In this case, why don't the cable/xDSL providers start suspending the accounts of people with infected computers? That tends to get people's notice a lot more effectively than vigilante counter-viruses . . .
If you're going to be sitting in a chair for up to 10 hours a day for a couple of years, isn't a measly $700 a fantastic investment?! And not just from a user's POV: what sane manager wouldn't want to make his geeks happy and comfortable?
Precisely. Compared to the cost of hiring a programmer, $700 is a piss in the ocean - if they really are significantly better than the competition. It's like fast computers and big monitors - if it helps people be happier and more productive, it's cheap at the price.
My boss has one of these, happily running Debian. Works like a charm (a little slow, but who really cares?), you can easily fit it in a standard backpack along with a pile of other junk, but it retains a keyboard that you can touch-type on.
IIRC, Emacs *did* have a problem allowing mail to contain arbitrary bits of elisp code which were auto-executed by emacs, but they took out this feature a long time ago.
To get the song into heavy rotation, the music label may pay the radio station to broadcast the song or to place it in a different slot.
In theory, this doesn't happen, because it breaks "payola" laws that state that all sponsorship of particular songs must be disclosed immediately after the song is played. However, intermediaries called "indies" are paid by the record labels to get certain songs onto radio playlists. In the past, this would involve getting cash, promotions, and the traditional bribes of sex and drugs, to the program directors of radio stations. Nowadays, the indies seem to basically take their cut and pay the rest straight to the radio stations.
There's a series of articles at Salon on ever-more-transparent channels between record companies and radio stations.
The recommendations here, while excellent books in the main, are virtually all books for programmers.
Some books for system administrators would be a very good idea (I'd imagine there's some O'Reilly guides which would be a good place to start), a user's guide to Linux or two would be appropriate, and a smattering of books on Windows, MacOS, and popular applications for each would be appropriate.
In addition, some "perspective" books would be appreciated by library users. A couple of suggestions to start with - The New Hacker's Dictionary (the print version of the Jargon File), In The Beginning Was The Command Line by Neal Stephenson, and The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose (not that I agree with a lot of what he says, but it's still a great read). Others?
Maybe I'm just too old to remember my childhood anymore, but I'd reckon the average 12-year-old girl, if she found porn while looking for Britney Spears, would do one of the following:
Exclaim "Yeeeew! Yucky!", delete it, and then go and look at the next file to see if it was the MP3 she was searching for.
Call all her friends around so they can *all* have a look and exclaim "Yeew! Yucky!" together . . .
Would somehow like to explain how either of these two scenarios is going to cause permanent physical or psychological harm to that twelve-year-old?
Go you big red fire engine!
Wouldn't the inverse square law save us?
on
Optical SETI
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· Score: 2
Lasers are just a concentrated light beam, and aren't immune from the effects of the inverse square law - so as the distance was doubled, the area that the laser would hit would be squared and thus the intensity would be greatly reduced.
What I want to know is, why does my palm really need to be faster?
It's all got to do with the relative cost of the processors. I don't know, but I suspect that a Dragonball chip is now *very* cheap, so they make up a smaller and smaller part of the manufacturing cost of Palm devices. However, they aren't likely to get any cheaper.
As time goes by, the ARM processor will reach a point where it, similarly, costs only a few dollars more than a Dragonball. At that point, seeing that you get maybe ten times the performance for negligible cost, why wouldn't you go with the high-performance solution and the extra applications it will make possible?
Yeah, Reese has had two great teen roles, Election and Pleasantville, playing two very different characters and pulling them both off nicely.
Looking back on Election, somebody on the IMDB reviews pointed out the parallels between the movie's election and the 2000 US presidential election, and they are *quite* uncanny. . . particularly the younger sister's (forgotten her name) "plague on both your houses" speech in the school auditorium.
So why do many people think that China is the worst place on earth?
Good question. I don't know the whole answer, but there are some points that I think that contribute:
I visited southern China briefly once, and to my pampered Western eyes it was a hellhole. The pollution was unlike anything I had experienced, the poverty everywhere I looked, the polarized distribution of wealth far more stark than anything I've ever seen, the political corruption that created that division obvious (the number of Mercedes-Benzes with military numberplates, and the fact that the only properly constructed buildings were either built by foriegn multinationals or the Army gives it away pretty quickly). While the rapid improvement in living standards was undoubtedly there (nobody seemed to be starving, and many of the poor farmers seemed to be acquiring television sets and refrigerators), we see the relative poverty, not the improvement.
