Actually, philosophy, law, or math majors seem to care much more about this sort of thing than English majors do.:)
The problem is that, even though "Red Hat" and "Linux" are not mutually equivalent, RH *is* a subset of L. The conventional meaning of the phrase "A is not B", where B is a set, is either "not (A in B)" (if A is atomic) or "not (A subset-of B)" (if A is itself a set)*. The more precise English statement "A does not equal B" or "A is not the same as B" translates readily to the unambiguous logical "not (A eqv B)". This is a subtle distinction frequently lost on Slashdotters who like to say things like "Foo != Bar" in their subject lines.
*Yes, I know that several schools of axiomatic set theory hold that anything that's not too large is a set, and therefore deny that there should be a difference between those two statements. Whatever.
that truly excellent Joey Skaggs prank from the OJ Simpson trial, where he masqueraded as a Columbia Law professor and demoed (for several major TV networks) his own verdict-rendering program. Of course, it had the obligatory flashing red "GUILTY" displayed over the defendant's face. It was awesome.
Funny, when I hear "Tom Christiansen" I think "hyperintelligent but self-righteous and totally insufferable zealot". But that's probably because I spend way too much time on perl5-porters.
What we need now is a device that can emulate the pressing of a useless keyboard character -- one that won't affect program operation, but can fill up the logfiles with a few hundred of these chars every second.
Randomly-placed doors on crudely-built structure to avoid interpretation as a useful or valued building.
Ah! Now I get it! Those "crude-looking" buildings we periodically unearth from past millennia are actually the product of civilizations so incredibly advanced that they knew exactly what we'd be looking for and sent us a carefully coded message!
Thank you for pointing this out--not enough people are aware of it.
What most folks don't seem to realize is that no new legislation or technology is required for a cell phone provider to get a fix on your location: *they already have this ability*. All they need to do is triangulate based on the relative signal strength received from two or more nearby towers.
This happens all the time in "emergency" situations; the only reason it's not (yet) a big deal is because the technology is being used to rescue people in danger, rather than, say, to track down and silence thought-criminals.
...is if it turned out they were transmitting both halves of the MIN/ESN pair, and thereby providing instant cloneability for anyone with access to the server logs.
OTOH, I'm sure that will happen at some point soon anyway.
Perl4 *was* a scripting language; perl5 is what you make of it. I choose to use it as a rapid development language with object orientation, efficient string handling, native interfaces to scores of useful system calls, process management and signal handling. In other words, just about everything I used to use C for in the application realm.
Is C still useful? Extremely. There are certain things it does do better. But don't sell perl short just because it's interpreted--any reasonable environment in which people use perl in real life--e.g., mod_perl--incurs the interpreter spin-up penalty very infrequently (ideally no more than once), and the language itself is extremely fast. Don't take my word for it; try benchmarking a set of programs that do the same complex regex match/subst in C and in perl. Guess who wins. Also, try writing a hashtable implementation in C (with arbitrary key data) that's anywhere close to as fast as perl associative arrays. Good luck.
Actually, according to someone I know who was an intellectual property lawyer, numbers, while not registerable as trademarks in themselves, are sufficient to cause conflict between one company's trademark and another's in the same area of business. E.g., if I have a car called the "Bob 9-3", Saab may be able to claim (at least in the US) that it infringes on the registered trademark "Saab 9-3". In fact[IANAL&TIAUA (I am not a lawyer, and this is an unverified anecdote.)]:
It seems that when IBM changed the name of the System/3 family to AS/400, they had to pay an undisclosed sum to the current sole holder of a registered trademark consisting of a sequence of letters followed by the digits 400, used to refer to automatic data processing equipment. Care to guess what "automatic data processing equipment" they were talking about?
That depends on how paranoid you are. For years people believed "Armistead Maupin" was a pseudonym, merely because it's an anagram of the phrase "is a man I dreamt up".
Yes, but if you use Junkbuster (which everybody should IMO) the advertisers don't get the verifiable eyeballs because the banners don't get hit. This is a Good Thing. Essentially the only thing you're doing is loading Amazon's servers. Yay!!!
No mention of collaborative cartooning would be complete without Slow Wave, a truly awesome comic strip drawn by the inimitable Jesse Reklaw. Every week features his rendition of someone's dream that they've sent him. Neat.
