Actually, there were a number of workable steam engine designs using more volatile fluids than water back in the 30's and 40's that purportedly had something approaching 40% efficiency. They were, however, much larger than an equivalent machine running on fossil fuels, and the postwar boom in oil production made them economically unattractive by comparison.
There are many, many workable alternative energy sources, but all of them are more expensive than oil -- at least in simple short term cash expenses. In the long-term view, oil is vastly more expensive than the alternatives, but the business world plans by the quarter, not by the century.
How the heck did this end up being +5 Insightful? Ah, perhaps it is because Slashdot lacks a -1 White Hood option.
How silly of me to forget that the ultimate goal of "diversity" is global uniformity--and monotony.
The idea that the invention of androids has been driven by xenophobia and racism, so the Japanese don't have to live with what they consider to be inferior races or to give them living wages, is disgusting.
We are supposed to celebrate the right kind of diversity--the kind where each country becomes so diverse in population, its culture so diluted by immigration, that all countries are eventually the same.
Oh, please. This is the same kind of pathological crap that comes from every racist. Racists lack the self-esteem to stand up as individuals, so they identify themselves with the collective culture in which they are embedded to dissociate themselves from their insecurity and self-loathing. When insiders come in and threaten to change the dynamic, they view it as a threat to the identity they adopted -- because they lack any identity of their own.
Individual creativity grows in direct proportion to the extent culture fades away as a social force. Hardly any of us could be doing what we are doing now, pursuing individual dreams, if our historical cultures had not been largely obliterated by successive waves of immigration. Each new arrival further weakens the hold that brainless tradition holds over each of us.
Fuck culture, nationality, race, and every other cowardly mob refuge for failed individuals. They're all imaginary constructs. People are real. People who can't get jobs because the xenophobes in Tokyo close the borders and replace them with robots suffer real hunger and privation. Cultures don't suffer, feel pain, go hungry, or do anything at all -- except exist in the imaginations of individual people.
My question: doesn't the uniqueness of Japanese culture add to the diversity of the world?
A culture that separates itself from the rest of humanity to engage in narcissistic self-admiration isn't contributing to the world.
You throw the toad straight into the pot of boiling water and it will jump straight out, but put it in a pot of cold water and slowly increase the heat, and the toad will be boiled to death.
This is off-topic nitpicking, but real toads will jump out of the pot as soon as they get too warm. This is pretty much true of all amphibians and reptiles. Lacking the ability to thermoregulate internally, cold-blooded animals instinctually move toward and away from heat sources as necessary. When, for example, a lizard is too cold, it will move into the sun to bask. When it starts to get too warm, it will move back into the shadows.
It's warm-blooded animals that are susceptible to this trick because they lack the necessary instincts. If you want to cook a human for example, you put him into a hot tub and slowly crank up the temperature. Long before you reach the boiling point or even any discomfort, he will pass from heat exhaustion to hyperthermia, and finally into unconsciousness, seizures, and organ failure. Read the warnings in a hot tub owner's manual sometime, or ask your friendly neighborhood paramedic how often failure to RTFM requires them to fish dead guys out of their hot tubs.
So really, all this "how to boil a frog" nonsense really out to be "how to boil an end user".;)
All of these discussions on novel means of energy production are well and good -- hydrogen, wind, solar, and several other approaches are quite promising. What seems invariably to be forgotten is that entropy, chiefly in the form of waste heat, is a limiting factor.
The executive summary version of this fact is that if the entire population of the earth were consuming energy at the same rate as Americans, the atmosphere would be incandescent with waste heat.
The obvious consequence of this -- and something which rarely receives any exposure on Slashdot unless it involves white LEDs -- is that producing more energy is not a viable long term goal; only conserving energy is. Even were this not the case, the current growth rates for energy consumption would lead to the exhaustion of even uranium for fission in a relatively small number of generations.
Arguably, the worst thing that could happent to the human race would be the practical availability of an effectively unlimited source of power like fusion. If fusion power proved to be anywhere near as cheap as its proponents claim it would be, all economic incentive to reduce consumption (and therefore waste heat production) would be eliminated. While it would be theoretically possible to offset some of this by moving production offplanet, the economic barriers would be steep. Considering the reluctance of our species to deal with the current manmade environmental effects of industry, there is little reason to be optimistic.
