When I got an eMac a year ago, I grabbed a cheap Kensington USB wireless mouse so I could right-click and use a scroll-wheel as I'm accustomed. It was a regular-sized mouse, not a teeny laptop version, but I was still impressed that the mouse itself had a compartment for storing the USB wireless dongle. That made it a much easier object to pack in a suitcase, without cables and without having to find the loose dongle buried in the luggage. Comfortable for such an inexpensive mouse, too.
I'm just not happy with the bluetooth devices I've used. They seem to be much more problematic with lost connections. USB wireless is just fine for the usual small devices around the desktop.
Simple question. What's the list of modern cards that can accelerate 3d without a binary vendor driver on Linux? Something you can load on a typical Ubuntu or Fedora without finding JoeNoName's-Bleeding-Repository?
Follow-up: can Red Hat or Novell or somebody please offer a certification logo program for some of these cards? You know, a sticker that you can find on the boxes in CompUSA or something, which says that it's not going to be a stink to get running on Linux?
I wish that third parties, such as "friends of the court" (those who filed amicus curae briefs in the case) could (1) gain access to the sealed settlement, and/or (2) request that any such settlement be blocked. There are a lot of stakeholders interested in having cases like this decided in a court of law, and whenever a sealed settlement happens, it just means that cases just like it will go to court again and again and again and again... Settle it, and let the whole corporate world know the law of the land.
I mis-read the blurb as "So they are more likely to be dissuaded from pursuing computer science if they are exposed to an unpleasant environment, bad touching, and negative stereotypes like the image of the male hacker."
Story available still on the front page of Slashdot as well.
Some days I would like to see the "editors" of this site strapped down Clockwork-Orange-style, forced to read their own stories before accepting new versions of the same old stuff.
Okay, we'll hide this 200,000 square foot top-secret military jet aircraft assembly facility in the secretary's desk drawer at night, just so the janitors can't snap a pic on their Verizon cellphone. Thanks, you just saved us a TON of money!
I never said you could recreate Windows from scratch. I'm saying if you started from scratch with today's design priorities, you would end up with something with an entirely different design. A non-Windows. It still won't last forever, but it won't have the issues of yesterday's Windows.
You can only patch a leaking boat so much, even if you drydock the vessel for a few months. When it's only held together by the barnacles and the masthead, it's going to sink whether you bail it out or not. At some point, you're going to have to re-think the design of that hull, and start from scratch.
The GPL is a license to ensure that your code and other code built using it remains open and usable by others who agree with your sharing philosophy. It is for those control freaks who don't share with people of other philosophies.
This is why I don't assign GPL. If I publish my source code and someone wants to take their own copy of that code private and sell it as a value-added alternative, they don't "steal" anything from me. They don't make my copy unavailable. They don't make anyone else's copy unavailable. I say, light your taper at mine, friend. I don't see why user's rights should trump developer's rights. They're both to be honored.
I don't see why user's rights should trump the developer's rights. BSD license, Perl Artistic license, or at the very most, LGPL to isolate the annoying share-but-only-if nonsense.
This is where content producers shift eyeballs to advertisers. And the way how they get paid to produce content too.
You think of this the wrong way around: content producers get paid to deliver commercials; they produce content designed to achieve this goal. They're not artists who need to find some way to make a living from their creativity, they're packaging engineers who find the cheapest but most appealing superficial wrapper around the real payload of advertisements.
One, I have a rule I teach to any programmer under my supervision: strategy in comments, tactics in code. Tactics are what you do to get something done. Strategy explains what you want done. In warfare, an officer focuses on strategy: "secure that hill!" "pick the best two devices!" "find the local minimum!" Don't mention the tools you use to get that job done, soldier, unless there's a good reason for being fiendishly clever. Comments should be in natural human language, while the code should just accomplish those tasks.
Two, I have a technique I teach to any new programmer, whether they're under my supervision or not: write the comments first. Programming courses always talk about writing pseudocode: why write it on scratch paper, just to throw it away?
sub process_ring_packet { # if we have a prior server registered, .# if this packet was received from the prior, ..# if this server created this packet originally, ...# kill the packet, it's completed the trip. # scan the packet for all object references. # dispatch packet to object mentioned which we control. # if any object references remain unhandled, .# if we have a next server registered, ..# send the packet to the next server. }
(Here's another concrete example of why the compression-as-lameness-indicator is not helpful. Think of the dots as indentation.)
Once the pseudocode is written in human terms, then fill in your actual code in whatever computer language is being employed. Note that I didn't say HOW to do each of the tasks in the comments. I just wrote what needed to get done.