As far as political freedom goes - the part I visited, sure, the obvious signs of political oppression have been toned down. But when you see the place where hundreds of Falun Gong protestors were apparently arrested and carted off to prison camps, again, you don't see the improvement from the days of the Cultural Revolution, you compare it to your own country where such arrests and indefinite detention for peaceful political protest would be unthinkable.
But take the other side of that argument, what if the ABM stopped the single nuke that was targeting some out of the way place (like somewhere in Montana or Wyoming). Would you say it's a waste of time to try and protect at least some people?
Yes, if it's not going to work, and it *can't* work. It simply can't defend against the most likely nuclear attack by a terrorist group or "rogue nation" - a smuggled weapon. Not to mention the many possibilities for countermeasures that can never be properly tested agsinst.
One last side argument - from space research, we get unrelated spinoff technologies that help us in our everyday lives (like frozen ice-cream). Might there not be some side benefits from ABM research as well?
It's possible, but unlikely. As I understand it, the research involves building expendable rockets that are precisely guided by computers and radar. None of those seem particularly promising areas for civilian application. In any case, aren't most of of the interesting technologies are likely to be classified and take many years to reach civilian applications?
Research projects are cool. The US would be wise to spend even more on them. There are plenty, however, that are more pressing and more interesting than trying to shoot down ICBMs. Fusion power, fuel cells, technologies related orbiting solar power stations, AIDS vaccines, malaria vaccines, and so on, are more likely to produce things that contribute positively to peace and security for US citizens than a multi-billion-dollar boondoggle that won't work and is pissing off both your allies and the two countries that actually *do* have the ability to turn America's cities into smouldering ruins, missile shield or no missile shield.
Besides, what mainstream advertisers would want their names associated with South Park, Howard Stern, or The Man Show?
While I can't speak about the last two, I know there's a fair proportion of people out there who really like South Park. I don't know a single person who likes pop-up ads . . .
3) The fact that it's the single most powerful political post an individual can hold, and that losers very rarely get a second shot at it, is a pretty powerful incentive to hang on and fight.
4) The fact that the people directly in charge of the vote counts were deeply involved in the campaign for one side.
5) The politicised nature of both the state and federal judiciary (I'm not so naive to imagine that judges in other countries don't have political views, but it is not so nearly as blatantly and publically political as in the US) made any decision they made contentious.
6) And, overall, the vote was really, really close - if a parliamentary election was that close in Britain or Australia the result would take almost as long to occur and perhaps result in a hung parliament and long periods of negotiations with the one or two whacked-out independents that get elected each time around.
Look, the hostile environment, the cramped quarters, and even things breaking, are part of the deal. However, fuckups due to bureaucratic incompetence (for instance, incompatible power plugs and water purification systems) are just unnecessarily making the lives of those astronauts harder than they should be, and probably wasting a great deal of their time that they could be using to do science - which is, after all, the whole point of the ISS. Isn't it?
If things are wrong, the astronauts shouldn't just lay back and think of the fact they are one of only a few hundred (?) people who've gone beyond earth's atmosphere. It is their duty to whinge, complain, and moan until the ISS works effectively.
Did you ever bitch to your superior officers about some brain-damaged piece of equipment, or moronic procedural requirement, on your sub? Did things change for the better because of it?
Some American-made gadgets wouldn't fit Russian plugs
All the shampoo stuff aside, does anyone find the above statement indiciative of a major screwup? How hard is it to agree on a power socket, and make sure all the stuff that gets sent up there (at a cost of thousands of dollars per kilogram and undoubtedly safety-inspected to the nth degree at a cost of thousands more) has the right friggin' power plugs?
Learning to program in C++ is like trying to learn to drive in a NASCAR. You can do it, but the language has all these complex doo-dads tacked on to a pretty old and ugly base. Sure, experts can drive C++ pretty damn well - some of them even think it's the best thing since sliced bread (as you might gather, I don't - but for some tasks it's not bad). For somebody who is struggling, picking a nicer language can let you get your head around *programming* rather than the arcana of the C++ specification and the particular wrinkles of the various implementations out there.
There are a variety of languages that people recommend as a first language. My old university used Haskell. It was very effective in a university situation, but because it's kind of obscure you might find it hard to get anyone to help you with it. A lot of people recommend either Python or Java - Python is a nice language, and probably a good choice. Java is also nice, and also apparently in demand by employers, but while much cleaner than C++ has a fair bit of required "boilerplate code" which is required to write anything in the language but won't make any sense to you initially.
Perl is a wonderful language for non-programmers. It's very easy to get things to work in Perl. However, Perl makes it particularly easy to write messy code. If you're serious about programming, it's probably not a great language to start with.