Alternative energy proponents all too often sound as if they were discussing perpetual motion machines. It is not possible to escape the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Some machines are more efficient than others, to be sure, but there is a theoretical limit and it is not a generous one. Beyond that limit, which is seldom even approached, all you can do is shuffle the wastage around; you cannot eliminate it.
This is not something anyone likes to hear, and I suspect that is why it is so universally overlooked. There is a utopian vision shared by technologists and science fiction devotees (and I count myself in both camps) in which technology will someday give us everything we want. Unfortunately, "everything we want" violates the laws of thermodynamics, and those laws appear unlikely to be repealed.
Apache 2 and a recent Linux kernel come pretty close to the theoretical limits of the hardware when it comes to serving static content. It just loafs along while saturating whatever net connection you give it. It's worth trying out.
For serving static content, thttpd absolutely blows both versions of Apache away, so I'm not sure what theoretical limit you're talking about, but perhaps that theory needs some revision.
Don't get me wrong; I think Apache is great, and I've used both 1.x and 2.x successfully with PHP, but if all you're doing is serving static content, Apache is absolutely the wrong tool for the job.
It'd just be an ego-trip and flag-waving exhibition. Sure, some projects are just that, and some developers are only concerned with themselves. Such projects and such people rarely last, either in open or closed-source environments.
There's a lot of scary things here, but to me what is most scary is that American copyright owners can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding.
Did you miss out on the CIA campaigns of assassination in the 1960's and 1970's? If the US government can mobilize foreign coups d'etat to snuff the democratically-elected leftist leaders of nascent democracies, then taking down a bunch of pimply-faced warez monkeys is neither surprising nor newsworthy.
I've run across enough blatent inacurracies over the last year or so, however, that I can't look at it as anything but a basic starting place for research now.
This is pretty much true for any encyclopedia if you're writing for anything other than a high school class.
The ability to site sources or research or present an authoratative case is...
...greatly bolstered by knowing the difference between "site" and "cite", and being able to spell "authoritative" correctly.
There could be a reason for this...
on
3D User Interfaces
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
3D interfaces have never caught on for a couple of reasons. First and foremost is that the majority of end-user applications, from web browsers to word processors to spreadsheets are simply digital reimplementations of paper documents. The second reason is that there is no hardware that provides three-dimensional imagery that isn't either hideously expensive, causes headaches, or uncomfortable and awkward. What we casually refer to as 3D games, for example, are really projections of 3D structures onto a two-dimensional screen.
Until it is possible to inexpensively provide a convincing illusion of depth -- which is arguably barely possible even with the expensive stuff -- 3D interfaces will require the user to perform 3D actions with a 2D representation. This is a needless complication in most cases.
When I allow my children to drive, it will because they've demonstrated to me that they are mature enough to handle the responsibilty of driving a car.
That's the approach my parents took. And of course, I promptly took their car out and saw how fast it could go. You wouldn't know it from looking at late 80's Ford Tauruses, but they can go a bit over 120 mph. And at 3am on a Sunday morning, you can maintain that speed all the way around the I-440 loop that surrounds Nashville, except for the offramp to I-40 West, where you must slow to 85 mph in order to avoid sliding into the barrier at the edge of the right lane.
It would have really pissed me off if my parents had a way of telling what I was doing with their car when I was out at night. I would certainly have had my driving privileges revoked, and all the effort I had invested in shoveling maturity and responsibility with both hands would have been completely wasted.
So I will definitely want this service in a few years when my daughter is old enough to drive. And if it happens that I have some kind of brainfart and allow her to keep driving at high speeds after catching her at it one time, I don't think it's at all unreasonable for the insurance company to charge me higher premiums because it means I'm dangerously stupid and completely disregard not only my own child's safety, but the general public's as well.
Mind you, I am very much alive to the privacy dangers of involuntary use of GPS tracking for adults. I don't see any such risk here. It sounds like a great way to be able to intervene before something truly awful happens to my kid.
