksLikeWord95.
Certainly the job of the converter is easier if you can just put lineBreaksLikeWord95 in the XML file.
Why did Microsoft feel the need to invent, push, and strongarm OOXML when ODF already exists? Because ODF doesn't support all the legacy Office-isms like linebreaksLikeWord97. Presumably in a DOC file there is this flag. So if you want to save it as XML and then convert it back this information needs to be stored in the file somehow. Would you rather they keep the file format closed? Or maybe they should just stop supporting the 90+% percent of the population that use MS Office and have a bunch of old files and then go bankrupt.
because its fast as heckfire. Much much faster than ML or haskell. Its often faster than c http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCaml#Philosophy Xavier Leroy has cautiously stated that "OCaml delivers at least 50% of the performance of a decent C compiler"[1], and benchmarks have shown that this is generally the case
Do you have a contact person at MSFT I can send an invoice to if I abuse you on the Internet? How much would I get per insult?
E.g. if I called you a "paranoid basement dwelling wackjob with a chronic drug habbit" how much? I'm not of course, I want someone to show me the money first - why would they buy a cow if they can get the milk for free. What about a more complex, technically researched flame? Do they pay per hour?
In a flattened world of course, rudeness is globalized. I thought about this as I boarded a SouthWest Airlines plane to Bangalore to bean some Indian motherfucker who criticized my book "Globabalization 4.0" on Amazon.com.
As I gulped my Starbucks coffee and boarded I mused that perhaps I would use my titanium iBook in the same way that my distant ancestors on the Kalahari used large flat rocks as rudimentary beaning tools. Yes, we are all Kalahari bushmen in a way now, both me and the Indian. Perhaps criticism on Amazon is a form of beaning too, long range Web 3.0 beaning using a flat world instead of a flat titanium iBook or a rock.
While I did so, it reminded me of a conversation with Jeff Bezos where he pointed out that Amazon.com is another notch in the flattness of the world. Perhaps the fact that said Indian could criticise me over Wifi from the beach rather than having to plug his iBook into an ethernet port at the office is yet another. I recall another conversation at Pizza Hut with Sergei Brin and Mikhail Gorbachev where Bill Clinton said that Pizza Hut is another notch in flattened world.
Microsoft have had plenty of opportunities to solve that problem, from virtualising their old OS (as did Apple) They actually tried that
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/10/05/477317.aspx For Windows 95, we actually tried this virtual machine idea. Another developer and I got Windows 3.1 running in a virtual machine within Windows 95. There was a Windows 3.1 desktop with Program Manager, and inside it were all your Windows 3.1 programs. (It wasn't a purely isolated virtual machine though. We punched holes in the virtual machine in order to solve the file sharing problem, taking advantage of the particular way Windows 3.1 interacted with its DPMI host.) Management was intrigued by this capability but ultimately decided against it because it was a simply dreadful user experience. The limitations were too severe, the integration far from seamless. Nobody would have enjoyed using it, and explaining how it works to a non-technical person would have been nearly impossible.
or re-implementing Win32 (like Wine). Actually they've already reimplemented Win32 several times. Win32s, Win32 on the 16 bit 9x/Me Kernel (Win32s+), Win32 on Windows CE, Win32 on NT based OSs. And subsets of Win32 have gone from being a thin wrapper over the kernel/device driver model to a sort of emulation over time. E.g. most sound stuff.
How would it help by the way? The best user experience comes from having only one Win32 implementation so that all application share the same desktop, taskbar and so on. And it seems like they have a shim architecture so that quirks of old implementations can be emulated on a per application basis.
I dunno. Maybe I'm cynical but it seems like this bridge, like the pyramids is a product of a pre science and mostly illiterate civilisation. Someone worked out how to do it by trial and error and got the equivalent of a no bid contract with the people that run society. Then he was put in charge of a vast workforce, probably press ganged by the military thanks to his political connections, and used it to build bridges until he retired with lots of nubile slaves. After that the technique was preserved probably by word of mouth or carried on by his children.
