He completely discounts those who do it for the love and there are too many developers out there whose idea of kicking back is to fire up a laptop and get stuck in to a project that interests them. Yes people should be more aware of the cost of their labour and not be taken for a ride as so many seem to, but to say that open source is simple going to curl up and die is just plain wrong.
You're cheating! You can't post on/. with an unfair knowledge of the system. That makes you an insider! You're one of us..I mean them!
On a more serious note; yes there are flaws in the system but I've yet to see something proposed that is even vaguely viable.
But there's a difference between writing multi-volume epics that cover multiple story lines and padding out the books with ad-nauseum descriptions of camps/jewellery/men and women arguing.
Robert Louis Stephenson once wrote that his motto was "Death to the optic nerve" meaning that he wanted books where the situation of the protagonists were presented as the story went along, doing away with the need for large chunks of descriptive exposition.
Jordan wasted his story-telling abilities with huge (try 11 pages of description of walking from one side of the camp to the other) tracts of petty details and description that did nothing to further the story or enrich the characters. This was the blatant padding that pissed of so many people that were huge fans of the first 5 or so books and then became disenchanted with the rest. It wasn't the multiple story lines or the massive number of characters - it was this repetitive (here's a camp description, here's another camp description, and here's another camp description) rubbish that polluted the later books. Winters Heart could probably be replaced by a 20 page synopsis and the first 400 pages of Crossroads at Twilight is just the rehashing of the last (admittedly important) chapter of the previous book. This isn't a stylistic style but a a plea - don't waste my time and my money.
It is a great shame that he is no longer with us but I wonder how successful the series would be if a real editor was let loose on it? It would be condensed to about 6-8 books and may well be the greatest piece of sci-fi fantasy ever written.
Do you see a difference between the world being created by pixies and elves or flying spaghetti monsters?
I'm joking of course, but your comment equates to saying that all world views - even the patently ridiculous and wrong - are just as valid as the real one.
How you choose to experience the world is up to you but just because you choose to believe something doesn't make you right and you are right in that this is what we need to teach our children.
Correct. It's called "recurrent inhibition" and it's when a neuron has an inhibitory connection to itself to prevent over-excitation. Damage to this mechanism can be one of the many pathophysiogies behind epilepsy.
The brain learns by weakening existing connections, not by adding new ones. That is incorrect. An increased number of synaptic connections is a classic indicator of increased usage such as is seen in the hippocampus of individuals who have undergone knowledge based learning.
But forensic analyses of blood has found cases well before 1969 (the earliest definite is 1959), and current research has the earliest cases at some time in the 1930's.
So no it doesn't sound like AIDS was manufactured.
Lamarckism wasn't a pseudo-science. It was a testable, if erroneous, hypothesis on how evolution works. The fact that it was easily disproved (an animal that has lost its leg in an accident does not breed 3 legged babies) doesn't make it a pseudo-science like Astrology.
I seem to recall that Stalin's issues came from the fact that his science advisers did not believe in DNA and it's involvement in genetics as well as the involvement of the Nazis in eugenics which may have tainted genetics to many communists.
People will believe in what they want to believe: tooth fairies, Father Christmas and Big Beards in the sky.
Great comment. Lucid, full of common sense and a fine reality check for all those companies who tell us we HAVE to upgrade, when actually our current systems can easily run 99% of what we do.
But seriously, you must be new to post something like this on/.!
I can see Microsoft wanting guidance before releasing a new product.
Those guidelines already exist. They are the guidelines that every other manufacturer of software has to obey when they sell software in the EU. All the EU is saying is that MS aren't a special case, but must obey the rules just like everyone else.
As an aside, why do you think that the EU treated them unfairly? What in particular bother you? And as for the "anti-Americanism that seems to be all the rage", what are you talking about? All I see are the arrows and slingshots that any market leader should expect. Yes I'm european (actually I'm British but that's another story), but that comment sounds like a persecution complex.