Having a degree from a big-name school will help you in two cases: getting your first job, and if an employer ever has to choose between you and an equally-qualified and equally-likeable applicant with a degree from a less-prestigious school. The first hurdle is one you only have to go over once and which you will get over one way or another, and the second is not terribly likely to happen.
I don't have a degree, and I'm the most senior and highly paid developer at my company. I won't tell you that not having a degree hasn't hurt me -- it has, mostly by making it much harder for me to get that first "real" job, and obviously, there are some companies that won't consider me. But I also do a lot of the hiring around here, and I can tell you that I don't pay too much attention to where new hires got their degree; I pay a lot of attention to prior work experience, code samples, references, and demeanor during interviews. I've worked with some people with degrees from prestigious schools who were terrible programmers and horrible coworkers, and I've worked with great programmers who were fabulous to get along with who had two-year degrees from local community colleges.
If I were you, I'd stay put. Of course, if your dad is going to foot the bill for a fancy school, you might consider it. Otherwise, the massive burden of student loans for that sort of thing might be a lot more trouble than it's worth.
The article is really an amazingly nasty, vicious rant, even if his basic points are sound. Unfortunately, the author misses the whole point of Wikipedia -- instead of writing a sloppy wet kiss to academic snobbery, maybe he should have just fixed the errors in the article.
I've been gleefully using the word counts in MS Word since the early 90's. There are actually two places you can get at them, and they're both readily accessible.
Speaking of the early 90's, this reminds me of a conversation I had on a TeX mailing list around 1994. I was thrilled with the idea behind TeX and struggling with the implementation. In the course of getting some answers about the surprisingly difficult process of setting up columns of varying widths, I overheard a conversation in which some TeX zealot was meandering on about all the things Word couldn't do. The problem was that all of the things he was talking about were things Word could do. He simply never got familiar enough with the application to actually use it well.
Word has its problems, it is true. It has a number of bugs that may or may not be a problem, depending on which features you use. Recent versions have become lumbering resource hogs without adding much new functionality. It lacks some expert layout features that would enable it to fully close the gap with real document layout software, though it's good enough 90% of the time. It's owned by Microsoft. It is, however, probably the most comprehensive and full-featured word processor out there. OpenOffice.org is getting very close, owing more to stagnant development at Microsoft than anything else, and may overtake it soon. I've started using it for complex documents and, most of the time, I don't miss Word.
You see the reverse with GIMP advocates. The claim that GIMP is as good as Photoshop can only be made by people who don't know Photoshop very well and whose graphic output is mostly limited to web pages. GIMP isn't even close to Photoshop, and as opposed to the situation with Word and Microsoft, Adobe lavishes so much developer resources on Photoshop that the gap is actually growing.
To return to the original topic, yes, wc is a handy utility. But it is really much more useful for data manipulation by programmers and other IT professionals than for anything else. And if you want to enlighten people about the virtues of commandline tools -- and they are indeed legion -- it helps if you don't immediately discredit yourself by discussing applications that you understand only very superficially.
Most buffer overflows are the result of simple laziness. For almost all cases, it is possible to write a generalized set of functions or, in C++, a class to manage dynamic buffers. There are, in fact, umpteen million implementations of resizeable buffers. This is not a flaw in C or C++ any more than a gun is flawed because it can be used to shoot yourself in the foot. Being careful and alert is a prerequisite for using most powerful tools.
Of course, it grieves me to be in the position of defending C++, since the whole type-safety nonsense was largely a response to the lamentable fact that some programmers can't bother to read a function prototype or treat void pointers with respect.
But then, C++ is a perfect example of the futility of attempting to design tolerance for carelessness into a language. C++ did indeed fix many of the problems of C, but as Microsoft and many others demonstrate, sloppy, careless coders are perfectly capable of writing sloppy, careless code in any language. Buffer overflows may be impossible in Perl, but have you noticed any shortage of buggy, poorly conceived code in Perl? Java? Python? For every correct implementation, there are countless trillions of incorrect ones. How are you going to plug that hole with a yacc grammar?
The currently dominant languages have a lot to recommend them. And for most of them, there are excellent tools for checking the correctness of code, enforcing good programming practices, generating accurate and up-to-date documentation, and so on. But if you don't use them, or you don't put serious and careful thought into design, implementation, and maintenance, you're going to produce buggy software in whatever language you're using.