Lastly, as others have indicated, the actual code should not be too clever for your teammates to understand at a glance. Use clear concise words for variable names, without abbreviating them unnecessarily. Use the idioms they're familiar with. Use the language they're familiar with. You shouldn't need any # swap $x and $y comments to explain basic tasks or idioms. If you really find a clever but unusual trick, or you need to hack out something that's not obvious, then you can mention it.
I have taught my editors to highlight tags like #REVIEW: #TODO: #BUGBUG: #HACK: so I can see areas that need more attention. Review things which may or may not be right or done in the best way. List things that are definitely undone but needed. Mark areas where known bugs are located, even if the fix isn't in there yet; give bug tracking numbers if appropriate. Mark code which is overly clever to get around dumb library limitations or which save a lot of processing in obscure ways.
I think the term "open source" was used in the journalism and intelligence fields long before it was used in relation to software. Beyond that, I agree that they use the term because there is a Boston area (MIT, Harvard) geek-cred tie in.
Do I care? Of course not - It's for a good cause! It improves security
I've heard way too much of this attitude. The USA founders defended personal liberty, but the average USA sheeple just assumes that if someone tells them "it's for a good cause: security," they feel all warm inside and let everyone get herded. Stand up for your rights, tell your congressfolk that the government doesn't need more powers, or just fuck off, please.
There's a long way to go from a proposal from the attorney-general to the signing of a law.
Unless it's USAPATRIOT. The AG's photocopy toner hadn't even had time to cool before it was through Congress and smeared onto the grinning President's hands.
Come on, can't we see through this Cathedral-driven charade? There's no rational thought behind Intelligent Drivers. It's all just a dogmatic rehash of the same old Closed Source thinking forced upon our Open Source kernel laboratories! I say, send these Intelligent Drivers ideologues back to Kansas where they came from!
Hope claims that while it is illegal for countries to stake a claim on the moon, it is legal for individuals and corporations to.
In the USA (ideal schoolboy optimism here), the government's powers are enumerated and the people retain the rest as their rights. That's "blacklist law" for you digit-heads: if it's on this list, you can't do it.
In many other regimes, the individual's rights are enumerated (or never even written), and the government retains the rest as their powers. That's "whitelist law" for analogy: if it's on this list, you can do it. Guess where the China government weighs in?
Meanwhile, most of our crime rates are lower than those in Europe, and their violent crimes are rising while ours are lowering.
A country which is getting to be more of a Police State all the time, and with a growing percentage of its population in prison under long mandatory sentences for relatively minor offenses. A few grams of the wrong molecules found on you, and you can be locked up for many years without so much as the judge's discretion.
I loved everything about the first Black & White game, except the frickin' pet. If I wanted one of those Tamagotchi (egg pal) electronic pets, I'd buy it on a keychain. I want to be a 'god' to my 'creation,' not an obedience school to some baby mothra knockoff. I want my 'worshippers' to follow MY vengeance with fear and tribute, not cringe at the Second Coming of the Great Big Teddy Bear. Too bad this is Black & White & Pet II, not a real god game.
laser pointers can project bright points over very long distances because they have a very tight, coherent beam (i.e., it does not increase in diameter with distance)
Er, you mean they have a well-collimated beam (like a column, it does not increase in diameter with distance). A coherent laser beam means that all of the photons leave the laser at the same wave phase, which is a useful property for interferometry studies, but is not true of all types of lasers, and certainly not true for sunlight reflected off some bronze panel.
Personally, I think that governments (including the USA) should be more ready to stake logical claims for the betterment of their populations over the betterment of the "owners" of intellectual property. This includes copyright, trademark, patent, and trade secrets.
Now, the US Constitution guarantees reasonable compensation for seized property. This doesn't have to be cash. It can be some other equitable consideration.
For example, if Disney would surrender almost all of their old television cartoons and theatrical movies into the public domain (where they should have lapsed years ago), the US could reciprocate and give a *permanent* protection for a few of their most prized revenue source characters: Mickey Mouse and Disney's Ariel (the Little Mermaid). The population could make whatever artistic mashup they wanted from the footage, but they couldn't claim the Mouse as theirs or claim the Mouse speaks for them. If I understand, this is somewhat like the protection Britain has given Peter Pan: it's a special cultural treasure and is handled different from other properties.
Another example is for pharmaceuticals: break an effective AIDS drug patent, and we'll let you keep a certain lifestyle drug like Viagra for a longer period.
Unfortunately, Disney and Pfizer have bought enough Senators to choke the Panama Canal, and so the trade in all of their products will be protected nearly forever anyway, even without surrendering the cultural feedstock and the life-saving inventions to society as a whole.