Only part of the client source code is downloadable, not the whole; this is a violation of the GPL. Also, the iChessU has an EULA which violates the GPL by placing new restrictions on how the code may be used.
The bad faith negotations accusation may be an overreaction but it's hard not to think this when iChessU initially wanted to license JIN but backed out when it appeared too expensive for them and then proceeded to use it anyway.
This is not an overreaction but a devloper fighting to prevent a third party assuming legal control of that developers work.
They are cashing in on the efforts of successful companies without any hard work of their own. It takes just as long to register one domain as another, and yet the apparent worth will be altered to fit the pockets of the current owners as to maximise revenue. This is naked greed and nothing else.
I just wanted you to know that having a PhD degree doesn't really mean shit
Ouch! You must be been royally screwed, while all around you your fellow PhD students were partying it up with their supervisors doing all the work.
Mine was a little of column A and a little of column B; an initially helpful supervisor who let me piggyback on his experimential method (saving me about 6 months) who then ruthlessly exploited my data collection (wrote papers using my data - no author credits to me) and disappeared when it came to writing up when he found out that I was not going to be staying in academia, but then helped brilliantly when I pointed out that when I submitted, he would be a laughing stock for a student failing at this point.
Having a PhD (from a decent Uni - internet ones don't count apart from the OU) shows that you stayed the course and have a modicum of brains. Having a good PhD, now that's a different matter.
I loved the freedom of study too, but I loved the cold hard cash available from working more as it bought me infinitely more freedom, and kept me away from the kindergarten politics of academia.
This is a common misconception, often blatantly misused to attempt to prove racial superiority. The truth is the evolutionary clock is always ticking and that all species are equally evolved be they sharks, birds or mammals. This is easy to forget when you look at a tree diagram of evolutionary history which makes it appear that certain species appeared and then stopped evolving. The only requisite of evolution is that they have become the fittest/most suitable for that environmental niche, not that they wer the first and just because they were the first, it doesn't mean that they are not exposed to the same evolotionary pressures that produced the species in the first palce.
Eugenics is the study of improving human genetic traits by improving the gene pool. While this could be a logical application of the theory of evolution (not just artificial selection but improving our genetic inheritance), how you go about this is what matters. If you attempt such things as gene therapy for conditions such as Cystic Fibrosis, this is eugenics in action. Where eugenics has been dragged into the mud is its use as the justification of infanticide , racial hygiene and extermination of "lesser races". This is not eugenics but "scientific racism" where people do not have the goal of improving humans, but of making the humanity "more like us".
Humans in Africa require dark skin if they are to be protected from the higher incidence of UV radiation which would give lighter skinned human skin cancer (as seen in Australia). Humans in more polar regions requires lighter skins else they suffer from lack of vitamin D due to the blocking of UV radiation from their melanocytes, these has been reported in Africans living in places such as Sweden. Fairly basic evolutionary theory. Apart from skin colouration, there is as much genetic difference between 2 people of the same race than there is between 2 racial groups, so showing falsity of some humans being more evolved than others..
So, in conclusion, one race of human is no more evolved than another, and attempts to show that they are is just a misrepresentation of the facts to fit a political agenda.
And, um, atheists are sans agenda? I mean, if you're going to use a ad hominem logical fallacy, you should at least realize when you're putting logic in the back seat.
As the definition of religion is that faith is prioritised over logic, while the gp's quote was ad hominem, it was not illogical of fallacious.
there should be loads of evidence to show the migrations between species
I believe that you are referring to "transitions between species" rather than migrations. This apparent belief in the lack of these species is a common misconception promoted by various creationist literatures such as "Pandas and People". The reality is that there are many transition species which have been known about for decades, with more being found all the time (the most recent is probably the fossil Tiktaalik which is of a fish with weight bearing legs like a land animal).
One of the most well known series of transition species is the ones associated with land based mammals becoming whales. This group goes as follows artiodachtyl (very hippo like land based mammals) --> pachycetis --> ambulocetis --> protocetids --> modern whales. Look them up on the web and tell me what you think
The fact is that neither creation nor evolution can be proven, which means both arguements[sic] belong to metaphysics.