Lack of competition and poor design and implementation are Microsoft's problems. Buffer overflows are just the characteristic symptom of careless coding in C and C++. If Microsoft switched to Java or Eiffel or ML tomorrow, the buffer overflows might vanish, but something else would take their place.
You have to ask yourself a very serious question: Is it the responsibility of the USA to bring democracy to the middle east? The rest of the world sees differently.
The problem is that the rest of the world doesn't believe we're fighting to bring democracy to Iraq, and there are two big reasons for this. Firstly, there is the issue of economic conflict of interest, which has already been flogged to death all over the place, so I won't go into it here. Secondly, despite the administration's wildly melodramatic portrayal of Ba'athist Iraq as Nazi Germany, there are a lot of countries in the world that are much, much worse. Why aren't we fighting to liberate the slaves of Mauretania, or interceding in the dozen or so indiscriminate genocides in sub-Saharan Africa, or toppling military dictatorships in Southeast Asia?
Nation-building is a worthwhile exercise, and it is doable, but it requires a major commitment and the support of a sizeable fraction of the people involved, and we meet neither qualification. The conclusion that the rest of the world reaches by simple logic, then, is that we are either fighting for oil, or fighting because we are crazy, or both.
I just wish to hell Americans would get over their bloody Vietnam complex. A good start might be teaching history accurately, so every child knows that Vietnam was not the first war we lost, nor the most humiliating defeat. We lost our second war -- the War of 1812 -- quite miserably, with Washington DC being sacked and the White House burned to the ground. Korea was, by any reasonable measure, a defeat. The pacification campaign in the Philippines, next to which Vietnam was a friendly boxing match, was a pyrrhic victory at best. All of our victories have been against pushovers -- Iraq, Mexico, Grenada, Spain -- or the result of enormous coalitions: the World Wars, or even the Revolution, where the French bailed us out of certain defeat at the hands of the British Empire.
The schoolyard bully comparison is an apt one. The underlying reason for post-Cold War American militarism is a brittle national ego and deep sense of unworthiness.
That's hardly fair.. there aren't many people in Britain who know who Michael Howard is.
I know who Michael Howard is, and sometimes, when I'm in a blue mood, thinking about him will give me a fantastic bout of giggles.
Seriously, anyone who follows UK politics knows that Blair's only credible opponent is Gordon Brown, who appears to be waiting somewhat impatiently for a revolt within Labour to pave the way for his ascendancy.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but from this side of the pond, it looks like the Tories are in complete disarray, and the lesser parties are even worse off.
You know that wonderful zero-G nausea you get when you're about to make a backup of some irreplaceable data, and the drive tray slides shut before you have the disc seated correctly, and then the whole thing makes a horrible grinding noise?
That's nothing compared to the feeling you'll get with 1TB discs.
It may well be my utter ignorance of how GPUs work, but it would be nice, if possible, to have tools to utilize all of that computing power when I'm just displaying a simple GUI or text interface. I understand GPUs are heavily optimized for what they do, but I expect they're still good for general purpose tasks and might be really useful in some math-heavy applications.
Don't get me wrong -- I have great sympathy for musicians, other artists, and everyone else trying to get their fair share, but I can tell you that my salary as a programmer would be in the high six digits if I was paid 10% of the revenue my software generates for my employer. The artists' percentage alone is not really cause for much sympathy.
What is royally fucked is the fact that artists could command much higher percentages if the music industry wasn't dominated by a cartel with the aid and abettance of easily-purchased legislators.
There are two kinds of fucked. In the first, lesser kind of fucked, Brian Kernighan is testifying against you. In the second, more serious kind of fucked, he is testifying against you as Dr. Kernighan, a title which he normally doesn't even use on research papers.
It's been a long time since I read the Book of Revelation, but I'm pretty sure the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse appear right after the Defense of the Dissertations.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there were a number of workable steam engine designs using more volatile fluids than water back in the 30's and 40's that purportedly had something approaching 40% efficiency. They were, however, much larger than an equivalent machine running on fossil fuels, and the postwar boom in oil production made them economically unattractive by comparison.