Regardless, it really ins't [sic] microsoft's job to ensure compatability [sic] with anyone but themselves.
That sentence lends itself to another reading, which is that it's in MS's interest not to interoperate with anyone else's stuff, except at a minimal level insofar as you need to (say) speak TCP/IP. This is the same sort of thinking that helped IBM sew up 90+% of the mainframe market well into the 70's, and earned them (a) widespread enmity from customers and competitors, (b) a federal antitrust investigation, and (c) carte blanche to unilaterally carry the state of the art in whatever direction they wished. There's a gray area between intentional incompatibility and actual anticompetitive behavior when you have the market share IBM did then (or Microsoft does now).
If they really care about increasing the utility of technology in the larger sense, which I'd argue they must if they know what's good for them long-term, they should participate reasonably in standards definition processes. I know that a lot of what you decry as "interorganizational posturing" involves companies being inflexible on just these sorts of issues, and that Microsoft is as bad an offender as any--when they deign to participate at all.
Anecdote: My friend was the Lucent delegate to an IETF Working Group. For three consecutive meetings no work at all was completed, because every time the Microsoft rep opened his mouth it was to say "I move that the entire text of the proposed section be stricken and replaced with: 'Bla bla bla....'." That is not what I would call playing well with others.
I am not a blindly Microsoft-hating zealot. I do take exception to many of their business practices.
Slashdot Mirror
Um. Actually, Snoop was on more than half of the tracks on The Chronic. Sorry.
Actually, philosophy, law, or math majors seem to care much more about this sort of thing than English majors do. :)
The problem is that, even though "Red Hat" and "Linux" are not mutually equivalent, RH *is* a subset of L. The conventional meaning of the phrase "A is not B", where B is a set, is either "not (A in B)" (if A is atomic) or "not (A subset-of B)" (if A is itself a set)*. The more precise English statement "A does not equal B" or "A is not the same as B" translates readily to the unambiguous logical "not (A eqv B)". This is a subtle distinction frequently lost on Slashdotters who like to say things like "Foo != Bar" in their subject lines.
*Yes, I know that several schools of axiomatic set theory hold that anything that's not too large is a set, and therefore deny that there should be a difference between those two statements. Whatever.
that truly excellent Joey Skaggs prank from the OJ Simpson trial, where he masqueraded as a Columbia Law professor and demoed (for several major TV networks) his own verdict-rendering program. Of course, it had the obligatory flashing red "GUILTY" displayed over the defendant's face. It was awesome.
Funny, when I hear "Tom Christiansen" I think "hyperintelligent but self-righteous and totally insufferable zealot". But that's probably because I spend way too much time on perl5-porters.
A more constructive solution: Why not donate the profits from sale of the book to the Columbine families?
...coprophagic colorectal nanosites! Woohoo! Bet there won't be a lot of people lining up to beta-test that one.
What we need now is a device that can emulate the pressing of a useless keyboard character -- one that won't affect program operation, but can fill up the logfiles with a few hundred of these chars every second.
I have one of these. It's called a cat.
Thanks a lot, dork. I really needed to have somebody tell me that when I haven't finished the damn book.
CT: We need a (-1, Spoiler).
So what we really need is some organization like RTMARK or the now-defunct McDonalds.Org to snap up a few tasty domains (and subdomains) such as:
- everyone-hates.co.ke
- there-are-toxic.chemicals-in.co.ke
- q-what-causes-brain.tumors-a.co.ke
- co.ke.co.ke
- snort.co.ke
- another-word-for.burnt-coal.residue-is.co.ke
I like it already.Randomly-placed doors on crudely-built structure to avoid interpretation as a useful or valued building.
Ah! Now I get it! Those "crude-looking" buildings we periodically unearth from past millennia are actually the product of civilizations so incredibly advanced that they knew exactly what we'd be looking for and sent us a carefully coded message!
And I thought they were mere huts.
Thank you for pointing this out--not enough people are aware of it.
What most folks don't seem to realize is that no new legislation or technology is required for a cell phone provider to get a fix on your location: *they already have this ability*. All they need to do is triangulate based on the relative signal strength received from two or more nearby towers.