This is the same issue I have with Apple: they design for the 75" Cinemaplex display, but at the low end they sell you machines with integrated low-resolution displays. There are re-skinning apps available, but they can't reduce the amazing amount of screen bloat, they can only put lipstick on the pig. I like Apple stuff, I just don't like their tendency toward low information density.
So slap a foolproof alarm device with language-agnostic hieroglyphics on there and you can finally tell the Beings of the Distant Future whether or not it is safe to enter the area around Yucca Mountain.
Slashdot Mirror
When I got an eMac a year ago, I grabbed a cheap Kensington USB wireless mouse so I could right-click and use a scroll-wheel as I'm accustomed. It was a regular-sized mouse, not a teeny laptop version, but I was still impressed that the mouse itself had a compartment for storing the USB wireless dongle. That made it a much easier object to pack in a suitcase, without cables and without having to find the loose dongle buried in the luggage. Comfortable for such an inexpensive mouse, too. I'm just not happy with the bluetooth devices I've used. They seem to be much more problematic with lost connections. USB wireless is just fine for the usual small devices around the desktop.
First, there was that whole thing where Britney broke her public oath of virginity.
Then, he helped Janet Jackson get funky with the famous "wardrobe malfunction."
Later, he was there when Cameron Diaz stole a paparazzi's camera, not a particularly classy reaction to the tabloid sleaze.
Now he's gonna help Bill's Urge to compete against Apple in a consumer space where the competitor already has a huge majority of the action.
Weird resume, this guy has.
Follow-up: can Red Hat or Novell or somebody please offer a certification logo program for some of these cards? You know, a sticker that you can find on the boxes in CompUSA or something, which says that it's not going to be a stink to get running on Linux?
I wish that third parties, such as "friends of the court" (those who filed amicus curae briefs in the case) could (1) gain access to the sealed settlement, and/or (2) request that any such settlement be blocked. There are a lot of stakeholders interested in having cases like this decided in a court of law, and whenever a sealed settlement happens, it just means that cases just like it will go to court again and again and again and again... Settle it, and let the whole corporate world know the law of the land.
I mis-read the blurb as "So they are more likely to be dissuaded from pursuing computer science if they are exposed to an unpleasant environment, bad touching, and negative stereotypes like the image of the male hacker."
Hm, Timmy seems to be at "Click here to name this zone." Hey, that's where Megan was yesterday. I wonder if they're seeing each other...
Some days I would like to see the "editors" of this site strapped down Clockwork-Orange-style, forced to read their own stories before accepting new versions of the same old stuff.
Okay, we'll hide this 200,000 square foot top-secret military jet aircraft assembly facility in the secretary's desk drawer at night, just so the janitors can't snap a pic on their Verizon cellphone. Thanks, you just saved us a TON of money!
I never said you could recreate Windows from scratch. I'm saying if you started from scratch with today's design priorities, you would end up with something with an entirely different design. A non-Windows. It still won't last forever, but it won't have the issues of yesterday's Windows.
You can only patch a leaking boat so much, even if you drydock the vessel for a few months. When it's only held together by the barnacles and the masthead, it's going to sink whether you bail it out or not. At some point, you're going to have to re-think the design of that hull, and start from scratch.
This is why I don't assign GPL. If I publish my source code and someone wants to take their own copy of that code private and sell it as a value-added alternative, they don't "steal" anything from me. They don't make my copy unavailable. They don't make anyone else's copy unavailable. I say, light your taper at mine, friend. I don't see why user's rights should trump developer's rights. They're both to be honored.
I don't see why user's rights should trump the developer's rights. BSD license, Perl Artistic license, or at the very most, LGPL to isolate the annoying share-but-only-if nonsense.
You think of this the wrong way around: content producers get paid to deliver commercials; they produce content designed to achieve this goal. They're not artists who need to find some way to make a living from their creativity, they're packaging engineers who find the cheapest but most appealing superficial wrapper around the real payload of advertisements.
Two, I have a technique I teach to any new programmer, whether they're under my supervision or not: write the comments first. Programming courses always talk about writing pseudocode: why write it on scratch paper, just to throw it away?
(Here's another concrete example of why the compression-as-lameness-indicator is not helpful. Think of the dots as indentation.) Once the pseudocode is written in human terms, then fill in your actual code in whatever computer language is being employed. Note that I didn't say HOW to do each of the tasks in the comments. I just wrote what needed to get done.Lastly, as others have indicated, the actual code should not be too clever for your teammates to understand at a glance. Use clear concise words for variable names, without abbreviating them unnecessarily. Use the idioms they're familiar with. Use the language they're familiar with. You shouldn't need any # swap $x and $y comments to explain basic tasks or idioms. If you really find a clever but unusual trick, or you need to hack out something that's not obvious, then you can mention it.