There are many, many workable alternative energy sources, but all of them are more expensive than oil -- at least in simple short term cash expenses. In the long-term view, oil is vastly more expensive than the alternatives, but the business world plans by the quarter, not by the century.
How the heck did this end up being +5 Insightful? Ah, perhaps it is because Slashdot lacks a -1 White Hood option.
How silly of me to forget that the ultimate goal of "diversity" is global uniformity--and monotony.
The idea that the invention of androids has been driven by xenophobia and racism, so the Japanese don't have to live with what they consider to be inferior races or to give them living wages, is disgusting.
We are supposed to celebrate the right kind of diversity--the kind where each country becomes so diverse in population, its culture so diluted by immigration, that all countries are eventually the same.
Oh, please. This is the same kind of pathological crap that comes from every racist. Racists lack the self-esteem to stand up as individuals, so they identify themselves with the collective culture in which they are embedded to dissociate themselves from their insecurity and self-loathing. When insiders come in and threaten to change the dynamic, they view it as a threat to the identity they adopted -- because they lack any identity of their own.
Individual creativity grows in direct proportion to the extent culture fades away as a social force. Hardly any of us could be doing what we are doing now, pursuing individual dreams, if our historical cultures had not been largely obliterated by successive waves of immigration. Each new arrival further weakens the hold that brainless tradition holds over each of us.
Fuck culture, nationality, race, and every other cowardly mob refuge for failed individuals. They're all imaginary constructs. People are real. People who can't get jobs because the xenophobes in Tokyo close the borders and replace them with robots suffer real hunger and privation. Cultures don't suffer, feel pain, go hungry, or do anything at all -- except exist in the imaginations of individual people.
My question: doesn't the uniqueness of Japanese culture add to the diversity of the world?
A culture that separates itself from the rest of humanity to engage in narcissistic self-admiration isn't contributing to the world.
You throw the toad straight into the pot of boiling water and it will jump straight out, but put it in a pot of cold water and slowly increase the heat, and the toad will be boiled to death.
;)
This is off-topic nitpicking, but real toads will jump out of the pot as soon as they get too warm. This is pretty much true of all amphibians and reptiles. Lacking the ability to thermoregulate internally, cold-blooded animals instinctually move toward and away from heat sources as necessary. When, for example, a lizard is too cold, it will move into the sun to bask. When it starts to get too warm, it will move back into the shadows.
It's warm-blooded animals that are susceptible to this trick because they lack the necessary instincts. If you want to cook a human for example, you put him into a hot tub and slowly crank up the temperature. Long before you reach the boiling point or even any discomfort, he will pass from heat exhaustion to hyperthermia, and finally into unconsciousness, seizures, and organ failure. Read the warnings in a hot tub owner's manual sometime, or ask your friendly neighborhood paramedic how often failure to RTFM requires them to fish dead guys out of their hot tubs.
So really, all this "how to boil a frog" nonsense really out to be "how to boil an end user".
All of these discussions on novel means of energy production are well and good -- hydrogen, wind, solar, and several other approaches are quite promising. What seems invariably to be forgotten is that entropy, chiefly in the form of waste heat, is a limiting factor.
The executive summary version of this fact is that if the entire population of the earth were consuming energy at the same rate as Americans, the atmosphere would be incandescent with waste heat.
The obvious consequence of this -- and something which rarely receives any exposure on Slashdot unless it involves white LEDs -- is that producing more energy is not a viable long term goal; only conserving energy is. Even were this not the case, the current growth rates for energy consumption would lead to the exhaustion of even uranium for fission in a relatively small number of generations.
Arguably, the worst thing that could happent to the human race would be the practical availability of an effectively unlimited source of power like fusion. If fusion power proved to be anywhere near as cheap as its proponents claim it would be, all economic incentive to reduce consumption (and therefore waste heat production) would be eliminated. While it would be theoretically possible to offset some of this by moving production offplanet, the economic barriers would be steep. Considering the reluctance of our species to deal with the current manmade environmental effects of industry, there is little reason to be optimistic.