Oh, and as a rule, avoid any book that ends in "for {idiots, dummies, complete fools}", or "in {time X}" - basically, if you're a dummy, you're not going to able to program effectively anyway, and it's not something you can be proficient in quickly. Once you pick your language, go see if there is a USENET FAQ on the language and see what's recommended. For instance, for C++, some commonly recommended books are The C++ Primer, by Lippman and Lajoie, or Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language (written by the original designer of C++ - a decent book but probably a little dense for the newbie).
Until more business' make a switch from Wintel, its really just not that valuable a skill to be teaching kids linux in high school...They need to be using what they'll be using later on in life, which currently is Windows...
I'm now at the ripe old age of 24. I have used the following operating systems as my primary desktop: Commodore 64's bizarre combination of a disk-drive based OS and basic interpreter shell, two CP/M systems, a couple of different versions of MS-DOS with a variety of DOS shells, Windows 3.0, 3.1, 95, Debian 1.3 with WindowMaker, Debian 2.0 and Enlightenment, through to Debian unstable with a fairly stock Sawfish/GNOME desktop. That's not to mention the time at various educational institutions on, variously, an Apple II, an Amiga, Macs, VT100 terminals attached to Solaris and Digital Unix servers (with varying collections of GNU tools installed), SGI Indys, various NT boxen . . .
Yes, I'm probably an extreme case (not by/. reader standards, but certainly by the standards of the general public), but the point is that training people at school for a system that "they'll be using later in life" is just not possible. At school, people should be learning general principles which they can then apply to the systems they come across in the future. Linux, being particularly flexible and transparent, is potentially an excellent way to teach some basic ideas about computing, ones that Windows derivatives go out of their way to hide.
I'm sure you could. However, it's very hard to kill large numbers of people with the identities of your choice in a short space of time without firearms, explosives, or other relatively sophisticated weaponry. If I'm pissed off at my coworkers, if I have the appropriate type of gun it's pretty easy to take it, wander through my workplace, and kill the lot.
The impetus to ban automatic and semi-automatic rifles in Australia came after just this situation - a deranged young man wandered around a historic tourist site and shot 35 people with a gun and ammunition he had legally purchased. Try doing that with your left hand.
What about hunting game, and stock and pest destruction? OK, it's not non-lethal, but it's highly justifiable. In Australia where they are an environmental disaster of the worst sort, it is highly ethical to introduce rabbits to the pointy end of a.22.
Handguns are a different matter. Except in very rare circumstances, the only thing they're useful for is killing and maiming others (or providing a credible threat that one is able to do so).
The question was, is it possible to use a perl plugin for this ?
If you want to use a scripting language to talk to the GnuCash engine, you're best off using scheme at the moment - well, the guile dialect of scheme, anyway. If you use perl, you'll have to jump through considerable numbers of hoops to do it.
If you still have your heart set on using Perl, you'd be best to write your pluging to convert the data to QIF and importing that.
Just a minor clarification. While GnuCash is licenced under GPL software, we are not technically a GNU project. The copyright is actually owned by the many individuals and the companies who have contributed to the project.
If we were a GNU project, all copyright of the code would have been assigned to the FSF. The GNOME libraries, gcc, and guile (which LDG developers have contributed to) are examples of projects like this.
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In this case, why don't the cable/xDSL providers start suspending the accounts of people with infected computers? That tends to get people's notice a lot more effectively than vigilante counter-viruses . . .
Precisely. Compared to the cost of hiring a programmer, $700 is a piss in the ocean - if they really are significantly better than the competition. It's like fast computers and big monitors - if it helps people be happier and more productive, it's cheap at the price.
My boss has one of these, happily running Debian. Works like a charm (a little slow, but who really cares?), you can easily fit it in a standard backpack along with a pile of other junk, but it retains a keyboard that you can touch-type on.
Anybody got more details?
In theory, this doesn't happen, because it breaks "payola" laws that state that all sponsorship of particular songs must be disclosed immediately after the song is played. However, intermediaries called "indies" are paid by the record labels to get certain songs onto radio playlists. In the past, this would involve getting cash, promotions, and the traditional bribes of sex and drugs, to the program directors of radio stations. Nowadays, the indies seem to basically take their cut and pay the rest straight to the radio stations.
There's a series of articles at Salon on ever-more-transparent channels between record companies and radio stations.
Go you big red fire engine!
Some books for system administrators would be a very good idea (I'd imagine there's some O'Reilly guides which would be a good place to start), a user's guide to Linux or two would be appropriate, and a smattering of books on Windows, MacOS, and popular applications for each would be appropriate.