I have taught my editors to highlight tags like #REVIEW: #TODO: #BUGBUG: #HACK: so I can see areas that need more attention. Review things which may or may not be right or done in the best way. List things that are definitely undone but needed. Mark areas where known bugs are located, even if the fix isn't in there yet; give bug tracking numbers if appropriate. Mark code which is overly clever to get around dumb library limitations or which save a lot of processing in obscure ways.
I think the term "open source" was used in the journalism and intelligence fields long before it was used in relation to software. Beyond that, I agree that they use the term because there is a Boston area (MIT, Harvard) geek-cred tie in.
I've heard way too much of this attitude. The USA founders defended personal liberty, but the average USA sheeple just assumes that if someone tells them "it's for a good cause: security," they feel all warm inside and let everyone get herded. Stand up for your rights, tell your congressfolk that the government doesn't need more powers, or just fuck off, please.
Unless it's USAPATRIOT. The AG's photocopy toner hadn't even had time to cool before it was through Congress and smeared onto the grinning President's hands.
Come on, can't we see through this Cathedral-driven charade? There's no rational thought behind Intelligent Drivers. It's all just a dogmatic rehash of the same old Closed Source thinking forced upon our Open Source kernel laboratories! I say, send these Intelligent Drivers ideologues back to Kansas where they came from!
In the USA (ideal schoolboy optimism here), the government's powers are enumerated and the people retain the rest as their rights. That's "blacklist law" for you digit-heads: if it's on this list, you can't do it.
In many other regimes, the individual's rights are enumerated (or never even written), and the government retains the rest as their powers. That's "whitelist law" for analogy: if it's on this list, you can do it. Guess where the China government weighs in?
That would be "damages under intergalactic trademark law," you dolt!
A country which is getting to be more of a Police State all the time, and with a growing percentage of its population in prison under long mandatory sentences for relatively minor offenses. A few grams of the wrong molecules found on you, and you can be locked up for many years without so much as the judge's discretion.
I loved everything about the first Black & White game, except the frickin' pet. If I wanted one of those Tamagotchi (egg pal) electronic pets, I'd buy it on a keychain. I want to be a 'god' to my 'creation,' not an obedience school to some baby mothra knockoff. I want my 'worshippers' to follow MY vengeance with fear and tribute, not cringe at the Second Coming of the Great Big Teddy Bear. Too bad this is Black & White & Pet II, not a real god game.
laser pointers can project bright points over very long distances because they have a very tight, coherent beam (i.e., it does not increase in diameter with distance) Er, you mean they have a well-collimated beam (like a column, it does not increase in diameter with distance). A coherent laser beam means that all of the photons leave the laser at the same wave phase, which is a useful property for interferometry studies, but is not true of all types of lasers, and certainly not true for sunlight reflected off some bronze panel.
Now, the US Constitution guarantees reasonable compensation for seized property. This doesn't have to be cash. It can be some other equitable consideration.
For example, if Disney would surrender almost all of their old television cartoons and theatrical movies into the public domain (where they should have lapsed years ago), the US could reciprocate and give a *permanent* protection for a few of their most prized revenue source characters: Mickey Mouse and Disney's Ariel (the Little Mermaid). The population could make whatever artistic mashup they wanted from the footage, but they couldn't claim the Mouse as theirs or claim the Mouse speaks for them. If I understand, this is somewhat like the protection Britain has given Peter Pan: it's a special cultural treasure and is handled different from other properties.
Another example is for pharmaceuticals: break an effective AIDS drug patent, and we'll let you keep a certain lifestyle drug like Viagra for a longer period.
Unfortunately, Disney and Pfizer have bought enough Senators to choke the Panama Canal, and so the trade in all of their products will be protected nearly forever anyway, even without surrendering the cultural feedstock and the life-saving inventions to society as a whole.
This is the same issue I have with Apple: they design for the 75" Cinemaplex display, but at the low end they sell you machines with integrated low-resolution displays. There are re-skinning apps available, but they can't reduce the amazing amount of screen bloat, they can only put lipstick on the pig. I like Apple stuff, I just don't like their tendency toward low information density.
So slap a foolproof alarm device with language-agnostic hieroglyphics on there and you can finally tell the Beings of the Distant Future whether or not it is safe to enter the area around Yucca Mountain.