Alternative energy proponents all too often sound as if they were discussing perpetual motion machines. It is not possible to escape the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Some machines are more efficient than others, to be sure, but there is a theoretical limit and it is not a generous one. Beyond that limit, which is seldom even approached, all you can do is shuffle the wastage around; you cannot eliminate it.
This is not something anyone likes to hear, and I suspect that is why it is so universally overlooked. There is a utopian vision shared by technologists and science fiction devotees (and I count myself in both camps) in which technology will someday give us everything we want. Unfortunately, "everything we want" violates the laws of thermodynamics, and those laws appear unlikely to be repealed.
Apache 2 and a recent Linux kernel come pretty close to the theoretical limits of the hardware when it comes to serving static content. It just loafs along while saturating whatever net connection you give it. It's worth trying out.
For serving static content, thttpd absolutely blows both versions of Apache away, so I'm not sure what theoretical limit you're talking about, but perhaps that theory needs some revision.
Don't get me wrong; I think Apache is great, and I've used both 1.x and 2.x successfully with PHP, but if all you're doing is serving static content, Apache is absolutely the wrong tool for the job.
It'd just be an ego-trip and flag-waving exhibition. Sure, some projects are just that, and some developers are only concerned with themselves. Such projects and such people rarely last, either in open or closed-source environments.
Unless it's BIND, anyway.
I definitely prefer its UI to GIMP's.
Hell, ls has a better UI than the GIMP.
There's a lot of scary things here, but to me what is most scary is that American copyright owners can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding.
Did you miss out on the CIA campaigns of assassination in the 1960's and 1970's? If the US government can mobilize foreign coups d'etat to snuff the democratically-elected leftist leaders of nascent democracies, then taking down a bunch of pimply-faced warez monkeys is neither surprising nor newsworthy.
I've run across enough blatent inacurracies over the last year or so, however, that I can't look at it as anything but a basic starting place for research now.
This is pretty much true for any encyclopedia if you're writing for anything other than a high school class.
The ability to site sources or research or present an authoratative case is...
...greatly bolstered by knowing the difference between "site" and "cite", and being able to spell "authoritative" correctly.
3D interfaces have never caught on for a couple of reasons. First and foremost is that the majority of end-user applications, from web browsers to word processors to spreadsheets are simply digital reimplementations of paper documents. The second reason is that there is no hardware that provides three-dimensional imagery that isn't either hideously expensive, causes headaches, or uncomfortable and awkward. What we casually refer to as 3D games, for example, are really projections of 3D structures onto a two-dimensional screen.
Until it is possible to inexpensively provide a convincing illusion of depth -- which is arguably barely possible even with the expensive stuff -- 3D interfaces will require the user to perform 3D actions with a 2D representation. This is a needless complication in most cases.
When I allow my children to drive, it will because they've demonstrated to me that they are mature enough to handle the responsibilty of driving a car.
That's the approach my parents took. And of course, I promptly took their car out and saw how fast it could go. You wouldn't know it from looking at late 80's Ford Tauruses, but they can go a bit over 120 mph. And at 3am on a Sunday morning, you can maintain that speed all the way around the I-440 loop that surrounds Nashville, except for the offramp to I-40 West, where you must slow to 85 mph in order to avoid sliding into the barrier at the edge of the right lane.
It would have really pissed me off if my parents had a way of telling what I was doing with their car when I was out at night. I would certainly have had my driving privileges revoked, and all the effort I had invested in shoveling maturity and responsibility with both hands would have been completely wasted.
So I will definitely want this service in a few years when my daughter is old enough to drive. And if it happens that I have some kind of brainfart and allow her to keep driving at high speeds after catching her at it one time, I don't think it's at all unreasonable for the insurance company to charge me higher premiums because it means I'm dangerously stupid and completely disregard not only my own child's safety, but the general public's as well.
Mind you, I am very much alive to the privacy dangers of involuntary use of GPS tracking for adults. I don't see any such risk here. It sounds like a great way to be able to intervene before something truly awful happens to my kid.
Having a degree from a big-name school will help you in two cases: getting your first job, and if an employer ever has to choose between you and an equally-qualified and equally-likeable applicant with a degree from a less-prestigious school. The first hurdle is one you only have to go over once and which you will get over one way or another, and the second is not terribly likely to happen.