In addition, some "perspective" books would be appreciated by library users. A couple of suggestions to start with - The New Hacker's Dictionary (the print version of the Jargon File), In The Beginning Was The Command Line by Neal Stephenson, and The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose (not that I agree with a lot of what he says, but it's still a great read). Others?
Go you big red fire engine!
Would somehow like to explain how either of these two scenarios is going to cause permanent physical or psychological harm to that twelve-year-old?
Go you big red fire engine!
Lasers are just a concentrated light beam, and aren't immune from the effects of the inverse square law - so as the distance was doubled, the area that the laser would hit would be squared and thus the intensity would be greatly reduced.
Go you big red fire engine!
It's all got to do with the relative cost of the processors. I don't know, but I suspect that a Dragonball chip is now *very* cheap, so they make up a smaller and smaller part of the manufacturing cost of Palm devices. However, they aren't likely to get any cheaper.
As time goes by, the ARM processor will reach a point where it, similarly, costs only a few dollars more than a Dragonball. At that point, seeing that you get maybe ten times the performance for negligible cost, why wouldn't you go with the high-performance solution and the extra applications it will make possible?
Go you big red fire engine!
Looking back on Election, somebody on the IMDB reviews pointed out the parallels between the movie's election and the 2000 US presidential election, and they are *quite* uncanny. . . particularly the younger sister's (forgotten her name) "plague on both your houses" speech in the school auditorium.
Go you big red fire engine!
Good question. I don't know the whole answer, but there are some points that I think that contribute:
I visited southern China briefly once, and to my pampered Western eyes it was a hellhole. The pollution was unlike anything I had experienced, the poverty everywhere I looked, the polarized distribution of wealth far more stark than anything I've ever seen, the political corruption that created that division obvious (the number of Mercedes-Benzes with military numberplates, and the fact that the only properly constructed buildings were either built by foriegn multinationals or the Army gives it away pretty quickly). While the rapid improvement in living standards was undoubtedly there (nobody seemed to be starving, and many of the poor farmers seemed to be acquiring television sets and refrigerators), we see the relative poverty, not the improvement.
As far as political freedom goes - the part I visited, sure, the obvious signs of political oppression have been toned down. But when you see the place where hundreds of Falun Gong protestors were apparently arrested and carted off to prison camps, again, you don't see the improvement from the days of the Cultural Revolution, you compare it to your own country where such arrests and indefinite detention for peaceful political protest would be unthinkable.
Go you big red fire engine!
Check out http://perens.com, his personal website. He's still doing useful stuff for the community.
Go you big red fire engine!
Yes, if it's not going to work, and it *can't* work. It simply can't defend against the most likely nuclear attack by a terrorist group or "rogue nation" - a smuggled weapon. Not to mention the many possibilities for countermeasures that can never be properly tested agsinst.
It's possible, but unlikely. As I understand it, the research involves building expendable rockets that are precisely guided by computers and radar. None of those seem particularly promising areas for civilian application. In any case, aren't most of of the interesting technologies are likely to be classified and take many years to reach civilian applications?
Research projects are cool. The US would be wise to spend even more on them. There are plenty, however, that are more pressing and more interesting than trying to shoot down ICBMs. Fusion power, fuel cells, technologies related orbiting solar power stations, AIDS vaccines, malaria vaccines, and so on, are more likely to produce things that contribute positively to peace and security for US citizens than a multi-billion-dollar boondoggle that won't work and is pissing off both your allies and the two countries that actually *do* have the ability to turn America's cities into smouldering ruins, missile shield or no missile shield.
Go you big red fire engine!
My karma has been maxed-out since the cap was implemented, pal, so I'm hardly going to need to karma-whore.
Go you big red fire engine!
(Yes, I know it gets said every time but people still don't seem to do it).
Go you big red fire engine!
While I can't speak about the last two, I know there's a fair proportion of people out there who really like South Park. I don't know a single person who likes pop-up ads . . .
Go you big red fire engine!
3) The fact that it's the single most powerful political post an individual can hold, and that losers very rarely get a second shot at it, is a pretty powerful incentive to hang on and fight.
4) The fact that the people directly in charge of the vote counts were deeply involved in the campaign for one side.
5) The politicised nature of both the state and federal judiciary (I'm not so naive to imagine that judges in other countries don't have political views, but it is not so nearly as blatantly and publically political as in the US) made any decision they made contentious.