This, frankly is rubbish. While you can take the Platonic theory and say nothing can be proven apart from straight lines and circles, scientific proof in the real world is that which can be proven to a statistical significance. This is no mean feat and is certainly no cop out (I spent 7 years in academia so trust me, I know). A scientific theory such as evolution can only been seen as valid (proven to be true) when there is overwhelming evidence in support and no evidence against. A single point of evidence against would destroy the whole theory. This is one of the strengths of science in that the smallest piece of evidence can challenge a theory and refute it. After several hundred years, this hasn't happened with evolution, unlike previous attempted explanations such as Lamarckism.
You write as an intelligent person (which for Slashdot is a rarity in itself!). I would ask that you take that intelligence and focus on the facts and see what they suggest to you, rather than focus on the cultural values you grew up with and waste your time fruitlessly trying to make the facts fit.
It's less "me too" and more "tried and tested", hence the use of programming languages such as Cobol and RPG when people may have expected them to be replaced. Not having experts isn't an issue either, if they need them, they just hire them, there's normally enough money at stake to make this a non-issue.
Long-term views is a definite yes. You have to ask questions like: "will this product still be supported in the next 5-10 years","will it be actively developed and patched", "will this product cause me trouble". The last one is always a good one as it covers everything from bugs and exploits to legal issues. I'm in banking and everyting runs through this sort of questioning before acceptance.
yeah RIGHT, like *every* fuckin' bit of software isn't full o' holes
Shrieking hyperbole aside - no they're not, the best ones (and the ones you should be using unless you've bought all the marketing BS) aren't. Assuming for one minute that you aren't a hobbyist or a schoolchild but have a coding job which depends on your reputation (difficult as you've taken the brave stance of beiing an AC) you would know that this titbit of news has left a lot of people high and dry. They have apps on production servers not knowing whether this would compromise just their RoR app or the entire server.
As to handling it well, no I don't think so. A simple diff will show what the issue is and I'm betting that plenty of people have already done that (especially judging by some of the recent posts), so not telling people what it is just adds to the uncertainty.
You're right about MS. That is why people don't use MS as an internet platform if they can help it. Look it *nix versus MS Server and Apache versus IIS. MS products are easy to use but I wouldn't be to happy for them to be used for my apps as they aren't secure or stable enough, common requirements for enterprise products.
There are plenty of pros and cons for Rails and personally I like it more than I dislike it, but the reality is it isn't mature and it isn't enterprise ready.
I agree that every framework or application has had a critical security update or two at some time. The point of my original post was that the established ones have had theirs at some time in the past. A good example would be the Tomcat ones you mentioned, version 3.1 was in 2001.
I pretty much knew that I was going to get flamed for the comment (your comment a fairly honourable exception) but speaking as a senior developer in a bank, I wouldn't touch RoR with a barge pole at the moment. Not because it isn't a good product but because there is so much unknown about it that I wouldn't risk my reputation on it. If you RTFA, quite a few people are left high and dry about to go to production with a possibly compromised application. I think that too many people see a critique of a product as a criticism then come off like a bunch of shrieking fanbois.
Jeez, listen to me...expecting rational thought on/. I must be getting old!
This is an example of why many major industries stay away from the "bleeding-edge" of tech products.
Only when something has been in the market long enough for people to find the holes, either by internal testing or by discovery of in-the-wild exploits can it be considered for the "higher" end of the market. It's unfortunate that it has happened to Rails, which is a great framework but it's another reason to staty with the more established web frameworks such as JSP/Struts.
If that is a legitimate message and his account hasn't been hacked then that is a top quality hissy fit! This is one of those things that will haunt him in the future as something that was posted in anger
Cosmology isn't my field but the data here is incredibly vague. I'm not sure this deserves more than a raised eyebrow and an "Okay...now come up with something a little less tenuous". Interpretation of data is an art in itself and can be wildly skewed by the observer's own opinions - show mw that this hasn't happened here.