I don't have a degree, and I'm the most senior and highly paid developer at my company. I won't tell you that not having a degree hasn't hurt me -- it has, mostly by making it much harder for me to get that first "real" job, and obviously, there are some companies that won't consider me. But I also do a lot of the hiring around here, and I can tell you that I don't pay too much attention to where new hires got their degree; I pay a lot of attention to prior work experience, code samples, references, and demeanor during interviews. I've worked with some people with degrees from prestigious schools who were terrible programmers and horrible coworkers, and I've worked with great programmers who were fabulous to get along with who had two-year degrees from local community colleges.
If I were you, I'd stay put. Of course, if your dad is going to foot the bill for a fancy school, you might consider it. Otherwise, the massive burden of student loans for that sort of thing might be a lot more trouble than it's worth.
The article is really an amazingly nasty, vicious rant, even if his basic points are sound. Unfortunately, the author misses the whole point of Wikipedia -- instead of writing a sloppy wet kiss to academic snobbery, maybe he should have just fixed the errors in the article.
I've been gleefully using the word counts in MS Word since the early 90's. There are actually two places you can get at them, and they're both readily accessible.
Speaking of the early 90's, this reminds me of a conversation I had on a TeX mailing list around 1994. I was thrilled with the idea behind TeX and struggling with the implementation. In the course of getting some answers about the surprisingly difficult process of setting up columns of varying widths, I overheard a conversation in which some TeX zealot was meandering on about all the things Word couldn't do. The problem was that all of the things he was talking about were things Word could do. He simply never got familiar enough with the application to actually use it well.
Word has its problems, it is true. It has a number of bugs that may or may not be a problem, depending on which features you use. Recent versions have become lumbering resource hogs without adding much new functionality. It lacks some expert layout features that would enable it to fully close the gap with real document layout software, though it's good enough 90% of the time. It's owned by Microsoft. It is, however, probably the most comprehensive and full-featured word processor out there. OpenOffice.org is getting very close, owing more to stagnant development at Microsoft than anything else, and may overtake it soon. I've started using it for complex documents and, most of the time, I don't miss Word.
You see the reverse with GIMP advocates. The claim that GIMP is as good as Photoshop can only be made by people who don't know Photoshop very well and whose graphic output is mostly limited to web pages. GIMP isn't even close to Photoshop, and as opposed to the situation with Word and Microsoft, Adobe lavishes so much developer resources on Photoshop that the gap is actually growing.
To return to the original topic, yes, wc is a handy utility. But it is really much more useful for data manipulation by programmers and other IT professionals than for anything else. And if you want to enlighten people about the virtues of commandline tools -- and they are indeed legion -- it helps if you don't immediately discredit yourself by discussing applications that you understand only very superficially.
Most buffer overflows are the result of simple laziness. For almost all cases, it is possible to write a generalized set of functions or, in C++, a class to manage dynamic buffers. There are, in fact, umpteen million implementations of resizeable buffers. This is not a flaw in C or C++ any more than a gun is flawed because it can be used to shoot yourself in the foot. Being careful and alert is a prerequisite for using most powerful tools.
Of course, it grieves me to be in the position of defending C++, since the whole type-safety nonsense was largely a response to the lamentable fact that some programmers can't bother to read a function prototype or treat void pointers with respect.
But then, C++ is a perfect example of the futility of attempting to design tolerance for carelessness into a language. C++ did indeed fix many of the problems of C, but as Microsoft and many others demonstrate, sloppy, careless coders are perfectly capable of writing sloppy, careless code in any language. Buffer overflows may be impossible in Perl, but have you noticed any shortage of buggy, poorly conceived code in Perl? Java? Python? For every correct implementation, there are countless trillions of incorrect ones. How are you going to plug that hole with a yacc grammar?
The currently dominant languages have a lot to recommend them. And for most of them, there are excellent tools for checking the correctness of code, enforcing good programming practices, generating accurate and up-to-date documentation, and so on. But if you don't use them, or you don't put serious and careful thought into design, implementation, and maintenance, you're going to produce buggy software in whatever language you're using.