It's not about physics or science though, you don't need those things to be able to do this.
I once worked on a hotel room booking web app that was based on ASP, components in VB and a couple in C++ and Microsoft Transaction server. There was an old mainframe guy working as a project manager that had had a meeting with Microsoft Sweden and told me "Microsoft care about this project - it is very important to them to break into the Swedish market and they won't let it fail". He insisted we all use Variants, even for the things we passed to C++ code or loop variables. Also based on his experience of ancient mainframe platforms he decided to store hotel bookings in a table like this
So to book you had to find the weeks affected, check none of the flags were set and then set them. His argument was that this was faster since the database could fetch a row at a time. But it sure made the SQL atomic check for space and then book function harder to write.
What was funny about it is that if more than about fifteen people used it it died with "ActiveX can't create object" and the webserver had to be rebooted. I left the project and worked on my own web app for the same company. I used pure ASP. My code was stable. He claimed my web app was breaking his because I hadn't complied with his coding standards and had my webapp turned off for half an hour. Needless to say his code still crashed. I don't think they ever managed to make it stable. Eventually I wrote an nasty email and they used that as an excuse to fire me.
O.K., I'll bite, what part of that line do you not understand? If/. billed itself as a "blog" then I'd understand your point. However,/. is a corporate based, self-billed "News" site. Whether reader submission driven or not, it is a news site. You are wrong. But, thanks for your thoughts.
Well Pravda means 'The Truth' in Russian too, but it usually wasn't.
If we could educate people to discriminate against orange people and police to feed suspects carrots it would be an interesting punishment. An alternative to imprisonment or fines. Force feeding with concentrated carrot juice would cause liver damage and a permanent color change, a carrot only diet should be temporary.
More generally thieves could be colored orange by exploding dye packs, rapists could be sprayed with portable aerosols and so on, so that police would be unnecessary. Perhaps orange people would naturally acquire a reputation for untrustworthiness like branded people did in the Middle Ages.
Because a bomb squad, who should have handled the dismantling of these devices, should have known in 5 minutes it wasn't a fucking bomb. Bomb squads don't dismantle suspected bombs in 5 minutes because they are afraid of booby traps, or terrorists setting them off by radio when they arrive, or just setting off the bomb accidentally.
I think I know what he means. Most of the code I write is for embedded platforms, but I've always liked writing Win32 or Windows driver code. They tend to be rather complex, but the complexity is usually there for a reason.
Try reading http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/ for a while. I like all the voodoo Microsoft do to keep old third party binaries working too - it's another example of complexity for a reason.
My uncle works in IT for a Japanese company of some size. He often speaks of the Japanese management as if this were still the eighties and sometimes its almost racist,so I apologize for him if this is insulting to anyone so take this with a heaping dose of salt.
He thinks that it goes against the Japanese culture to use a technology without paying for it, that it shows disrespect to not pay for software licenses. He is not even allowed to consider using Linux or any other OSS for that matter. That just sounds like honesty to me, and the Japanese are remarkably honest. E.g. when my Dad was working there one of the guys in the office left his laptop on the train, but he wasn't worried - he knew it would get handed in at lost property by someone. He went back at 8pm when he left work and picked it up from the station. Try doing that in the US or the UK, or anywhere but Japan really.
And you shouldn't worry about racism when you talk about other cultures. Other cultures are different. Sometimes as in this case better and sometimes worse. Pretending that they are all identical is silly.
* I am an American, since I live in the American continent. Calling the US "America" is foolish. Doesn't the US have a trademark on America® like it does on Land of the Free®?
Slashdot Mirror
The sooner the US realises that Pakistan is a natural ally of Islamic fundamentalists and China much more than it is a natural ally of the west, the better.
If you ever have kids of your own, you'll understand.
http://www.slate.com/id/2174841
He proposes three boundary ages, and has studies to justify each one.