Slashdot Mirror
He completely discounts those who do it for the love and there are too many developers out there whose idea of kicking back is to fire up a laptop and get stuck in to a project that interests them. Yes people should be more aware of the cost of their labour and not be taken for a ride as so many seem to, but to say that open source is simple going to curl up and die is just plain wrong.
You're cheating! You can't post on /. with an unfair knowledge of the system. That makes you an insider! You're one of us..I mean them!
On a more serious note; yes there are flaws in the system but I've yet to see something proposed that is even vaguely viable.
management is calling.
But there's a difference between writing multi-volume epics that cover multiple story lines and padding out the books with ad-nauseum descriptions of camps/jewellery/men and women arguing.
Robert Louis Stephenson once wrote that his motto was "Death to the optic nerve" meaning that he wanted books where the situation of the protagonists were presented as the story went along, doing away with the need for large chunks of descriptive exposition.
Jordan wasted his story-telling abilities with huge (try 11 pages of description of walking from one side of the camp to the other) tracts of petty details and description that did nothing to further the story or enrich the characters. This was the blatant padding that pissed of so many people that were huge fans of the first 5 or so books and then became disenchanted with the rest. It wasn't the multiple story lines or the massive number of characters - it was this repetitive (here's a camp description, here's another camp description, and here's another camp description) rubbish that polluted the later books. Winters Heart could probably be replaced by a 20 page synopsis and the first 400 pages of Crossroads at Twilight is just the rehashing of the last (admittedly important) chapter of the previous book. This isn't a stylistic style but a a plea - don't waste my time and my money.
It is a great shame that he is no longer with us but I wonder how successful the series would be if a real editor was let loose on it? It would be condensed to about 6-8 books and may well be the greatest piece of sci-fi fantasy ever written.
Do you see a difference between the world being created by pixies and elves or flying spaghetti monsters?
I'm joking of course, but your comment equates to saying that all world views - even the patently ridiculous and wrong - are just as valid as the real one.
How you choose to experience the world is up to you but just because you choose to believe something doesn't make you right and you are right in that this is what we need to teach our children.
Correct. It's called "recurrent inhibition" and it's when a neuron has an inhibitory connection to itself to prevent over-excitation. Damage to this mechanism can be one of the many pathophysiogies behind epilepsy.
But forensic analyses of blood has found cases well before 1969 (the earliest definite is 1959), and current research has the earliest cases at some time in the 1930's.
So no it doesn't sound like AIDS was manufactured.
Lamarckism wasn't a pseudo-science. It was a testable, if erroneous, hypothesis on how evolution works. The fact that it was easily disproved (an animal that has lost its leg in an accident does not breed 3 legged babies) doesn't make it a pseudo-science like Astrology.
I seem to recall that Stalin's issues came from the fact that his science advisers did not believe in DNA and it's involvement in genetics as well as the involvement of the Nazis in eugenics which may have tainted genetics to many communists.
People will believe in what they want to believe: tooth fairies, Father Christmas and Big Beards in the sky.
From TFA: "[Google] has traditionally focused a lot on candidates' academic performance and favored those who went to elite schools"
Nice to know that the new hotness is still the same old and busted.
Great comment. Lucid, full of common sense and a fine reality check for all those companies who tell us we HAVE to upgrade, when actually our current systems can easily run 99% of what we do.
But seriously, you must be new to post something like this on /.!
Those guidelines already exist. They are the guidelines that every other manufacturer of software has to obey when they sell software in the EU. All the EU is saying is that MS aren't a special case, but must obey the rules just like everyone else.
As an aside, why do you think that the EU treated them unfairly? What in particular bother you? And as for the "anti-Americanism that seems to be all the rage", what are you talking about? All I see are the arrows and slingshots that any market leader should expect. Yes I'm european (actually I'm British but that's another story), but that comment sounds like a persecution complex.
This was reported a couple of days ago on el reg http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/05/ibm_roadru nner_amd/
Nope.