Lack of competition and poor design and implementation are Microsoft's problems. Buffer overflows are just the characteristic symptom of careless coding in C and C++. If Microsoft switched to Java or Eiffel or ML tomorrow, the buffer overflows might vanish, but something else would take their place.
Of course we can't have recounts. Ohio is all Diebold, and no paper trail. We just have to take their word for it.
You have to ask yourself a very serious question: Is it the responsibility of the USA to bring democracy to the middle east? The rest of the world sees differently.
The problem is that the rest of the world doesn't believe we're fighting to bring democracy to Iraq, and there are two big reasons for this. Firstly, there is the issue of economic conflict of interest, which has already been flogged to death all over the place, so I won't go into it here. Secondly, despite the administration's wildly melodramatic portrayal of Ba'athist Iraq as Nazi Germany, there are a lot of countries in the world that are much, much worse. Why aren't we fighting to liberate the slaves of Mauretania, or interceding in the dozen or so indiscriminate genocides in sub-Saharan Africa, or toppling military dictatorships in Southeast Asia?
Nation-building is a worthwhile exercise, and it is doable, but it requires a major commitment and the support of a sizeable fraction of the people involved, and we meet neither qualification. The conclusion that the rest of the world reaches by simple logic, then, is that we are either fighting for oil, or fighting because we are crazy, or both.
I just wish to hell Americans would get over their bloody Vietnam complex. A good start might be teaching history accurately, so every child knows that Vietnam was not the first war we lost, nor the most humiliating defeat. We lost our second war -- the War of 1812 -- quite miserably, with Washington DC being sacked and the White House burned to the ground. Korea was, by any reasonable measure, a defeat. The pacification campaign in the Philippines, next to which Vietnam was a friendly boxing match, was a pyrrhic victory at best. All of our victories have been against pushovers -- Iraq, Mexico, Grenada, Spain -- or the result of enormous coalitions: the World Wars, or even the Revolution, where the French bailed us out of certain defeat at the hands of the British Empire.
The schoolyard bully comparison is an apt one. The underlying reason for post-Cold War American militarism is a brittle national ego and deep sense of unworthiness.
That's hardly fair.. there aren't many people in Britain who know who Michael Howard is.
I know who Michael Howard is, and sometimes, when I'm in a blue mood, thinking about him will give me a fantastic bout of giggles.
Seriously, anyone who follows UK politics knows that Blair's only credible opponent is Gordon Brown, who appears to be waiting somewhat impatiently for a revolt within Labour to pave the way for his ascendancy.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but from this side of the pond, it looks like the Tories are in complete disarray, and the lesser parties are even worse off.
But my computer already sounds like a jet engine when it powers up!
Chassisses?
Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that you're not pronouncing it correctly, either?
You know that wonderful zero-G nausea you get when you're about to make a backup of some irreplaceable data, and the drive tray slides shut before you have the disc seated correctly, and then the whole thing makes a horrible grinding noise?
That's nothing compared to the feeling you'll get with 1TB discs.
It may well be my utter ignorance of how GPUs work, but it would be nice, if possible, to have tools to utilize all of that computing power when I'm just displaying a simple GUI or text interface. I understand GPUs are heavily optimized for what they do, but I expect they're still good for general purpose tasks and might be really useful in some math-heavy applications.
Don't get me wrong -- I have great sympathy for musicians, other artists, and everyone else trying to get their fair share, but I can tell you that my salary as a programmer would be in the high six digits if I was paid 10% of the revenue my software generates for my employer. The artists' percentage alone is not really cause for much sympathy.
What is royally fucked is the fact that artists could command much higher percentages if the music industry wasn't dominated by a cartel with the aid and abettance of easily-purchased legislators.
Arrrrrgh. It be barnacles!
As Dr. Kernighan [IBM's expert] notes [...]
There are two kinds of fucked. In the first, lesser kind of fucked, Brian Kernighan is testifying against you. In the second, more serious kind of fucked, he is testifying against you as Dr. Kernighan, a title which he normally doesn't even use on research papers.
It's been a long time since I read the Book of Revelation, but I'm pretty sure the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse appear right after the Defense of the Dissertations.