12 - when you can physically have sex - when women reach puberty
16 - when you're intellectually mature - people under 16 score quite badly on intelligence tests
25 - when you have some kind of emotional maturity - people under that age don't have proper self regulatory systems
Which is a bit like a boot sequence when you think of it - I particularly like the way there's ten years between 16 and 25 where you're smart but clueless.
As he puts it - I'd draw the object line at 12, the cognitive line at 16, and the self-regulatory line at 25. I'd lock up anyone who went after a 5-year-old. I'd come down hard on a 38-year-old who married a 15-year-old. And if I ran a college, I'd discipline professors for sleeping with freshmen. When you're 35, "she's legal" isn't good enough.
What I wouldn't do is slap a mandatory sentence on a 17-year-old, even if his nominal girlfriend were 12.
Is that really possible though? I can see if you convert from DOC to OOXML you could convert from the old legacy encoding to the new one which would be a superset. And later on you could to spot patterns of uses of the new superset which can be converted back to lineBreaksLikeWord95. But then people will edit it and even just resaving would presumably regenerate the file, and I can't really see how the converter can convert that back to lineBreaksLikeWord95.
Certainly the job of the converter is easier if you can just put lineBreaksLikeWord95 in the XML file.
Apart from that though you have to admit the summary is quite well written.
Maybe he's talking about Mr Nobody.
Xavier Leroy has cautiously stated that "OCaml delivers at least 50% of the performance of a decent C compiler"[1], and benchmarks have shown that this is generally the case
Do you have a contact person at MSFT I can send an invoice to if I abuse you on the Internet? How much would I get per insult?
E.g. if I called you a "paranoid basement dwelling wackjob with a chronic drug habbit" how much? I'm not of course, I want someone to show me the money first - why would they buy a cow if they can get the milk for free. What about a more complex, technically researched flame? Do they pay per hour?
In a flattened world of course, rudeness is globalized. I thought about this as I boarded a SouthWest Airlines plane to Bangalore to bean some Indian motherfucker who criticized my book "Globabalization 4.0" on Amazon.com.
As I gulped my Starbucks coffee and boarded I mused that perhaps I would use my titanium iBook in the same way that my distant ancestors on the Kalahari used large flat rocks as rudimentary beaning tools. Yes, we are all Kalahari bushmen in a way now, both me and the Indian. Perhaps criticism on Amazon is a form of beaning too, long range Web 3.0 beaning using a flat world instead of a flat titanium iBook or a rock.
While I did so, it reminded me of a conversation with Jeff Bezos where he pointed out that Amazon.com is another notch in the flattness of the world. Perhaps the fact that said Indian could criticise me over Wifi from the beach rather than having to plug his iBook into an ethernet port at the office is yet another. I recall another conversation at Pizza Hut with Sergei Brin and Mikhail Gorbachev where Bill Clinton said that Pizza Hut is another notch in flattened world.
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/10/05/477317.aspx
For Windows 95, we actually tried this virtual machine idea. Another developer and I got Windows 3.1 running in a virtual machine within Windows 95. There was a Windows 3.1 desktop with Program Manager, and inside it were all your Windows 3.1 programs. (It wasn't a purely isolated virtual machine though. We punched holes in the virtual machine in order to solve the file sharing problem, taking advantage of the particular way Windows 3.1 interacted with its DPMI host.) Management was intrigued by this capability but ultimately decided against it because it was a simply dreadful user experience. The limitations were too severe, the integration far from seamless. Nobody would have enjoyed using it, and explaining how it works to a non-technical person would have been nearly impossible. or re-implementing Win32 (like Wine). Actually they've already reimplemented Win32 several times. Win32s, Win32 on the 16 bit 9x/Me Kernel (Win32s+), Win32 on Windows CE, Win32 on NT based OSs. And subsets of Win32 have gone from being a thin wrapper over the kernel/device driver model to a sort of emulation over time. E.g. most sound stuff.
How would it help by the way? The best user experience comes from having only one Win32 implementation so that all application share the same desktop, taskbar and so on. And it seems like they have a shim architecture so that quirks of old implementations can be emulated on a per application basis.