Only part of the client source code is downloadable, not the whole; this is a violation of the GPL. Also, the iChessU has an EULA which violates the GPL by placing new restrictions on how the code may be used.
The bad faith negotations accusation may be an overreaction but it's hard not to think this when iChessU initially wanted to license JIN but backed out when it appeared too expensive for them and then proceeded to use it anyway.
This is not an overreaction but a devloper fighting to prevent a third party assuming legal control of that developers work.
What's the justification on this?
They are cashing in on the efforts of successful companies without any hard work of their own. It takes just as long to register one domain as another, and yet the apparent worth will be altered to fit the pockets of the current owners as to maximise revenue. This is naked greed and nothing else.
Ouch! You must be been royally screwed, while all around you your fellow PhD students were partying it up with their supervisors doing all the work.
Mine was a little of column A and a little of column B; an initially helpful supervisor who let me piggyback on his experimential method (saving me about 6 months) who then ruthlessly exploited my data collection (wrote papers using my data - no author credits to me) and disappeared when it came to writing up when he found out that I was not going to be staying in academia, but then helped brilliantly when I pointed out that when I submitted, he would be a laughing stock for a student failing at this point.
Having a PhD (from a decent Uni - internet ones don't count apart from the OU) shows that you stayed the course and have a modicum of brains. Having a good PhD, now that's a different matter.
I loved the freedom of study too, but I loved the cold hard cash available from working more as it bought me infinitely more freedom, and kept me away from the kindergarten politics of academia.
This is a common misconception, often blatantly misused to attempt to prove racial superiority. The truth is the evolutionary clock is always ticking and that all species are equally evolved be they sharks, birds or mammals. This is easy to forget when you look at a tree diagram of evolutionary history which makes it appear that certain species appeared and then stopped evolving. The only requisite of evolution is that they have become the fittest/most suitable for that environmental niche, not that they wer the first and just because they were the first, it doesn't mean that they are not exposed to the same evolotionary pressures that produced the species in the first palce.
Eugenics is the study of improving human genetic traits by improving the gene pool. While this could be a logical application of the theory of evolution (not just artificial selection but improving our genetic inheritance), how you go about this is what matters. If you attempt such things as gene therapy for conditions such as Cystic Fibrosis, this is eugenics in action. Where eugenics has been dragged into the mud is its use as the justification of infanticide , racial hygiene and extermination of "lesser races". This is not eugenics but "scientific racism" where people do not have the goal of improving humans, but of making the humanity "more like us".
Humans in Africa require dark skin if they are to be protected from the higher incidence of UV radiation which would give lighter skinned human skin cancer (as seen in Australia). Humans in more polar regions requires lighter skins else they suffer from lack of vitamin D due to the blocking of UV radiation from their melanocytes, these has been reported in Africans living in places such as Sweden. Fairly basic evolutionary theory. Apart from skin colouration, there is as much genetic difference between 2 people of the same race than there is between 2 racial groups, so showing falsity of some humans being more evolved than others..
So, in conclusion, one race of human is no more evolved than another, and attempts to show that they are is just a misrepresentation of the facts to fit a political agenda.
As the definition of religion is that faith is prioritised over logic, while the gp's quote was ad hominem, it was not illogical of fallacious.
I believe that you are referring to "transitions between species" rather than migrations. This apparent belief in the lack of these species is a common misconception promoted by various creationist literatures such as "Pandas and People". The reality is that there are many transition species which have been known about for decades, with more being found all the time (the most recent is probably the fossil Tiktaalik which is of a fish with weight bearing legs like a land animal).