This happens all the time in "emergency" situations; the only reason it's not (yet) a big deal is because the technology is being used to rescue people in danger, rather than, say, to track down and silence thought-criminals.
So far as you know.
...is if it turned out they were transmitting both halves of the MIN/ESN pair, and thereby providing instant cloneability for anyone with access to the server logs.
OTOH, I'm sure that will happen at some point soon anyway.
My personal favorite (from a Bjarne Stroustrup interview years and years ago):
"There are two kinds of languages: the kind everybody bitches about, and the kind nobody uses."
You are under-informed.
Perl4 *was* a scripting language; perl5 is what you make of it. I choose to use it as a rapid development language with object orientation, efficient string handling, native interfaces to scores of useful system calls, process management and signal handling. In other words, just about everything I used to use C for in the application realm.
Is C still useful? Extremely. There are certain things it does do better. But don't sell perl short just because it's interpreted--any reasonable environment in which people use perl in real life--e.g., mod_perl--incurs the interpreter spin-up penalty very infrequently (ideally no more than once), and the language itself is extremely fast. Don't take my word for it; try benchmarking a set of programs that do the same complex regex match/subst in C and in perl. Guess who wins. Also, try writing a hashtable implementation in C (with arbitrary key data) that's anywhere close to as fast as perl associative arrays. Good luck.
Actually, according to someone I know who was an intellectual property lawyer, numbers, while not registerable as trademarks in themselves, are sufficient to cause conflict between one company's trademark and another's in the same area of business. E.g., if I have a car called the "Bob 9-3", Saab may be able to claim (at least in the US) that it infringes on the registered trademark "Saab 9-3". In fact[IANAL&TIAUA (I am not a lawyer, and this is an unverified anecdote.)]:
It seems that when IBM changed the name of the System/3 family to AS/400, they had to pay an undisclosed sum to the current sole holder of a registered trademark consisting of a sequence of letters followed by the digits 400, used to refer to automatic data processing equipment. Care to guess what "automatic data processing equipment" they were talking about?
The Atari 400.
How's that for funny?
That depends on how paranoid you are. For years people believed "Armistead Maupin" was a pseudonym, merely because it's an anagram of the phrase "is a man I dreamt up".
Yes, but if you use Junkbuster (which everybody should IMO) the advertisers don't get the verifiable eyeballs because the banners don't get hit. This is a Good Thing. Essentially the only thing you're doing is loading Amazon's servers. Yay!!!
Well hgalhagahlghgalhgghlaghahgh, I'll be dipped. It certainly is down, isn't it? Here's a mirror.
Theodore Sturgeon.
dude, that was awesome. you made my day. long live pants!!
No mention of collaborative cartooning would be complete without Slow Wave, a truly awesome comic strip drawn by the inimitable Jesse Reklaw. Every week features his rendition of someone's dream that they've sent him. Neat.
Regardless, it really ins't [sic] microsoft's job to ensure compatability [sic] with anyone but themselves.
That sentence lends itself to another reading, which is that it's in MS's interest not to interoperate with anyone else's stuff, except at a minimal level insofar as you need to (say) speak TCP/IP. This is the same sort of thinking that helped IBM sew up 90+% of the mainframe market well into the 70's, and earned them (a) widespread enmity from customers and competitors, (b) a federal antitrust investigation, and (c) carte blanche to unilaterally carry the state of the art in whatever direction they wished. There's a gray area between intentional incompatibility and actual anticompetitive behavior when you have the market share IBM did then (or Microsoft does now).
If they really care about increasing the utility of technology in the larger sense, which I'd argue they must if they know what's good for them long-term, they should participate reasonably in standards definition processes. I know that a lot of what you decry as "interorganizational posturing" involves companies being inflexible on just these sorts of issues, and that Microsoft is as bad an offender as any--when they deign to participate at all.
Anecdote: My friend was the Lucent delegate to an IETF Working Group. For three consecutive meetings no work at all was completed, because every time the Microsoft rep opened his mouth it was to say "I move that the entire text of the proposed section be stricken and replaced with: 'Bla bla bla....'." That is not what I would call playing well with others.
I am not a blindly Microsoft-hating zealot. I do take exception to many of their business practices.
....and wazzzzzuuuuuup.com is probably already 0wn3D by Anheuser-Busch.
Has anyone thought about calling this thing a biode?