If you leave SATA in enhanced mode you can slipstream the drivers into XP SP2 too.
http://www.ozzu.com/ftopic28824.html
Don't be a pendant.
I dunno. Maybe I'm cynical but it seems like this bridge, like the pyramids is a product of a pre science and mostly illiterate civilisation. Someone worked out how to do it by trial and error and got the equivalent of a no bid contract with the people that run society. Then he was put in charge of a vast workforce, probably press ganged by the military thanks to his political connections, and used it to build bridges until he retired with lots of nubile slaves. After that the technique was preserved probably by word of mouth or carried on by his children.
It's not about physics or science though, you don't need those things to be able to do this.
I once worked on a hotel room booking web app that was based on ASP, components in VB and a couple in C++ and Microsoft Transaction server. There was an old mainframe guy working as a project manager that had had a meeting with Microsoft Sweden and told me "Microsoft care about this project - it is very important to them to break into the Swedish market and they won't let it fail". He insisted we all use Variants, even for the things we passed to C++ code or loop variables. Also based on his experience of ancient mainframe platforms he decided to store hotel bookings in a table like this
... Sunday_Flag
Start_of_Week_Date Monday_Flag Tuesday_Flag
So to book you had to find the weeks affected, check none of the flags were set and then set them. His argument was that this was faster since the database could fetch a row at a time. But it sure made the SQL atomic check for space and then book function harder to write.
What was funny about it is that if more than about fifteen people used it it died with "ActiveX can't create object" and the webserver had to be rebooted. I left the project and worked on my own web app for the same company. I used pure ASP. My code was stable. He claimed my web app was breaking his because I hadn't complied with his coding standards and had my webapp turned off for half an hour. Needless to say his code still crashed. I don't think they ever managed to make it stable. Eventually I wrote an nasty email and they used that as an excuse to fire me.
O.K., I'll bite, what part of that line do you not understand? If /. billed itself as a "blog" then I'd understand your point. However, /. is a corporate based, self-billed "News" site. Whether reader submission driven or not, it is a news site. You are wrong. But, thanks for your thoughts.
Well Pravda means 'The Truth' in Russian too, but it usually wasn't.If we could educate people to discriminate against orange people and police to feed suspects carrots it would be an interesting punishment. An alternative to imprisonment or fines. Force feeding with concentrated carrot juice would cause liver damage and a permanent color change, a carrot only diet should be temporary.
More generally thieves could be colored orange by exploding dye packs, rapists could be sprayed with portable aerosols and so on, so that police would be unnecessary. Perhaps orange people would naturally acquire a reputation for untrustworthiness like branded people did in the Middle Ages.
"Foolish Infidels, this is actually a bomb disguised as a hip PR stunt"
Probably some Jack Bauer wannabe is still waterboarding her to make her TELL HIM the LOCATION of the NUCLEAR DEVICE.
I think I know what he means. Most of the code I write is for embedded platforms, but I've always liked writing Win32 or Windows driver code. They tend to be rather complex, but the complexity is usually there for a reason.
Try reading http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/ for a while. I like all the voodoo Microsoft do to keep old third party binaries working too - it's another example of complexity for a reason.
He thinks that it goes against the Japanese culture to use a technology without paying for it, that it shows disrespect to not pay for software licenses. He is not even allowed to consider using Linux or any other OSS for that matter. That just sounds like honesty to me, and the Japanese are remarkably honest. E.g. when my Dad was working there one of the guys in the office left his laptop on the train, but he wasn't worried - he knew it would get handed in at lost property by someone. He went back at 8pm when he left work and picked it up from the station. Try doing that in the US or the UK, or anywhere but Japan really.
And you shouldn't worry about racism when you talk about other cultures. Other cultures are different. Sometimes as in this case better and sometimes worse. Pretending that they are all identical is silly.
Maybe he's too dumb to be convinced when smart people tell him to give away his stuff for free ;-)