One of the most well known series of transition species is the ones associated with land based mammals becoming whales. This group goes as follows artiodachtyl (very hippo like land based mammals) --> pachycetis --> ambulocetis --> protocetids --> modern whales. Look them up on the web and tell me what you think
This, frankly is rubbish. While you can take the Platonic theory and say nothing can be proven apart from straight lines and circles, scientific proof in the real world is that which can be proven to a statistical significance. This is no mean feat and is certainly no cop out (I spent 7 years in academia so trust me, I know). A scientific theory such as evolution can only been seen as valid (proven to be true) when there is overwhelming evidence in support and no evidence against. A single point of evidence against would destroy the whole theory. This is one of the strengths of science in that the smallest piece of evidence can challenge a theory and refute it. After several hundred years, this hasn't happened with evolution, unlike previous attempted explanations such as Lamarckism.
You write as an intelligent person (which for Slashdot is a rarity in itself!). I would ask that you take that intelligence and focus on the facts and see what they suggest to you, rather than focus on the cultural values you grew up with and waste your time fruitlessly trying to make the facts fit.
Yes and No.
It's less "me too" and more "tried and tested", hence the use of programming languages such as Cobol and RPG when people may have expected them to be replaced. Not having experts isn't an issue either, if they need them, they just hire them, there's normally enough money at stake to make this a non-issue.
Long-term views is a definite yes. You have to ask questions like: "will this product still be supported in the next 5-10 years" ,"will it be actively developed and patched", "will this product cause me trouble". The last one is always a good one as it covers everything from bugs and exploits to legal issues. I'm in banking and everyting runs through this sort of questioning before acceptance.
Shrieking hyperbole aside - no they're not, the best ones (and the ones you should be using unless you've bought all the marketing BS) aren't. Assuming for one minute that you aren't a hobbyist or a schoolchild but have a coding job which depends on your reputation (difficult as you've taken the brave stance of beiing an AC) you would know that this titbit of news has left a lot of people high and dry. They have apps on production servers not knowing whether this would compromise just their RoR app or the entire server.
As to handling it well, no I don't think so. A simple diff will show what the issue is and I'm betting that plenty of people have already done that (especially judging by some of the recent posts), so not telling people what it is just adds to the uncertainty.
You're right about MS. That is why people don't use MS as an internet platform if they can help it. Look it *nix versus MS Server and Apache versus IIS. MS products are easy to use but I wouldn't be to happy for them to be used for my apps as they aren't secure or stable enough, common requirements for enterprise products.
There are plenty of pros and cons for Rails and personally I like it more than I dislike it, but the reality is it isn't mature and it isn't enterprise ready.
I agree that every framework or application has had a critical security update or two at some time. The point of my original post was that the established ones have had theirs at some time in the past. A good example would be the Tomcat ones you mentioned, version 3.1 was in 2001.
I pretty much knew that I was going to get flamed for the comment (your comment a fairly honourable exception) but speaking as a senior developer in a bank, I wouldn't touch RoR with a barge pole at the moment. Not because it isn't a good product but because there is so much unknown about it that I wouldn't risk my reputation on it. If you RTFA, quite a few people are left high and dry about to go to production with a possibly compromised application. I think that too many people see a critique of a product as a criticism then come off like a bunch of shrieking fanbois.
Jeez, listen to me...expecting rational thought on /. I must be getting old!
This is an example of why many major industries stay away from the "bleeding-edge" of tech products.
Only when something has been in the market long enough for people to find the holes, either by internal testing or by discovery of in-the-wild exploits can it be considered for the "higher" end of the market. It's unfortunate that it has happened to Rails, which is a great framework but it's another reason to staty with the more established web frameworks such as JSP/Struts.
Sorry, but I read this as "Choice is confusing - stick with what you are comfortable with. Hey look, that's us!"
This sort of gibberish is what you would expect from the most popular product in the market who are being challenged for the first time in a while.
Must....throw....all....toys...out....of........ pram!
If that is a legitimate message and his account hasn't been hacked then that is a top quality hissy fit! This is one of those things that will haunt him in the future as something that was posted in anger
Cosmology isn't my field but the data here is incredibly vague. I'm not sure this deserves more than a raised eyebrow and an "Okay...now come up with something a little less tenuous". Interpretation of data is an art in itself and can be wildly skewed by the observer's own opinions - show mw that this hasn't happened here.