6) And, overall, the vote was really, really close - if a parliamentary election was that close in Britain or Australia the result would take almost as long to occur and perhaps result in a hung parliament and long periods of negotiations with the one or two whacked-out independents that get elected each time around.
Go you big red fire engine!
If things are wrong, the astronauts shouldn't just lay back and think of the fact they are one of only a few hundred (?) people who've gone beyond earth's atmosphere. It is their duty to whinge, complain, and moan until the ISS works effectively.
Did you ever bitch to your superior officers about some brain-damaged piece of equipment, or moronic procedural requirement, on your sub? Did things change for the better because of it?
Go you big red fire engine!
All the shampoo stuff aside, does anyone find the above statement indiciative of a major screwup? How hard is it to agree on a power socket, and make sure all the stuff that gets sent up there (at a cost of thousands of dollars per kilogram and undoubtedly safety-inspected to the nth degree at a cost of thousands more) has the right friggin' power plugs?
Go you big red fire engine!
There are a variety of languages that people recommend as a first language. My old university used Haskell. It was very effective in a university situation, but because it's kind of obscure you might find it hard to get anyone to help you with it. A lot of people recommend either Python or Java - Python is a nice language, and probably a good choice. Java is also nice, and also apparently in demand by employers, but while much cleaner than C++ has a fair bit of required "boilerplate code" which is required to write anything in the language but won't make any sense to you initially.
Perl is a wonderful language for non-programmers. It's very easy to get things to work in Perl. However, Perl makes it particularly easy to write messy code. If you're serious about programming, it's probably not a great language to start with.
Oh, and as a rule, avoid any book that ends in "for {idiots, dummies, complete fools}", or "in {time X}" - basically, if you're a dummy, you're not going to able to program effectively anyway, and it's not something you can be proficient in quickly. Once you pick your language, go see if there is a USENET FAQ on the language and see what's recommended. For instance, for C++, some commonly recommended books are The C++ Primer, by Lippman and Lajoie, or Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language (written by the original designer of C++ - a decent book but probably a little dense for the newbie).
Go you big red fire engine!
I'm now at the ripe old age of 24. I have used the following operating systems as my primary desktop: Commodore 64's bizarre combination of a disk-drive based OS and basic interpreter shell, two CP/M systems, a couple of different versions of MS-DOS with a variety of DOS shells, Windows 3.0, 3.1, 95, Debian 1.3 with WindowMaker, Debian 2.0 and Enlightenment, through to Debian unstable with a fairly stock Sawfish/GNOME desktop. That's not to mention the time at various educational institutions on, variously, an Apple II, an Amiga, Macs, VT100 terminals attached to Solaris and Digital Unix servers (with varying collections of GNU tools installed), SGI Indys, various NT boxen . . .
Yes, I'm probably an extreme case (not by /. reader standards, but certainly by the standards of the general public), but the point is that training people at school for a system that "they'll be using later in life" is just not possible. At school, people should be learning general principles which they can then apply to the systems they come across in the future. Linux, being particularly flexible and transparent, is potentially an excellent way to teach some basic ideas about computing, ones that Windows derivatives go out of their way to hide.
Go you big red fire engine!
I'm sure you could. However, it's very hard to kill large numbers of people with the identities of your choice in a short space of time without firearms, explosives, or other relatively sophisticated weaponry. If I'm pissed off at my coworkers, if I have the appropriate type of gun it's pretty easy to take it, wander through my workplace, and kill the lot.
The impetus to ban automatic and semi-automatic rifles in Australia came after just this situation - a deranged young man wandered around a historic tourist site and shot 35 people with a gun and ammunition he had legally purchased. Try doing that with your left hand.
Go you big red fire engine!
What about hunting game, and stock and pest destruction? OK, it's not non-lethal, but it's highly justifiable. In Australia where they are an environmental disaster of the worst sort, it is highly ethical to introduce rabbits to the pointy end of a .22.
Handguns are a different matter. Except in very rare circumstances, the only thing they're useful for is killing and maiming others (or providing a credible threat that one is able to do so).
Go you big red fire engine!
If you want to use a scripting language to talk to the GnuCash engine, you're best off using scheme at the moment - well, the guile dialect of scheme, anyway. If you use perl, you'll have to jump through considerable numbers of hoops to do it.
If you still have your heart set on using Perl, you'd be best to write your pluging to convert the data to QIF and importing that.
Go you big red fire engine!
If we were a GNU project, all copyright of the code would have been assigned to the FSF. The GNOME libraries, gcc, and guile (which LDG developers have contributed to) are examples of projects like this.
Go you big red fire engine!